A/N: Happy New Year! I had a wonderful Christmas break-and a long one, too (my boss made me use up my vacation days because I had too many of them from 2019 still). Spent them at my parents', which is why I couldn't update the story. But I'm now back at my own place and ready to roll into 2020 full-on. We're getting nearer to the end of this part of the series now, only few chapters left, and I'm already working on the next installment... I hope you continue to enjoy it :)

Chapter 17, part 1.

She hesitated for too long, again. If she were flying an F-302, which needed manual control, she wouldn't be able to dodge Jareth's drone; thankfully, the Jumper only needed the smallest fraction of a second between her noticing the missile to executing an evasive maneuver. The projectile missed her by a hair's breadth, but it was already turning around in the air and she needed to move. She increased the distance from Jareth, but soon enough she had the drone on her tail again, and the other Jumper was close behind, too. And, injured as she was, her reaction time was severely elongated. She had to get the hell out of there.

Flying in loopy zigzags, she directed her spacecraft upwards, intending to get to the Gate as soon as possible. If only she could dial Atlantis, she'd be able to radio for help. Unfortunately, Jareth must have thought the same because he sped ahead of her—she had to maneuver to avoid the drone—and before she even got to the orbit, he already had a wormhole open, blocking her from dialing out. He positioned his Jumper in front of the Gate and simply watched as she danced before him. With each turn, the drone seemed to pass closer, and Alice knew she didn't have much time. She was simply too weak—hurt, exhausted, stressed—to evade it for much longer. Sooner or later the drone had to reach her—and although Alice figured Jareth was steering it towards the aft of her Jumper, trying to disable it and not destroy, she couldn't let him do that. If he managed to recapture her, he wouldn't let himself be careless enough to allow her to escape the second time. It was now or never.

Making a barrel roll around the drone, she left it behind her; before it managed to turn, Alice sped towards the Gate—and Jareth's Jumper. The drone rushed after her, quickly closing in; but Alice was already almost upon her target. The moment stretched into infinity as she watched Jareth's face through the window, screwed up into a horrible mask of fury, his eyes bulging out, lips curled, showing his sharp teeth. He wouldn't move, though; apparently he figured she wouldn't be crazy enough to ram into him. He was right, of course; at the last possible moment—almost too late—Alice pulled up, nearly brushing against the top of Jareth's Jumper. He forgot, though, that there was still a drone on her tail, and, maneuverable as it was, it depended on his own reflexes; they were better than human's, perhaps, but he was not used to operating Ancient technology yet, and it took half a second. Making a tight loop, Alice saw the drone start moving upwards, but at this velocity, it was too late; she held her breath. But there was no explosion; instead, she saw the drone's light flicker out and bounce harmlessly against the Jumper's front window pane. Jareth managed to deactivate it in time.

Alice didn't lose the opportunity this accorded her. She was already level with the other ship, and she fired a drone of her own. It bolted towards Jareth's Jumper, and he had no choice but to scuttle away, abandoning his position in front of the Gate and begin a dance much like the one Alice had just done. But she was slightly better at it than he had been; weak and injured as she was, she still felt high on adrenaline and her mind was sharp as ever, and that was what was important for the neural interface of the Jumper. Had she been forced to manually direct the missile, she would have had a problem.

She flicked a switch to open a communication channel.

"It's over," she said, repeating her earlier words. "You can't win. I'm better at it than you. Surrender."

Jareth didn't reply, perhaps too occupied with avoiding the drone to speak.

"All I need to do is fire a second drone," she told him tiredly. "You will not be able to evade two of them." She wondered why he hadn't done it; perhaps he was too sure of his triumph. Or maybe he simply wasn't able to control two drones and flying his Jumper at once yet; it was not an easy feat.

He still didn't reply. Alice sighed. "This is your last warning," she cautioned. "Surrender, or I'll blow you up!"

"You won't dare!" He finally snarled in response, making a wide loop and inadvertently getting closer to her. "You'd be killing Karim, too!"

She grimaced and hesitated. He was right, of course; but she knew, she knew he could not be allowed to live. A Wraith with the ability to operate Ancient technology, and god knew what more… she had to kill him. She had to. Forgive me, Karim…

She fired the second drone. At the same moment she noticed that, while getting closer to her, the Wraith also found himself near the Gate—and it was still open… Before she managed to react and steer the second drone close enough, Jareth's Jumper made another tight turn, retracting its drive pods and losing velocity. As it leveled up in front of the Gate, it had to slow down even more to get through. It was now or never—the first drone was just on its tail, with one more push she could drive it into the ship, destroy it before it went through. She bit her lip, her heart beating very fast, as she made the projectile speed up… it was almost there. Another second and Jareth will be gone—and Karim with him…

And once again, she hesitated. The drone slowed down, according the Jumper enough time to pass through the Gate. The missile went through the event horizon to wherever the Wraith had gone, but a second later the connection was lost and the wormhole disappeared. Alice knew that, on the other side, the drone must have lost its power and become harmless. Jareth was gone.

She had allowed him to escape.

Fuck.

She didn't have a clue what planet was it, but, with the help of Jumper's star maps, she was able to calculate its approximate position in space. Based on that, McKay would be able to find its address in the Ancient database to send reinforcements and medical personnel. She dialed Atlantis and radioed for help; she couldn't go through herself because she didn't have her GDO. Instead, she hung around the Gate until it activated again and admitted three Jumpers.

"Captain, you okay?" Were Sheppard's first words as he hovered in front of her. She could clearly see the concern on his face. McKay, Teyla and Ronon were all there in the cockpit with him, and she thought she saw someone move in the back, too.

"I've been better," she answered, her voice cracking under the weight of fatigue that has now descended onto her with full force. The adrenaline now flushed from her system, she suddenly felt very, very weak, and both her arm and her leg were pulsating with pain. "There's still one Jumper down there, sir," she cautioned, and then added reluctantly: "I think Major Lorne is flying it, so you might wanna be careful how you go about bringing it down."

"Lorne?" There was surprise in Sheppard's voice now. She hadn't had the time to explain on the radio before. "Why would he be a problem?"

"He's under the influence of a Wraith, sir. They all are, down there. That's why I asked you to bring stunners only. We don't want to kill our own people. I think… I hope that without him around, they will be more docile, but still…"

"Influence?" McKay's tone was full of disbelief.

"It's a long story," she said, unwilling to lose time over this now.

"Let's get our people first," Sheppard ordered, and Alice was thankful to him. Tiredly, she directed her Jumper down after them.

Getting Lorne to surrender wasn't easy. Eventually, Sheppard had to fire a drone and knock down one of his Jumper's drive pods, which caused him to crash into the forest. Fortunately, the Lantean ships were sturdy and durable and, though a little banged up, the major came out of it only a little worse for wear. One of the Jumpers stayed behind to collect him—he had lost consciousness—and the two others followed Alice towards the castle. The roof of the Jumper bay was still half-retracted and so that's where she directed them.

She noted that neither Jake nor the two other men were inside now. They must have woken up and left; there was nowhere to hide in the big, empty room. Alice landed and opened the rear door, but she didn't have the strength to get up just yet. In fact, now that she was back on the ground and didn't have to maintain her concentration to fly the ship, her mind was quickly becoming muddled, her vision darkening. She shook her head and told herself that she couldn't pass out—not yet, anyway.

She slipped out of her seat and almost fell onto her knees. Leaning heavily on the wall with her left hand, she moved aft, but was unable to walk on her injured leg anymore. She slid down onto the ground and left out a pained moan. At the same moment, someone came up to the back door of her Jumper.

"Jennifer!" She heard McKay call from a few feet from her. "Boyd needs medical attention!" He then bustled nearer and kneeled beside her. "It's okay, Captain, help's coming."

She nodded tiredly. She knew she was supposed to tell him something important, but she could no longer remember what. "He got away," she mumbled. "It was my fault."

"It's okay, don't speak." McKay's voice was oddly soft, but it also seemed to come from a distance. "Save your strength..."

She heard another familiar voice snap at him to make way, but she was too weak to raise her head to see… too weak to talk… too weak to do anything… and then the darkness came and she lost consciousness.

She woke with a start. Her heart was beating fast and she felt a drop of cold sweat slide down her temple. Chasing away the remnants of a nightmare, she blinked in the bright light coming from a window to her right. She knew where she was at once—the infirmary on Atlantis. And she remembered what had happened.

Looking around, she noted an IV drip attached to her left hand. Her right upper arm was heavily bandaged, and, moving her legs around, she felt that so was her left calf. It hurt, too, but the pain was oddly subdued, and she thought she must have had some pretty powerful painkillers in her system. Good.

She sat up in the bed, feeling as if it was almost a superhuman feat. She felt weak—weaker than she'd been before her escape attempt from Jareth's castle. Not attempt, she thought, befuddled. I did it. I escaped.

Looking around, she noted that there were a few other beds in the room with her, all taken—and that the people laying in them were awake, but unmoving. With a closer look, she realized they were all restrained and bound to their beds. None of them looked familiar.

"Captain!" A voice piped up from her left. She turned that way and recognized Nurse Watts. "Good, you're awake! How are you feeling?" She immediately seized Alice's left hand to feel for a pulse.

"Not bad, all things considered," she replied malleably, letting the nurse take her pressure next. "I need to talk to Colonel Sheppard."

"Yes, of course, Captain. First I need to check your vitals, and then you need to eat a good meal and see the doctor, though," the nurse replied, flashing her a bright grin as she unceremoniously shoved a thermometer into her mouth.

"Nah, I need to thee him nou," Alice mumbled. Watts's smile widened, but she didn't otherwise react until the thermometer beeped and she took it out. She then produced a small tablet from a pocket of her white coat and tapped on it for a moment. She then looked up at Alice again, pushed a button on her bed to bring its top half up, so that Alice could remain sitting and still lean on it. It was actually quite a relief—keeping her body up straight was curiously taxing.

"I'll get the doctor now," the nurse announced and before Alice could protest, she was gone. Only a few moments after that, Keller replaced her at Alice's bedside.

"Hey," she greeted her quite cheerily. "I'm glad you're awake. How are you feeling?"

"Not bad, considering," Alice repeated. "What happened after I passed out?" She demanded immediately.

Keller rolled her eyes, but replied nonetheless. "Colonel Sheppard and his teams have swept through the place, stunning anybody they met. We then transported them all here, to Atlantis." She gestured at the other occupied beds. "They're not really responsive," she noted, worry in her voice now. "I mean, they eat and drink, and they sleep, but in the meantime they're just laying there, not moving, not talking… nothing. I am quite at a loss."

Alice nodded gravely. "They've been broken. Jareth called it bending. I'm not sure how exactly he did it, but it was quite horrible." She shook her head. "Did you find all of our people?"

Keller's face fell. "No. We are missing one person."

Alice felt relief. It must have shown on her face because the doctor raised her eyebrows at her.

"Karim was in the Jumper with Jareth. They both escaped."

"Oh… wait, who's Jareth?"

Alice chuckled nervously. "It's the name I gave to that Wraith. You know, Jareth the Goblin King?"

"Oooh, from the Labyrinth! I get it now." Keller nodded. "Anyway, it's good to know about Sergeant Karim… though of course I would have preferred that he'd stayed in the castle."

Alice didn't reply, but looked away. If Karim hadn't been in the Jumper with Jareth, she wouldn't have hesitated. Jareth would be history by now.

"Colonel Sheppard and Mr. Woolsey want to talk to you," Keller announced after a moment's silence. "But you need to eat something first. I don't know what happened there, Alice, but you're seriously malnourished and dehydrated. I've been trying to get some nutrients and water into you." She nodded towards the IV drip.

Alice smiled crookedly, but didn't respond to that, either. Keller had no idea how much better Alice already was. "I think it's more important to speak to them first," she said instead. "I can eat later."

"You will eat now. It'll just take five minutes, and then you can talk for a bit, but you need rest, Alice. Doctor's orders." She waved her finger at Alice and then turned around and left before Alice could protest further.

To her surprise, alongside Sheppard and Woolsey came Perrault to listen to her report. She wasn't sure why it surprised her—clearly, he must have been back from his vacation long ago, but somehow she had forgotten about it.

It took her only ten minutes to relate everything that happened. She cut the description of her solitary time in the dungeon to the absolute minimum and instead spoke at length about the Wraith and the way he bent people to his will.

"It felt like my entire body wanted to comply," she said of the first time he tried to do it to her. "I found myself reaching out before my mind even registered any movement. It was really eerie."

"Sounds like what the Wraith Queens do," Sheppard commented. "It's equally irresistible."

Alice nodded solemnly. "I wouldn't be surprised if that was where he got it. I don't think male Wraiths normally can do it, at least not to that extent, but this one was… special." And she told them about her supposition that he meddled with his own DNA by mixing it up with that of other species'. "That's how he was able to operate the Jumper. He developed his own gene therapy, maybe even based on the one Doctor Beckett's devised for us, only applicable for Wraiths."

They were appropriately horrified by the idea, and understood the implications just as well as Alice did.

"Pity you didn't manage to shoot him down," Perrault said after Alice finished her story.

"I'm just amazed that you managed not to get killed in the state you were in." Sheppard shook his head. And then added: "What?"

Alice had dropped her head and must have looked guilty, and he noticed. She sighed deeply.

"It's my fault he escaped," she admitted glumly. "I knew Karim was there with him, and I hesitated to shoot for a second too long." Twice, she didn't add.

"Oh, Boyd…" Perrault began, but Sheppard interrupted him.

"It's okay, Captain. I know how it feels to be in that position, and I can't blame you. I've been there."

"But we must find this Wraith," Woolsey put in. "He is a high security risk. Not only did he learn everything there is to know about Atlantis from Karim and the others that he'd—bent, I think was the word—but also, if he can operate the Ancient technology, and he has a Jumper at his disposal…" He shook his head.

"Does he work with other Wraith?" Perrault asked.

Alice shrugged. "I don't know. He was the only one in the castle, at least that I'd seen." She looked at Sheppard and he nodded. So they didn't find any others of his species during their sweep. "But that doesn't preclude the possibility. Wraith rarely work alone, and we did just take out his hidey hole. If he wasn't before, he might ally himself to some other clan now that he'd lost his base of operations."

"Unless he has more of those," Sheppard added.

Alice nodded. "But, at least, I don't think he had time to gather the research he'd done there, so unless he had some sort of backup on him, he will have to start from scratch."

"That's what McKay said. He'd stayed behind on the planet with a science team to go over the computers there, with a security contingent to keep them safe."

"Good. I'd like to join them, sir," Alice said, her voice ringing with determination. She had to find him and kill him. And she had to find Karim and save him…

"You need to regain your strength first, Captain. That's an order," Sheppard emphasized, seeing she was about to protest. "You're no use to anyone like this. Rest up, and once Doctor Keller pronounces you well enough, I'm sure you'll be able to help."

"Yes, sir." Alice mulled a curse in her mouth.

"Oh, and by the way—good job there, Captain." Sheppard smiled crookedly. "I don't know anyone else who'd figure to make a knife out of bone found in food. You saved a lot of people."

Alice looked around at the unmoving, quiet bodies laying in the other beds. "That remains to be seen, sir," she contradicted quietly.

"Nonetheless… good job. We would never be able to find you on our own. You were held in a completely different quadrant of space than the one where the ambush was."

She gave him a wan smile and didn't reply.

"Alright, we'll let you rest now. Guys…" Sheppard gestured at Woolsey and Perrault to go ahead, but he stayed behind. "One more thing, Captain… I recommended you for a citation. I wouldn't be surprised if you got a nice little medal out of it." He grinned and then turned around and left.

Alice sighed. That was nice of him, of course, but she knew she didn't actually deserve the citation. Even if one disregarded the fact that she allowed Jareth to escape, she wasn't actually doing anything that heroic. She was trying to save her own ass as much as anybody else's. And it was still unclear if she did save anyone. If the people the Wraith had bent didn't wake up from it… She felt a shudder climb up her back. How would she ever look her mother in the eye if Jake remained like them in the beds next to her, lifeless and inert—like a vegetable, all life sucked out of him…? Knowing that it was her fault? Jake only got captured because he was trying to find her, and so the blame was squarely on her shoulders.

She took a deep breath. It was no use beating herself up over this. She needed to get better quickly and find a way to Jareth's lab. Maybe there would be something that would help to wake them all up. There must have been a way. She just needed to find it.

Alice had lost a lot of blood, which, coupled with the general anemia brought on by the period of inanition and dehydration, had slowed down her recovery. Thankfully, both bullets had shot cleanly through the flesh without damaging bones or arteries, and with Atlantis' superior medicines—most of which were just the best quality drugs Earth had to offer, but some came from alien sources—they healed quite quickly; the bigger problem was Alice's overall condition, which was improving slower than Doctor Keller hoped. She kept shaking her head over Alice's blood test results and prescribing more rest, nutritious food, and supplements. Alice, on the other hand, was itching to get out of the infirmary as soon as possible.

At least she got to see her brother. She practically forced a nurse—not Nurse Watts, whose bright professionalism suffered no opposition, but a military nurse who succumbed to her authoritative voice and stern looks—to get her a wheelchair and bring her to where Jake was laying, in another sick room on the same level. It was full of people—aside from Jake, Utkin and one of his men were there, and some others that Alice didn't recognize. They were all laying motionless on their beds, strapped in, looking into space. Alice stayed with Jake for about half an hour, holding his hand in total silence. Inside, she was boiling with rage—at the Wraith who did that to him, at herself for being stupid enough to get herself caught, at Jake for letting himself be abducted, at his team leader, Lieutenant Moors, for allowing him out of sight on a mission, at the unfairness of the situation. Before the nurse came back and wheeled her back to her room, she promised Jake that she'd find a way to bring him back if it was the last thing she did.

Now that she had time to carefully think through what had happened, she couldn't decide what she felt about it all. It was such a complex mixture of emotions… she felt fury at herself for not seeing the trap in the first place—and pride to have withstood Jareth's mind-bending tricks—and embarrassment to remember how she had crumbled to pieces during her solitary confinement in the dungeon—and gratefulness to have found something that had brought her sanity back—and utter horror and humiliation of what the Wraith had done to her during his anatomy exam—and pride again for having found a way out of her bonds—and guilt over hesitating so many times when she had had a chance to kill Jareth—and relief that she hadn't killed Karim—and shame that she hadn't had the guts to do what had clearly been the right thing to do… A terrible jumble of feelings that she couldn't quite separate one from another.

She was quite shocked to learn that she had been gone for twenty three days. She had lost count of days and nights as she had descended into that low place in her isolation where time had stopped and all that mattered had been getting the water from the dampening fabric—but she didn't think it had been that long. And yet every calculation she did told the same tale: she'd lost fifteen days. She had been abducted on December 26th and had woken up in the dungeon the next day. After a brief talk with Jareth, her solitary confinement had begun. She broke out of her bonds and was rescued on 17th of January, and that had been the third day of the Wraith's examinations on her, after a four-day period when he had allowed her to eat, drink, and rest up. So, she could account for eight days out of twenty three—she had spent fifteen in the dungeon, without food, and with very limited drink, all alone. It was hardly believable, but it explained why her overall health suffered as much as it did. She must have been closer to death of starvation and dehydration that she'd ever suspected.

It was visible, too. When, after four days in the infirmary, she was finally allowed to return to her own quarters—walking carefully and using a crutch to preserve her leg—she took a long, hot shower, and then stood in front of the mirror for a long time, looking at her naked body with a mixture of shock and disgust. She had always been thin, but now she was—emaciated. Her clavicle was normally poking out, but now she could even see the outline of her shoulder blades and hip bones. Her skin, usually pale, had a distinctly yellowish tint, and it seemed different to the touch—dry and rough. Her hair was damaged, too; it was becoming straw-like, not in color, but in texture. At least it remained coppery orange, little consolation as it was. She ran her hands through it a couple times, and then, with her lips pursed together into a thin line, she turned around, found a pair of scissors in the dresser, came back to the mirror and cut off the entire length of her ginger tresses, leaving only enough to be able to call it a very short (and rather sloppy) pixie.

The next day she made her way to the lab where most of Jareth's equipment was moved over. McKay and Keller were both there, leaning over a screen, so close to each other that their heads were almost touching. They looked up when they heard the clack of Alice's crutch.

"Captain!" McKay exclaimed, bewildered, sizing her up and down. "You're… up. You look"—he hesitated and stole a furtive glance at his girlfriend—"good."

"Don't be ridiculous," Keller chided him. "She looks awful. Alice, what did you do with your beautiful hair?"

"I cut it off." She shrugged, edging closer to them to peer at what they'd been working on. "It was damaged so I figured I let it grow back stronger that way."

Jennifer frowned. "Well, I can't argue with that logic, but I wish you'd ask someone to do it for you. I'll come by your quarters later and try to even it out somehow. Anyway, you shouldn't be here. I told you to rest, didn't I?"

"I can't stay in my room." Alice shook her head empathically. "I'll go nuts doing nothing. And I wanna help."

"You really should not exert yourself…"

"Jennifer," she said quietly, but determination rang in her voice. "It's my brother."

This seemed to mollify the doctor. She exchanged a look with McKay and they stepped away, making enough room for Alice to join them by the screen. They were going through the records of Jareth's research in hopes of finding a clue as to how exactly he bent his victims.

"It's gotta be some sort of biological agent," McKay insisted. "Something they secrete that has a narcotic-like effect on people, perhaps?"

"If it is, it's non-persistent, I couldn't find anything in their bloodstreams," Jennifer contradicted. "And if it's non-persistent, why do the effects don't wear off? There's nothing physically wrong with them. I did every test known to us, I found nothing."

"What did you try to wake them up?" Alice asked.

"Everything I could think of. I even tried to put one of them into a pharmacological coma and then brought him back, but for nothing. We have to be careful, though," Keller cautioned. "We don't want to make it worse."

Alice nodded understanding. "How do Wraiths communicate with each other telepathically? How does it work?"

Keller and McKay exchanged looks again, and then said in unison: "We don't know."

Jennifer continued: "We know that it's coded in Wraith DNA, I can even tell you which genes are responsible for this ability, but we still know preciously little about the actual biology of it. Same with their ability to project visions or manipulate humans with their minds. It's similar to what advanced humans can do, though, but we don't really understand how that works either, so it's of little help."

"What Jareth could do was quite more potent than what we've seen so far in Wraith," Alice noted. "Even the most powerful Hive Queens couldn't possibly break a person's mind so fully and completely as he did."

To that, neither of them had any reply. They went back to examining Jareth's database, now helped by Alice, whose ability to read fast and retain much came in handy once again. She spent most of her time in the lab, reading page after page of meticulous notes—organized from recordings of his spoken observations—describing the Wraith's experiments on people; some of them were as innocuous as drawing blood or taking skin samples, others were almost too gruesome to fathom: vivisections, genetic manipulations resulting in horrific deformations, and more deaths than Alice cared to count. Literally hundreds of people lost their lives in that castle; the thirty-four they rescued were all that survived.

The database contained little else; it held the castle's schematics and some other references pertaining to that base of operations, but they didn't find anything that pointed to existence of any other such places. Either Jareth didn't have a backup—or he was too smart to put the information about it where someone could find it.

When not in the lab, Alice could be found sitting at Jake's bedside, looking at the mask that his face had become, empty and distant. Sometimes she held his hand, wishing that he'd squeeze hers back, but it was all in vain.

On the third day of examining Jareth's research, Alice ambled back to Jake's room at the infirmary after her own checkup with Keller, and sat down in a chair next to his bed. Keller came after her to verify the status of her patients; she moved through the room quietly like a ghost, and finally went back to Alice.

"We'll find a way to bring him back," she reassured the captain, putting her hand on Alice's shoulder. "Sooner or later. We always do."

They both knew that wasn't true, but Alice nodded anyway.

"I've been thinking about the Goa'uld lately," she said musingly. "They used various methods to influence or brainwash people, too. Nish'ta, I think, was the name of a compound they used, or one of them anyway. You remember that one?"

Keller shook her head. "I've never worked in the Milky Way. I mean in the Stargate program," she amended.

Alice smiled, but only for a moment. "I wasn't there either, I just read about it in a report. Anyways, it made me think… did you try electroconvulsive therapy?"

"Electroshocks? No, why would I?"

"Stargate Command was able to break through the Goa'uld brainwashing by shooting the victim with a Zat'nik'tel." Alice shrugged. "Perhaps it wasn't very humane, 'cause that stuff hurts like a motherfucker, but it snapped them out of it. It didn't always work," she cautioned. "When the Goa'uld learned we found out how to counteract the substance they had used for centuries, they moved on to stronger stuff, that wasn't so easy to break. Still, it couldn't hurt to try?"

"But they were all stunned and it didn't change anything," Jennifer protested.

"Yeah, but Wraith stunners work very differently than the Goa'uld Zats. The stunners are neuron-impeding, they literally overload your nervous system. The Zats fire energy blasts that act more like your usual electric shock. It's like getting struck by lightning, but without the burns." It wasn't exactly that either, but close enough, Alice thought. "Don't you think we should try everything?"

Keller nodded. "Let's do it."

It took about an hour to inform Sheppard and Woolsey of their idea, get their green light to try and set up the attempt. They weren't going to actually fire a Zat, but shock the target with an electric impulse whose voltage and current could be controlled closely by the medical team. They were going to use Jake as their guinea pig.

"I know he'd want to do it," Alice told a dubious Keller and a more convinced Sheppard.

She was present when the doctor finally allowed the trial to go on, having checked Jake's vitals three times and made sure the current was low enough not to do any permanent damage. Throughout all of it, Jake continued to lie motionless on his bed, staring into space with an empty expression. The shock actually made his whole body tense for a second, and he lost consciousness for a while. When he finally opened his eyes twenty minutes later, they all kept their breaths for a moment—but he only blinked a few times and went back to staring at the ceiling.

Alice let out a long sigh and looked down for a moment. She had actually managed to convince herself that it would work. She wanted it so bad it had to work. But real life didn't grant people's wishes just because they wanted them badly enough.

"It was a good idea," Keller tried to comfort her. "I'm sorry it didn't work."

Alice smiled at her wanly and left quickly to escape to her own quarters and be alone for a moment. She didn't know why the disappointment hit her so forcefully, but, for the first time in a long time, she found herself crying herself to sleep that night.

Life in the city went on. With Alice still on the mend, Cooper staring into space on the hospital bed, and Karim off somewhere with Jareth, Perrault was temporarily assigned to another unit. They made it their main concern to gather intel on the Wraith in order to find his location, but much as they tried, they were coming up empty. Alice spent many a sleepless night, tossing and turning in bed, torn between worrying over Jake, Cooper, Lorne and the others, and concern about Karim's fate. When she finally was able to fall asleep, nightmares brought her back to the dungeon or to the reclining chair in Jareth's lab, and she woke up, covered in sweat and trembling like a leaf on the wind.

Physically, she was beginning to feel better. Although they left rather unseemly scars, the wounds on her arm and leg healed up quite nicely and soon enough she could abandon the crutch and walk about on her own two feet, though running or lifting anything heavier than her laptop was still problematic. Her overall condition was slowly improving, too. Keller was finally satisfied with her blood test results, and she could see some progress herself in the way she looked, too; the yellowish tinge had faded away from her skin, leaving it fragile and white as a sheet, but at least it was closer to her usual paleness. She was having problems gaining back the weight, though, which Keller supposed was connected to all the stress and worry.

One day, a couple weeks after the unsuccessful electroconvulsive therapy attempt, Alice had sneaked out of the lab early and climbed to the top of one of the city's towers. She had often come up there for a beer with Karim before, and she brought one with her this time, too. She sat down at the very edge and sipped at it slowly, watching the sun descend lower and lower until it touched the horizon, marking the ocean with a stream of orange light. She didn't hear the footsteps and only noticed Sheppard when he appeared at her side, dropping to the ground to sit by her.

"Colonel! I'm sorry, I didn't see you there."

"Yeah, you seemed very much engrossed in your own thoughts. Didn't want to interrupt."

Alice smiled and raised her beer bottle a bit. "Sorry, I don't have any more to share with you."

"That's okay, I'll live. How are you doing, Captain?"

Alice resisted rolling her eyes at him. So he came to check up on her. "I'm fine, sir."

"Are you? I mean, the whole thing with your brother must be tough on you."

She sighed. "I won't lie, it's not easy. But I haven't given up hope that we'll find a way to bring him and the others back. I wish we had captured Jareth, though. We could question him…"

"Or he would use this superpower of his and take over Atlantis." Sheppard shrugged, but Alice was shaking her head.

"I doubt he'd be able to. I mean… there must be a reason why I of all people could withstand him. I think it's got something to do with the ATA gene."

"Your brother and Lorne both have it too, and it didn't help them," he noted.

"Yeah, but their gene is recessive. Doctor Lam told me that you, me and Doctor Beckett are the only ones in Atlantis who have it as a dominant allele. Jennifer and I were speculating that it might be what allowed me to resist him."

"Or maybe you're just that special," he mused.

Alice smiled crookedly. "I doubt that, sir. At any rate, I don't think Jareth could ever bend you to his will, and you would never let him have Atlantis. You'd rather destroy it than see a Wraith take over."

"Can't argue with that," he agreed. "Let's hope it never comes to that, though."

"It might," Alice warned. "Why else would Jareth want to get the ATA gene himself? Our Jumpers are handy, I'll grant you, but I doubt he'll stop there. He knows we have a ZPM now, and I bet you a hundred bucks that he's after the city. It would give him such an enormous advantage over the other Wraith… not to mention passage to Earth."

"That's a chilling thought." Sheppard looked up at the sky, which was darkening quickly and first stars were already twinkling on the firmament. "I am trying to decide whether he's more or less creepy than Michael had been…"

Alice shook her head. "Michael was before my time, but I'd say Jareth. You know—" she added pensively "—I think Jareth might have been inspired by Michael's experiments, one way or another. Either he just heard about them and decided to try his own, or, you know, maybe he was actually involved in them at some point?"

"If he were, Michael would've changed him into a hybrid too."

"Maybe, maybe not. Jareth is smart, he might have seen where Michael was going with his research and left him to do his own. At any rate, it's unlikely that he'd think of it completely on his own, it's just too similar."

"You're probably right." Sheppard nodded.

For a moment, they were both silent. The sun has sunk below the horizon by then, and night was coming on swiftly. Alice sighed.

"Two years ago today I had received my PhD," she mentioned casually. "Fifteen days later I got my assignment to Atlantis. Hard to believe it's been so long."

"Wait until you get to six," the colonel joked. "You get so entangled in the war and life here, you don't even notice as the time passes…"

Alice's smile froze on her lips. "Entangled…" she repeated dreamily, her mind churning at high speed. Sheppard looked at her and raised his eyebrows, but she hardly noticed. The word he used struck her. She blinked quickly and scrambled to her feet. "I have an idea," she told him absent-mindedly.

"Go." He waved at her and she started off towards the door. She didn't even see him following her, or heard him radio Keller and McKay to ask if they were still at the lab. She was too preoccupied with her own thoughts.

Once in the lab, she ignored both doctors, and walked to the computer to check Jake's health test results. Normally such things were restricted to medical personnel, but Alice was Jake's designated next of kin and thus could access his data. With her assumption confirmed, she turned around to face Keller, McKay and Sheppard. All three were looking at her impatiently.

"Something Colonel Sheppard said made me think," she began without preamble. "He used the word entangled and of course I immediately thought about quantum entanglement."

"Of course." Sheppard made a face at her, but McKay waved at him to be quiet.

"Are you saying that the Wraith somehow changed the quantum state of human brain cell particles?" The physicist looked very doubtful, his brow furrowed.

"No, that would require him to somehow pair the particles to his own, and I don't think that's possible, or at least—I don't think the Wraith have gained that level of scientific advancement. We certainly haven't. And if he did that, he'd still be able to control people even from the other end of the galaxy, which he clearly can't do. But it did get me thinking—what if he somehow imprinted or influenced the neural connections in his victims brains to respond to some sort of signals that only he can emit? Isn't a lot of what goes on in the nervous system based on electrical or chemical impulses, passing through synapses? Couldn't he have manipulated that?"

Keller and McKay exchanged looks.

"It is theoretically possible," Jennifer admitted. "I mean, it fits. He could have created or strengthened specific connections between certain neurons in the brain to build a structure that would override the standard decision-making processes. Then without input from him, no conscious decision could be taken. There's even some evidence to support it. All of the people we found at the castle displayed significantly altered levels of certain neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, norepinephrine, histamine and serotonin. But Alice, since then we'd been medicating them to regulate that situation, with no effect."

"I know." Alice nodded. "And I think that was a mistake." She smiled at Keller, seeing her alarmed expression. "It was the right thing to do medically, I am sure," she reassured her. "But I think that if we had left them be, eventually the artificially created synapses would became less potent, enough so to bring back independent thought. As it is, if we remove the drugs and allow the neurotransmitter levels to go down again, essentially starve the nervous system… maybe we can reverse the effects."

But Jennifer shook her head. "It doesn't work like that. Those neurotransmitters are necessary for the brain to function properly. And removing them wouldn't necessarily reverse the effect of Jareth's manipulation. What we really need is to eliminate those synapses that he created—if that is how it works. The problem is—I don't know how to do that. There is a natural process called synaptic pruning in which the neural connections that are not used are being removed, but I don't know how we could ever stimulate that. Neuroscience is not exactly my field."

Alice frowned. "I'm sure there's someone specializing in it in Stargate Command or at Groom Lake. Couldn't we ask for a consult?"

Keller raised her eyebrows. "I guess we could."

"Let's do that, then," Sheppard suggested. "I'll get Woolsey to request the best specialist we can find."

The best specialist they could find turned out to be an Italian neuroscientist from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory who was granted limited security clearance. That meant that she was not allowed to come to Atlantis, and instead, Jake and two other people were transported back to Earth, where Doctor Chiara could attend to them. Both Keller and Alice went back with them to assist Chiara.

The neuroscientist began with a series of tests. She was quite taken aback with the quality of the equipment in the infirmary of a military base several hundred feet under the surface of the Cheyenne Mountain, especially that some of it was not commercially available anywhere in the world.

"They're classified prototypes," Alice lied to her; Chiara was not allowed to know about the Stargate Program at large. She was told the patients' status was a result of a mishap with a chemical agent of unspecified nature. Of course, she saw through the cover story within seconds, but wisely kept her thoughts to herself. Instead, she eagerly threw herself into work, happy to have an opportunity to use the sort of equipment that gave her much more flexibility in doing non-invasive exams that would otherwise have been impossible on living subjects.

"The synaptic pruning in humans occurs mostly during childhood, and up until early twenties," she explained to Keller and Alice after a week of intensive examination of her three patients. "That's when we need our nervous system to be at its best, because we constantly discover and learn new things, and therefore we need bad and unused synapses to be removed to make room for new ones. But this process continues in our adult age, as well, at a lower rate—that's one of the reasons it's harder for us to learn a new language or a new instrument than it is for a child or a teenager. This mechanism is carried out by cells called microglia. They are abundant in the brain and are related to macrophages; like them, microglia detect viruses and microbes and engulf those that are found. Additionally, they remove dead neurons and any cellular debris caused by brain damage or stroke and suchlike. Recently we have found, however, that they are also responsible for removing neural connections—synapses—that are not used or are wired incorrectly. We think that there is a specific protein marker present in those synapses that tells microglia that a connection can be eliminated."

"Is this something we can use?" Alice asked, trying to keep up, but this was far out of her usual area of expertise.

"Maybe. I have found that in our subjects, certain synapses seem to be built a bit differently than the rest of them. Well, it's a little more complicated than that… but anyway I am almost sure that those are the connections created as a consequence of that, um, chemical exposure." Chiara rolled her eyes. "They are what accounts for the subjects' altered brain activity. Neurotransmitters are simply not flowing through due to this unusual wiring. It's weird, it's almost as if there was some blockage there, like a dam that could only release the neurotransmitter if some external signal was received…"

Keller and Alice exchanged significant looks, but neither of them spoke. They knew what it meant. Jareth must have been the source of that signal that allowed the neurotransmitters to pass through. But how did he do it?

"I am pretty sure that, in time, the microglia will dismantle those synapses because of their uncommon structure on their own," the neuroscientist continued. "However, this may actually take years before we see any visible effect on subjects' brain activity. It's impossible to say at this point. Now, if we could somehow deliver the protein marker that attracts microglia to specific affected synapses, I think we could speed up that process considerably. The problem is that there is no way to do that. There's something like five hundred trillion synapses in a human brain, and I just don't know how to target only the ones that have the wrong wiring."

Alice looked at Keller, but the doctor wore a frown on her face which didn't bode well. She noticed Alice's gaze and shook her head.

"I'm sorry, I have no idea either," she said sadly. "But we'll continue looking for a way," she assured her.

Alice nodded, mulling through what Doctor Chiara had said.

"You said that delivering the protein marker to the synapses would cause the microglia to remove them at a faster rate. How much faster?" She asked after a moment of silence.

The Italian shook her head. "No way of knowing. Days, weeks, maybe months. It could vary from person to person, too."

"Weeks or months instead of years." Alice sighed. "I think it's worth a try."

"But we have no way of delivering the marker," Chiara protested.

"I know." Alice turned to Keller. "I have an idea, but you won't like it. And Colonel Sheppard will go ballistic over this."