by analise
Rating:PG
Category: J/A, Outside POV
Archive: Anywhere, just let me know
Feedback: Yes, please. analise@2cowherd.net
Disclaimer: The Farscape characters don't belong to me. Obviously.
Summary: Set on Earth in a secret government facility, a young woman makes a life-changing discovery.
Notes: Talk about more work than expected. This undertaking ended up twice as long and far more fun than its original incarnation. And thank god for that. As always, gushing thanks to Kirby Crow for her usual crackerjack Beta. This time I'd also like to thank Craig for his fabulous comments, even though he's not a fanboy he stuck it out and helped enormously. Thanks sweetie! And as I like to add to my notes, *please* read it all the way through without skipping to the end. Trust me, you won't be sorry. I hope :) Enjoy!
The transport appeared in a burst of brilliant blue light far beyond the asteroid belt, moving towards the blue planet on a silent and stealthy trajectory. Effectively concealed in the cloak of the Sun's corona they entered the atmosphere over the magnetic riot of the southern pole. Streaking low along the ice fields against the dark skies, moving too quickly and quietly for any casual observer to notice them, they flew north. Keeping to the dark side of the blue planet, they had timed their approach to take them beneath radar and in the dead of night. When they landed the transport in the heavy pine forests of Maine, no one knew they had come but the startled wildlife.
The two people who disembarked, him fair, her dark, did not plan to stay any longer than a weeken. They hid the transport with care, using a complex camouflage net that had been purchased in the distant marketplace of a planet where the locals belched fire. They took a small bag of belongings each and they hiked a short distance to where a small, rustic cabin crouched on the shore of a lake known only for its mosquitoes.
Despite their fear of the unknown hazards they might have exposed themselves to by coming, both managed to be seduced into calm by the beauty of the crisp fall evening and the gentle buzzing of the night insects. The key was found tucked in its spot behind the porch light. There was still wood in the shed and canned food in the cramped pantry. When they fell asleep that night on the dusty sheets of the loft bed, they were able to ingdulge in being warm and full and content in each other's arms.
++++
Fall leaves rustled and whispered in the late afternoon breeze, rust and orange and yellow, crackling and marbled with earthy decay. Still warm, that breeze, but bringing a hint of ice with it. A subtle reminder that winter was approaching and that it would not be merciful when it came. It reminded me that I still needed to weatherproof my apartment windows. Washington D.C. winters were never kind.
I realized slowly, and with no hurry, that I was still standing in the parking lot, my hand loosely clasping the top of my car's door. The gentle tick-tick of the Honda's cooling engine and the distant hum of light traffic on Sternway Avenue somehow blended perfectly with the tree full of chuckling starlings a few yards away. Shaking myself out of the fugue I seemed to have found myself in I gathered my bag and my keys and bumped the car door shut with my hip. The noise sent a shockwave through the tree of arguing birds and they exploded outwards in a cloud of black wings and shapes and furious sound, glossy walnut in the slanting yellow sunlight.
It was almost exhilarating, their egress. I could feel the threads of my control fraying at the edges as I tried to touch their surprise. For just an instant, time stopped and the birds froze in the air, a glorious pattern of wing and sunlight. My eyes unfocused, staring at them until they became blobs of shiny brown painted on a blue canvas. Abstractions. Life becoming a palette of colors and shapes with no meaning beyond what I gave it. It only lasted an instant before I felt control return, clamping down, and the birds scattered onwards as if they had never been interrupted. Regrouping at some invisible command and settling as one onto the telephone wires that sketched lines against the sky, they rebuilt their bird-debates and their bird-rebuttals until it was as if I had never disturbed them.
I blinked, coming back to myself again. Experiencing what I called the "Freezeframe" when I was a child was always exhausting beyond words. It seemed to drain the energy out of me like a tap. A strand of hair pulled itself free of my hair clip and fluttered against the side of my face in the breeze, hair the same color as the starlings. Black with deep brown highlights. Only not so shiny. Tucking the errant lock behind my ear almost numbly, I continued slowly up the walk to the wide steps before I pushed inside and replaced the lovely afternoon with the air-conditioned sterility of the familiar monolith of Building G-2.
Reluctance, I supposed. It was what I felt more and more strongly every time I returned here. This place that was the only connection and the only community I had ever shared in. My job, my small apartment, my single potted cactus, these things were just shapes and concepts. This stark building was where I had grown up, it held people that I knew and that knew me. I understood instinctively that it was not what those starlings had. It was nothing like it. There was no connection for me here. And if it wasn't here then where was it?
"Dr. Pollson will see you, Miss Gray." The guard behind the desk handed me a badge after he double-checked my ID, indicating that I should clip it to my collar. "Please have a seat and wait for your escort."
As if I didn't know the way with my eyes closed. But I didn't know this man well enough to tell him that, and he didn't know me well enough to trust me. I turned and clicked hollowly across the floor, taking a seat on the hard, friendless, government-issue chairs. There were no magazines. This was not meant to be a place of comfort.
Crossing my legs, I let my eyes travel over the hard lines of the lobby. It had been two years since I had left the confines of Building G-2 to go to college, but nothing had changed. I had been back many, many times to visit, and each time I expected there to be something. Some sign that time had passed. There never was. The solidity of this place, the unchanging qualities of it, it only added to my feeling of numb distance. When I had finally left it, I had been surprised to find that I still didn't matter. That I never made any sort of imprint on anything or anyone around me.
It was like I was in a dream. But then, I never dreamed.
The starlings were still a frozen tableau of beauty in my mind. I closed my eyes and leaned back, taking a small breath. It had been a long time since I had done what I had done to those birds. I honestly hadn't thought I still could. It had been a childhood ability, a freakish, unpleasant one. One that marked me as desperately different.
I could still remember that orderly's face. So long ago, I was only a child, perhaps 6, when it had first shown itself. A long white hallway, windowless doors at the end. I hadn't wanted to go where they were taking me. The tests always hurt. He had dragged me, my stocking feet slipping on the shiny vinyl floor tiles, his fingers biting into my wrists.
Panic had spurred it that first time. My control frayed and unraveled and I could feel the whitewashed cinderblock halls bending in my head, I could hear the orderly's heart beating a rhythm against my skin. Maybe he sensed it, or maybe he just happened to look back, but his face was turned to mine when it froze in place. Sound stopped, the walls and floors shimmered as if I were watching them construct and deconstruct in fast motion. I had a sense of everyone in the building, *knew* that they had frozen in place too, *knew* that I was doing it.
I had been too young to understand what I had done on that day and I still didn't understand. No one did. But the orderly knew *I* had done it when I dropped control like a hot rock and his mobility returned. He let go of my wrist as if I had suddenly contracted the plague and he had backed away, his eyes filled with fear and revulsion.
Everyone had looked at me like that for a long time afterwards. Even Beth.
"Miss Grey?" I opened my eyes, losing the memory almost gratefully. A stone-faced military boy had appeared soundlessly before me, this youngster hardly older than I was. I recognized him from my last visit the month before, but I didn't remember his name.
I stood and let him lead me down the bare corridors, through security door after security door. Checkpoint after checkpoint, until we came through that last set of gray metal doors and entered the part of G-2 that had been my home.
+++
For the man it was too easy for him to forget to be cautious. He was in a favored place, a place he came to often in his memories. He wanted to revel in those memories now that they were made real, share each broken board and moldy tire swing with the woman. She allowed him the indulgence, even took some pleasure in his nostalgia, but never fully lost her own paranoia.
She kept him on schedule even though she was starting to feel sick that first day, able to keep little food down. His concern over her illness dampened his joy more than any reprimand from her could have, and he redoubled his efforts to finish their business quickly.
He contacted an old friend who had always lived in the area as a go-between, for he could make no advances himself without exposure. He told the friend nothing but that the phone at the cabin was out, and could the friend please contact his father and tell him his son was at the cabin.
By the end of the first day, the woman was feeling better. They were both relieved.
They waited for the next contact into the night, not realizing that the friend was unable to get a hold of the man's father. Unaware that the friend had called the work number and left a detailed message with the father's aide. Unaware that the father's aide was not someone to be trusted with such news. The father was never informed.
+++
My home indeed. To this day, I still didn't know what went on in the secret places of G-2. I had never asked, fully aware that even if I had, I would have never been answered. It was a mantra that I had been brought up on. Don't ask. I never had. Oddly enough, I had never felt the urge to.
The high security ward in G-2, the place I had grown up in, was a drastic change from the icy gray unfriendliness of the halls and lobby. There was light here, now a buttery yellow as the sun sank lower and lower on the horizon. It streamed in through large barred windows set along the main commons. An old television muttered in a scratchy voice down near the end of the room, empty chairs loosely clustered around it like aged groupies. There were sets of wide, worn couches here and there, tables with blunted edges that had been bolted to the floor, and everywhere, the drifting, almost ethereal white figures of the Patients. They sat in the chairs, at the tables, stood at the windows. Placed here and there like so much sheet-draped furniture.
"Please wait here, Dr. Pollson said she would be out momentarily, Dora."
Ah, so he remembered *my* name.
I walked forward into the room, running my fingers over the stain on the arm of the end couch where I had spilled grape juice once, the cushions I had built into forts when all the Patients were taking their afternoon naps. The table where Jane had played chess with me every single day over lunch, and still did when I came now. Memories drifted by like so much blown dust, and meaning just as little. So there was proof that I had existed in this space, that I was solid and not some wraith. What did it really matter that I had once played here?
My eyes were drawn to an older man standing at the far window, staring out at the leaves swirling in the rising breeze. His white Patient garments hung off him, his limbs thin.
It was my favorite window he stood at. You could just see the tops of the bridge towers over the treetops, and every once in a while, the flag on the mast of a passing sailboat going down to sea for a day of recreation. I had spent many hours perched on the sill, waiting to catch a glimpse of those boats, always distantly curious about the lives that were passing by just beyond my sight.
I moved to stand quietly next to the white-clad man, staring out at the river, now slightly visible as a distant sparkle through the baring limbs of the trees. I could just see my reflection on the inside of the glass, faint, like the ghost I was. Slender features, long wavy dark hair pulled into a clip, my features a pale mask. I'd been called pretty, even beautiful. I had also been called cold. Unfeeling. Freak and demon.
I could see my erstwhile companion's image too, possibly in his late 40s or early 50s, a glimmer of the handsome man he had once been and still was shining through. His eyes were fixed forward, unblinking.
Some form of catatonia. I had no doubt that if I waved my hand in front of his face, he would not follow it. Strangely, I felt a part of me actually wondering what was wrong with him. How had he gotten here? How long had he been here? Why was he locked away from society, kept from the public? But I knew already, before the thoughts completed themselves, that these were questions that would not be answered.
'Don't Ask'.
This place was nicknamed The Shadow Base for a reason and the lost souls here had no identities. Maybe that was why I didn't either.
But I was still a human being. I couldn't resist gently touching his hand.
He did not move or acknowledge me in any way, and I scoffed gently at myself for reaching out at all. With a silent sigh, I turned back to the view. Outside I could see my flock of starlings still clustered along the phone lines. I could still feel each of their little bird hearts pattering rapidly in my memory from when I had frozen the weaves of space and time that surrounded them. For a moment I wondered if I could do more than stop it. Perhaps I could speed it up, watch the rest of my life on fast-forward so I wouldn't have to endure living it.
I was watching the birds jabber and chatter to each other and I missed the tiny movement in my companion's reflection as his eyes flicked to the right. Looked at me.
It was only when a grip like iron clamped around my wrist that I jerked back away from the window, adrenaline surging through me in a cold flood. He was staring at me face-on, eyes as intensely blue as my own, only lighter. Like the cerulean palette of an iceberg.
"Erin?"
I found myself unable to speak under the intensity of his stare, a myriad of powerful and unfamiliar emotions buffeting me with the audacity of a crowd of children vying for attention. He looked... I couldn't describe what I saw when he looked at me, but shivers ran up and down my spine. My nerves were buzzing, my head reeling. Somehow, somehow this man had touched something in me.
For the first time in my life, I felt something welling up inside. Something too strong, too all-encompassing to express.
And just like that, everything changed.
+++
They came before dawn two days later, slinking and sneaking, surrounding the tiny cabin with a silent efficiency that spoke of secrets and death and misinformation. Special Forces. Dressed in matte black armor, they came, alerted by the aide who had been set to watch the man's father years before for just such an occasion. Further back, in a black SUV, more men in equally black coats sat and watched through the safety of infrared binoculars.
There was no movement in the cabin. The man and the woman were fast asleep in the loft, oblivious to the closing trap. Oblivious to everything but each other. They had talked late the night before, in sleepy tones, curled around each other underneath ragged old quilts, about what they now knew was the cause of her illness. It had been the woman, of course, who had finally realized why she had no appetite.
It was just like him, she had said in tones that held only the slightest hint of understandable fear, to give her a child that would make her sick. They had both laughed softly, but it was obvious that now it seemed more imperative than ever that they leave as soon as possible. The man even suggested going immediately, but the woman told him no. They had come a long way for this, and they would see it through to the end. He would never be able to live with himself if he did not speak to his father one last time. If he did not try and impart some of the dangers and knowledge that he had learned. If he did not warn his people of what lay out there.
They had fallen asleep at last, both full of their own fears and hopes, but taking comfort in each other.
The sun had just started to paint the lake with streaks of peach and pink when the black-clad operatives broke silently into the cabin. Both man and woman fought fiercely, but they were outnumbered and trapped.
Without flair, without ceremony, they were taken into custody of the government.
+++
"Her name is Dora, John." The sharp snapped voice belonged to Dr. Beth Pollson, the woman who had taken on most of the burden of raising me. She was in almost all respects, my mother. And it was she whom I had come to take lunch with, as I always did on the third Thursday of every other month.
She deftly removed his suddenly lax hand from my wrist and tucked my arm into hers with a rough haste, as if she was afraid of him touching me. "That's quite amazing, Dora," she said tersely, "he hasn't spoken in almost 5 years now. You must have really gotten to him."
Just like that, she dismissed the intensity, the incredible roar and tumble of emotions in the man's face. She dismissed it and she turned away. It was something that she had always been able to do. Shut out the intense feelings of others without so much as a flick of an eyelash. But there was something else there, a fear, a secret that coiled beneath her cool greeting like a poisonous snake. Something. I could not shake the sensation that it had to do with the man, John.
John.
Beth was leading me away from him, but I could feel those blue eyes boring holes in my back. If I had to guess at the nature of that stare, I would almost say starving. I didn't dare look back at him, though something urged me to. It was only with willpower that I refused. Why did I feel my heart tearing as if I had somehow betrayed him by walking away? That I had betrayed myself as well?
We moved down the hall towards her office, leaving the raspy voice of the television playing an ancient, scratchy tape of Bonanza in the commons behind us. I felt almost out of breath. I felt. It was intoxicating.
We walked into her office and she let go of my arm, walking behind her desk as she always did and pulling out the scratched wooden chess board. Lunch had already been set out on top of the low sidetable that contained assorted pictures of me and two other people I knew only as her relatives. Those pictures always made me wonder if those nameless people knew of me. Somehow, I didn't think so.
I took a seat on the same old orange couch that had been in Beth's office, she claimed, since before she even took the job at G-2. The tired weave under my fingers was familiar, bringing back a flood of memories. So much time had been spent on this worn couch, waiting while Beth worked. Crayons squeaking quietly in my coloring books. She had never liked me to play loudly. I had wondered then and since, why she had taken on the burden of raising me after my parents had died in custody here. She seemed ill-suited to motherhood.
She had taken a seat on the opposite side of the couch and was setting up the pieces on the stiff board when I spoke.
"Who was that man?" The words came out of my mouth before I could stop them, before I could even realize that I had never asked her anything before. That it had always been an unspoken thing between us. And I had never needed to know anything as much as I needed to know this.
Beth gave me a long look, the scuffed king and queen cradled loosely in her hand, and I couldn't even catalog all the things I read there they flew by in such rapid succession. Shock? Fear? Guilt? Shame? Sorrow? I couldn't identify any of them, I could only tell they were powerful and that she had never wanted me to see any of those things in her.
But I did not regret the question. I could still see his eyes. So intense. He had called me Erin.
She looked away from me, down to the board as if occupied by something important and finding only the half-assembled army of pieces. Why did my heart speed up? Why did my breath hitch in my throat?
This secret, this man with the arctic eyes. They were the same thing.
"You know better than that, Dora." Her cool was back, her composure. A still pond that showed no ripple of disquiet. My spine straightened almost involuntarily.
"Yes, of course." I forced a smile to my wide mouth, pretended that it was nothing. A small thing.
The conversation turned to the things that we always talked about. My work, my life, my small accomplishments. We never talked of her, and for the first time I found myself chaffing under the one-sided relationship that I shared with this woman who was my mother. The secrets she held had always been there, I knew that, but I had never looked for them.
Don't Ask.
She set the board, we ate sandwiches that she had had brought up from the commissary. We talked about the sorts of things that we always did. My rent increase. The sick child next door that kept me up at night. The weather. I had never been more empty then, never more aware of it. And frankly, I didn't want to know what Beth's favorite food was, or if she was happy with her life or her goals or even me. All I could think about was that old man's blue, blue eyes.
When Beth finally pushed up off the couch to answer the call of an orderly, I rose automatically. Our game was not finished, but I knew that we would not continue it now. How had I never noticed what a robot I was? Had Beth made me this way? Or was I just born an unfeeling monster? The fire in the man's - in John's - eyes was still with me, somehow keeping me warm simply from the emotions that it had inspired in me.
Beth and I embraced. It was unspoken that our brief reunion was over. I felt suddenly, as I looked down into her pale brown eyes, that I did not want to come back here again. I could even tell that some part of her knew it as well. There had been a breach between us with the uttering of a single question that I was never supposed to ask. The silence of the answer she had not given.
Beth left her office, a short, round shape in her white doctor's coat, tapping efficiently down the hall with two orderlies flanking her. She glanced back only once, and I wondered if it was to make sure I was leaving, or if it was for some other, less defined, reason.
I let out a small breath and shouldered my bag, taking one last glance around the commons, looking surreptitiously for the man who had stared so intently at me.
He was no longer there, the window he had occupied was a clean criss-cross of bars and afternoon light. A strong sense of regret and despair welled up in me and I let it come, strangely happy to feel anything at all.
One step, then two, and I was walking away, back down the hall to the front desk, not bothering to wait for my escort. I did not look back.
+++
The man and woman were separated that morning. Taken away in different cars, they were sedated when it became clear that neither of them would accede to captivity quietly. There was a plane waiting at a small local airport that took them off with little fanfare to the capital, leaving behind large search teams that had been tasked with finding their transport.
They had been taken to a secret installation that masqueraded as a simple secure facility on the outskirts of Washington DC. It contained one of the most technologically advanced labs on the planet. Within the Black Ops community, they simply called it the shadow base. The people who were remanded there became ghosts. Vanishing from society.
It was here that the man and woman were taken, and here that they were locked into different high-security cells. Neither of them surrendered an inch to their captors, refusing to speak, refusing to submit, simply refusing. They fought the simplest things that their jailers asked of them. Moving, eating...speaking, they would give nothing without silent, furious protest and flailing limbs. The tests were painful and unending, but still, they both fought on.
It became much harder for the woman not soon after their arrival. Her pregnancy was not something that could be hidden from them and it was also something they became obsessed with. She still did not cooperate with them, not even when they started to try and keep her healthy.
And when they tried to save her, she fought them.
+++
That night, I dreamed.
In and of itself, I suppose that might not mean much. But I never dreamed. The night after I met John With The Blue Eyes, I did.
White halls, the halls of G-2. The silence was deafening. I could not hear the sound of my own breath. Empty doors gaped open on either side of the hallway, still and somehow menacing. There was pain climbing up and down my body, cramping my muscles, cutting into my nerves. I couldn't scream. I couldn't even move. There was a voice, my own or someone else's? Sobbing a name so softly that I felt it more than heard it. John, it said. John. The pain in that syllable, the grief, the broken hope. I couldn't bear it.
The sheer weight of the sorrow and pain pushed me straight up in my bed. I sat there, curled into myself, rocking back and forth in tiny jerks while my eyes bled tears. And just like that, my control started to slip again for the second time in two days. As with the birds, with the orderly...with the boy who had tried to rape me at a frat party my freshman year, I could feel the heartbeat of the world slow and stop. Only for a second this time. Almost panicked I snapped myself back from the edge, not prepared for the freezeframe in my emotional state. I was already disturbed enough.
It was a while before some of the hysteria died away, before I was able to grope on the nightstand for some belated Kleenex and a drink of water. My hands were shaking and I could still hear the whispered voice so clearly.
The mystery of it was painful. I had gone from caring not at all to desperately needing to know.
Rolling out of bed, I walked across the creaking wood floor of my bedroom to open the window. Leaning out, I could feel a sting in the night chill that spoke of a cold front coming in. It cleared my head a little, calmed me down. I was almost afraid to go back to sleep. Afraid of another dream.
Afraid that I knew that it was no dream. That it was a memory. Only...
...only maybe not mine at all.
There were, I knew, answers. They lay with Beth.
And they lay with John. Whoever he was.
++++
I had to look up Beth's number in my small empty address book. I never called her, she had left me the number when I had left for college, but it had never occurred to me to use it. Taking the phone into my lap, I sat on the edge of my cheap couch and stared at the black handset in my palm...the scratched pencil phone number in my book.
Why was I trembling? The white walls and the whispered name and the sorrow and the aching loss were eating at me like a cancer. I had to know, and yet still...I hesitated.
Fear? Or was there a shade of grief echoing inside me that I was afraid to resurrect? If I was only feeling a distant shadow of this thing, what would the truth be like? A tear splashed onto the keypad of the phone I clutched and I hung my head.
Moments passed, the only sound in my apartment was the groan of the old refrigerator and the clicking sound of the wall clock. The muffled sound of a car passing by, rattling as it hit the potholes on the corner, broke me out of it. Clenching my jaw, I slowly dialed the number.
It rang four times before it was picked up, Beth's voice sounding disoriented and sleepy. It was, after all, three o'clock in the morning.
"Hello?" There was the faintest apprehension in her tone, for no one can answer the phone so late at night and not feel fear that something terrible has happened. I suppose that it had.
"Beth?" My voice was low and fractured with fears of my own. "It's Dora."
There was a silence then, a long one. I knew she knew why I was calling. Me, who had never called but for that once when I'd needed a reference for my job at the library.
"What is it, Dora? It's early. Is everything all right?"
She knew, damn her. Why make me do this? Why make me beg?
"Please, Beth." I couldn't keep the emotion out of my voice. "I've had a dream."
She knew what that meant. She knew I had never dreamed in all of my 20 years. There was a time I could recall when she had brought a specialist in to talk to me about it. I had been 11 at the time.
I didn't find it odd that Beth did not ask me what the dream was about. Instead, there was another long, long silence. So long that I had opened my mouth to ask if she was still there, when she finally spoke.
"Meet me at the building, Dora. I'll be there."
Then she hung up, leaving me to stare at the buzzing phone with my heart in my throat.
+++
The man knew somehow, when it happened. The scientists and doctors scoffed at the notion, but not a one of them was immune to the grief he displayed. Of course, they were not there to feel pity for him.
He raged first. Then he sank into despair. Finally...he gave in.
+++
The building was dark, the birds long gone when I walked up the sidewalk. Beth stood at the top of the stairs in the shadows, a long coat pulled over her hastily assembled outfit. Her hair was loosely pulled back into a clip. I had never seen her disheveled before. Never. She was almost like a stranger.
When I drew nearer, I realized that she was a stranger in more ways than her clothing. Her eyes were burning with something I had never seen before. My breath quickened. I knew then that she would tell me everything.
Her card let us into the building and she signed us through the night security with ease. No one questioned her attire or my presence. Our footsteps clicked hollowly in the empty, dim halls. Beth would not look at me, she only led me. I didn't ask where we were going, I simply followed.
Her office. She sat down briskly, tapping a series of complicated things into the system when it came up, the green glow of the monitor reflecting eerily on the soft, tired planes of her face. I watched her, examined her. She was not really my mother, I knew. And it wasn't just because of the lack of emotional attachment between us. It was something ineffable. Intangible. But then and there, that night, was the first time that I knew that she loved me. I could see it in her eyes even when she only stared at her computer screen and not at me. It was the first time, I think, that I really understood that.
Or the first time she had let it show.
She tapped the enter key and then stood abruptly, startling me slightly. She held out her hand and I took it, letting her draw me to the computer, letting her press me down into the chair.
I looked at the screen. And gasped.
It was a much younger photo of him, taken perhaps 20 years or so earlier. He was very handsome, the sort of handsome that you saw in Marlborough ads and TV commercials. He was vibrant. The man I had met had been washed away in comparison. The life bled from his features. But his eyes were the same.
His name was John Crichton.
My hands were trembling, and I didn't turn from the screen to look at Beth. Instead I read his file, devouring it.
Disbelieving it.
Alien contact? Alien microbes? Alien biotechnology? Alien?
But there it was, printed in cold black letters on white. Typed neatly next to mundanities like blood type and hair color. Somehow, I found the fact that alien life existed, had been here, we had been *there*, I found it almost irrelevant next to the fact that it was *him*. He had done these things. He had found his way home again after it all.
And Beth and the others, had locked him up in a secret government facility for the rest of his life.
My palms were stinging and I realized that I was clenching my fists in my lap, staring into the gaze of the man onscreen. I glanced down at the damage done to my flesh and as I did so, something caught the corner of my eye. A link to another file through a name. Aeryn. My breath hitched.
Erin?
Without hesitation, but with shaking fingers, I clicked on it. The screen filled with information. Reams of it, hundreds of crosslinks to internal organ files and DNA studies. Blood test result after result. Slides of neural tissue and study upon study of brain functionality. I saw none of it.
All I saw was the picture, and it was me.
My fingers were pressed to my lips, stifling the sob that wanted to bark forth. I could taste blood from where my teeth cut into the soft tissue of the inside of my mouth. I didn't have to read much farther because I knew everything then.
And I knew what I had to do.
So did Beth.
+++
The child never saw her father. Never knew her mother. She was taken and tested and watched.
She was bright, but stifled by the scientists. They discouraged curiosity, not knowing how she would react to the truth of her own existence. To all purposes, she was a normal human child with dark hair and blue eyes. Her body temperature was lower, her blood contained the unknown elements that her mother's had, but she was basically the same internally as her father. It was only on the day that she warped time and space with nothing more than her will, that they realized she was not as human as they had thought.
It was argued over and over again, how she had this ability when her parents did not. How any creature could display that level of control over such abstractions as time. The only firm conclusion was that it had to do with the fact that her mother had passed through not one, but two singularities when their transport had come through the wormhole. And she had been pregnant at the time.
No one understood any more about wormholes than they had when the man and woman had been taken into custody. They had never been able to get either of them to talk. The ship had been found not long after their capture, and it was examined thoroughly. It showed signs within the structure of its very molecules of extreme gravitational forces. And other traces too, perhaps of Exotic Matter, perhaps the very thing that had made the wormholes navigable in the first place.
Possibly, they thought, possibly the wormhole itself had influenced the fetus.
It was only speculation, and for almost a year after she had warped the hallway and frozen the orderly, they had subjected her to the most intensive testing they could do while she was still alive. They came up with nothing and nothing.
She didn't do it again in the presence of any of them. But they never treated her quite the same after that. She had looked like a normal child to them up to that point, but she herself had reminded them that she was not.
+++
Lies and lies. The lurking secret that had so unsettled me in her office mere hours ago had only been the very tip of the iceberg. I felt jittery, like my body was not my own, and perhaps it wasn't. I had never really inhabited it before, drifting through life like the ghost I had always thought of myself as. But now, I was almost a wholly different person. I had never let my emotions get the better of me before because I had always been so empty. Now I *knew*. I knew what it was that had been missing, and it was as if I was reborn.
The pain of it was terrible.
Control was the key, of course. It always had been. I firmed both my resolve and my nerve, sniffing back the tears and clamping down on the cascade of unfamiliar emotions.
Did I expect Beth to say anything then? What could she say? Looking at her, I could see her face was drawn, tired. Drained now. Was that relief I read in those eyes? The weight of a secret burden lifted? She had taken a seat on the orange couch, leaning forward and folding her arms across her knees, her gaze falling to the floor. She looked so old, somehow fragile. A dead leaf that time and conscience had worn to a skeleton of old veins and stem.
It was out now, the secrets that she and the others had spent twenty years hiding from me. I looked at her impassively. Asking. Finally asking. She only rose and led the way.
Down to the high-security ward. A place I had never been. A place behind doubly locked doors and past another security booth. She walked past them as if she had been doing so all her life. When we paused outside a door and she found her keys, I felt myself start to shiver. When we walked into the dark interior of the tiny room and I saw him lying there, I started to shake.
We stood there, the two of us, in silence for a long moment.
"Tell me," I said finally, my voice stronger than I felt it had any right to be, "tell me that you didn't kill her at least."
She looked up then, her glasses catching the faint light from the hall, reflecting eerie blank circles.
"There was a faction of us that had always wanted to do just that. From the moment she was first brought here there was pressure from up top to discover every last thing about her. Just how it was that she deviated from humans. In every conceivable facet of her makeup. The only way to truly accomplish that was to dissect her."
The words were said so clinically that I actually shuddered with revulsion. There was a nausea building in my gut. I had been raised here, surrounded by this distance. The men and women who were capable of removing emotion and conscience from an act of cold-blooded murder were the same men and women who had taken my childhood.
"We didn't kill her." Beth said the words and they echoed faintly off the walls in descending shades of tonality. I swallowed, fearful of more lies.
"I saw the slides. The photos. The endless cataloging of her ... body."
"We didn't kill her." She repeated the words to me firmly as if by saying them twice, she wouldn't have to tell me what *did* kill her. The silence that stretched between us spoke volumes. I clamped my arms across my body, hugging myself. There was a lump in my throat.
"I did." Was that really my own voice? It sounded so raw. Beth didn't even have to nod, I could read it in the soft sorrow of her eyes. "I killed her."
The dream was clear now. Not me at all. My mother. My mother's pain. My mother calling out for the one who had been torn from her. Beth's voice was very low as she talked. Thin.
"Yes, Dora, you did. There were complications. Terrible ones. We couldn't stop the bleeding, obviously knew nothing of how to attend to her. She died a few hours after she gave birth. There were a few of us who quit the Project after that."
The final sentence seemed to mean so much more than it said. My mother, dying alone in a strange place, surrounded by people who looked at her as an animal to be studied and sliced up. Bringing a child into a world and place that she knew an infant would not be safe in, but unable to stay and protect her.
The ugly irony. I choked on it. I had been taken care of all right. My life had been an empty wasteland. I had freedom, but only what these people had doled out to me. I had food and clothing, but nothing of caring. The vista of my mind had expanded, but my soul had shriveled and died. Does an infant know, somehow, when it is being lied to? When it is being deprived of something? I think I knew the answer to that.
Finally, finally, I looked down at the bed. John Crichton had not moved. He was not asleep, but neither was he awake. It was the same state that he had been in when I first approached him at the window what seemed like years before.
In a dream, it seemed, I moved forward and sat on the edge of the bed, taking one of his slack hands up in mine. It was warm and firm, engulfing my more-slender fingers.
"Tell me why he is still here." I said it dully, as if nothing she could say at this point would affect me.
"He knows too much about the Project. He has been out in space, we can't have people hearing his stories. He would expose us. And, most of all, he was irreversibly contaminated by his time spent off-planet. His body is full of alien microbes and biotechnology. We simply couldn't afford to let him go."
"And why," I paused for a moment, swallowing hard to regain control of the shake in my voice, "why is he like this?"
"A form of dissociation." Beth sounded so old. "He slipped into it gradually starting about 10 years ago. At first, he would try to escape every few months, but as he grew to see that it was impossible, he became more and more depressed and despondent. Finally, catatonia."
I could imagine it. I had seen his pictures, read his profile. I could see him locked in this tiny cage, pacing like a wild animal. Oh God.
"Did...did he know about me? Why did I never see him when I was growing up?"
"They were kept separate when they were brought here by Special Ops 24 years ago. He did know about her pregnancy, she must have conceived not long before they were captured." She sighed. "We told him that you had died with your mother in childbirth. It was thought that it might be enough to get him to stop fighting us. It was." Her voice was so tired. I had no pity. "As to why you never saw each other, we kept him out of your way. He would have known you immediately, as he did today. It would have renewed his interest in escaping. You look just like her, you know."
I had seen the picture. Yes.
"It was an accident of scheduling today, you were never supposed to meet. When I saw him reach out to you, there was a part of me that *wanted* him to snap out of it. He was so strong once. For so long we'd secretly admired him for it." Her words shook slightly and I could hear years of repressed guilt behind them. Clearly she had never had the strength of this man's convictions.
I looked back down at him, the man who was my father.
"Knowing what I am. Knowing what I am, why did you let me leave? Why did you let me go to college? Get a job? Why did you send me out there to try and pretend to have a normal life?"
"You were always watched. Always under our control. It was a great debate, but in the end, the Project had raised you. Believe it or not, as you will, but we loved you."
I supposed that whatever passed for love from those people was something. I didn't know what, but something. Not enough.
"A few of us didn't want to keep you here, trapped. We fought to get the permission to let you go. It was agreed to, but every aspect of your life was monitored. We have gone to a great deal of trouble for your freedom, Dora."
"And should I thank you now?" My voice was harsh, bitter. Angry. The toss and tumble of emotions were running the gamut, but now it was mostly vivid fury I felt. The numbness that had plagued me my whole life was gone. I bowed my head over my father's hand and took a deep breath to revel in the sensation of my own bright and burning ire. "Why you Beth? Why not Dr. Faber? Or Dr. Ellerson? Hell, why not Linda or one of the other orderlies?"
She was quiet for a long time, the only sound was the quiet humming of the air processing unit.
"I was the Operative assigned to your observation."
Assigned.
Beth was silent. I did not look at her.
Finally: "Why have you finally brought me here, Beth?" My eyes did not leave my father's face, one hand reaching to touch his cheek gently. He had been shaved recently.
"You know why. I do love you, Dora. I know it doesn't mean much to you right now." Her words were water-weak.
She was going to let us go.
There was no sense of jubilation or triumph. Only a grim purpose. There was nothing to celebrate. Nothing would ever return those lost 20 years of my life or the horror of his. Nothing would bring back my mother. There was only John Crichton now, and I would do what I could to return his life to him though I could never return her. I pulled gently on the captured hand and he sat up automatically, like the robot I had always fancied myself.
Looking into his once-handsome face, each etched line one of pain and suffering and love lost, I felt the tears starting again. I leaned forward and pressed a kiss to his forehead. When I pulled back again, preparing to help him up, he blinked.
I froze, remembering the blazing intensity I had glimpsed earlier, our stares locked and held.
"Not Aeryn." His voice was harsh from disuse and ancient grief. There was just the hint of a southern accent there, a lilting flavor in the deep chords. I shook my head, sniffing a little, clasping his hand tighter.
"My name is Dora. I'm going to take you out of here."
His hand slipped out of my grasp then, its mate joining it to move slowly and uncertainly up to my face. He hovered over my cheeks for a long moment, as if afraid to touch me, before he cupped the sides of my face, one thumb lightly brushing away the tears that would not stop spilling. I did not break his gaze.
"You look just like your mother," he said softly, wonder in his expression.
I could not stop the smile from cracking through my tears. My face was contorted by the joy of having him speak to me, of having him know me, and the sorrow of everything that had happened between us and everything that hadn't. When he pulled me into his arms and pressed his face into my neck I felt complete in a way that I had never known was possible.
"I'm sorry it took me so long to find you."
The whisper could have been from either of us.
++++++
It was all the reunion we would get just then.
"We have to go now, if you want to get him out of here." Beth's voice was nervous. "Soon the night shift will change. I can handle Sandy, but Gerrold will be tougher."
He stared at Beth with such hollow eyes. There was hatred burning there when he looked at her. I could only imagine what he was thinking. What I would be thinking in his place. I helped him to his feet, taking his hand and leading him out into the hall after the rotund doctor.
"I can get him out of G-2, but its going to be harder getting out of the main gate." She was whispering, but I could hear her just fine. I clung to my father's hand like a lifeline, almost afraid that if I let go, he would be lost again.
"We'll have to take our chances." My voice was hard, brooking no resistance. I could feel G-2 around me like a living presence now. It felt dirty, evil and merciless. I shivered slightly as we came up to the first security desk. Sandy was a hard looking woman with graying hair and lines around her mouth.
Beth put on the face that I had known for most of my life and only glanced at the guard as we walked by, pretending that she had every right in the world to take any patient she wished anywhere she wanted. She did, but only within reason. Sandy didn't make that distinction, she only nodded at the doctor. I couldn't believe it had been that easy. The pessimist in me only warned that it would not be that easy at the main gate. Even I, who came here every other month, had a difficult time getting through those massive gates. As innocuous a collection of buildings as the shadow base was, it was guarded like Fort Knox.
I felt my father flinch when we walked out the main doors and down the stairs. It was not just the cold air, but the fact that he was outside. I felt myself start to tear up again when I remembered that he had not walked under the open sky in 20 years. I wanted to let him stop and look up at the stars he had been kept from, but I knew there was no time. And I felt the urge to flee this place growing stronger with each passing moment.
Beth was shrugging out of the overcoat that she still wore as we walked to the parking lot, handing it to me. I settled it over John, his thin shoulders still too broad to fit into Beth's short sleeves. It would do a minimal job of hiding his white Patient garb.
We forewent my Honda for her larger Acura and I felt my breathing quicken as I scooted into the backseat with my father, still clinging to his hand. He did not talk, and I was glad for it. At that point, I was not sure I could handle it. There would be time when I got him out of here.
It was still dark out, but I could tell that dawn was not far away as we drove towards the front gate. It squatted in a pool of security lighting, a pair of guards standing at complete attention on either side with full weaponry. Another man perched in the booth.
"Be prepared, Dora." Her voice was low, but for the first time that night I detected steel in it again.
I was wondering just what Beth was going to say to the men when I watched her reach into her purse that sat next to her and palm a can of mace. It seemed almost ridiculous. I opened my mouth to question just what she thought she was going to do, but shut it again when we pulled into the pool of light. The two guards stepped closer to either side of the car, peering in through her tinted windows, their rifles held at the ready. Standard procedure, I knew, but it was still terrifying. My breathing was quickening and I forced myself not to squeeze John's hand too tightly.
"You and Dora all done, Dr. Pollson?" The guard in the booth had come forward as Beth rolled her window down. He carried a clipboard. There was a gun in his holster, but it was thankfully still held in by the safety strap. He frowned then, leaning down and peering into the back seat at us. "Who's that with you, Doc?" Both the guards on either side stiffened.
"You know Dora, Lieutenant." Beth's voice sounded lightly scoffing.
"And you know what I mean, Doctor. Who is that with her? You both came in alone. You know the rules. You need authorization to take a patient out."
"Of course I do. I have it right here." She turned to her bag and pulled out what looked like an ordinary folded piece of paper. I tensed myself, certain that everything was about to fall apart. Beth handed him the paper and as he reached out to take it, she swung open her door with as much force as she could muster. The lieutenant stumbled back, crashing into his booth and knocking the door open.
And then, Beth, round little graying Beth, flung her small body out of the open door, lunging into the booth.
"GO, Dora!" Her voice was a scream that I could not ignore. I acted reflexively, leaping over the seat and jamming myself behind the steering wheel just as gunfire rattled my eardrums. I saw Beth jerk like a puppet, red holes blossoming on her lavender sweatshirt, but she was in the booth and her hand came down hard on the gate button.
It began to rattle open and I hit the accelerator just as the back window shattered inwards in a hail of glass and bullets. Hunching down, holding my breath, I steered the car forward, my foot pressing down on the pedal like it was a lifeline. I could smell burned rubber and the scorched odor of gunfire as I rocketed towards the gate that was not opening fast enough. The entire car jerked violently as it hit the opening, metal screeching against metal as I tore off both the side mirror and most of the paint on the left side of the vehicle.
But then we were free.
I could hear the klaxon starting up, the lights all along the fencing starting to flash as the guards set off the alarm. I simply drove. The sky was lightening ever so slightly and I knew that darkness could have been a better cover, but we would have to make do. There was no alternative. Neither of us would go back.
"Are you alright?" I gasped out the question when I finally felt I was able to speak again, my eyes not leaving the road. When there was no answer, I risked a look into the back seat to see my father slumped over, blood leaking sluggishly down his chest.
+++
The time between when I discovered that he had been shot and when I finally found a place to pull over safely was an eternity. I knew that they would be after us already, but I couldn't let him bleed to death if he wasn't already dead. I wasn't prepared for the nearly debilitating rush of relief when I discovered that he was still alive.
We were deep in a residential neighborhood, and I'd found a deserted park with a reservoir. I helped him from the car, settled him under a tree and grunted and pushed the vehicle down the boat ramp into the water. The car was what they would be looking for first, and I wanted to be rid of it as soon as possible. Only then did I tear up the remains of Beth's overcoat and wrap my father's wounds as best I could. I was no doctor, but I could tell that the bullets had passed all the way through him, once through his shoulder and another through his collarbone. They were serious wounds, but I could not take him to a hospital. All I could do was hope. And hope had never been enough.
He was staring out at the lake as I attempted to tend his injuries, something in his eyes that I could not define. When he spoke, it startled me.
"Dora. That's a pretty name. I wonder why they gave it to you." I smoothed his hair back with a trembling hand. I knew he was going to die. He knew it too.
"I don't know." My voice was a whisper. He looked up at me then, reached out to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear.
"Your mother would have been very proud of you, you know."
Would she? The way I trembled and wept inside, I was not so sure.
"I wish I had known her." My words were faint, distant. Just like I had always been, just like my farce of a life. I wanted to say that I wished I had known him too, but I despaired at the idea that I would not be given the chance to now.
Birds were beginning their morning singing, twittering and jumping about in the tree overhead. Distantly along the lake I could hear a dog barking and the sound of a car engine starting up. The morning was fresh and clean with clouds gathering on the horizon. My father's first day of freedom had an 80% chance of rain.
"We're going to Maine, Dora. I'll show you the way."
Maine?
It took me some time, but I found another car and he told me how to hotwire it. I didn't ask how he knew such things, I wanted to get away from DC as fast as possible. It was only once we were on the road and over 300 miles away traveling on back roads, that I thought about Beth.
There was no real sense of grief, only a numb loss. She died to help me, I knew. It was proof, I supposed, that she loved me. I could not forgive her for what had happened to my parents, but I could try not to hate her. It was the best I could do for now. I was no noble soul.
We drove into the night and through it, stopping periodically to change his bandages. I didn't dare stop for anything else except gas and to change our plates at my father's instruction. I paid for everything with what cash I found in Beth's purse. It was just enough to get us to Maine.
In the end, we barely made it. I had to help my Father walk the last mile to the cabin that nestled at the end of the narrow dirt track after pushing the car off the side of a ravine. The last of the sun was glinting off the waters of the lake beyond it, tall fragrant pines surrounding us on all side. I had never been out of D.C. and it was so beautiful.
He was so weak, each breath an effort, each step a trial. It was dark by the time we entered the cabin and I settled him on the old moth-eaten couch. His eyes were closed, his face bone-white and his skin icy to the touch. He had lost so much blood. Tucking an old quilt around him, I knelt by his side in the darkness. I dared not make a fire, not because someone might see the smoke, but because I was simply terrified that he was going to die without me there.
I stroked his forehead and kissed his ashen cheek. When he opened his eyes to look at me, I knew that he was close. My throat was closed with the pain of it. I almost wished for the numbness back just so that I didn't have to feel this wretched agony. This consuming lonliness. He didn't speak, he just smiled at me and touched my lips. Then his hand went slack and the faint light that was left in his eyes, went out.
I knelt there for a long time, still holding his hand. Tears would not come. There was only a terrible rending pain in my heart, the sensation of an empty paper life crashing down around me. Meaningless. I'd only had him in my life for a scant few days. So little time.
Time.
I sucked in a breath and dropped his hand then, tipping my head back to look at the dark rafters, unseeing. My fingers laced tightly together in my lap, biting into each other like teeth. Sacrifices for a life that should never have been. Sacrifices for what was lost. I closed my eyes and simply ...let go.
The world unraveled like yarn pulled from a sweater. All around me, the cabin fell to dust and rebuilt again. I did not allow myself to stop it this time, I just fell into it like Alice into her rabbithole. John Crichton's body turned to dust before me, the rhythm of the forest thumping and pounding in my veins, the silent roar and tumult of the universe folding and twisting in on itself. It had been here that everything changed. Here that time branched. So simple, I thought distantly. So very, very simple that a child could do it. I turned a key in my mind, and stepped through that delitescent door where time and time touched and fractured.
And found that I was kneeling on the dusty cabin floor beside an empty couch.
There was almost nothing left of myself. The effort of pulling my body through the fabric of time, while it had been what seemed a simple effortless matter, had drained me almost to transparency. My muscles just gave out and I tumbled to the floorboards with a small, weak noise. I hadn't formed a rational thought on what I had just done. There was only a tiny part of me that seemed to understand what I had tried.
It was all washing away, everything about me. I could barely feel my skin, my vision pulsed and fluttered at the edges, teasing unconsciousness. But I had to stay awake for one more moment. I knew, as I had felt, that there was little time left in me.
"Who the frell is there?!" The voice was a low growl, and it had come from up the ladder of the loft. I didn't bother to wonder what 'frell' meant, or even wonder that I had succeeded. I had to save everything to deliver my warning. Hurry, I urged silently. Please, I begged.
The sound of scuffling and a murmured conversation in low tones seemed far away, as did the creaking of the ladder as someone descended.
"What the-" Was that light? A single lightbulb dangled from the ceiling, glowing with cold fever, casting stark shadows across the room. I could not lift my head. I could barely lift my ribcage to breathe. Hurry.
"Who is it, John?" The new voice was sharp, close. There was fear underlying the irritation. A warm hand turned me over and I managed to lever my eyes open enough to look at them. He was young, young and beautiful like his photo had been. She looked just like me. I smiled, too weak to even cry.
"Hezmana!" The woman hissed a curse, one hand coming up to her mouth, blue eyes the same hue as mine widening.
"Christ, Aeryn, she looks just like you!"
"Not... quite. She has your mouth." Disbelief and confusion thrummed through both their faces and their words. My mother had fallen to her knees next to me, and I reveled in the fact that I had at least finally gotten to see her. I could feel my heart slowing with the effort of pumping blood through my limbs. Things were going numb. I had no time left in this, a life that was never meant to be.
"Who are you?" His voice was echoing in my ears. I only had a certain number of words that I could push out, but I wanted them to know my name. It seemed oddly important to me.
"I am Dora. You have to go." My voice was barely audible and both of them had to lean over me to hear. "You. Have. To. Go. NOW." My breath hitched and I closed my eyes. "Please. Run. They are coming."
The intake of breath from the man who would be my father, who had been my father, was the sweetest thing I had ever heard. He understood. Somehow, he understood. Maybe not who I was, but at least my message.
"No time left."
I was unable to tell if I had even said the last three words aloud. I couldn't see them anymore. An indescribable peace settled over me like a shroud ...and then everything faded gently to black.
+++
The ship was silent as she ran through the corridors, the sound of her bare feet slapping a staccato rhythm against the smooth surface. Her breath hitched in and out as she ran, long dark hair flying behind her. The DRD raced before her, whining with the effort to escape the small, mangling hands. It darted into a maintenance crevice and she fell to her knees, immediately reaching into the hole after it only to pull her hand back out just as quickly with a little shriek when she was zapped for her invasion.
Slapping the floor in frustration, she leaned way down and peered inside. The DRD was still there, mechanical eyes glowing as it perused her from the safety of its nook. She frowned at it, thrusting her lower lip out angrily, as if the power of her displeasure would be enough to flush it from its hole. It didn't move.
Finally, with a huff of disgruntled disgust, she pushed up to her feet and continued on the corridor, running her hands along the ribs and ridges of the wall, keeping an eagle eye for another DRD.
The sound of voices as she rounded a bend, stopped her. Even knowing that she had been told not to eavesdrop, she couldn't resist when she heard her name. It was her parents, they were talking quietly to Zhaan.
"I swear to you, Zhaan, Dora was the one responsible. I could see it in her eyes." Her mother's voice was exasperated, she didn't like to be doubted.
"It had to have been an anomaly, my dear. I don't see how you can think that a small child has the power to bend space and time in the same manner as a wormhole does, but..."
"She does. She even looked guilty." That was her father now. She bit her lip and pressed closer to the wall.
The sound of a sigh was clearly from the Delvian.
"All right, since you seem so convinced. Tell me how you think she did this? Certainly parents are allowed to feel some exaggerated pride in their offspring, but this is just foolishness." Despite her words, the priestess seemed honestly curious.
"I don't know." That was her father again, rebellion in his voice. "Maybe it was because we went through that wormhole when we went back to Earth six years ago. Aeryn was pregnant then, but we didn't know that."
Zhaan made a small noise in the back of her throat.
"It is said that a wormhole distorts time, folds it. I think that you have proven that it does by your experiences. But though I can see how it could have affected an unborn child in some way, this seems a little farfetched."
"I don't have another explanation, Blue. All I can say is that she can do it. All I *want* is for you to keep it in mind. If it happens again, then maybe we'll know for certain-" Her father stopped in mid-sentence, and that was never a good thing. She turned to run, but was too late. Hands wrapped around her waist and she was lifted squealing into the air.
"Oh for Hezmana's Sake..." She couldn't see her mother, all she could see was the fall of her own hair and her father's back as he trussed her over his shoulder and carried her into Zhaan's chambers. "That girl is a horror." Her mother's voice was affectionate despite the words.
"She certainly is." Dora felt her ankles seized and she was lifted, squirming, up face to face with her mother's upside-down, wry expression.
"What did we tell you about listening in on other people's conversations?"
"Nothing." Her voice was tentative, her blue eyes wide with innocence. Her father hoisted her higher and suddenly her mother was tickling her ferociously. She began to shriek like a banshee, twisting and contorting her body to get away from the merciless fingers. They stopped just as suddenly and she subsided into giggles and hiccups.
"What was that, again?" The hands were poised. She knew better than to tempt fate a second time.
"I'm not supposed to." She said, still squirming. Her face was getting all red from hanging upside down. Her father relented then, flipping her right side up and setting her down on her feet. She tried a smile on them before dashing quickly out the door. It was time to retreat.
She could hear them all laughing at her as she charged down the hall at full tilt. Just before she got out of earshot, she heard Zhaan again.
"One thing's for certain, if she *could* tamper with time and space, Goddess have mercy on us all."
Once she was out of range again, she slowed down at the next intersection, brushing her long hair back behind her ears and scanning both ways. A DRD spied her and with a little electronic squeal, took off back the way it had come. She smiled, it already had too much of a headstart. She would find another, less vigilant one to play with. Dinner was over four arns away.
She had plenty of time.
++++
END
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