My captor looked at her captor with eyes like black granite, her full crimson painted lips twisting into a dangerous sneer.  The solid looking blond woman appeared wholly unaffected by the dark woman's hatred of her.  After seeing what she had done to Alec I wouldn't have been so blasé.  At my best estimate I'd been unconscious for a little over an hour after my sister, the blond woman had called her Lela, knocked me out.  When I came to, I'd been lashed firmly with hemp ropes to a bench in the back of some kind of transport van, and my sister had been tied up next to me.  From the evil looks being exchanged, the blond woman and Lela didn't like each other very much.

"Charlotte, dear sister, are these ropes really necessary among family?"  Venom dripped from her words, and if she'd been smiling at me as she smiled at the blond woman I would have been cowering if fear under the nearest bulky object.

The blond returned an acidy smile of her own.  "It's for your own safety sister.  You are the key ingredient in our plan.  We wouldn't want you to be snatched up by some unscrupulous do-gooders would we?"  I found myself wondering if she used the word "we" in the sense that there were other people involved, or is she was so conceited that she was using the royal plural.  From her smug expression I rather thought that it was the latter choice.  "We're here now Lela, mind you don't make a fuss with the guards.  Sister or not I'm not averse to having you drugged unconscious for this whole procedure."

Snarling like a caged tiger, Lela held out her hands in mock submission.  However, I noticed that when the guards yanked us out of the van, she very pointedly did not put up a fight.  I saw only a single beam of sun before rough hands bound a piece of material around my eyes.

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I sat up morosely on the edge of one of Kate's hospital beds, while Kate herself finished the process of re-bandaging the deeper cuts along my chest and back.  Her hands were so deft that not a single patch of dried blood stuck to either surface, thereby causing me pain.  Somehow I wished for the hurt, it would have been easier to bear than the constant torture of my newly surfaced conscience.  By the time I was seven years old, Manticore had succeeded in burying most vestiges of my feeling for other people.  I'd only just started feeling again when I'd become involved with Rachel.  It had been Max who'd completed the process of making me feel and empathize again.

Guilt burned me now.  How could she have traded her life for mine?  It was as stupid as it was touching.  She was the Sandeman's cure, the one who would save humanity, and she'd tossed her life away for my worthless ass.  I didn't understand how Sandeman could take this so calmly.  Plans that he'd set in motion four decades ago were falling apart around his ears, and it didn't seem to trouble him any more than a burnt out light bulb.  Speak of the devil.

"How are your wounds healing my boy?"  He put an avuncular hand on me knee and beamed at me with his humor filled smile.  "I'm sorry about them taking her Alec, but I can assure you that we'll do everything in our power to bring her back."  I smile crookedly back at him.

"It was my fault you know."  His face turns stern.

"Now I won't have you carrying that load of malarkey around.  Doubt and self-recriminations can get a soldier killed, and you most certainly aren't going to save Max by sacrificing yourself, not this time anyway."  The smile comes back into evidence.  "I'm most proud of all of you, you know.  I had expected that by mixing animal DNA with human, I would be creating something closer akin to an animal.  At the very least I had expected a bunch of staid, emotionless soldiers who only took orders from Manticore.  Instead I got you kids, with all of your marvelous abilities, but still tempered by the ability to love and hate.  The only thing that didn't shock me, is that you and 452 fell in love.  To sound perfectly conceited, I am quite good at what I do, and I did after all create you for one another.  I shouldn't wonder at her willingness to give her life for yours, and you to give for hers"

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When the cloth was finally yanked from my eyes, I found myself locked in a small and very dark room with Lela.  The whooshing sound of a torch being lit from behind me cause me to lurch to my feet.  A tiny, aged woman stood holding the light in her bent old arms, and surrounding her were volumes of test tubes and boilers.

Laying in the exact center of the room, coils glistening in the firelight, rested a fifteen foot long cobra