AN: This was an idea from my Dad saying I should revise more through my fanfic because I spend so much time on it anyway. So all science in here SHOULD be accurate. Hope I don't bore you and don't despair if none of it makes sense, I've tried to put it in layman's terms but it's all a load of BS anyway!

Part V

After finding beds for Sharon and Eber for the night, Adam headed back to the lab to check over the information from Eber's scan. He was surprised to see that the computer judged her age as only 12. He had misjudged her age quite drastically. That meant she was the younger of the two. That meant she had been only10, 11 at most when they had escaped from the place that they had been held captive. He needed to know more, but questions could wait until the psionic had rested. Tomorrow perhaps.

He looked over his shoulder as Jesse entered, eating something unrecognisable.

"Jesse, come have a look at this..." He called him over.

"What am I looking at?" Jesse asked.

"This is the young feral's genetics, I've only just had a chance to look over them. You can see here..." He outlined a small section of the twisting code. "And here, these are the typical feline feral codes. But this here, this is strange. In another feral, this would be the area that codes for the feline tapetum lucidum, the part that enhances their night vision and makes their eyes seem to glow, but it's been changed to junk, it doesn't code for anything any more. And here as well, this is the gene for rhodopsin, the chemical that allows us to see in the dark, but it's been de-activated, and it looks like it's been done on purpose."

"What does that mean?"

Well, effectively that she has limited night vision, even compared to you or me, and what she sees through her feral eyes is likely to be of worse quality that through her human eyes."

"Why would anyone do that on purpose?"

"I don't... hang on a minute..." Adam turned back to the image, enlarging a section. "It can't be..." He muttered to himself. Jesse knew better than to interupt him while he was working and so he watched on as Adam pulled up another image and enlarged the same section on that one. Jesse looked over the two sections on the screen. They looked very similar, although he could see that the genes that Adam had pointed out as tampered with in the young feral were in tact in the new image.

"They forced her to adapt." Adam murmured, seemingly having forgotten Jesse completely.

"Adam?" He asked.

"Do you see this here?" Again Adam pointed out a section of the code in the first box. At jesse's nod he continued. "Well, I thought I recognised it and it just came to me where from. This..." He brought the new image into the foreground. "Is a scan of Shalimar's DNA." He winced but contined. "This section is in the same area as you can see at the moment in Eber's scan, and this is the part of Shalimar's DNA which changed when she mutated a couple of months ago. They're almost exactly the same."

"When she mutated she gained the ability to fight without seeing or hearing her opponent." Jesse nodded, finally understanding. "They forced her DNA to mutate to keep herself safe."

"I don't think they meant to damage her hearing but I think, whoever 'they' were, they tampered with these genes to see if she could adapt."

"And she did."

"It seems so."

"What we can do is try and re-activate the genes which have been tampered with and start restoring her eyesight." Adam explained to Sharon, as they sat and watched Jesse with Eber at the computer. They were preparing a holographic opponent for Eber to fight, Jesse explaining something in quick fluidic hand movements. Finding that Jesse knew sign-language was a revelation even to Adam, but though he claimed to be a little out of practice he seemed to have caught up quickly enough. "And then we can see if we can't do something about her hearing."

"You can fix that?"

"Yes. It'll take some time but it should be worth it. Even if we can only get her some hearing back it would be better than what she has at the moment. I'd like to ask her first of course. Get her permission." Sharon looked quietly on, nodding. There was a silence and Sharon continued, almost whispering.

"Sometimes I wonder if she would have been better off if I had left her there, with them. She would have been fed properly, and she would have at least been safe. They didn't work us too hard, we got exercise. They fed us properly. She used to get weak sometimes, when there wasn't much food about. I mean fall-down weak, like she couldn't even keep her own body weight up. Why is that? Why can I live on less food than she can, surely because she's stronger she should be OK for longer?"

"As a feral she has a higher metabolism." Adam provided. "She needs more food for her size than most humans do, to keep up the pace." Sharon sighed. "And I think you're wrong. I don't think she could have been any safer than with you. If you had left without her, goodness knows what they would have done to her next." Sharon nodded and turned away from Adam, looking out again into the main hall where Eber was now being shown how to battle the holograms in the dojo. When she spoke again tears were trailing her face, strangely inaudible in her telepathic words.

"It's my fault Adam. It's my fault she can't remember."

"What do you mean? What can't she remember?" He asked.

"When I told you she can't remember her parents - that isn't all she doesn't remember. It was a kind of test, for me. The tests they already had her in would take time and she was free until something happened with those, so they put her in for other things. They wanted to see what kind of memory suppressants I could break through. But I couldn't. I can't do it and I've been trying. There are walls around her memories and I can't break them down. For her it's like her life started the day she woke up in that horrid dark cell. She doesn't remember sound, she was deaf before they did it to her. I had prepared a way to escape by then but I couldn't leave her there, on her own. I took her with me so I could keep trying to help her." Adam sat silently for a moment, thinking.

"When did she learn sign-language and to lip-read?" He asked finally. "Because I don't think these people were the kind to take the time to think about that kind of thing?"

"We found a school." She smiled, and he could hear the smile in her words. "We couldn't stay as long as I had hoped, but it was long enough for her to learn to lip-read and sign. I tried to learn to sign, but she picked it up so much faster than I did, she ended up teaching me the rest after we had left. At least then we could communicate outside of her mind. At the time I was much more wary of the telepathy, it takes a lot of concentration and I wasn't sure I could control it. But eventually we found it was easier."

"Why did you have to leave?"

"They found us. They'd followed us to the place we were staying. Our pictures were in the paper and someone turned us in. We only just got away in time."

"Do you know who it was, that held you captive, that did these tests on you?"

"No, we never saw anyone other than the scientists working on us. Most of the time Eber didn't even have that, they stood behind reflective glass so she couldn't see them. We know the faces of the men who are out to take us back, but we've managed to avoid them for a while now. We never stay anywhere long."

"What about now? What if we offered you a place to stay?"