Chapter Four:

Reunion

There was something on her chest, a soft, warm something, and it was . . . vibrating? Max opened her eyes slowly, her reflexes held at the ready, not quite sure what she would find. What she found was a rather contented looking black cat, front paws curled beneath its body, purring and staring directly into her face. "And who might you be?" she asked, lifting a hand to stroke the furry stranger.

"That would be my cat, Familiar. Milly for short. Congratulations, she is now convinced that she owns you." Max turned her head to see her sister holding out a glass of milk to her. She reached out and took it as the cat jumped down from her perch and went padding off in search of another human to pester. She sat up slowly, thankful that her hands were no longer shaking. Last night had been far too terrifying, even for her. "She showed up outside of my apartment about a year and a half ago," Jondy continued as Max drank the milk. "I couldn't just leave her. Besides, she's probably our second cousin or something."

"So I wasn't dreaming," Max said as she finished off the milk.

"You should be so lucky." Jondy grinned. "You oughta come out and get some breakfast. We're raiding your boyfriend's kitchen."

"He's not my boyfriend," Max muttered, as she stood, still slightly shaky on her feet.

"Yeah, okay." Jondy grinned to herself. "So your roommate told me this morning." She held out her arms. "Don't I get a hug?" Max smiled and hugged her sister. "You know," she said, sobering, "when you slipped through the ice on that pond, I thought for sure they'd get you."

"Nah, I just hung around until they were done searching the area. They kept walking around that pond, and there I was underneath the ice, looking right up at them. I thought for sure they'd look down and see me." She shrugged. "I guess they forgot that their perfect soldiers could withstand freezing temperatures and hold their breath for extended periods of time."

"Well, that's what happens when you send a man to do a woman's job."

Max smiled. "You know what, baby sister? I think you and Original Cindy are gonna get along just fine." She glanced down at her disheveled clothing. "I think I'm gonna take a shower first. I'm kind of a mess."

"Suit yourself, but I make no promises about anything being left in the kitchen when you get done."

Several minutes later, Original Cindy looked up from her coffee cup. She eyed Jondy curiously for a moment. "So, tell me somethin', girl," she asked. "What's the dealio on this whole 'baby sister' thing you two got goin' on?"

Jondy smiled, touched that Max's roommate was taking such an interest in her personal life, even the parts of her childhood that weren't necessarily very pretty. "Max was the youngest, everybody's 'baby sister.'" She paused to take a drink from her own cup. "One day when she was about four or five she got sad because everybody had a baby sister except for her, so I told her I'd be her baby sister, and ever since that day that's what we've called each other." Well, ever since that day minus eleven years, she silently amended.

Logan, who'd been listening intently from his spot by the stove, walked over and sat down across the table, his exoskeleton making a light whirring noise in the silence of the room. Thankfully, Jondy had had that little bit of information explained to her earlier this morning, though she'd been quite confused when she'd first seen him strolling into the kitchen, making her doubt, for just a moment, her sanity for remembering him being in a wheelchair the night before.

A rustling in the next room alerted her to the fact that Max had finished in the bathroom, and a moment later her sister came wandering into the kitchen wearing fresh clothes, her hair still damp from the shower. She wondered for a moment just where she'd gotten them. Did she keep clothes at Logan's apartment? Interesting. She also noticed that Max and Logan avoided looking at each other, but as Max walked across the kitchen to get herself a cup of coffee, she noticed Logan's eyes follow her across the room, a look in their depths so intense that she felt her stomach clench. She knew that look all too well. It still hurt to remember.

Original Cindy gave Max an assessing look. "You okay this morning, boo?"

"Yeah, I think I'm gonna be okay, just gotta take it easy for a little while, you know."

Original Cindy finished her coffee and sat the coffee cup in the sink. "Well, Original Cindy's gonna be late for work, and though nothin' in this world would bring her greater joy than five more minutes without hurting her eyes on Normal's face, her ears fear the noises he would make much more." She gave Max a hug. "You sure you don't want us to start another slowdown or somethin'? It's worked before."

"No, I don't want you guys to put your jobs on the line for me." Original Cindy frowned.

"If you're sure, girl, but you change your mind, you just say the word, and it's done." She slipped her backpack onto one shoulder. "Thanks for breakfast," she said to Logan. "Later," and then she was out the door.

"Well," Logan said, standing and starting towards the kitchen door. "I guess I'll leave the two of you to get reacquainted. I'd imagine you've got quite a bit of catching up to do." And then it was Max's eyes following Logan's figure as he walked away. Her face softened, reflecting a sort of longing that exposed the woman who existed under the tough façade she erected for the world. Two people so obviously in love, and Jondy couldn't help but envy them for a moment because of this thing from Manticore that kept them apart. As love went, it could be so much worse.

"So," Jondy said as Max dropped her gaze down to the cup in her hands, "what kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into in the last eleven years?"

They chatted back and forth over breakfast, and as they ate, Max filled Jondy in on the details of her life and some of the places she had been and things she had done since the escape. They both carefully avoided the topic of Max's months at Manticore. When she mentioned meeting up with Hannah again and the woman's role in her escape, Jondy had to smile.

"That's strange. I wonder how many of us had help getting away? A group of transgenic kids escape from a covert government genetics lab, and a couple of them get picked up and helped out along the way. It's enough to make you believe in the good of mankind. Well, almost."

"You had help too?"

"Yeah, well, he hit me with his car. I guess he figured that if I got away, he'd never be able to turn it in to the insurance company. 'Yes sir, my car was severely dented when I ran into a pre-pubescent killing machine.' I guess you gotta have some proof if you're going to make a claim like that." She paused a moment, the grin sliding from her face. "Actually, he was on his way to work. Only his third day, and he hadn't found an apartment in the area yet, so he was still making the two hour commute." Memories began flashing through her mind. Being picked up, carried to the car. "Dr. William Marsley, fresh out of school with a shiny new degree in psychology. You'll never guess where he worked."

"Manticore."

Jondy grinned. "You weren't supposed to guess." She paused before continuing. "He was there to study the way we interacted with each other, the way that integrating the concept of family into a military squadron would affect the performance of the group as a whole, and of its members as individuals. He was also studying the way our training affected us emotionally, looking for any reasons to believe we might have a psychological breakdown later on in our lives."

Max smiled ruefully. "In other words, they wanted to know if we had a conscience." She shuddered inwardly for a moment.

Jondy nodded. "We were our own, new and vastly different society. 'It was a great research opportunity,' or so he was told." She took another sip of her coffee, the memories floating back.

"I'd been running for over an hour. I'm sure they'd lost my trail by then. I'd cut through a couple of frozen streams, even doubled back a few times, hoping to confuse any dogs that they had trailing me. Of course all I could think of at the time was getting as far away as I could. The terrain was unfamiliar. I'd never been so far from base, and coming down over the side of a hill, I slipped on some crusted-over snow and slid right into the road in front of him." She could still remember the headlights, the feel of the impact. "When I came to he was checking me for broken bones, turned out he'd been a med student before he decided he was more interested in what made people tick mentally than how they worked physically. He acted pretty surprised that I'd made such a nasty dent in his car without getting hurt myself."

"So he just took you and left?"

"Well, he knew what I was the moment he saw me, not too many kids with barcodes running around in their undies in rural Wyoming, you know. He told me once that he'd thought about taking me back there, but only for a second. He couldn't bring himself to do it. He'd only worked there for a couple of days, but that had been more than enough for him to realize that something was seriously wrong. When he was checking me over, he found the pink scars, the ones that hadn't healed over from their most recent bout of severing my spinal cord to see how long it would take for it to grow back together. I think that's what made up his mind. He just picked me up, rolled me up in a blanket, put me in the backseat, and got the hell out of there."

A moment of silence passed between them as both remembered their times as transgenic lab rats. "They didn't catch him?" Max finally asked, sounding skeptical.

"Well, he didn't exactly go back to Manticore after that. He knew he couldn't keep me himself, so he . . . dropped me off somewhere for safe keeping and quit his job there. By the time Manticore put two and two together, assuming of course that they ever did, one Dr. William Marsley had already died in a rather fiery auto accident. Well, with a little help from yours truly, that is." Max raised an eyebrow.

Jondy rose to pick up the coffeepot, refilling both of their cups. "It was right after the Pulse, and everything was in shambles. We found some bum on the street who had drunk himself into a fatal case of alcohol poisoning, put him in the car, and voila! Of course it took a little legwork from a pint-sized burglar, but Bill grew up in a small town, so his medical records weren't too spread out. I walked right in, switched the records, and walked right out. I mean, honestly, who expects a little kid to be doing something like that?" She smiled. "So, when they finally managed to identify the car, what was left of the body inside it matched the owner's medical records perfectly, and with the evidence of alcohol in the victim's body, it worked like a charm. All anybody ever thought was that another guy had lost his fortune, gotten a little too drunk in an attempt to console himself, and gotten himself killed on the way home one night. If Manticore ever got into it, they were probably pretty convinced by the entries in his journal about how he'd 'never be able to live with the memories of what they did to those kids.'"

Max shook her head, visibly impressed. "You stuck around to do that for him?"

"Yeah, well, I guess I must have been designed with an overly-developed sense of loyalty. All of my instincts and all of my training told me to keep moving, but somehow I guess I figured I owed the guy. He got a new name, a new job, and a new life, and Manticore will never know the difference."

Max looked down at the cup in her hands. "I wish it were so easy for us."

"Yeah, I know. Me too."

They talked for a little while longer, but Max insisted that she had to go run an errand that afternoon. After a few minutes of questions, she finally admitted that she had to go see her boss about getting her old job back. She'd already tried talking to him once before with no luck, but she figured she would give him a week or so to cool down and then try again. Though she didn't say so, Jondy imagined that anybody's boss would be pretty ticked off if one of his employees just vanished for three months without a word.

"So," Jondy said to Logan after Max had left, "where exactly is this wonderful job my sister is trying to get back, anyway?" She was organizing her meager possessions in her backpack, preparing to move over to Max's apartment, where she was planning to stay for a while.

"Well," he said, looking up from his notes. "It's not exactly a wonderful job." He was sitting in his wheelchair again, though from the way he was balancing papers on his knee she could tell he was still wearing the exoskeleton. She guessed that old habits just died hard. "It's a bicycle package delivery service. A place called Jam Pony."

"Jam Pony?" Jondy grinned to herself. Life was definitely full of irony. She stopped what she was doing and glanced over at Milly, who was napping beneath his coffee table. "Would you mind watching my cat for just a little while? I believe I've got a little errand of my own to run."