That night, Julia's metabolizers completed their work on Roadkill. ::I really shouldn't adopt Uly's name for him.:: the blond haired doctor thought ruefully. :: He's my patient and now Eden Advance's guest until further noticed.::

"Hey.." Heller said gently, near the young man's ear. "Can you open your eyes yet? We've healed you. You're safe."
The red haired man's eyes were hazel when they finally opened and met the gaze of her own blue ones. They watered through a veil of confusion.

"I...uh.. .I'm sorry. I can't seem to think just yet." he replied with Gaal's mulled over English accent.

::Oh, that's creepy.:: Julia shivered. ::He sounds just like Gaal.:: Her inner reaction remained a mental one as she forced herself to smile. "That brain fog's residual. We just broke your fever a few hours ago. What's your name?" Julia asked, waving Devon and John over to his bedroll.

"Seth. I thought we couldn't get sick on this planet, nurse,..er..."

"Doctor. Julia Heller." she began. "And these two new arrivals are Devon Adair and John Danziger of Eden Advance... II." she stated carefully.

It got the reaction it always did from first generation penal colonists. "A second mission? Are you prisoners, too?" Seth asked, fighting to sit upright on wavering propped elbows. The genuine look of hungry hope and sympathy immediately thawed Heller's earlier reservations about him being Gaal's son.

Devon spread out her hand in greeting and the late teens aged Earth2'er shakily accepted her hand clasp with one of his own. Adair grinned lightly. "No, we're forward scouts ahead of the Syndrome Colony Ships who are still timing it, two years behind us, on the journey to this planet."

"Did it work?" Seth asked fearfully, glancing quickly at Uly, who although well, still bore the marks of light bones and a guarded standing stance left over from the time he needed his support suit.

Seth's scrutiny of her son raised gooseflesh on Devon's arms. She startled. "Wait a minute, how did you know about my son's prior syndrome history?"

The slightly breathless teenager wearily set his ponytailed head back down on his pillow. "It takes one, to know one." And he started to trill Terrian coos at Ulysses, who was still observing Seth severely from a spot at his feet. The slight boy's eyes got really big. "That's my Prince name. How did you-?"

"Learn it?" Seth sighed tiredly. "I am the Terrian Prince, who abdicated my spot, to you." he whispered.

"What?!" True Danziger sputtered. "No way!" she said incredulously, smiling in excitement. "Can you shoot that thing off?" she blurted out, pointing at Ulysses' Terrian staff.

Seth tilted his head to look. "No, I...never got that far in the communion." he smiled, trying to reassure his counterpart. "I can no longer hear them."

Julia began a new assessment over his body with the diaglove. "You're right. There's no Terrian DNA showing up in your cells."

"But you glow, Julia." said Seth, nodding at her. "Did they choose you as well?" he wondered. Seth marvelled at her. "Do they still talk to you?"

Julia eyed up John and Devon reluctantly. "Only in half dreams. I can hear them, but they can't reach me and I can only make myself heard if there's something life or death going on." she shared.

Danziger forgave Heller's admission once again, with kind eyes silently.

Seth regarded the doctor in understanding. "I told the Terrians what my father was doing here. With all of the killings and murders. But, they didn't understand it. So the only way I.. could protect them, was to break my link to them, so father couldn't use the Terrians to serve him any more."

"Oh, he found another way." Devon shared dryly, frowning.

True looked up sadly. "Gaal robbed their Moonpools of Terrian bones and wore them as jewelry."

"That's.." Seth gagged until Julia handed him a canteen of water to help quell his nausea induced reaction. "That's horrible!" he said, wiping his lips free of water droplets. "Terrian life is sacred."
"Terrian life is sacred. " whispered Uly with him in unison. But only Uly's eyes lit up red in communion sympathy.

John Danziger asked the burning question. "How did you find us? This is a big continent. And we've made it a point to go nowhere near the penal colony coordinates."

"The Grendlers did. Because they know you sometimes find your missing supply escape pods using beacon signals. I just followed them."

"May we ask about your mother?" Devon pressed, the safety of the group still on her mind.

"Dead." Seth said bleakily, staring at the cloudless night sky. The firelight added years to his actual age. "When I was five, one of us decided to digress back into a serial rapist. He broke my mom's neck afterwards. And then my father killed the rapist." he shrugged mildly.

"I'm sorry." said Adair.

"I don't remember the tinier details." Seth shared. "I only know what happened from my father, when he muttered in his sleep on the nights he got drunk on orchid wine a few times. How did you know my dad?" Seth asked fearfully. "I...ran away from him a year ago when he ordered the Grendlers to beat up a stranger I had never seen before. "

"What did he look like?" John asked, mouth firm in unpleasantness.

"Tall, round, white hair, space between his teeth." Seth replied.

Devon suddenly studied her feet subconsciously. "Commander O'Neill."

Seth sat up and touched the ground near Devon's feet. "That man did not deserve to be tortured. He was innocent and not from our colony. I helped him escape and then I ran away. Uh, if he's here, I'd like to thank this man. He taught the Grendlers how to take care of me while he bartered for their goods out here. That is, until-" Seth broke off.

"Until what?" John asked quietly.

"Until we both started getting sick with the same disease, the Grendlers and I."

"The Phage." Julia realized. "When did that begin?"

"Day before yesterday if the last moon cross hasn't happened yet." Seth replied.

"Were you attacked by Grendlers?" True asked, touching a yellowing bruise on Seth's arm.

"Yeah. It's like their intelligence disappeared suddenly." Seth tried to explain.

"They were probably feverish." Julia guessed. "Too high of a fever with their body mass would cause heavy brain damage. Grendlers can't sweat. It's why they pant out their slime."

"And how were you born?" Morgan quipped, still not trusting the lost goody two shoes story that Seth was weaving.

"Morgan!" Bess admonished. "Don't be rude."

But Seth only smiled. "The same way you probably became part Terrian royalty, Dr. Heller. By using diagloves." he laughed.

Julia smacked her hand down on the gray grass. "I knew the Council should have eliminated those corrective surgery algorithms. They reversed all of their vasectomies." she hypothesized.

"Uh... yeah." Seth said, turning red. "But the diagloves we had, have long since been burned out, if it helps."

"Cat's out of the bag, Seth." said John. "Who knows how many penal colonists are fertile now."

Yale nodded. "There's no more record of it if what you say about the equipment failure is true."

Seth could only stare at the cybernetic Tutor. "Are you one of us?"

"No." the close shaved Jamaican man shared. "I was a soldier, a made weapon, and I've since been reprogrammed. I'm not a ZED. Those came a few generations after us, young man."

"I'm sorry, cybo." Seth murmured, looking away from Yale's monocle. "I only heard about all of your kind going crazy."

"I am stable now. Please. It's Yale. Call me by my post period name. It will do me honor."

"I will." Seth saw that True, the mechanic's daughter, was still glaring at him. "Have I done something wrong?"

"I don't know. You tell me." she snapped. "Your dad tried to trick me into leaving my family by telling me a whole bunch of lies!"

John decided not to cut the sharp soup. "He also had Commander O'Neill killed. We found traces of Grendler and Gaal's DNA on our friend's body." he added.

Seth vomited immediately. "Oh, God! No.. I thought...he got away okay.."

True ignored the puke flooding out of Seth's mouth as he bent over to keep from fainting. "I got my revenge, Seth. I yanked off Gaal's bone necklace and let the Grendlers tear him to shreds!" True finally shrieked.

John finally stepped in. "That's enough, True. He gets it."

Seth fell back onto his bedroll, breathing hard once the heavy nausea had fled. "He had it coming, little girl. But I swear on all that's holy, that I'm not like Gaal is."

"Was!" True spat.

"...was." Seth added meekly. "My father didn't raise me. Everybody else did. The worst thing I ever did was-"

Morgan's eye fell on something glimmering in the muddy pack they had peeled off their patient and had ignored until now. Morgan dug around for what had attracted him. He lifted out a canteen that was clearly stamped, 'EA2.' "...steal from our cargo pods?!" the businessman glowered. "Did you help the Grendlers break into all of them, too?"

Seth curled up tiny in the bed. "I didn't know you were here. I swear it! We all saw a ship blow up in the atmosphere into a huge fireball. How could any of us know if anybody survived that?"

John finally cooled, after getting a more truthful reaction out of Seth. "Only three of our pods were manned, Seth. Our group's and two others. The ship was sabotaged by pro-stationers."

The next question was in Seth's overwrought eyes. Devon finally tossed the orphaned teen a damp towel so he could clean the ick off of his face. She dropped the last piece of the puzzle down for the older boy. "They're all dead. One of them found the Phage, the same thing we just cured in you, coming from a Council ship sent here fifty years ago. That bioweapon arrived using a computer program named Reilly from orbit. A second one down here, named Eve, was restored by a scientist. She saved us, gave us a cure, and is now watching this infection's progress across the planet from a satellite."

Seth's eyes looked dull as slate. "What happens now? Do I pay the price of being the son of a man who killed your mission leader?"

"Absolutely not." Bess Martin broke in. "Honestly, all of you! Picking on this young man just for being a teenager on survival mode. I for one am going to get a hot meal going, and I'm feeding it to him. The rest of y'all be d*mn*d." she hissed.

"Bess, I-"

"Shut up, Morgan! My mind's made up!" his wife replied.

Carefully, Bess Martin guided the stunned Seth up onto a pair of shaky legs using a gentle shoulder lift. "We'll be in my tent. NOBODY follows me. Zero! Privacy mode. Bess Martin. 0079!"

"Yes, ma'am." replied the drone, taking up a sentry position after the two had hobbled inside to Bess's kitchen set up.

Cameron started laughing. "Well that's a complete f*ck up. She's got all of our food."

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