Chapter 4
Claire looked at him from across the fire, his gray eyes were softly gazing at her, and although she was aware that what he had just said should alarm her, for some reason it didn't.
Instead, her whole body felt calm, as if it were slowing down. She nodded and smiled softly at him.
"I bet you say that to all the girls." She said softly, gazing deeply into his eyes.
The man smiled softly, his lips pulling away from his teeth to reveal perfect white teeth. "No I do not my dear, only to you."
Claire's eyes widened, how had he known her name. Her instincts were telling her to get up and leave, but another part of her didn't want to.
"You seem to have the advantage, you know my name, but I have no idea who you are."
The man nodded, "you will know me my dear, make no mistake about that. My name is Gerald."
Claire let the name roll around on the inside of her head. "How do you know me?" Her voice sounded soft, far away to her.
Across the fire from her Gerald stood up and held his hand out to her. "We share mutual friends, would you like to meet them?"
Claire felt her legs lifting her smoothly off of the ground, the muscles no longer protesting. "I don't have friends mister, and even if I did why would I have to be introduced to them?"
Gerald took Claire's hand, closing his large hand over her smaller one and drawing it to his arm. She fell into place beside him, as if it were completely natural for her.
"Over time the mind forgets my dear, I'm simply here to help you remember."
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Hank bent over a microscope looking at his latest sample. This one was from a blood sample he had taken from Claire.
He was fascinated to figure out how Cortez had affected her, and how she had survived the blast. Reaching up he scratched his sideburn as he looked at the slide.
His eyes narrowed as he saw something that didn't make sense. There appeared to be a foreign matter floating in her blood. It held the appearance of a cell, but there was a small matter of silvery liquid suspended in the center.
"Fascinating," he muttered, reaching for a needle lying nearby on the table. Inserting the needle into the cell he attempted to extract the silvery material, but the moment he punctured the cell there was a flash of light, and a wave of heat that knocked him off of his stool.
He sat up on the ground and rubbed his eyes, wishing the stars he was seeing would cease and desist. Scrambling up as fast as he could he looked back into the microscope only to find that not only had the slide been destroyed, but half of the microscope also.
He looked around for pieces of it, but it was as if it had simply vanished.
"How very peculiar." He bounced over to the storage unit in the lab and extracted another sample of Claire's blood, inserting it into the high powered Sh'air computer he used for his research.
He turned to some paperwork he had to fill out while he waited. It only took the machine about a half-hour to make a report, and as Hank sat down to read the contents of the sample he was stunned.
He read it again to make sure that he hadn't misunderstood, but it was there, in black and white.
"That's impossible," Hank muttered to himself, taking off his glasses and chewing on the edge. "That doesn't even exist in out galaxy."
He looked over at the samples in the storage unit realizing that it held the unstable substance known to mankind.
