A/N: In order to keep my promise of updating sooner than seven weeks, I decided against making this a longer chapter. Nevertheless, it still came out to be the longest one I've written so far – almost 20,000 story-words! I hope you haven't grown tired of this story yet haha.

This chapter moves along two different timelines. It's not such a big deal since they don't interact but if you have questions, the blanks will be filled in the next chapter, or you can just ask me.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Present Meets Past

The first thing Chloe felt when she regained consciousness was the throbbing at the back of her head, and when she blinked her eyes open she realized that the throbbing was made worse by the erratic rocking of her surroundings. She was lying flat on her back with her head slightly raised on a thin pillow, staring at a shiny white ceiling and white walls with no windows. The surface beneath her palms was cold and hard and if it weren't for the pillow her head would have been in even more pain, scraping against the metal floor.

Chloe quickly sat upright, only to groan when a head rush combined with her migraine. She gingerly rubbed the spot that had been hit and checked for blood, and she was somewhat relieved to feel only a large bump had formed.

She shivered and looked around the small, narrow room. A refrigeration unit just above her head was the cause of the freezing temperature, and seeing it made Chloe realize that the rocking she felt was the result of being driven through rough terrain. She wasn't in a room; she was in a moving vehicle.

After a particularly violent dip in the road, a metal basin holding an ice bag slid to the other side of what Chloe assumed was the back of a refrigerated van. Glancing at the ice bag, it seemed to Chloe that her kidnapper showed more concern for her wellbeing now than when they had hit her over the head earlier; nevertheless, she picked up bag and got to her feet.

"Beca," she whispered to herself, remembering that she hadn't been alone during the attack. Glancing around the compartment, she wondered where Beca could be, and why she wasn't with her when there seemed to be plenty of room for the both of them…

After a while, Chloe sought something to rest her eyes on besides the whiteness of her surroundings, as they gave her an uneasy feeling of déjà vu. She turned to the wall behind her, beneath the refrigeration unit, where she assumed the driver of the van was, and contemplated banging her fist against it to let him know she was awake. But just as she raised her hand to do it, the van hit another bump and Chloe lost her balance. She tumbled backward and fell on her ass—loudly. The van lurched to a halt and Chloe heard muffled voices arguing beyond the divider. There was more than one kidnapper.

Her heart beating like a war drum, Chloe quickly got to her feet when she heard the sound of two doors slamming shut and backed up as far away from the end of the truck as possible. She dropped the ice bag and raised her fists.

Okay, Chloe, this is it. This is the moment that makes all your combat training worth it.

The double doors swung open smoothly and revealed the strangest sight Chloe had ever seen—and that included Fat Amy enlarging herself to swallow an entire meatloaf whole.

It was the galactic villain Darth Vader wearing an argyle sweater vest two sizes too large, along with a grotesque monster in skinny jeans—or at least, a woman wearing a Darth Vader helmet and the other a generic dollar store Halloween mask.

Chloe was only momentarily blindsided by her captors' bewildering outfits, since she quickly realized they were likely doing it to hide their identities. But what mostly caught her attention was the view behind the two women: an expanse of overgrown grass as far as the eye could see, and the horizon completely flat with no structures, or even mountains, to disturb it. Only a smattering of clouds against a powder blue sky accented the otherwise plain, desolate image before her.

They had brought her to, quite literally, the middle of nowhere.

Chloe's eyes snapped back to her captors. They had both climbed inside the van, and the one in the Darth Vader mask had her hands up to show that they meant no harm. She stopped a few feet away from Chloe out of respect, but the one in the monster mask continued to approach her, hands on her hips and head cocked to the side menacingly. Chloe tried not to be intimidated but she couldn't help instinctively pressing back into the van's wall when the monster brought the horrid mask inches from her face.

"Boo."

"Are you sure you weren't followed here?"

"Of course not. Why would anyone follow me? I'm a nobody."

"You work as an unlisted researcher for a secret task force within the Abernathy-McKadden Group, hand-picked from the graduating class of UC San Diego's Biological Sciences Division, despite the fact that you had a mere 3.13 GPA. Clearly, there's something special about you."

Justin glared at the pasty-faced young man walking alongside him. Whether the rapidly recited mini-biography was meant as an insult or not, Justin could tell that this guy was quite a character; a thought furthered by the fact that he merely smiled smugly and stuffed his hands into his faded purple hoodie after his assessment.

"Tell me again why we are meeting at your mother's house," said Justin, eyeing a grumpy man trimming his hedges as they passed his well-kept garden.

"It's called hiding in plain sight, my friend," the guy replied, making a sharp turn up the driveway of a quaint one-story house with a porch swing on the deck. He scuffed his shoes on the doormat before turning the knob and letting himself in.

A frail, middle-aged woman popped her head out of the den. "Tommy! What are you doing home?"

"Just came to show my friend some of my old comic books," Tommy explained tersely. "Don't come in my room, Mom! Not even with cookies and juice!"

"All right, sweetie," the woman replied passively. From her tone, Justin deduced that this was a regular request of his.

Justin followed the enigmatic blogger up the steps, passing a number of childhood and graduation photos. He hadn't expected the person behind the pro-mutant website to be this young—but then again, they were probably around the same age and equally involved with the mutant issue. Tommy did, however, have the aura of someone who would chase conspiracy theories, with his beady eyes and hunched shoulders. And, upon entering his room, one more thing was certainly made clearer about him.

"You still live with your—?"

"No, I don't live with my mother," Tommy interjected thickly, throwing some items off his bed to make room for Justin to sit. "It just looks like I do so I have an alibi whenever I need it."

Justin looked unconvinced but took a seat on Tommy's Jurassic Park sheets nonetheless while his host wrenched open a cabinet and reached up into the corners. A couple of comic books fell out and joined the general mess on the bedroom floor. Tommy came back down moments later with an old but well-kept shoebox. "So, what does AMG want to know about the SRA?"

"I told you not to do that."

The woman in a Darth Vader helmet scolded her accomplice while she half-heartedly pinned Chloe's arms to her sides to prevent the redhead from taking another shot. The monster chuckled as she rubbed the mask over her probably bruising face.

"I'm sorry about her," added Darth Vader, her voice garbled by the toy mask but still managing to come out sounding apologetic. "She likes to mess with people."

Chloe didn't answer right away. She was still trying to determine whether the two women were legitimately insane, or just playing some sort of 'good captor, bad captor' game with her because, based on their casual demeanor, they were either confident that Chloe wouldn't try to escape or just really bad at their job.

"Where's Beca?" she finally asked, pulling her arms out of Darth Vader's pin. The woman gave away instantly, which only increased Chloe's suspicion that this might not be your standard kidnapping.

"Do you wanna tell her or should I?" the monster asked her accomplice. Her voice was not as distorted by the rubber mask but it came out nasally due to the broken nose Chloe had given her. "And kudos, Red, that was a solid punch…"

Chloe ignored the use of the nickname and gave the monster her most intimidating look. "There's more where that came from if you don't tell me where Beca is right now."

"Oh, she's not here," she replied matter-of-factly, as though Chloe had just asked about the weather.

"Then where—?" Chloe paused. Now that the balance of power had shifted and she was gaining more control over the situation, she started to notice things. For instance, staring through the fleshy mask's eyeholes, Chloe could easily tell that the woman's eyes were blue. Her gaze then traveled downward, registering the woman's white tank top, her skinny jeans and black boots… all seemed familiar, except… something was missing.

A leather jacket.

KSHHH.

Chloe heard a sigh come out of Darth Vader's plastic mouthpiece as the monster hooked her fingers under the mask and pulled. "Surprise!"

It was Beca—well, almost.

"You're not Beca," Chloe said immediately and felt a wave of relief. At least the real Beca was safe from all of this, because the real Beca wasn't the one she met outside the elevators. And, because she couldn't help herself, Chloe pointed out, "You're taller."

The fake Beca's jaw dropped in disdain. "Dammit! I knew I shouldn't have shifted back without the reference…"

"You also sound different, although that might be because of the broken nose," Chloe added snidely before turning to the woman in the Darth Vader helmet. "What's going on? Who are you really?"

"Well, um." Darth Vader seemed disappointed that she was the one asked. "Long story short, we're mutants. Like you."

"Yeah, I figured that one out, thanks," Chloe muttered sarcastically. She had no doubt that these two were unregistered; otherwise, they wouldn't need to hide their identities from her. "What do you want from me? Money?" she added, thinking of her high-profile adoptive parents.

"Tch," the fake Beca snorted. "We didn't take you all the way here just to ransom you off again, Red. You see, flying under the radar is sort of how we survive..." She fidgeted on her toes until she was a couple of inches shorter. "Okay, how's this?"

Chloe rolled her eyes. "I'm not going to help you be better at impersonating my girlfriend!" she said before turning back to her more reasonable captor. "So if you don't want money, what is it? Do you have something against registered mutants?"

"No, not at all," Darth Vader said hurriedly. "It's just that we saw you and Beca a few weeks ago on the news—"

"And we saw what happened with those assholes," continued the fake Beca, who was still adjusting her own height to match Beca's perfectly based on a candid photo of her that she kept in her back pocket, "and let's just say... you caught our attention."

Chloe said nothing.

"They said you were a mutant. A Category Three."

"What's it to you?" Chloe shot back stubbornly.

The fake Beca laughed at Chloe's continued defiance. "Well, we checked Homeland Security's website—pretty useful, that thing—and we found your powers quite interesting."

Chloe tensed. So they were after her abilities. If only they knew—

"But Beca had said that you couldn't actually use your powers yet," Darth Vader said in an almost concerned tone. "Is that true?"

Chloe grit her teeth; even among the mutant community she was getting a reputation for being the mutant equivalent of an invalid. "What's it to you?" she repeated, though with a lot less bite than before.

"I think we can help you with that," the fake Beca smirked. It was far from the signature smirk the real Beca wore, but it radiated the same levels of cockiness and confidence.

"So let me get this straight," Chloe shook her head in confusion and regretted it when she felt the dull throbbing again, "you hit me over the head, kidnap me, and take me to the middle of nowhere… to help me?"

"We're sorry about the way we handled it—aren't we?" Darth Vader added pointedly toward the fake Beca.

"Of course I'm sorry!" the woman insisted. "I would never hit a defenseless girl. It's just that you refused to go outside with me and the clock was ticking so I had to take drastic measures. Do you know how dangerous it is to be around that school?"

Chloe prickled at being called a 'defenseless girl.' If she hadn't been caught by surprise, the impostor would have found herself passed out on Chloe's bedroom floor in seconds. But the fact that she was caught by surprise made her think. "So your mutant ability is changing your physical appearance?"

"Yes, and before you ask, I'm not showing you my real identity," the fake Beca said, wagging her finger.

"Well, can you be someone else then? I don't feel like calling you 'Beca.'"

"You can call me whatever you like, honey," she replied in a drawl and morphed into a ruggedly handsome man. The result looked slightly awkward, however, because he was now in clothes a couple of sizes too small. "Ugh," he grunted before shifting to a more appropriate size and shape.

The man's muscle mass shrank into his shortening bones; his waist tightened while his bust ballooned and his hips curved; the sharp definition of his face and jaw smoothened to feminine contours, and hair sprung from his scalp like a fountain. And the entire process took all of three seconds.

Running a hand through her now blonde hair, the shape-shifter winked at Chloe. "I go by Frankie. Apparently that's both a boy's a girl's name now." Noticing how Chloe ran her eyes around every bit of her changed physical form, she added cockily, "You saw how good at this I am? Stick with us and you'll be bending reality like a pro, too."

"What makes you think I even need your help?" Chloe demanded defensively. "I'm at Barden for a reason."

Frankie scoffed. "The facts aren't exactly on your side, Red. You'd been at that school for, what, three months when that news story ran? And if you'd had any progress since, you would have escaped by now. We didn't tie you up or anything."

"We're in the middle of nowhere, where the hell would I escape to?" retorted Chloe.

"We understand that the measures we took were drastic, but we really just want to help you achieve your full potential," the woman beneath the Darth Vader mask said gently.

Chloe narrowed her eyes suspiciously. Sure, she hadn't been in the "real" world very long, but she knew that favors were almost never given without strings attached. "In return for what?"

The two captors exchanged looks (as much as they could with one wearing a mask) and Frankie shrugged at Darth Vader as if to say, "Your move."

KSHH. Chloe heard another sigh from the masked woman and turned to her expectantly.

"We want you to master your telepathy."

Chloe was genuinely surprised by the specific request. In fact, she had almost forgotten about her other ability, having been told to focus on telekinesis all these months because it was supposedly the simpler of her two powers. "Why my telepathy?" she asked curiously.

"Don't worry," smirked Frankie, "it's for a noble cause that I'm sure even you would agree with."

Darth Vader nodded. "You're going to put an end to the MRA."

"I'm telling you now, buddy, you won't find the first gen mutants," said Tommy. "Whoever was left after the whole SRA debacle probably either died or went so far into hiding they'd've died anyway."

"That's what we thought, too, but you must have some idea of how to move forward on the case," Justin said hopefully. He didn't want his first ever mission as a newly inducted AMG special agent to be a failure. "Otherwise you wouldn't have agreed to meet with me."

"I never said I'd tell you where they were; I agreed so you could help me finish my case." Tommy opened the shoebox and laid out a collection of newspaper clippings and handwritten diagrams on the bed. "You're familiar with the government's side of what happened in the 80's, I assume? Targeting the world's greatest," he pointed to a photo of a bodybuilder, "and the top-secret military operation behind it."

Tommy handed Justin another photo of a group of people with the names of army generals and 'superhuman' civilians highlighted in the caption. Justin nodded. "The McKaddens filled me in."

"Really? Was AMG involved in the operation? Or did they just follow the trend of conspiracy theories like me?"

"They were told about the behind-the-scenes stuff years after it happened, but even then they were only told that it existed. No details," said Justin. "Does it matter?"

Tommy narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. "Well, it matters to me." He picked out a tiny, square piece of newspaper from the box. "I was lucky to have found this article in an old newspaper. It's a short piece on a Congressional hearing back in '85 to investigate military activity," he explained, handing it to Justin. "It doesn't reveal much either, only that a hearing happened. But if you look in the right places for the right document…"

He walked over to his cluttered desk and pulled out a folder. He spent half a minute rifling through it until he pulled out a piece of paper with a few lines highlighted. "One of the things the Department of Defense disclosed during that hearing was that they," he began to read aloud from the paper, "'sought assistance from special individuals… and used them for research on human physiology.'"

Tommy returned all the papers and news clippings with a satisfied look on his face. "That's how I figured out that mutants were taken in for military research a full two years before the SRA even came out. And, obviously, the only reason they would conduct a research is to figure out how superhumans could be so, well, super, and use it to their advantage. Pretty clever snooping, eh?"

Justin frowned. "If you'd known about this already, why didn't you publish it on your website? Get the word out for the mutant rights cause?"

"I've recently had to, uh, fly under the radar," Tommy admitted, turning away from Justin. "I was writing about the modern mutant lifestyle long before the whole Barden Institute scandal came out and, after the MRA, I just knew that history was going to repeat itself—and do much worse. I couldn't risk people identifying me as a pro-mutant radical and triangulating my location from my next post so I had to drop it."

"A pro-mutant radical?" Justin repeated with a light chuckle. "There is no war against mutants going on here, Tommy. We're all just working toward a society where mutants and humans can coexist peacefully."

Tommy shot him a disbelieving look. "Do all of you at AMG really believe that? You're building an anti-mutant weapon, for Christ's sake!"

Justin rolled his eyes. "Do I have to defend our work to you, too? We're on the same side. I just personally believe the only way mutants can be free from discrimination is if there's a balance of power."

"A balance of power? Your very motives are unbalanced, Justin," argued Tommy. "At least, the motives of the people you work for are. Their right hand is working on suppressing the mutant gene to achieve this balance while their left hand is building an army of mutants to unbalance an even greater power—a world power."

"You're overreacting," said Justin. "AMG limits the military's communication with the Barden Institute. We're all just interested in knowing how to stop mutants for very obvious public safety reasons."

"Shows what you know," muttered Tommy.

Justin shook his head. He couldn't argue with Tommy on moral intentions, but he could argue logical facts. "Anyway, the MRA prohibits experimenting with mutants and their powers," he said with an air of victorious finality. "So there."

"Do you really believe the MRA will work?" sneered Tommy. "Those mutants at Barden signed over their privacy, probably envisioning the same peaceful coexistence you are, but behind their backs people are already planning what to do with them. How to use them."

Justin refused to be swayed by Tommy's conspiratorial speech. "Once we create a suppressant, balance will be restored and no one would have to live in fear of what mutants could do," he reiterated firmly. "And that goes both ways: human and mutant. That's what the system aims to achieve, and it will achieve it."

"But you're not working with a system here," warned Tommy. "You're working with people, and people don't always make the right decisions." He drew out one last piece of paper, this time from his back pocket. It was handwritten. "If you still need convincing, this my final theory on the mutant side of the events surrounding the SRA."

"How—?"

"Oh, come on, it's not that far of a dot to connect," Frankie sighed exasperatedly. "Mind control, persuasion—whatever kids call it these days."

Chloe opened and closed her mouth wordlessly. Mind control? The idea was incomprehensible, not just because she couldn't even lift a rock with her mind for longer than a minute, much less invade someone else's mind, but also because doing such a thing was deeply immoral.

"Look, I know it's scary to imagine doing something so powerful given where you are now," the woman behind the Darth Vader mask said, guessing only half of what was on Chloe's mind. "But trust me, I can get you there."

"That's not what I…" Chloe trailed off, considering her options. "What if I refuse?"

Frankie barked out a laugh. "I knew that was a possibility but I didn't think you'd be that stupid to say it out loud."

Chloe glared at her in annoyance.

"We just thought that you'd be, you know, desperate by now," said Darth Vader, sounding a little confused through the helmet. "I mean, you're not getting anywhere at Barden so—"

"So you thought you'd give me an ultimatum? 'Do as we say or you'll never learn your powers?'" Chloe crossed her arms. "How do you know the problem is with Barden anyway? What if it's me? How do you know I haven't lost whatever it is that makes me use my powers?"

The two were silent as Chloe unwittingly let out her insecurities along with her frustration. Deep down, however, she knew that it wasn't the case; her powers were still inside her, she just couldn't get to them. But, while she was admittedly disappointed with her progress at Barden, was it enough to convince her to give it up and accept the help of a pair of unregistered mutants?

"I just know," Darth Vader answered firmly.

"But how?"

At this point, Chloe was only asking for the sake of putting up a fight, because she could already tell what the rest of their deal entailed. They would require her to stay away from Barden, away from anyone who could turn them over to the authorities for being unregistered. That was why they kidnapped her and brought her to the middle of nowhere; somehow they already knew she was desperate enough to agree. And she was.

But at the back of her mind Chloe also knew that, as dirty and dishonest as it was, she could always back out of the deal, or worse, double-cross them once she got what she needed. After all, what could they do to stop her once she could control both her telekinesis and her telepathy? Did they really trust her that much?

Ultimately, however, it wasn't so much her captors' immoral objective that weighed heavily on her mind, as much as it was the thought of leaving Barden and everyone there to think that she had been hurt. Not to mention, there was no conceivable way Beca could find her in the middle of nowhere without a clue.

Taking Chloe's thoughtful silence as a sign that the she needed more convincing, Darth Vader raised her hand slowly. Chloe watched as the bag of ice she had tossed aside earlier slid back toward the basin, twisted in midair as through wrung by invisible hands, and levitated back toward Chloe without all the excess liquid.

Chloe took the bag and gingerly placed it at the back of her still throbbing head. "So you're like me," she said, her voice hiding the excitement she felt at discovering another telekinetic mutant.

The woman in the Darth Vader helmet nodded. "So trust me when I say that what they are doing at that school won't help you. Our powers develop differently, Chloe. Only I can help you."

"As cool as it was to be splashed across the entertainment pages, that was nothing compared to the sense of patriotism and pride these 'world's greatests' might have felt if top military generals came to them and praised them for their superhuman feats," proposed Tommy. "And suppose they were told that they could help soldiers do better in the war against communism or whatever by allowing the study of their physiologies, their chemical make-up.

"I can totally imagine the posters," Tommy made an arc in the air with his hands, "'We want you—and your definitely-not-freakish abilities!' I mean, really, who would say no to volunteering for a study that glorifies the volunteer?"

Justin raised an eyebrow. "You make it sound like the streets were lined with people signing up for this."

"Well, lucky for the government, throwing words like 'classified' and 'sensitive information' is enough to keep noses away from their projects, so these volunteers had to be glorified in secret, too. But lucky for us, government secrecy is like catnip to conspiracy theorists."

"Sure," sighed Justin.

"Hey, some theories are just facts waiting to be proven," defended Tommy. "Anyway, let's say, months later, a small group of people cared enough to notice that some of these volunteers never came back to society… Now, who could this small group of caring people be?" Tommy feigned a thoughtful expression. "Why, of course! The people who would have been interested in volunteering in the first place—the superhumans!"

Tommy paused for a moment as footsteps passed his door. When they heard a door close and loud, pop music blaring, he continued his theory.

"So, picture this, they stop being interested. They get cautious. They don't volunteer to show off their special abilities to help the brave men and women at the frontlines anymore. And they spread a rumor—maybe intentionally or unintentionally—that this 'study' was actually a freakin' genetic cleansing! Hell, that'd be good enough for the entire superhuman community to never want to show their faces or their powers in public ever again, wouldn't it? And, as you can guess, that might be a huge problem for the military, which could've been spending millions of dollars funding this research to gain the upper hand in, erm, let's just say, international relations." Tommy emphasized the euphemism with air quotes.

Justin had to give him credit; the guy knew how to connect the dots in dramatic fashion.

"So in comes this man," continued Tommy, mimicking a fanfare. "Let's call him Senator Robert Edwards—the man with a plan and a face like ham. So in order to round up more of these folks, he proposes that superhumans register themselves, right? Maybe he reasons that, because these people have access to dangerous weapons, i.e., their own bodies, they ought to be regulated. The moment he called them 'dangerous weapons' in—" Tommy glanced down to check the date on a newspaper clipping "—June 26, 1987, his popularity skyrocketed and the next two days had people clamoring for his bill to pass, which it did on the 28th. So all that public hysteria they've been reporting on the news had happened before the SRA? Yeah, it barely lasted a weekend."

Justin recalled that Gail had said the part about addressing 'hysteria' was inaccurate. Could Tommy be right with his theory?

"But hold on, people aren't that stupid, are they?" continued Tommy. "Wouldn't you question a bill that claims people with superhuman powers existed? That's like straight out of a comic book!" He gestured over to his closet. "In the end, as you know, Edwards' SRA was repealed—not because superhumans' existence was disproven, but because 'all people should be equal in the eyes of the law,'" he recited from another paper. "Which basically means that just because someone's better than the average man at punching doesn't mean you're not allowed to punch anymore—kinda like how we treat martial artists. Plus, virtually no one registered anyway—let's assume that's because of the whole cleansing rumor, shall we?—and things sort of petered out after nothing exciting came from that brief controversy. So the issue had what, two and a half months total in the limelight?"

"But why didn't Edwards fight for it?" Justin asked, finding himself unable to stop his curiosity despite his skepticism.

"My theory is that, if driving mutants out of their holes was his plan all along, then putting more focus on the SRA would have had the opposite effect," replied Tommy. "It was easier to say that a young and eager senator had an overreaction than it was to open a whole debate on mutant existence and their rights—like the mess that's happening today. After all, Edwards just wanted a quick solution to the military's shortage problem.

"But, still, I was curious." Tommy stood up and began pacing. "So I finally understood why the SRA had to happen and how it failed but… what did happen to those superhumans that never made it out of the project? Did anybody ever bother to follow up? Then," he paused dramatically, "I finally hit a breakthrough a couple of months ago when I myself met a, uh, group of special individuals."

Justin frowned suspiciously. This was the second time Tommy had hinted that he was working with unregistered mutants.

"They told me something that somewhat validated a theory I was working on. They told me about a more recent research project, where the subject, who had superhuman abilities, had also mysteriously disappeared from the face of the Earth," Tommy revealed with a faraway look in his eye. "According to my new friends, a secret government agency wanted to replicate this girl's power. And this is a fact now, Justin, no conspiracies in that statement. So I thought, hmm, replication… sounds familiar, doesn't it? Where would they have gotten the idea?"

He gave Justin a knowing look, and they both glanced down at the newspaper clipping of military personnel.

"My friends weren't very keen on the details but, from what I gathered, the girl in the second study nearly died from what they were doing to her in secret. So, consider this sequence of events: when they ran out of volunteers in the 80's, the SRA was created. It failed, and then the first project died when they had no one else to study. Then, years later they finally found someone who could be experimented on without anyone knowing. If the girl nearly died from whatever they were doing the second time, and we still haven't heard a peep from the victims of the first time this happened… then we can assume that those part of the first batch of volunteers—the first generation of mutants, which you are currently looking for—are all probably dead."

Justin was at a loss for words. A small part of him was still skeptical for the sake of skepticism, but a larger part of him was more concerned with what to do with this information and how it affected his mission. "So what now?" he asked slowly. "Are you telling me I've hit a dead end?"

"I did say I wasn't going to tell you where they were," Tommy pointed out. "But I told you all of this so you could help me, remember? Help me prove this theory and, hey, maybe you'll find the answers you need along the way."

"What do you mean?"

Tommy rubbed his chin. "I can prove my theory and weaken the MRA by finding out what exactly happened to the superhuman volunteers being experimented on in the 80's. If things work out right, you might be able to get your hands on DNA samples, or at the very least their names, and go forward with your own little research."

Justin was still confused. "But why me? What can I do?"

"There were striking similarities between what I theorized could have happened during the first project, and what my friends told me actually happened in the second one," said Tommy, resting his fingertips together. "I don't think experiments of this nature would be carried out by different people, and if that's true then there's a chance that whoever is behind the first is probably behind the second. And you have ties to one."

"If you're talking about the DOD, you're hitting a dead end, too," said Justin. "They don't give AMG information—it's the other way around."

Tommy shook his head. "I actually meant AMG itself."

"That's impossible," Justin defended stubbornly. "They can't be involved with the first project, AMG wasn't even established then. Besides, the McKaddens would have told me the moment I asked."

"I'm not saying they were involved in the first project," Tommy said carefully, watching Justin for his reaction. "But they do have access to it; they probably just didn't know it." He took out an old, grainy photo, this time from his back pocket. "The building that AMG currently occupies used to be a federal defense building until—oh, look at that—1987."

"This is such a bad idea."

Chloe heard the deep growl from beyond the van's doors right before they opened. She was once again greeted by Darth Vader in her hideous sweater, while the shape-shifter this time appeared as a nondescript blue-collar worker. He was leaning against one open door with his arms crossed. "I don't like being back at the scene of the crime," Frankie said grumpily.

Chloe instantly looked into the round, plastic eyes of the Vader helmet with a fiercely indignant expression, as if to say, "You promised."

"Just remember what we agreed," the woman breathed through the helmet. "You can't tell her our plan. You can't take her with you. You can't give anything, or take anything, that could lead her to our location."

"Yeah, you don't wanna be strip-searched by these guys," Frankie warned, raising his stubby, calloused hands,

Chloe grimaced in his direction before turning back to the other woman. "What if she insists?" she asked with a hint of worry.

A noise that sounded like a breathy chuckle came through the mask. "Well, it's up to you to convince her, ho—ow much you need to do this."

Both Chloe and Frankie cast puzzled looks at the masked mutant over her odd enunciation. "Oh-kay," drawled Frankie. "Come on, Red. Let's not waste any time."

Chloe looked out the back of the van. Hours must have passed since her captors revealed their intentions, as the sun was now replaced by the moon peeking out from behind a cloud. The only other light source came from a solitary lamppost at the side of the deserted, curved road, on either side of which were thickets of loblolly pines.

"You know where to go, right?" Frankie grunted as Chloe stepped out of the van. When she responded with a blank look, he jerked his head toward the small forest. "Just keep heading straight that way and you'll reach the small creek that cuts through Barden's forest. Follow it in the south-south-west direction until you reach someplace familiar."

Chloe nodded slowly. She was terrible at directions but she didn't want to look like an idiot in front of Frankie, who was now taking a long ladder out the van and propping it against the lamppost to better sell their disguise as workers from the electric company.

"Good luck," said the woman in the Darth Vader helmet, poking her head out of the van. Chloe was a few feet from the edge of the thicket when, thanks to the silence of the night, she clearly heard the woman whisper to Frankie, "God. I almost called her 'honey.'"

A couple of minutes later, Chloe sighed in relief. She had fortunately picked the correct direction of the creek to follow and could now see the faint yellow lights on the mansion's back porch… and the security camera pointed directly at it.

Pursing her lips in annoyance, Chloe let her eyes roam across the mansion's outer walls, taking note of all the security cameras she could remember being installed a few months ago. She also noticed that the lights were almost all out; it must be later in the night than Chloe had originally thought. At that point, her eyes locked onto Beca's bedroom window and realized how her girlfriend had managed all those late-night visits without anyone knowing:

There were no cameras pointing upward.

Darting from behind one bush to another, Chloe inched closer to the mansion. Carefully avoiding the cameras' lines of sight, she climbed on top of the garden shed, where she could just about reach the second story's ledge and pull herself up. Beca makes this look so easy, Chloe thought as she struggled to cling onto the wall. Then again, she defies gravity.

After side stepping enough times, she finally reached Beca's window. Luckily, her girlfriend had managed to get the bed closer to the window without much argument from her roommate, but when Chloe raised a hand to lightly tap against the glass, she was surprised to see, through the moonlight, that Beca had grown nearly three times in size—and was now blonde.

"Dammit," she muttered. Beca must have decided to stay in Chloe's room, causing Fat Amy to take her place… because Beca was probably missing her so much that it made Amy sick. Chloe smiled and swooned at the thought, until she realized that her room was facing the other side of the building. "Dammit."

Another couple of minutes later, Chloe was already breaking out a sweat while deciding how best to descend from the roof and onto her own room. Hanging upside down with her legs hooked onto the gutter, she took a peek through the windows and saw that Beca was indeed curled up on her bed, the one farther from the window, hugging her pillow to her chest.

Chloe thanked the universe that her untamed roommate enjoyed yelling various abuses out the window at students doing their outdoor physical exercises in the grounds facing their side of the mansion, because it meant that their window was perennially unlocked. Making use of her spectacular physical condition, Chloe reached down, pulled the windows open, and used her upper body strength to flip herself directly into the room.

Landing firmly on both feet, however, she was surprised to find, not her softly snoozing girlfriend, but a blanket flying straight toward her. Realizing that she had woken Beca, Chloe hurriedly attempted to shush her before the entire residential wing woke up. "Shh—" But after instinctively stepping forward, her feet got tangled in the sheet, and she lost her balance and fell. "—oh shit! Beca!"

Chloe felt hands pull off the sheet just as she was doing the same, and came face to face with a very serious-looking Beca. "Is it—is it really you?" the brunette asked cautiously.

Instead of answering, Chloe lunged forward and wrapped her arms around Beca's neck with enough force to knock them both onto her bed. Despite everything that had happened between them in the past twenty-four hours, Chloe could only focus on the fact that she was reunited with Beca after a record time apart. She hoped that the way they had left things would be long forgotten after what they both went through since.

No one gives hugs like Chloe's, and it was for that very reason that Beca lowered her guard and squeezed back tightly. "Thank God you're okay," she breathed, and then pulled back to check if that was indeed the case. "Are you hurt? What the hell happened to you? Who was—?"

Chloe put a finger to Beca's lips gently. "Beca, there's a lot to explain, I know. But first you've got to quiet down and promise me something, okay?"

Beca searched Chloe's eyes for a quicker explanation. "Are you in trouble?"

Chloe shook her head. "Promise you won't tell anyone what I'm about to tell you."

"Chloe, you're freaking me out—"

"Beca, please!"

Beca exhaled through her nose before nodding reluctantly. "Okay, I promise."

Chloe leaned forward and kissed her. Beca savored the lips she had gone far too long without and deepened their kiss, until Chloe pulled back and whispered, "Okay. I trust you."

"Tell me what's going on."

Chloe readied herself for the conversation she had been preparing during the long ride to Barden. "The one who took me, the shape-shifter—"

"So it was a mutant!"

"Yes. She—or he—has an accomplice, a woman. She's wearing a Darth Vader helmet so I can't identify her, and obviously there's no way to know what Frankie—that's the shape-shifter—really looks like—"

"Darth Vader—? What?" Suddenly Beca regretted demanding to know immediately what was going on, because what Chloe was currently saying made no sense to her.

"That's not what's important," Chloe said quickly. "Beca, the woman has telekinesis, too."

Beca's bemusement morphed into confusion. "That's… possible?"

"Yeah, didn't Luke say that about Jesse? Powers can overlap with each other if they're on the same development tree or something." Chloe smirked at Beca. "You're a trainer; you should know this stuff."

Beca laughed at the brief moment of levity and she let slip, "Actually, we kind of all got demoted now that the Professor's back."

Chloe blinked in surprise. "The Professor's back?"

"A lot of things have happened since you disappeared," Beca said grimly. "But tell me your stuff first."

"Right." Chloe was curious to know what had changed, but she reminded herself that she had something more important to tell Beca. "So the woman showed me that she was telekinetic, and she offered to help me. She said that our powers 'develop differently' and that I have a lot of ground to cover because of everything I might have been doing wrong. Basically, I'm never going to get it right here, which makes sense because Bree said that Barden has never had a mutant with psychic powers before."

"But if all they wanted was to help you, why did they have to kidnap you that way?" Beca asked in concern, recalling the chilling way Chloe was brought out of her own room.

"Frankie said it wasn't supposed to get that bad," muttered Chloe, rubbing the back of her head subconsciously. "She apologized but I gave her a broken nose anyway."

"That's my girl," Beca praised proudly.

"Yeah… you don't look good with a broken nose, baby."

Beca scowled when it dawned on her what that meant. "That still doesn't explain why they had to take you that way."

"Well, think about it—why else would they not want to be seen?" A pause. "They're unregistered, Beca."

"Oh, right." Then something kicked in. "Oh, no—Chloe, the FBI just put unregistered mutants on their Most Wanted list! You can't let them know you're associated with unreggies—the Alpha team is already being questioned about Luke and Stacie's involvement in the New York bombings!"

"What?!" hissed Chloe, careful not to wake the entire dorm. "What the hell has happened since I disappeared?"

Beca internally struggled between catching Chloe up and getting to the bottom of what happened to her. "Just finish what happened to you first! So you met unregistered mutants who could help you with your powers and—" Suddenly it struck her; the reason Chloe didn't want her to tell anyone she had returned, the reason she was sneaking into her own room in the middle of the night, and the reason she seemed to be in a hurry to get her story out.

Chloe was leaving.

It should have been obvious from the moment Chloe explained who her kidnappers were, and Beca couldn't blame her for her contentious decision to run off with them; after all, Chloe had been frustrated beyond relief over her powers getting nowhere at Barden. If what the unregistered telekinetic mutant said was true, then leaving really was Chloe's only option to fix that, unless she wanted to spend the rest of her life trying to figure it out through trial and error.

Chloe was being given the opportunity to finally live up to the mutant she was thought to be...

And Beca was all on board. "Okay, then I'm going with you."

Chloe smiled sadly and cupped her cheek. "I kind of love that I knew you were going to say that," she said wistfully. "But, Beca, you know why you can't…"

"No. I don't know why," Beca said stubbornly, pulling Chloe's hand away and holding it in her own. "I don't see a reason why I can't go. I can live like unregistered mutants. I can fly under the radar." When Chloe continued to look apologetic, Beca shook her head. "You can't do this to me, Chlo. You can't leave me."

Chloe's eyes widened when Beca interpreted her decision to go as her leaving Beca, and she leaned forward to press her lips against Beca's in an attempt to reassure her that it wasn't the case. The kiss started out firm and steady—a promise and a plea to be strong—but after having missed the contact, they quickly melted into each other's bodies until they could practically feel their hearts beating in sync. And this time, Chloe didn't break the kiss until they both felt ready to let the other go.

"Oh, Beca," she whispered desperately once they did. "You know I love you—I love you so, so much. I'm not leaving you, I promise." She forced Beca to look into her eyes. "Look, I admit that I don't know how long I'll be gone, how long it'll take me to catch up... All I know is that I'd be stupid not to try. And who knows, maybe—maybe I won't even catch up after all these years of sucking at it," she added in an attempt to cheer Beca up. "But I also know, more than anything in the world, that I will always find my way back to you. I always have, haven't I? And I know this is horrible timing for us, but all you have to do is wait for me. Can you… will you wait for me?"

To Chloe's relief, Beca looked up after a brief moment of resignation and tucked a stray strand of hair behind Chloe's ear. "I'll wait as long as I have to," she said. "But you know how impatient I am. I'm going to try to find a way so that I don't have to wait."

Chloe smiled but looked slightly confused. "What do you mean?"

"If unregistered mutants don't have to be in hiding, then neither do you, right?" Beca said determinedly. "We're going to find a way to fix this mutant issue once and for all—and this time, we're not settling for registration. We're going to fight to the end for our freedom. That, I promise."

"There's the Beca I know!" Chloe grinned proudly at her girlfriend.

Eventually, though, their smiles faded into a solemn line. They took a break from looking into each other's eyes to quietly reflect on the challenging days, weeks, or even months ahead of them. Though the past few months had also been challenging—having to subject themselves to scrutiny, dealing through conflicted feelings of how to help their friends turned fugitives—there was always something to fall back on to keep their heads up. But now they were moving toward the future from separate paths and, if the past twelve hours were any indication, Beca knew she would be utterly lost without Chloe.

"Is there really no way we could…?" Chloe shook her head before Beca could finish her trailing sentence. "Then how am I supposed to know you're safe?" she asked, viewing the situation practically.

"Don't worry about me. No one can find me that far into the middle of nowhere—that's where they brought me, before agreeing to let come back to talk to you," Chloe added in response to Beca's unasked question. "I think they want me as isolated as possible so I can't just up and leave. And so that no one can find me."

Beca frowned. "And you trust these two?"

"I kind of do," nodded Chloe, with a faraway look in her eye. "There's something about them that tells me they're not bad people, you know? They're kind of goofy and—" She suddenly turned to Beca with a thoughtful expression. "Actually, there is one thing I found kind of strange."

"What is it?"

"I think they're older mutants," she said. "Not like how Luke and Aubrey are a bit older than us, but like… an older generation."

"But you haven't even seen their faces."

"It's more about the way they talk," said Chloe. "Frankie used the phrase, 'whatever kids call them.' Why would she say 'kids'?"

"Aubrey says that sometimes, too," shrugged Beca, "when she's being all mother superior to the rest of us."

"And the other one tried to call me 'honey,'" added Chloe, remembering the unusual pet name that almost escaped the Darth Vader mask. "It felt like when you were called 'dearie' by the old lady who feeds the pigeons at the park."

"Hmm." Beca still looked unconvinced.

"Okay, how about this? She's wearing an argyle sweater vest."

Beca bit back a laugh. "Okay, okay, I believe you," she said in amusement. "I trust your instincts, but why does it matter if they're old?"

"C'mon, Beca!" Chloe chastised her girlfriend for not making the connection instantly. "How have you been at Barden for a year and not wonder why everyone here is our age? If these two are mutants of an older generation, then they could help Cynthia Rose with her research! Doesn't her team deal with DNA samples and stuff?"

"How do you know about their research?" Beca asked in surprise. "We're supposed to be staying away from their anti-mutant weapon project."

"Jack and Gail told me," Chloe replied simply. She noticed that Beca had suddenly stiffened at the mention of their names. "What's wrong?"

Beca took a moment to weigh the benefits and costs of telling Chloe about her parents' arrest. Even though she knew she would pay for it later, she decided that Chloe was better off not having to choose between staying and leaving. "It's just that… now that everyone's out to get them, it doesn't seem likely that unregistered mutants would willingly give themselves or their DNA up to help create a weapon to be used against us."

"No, but maybe I can convince them to. And guns are weapons that can be used against humans and animals, too, but they're still used as a law enforcement tool."

Beca pursed her lips and sighed. The anti-mutant weapon's true intent was another polarizing issue that Beca would rather not spend her last night with Chloe arguing about—regardless of how naïve she thought her girlfriend was being about it. If Chloe wanted to change the world one mutant at a time, Beca wasn't going to stop her, but she was going to do whatever it takes to protect her, especially if those mutants were of a sketchy nature.

She looked into Chloe's eyes, a surefire way to see how the redhead was feeling about anything, and saw only determination. It was tinged with a little sadness, most likely due to the requirements of her new 'training,' but there was not a trace of fear or even apprehension over what was to come. Clearly, Chloe was very eager to get somewhere with her powers now that these possibly older and oddly helpful mutants could show her the way...

"Hang on," she frowned. "Why are they helping you anyway? And how did they even know about you and your powers in the first place?"

Chloe looked away quickly to hide her readable eyes, which failed to go unnoticed by Beca. "They, um, well, they saw us on the news that day you got shot. That's how they figured out that I couldn't use my powers," she answered evasively.

"And why are they helping you?" repeated Beca.

Chloe ran out of things to lay her eyes on. "Beca, you know I can never lie to you—"

"What did you promise them?"

"Um…"

"Chloe!"

"They want me to use my telepathy to control some important people's minds and make them get rid of the MRA," Chloe blurted out, all in one breath. "But I'm not going to do it!" she insisted quickly. "I'll just get them to teach me to use my powers and then I'll ditch them when I get what I need. I mean, they can't stop me when I can already… change their... m-minds… right?"

She slowed to an awkward stop when Beca simply gaped at her the entire time she was rambling. "Look, I know it's a really, really crummy thing to do but, morally, it's the lesser of two evils, right?" she said, desperately waiting for Beca's approval.

"Oh, yeah, definitely," Beca replied distractedly. Then she bit her lip thoughtfully. "But, um… aren't you kind of missing an opportunity here?"

"What do you mean?"

Beca was careful in choosing her words. "I mean… if it were my—well, I guess I would—I would actually do the mind control thing."

Chloe gave her a confused look, which Beca returned with her own.

"But it's wrong!" Chloe said plainly. "Morally wrong—that's not the lesser of two evils, that's the more of two evils!"

"The word is 'greater' but think about it though," argued Beca. "You'd be saving us a shit-load of trouble if you could actually just reverse everything that has gone wrong! The lesser evil is the mind control part—the greater good is peace between mutants and non-mutants."

Chloe scrunched her face in disagreement. "The ends don't justify the means, Beca. I won't take away people's free wills just to get what I want—"

"Not just what you want," Beca pointed out, "it's what majority wants."

"Well, then, this isn't the way majority should be getting what it wants," Chloe said firmly.

Beca opened her mouth to continue arguing but went with her better judgment instead and stepped on the brakes. Again, she reminded herself that an argument was not the best parting gift to give Chloe; she should have already learned her lesson the last time she left Chloe in a huff. And besides, they were still far—unknowingly far, in fact—from crossing that bridge. Chloe still had time to think about the mind control plan.

In any case, Beca thought, it should ultimately be Chloe's decision, not anyone else's.

"I'm sorry," she conceded sincerely. "Your whole life, people have been trying to dictate what you should do with your powers. I'd be no better than them if I didn't respect your decision."

Chloe gave a small nod but deflated a bit at Beca's apology. "Thank you," she said softly. "I know you're just trying to do the right thing and I love you for that. You know, you have such a big heart for someone in such a tiny body." She placed her hand over Beca's chest and sighed.

After a comfortable pause, wherein they both let go of their own ideologies just for that night, Chloe lay back and pulled Beca down beside her. "What are we doing?" Beca asked nervously as Chloe rolled to the edge to gather the discarded sheet from the floor.

"Relax," giggled Chloe, noticing how awkward her girlfriend had gotten. "I just want to cuddle until you fall asleep. I thought it might make it easier to leave if you were asleep…"

Beca rolled to her side to face Chloe and looked into her eyes, which were still as vibrant as ever no matter how dim the lighting. "How soon do you have to go?"

"When the sun begins to rise and I'm not back, they'll take it as me declining their offer."

Beca knew by now that there was no dissuading Chloe, so instead she turned her energy to deriding the people taking Chloe away from her. "They're not very good kidnappers if they're giving you a choice on that."

"Then I guess they're not kidnappers," Chloe chuckled softly. "Now turn around, little spoon."

"Nuh-uh." Beca waggled a finger in front of Chloe's nose. "You're the one leaving, which means I'm the one letting you go, which means I get to be the big spoon this time."

"But you'll wake up."

"Then I'll wake up," shrugged Beca. "Even if it'll hurt, watching you walk away is better than waking up and finding you gone. Believe me."

When the time came for her to leave, Chloe didn't have to worry about waking Beca after all, as they were both still wide awake. Only kisses were exchanged, no words, before she climbed out the window, onto the roof, and back through the same path she took from the forest. By the time Chloe finally found the curved road and traced it back to the van, Frankie was impatiently drumming his fingers on the wheel.

"You sure took your sweet time," he said gruffly.

"Yeah… Where's, um—?"

"In the back. Hurry up and get in, we still have to make sure you don't have any traces on you."

Chloe rolled her eyes and let Frankie pull the doors to the back open. The woman in the Darth Vader helmet was sitting with her head against the wall, presumably asleep. She awoke, however, from the sound of Chloe climbing inside. "How did it go?" she asked.

The modified voice made it difficult for Chloe to tell if the woman was genuinely concerned but given the earlier slip of her tongue, Chloe felt slightly reassured that she was. "Let's just say this better be worth it."

"Was it really that hard to leave?" grunted Frankie. "What's so good about this Beca girl anyway?"

Before Chloe could come up with a snarky retort, Darth Vader came to her rescue. "Leave her alone, Frankie, it's none of your business."

Frankie merely snorted and left to start the engine. "Sorry about her," Darth Vader apologized on her accomplice's behalf once again. "She likes to match faces with personalities. It gets quite offensive sometimes, actually, when you see how she stereotypes guys."

"So Frankie is a she?"

Darth Vader shrugged. "Even I don't know, to be honest. She's always in her female form when it's just the two of us, so I'm guessing she's more comfortable as a woman."

Chloe nodded slowly, wondering if she could get the woman to accidentally reveal their ages. "How long have you and Frankie been on the run together?"

The telekinetic mutant didn't respond immediately, but Chloe continued to stare into the round plastic eyes of the fictional space villain's helmet. "Quite a while," the woman answered simply. Then she began to shuffle away and Chloe took it as a signal that their conversation was over.

"Wait," she said. Thankfully, her captor obliged. "Why won't you show me who you are? Or tell me your name? I'm stuck with you now; I can keep your secret."

They were both motionless for a moment, until the woman continued scooting out of the van. "Soon," was the last word Chloe heard before the door closed shut.

Absolute darkness and complete silence, Chloe learned, were excellent ingredients for a deep and restful sleep. She woke up naturally hours after the van pulled off the side of the road and found that her wrists no longer bound and that she was now lying on a comfortable cot, which was slightly cold but incredibly soft. If she weren't so eager to begin her new training and figure out who the two women really were, Chloe would have gladly sunk back into the bed for an extended sleep. But she was so she sat up, swung her legs off the bed, and let her feet touch the floor.

Cold stone.

After rubbing her eyes of sleep, she looked around the tiny room. Its walls were bare, save for a window by the foot of her bed and the wooden door across it, and the only piece of furniture in the room aside from the bed was a small wooden chest beside it.

"Seriously, how old are these mutants?" muttered Chloe, briefly wondering if they had time-travelled from a different century. "Ha. Don't be silly, Chloe, time travel is impossible," she again muttered to herself as she stood and moved toward the window. Outside was, as expected, a vast expanse of nothing but nature. However, unlike the area somewhere en route to this place, a few hills and trees decorated the landscape.

Chloe's stomach suddenly emitted a low and prolonged rumble, reminding her that she hadn't eaten a thing in over twenty-four hours. The excitement of the 'kidnap' and the adrenaline it provided could only hold her for so long, and now she was starving. She left the room as quietly as she could, hoping to catch her helpful captors off guard and overhear them reveal something about their identities.

Their hideout, which Chloe assumed was what this cottage served as, was quite modest. Just like the bedroom she was placed in, it had bare walls, and only doors and windows. It also had a closed, fortress-like feel to it that made Chloe wonder if anyone had ever even tried to break in, considering they were in the middle of nowhere. But there was something else, something about the air that told Chloe this place was old. The walls were too bare, the floor was dusty, and—

Chloe's investigative instincts were instantly shut down once the smell of buttery scrambled eggs filled her nostrils. Her head and stomach both ached in their earnest desire to satiate her hunger so, without much further thought, Chloe followed her nose and padded down the short hallway. Once she was through the small living room and in sight of the kitchen, her eyes immediately locked on to the deliciously yellow dish on the wooden counter.

But no more than a second later, she looked up and felt her face drain of blood. Her ears filled with a ringing sound and she grew mind-bendingly dizzy, and before she could understand what was going on, she fainted.

Later on Chloe would argue with Frankie that the reason she passed out was not so much the fact that she had reached the breaking point of her hunger than it was the fact that it was her mother serving it.

"Jesus—if I'd have known that would be her reaction, I would have kept the helmet on much longer."

"Nah, she's just hungry. Hold on… Here, Chloe, have a bit of toast..."

Chloe felt something stiff and crumbly placed against her lips and swatted it away angrily. Her vision was still out of focus but she could feel herself sitting upright on a couch with the two women on either side of her, one of whom—Chloe still hadn't forgotten despite her semi-consciousness—was her mother, the long-presumed deceased Katherine Beale.

"You!" she screeched, yanking her arm away from the woman's grip. "You're—I—oh, God, I think I'm gonna pass out again—"

"Relax, honey, just breathe—"

But Chloe only zeroed in on the term of endearment, which suddenly cleared up what had happened the night before. "Oh, no, no, no—you don't get to call me 'honey,' you're not my moth—" She whipped her head to the other side and stared at Frankie, who had returned to the blonde form she introduced herself in, remembering that she had already been tricked by a familiar face once. "If you're a shape-shifter, too, this isn't funny! How dare you—!"

"Chloe, I'm not a shape-shifter!" the woman insisted, grabbing Chloe's hands to prevent them from hitting them as she waved them about hysterically. "I swear. It's really me."

Chloe stared at her. Going a decade without seeing her mother, or even pictures of her mother, made it difficult for her to believe this woman. Sure, on the outside she looked like the woman she remembered, with her red hair (now closer to blonde than Chloe last saw it), her light, almost greenish brown eyes, and her sharply defined nose. The only things vaguely different were the way she styled and colored her hair.

A shape-shifter would have just kept everything exactly the same as I remembered if they wanted to mess with me, Chloe's conscience reasoned. Nevertheless, given her history with family and lies, she dryly replied, "My mother died ten years ago," as though serving up the fact for this woman to disprove.

"When? In an unexplained incident at our home in Miami?" Katherine said skeptically. "Funny, 'cause the way I remember it, you died that day." She stood up and shook her head in confusion. "But if you didn't… what happened to you? Why didn't you ever look for me?"

Chloe gaped at her. "Why didn't you look for me?" she countered, her voice and body rising as she confronted her mother. "I had a reason to believe you died, but I was—!"

"Okay, everybody, calm down," said Frankie, pulling Chloe back down, away from her mother, until the younger redhead relaxed on the couch. "Look, there's clearly a lot of mother-daughter tension here. You both thought the other had died, you both didn't bother to look for each other—you're not exactly winning family of the year, I get it. But let's not point fingers. Remember why we're here."

"I'm not doing anything you ask until she explains everything," Chloe said stubbornly. Then, back to her mother, "I can't believe you would let me go my whole life without knowing you were alive!"

"It's not like you cared to know anyway," Katherine shot back, "obviously, since you didn't think to check if I was really dead! So, what, was life in the Upper East Side too good to turn down? Did you not think I'd find out—"

"Hey, hey!" Frankie raised a finger at her. "You are a forty-year-old woman, Kate, you do not get to act like a jealous teenager. And you." She turned to Chloe and flicked her on the forehead. "Cut your mom some slack. Because of the way we've had to live our lives, she only found out about you during your fifteen seconds of fame on national TV! You, on the other hand, had ten years to track her down—or at least make sure she was actually dead, so what the hell have you been doing, huh?"

Chloe avoided their eyes guiltily. She didn't think bringing up the whole Project and memory-implanting parts of her life would help anything; it might actually make it even more difficult for her to persuade them to help with the anti-mutant weapon. Besides, Frankie had a point. Chloe had to admit that she simply accepted it when Gail told her about her mother's death and didn't even ask to visit her gravesite. She simply… moved on.

Chloe looked up and saw that her mother had a similar expression of guilt. Frankie took note of both Beales' reluctance to actually explain themselves, so she rolled her eyes and declared, "Okay, let's make a deal. First, we're going to get some food in Chloe's stomach because, honestly, it sounds like we have a Rottweiler in the house."

Chloe blushed and put a hand over her growling stomach.

"Next," continued Frankie, "so that we all get what we want: for every lesson or training what-have-you that you two finish, you each get to ask and answer a question dealing with this," she waved a hand around them, "family crisis of yours, okay? Do we have a deal?"

Too hungry and dizzy to carry on arguing for anything else, Chloe nodded. And Kate, seeing how pale and weak her daughter had gotten, quickly agreed as well. She reached over to the coffee table and handed Chloe her cold breakfast. "Here," she said gently. "Don't eat too much too fast. We've got a long day ahead and I can't have it start with you throwing up."

A little over an hour later, Chloe deemed herself physically and mentally capable to begin her training without freaking out about who was giving her the training, and she followed her mother outside the cottage. She had a million questions running through her mind—and at the very top of the list was why now? Why was her mother offering to teach her to control and use her powers ten years too late, when she could have avoided the whole Heartless fiasco that fateful night.

Chloe had only gotten to setting up the question in her mind when Frankie, noticing her expression, clucked her tongue and reminded her about their agreement. "One lesson, one question, one answer—respect the order, Red."

Chloe looked ready to argue that there were more important things than learning how to use her powers, but then realized how that would make her a tad hypocritical after her many hissy fits with Beca. So she exchanged exasperated looks with her mother and positioned herself a few paces before the woman, under a large flowering tree. "Okay, let's get on with it," she said. It was funny how she no longer seemed as eager.

Kate took a deep breath. "I've never done anything like this before," she admitted. "But I guess we can start with you telling me what you've been able to do so far."

"Nothing," Chloe replied dully. "Well, I can make a rock hover for a couple of seconds, or stop one from hitting my face, but I wouldn't say it's reliable; I never seem to keep a hold on it long enough."

Her mother nodded understandingly. "Let me guess, they asked you to visualize the object moving to try to activate your telekinesis."

"Yeah but we gave up on that when we realized it wasn't working," shrugged Chloe, omitting the exception that was Charlene's last training. "So far, what seemed to work was clearing my mind."

Kate hummed thoughtfully. "And how exactly did you do that?"

Chloe thought back to her time at the Dark Margin with Jack, when she was first successful. "Well, I had to detach myself from the world—to reach this weird place in my mind where I saw things differently. Like, I stopped noticing everything except myself and the thing I was trying to move."

Kate nodded with pursed lips. "You were on the right track with clearing your mind, but you misunderstood one critical thing about our powers," she assessed. "Even when you were detaching yourself, you were still concerned with the physical object, so you weren't completely detached."

"But how can I move physical objects without thinking of them in the physical world?" Chloe asked in confusion.

"The question isn't about object, Chloe, but about being," explained Kate. "Powers like ours—mutations of the mind—are unlike any other because we delve into things beyond the physical world." Kate paused thoughtfully, her bottom lip between her teeth. "Think of your friends at Barden—think of Beca."

Chloe swallowed. Thinking of Beca was probably not the best thing to do, considering the last time she thought of Beca in the middle of training—not to mention the events of the previous night.

Thankfully, her mother quickly continued, "When she manipulates air, she doesn't manipulate what air is, she probably only manipulates its form. Those are two different things—being and object. When Beca flies, she doesn't give herself the ability to defy gravity; she probably only forms the air beneath her to propel her upward, or something like that. But with telekinesis," Kate raised her arm upward and brought down a flower from above them, "the movement comes from our minds."

Chloe watches as the flower separated into petals in midair and flew in a single file around Chloe's head. "So… it's more of visualizing something happening than—wait, no." Chloe frowned and shook her head. Her mother had just said visualizing was wrong. "I'm still confused."

"Don't worry, I don't expect you to get it today," said Kate. "We're going through this step by step. And the first step is understanding that…?"

Chloe took the cue from her mother's tone and answered tentatively, "It's about being not object?"

"Correct," Kate nodded, and Chloe internally chastised herself for feeling elated at her mother's approval. "Reality bends itself for the mind, Chloe. When people think of reality, they think of what they can perceive with the senses. But there are also things beyond the senses—abstractions—that we can all agree are considered 'real.' For instance, ideas, events, and concepts. But aren't ideas and concepts just plain thoughts that come from our minds?"

"Reality bends itself for the mind," Chloe echoed in realization.

Kate nodded. "Exactly. Our mutated minds allow us to tap into this particular phenomenon, to reach beyond the physical world—literally, the meta-physical."

Chloe winced. "I should have taken that Intro to Philosophy class with Beca," she mused.

Kate chuckled. "It's not as complicated as it sounds," she assured. "Basically we take our thoughts, translate them into a metaphysical command of some sort, and project that into the physical world. But in order to begin doing that, we ourselves must be metaphysical. We need to ride on the same wavelength, so to speak. And what that means is similar to what you've already been trying to do: detaching yourself from the physical world, only this time with the specific objective of moving toward the metaphysical."

Kate gave her daughter a moment to absorb all the information.

"How do I… be metaphysical?" asked Chloe.

Kate hesitated, as though unsure if Chloe was ready to hear the implications. "This will be a lot to take in, Chloe, are you sure you're ready?"

"I don't think I have a choice," Chloe pointed out. Even Frankie gave a shrug in agreement. So, after a sigh, Kate said, "You'd need to let go of the physical world completely by understanding that there is nothingness around you."

Chloe furrowed her brow. At first it didn't make sense to her—how could there be nothing around her?—but she then recalled that Jack had said something similar about everything being nothing. In fact, even she had an experience with what nothingness meant: "It's scary, but the only way I can reach that feeling is if I'm indifferent to everything around me. To be at a point where only I exist, where everything else is meaningless…"

"Nothingness?" Chloe repeated softly. "Is that like… meaningless?"

Kate cocked her head to the side. "You've felt it before, haven't you?"

Chloe nodded. "The first time I…" She trailed off, suddenly remembering how that conversation with Jack actually ended. She would have to stop caring about things, about people. "I have to be really selfish, don't I?"

"Sorry?"

"I have to be selfish to use my powers. Sociopathic, even. To live beyond the physical world, like you said, I have to not care about anything here." Chloe suddenly had a thought. "Is that why I haven't been able to use my powers? Because I care about a lot of things in the physical world? But that's not fair—!"

"Whoa, slow down!" Kate put up her hands to stop her rambling. "Don't think about that yet. Let's just take it one step at a time, okay? What have I told you so far?"

Chloe took a deep breath. "Being not object," she recited slowly. "Reality bends itself to the mind. Be metaphysical."

"Good. Now, I'm going to dissect what living metaphysically means for mutants like us," said Kate. "Let's start with nothingness first."

"I already know what it is," Chloe said at once. "It has something to do with angst, right?"

Kate straightened up in surprise. "How on earth did you know that?"

Chloe was careful not to give away too much about her past. "A friend was talking about peer pressure and how basically everything we worry about as teenagers doesn't actually mean anything—then suddenly I was able to levitate myself. He said that feeling was called angst."

"You're farther along than I thought," Kate said with an impressed nod. "Your friend and I must have a lot in common. But yes, angst is the best way for someone to understand nothingness. Like you said, it's the realization that everything we busy ourselves with in the physical world—money, status, approval—is meaningless, which opens you up to letting go of it."

"Yeah, but that still doesn't help my problem," Chloe said in a huff. "I can forget money and material things, easy, but you can't make me not care about people!"

"Well, you don't have to hate them," reasoned Kate. "Just stay away from relationships that drag you back into the physical world."

"Stay away from relationships?" Chloe was aghast. "What's the whole point of living if you don't have people to care about?"

Kate folded her arms and shifted her weight. The action made Chloe feel like a child reprimanded for being stubborn, and she scowled at her mother. "Do you not care about people anymore?" she asked accusingly. "Well, obviously, you didn't care about me enough to come find me—"

Both her mother and Frankie scowled at her, though for different reasons.

"—but what about Frankie? I mean what's the deal with you two anyway?"

Frankie's scowl morphed into a smirk. "Not to worry, Red," she said. "You're in no danger of becoming my step-daughter or anything like that."

"It gets easier to compartmentalize friendships when you're used to it," Kate said, rolling her eyes. "But you're not used to it yet, Chloe, so you're going to have to learn first. And right here, right now is the best place and the best time for you to do that."

Kate waited for a particularly strong wind to pass before she softened her tone. "I know it sucks that we made you leave your everyone you care about behind, but there was a reason for that—and it's this," she said, waving a hand around them. "You need to be away from the world and focus until you can leave it all behind and connect with the metaphysical world. If you're serious about mastering your powers, you'll stay here for as long as it takes for you to do that."

"All right. I think we can call that the end of lesson one," said Frankie, taking note of Chloe's conflicted expression. "You two can have your Q-and-A—but remember, just one each," she added firmly. "I'll give you ladies some privacy."

Once Frankie's slender back had disappeared through the cottage door, Kate lowered herself slowly to sit on the grass. She made a motion for Chloe to join her and said, "I guess it's only fair that you get to ask first."

Chloe thought about the most important question she wanted to ask on her way down. She settled with, "So you're a mutant?" and hoped that the answer would explain everything else about her mother's secret life.

Kate nodded softly and ran a hand through her hair after another strong wind blew it out of place. Chloe vaguely remembered that mannerism of hers; she used to do it at the kitchen table when she was frustrated over something Chloe was too young to understand.

"I am a mutant, yes. But to be completely honest with you, I hadn't been in touch with my powers for a long time when I had you," she confessed. "And, like I said, leaving the world behind is key to mastering your powers; so coming back to it means the opposite. It was a sacrifice, but one that I truly wanted to make."

"And when I started showing my powers?" Chloe pushed, hoping that her mother wouldn't take the one question rule too seriously. "Why didn't you help me control myself then when you knew what it was? How could you let him do that to me?"

Kate looked down guiltily and despite not seeing her mother's eyes Chloe could tell that this was something that weighed heavily on the woman's conscience all these years. "I am… endlessly sorry for that, Chloe," she said quietly. "I was a coward. I didn't want you to get us in trouble with the police any less than your father did so I just… I turned the other way."

Chloe looked at her with eyes full of betrayal. "You could have stopped him. Told him there was another way."

"After I realized that physically punishing you was making it worse, I did try to stop him, believe me," pleaded Kate. "But I was too late and by then he wouldn't listen to me. So I tried to fix what I had already broken." Her voice softened. "Do you remember, early in the morning, when I'd unlock your door and bring you food—do you remember what I said to comfort you?"

Chloe did remember. Those memories were the reason she loved her mother and thought that she was the bravest and kindest person in the world; a thought that she was quickly rethinking now. "All you told me was to not think about it," she said dismissively. "Not exactly useful advice."

Kate shook her head. "I told you to clear your mind. There's a difference," she said. "You were a talkative child; it made sense that your mind was just as busy as your mouth was. And with your powers just starting to manifest, it was critical that you stopped fueling it with your thoughts."

Chloe gave her a look. "Still, you could have told me you had powers, too. I wouldn't have felt so different. So alone."

"Like I said, I was a coward."

"What were you so afraid of?"

Kate pulled at a blade of grass. "I think that counts as a second question," she mumbled.

Chloe reluctantly nodded. At least she knew what her next question would be. "Fine. What do you want to ask me?"

Her mother looked up and smiled sadly. "Was living with those rich folks really so great that you gave up on me so easily?"

Chloe instantly softened her stance and felt guilty. Her mother's question, and the way she phrased it, really told Chloe how the woman had felt to discover that her daughter had been adopted. But even then, Chloe struggled to come up with an answer because she herself wasn't sure.

Ever since she got her memories back after her Heartless was defeated, Chloe had had two versions of her childhood: the actual one and the one implanted in her Nobody. She had no doubt that her present disposition was more of a result of the latter, since her memories of the past decade included Jack and Gail and none at all of her real parents. So it was entirely possible that Jack and Gail had inadvertently pushed away the desire to connect with her mother, turning Katherine Beale into a figure of her distant past.

But Chloe didn't want to tell her mother that. "I didn't give up, I just… forgot," she finished lamely. She knew it wasn't a good enough explanation so she added, "I was pretty banged up after—after what happened, and the McKaddens took care of me. They made me forget the bad stuff."

Kate nodded, thinking that anyone who had gone through what Chloe had would rightly be traumatized. But she didn't know how literal her daughter actually meant by 'forget.' "I guess I can't really blame you for forgetting," she said. "I didn't exactly provide many happy memories for you in your childhood. It was probably best that you grew up in the care of someone who could give you that."

Chloe didn't feel right in letting her mother continue on believing that she was raised in a better household, when in fact she had spent years of her life virtually asleep and being fed good, but fake, memories. But Chloe also couldn't bring herself to tell her mother about the reality of her dark past, maybe because she was unsure how she would even react. Telling her that her daughter was tortured and almost killed probably wouldn't make her feel better about her decision not to teach Chloe to control her powers when she had the chance.

So Chloe kept her mouth shut.

"Well, knowing that you were well looked after is enough for me," Kate conceded, though with a hint of regret in her tone. "But before we continue, I want to officially say I'm sorry. Frankly, there are a lot of things I should apologize for but I think I'm most sorry that I wasn't a good mother to you—even before your powers started to manifest," she insisted upon seeing Chloe ready to contradict her. "Because, shameful as it is to admit, your father and I weren't exactly… expecting you," she confessed. "But his mother—your grandmother—insisted that we get married, only to die too soon after you were born and… well, we just simply weren't ready. Your father and I had a lot of problems... I think that affected the kind of life we gave you."

Chloe felt sick to her stomach at her mother's confession. In her heart, she could not blame her mother for not being ready. The sickening thought was that perhaps this was why she had difficulty remembering the earlier years of her life: there wasn't anything worth remembering. Even her own birth was not a happy memory to her parents. The revelation filled her with a strange emotion—sadness over the loss of something that was never there to begin with.

"I think... I need a moment alone," she said, rising from the grass and walking in the opposite direction of her mother.

She kept walking and walking, hearing no objection in the silence of the open field, until she felt far enough that she could fall back on the grass and close her eyes against the torrent of emotions flooding her.

A little over a week had passed by since Chloe's first lesson with her mother. Things returned to normal, albeit awkwardly at first, with a silent agreement not to speak about each other's pasts anymore than was necessary.

Chloe came to learn that life in the middle of nowhere was as dull as anyone could have ever expected, but she didn't complain. The pair of unregistered mutants seemed to be experts at living under the radar. Though there were hardly any electronic devices in the cottage besides the essentials, the residents of the small cottage spent their downtime efficiently.

Frankie used her unique ability to go out and work, while Kate tended to the small patch of arable land nearby where she grew a variety of small crops, which she would then sell at a village a couple of miles away. Chloe, who had developed an affinity for gardening at Barden, was more than happy to help with the latter.

And, to her own amazement, Chloe had improved drastically since she began training 'properly.' Once she learned to focus on being rather than object, she went from being unable to lift a stone for longer than fifteen seconds to sending one flying across the room—in circles, even—after just one day.

Unfortunately, that was only the easy part.

"Moving objects, especially small objects, is the most basic form of bending reality," her mother had said, "because it only deals with an object's being in relation to space. That's just one relationship you're changing. Modifying the object is trickier, because there's a whole bunch of molecules involved. The more complicated the change in reality, the more difficult it is for us to do."

Which, for Chloe, meant more meditation. She had hoped that those days of sitting in silence for an hour and a half were over, but apparently they really were key to reaching the metaphysical world. In fact, Kate had even hiked up Chloe's meditating time three-fold, telling her that hour-and-a-half sessions were nearly pointless at her current level. Kate had also taught her daughter the proper way to meditate, something Aubrey and Jesse would never have been able to do for her.

While Chloe was glad to be learning the technical side of her powers and unveiling the mystery behind them, the fear of what was to come still haunted her sessions. Though much of the heat from their first lesson had now cooled, neither redhead dared to bring up what Chloe had to leave behind.

It was easy not to care about material objects and look past them in order to control their being—and the fact that she could now move objects easily with her mind proved that—but when it came to people with actual feelings and lives, Chloe was certain it would be impossible.

She wondered if part of the problem was that she clung on to a hope that she could have the best of both worlds—like her mother seemed to. So one night, while Kate was preparing their dinner, Chloe walked out of her room and approached her.

"Hey, Mom?" (The word came out less awkwardly than it did the first few days.)

Kate looked up from the vegetables she was chopping. "Are you going to ask me about letting go again?"

Chloe cocked her head to the side. "I thought you said you weren't a telepath."

"I'm not." Kate scraped the vegetables into a bowl. "Not for the lack of trying, though," she added under her breath. "It's just that easy to read your expression. Plus, it's obviously what's stopping you from trying out your telepathy. You've been refusing ever since."

"I already told you I wanted to master telekinesis first."

"They aren't mutually exclusive, honey," Kate reminded her with a knowing look. "You can try out your telepathy even without mastery of telekinesis."

"Yeah, but…" Chloe had no excuse. "Fine. I guess I'm just surprised that it only took a week to learn something I've been bitching about for months. I mean, I had a whole goodbye thing with Beca—I thought it would take me forever to catch up."

Chloe caught her mother pursing her lips as she stood in front of the stove. "You shouldn't get complacent," she warned. "You've still got a long way to go."

"You mean because I haven't stopped caring about my girlfriend?"

Kate set the pot down a little too roughly on the stove. "Yes, actually," she said gruffly. "The whole point of your meditating is to learn to leave that life behind, Chloe—"

"I'm not trying to start a fight here," Chloe said hurriedly. "It's just… I know you said it gets easier after I master my powers but how are you so sure? You said it yourself, you stopped using your powers so you could focus on your family. And you only started using them again when you lost us."

Kate set the empty bowl aside and leaned her elbows on the table. She interlocked her fingers and took a deep breath. "I wish you wouldn't overthink this whole 'letting go' thing. You're allowed to care about others, Chloe, just not the things that make relationships, well, relationships."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, not to sound shallow but, you know, wanting things with the other person," Kate replied wistfully. "Going on dates… kissing…"

Chloe looked down at her mother's intertwined fingers. "Having a family?"

Kate heaved a reluctant sigh. "Considering the material and emotional demands, I don't think the idea is exactly compatible with your powers, and especially not with your telepathy. The stronger your mutated mind is, the more discipline it needs to reach its full potential—which was kind of why we had to take such drastic measures to keep you away from everything you already knew."

Chloe frowned thoughtfully. "But you've had a family and relationships and stuff and you can still use your powers after all that. Does that mean I can just turn it on and off whenever I need to?"

"No!" Kate looked scandalized at Chloe's radical idea. "Chloe, you have to take 'living in the metaphysical world' as literally as you can. It took me ages to figure out how to get my powers back after I thought I had nothing to lose." She turned serious. "Listen carefully, Chloe, you can't just hop between states as you please. If you do, it'll be like forcing yourself to balance between two worlds, and we both know that the physical world is way too tempting and the metaphysical too depressing. I don't personally know what happens if you keep flitting back and forth because it's too much of a risk to try. You could lose one or the other forever."

Chloe's shoulders slumped dejectedly. Her mother's warning reminded her of what Kommissar had said about the balance between the light and dark sides of the world. Kommissar and Pieter couldn't say in the the human world, which was where the light dwelled, for a long period of time without upsetting that balance. She wondered if it was the same for her.

"But just give it time," Kate assured her. "When taking control of the metaphysical world comes as naturally to you as breathing, you might be able to have the best of both worlds. No promises, of course, but I mean look at me now," she gestured to herself. "I'm doing pretty well for someone who had just experienced the emotional storm of being reunited with her daughter.

"Granted, I am not as powerful as you are definitely turning out to be," Kate continued with a proud smile. "Maybe—hopefully," she corrected herself, "after a while, you stop seeing the physical and metaphysical worlds as separate, which I did only after I learned the hard way that they are separate, just like you are learning now. Just give it time," she repeated encouragingly.

Chloe hummed thoughtfully. "And how much time do you think it'll take for me to get to that level?"

"Well," Kate turned back to the stove, "nine years is a safe bet, at least for me."

Chloe groaned and rested her head on the table.

Despite the initial hopelessness she felt when she learned that it would take the utmost mastery of her abilities—and the better part of a decade—to be able to live a life in both physical and metaphysical worlds, Chloe was more motivated than ever. She was already progressing faster than she could ever imagine, so if mastery were the key, then she was determined to get it as quickly as possible.

And, using her faith that Beca would always be the light in her heart no matter what, Chloe was slowly and surely able to let go.

"I'm pretty sure top-secret government documents are incinerated after a project fails," argued Justin.

"And you would be right," nodded Tommy. "But for some reason, these particular documents were not on the list of items transferred out of the building in December 1987."

"It never occurred to you that it might be because it's confidential?"

Tommy shook his head. "For logistical reasons, the GSA requires agencies to label and identify all documents, even classified ones. I think it was for that very reason that they never brought it out of that building."

Justin scowled at the memory of that conversation with Tommy as he tied a handkerchief around his nose and mouth. Taking one last breath of clean air, he ventured further into the building's lowest basement, nearly half a dozen floors underground. Apart from housing AMG's own dated documents that were too risky to get rid of, the basement also held some junk that previous tenants had left behind.

Cynthia Rose, placed in charge of AMG's more covert operations while Jack and Gail were occupied, had been curious of Justin's request to enter the minimum-security area, also believing that anything left behind by the federal government was likely too unimportant to properly transfer, but she trusted Justin and his investigation.

"Where the hell do I even begin?" Justin whispered to himself, looking up at the tall shelves of dusty cardboard boxes. He shined his flashlight down the aisle and saw rows of shelves that ran as far as the beam of light did.

By the middle of her second week at the cottage in the middle of nowhere, Chloe was getting used to being in the metaphysical world. From taking tentative dips with her toe, she was now metaphorically swimming in it. She also realized that her mother was right in telling her not to overthink it, since living metaphysically was no different from otherwise living. She learned that what changed was only her worldview, which was only in her mind.

"Could you quit blowing smoke in my face?" Chloe said irritably, waving a hand in front of her nose to get rid of Frankie's puff. "And it's six o'clock in the morning, jeez. Give your lungs a break. Better yet, quit smoking altogether."

"If I blew the smoke up your ass would you quit nagging me about quitting?" smirked Frankie, though she aimed her next one in the other direction. "How's the telepathy going, by the way?"

"I already told you, I can't tap into minds yet," Chloe answered, stretching her arms up and sitting back on the grass to watch the sunrise.

Frankie took another drag and nudged Chloe's shoulder with her knee. "You're not purposely delaying your own progress until your girlfriend figures out a way to find you, are you?"

Chloe scoffed. "Getting into people's minds is difficult enough, let alone manipulating them. Cut me some slack."

Frankie dropped the cigarette and snuffed it with her shoe. "That wasn't really an answer."

Chloe knew that her mother constantly updated Frankie on her progress, so this line of questioning could only have one objective: to test her resilience against reminders of what she left back home. So Chloe gave her an answer.

"No."

"Is that so?" smirked Frankie. "You know what I think?"

"What?"

"Read my mind."

Chloe rolled her eyes. "I told you, I can't."

"Just try it," cajoled Frankie.

Chloe sighed and stood up. She gave Frankie one last look before closing her eyes and zeroing on the aura coming off of Frankie—something that she started seeing after engaging with the metaphysical world. She tried not to imagine Frankie as the smirking annoyance that she was in reality, but instead focused on her as a metaphysical being she could communicate with through the threads of their shared existence…

Suddenly, Chloe noticed a disturbance in the air and instinctively stopped the rapidly incoming object. She opened her eyes to see a one of her mother's trowels hovering two feet from her face. She lowered the tool telekinetically and glared at Frankie.

"What the hell? This thing is sharp!"

"I think your next lesson should be how to use your powers with your eyes open," the shape-shifter sniggered, before walking back to the cottage.

"Oh, my god…" Justin held the paper gingerly between his trembling fingers. The word 'confidential' was watermarked diagonally across the page and bold, printed letters at the top of the page reinforced that fact. "Damn... Well, at least I get to tell Tommy he was wrong."

"Frankie thinks you're ready to try telepathy."

Chloe drained her glass and wiped her mouth. "But I still can't get into her head."

The setting sun cast an orange glow on the kitchen and made Chloe think of how many sunsets had passed since she began training. She continued to be surprised at how quickly she was able to grasp the use of her powers and, as much as it pained her to admit it, cutting ties with the outside world seemed to have made a huge difference on the quality of her meditations. She was now able to last almost half a day without a worldly thought in her head.

"Well, Frankie has a strong mind," said Kate, taking Chloe's glass and putting it in the sink. "It's not as easy to penetrate the mind of someone who knows how to protect it, but she felt you pushing hard."

"Wait, she was resisting this time?" Chloe asked, surprised. She assumed Frankie was just messing with her, like she always did.

"Why did you think she threw the trowel at you?"

"It's Frankie," shrugged Chloe. "She's nuts."

Kate laughed. "In any case, she wanted me to make it easier for you tomorrow. I'll be sending out good thoughts, literally, and you should try to pick traces of it in the meta world."

"Why tomorrow?"

"You just finished a twelve-hour meditation," said Kate, patting her on the shoulder on her way out of the kitchen. "Even the mutated mind needs a break."

Chloe nodded, conscious of the warmth that spread through her shoulder from contact with her mother's hand. Ironically, despite the orders she received to not get attached to worldly relationships, Chloe had already grown very fond of the dynamic of their little group.

Chloe and her mother had developed a respectable relationship after their rocky start. Chloe got to know the woman as an individual outside her motherhood role, and as a fellow mutant faced with the same challenges. She had a faint suspicion, however, that there was more to her mother's history than she was being told, but she also suspected that the suspicion was mutual when it came to her own history.

Frankie, on the other hand, had the unhelpful quality of reminding Chloe a lot of Beca, and she wasn't sure if it was merely because her first impression of the shape-shifter came in the form of her girlfriend. Frankie was defiant, cheeky, and sarcastic—qualities that could very well define Beca, but Chloe wondered why she found those endearing in her girlfriend but irritating in Frankie. The shape-shifter was insufferable but, in her own way, she made Chloe more comfortable.

Chloe believed that she was a good enough judge of character that it didn't make sense that these two outlaws would hatch a plan to manipulate the minds of the people behind the MRA. More than once, she found herself comparing them to Luke and Stacie, who were also against the law but wouldn't do such a thing as take away a person's free will—as far as she believed.

Chloe shook her head instinctively, reminding herself that she shouldn't be thinking of her friends. But Kate noticed the action and paused on her way out. "What's wrong?"

"It's nothing," Chloe replied quietly. "I was just thinking… if my mind is strong enough to pick up traces of your thoughts, that means I'm getting deeper into the meta world. And that means we're almost done here."

Kate turned around and took a seat on the stool beside Chloe. "I don't think it will be that easy, Chloe. You're only beginning to read thoughts; you've still got a lot to master before you can actually manipulate them." She paused. "But yes, once you can, we can proceed with what we agreed."

Chloe's stomach churned with guilt. She had known from the very start—though she kept it locked away at the back of her mind—that she was going to bail on her captors after she got what she needed from them. But with the combined revelation of who these captors turned out to be, and of the mechanics of her powers, things had turned out more complicated than Chloe had anticipated.

For one thing, if she somehow escaped and returned to Barden before even mastering the metaphysical world, she could lose everything she had worked for, since Barden and everyone there represented her physical world. It seemed that her own powers were forcing her to have no choice but to stay until being meta was second nature.

Chloe's fear was that, at some point in the process of achieving that, she would become so numb to people's feelings that performing the mind control wouldn't bother her at all anymore. It was no wonder that Frankie was so confident that Chloe had accepted their mission wholeheartedly; Kate must have told her that because of the way her powers were wired Chloe would end up having no choice.

And there was the other problem: if she went through with her original plan, Chloe would be double-crossing her own mother—and so soon after getting their relationship back on track. Worried that harboring these thoughts would adversely affect her future meditation, Chloe had decided that, if there were ever a chance that she could persuade her mother against her plan, she would take it.

And that chance was now.

"I don't think I want to go through with the mind control," she blurted out, grateful that Frankie was out of the cottage. "I'm sorry, Mom, but I have to get it out now before it's too late. This is not the right thing to do."

Chloe had absolutely no idea how her mother would take it. But Kate's response ended up being short and simple: "Why?"

"It's just not right," she repeated.

"I understand the immorality of taking away someone's free will," Kate said curtly, but not angrily, "but if it prevents the taking away of an entire peoples' free will, I would say it is the right thing to do."

So both her mother and her girlfriend thought it was the lesser of two evils. Chloe looked up, ready with the same argument she gave Beca, but before she could say anything, her mother asked in a half-disbelieving, half-amused tone, "How do you not feel what the rest of us are feeling? Mutants are being pushed into a corner—fear mongering and discrimination are forcing them to do things that are against their wills!"

"They are not forced to do anything, we made sure the MRA would—"

"You put too much faith in laws, Chloe, you're practically using it as a crutch," accused Kate. "Laws can easily change, especially controversial ones like the MRA. Amendments are coming by the dozens after the President declared us Public Enemy Number One. The holes in your safety net are getting much larger, Chloe. Even Barden isn't safe from scrutiny."

Chloe shut her eyes and tried not to think about her friends, how she just left them to deal with all of this on their own—how Beca must be itching to leave Barden, thinking that there was nothing left to keep her there.

"And yet you can confidently say that if you had the power, you wouldn't do what you can to reverse this?"

Keeping her eyes closed, Chloe did what she had been doing almost nonstop for the past two weeks: she cleared her mind. She let go of thoughts of the MRA, of her friends, of her mother and Frankie, and of their plan to save the mutant race.

But she didn't reach out into the metaphysical world completely. She kept just far enough to not let worldly things affect her, but close enough to it to understand something… something greater than the nothingness she had been trained to see.

Being.

"We are mutants," Chloe said solemnly. "We were born with these differences and the way we exist in this world is to be mutants, to use our powers." She opened her eyes. "But the answer to what it should be used for—the reason we should all live our lives—is something that comes from each of us individually, not from the world."

Up to this point, Chloe had avoided talking about her own past because didn't want it to affect her mother in the wrong way. But now she may have found a use for it after all.

"Mom, aside from the fact that there was no one to teach me, there is another reason it took me so long to learn my powers," she began. "Which also kind of explains why I didn't—why I couldn't look for you all those years."

Her mother kept respectfully silent.

"After I lost control that night and thought you died, I ran away. And I don't exactly know how but I got caught up in this… project." Chloe focused her eyes on the clock above the fridge. "Some people wanted to know how my powers worked so they could turn it into an alternative energy source. They studied my blood and everything but I couldn't—I couldn't use my powers. I think I was too traumatized to."

Chloe spaced out for a moment. Her memories of those years were still hazy but she could clearly recall the feeling of not being able to do what your own mind wanted to.

"Eventually, they thought physical torture would help trigger my powers since—"

"They tortured you?!" Kate suddenly cried out and angrily clenched her fist. "Chloe, the people behind that project are almost definitely the same people behind the MRA! How can you not—?"

"Hate them?" finished Chloe. "I did one better, Mom. I forgave them. You know why? Because I understand—now more than ever," she added, her mind still fresh with insight, "that no matter the tension between mutants and non-mutants, we are all still human beings. We exist in the same capacity. We share the same world and the same desire to do something great with our lives. But, most importantly, we share the quality of being flawed.

"The man who tortured me did it because he wanted to change the world for the better; the MRA was written because the government cares about protecting its citizens. Terrible things happen all the time because people make mistakes. And I know that the ends don't justify the means but, the thing is, this isn't the end. There's still time to correct some mistakes.

"I still believe in fighting the good fight," Chloe declared. "I can't do what you're asking me to do, even when the time comes, Mom, because I still hope for a better way. My life has been tainted by so much darkness, but I will never lose faith in the light. You shouldn't either."

"There was no cleansing—the volunteers weren't the ones dying during those experiments, it was the soldiers who were injected with the replicated mutant gene!" Justin huffed as he made his way back to the above ground level of the building while carrying dusty old cardboard boxes filled with the documents he hadn't finished reading yet. "The non-mutant volunteers were let go immediately after they found nothing special, but the actual mutants were kept in labs while scientists tried to isolate the origins of their powers—just like I'm doing."

Justin shook his head in disdain. "But they were more reckless. Even without enough scientific backing, they went ahead and created a serum out of the mutants' blood, and they injected soldiers with it—but obviously all experiments were failures."

He lowered his voice as he passed civilians in the main lobby on his way to the private elevator. "When the mutants found out what was happening to the soldiers, they wanted out; they felt that the blood was on their hands. But even if the project was failing, the military wouldn't let them go—they couldn't risk letting anyone else know about what they were doing, and they didn't trust the mutants not to blab.

"That's why no mutant ever walked away from that project! Before it was officially closed, it was ordered that they all be killed."

Kate looked at her daughter with a mixture of admiration and pity. "Oh, Chloe," she said softly. "You have such a beautiful spirit—even after all the terrible things that have happened in your life. I have to say... I'm jealous."

Chloe frowned worriedly, surprised that she was unable to convince her of the goodness of humanity.

But Kate was more experienced than her daughter with what humanity was truly capable of. "Since you were honest with me about your past, I think this is the right time for me to be honest with mine..."

Kate sat across Chloe and began, "I hadn't been using my powers for about five years when I got pregnant with you. It wasn't because I wanted to start a family; it was because I had to stop. Chloe, have you ever heard of the SRA?"

Chloe nodded at once. "It was the first MRA, years ago, right?"

"I was a part of the generation that was affected by that law. When Chloe seemed confused, she continued, "I got my first taste of how being different could really change your life at thirteen. I can't say I had a good handle on my powers by then, but at least I could keep it under control. You see, I was kind of a weird and lonely kid," she added with a quirk of her lips, "which was probably why it didn't come in bursts like yours did. But after puberty my powers only made me weirder in the eyes of my peers. And lonelier. So when a man drops by my house at dinner and tells my parents he thinks there's something special about me—that I'm gifted or something—I had no trouble believing him.

"He promised me friends. He said there were others like me and that we were all being rounded up so we could be trained to help the country. I thought it was the coolest thing," she mused. "So I went to New York and, just as he said, there were others like me. Different abilities, but still… the same, you know what I mean?"

Chloe nodded softly.

"But something bothered the older mutants there—Frankie was one of them," revealed Kate. "For one thing, we were being trained like military soldiers when we didn't sign up to be in the military. But what really didn't sit well with a lot of us was the fact that it felt like we were being kept secret, hidden away from the world. We thought we were finally going to be treated like normal people.

"It turned out that gathering us up to train our powers wasn't their actual objective. They wanted to study us, our powers, so they could use it for themselves. Sound familiar?"

Chloe swallowed.

"They wanted to take a bit of each of our powers and put them together into some sort of super human solider. Unfortunately, that didn't end well for the soldiers themselves. They died," she said, in answer to Chloe's apprehensive look. "Once we found out, we couldn't bear to continue on with whatever sick project they had us involved in. But we made the mistake of telling that to their faces. With a failed project, half a dozen freaked out mutants, and the government's reputation on the line, they came up with an easy solution."

"They tried to kill you?" gasped Chloe.

"We managed to escape, except for one," Kate said sadly. "After that we all agreed it would be easier to split up and keep low profiles. Soon, the SRA came but we all knew it was bullshit, just another way for them to get to us. So we kept our heads down and carried on as best we could. Somehow I ended up in Florida, where I met your father.

"Ten years later, when I found out that you had powers, too, I freaked out. It didn't help that you were this cheerful little ball of sunshine," she added with a smile. "You were very unlike me so I knew your powers would be difficult to hide. After the incident when you lost control, I knew it was only a matter of time before my name would be in the papers and whoever was behind those experiments would track me down so… I fled.

"Before we mutants split up, we made sure that we could always find a way back to each other if we ever needed to. So I went straight to Frankie. This cottage that we're in?" She gestured around them. "One of five we have in remote places scattered across the country. And that was also my reason for not looking for you. I spent the first two years laying low while Frankie checked the papers and missing persons. It made no sense that you just disappeared so I assumed you were gone—'beyond-this-world' gone.

"But the point I really want to make, Chloe, is that history is repeating itself," she said seriously. "I don't have proof but I am certain that these are the very same people doing the very same things—the soldier experiment, the SRA, your torture, the MRA. Sure, they might be past creating some super soldier today, but they aren't past using mutants to their advantage.

"You said that our flaws make us human, that our mistakes make us human. But these people aren't interested in correcting their mistakes, Chloe. They're repeating them. Without remorse." Kate stared into her daughter's innocent eyes. "I really admire your faith in humanity, but these people… they can't be considered human. They don't deserve your faith."

"Jesus… Well, what about the files—the data from the testing?"

Justin waved away over-eager interns' offers to help him with the boxes. "Missing. Someone's been through these boxes, Tommy, I could tell. We're not the only ones looking."

There was a pause on the other end. "I think I have an idea who that someone might be. But you're not gonna like it."

Justin skidded to a stop right in front of his office. "You're only telling me this now? Well?!"

"It might be with the people behind the second project. They could have dug it up when they wanted to do it again."

"It's back with the military?"

"No… I meant Jack and Gail McKadden."

Justin frowned. "But they would have told me if—hang on, did you say they were the people behind the second project? Which conspiracy is this?"

"It makes sense, J. They bought the building where it happened the first time and they were told about the first project. But there's something else I haven't told you... You know that daughter they have? The one enrolled at Barden? She was the girl in the second project. That's how they met."

Justin dropped the boxes to the floor and slumped against his door in shock. "But—but you said she nearly died from what they were doing!"

"Well, that's the dark part. If they did take the files and didn't tell you on purpose, then shit. But you know what's an even bigger shit? If the files were taken by someone we don't know who plans to use it against mutants. Because, boy, are we in trouble then."

Justin pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. This mission was turning out to be a wild goose chase that presented more questions than it answered. He didn't have much time to think, however, since the elevator doors down the hallway opened again and half a dozen FBI agents filed into the hall.

"Agent Paul Paulson, FBI," the man at the center declared to the security personnel flanking the way further up the hall.

"Gotta go, the FBI are here," Justin muttered into his phone, hanging up before Tommy could get a word in. "Can I help you?" he said in his toughest voice.

"Why yes, young man," Agent Paul said smoothly. "You can get the hell out of here."

"What the—?"

The elevators dinged open once more and Cynthia Rose came walking out, looking furious. "What's going on here? The lobby guards called—"

"Ah, Ms. Adams." Agent Paul turned and gave her an insincere smile. "It's a shame you weren't at the office the other day. I would have liked to have seen you face as Jack and Gail walked out in handcuffs."

Cynthia Rose looked unaffected. "What do you want?"

The agent took out a piece of paper from his jacket pocket and held it out for her. "That is a court-ordered injunction," he said smugly. "You are to stop whatever you're doing and vacate the premises until the McKadden's hearing at the end of the month. Move along now."

"Hang on," said Justin. "What about our research—?"

"Clearly the research into a mutant suppressant is going nowhere with AMG's employees at the helm," Agent Paul said patronizingly. "An independent team of scientists and engineers will take over from here."

"I'm an independent scientist," Justin pointed out defensively.

"But not unbiased," the agent countered. "I would suggest," he added, when Justin glanced nervously at his office, "that you not complicate things further for yourself and leave all your work as is. Our team can surely pick up where you left off."

Justin looked at Cynthia Rose hopefully. He could practically see the cogs turning in her mind but, unfortunately, they must have come up with nothing because she gave a small shake of her head.

"And as for you, Ms. Adams," Agent Paul turned to her, "you're lucky your bosses lawyered up heavily to keep you out of jail, but keep in mind that you're walking on very thin ice."

"Noted," she replied unemotionally.

"Good. Now, there are confused AMG employees in the lobby whom you might want to assure haven't completely ruined their lives and careers by working for a company with an overt mutant agenda."

Cynthia Rose finally prickled at that.

"Well," the agent made a show of looking at his watch, "as the saying goes, you don't have to go home but you can't stay here."

The last thing Justin saw before the elevators closed were the dusty old boxes containing twenty-year old confidential government documents. He gulped. "What the hell are we gonna do now?" he asked the woman beside him.

"You are going to go home," Cynthia Rose answered simply. She didn't look at him, only up at the digital display showing the current floor number.

"What?"

"If you value your career—and your future in general—you'll stay away from this and keep a low profile."

"But—"

"The last civilian defense of the mutants has just fallen," she said ominously. "They'll head for Barden next. And trust me, you don't want to be on the losing side of this war."

Before Justin could say anything to contradict her, the elevator doors opened to the lobby and they were greeted by the noise and sight of displaced employees loudly demanding for an explanation.

P.A.Q.'s (Preemptively Asked Questions):

Why didn't Tommy just ask Lilly to get the documents from the basement?

Lilly cannot open portals to places she cannot 'see.' Since Stacie had been at AMG, she was able to visualize the room where they stole the weapon blueprints, but Stacie had never been to the basement level.

What's the deal with Chloe's powers?

Originally, this was where Heidegger's philosophy came in, but I got lazy and simplified it. Basically, Chloe has to be in a state similar to the Buddhist Enlightenment – where everything worldly is discarded – in order to access her powers. That presents a problem for Chloe, who worries that getting there will mean breaking down worldly relationships, particularly the one she has with Beca.

Response to Reviews:

Psychic Guest (Jun. 7) - I would offer to wrap your knuckles in bandages but after a month, I'm guessing they've healed lol. Now you know that the other guy was Tommy! Who else would be nerdy enough to dedicate a blog to mutants? You are right to be suspicious and, tsk, Smith is probably getting his ego stroked with all the authority. To answer your shape-shifter question, no. As Chloe said, being a mutant is something you're born with so it can't be learned just by looking like a mutant hehe. Nope, that's true, and probably – in response to Chloe, KP, and Jack & Gail. (I'm just realizing that A LOT of things happened last chapter.) OMG Emily, yes! It was a difficult writing choice but one I was happy to make lol. Let's see what Luke and Stacie have planned in the next chapter... because yes! They will be reuniting soon. Yeah, I was thinking of places KP could appear from and the wardrobe was literally right there. Now you know what happened to Chloe! Tan-tun-tuuuun – IS Charlene the villain behind the villain? We'll see. Those are a lot of theories! One thing was made clearer in this chapter though: the shape-shifter that kidnapped Chloe doesn't seem to be evil haha. Argh, I keep waiting for Staubrey to happen myself! The part's written but it's taking forever to get to it!

xcombixgirlx (Jun. 8) - I did feel a wave of contentment when I changed the categories lol. What a nice thing to say! :) Thanks but maybe it's for the best that Sci-Fi/Fantasy fans have this small story to follow. I'm personally not a fan of this genre either (ironic, huh) but I sorta enjoy building this alternate universe and injecting as much social commentary as I can lol. I've now dropped the bomb on Chloe's powers. Let's see how that goes... If only Chloe could read John's mind and get to the bottom of his suspicious behavior! Yes, let us not forget that other characters have feelings, too lol. Aubrey has her own way of dealing with all this. I like to think that the 'original' 6 (B, J, A, L, S, CR) really bonded after Season 2, so when one needs help the others are always there. :) I added the Amy and Beca bit for a little light-hearted fun after such a depressing moment haha.

Thuh Tank (Jun. 10) - Incidentally, someone had predicted – way back in Season 1 – that there was a shape-shifter in our heroes' midst. Hmm... (Lol, unless that wasn't the plot twist you meant!)

Maggie (Jun. 9) - Thank you! I'm always self-conscious that my chapters are getting more and more boring because I deal with a non-romantic plot. You're right! The change of pronouns was intentional, and Charlene IS a shape-shifter. Frankie is also a shape-shifter, and I also switch the pronouns whenever appropriate.

A/N: As I mentioned at the start, there are two separate timelines here, since Chloe's training spans two weeks. Justin's adventures happen within a couple of days after the previous chapter. Since so many things are happening, I focused this chapter on just Chloe, with a anti-mutant weapon side story to fill the breaks, which means next chapter will probably have little or no Chloe. I totally have newfound respect for George R.R. Martin. Writing multiple plots if T-U-F-F.