AN: Here we go, another chapter here.

I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!

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"Shouldn't Mr. Mamet be here?" Maggie asked, shifting in her seat. Alice knew the question was going to be the first one that the woman asked as soon as the three of them were gathered together, so she was prepared for it ahead of time. She was set to respond to the question the moment it was given voice.

"He doesn't have to be here," Alice said. "He briefed us on what he wants covered. He has more important work to do than attend a meeting like this where his presence isn't necessary for you to get the message."

History.

That's what Michonne had called it. Tension might have been a better word for it.

Whatever the name given to it, Alice saw it as clearly as if it had been a physical entity when Maggie sat forward in her chair.

"And what message is that, Alice?" Maggie asked, only somewhat trying to sweeten her tone for Samirah's benefit.

"Hands off the citizens," Alice said. "That's the gist of it. Especially Andrea, but all of the citizens here. You don't touch them. Your guards don't touch them—when we find you some suitable guards, of course."

"They have to be handled if they're out of control," Maggie said.

"No one's disputing that," Samirah intervened. "Just that one should be very careful to be sure that they're out of control before they're punished."

"Attacked," Alice corrected. "What happened was nothing short of a series of attacks. And one of those attacks could have stalled the entire project for a significant amount of time."

"It was hardly an attack," Maggie argued, covering her frustration with a half-hearted laugh. "And you can dispute it if you want, but Andrea had a weapon. The glass bottle was a potential weapon."

"Every day," Alice said, "every single day, I let my assistant handle almost everything in the clinic and in my office. And there are things there that are classified as weapons. To try and get Andrea the nutrients she's lacking because of morning sickness that's relentless? Milton regularly orders steak for her and other meats. She sits and she eats her food—with a knife—and no harm comes to anyone. A glass bottle could be a weapon. We're not arguing that it couldn't. We're arguing that, in that moment, it wasn't being used as a weapon. Yet she was still attacked and brutalized for possession of—a beverage."

"It's about correctly assessing the situation," Samirah offered. "About not using force unless it's necessary. We're building a peaceful community and violence by authority figures doesn't promote peace."

"Listen, I'm about to start coupling the max-prisoners that are now our citizens. We're about to start working with them to see if they'll be able to be introduced into the population. We don't need any nervous-Nellies around them. We don't need it around anyone here. Everyone here has suffered a great deal. Things some of us can't even imagine. One of the keys to undoing the past trauma these people have suffered—and yes, I call them people—is earning their trust," Alice said. "Your methods inspire the exact opposite of trust, and I shouldn't have to tell you that."

"That's right, Alice," Maggie said. "You shouldn't have to tell me my job. And you don't have to tell me my job. I'm doing what I was assigned to do."

"You weren't assigned to brutalize the citizens," Alice said. "I have four citizens that are traumatized by your little stunt the other day. All of them suffered injuries. Andrea was just one of them. And her injuries, alone, include a two inch gash on her foot, bruising over a good bit of her body, cracked ribs, and a mild concussion. Her crime was choosing to drink juice for breakfast."

"I think you're throwing around the word 'trauma' a little too easily for someone without any real knowledge of psychiatry or psychology," Maggie offered.

Alice laughed to herself. This time it was an attempt to relieve some of her own frustration.

"I know that she won't drink juice now," Alice said. "I know that—she had the other two bottles removed from her home and she wouldn't remove them herself. I know that she's refusing it, even though it was one of the things that she could usually keep down—and was something I was promoting, as her physician, for her medical benefit. I think that's enough for me to diagnose trauma as a laywoman."

"Maggie," Samirah said, massaging her temples in a clear show of how much she didn't want to be there mediating the conversation that, in Samirah's opinion, she thought they shouldn't even have ever been driven to have, "I think that the problem may be that you've worked too long inside the prison system and you haven't worked that much with rehabilitation."

"Because there is no rehabilitation," Maggie said, directing her words toward Samirah now. "There isn't. They're wild and they're going to stay that way. They're killers. They kill for what they want. They don't respect our laws. They don't respect personal property. They don't respect anything except the laws of nature. Attack and kill. That's all they know. If you read anything by Kreegan, or if you heard him speak, you'd know that no matter what you give them and no matter what you do for them, it's never enough. They don't understand anything except force."

"And Kreegan is exactly who we're trying to disprove here," Alice said, not able to help herself from jumping in. "Listen—I know that you hate Wilds. I know that you have had—some very bad experiences with Wilds. But they're people. And just like people, there's good and there's bad. That's what we're doing now. We're weeding out the ones who are good and can be helped and the ones that are bad and probably never were any good to society. We're proving that they are human. And we're going to prove that they're completely human. That they're—genetically human. And that they can act like humans too—if only they're not forced into situations where the only thing they can even possibly be driven by are the animal instincts that all of us have inside us."

Samirah stood up, this time commanding that she be listened to. Alice looked at her, and Maggie did too, simply because her change in position demanded it.

"We ask everyone that comes through those gates to do the best that they can to ignore Kreegan's findings," Samirah said. "Until the project has reached later stages, we won't be able to release any official information, but we have a strong hypothesis that Kreegan's findings were incomplete, inconclusive, and incorrect. They were immoral and unethical. They were—the worst kind of pseudo-science that ever has been taken as fact. And Wave Thirty Three is going to prove that. It's going to—change the way the world looks at Wilds. But—to do that? We have to put Kreegan and his findings aside and start from scratch. Milton Mamet's experiment will put Kreegan's to bed."

"You have a lot of confidence in one man's vision that science is wrong," Maggie said.

"I have a lot of confidence in a man that says he can prove what I—what I already feel to be true," Samirah said.

"Sometimes—we all learn that what we believe, and what we feel, is wrong," Maggie said. "I just hope you don't find out the hard way."

"If Milton Mamet is wrong," Samirah said, "then thousands of Wilds will be destroyed in prisons. Everyone here, in Woodbury, will be executed. The Wilds that remain out there? In the Wild? It'll be open season on hunting them again."

"Something, if I recall correctly, you were in very strong support of the first time it happened," Alice pointed out to Maggie. Samirah put her hands out, a palm toward each of them.

"That much loss? That's the hard way for me," Samirah said. "I can't think of anything harder than going to bed at night and... and knowing that these people were—just killed. But...if it happens when the project is complete, because the hypothesis was wrong? It's going to be a lot easier than living with the knowledge that it happened just because of fear and anger and unbridled hatred."

"It's no secret you want me off the project," Maggie said. "You want me out of here. If you had your way? I'd lose my job. I'd have lost it a long time ago. Alice would've seen to that herself."

"We don't want you off the project," Samirah said. She shook her head at Alice when Alice drew in the breath that she fully intended to use to say that she wasn't of that mindset. She would be happy to see Maggie go simply because she knew her current view of Wilds. "We don't. Because—if you come out of here a believer? Then there's nobody that isn't going to see the light when we expose Kreegan's findings for what they are. But we're going to need you to do your job. And doing your job, means that you have to do what the project entails."

Maggie crossed her arms across her chest and sat back in her chair. She bobbed her foot quickly and took a moment to do something akin to counting the ceiling tiles.

"I'm dedicated to my job," she said. "And doing what's best for the government. Doing what's best for the country. I'm entitled to my opinions—but I can put them aside to work."

"That's all we're asking," Samirah said. "And—we're bringing in another psychiatrist of our own that will be checking in with the citizens too. Just—so they'll see both of you. They'll talk to both of you. You won't be pushed out. They'll be separate evaluations."

"Because you don't trust me to do a good job," Maggie said.

"Checks and balances," Samirah responded.

"There's no other system of checks and balances," Maggie pointed out. "Not from what I can see. You have one primary physician. Who's the scientific team that's working alongside Mr. Mamet?"

"Not that anything has to be justified to you," Samirah said, "but Mr. Mamet has a team. It's a team provided for him by the one true power. He's overseeing everything, as you know, and Mr. Mamet works closely with him."

"And medical?" Maggie asked, looking directly at Alice. "You're doing this alone. Who's to say that you won't change data?"

"All my important tests will be done with a team," Alice said. "And they'll be done blind. Those evaluating the results won't know who they're for or where they came from. The rest of what I'm doing? I'm not going to sabotage the program. But if I were? I think things like death would give me away." Alice smiled at Maggie and shifted in her own chair. "But—if you know of anyone who's sympathetic to the cause and looking to join my team, I could always use other doctors to assist me. It's just, as you know, there wasn't a line out the door of doctors who thought they could put aside everything they knew from Kreegan to treat Wilds outside of the prison system. It's not exactly a glamorous position."

And it was true. Alice hadn't asked to be the only doctor working on the project. In fact, with everything that entailed, and also with the outside commitment of working with Milton and Samirah to make sure everything would keep moving according to plan, it was a lot on her plate and she'd have gladly taken some assistance. However, it had turned out that there weren't that many doctors that were willing to take the role. Some doctors wouldn't work with Wilds at all. The ones that would often worked in the prison system and felt at least a little degraded by that. They saw themselves as glorified veterinarians. There just wasn't a line of people who wanted to work with Wilds and admit that they were treating them like humans.

In short, one of the doctors that she'd previously worked with equated what Alice was doing to trying to work with mad cows and believing that they could be reasoned with. The same doctor suggested that Milton Mamet, for even attempting such a project, was nothing short of a mad-scientist doing something as ridiculous—and potentially dangerous—as Dr. Frankenstein toying around with electricity and body parts in a lab. Anyone who joined the project, he'd suggested, and really believed that what they were doing was sensible and meaningful, had to be at least a little off their rocker if they weren't going to be discredited as being simply incredibly stupid.

It made her, though conveniently well-named for her position, someone who was choosing to co-exist with the mad and adopt their habits.

But then, maybe she was already just as mad as anyone else there.

When Maggie relaxed back into her chair, it was clear that she had nothing to offer Alice as an argument and she had no names of anyone who wanted the position of working alongside her.

"You've talked to Mr. Mamet," Maggie said with a sigh. "That means you know what's going to happen. How do things change for me?"

"You continue to see the citizens," Samirah said, "just as you agreed to do in the beginning. Separately they'll be evaluated by another psychiatrist and all evaluations will be turned into the government office for Milton's team. You'll be assigned guards that will be there to protect you if you should need protection..."

"But they're not attack dogs," Alice interjected. "They're trained to control the citizens should they need it. They're trained to transport them from one location to another if you should need to move them for any reason. But—they won't attack them. They won't be any more forceful than is absolutely necessary, not even if you command it."

"Do I get any form of self-protection?" Maggie asked.

"No," Samirah said. "I'm afraid not. Not after what happened."

"You could wear a vest, if it makes you more comfortable. Whatever gear you want to wear for protection. But we won't give you a weapon. We don't want anyone shot for sneezing," Alice said. She got a warning look from Samirah.

Maggie sighed and nodded her head.

"Anything else?" She asked.

"You don't have any interactions with certain citizens without me being present," Alice said. "Those who are pregnant, who have medical conditions, or who otherwise might need my assistance. Those whose stress level needs to be monitored. You don't have contact with them without my presence."

"The citizens of Woodbury trust Alice," Samirah said, seeming to anticipate Maggie's coming argument. "And we need that. They need that. She won't intervene unless it's necessary, but her presence will be reassuring to the citizens."

"Does Melodye have to have you present?" Maggie asked. "Because I'm not stupid enough, Alice, to not know who the other psychiatrist will be."

"If that would make you happy," Alice said, "it can be arranged."

"Fine," Maggie said.

"Oh," Alice offered with a smile. "And Milton wanted me to tell you that—one very important stipulation is that you never ever have contact with Andrea without clearance again. Even if—you see her walking down the street, and she's headed out the gate? You get someone to give you clearance before you so much as address her. You stay away from all my mothers to be without clearance. All of them. But—Milton said Andrea especially. Under penalty of law. I'm sure you understand."