About two hours later, Max and Logan sat in his office, as Max told Logan about a delivery she'd made a few days earlier. The doorbell rang, and she all but fell on her feet.

"They're here!" she said, the excitement apparent in her face and movements.

"Alright, now relax. You stay in here, I'll start talking to her... them... you know when to come in." She hesitated, then nodded. He took a last look at her, and wheeled over to the door. He was nervous too, but he tried not to show it, as he grabbed the knob and opened the door.


"Miss Parker?" he asked of the woman who stood in front of the small group.

"Y... yes, that's me," she said, observing the wheel chair Logan sat in. So did the others.

"I'll explain that later. Please come in." The group entered and he counted, four men, four women, two boys and two girls. He recognized the woman from his dream and could hardly believe she was real. He invited them to follow him to his living room. They did.


"Why did you need us to come here?" asked the woman from the dream.

"Maybe we should start with introductions. I'm Logan Cale," he said.

"Oh, yes of course. Well, I'm Isabel Evans, you know Liz Parker, and this is Michael Guerin, his wife, Maria DeLuca, their son Ricky, Kyle Valenti, his wife, Tess Harding, their daughters, Lisa and Anna, my husband, Alex Whitman, our son Jack and my brother, Max Evans."

"You..." started Logan, looking to Max, "Are you close to..." He indicated Liz.

"We used to date, we were very... close..." he said, glancing at Liz, as both looked away.

"Wow... this is... interesting..." said Logan with a small grin.

"What?" asked Liz.

"Miss Parker, there's something you need to know. In 2009, a few months before the pulse, twelve of the X5 kids escaped the Manticore base in Wyoming."

"T... they did? What about my..."

"Your daughter was one of them."

"Do... do you know where she is?"

"You want to know why I reacted the way I did before? About his name?" he asked, pointing to Max with his head. Liz nodded.


"Well... I guess there's no two ways to say this. The X5 kids gave themselves names... they didn't like calling themselves by numbers like the others did. Your daughter's name, is Max." The adults were equally surprised, amused and awaiting the next part while barely breathing.

"And she's here." They manifested their shock with gasps and wide eyes, and they knew Liz was crying. The floor cracked and they looked up to see a young girl standing by the entrance, her own eyes filled with tears as she attempted to regain her ability to breathe normally.


Not a word was spoken. The group observed the two women as they came face to face, only inches separating them. When recognition that they were really mother and daughter finally dawned on them, the emotions were let loose. Liz took her daughter into her arms for the very first time and Max hugged her mother back, taken over by a feeling she'd never felt before, a feeling she certainly liked. When they separated, they observed each other again, and eventually sat down. The other women were joyfully weeping as well, while the men tried to hide their own tears. Max looked down to her mother's ankle. Understanding, Liz removed her shoe and sock and propped up her ankle on her knee.

Max studied it and spoke her first words to her mother, "I knew it was you." She turned in her seat and lifted up her hair for them to see her own barcode.

"Oh my goodness," whispered Liz.


In the course of the next half-hour, they remained primarily silent, too busy with inspecting the girl and getting back to a calmer frame of mind. At last, Max told her side of the story, or at least the part she was willing to mention in front of the children.

"I met Logan a couple months ago..."

"Yeah, and what a meeting it was," he continued with a grin. She shot him a look, and risking bodily harm, he went on.

"She broke into my apartment, trying to steal something..."

"Girl's gotta make a living!" she defended herself.

"Yeah, you keep saying that... anyway... when I saw her defend herself against my ex-cop bodyguard with effortless ease and dive through the window headfirst and land on her feet, I kinda got the clue she wasn't your average girl..." he finished, looking at her.

"ANYWAY, once we figured out each other's 'secret identities', I started helping him out. When you talked to him yesterday, I was listening and... when I saw the barcode..." She looked to her mother with a smile, and the woman hugged her instantly.


"Tell me. About you, how you ended up in Manticore, what happened..." Liz looked around a bit, then turned back to Max.

"Well... how could I put this..." Seeing the pleading look in her daughter's eyes, she started.

"I can't tell you just how I got in," she said, indicating the kids. She went on to explain her first day at Manticore, how she'd met Gina on the bus, her first meeting with Lydecker...

"At first... I guess I was angry at you. Unfair because you hadn't done anything, but it wasn't what I'd planned for my life, not at all. But eventually... after my belly had started to grow... and I found out you were a girl... I realized that I didn't want to lose you..." Max cried, listening to her mother's tale.

"So I started to plan an escape... with Gina... but we didn't get to try until..."

"Your seventh month," finished Max, remembering.

"Yeah. How'd you know?" asked Liz.

"The woman who helped me get away once I'd passed the perimeter told me. She said you'd tried to escape when you were in your seventh month."

"I did. I did, we did, me and Gina, we were so close and then..." Max took her mother's hand, sensing this was something hard for her to tell.


"The guards found us, and when I stopped, Gina went on. They shot her and she fell to her end..." said Liz, trying to mask the event in front of the kids.

"Who?" asked Max, already knowing the answer. Liz looked to her and she knew.

"W... what about her baby?"

"I was told by one of the people in there that they'd delivered her baby safely, even though she was two months premature. I never knew what happened to her."

"Do you know her number?" asked Max. Liz provided it.

In the months they'd spent at Manticore, they'd managed to learn all the numbers from their group. "Jondy..." whispered Max when she heard it.

"You know her?" said Liz with hope.

"Yes, of course I did. She was probably the one I was closest to. Ironic, uh? Wow... it explains why she was smaller than the rest of us." Liz felt so relieved to finally know that even though Gina hadn't survived, a part of her might still be alive.

"Did she escape with you?"

"Yes. Although I didn't know that until a couple months ago."

"What do you mean?"

"I never knew if any of the others had made it out and if they did, which ones..."

"Where is she?"

"I'm not sure. We were taught to always keep moving, to never stay in one place too long. Although I never really followed that rule... the others probably do..."


"So what happened next?" asked Max.

"I was placed in isolation. And then when I was full term... they gave me something... the last thing I heard before I passed out was you... your first cries... and I couldn't do anything..." She wiped at the tears around her eyes and on her cheeks.

"When I woke up, I was in..."

"A psychiatric facility..."

"Yes. Snowhill psychiatric institute."

"That's right here in Seattle! That means you were right by all this time... I pass by there almost everyday!" said Max in shock. Her mother had been within her grasp all this time and she didn't know...

"I was there for twenty years approximately... and I thought of you everyday... wondering what you were doing... what you were feeling... what you looked like... Every year, one day every year I celebrate your birthday... that was one of the only things that kept me going all this time... that you were out there, living your life... no matter what it was or where it was..."

Max hugged her mother and she whispered in her ear, "I love you, Mom. I think of you everyday too..."