PART 5
When did she suddenly get so tired, Shalimar wondered, leaning her head wearily against the cool surface of the kitchen cabinet door while she waited for the kettle to boil. Having been banished from the room while Adam worked on stabilising Jesse, because her prowling was becoming too distracting, she'd decided to follow Emma's advice – though substituting a giant mug of hot chocolate for the suggested cup of green tea – if only for something to do while she waited. But now she was here, she found she was quite glad of the solitude and the chance to regain some control over those facets of her feral self she'd allowed to take her over so completely while she'd been searching for him.
The burning need to find and protect him had been frightening in its intensity, driving her in a way that, despite the close bond she'd built up with him over their time in Sanctuary together, she hadn't really expected. Before Adam had found her and brought her here she'd had no family, no-one to care whether she lived or died, and she'd taught herself that that was the best way, that she didn't need anyone. That the only person who really mattered to her was herself. It hadn't stopped her ending up starving in a seedy motel, but at least she wasn't beholden to anyone, hadn't sold her soul to the highest bidder like so many of her contemporaries.
After a bumpy start Adam had taught her to trust again, in herself and in others, to allow them close enough to have an effect on her actions. But, with a couple of key exceptions whose departures had hurt enough to send her back to her old ways, no one had seemed to stay with them long enough back then to really make an impact.
And then Jesse had arrived, and she'd found herself challenged to break down the self-imposed walls he'd been hiding behind, built to keep out all those who'd continually hurt him while pretending to the world to have his best interests at heart. Challenged to find a way to draw him back from the fantasy world he was in danger of becoming lost in, in his attempts to escape from a reality he found too painful an existence. And although their backgrounds were so vastly different, they'd found a commonality that neither of them had experienced before.
It was Jesse who'd helped her rediscover her capacity for caring, for worrying about someone other than herself, who'd brought out the 'pride' mentality inherent in her feral nature that she'd been suppressing for so long. And she'd given him the gift of laughter, shown him that not everyone expected perfection all the time, that it was OK to let go and just have fun.
They'd helped each other in ways neither of them could truly explain, and become even closer – a sibling relationship that transcended the lack of a blood tie, and was probably stronger for it. Though somehow more recently she felt that things had changed. He'd grown up – they both had, of course, but in him it seemed to have brought about a shift in past weeks away from the easy-going, fun-loving young man he'd become, making him more insular again, less open, less approachable than he'd been for years. And she'd felt that closeness suffering, privately mourned its loss.
Until today. Her reflexive response to his perilous situation showed that nothing had really changed, at least from her perspective. And she was glad.
The click of the kettle shutting off disturbed her reverie sufficiently for her to make her drink and carry it through to the communal living area, sinking onto one of the sofas and drawing her legs under her as she savoured the warmth of the mug cupped in her hands. A far cry from the dank chill of the river bank, she thought as, sipping absently at the hot sweetness, she felt her mind slip back there of its own accord. A shiver rippled through her, though, despite the perfectly maintained ambient temperature of her surroundings and the dry clothes Adam had insisted she change into, at the memory of the lethargy that had seemed to grip her once she'd pulled Jesse from the water. A lethargy that, conspiring with the icy fear that wrapped around her soul, robbed her of the volition to do anything other than hold him close and focus everything on the faintest of heartbeats she'd sensed in him, as if that would keep it going long enough to get him back to Sanctuary.
It had seemed to take forever until Brennan arrived, dragging the unwilling Connie with him and thrusting the girl into Emma's care while he'd pragmatically extricated Jesse from her grasp and chivvied her into motion. With no time for finesse, he'd heaved him over his shoulder to carry him back to the Helix, an action that had provoked a fit of feeble coughing from the unconscious man. This had been sufficient to at least start to expel the water from his lungs, though it still wasn't enough to wake him. Nothing seemed to be enough for that.
All she really remembered about the journey home was how cold he'd felt as she'd sat on the floor with him cradled in her lap to stop him being thrown around by the plane's motion. How ragged and faltering his breathing had been, interspersed with more weak coughing as his body sought to evict the alien intruder causing those problems. How deathly pale he still was, even though he no longer had that corpse-like quality of before. And how close they'd come to losing him.
Still might lose him. And that thought was sufficient to send a burst of impotent rage through her that had her slamming the mug carelessly onto the table as she surged to her feet and headed back towards med-bay. Dammit, but he was *not* going to die, not after the effort she'd put in to find him, to bring him home. Not if she had anything to do with it...
**
"What makes you think I'm going to tell you anything?" The question came loaded with all the swaggering insolence and borderline aggression that a 14-but-I-want-people-to-think-I'm-grown-up teenage girl can muster, especially when she's trying to hide the fact she's really very uncertain about her situation. "And anyway, you can't keep me here. It's kidnapping!"
Connie lounged back in the chair she'd appropriated on her arrival in the lab with her hands shoved into the pockets of her artfully faded jeans, watching Adam calculatingly from under the shaggy curtain of blonde-streaked hair that swept diagonally across her forehead and partially hid the grey-green eyes rimmed with smudged black eyeliner. Her lips were twisted into just the hint of a sneer, but there was an underlying fragility about her that was at odds with the image she was trying to project.
Adam sighed, thinking – not for the first time since this conversation had begun – that he really didn't feel any better equipped to be dealing with this kind of thing than he had when he'd first met the 15-year-old Shalimar. "You asked for our help, you know, not the other way round. And you also know Gayle trusted us, or she wouldn't have given you the emergency number. Though I don't really understand why she did. She knows that line is exclusively for..." He broke off, but she continued for him.
"For freaks? Freaks like them?" She nodded towards the windows separating the lab from the more dimly lit room next door where Shalimar could be seen standing staring intently at the unmoving figure on the bio-bed.
"Hey!" Brennan snapped from the far side of the room where he'd been observing the exchange from a safe distance; he'd sampled more than enough of the brat's 'badass' attitude already that day and had been happy to hand her over to Emma and Adam to deal with. But he didn't feel inclined to let her get away with that. "One of those 'freaks' saved your life and damn near lost his in the process!"
Connie shrank back from his obvious anger but didn't deign to reply, folding her arms defensively across her chest as she looked up sullenly at Adam again. "And anyway, don't you mean she *knew*?"
He shook his head firmly. "We can't say that for sure, can we? Unless you saw them kill her?"
The girl glared at him defiantly for a few seconds before lowering her gaze, deflating visibly under his piercing stare.
"Well?" he asked, more gently. "Did you?"
"No," she whispered, eyes clouding slightly as she remembered. "They dragged her out of the house, but she was alive when they left. She was pleading with them, begging them not to. But they didn't listen."
"Did they say anything? Anything that would help us find them? Find her?"
"They just kept saying they were arresting her for crimes against humanity. But Gayle never hurt anyone - *couldn't* hurt anyone! She was the gentlest person I've ever met. She saved me, and I couldn't do anything to help her!!" Connie's voice rose to a wail of distress that had Emma moving forward to rest a calming hand on her shoulder.
"It's OK," she said, soothingly, but the girl shook her away.
"No, it's my fault she was there! She saw them watching her at the store and she wanted to warn me, so she slipped out the back way, but they must have seen her, followed her home and she only had time to push me into the hiding place under the stairs before they broke in..." She stopped as she ran out of breath and, with it, out of steam, sinking back into her chair and huddling in on herself. "If she'd stayed where she was, she'd still be safe," she whispered, eyes filling with tears.
"No, they'd just have carried on waiting for her – she would have had to come out eventually and they would have got her then. It's not your fault." Emma squeezed her arm reassuringly, but Adam saw the psionic's eyes widen slightly as she snatched her hand back with the air of someone who'd just been given a static shock, before she stepped away to gaze down at her in query. "You're one of us, aren't you?"
"No! I'm not!! Don't say that, it's not true." The strength of the girl's reaction was so extreme that Adam was certain it had been almost programmed into her, and he wondered again about what kind of background she'd come from. Obviously not one where mutancy was something to be accepted – or even admitted - which would probably be why she'd escaped from it and ended up with Gayle.
"You don't have to be frightened of who you are here," Emma continued, trying to catch and hold the gaze that darted around the room in panic. "We can help you. But we need you to help us too."
"No! Stop it – leave me alone!" Connie almost wailed, sounding every bit the scared child she really was, and buried her face in her hands as if trying to hide from her inquisitors. The muffled sobs that followed told them that they were unlikely to get anything more from her until she'd calmed down, so Adam suggested quietly that she might need some rest. Emma nodded her understanding and coaxed the tearful girl to her feet before leading her away to find somewhere she could lie down.
Distracted by the noise, Shalimar came to see what all the fuss was about, standing aside in the doorway to let them pass. She came to join the two men, nodding towards the departing figures as she asked, "Well? Did she give you anything that might help?"
"Not really," Adam answered. "I'm thinking it might be worth having Emma try a psionic memory scan on her, see if she heard or saw anything she's not remembering now. But she's almost definitely a New Mutant, though. I'll need to check her DNA to be sure, but I'd suspect some sort of latent Elemental from how Emma reacted. She probably doesn't really know herself – I'm guessing her family made it such a taboo that she'd been repressing it totally. But Gayle would definitely have seen it – which would be why she took her in."
"She was a psionic?" Brennan questioned.
"She still is – until we know for sure."
Brennan rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on! I'm not 'little Miss Attitude' there. You don't need to sugar-coat stuff with me. We all know the chances of her – of any of them – still being alive now are too slim to measure. Those guys were loaded for bear, Adam, and they didn't care who got in the way!"
Adam stared bleakly at him, wanting to tell him he was wrong, that without proof positive there was always hope, but knowing in his heart that he was probably right. In the end, though, he just said, "Then we need to find them and stop them. Before they can do this to anyone else."
"Oh, with you there," Brennan agreed readily. "Especially now it seems pretty clear they're targeting New Mutants. One small problem – we still don't know who they are or where to start looking for them."
"We have Connie, though – and I'm betting there's more she can tell us once she's had time to get her thoughts together. You did a good job getting her away from them alive."
"Yeah? Well, I'm sure Jess will be real glad to hear it was all worthwhile." The elemental's sarcasm wasn't lost on any of them but Adam decided silence was the best response.
While they'd been talking, Shalimar had been gazing almost wistfully through the windows and she used the sudden lull in the conversation to ask the question that was still foremost on her mind. "How is he? Really?"
"Not so good." Adam sighed. "He was without oxygen for a long time. In fact, I don't quite know how he managed to get himself back to normal density without being able to take a breath. Though for some reason he has an abnormally high hydrogen molecule count..." He paused, gazing absently at one of the monitors for a few seconds as if deep in thought, before he blinked and brought his attention back to them again. "The cold helped," he continued, "slowed his metabolism down, kind of like putting him in stasis. But although we've warmed him up again, he's breathing on his own and there's brain activity, to all intents and purposes he's in a coma."
He saw the consternation his words were causing, but had no way of softening them – only of making things harder. "My biggest concern right now is pneumonia – his body temperature was very low and he swallowed a lot of water. But then, from what you've told me, he's lucky to be here at all."
Shalimar paced away from them to stare at Jesse's pale still form beyond the glass. "He should never have gone out on that bridge... Why did he? You know he hates water, has since he was a kid and he fell in the pool at his parents' place. He almost drowned then and it's always frightened him, the idea of dying that way – like being buried alive, not being able to breathe, it's all the same thing. It's why he never learned to swim." She turned back to look at them in horror. "God, he must have been so scared!"
"He had no choice," Emma said softly from the doorway.
"Yeah, if the kid had kept moving it would have been different," Brennan put in. "But once she froze out there in the middle, and with all that moisture in the air, we were out of options."
But Emma shook her head as she came and perched on one of the lab stools. "No, I don't mean it like that." She wrapped her arms around herself as if to ward off a sudden chill. "He's been having a nightmare. A recurring nightmare. And it almost came true for him today."
She flinched away from the barrage of questions that flew at her after the momentary stunned silence following her words, closing her eyes and dragging her shields more firmly into place to block out the surging emotions that accompanied them. But there came a pause, into which she heard Adam insert a querying, "Emma?" and she opened her eyes again to see them, as expected, staring at her in varying degrees of confusion. "How do you know about this?" Adam asked for all of them. "Did he tell you?"
She took a steadying breath. "He's been broadcasting so loudly he didn't need to," she said, with a touch of irony. "I shouldn't have been able to 'see' it too, though, should only have been able to sense how he was feeling about it, but for some reason I was picking up stray images. What happened today seemed almost exactly as it was in his dream. Except that there he phased out of existence. And in reality he didn't."
"But..." Shalimar swept hands through her hair in frustration. "Why didn't he *say* something? If we'd known, we could have helped, kept him safe..."
"From what?" Emma turned frank blue eyes on her. "From a dream? There was no way of knowing it was precognitive – Jesse's not psionic, he doesn't have that power."
"No," said Adam slowly, "but there are those that do. Or this could just have been an unhappy coincidence – a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you like. Maybe Jesse saw the bridge and fitted his actions to the events of his nightmare."
"Hey, that would make it, like, attempted suicide!" protested Brennan. "Jess may get a little down on himself occasionally, but he's the least suicidal guy I've ever met. He's more likely to go take it out on the simulations, kick a few butts, break a few heads."
"He's tried that," whispered Shalimar, remembering how she'd found him those few days previously. She looked to Adam for reassurance. "You don't really think...?"
But Emma answered for him. "No, it didn't feel like that. There was... panic, anger, desperation. OK, and an element of fatalism. But no active desire to die. Quite the opposite – he was fighting to survive right up until I lost him."
"Then there has to be some other explanation for it," Brennan said determinedly. "Some external force?"
Adam shrugged. "Could be. But we're probably going to have to wait until he wakes up to find that out."
But they were all painfully aware that they could be in for a long wait.
****
When did she suddenly get so tired, Shalimar wondered, leaning her head wearily against the cool surface of the kitchen cabinet door while she waited for the kettle to boil. Having been banished from the room while Adam worked on stabilising Jesse, because her prowling was becoming too distracting, she'd decided to follow Emma's advice – though substituting a giant mug of hot chocolate for the suggested cup of green tea – if only for something to do while she waited. But now she was here, she found she was quite glad of the solitude and the chance to regain some control over those facets of her feral self she'd allowed to take her over so completely while she'd been searching for him.
The burning need to find and protect him had been frightening in its intensity, driving her in a way that, despite the close bond she'd built up with him over their time in Sanctuary together, she hadn't really expected. Before Adam had found her and brought her here she'd had no family, no-one to care whether she lived or died, and she'd taught herself that that was the best way, that she didn't need anyone. That the only person who really mattered to her was herself. It hadn't stopped her ending up starving in a seedy motel, but at least she wasn't beholden to anyone, hadn't sold her soul to the highest bidder like so many of her contemporaries.
After a bumpy start Adam had taught her to trust again, in herself and in others, to allow them close enough to have an effect on her actions. But, with a couple of key exceptions whose departures had hurt enough to send her back to her old ways, no one had seemed to stay with them long enough back then to really make an impact.
And then Jesse had arrived, and she'd found herself challenged to break down the self-imposed walls he'd been hiding behind, built to keep out all those who'd continually hurt him while pretending to the world to have his best interests at heart. Challenged to find a way to draw him back from the fantasy world he was in danger of becoming lost in, in his attempts to escape from a reality he found too painful an existence. And although their backgrounds were so vastly different, they'd found a commonality that neither of them had experienced before.
It was Jesse who'd helped her rediscover her capacity for caring, for worrying about someone other than herself, who'd brought out the 'pride' mentality inherent in her feral nature that she'd been suppressing for so long. And she'd given him the gift of laughter, shown him that not everyone expected perfection all the time, that it was OK to let go and just have fun.
They'd helped each other in ways neither of them could truly explain, and become even closer – a sibling relationship that transcended the lack of a blood tie, and was probably stronger for it. Though somehow more recently she felt that things had changed. He'd grown up – they both had, of course, but in him it seemed to have brought about a shift in past weeks away from the easy-going, fun-loving young man he'd become, making him more insular again, less open, less approachable than he'd been for years. And she'd felt that closeness suffering, privately mourned its loss.
Until today. Her reflexive response to his perilous situation showed that nothing had really changed, at least from her perspective. And she was glad.
The click of the kettle shutting off disturbed her reverie sufficiently for her to make her drink and carry it through to the communal living area, sinking onto one of the sofas and drawing her legs under her as she savoured the warmth of the mug cupped in her hands. A far cry from the dank chill of the river bank, she thought as, sipping absently at the hot sweetness, she felt her mind slip back there of its own accord. A shiver rippled through her, though, despite the perfectly maintained ambient temperature of her surroundings and the dry clothes Adam had insisted she change into, at the memory of the lethargy that had seemed to grip her once she'd pulled Jesse from the water. A lethargy that, conspiring with the icy fear that wrapped around her soul, robbed her of the volition to do anything other than hold him close and focus everything on the faintest of heartbeats she'd sensed in him, as if that would keep it going long enough to get him back to Sanctuary.
It had seemed to take forever until Brennan arrived, dragging the unwilling Connie with him and thrusting the girl into Emma's care while he'd pragmatically extricated Jesse from her grasp and chivvied her into motion. With no time for finesse, he'd heaved him over his shoulder to carry him back to the Helix, an action that had provoked a fit of feeble coughing from the unconscious man. This had been sufficient to at least start to expel the water from his lungs, though it still wasn't enough to wake him. Nothing seemed to be enough for that.
All she really remembered about the journey home was how cold he'd felt as she'd sat on the floor with him cradled in her lap to stop him being thrown around by the plane's motion. How ragged and faltering his breathing had been, interspersed with more weak coughing as his body sought to evict the alien intruder causing those problems. How deathly pale he still was, even though he no longer had that corpse-like quality of before. And how close they'd come to losing him.
Still might lose him. And that thought was sufficient to send a burst of impotent rage through her that had her slamming the mug carelessly onto the table as she surged to her feet and headed back towards med-bay. Dammit, but he was *not* going to die, not after the effort she'd put in to find him, to bring him home. Not if she had anything to do with it...
**
"What makes you think I'm going to tell you anything?" The question came loaded with all the swaggering insolence and borderline aggression that a 14-but-I-want-people-to-think-I'm-grown-up teenage girl can muster, especially when she's trying to hide the fact she's really very uncertain about her situation. "And anyway, you can't keep me here. It's kidnapping!"
Connie lounged back in the chair she'd appropriated on her arrival in the lab with her hands shoved into the pockets of her artfully faded jeans, watching Adam calculatingly from under the shaggy curtain of blonde-streaked hair that swept diagonally across her forehead and partially hid the grey-green eyes rimmed with smudged black eyeliner. Her lips were twisted into just the hint of a sneer, but there was an underlying fragility about her that was at odds with the image she was trying to project.
Adam sighed, thinking – not for the first time since this conversation had begun – that he really didn't feel any better equipped to be dealing with this kind of thing than he had when he'd first met the 15-year-old Shalimar. "You asked for our help, you know, not the other way round. And you also know Gayle trusted us, or she wouldn't have given you the emergency number. Though I don't really understand why she did. She knows that line is exclusively for..." He broke off, but she continued for him.
"For freaks? Freaks like them?" She nodded towards the windows separating the lab from the more dimly lit room next door where Shalimar could be seen standing staring intently at the unmoving figure on the bio-bed.
"Hey!" Brennan snapped from the far side of the room where he'd been observing the exchange from a safe distance; he'd sampled more than enough of the brat's 'badass' attitude already that day and had been happy to hand her over to Emma and Adam to deal with. But he didn't feel inclined to let her get away with that. "One of those 'freaks' saved your life and damn near lost his in the process!"
Connie shrank back from his obvious anger but didn't deign to reply, folding her arms defensively across her chest as she looked up sullenly at Adam again. "And anyway, don't you mean she *knew*?"
He shook his head firmly. "We can't say that for sure, can we? Unless you saw them kill her?"
The girl glared at him defiantly for a few seconds before lowering her gaze, deflating visibly under his piercing stare.
"Well?" he asked, more gently. "Did you?"
"No," she whispered, eyes clouding slightly as she remembered. "They dragged her out of the house, but she was alive when they left. She was pleading with them, begging them not to. But they didn't listen."
"Did they say anything? Anything that would help us find them? Find her?"
"They just kept saying they were arresting her for crimes against humanity. But Gayle never hurt anyone - *couldn't* hurt anyone! She was the gentlest person I've ever met. She saved me, and I couldn't do anything to help her!!" Connie's voice rose to a wail of distress that had Emma moving forward to rest a calming hand on her shoulder.
"It's OK," she said, soothingly, but the girl shook her away.
"No, it's my fault she was there! She saw them watching her at the store and she wanted to warn me, so she slipped out the back way, but they must have seen her, followed her home and she only had time to push me into the hiding place under the stairs before they broke in..." She stopped as she ran out of breath and, with it, out of steam, sinking back into her chair and huddling in on herself. "If she'd stayed where she was, she'd still be safe," she whispered, eyes filling with tears.
"No, they'd just have carried on waiting for her – she would have had to come out eventually and they would have got her then. It's not your fault." Emma squeezed her arm reassuringly, but Adam saw the psionic's eyes widen slightly as she snatched her hand back with the air of someone who'd just been given a static shock, before she stepped away to gaze down at her in query. "You're one of us, aren't you?"
"No! I'm not!! Don't say that, it's not true." The strength of the girl's reaction was so extreme that Adam was certain it had been almost programmed into her, and he wondered again about what kind of background she'd come from. Obviously not one where mutancy was something to be accepted – or even admitted - which would probably be why she'd escaped from it and ended up with Gayle.
"You don't have to be frightened of who you are here," Emma continued, trying to catch and hold the gaze that darted around the room in panic. "We can help you. But we need you to help us too."
"No! Stop it – leave me alone!" Connie almost wailed, sounding every bit the scared child she really was, and buried her face in her hands as if trying to hide from her inquisitors. The muffled sobs that followed told them that they were unlikely to get anything more from her until she'd calmed down, so Adam suggested quietly that she might need some rest. Emma nodded her understanding and coaxed the tearful girl to her feet before leading her away to find somewhere she could lie down.
Distracted by the noise, Shalimar came to see what all the fuss was about, standing aside in the doorway to let them pass. She came to join the two men, nodding towards the departing figures as she asked, "Well? Did she give you anything that might help?"
"Not really," Adam answered. "I'm thinking it might be worth having Emma try a psionic memory scan on her, see if she heard or saw anything she's not remembering now. But she's almost definitely a New Mutant, though. I'll need to check her DNA to be sure, but I'd suspect some sort of latent Elemental from how Emma reacted. She probably doesn't really know herself – I'm guessing her family made it such a taboo that she'd been repressing it totally. But Gayle would definitely have seen it – which would be why she took her in."
"She was a psionic?" Brennan questioned.
"She still is – until we know for sure."
Brennan rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on! I'm not 'little Miss Attitude' there. You don't need to sugar-coat stuff with me. We all know the chances of her – of any of them – still being alive now are too slim to measure. Those guys were loaded for bear, Adam, and they didn't care who got in the way!"
Adam stared bleakly at him, wanting to tell him he was wrong, that without proof positive there was always hope, but knowing in his heart that he was probably right. In the end, though, he just said, "Then we need to find them and stop them. Before they can do this to anyone else."
"Oh, with you there," Brennan agreed readily. "Especially now it seems pretty clear they're targeting New Mutants. One small problem – we still don't know who they are or where to start looking for them."
"We have Connie, though – and I'm betting there's more she can tell us once she's had time to get her thoughts together. You did a good job getting her away from them alive."
"Yeah? Well, I'm sure Jess will be real glad to hear it was all worthwhile." The elemental's sarcasm wasn't lost on any of them but Adam decided silence was the best response.
While they'd been talking, Shalimar had been gazing almost wistfully through the windows and she used the sudden lull in the conversation to ask the question that was still foremost on her mind. "How is he? Really?"
"Not so good." Adam sighed. "He was without oxygen for a long time. In fact, I don't quite know how he managed to get himself back to normal density without being able to take a breath. Though for some reason he has an abnormally high hydrogen molecule count..." He paused, gazing absently at one of the monitors for a few seconds as if deep in thought, before he blinked and brought his attention back to them again. "The cold helped," he continued, "slowed his metabolism down, kind of like putting him in stasis. But although we've warmed him up again, he's breathing on his own and there's brain activity, to all intents and purposes he's in a coma."
He saw the consternation his words were causing, but had no way of softening them – only of making things harder. "My biggest concern right now is pneumonia – his body temperature was very low and he swallowed a lot of water. But then, from what you've told me, he's lucky to be here at all."
Shalimar paced away from them to stare at Jesse's pale still form beyond the glass. "He should never have gone out on that bridge... Why did he? You know he hates water, has since he was a kid and he fell in the pool at his parents' place. He almost drowned then and it's always frightened him, the idea of dying that way – like being buried alive, not being able to breathe, it's all the same thing. It's why he never learned to swim." She turned back to look at them in horror. "God, he must have been so scared!"
"He had no choice," Emma said softly from the doorway.
"Yeah, if the kid had kept moving it would have been different," Brennan put in. "But once she froze out there in the middle, and with all that moisture in the air, we were out of options."
But Emma shook her head as she came and perched on one of the lab stools. "No, I don't mean it like that." She wrapped her arms around herself as if to ward off a sudden chill. "He's been having a nightmare. A recurring nightmare. And it almost came true for him today."
She flinched away from the barrage of questions that flew at her after the momentary stunned silence following her words, closing her eyes and dragging her shields more firmly into place to block out the surging emotions that accompanied them. But there came a pause, into which she heard Adam insert a querying, "Emma?" and she opened her eyes again to see them, as expected, staring at her in varying degrees of confusion. "How do you know about this?" Adam asked for all of them. "Did he tell you?"
She took a steadying breath. "He's been broadcasting so loudly he didn't need to," she said, with a touch of irony. "I shouldn't have been able to 'see' it too, though, should only have been able to sense how he was feeling about it, but for some reason I was picking up stray images. What happened today seemed almost exactly as it was in his dream. Except that there he phased out of existence. And in reality he didn't."
"But..." Shalimar swept hands through her hair in frustration. "Why didn't he *say* something? If we'd known, we could have helped, kept him safe..."
"From what?" Emma turned frank blue eyes on her. "From a dream? There was no way of knowing it was precognitive – Jesse's not psionic, he doesn't have that power."
"No," said Adam slowly, "but there are those that do. Or this could just have been an unhappy coincidence – a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you like. Maybe Jesse saw the bridge and fitted his actions to the events of his nightmare."
"Hey, that would make it, like, attempted suicide!" protested Brennan. "Jess may get a little down on himself occasionally, but he's the least suicidal guy I've ever met. He's more likely to go take it out on the simulations, kick a few butts, break a few heads."
"He's tried that," whispered Shalimar, remembering how she'd found him those few days previously. She looked to Adam for reassurance. "You don't really think...?"
But Emma answered for him. "No, it didn't feel like that. There was... panic, anger, desperation. OK, and an element of fatalism. But no active desire to die. Quite the opposite – he was fighting to survive right up until I lost him."
"Then there has to be some other explanation for it," Brennan said determinedly. "Some external force?"
Adam shrugged. "Could be. But we're probably going to have to wait until he wakes up to find that out."
But they were all painfully aware that they could be in for a long wait.
****