He preferred food high in protein, so he was at the stove, frying himself bacon and eggs when the phone rang. He flicked off the burner before reaching for the phone, picking it up on the third ring. For a long moment he merely listened, silent.

"Yes sir, I understand that. I will be in place to act at that time. Thank you for confirming my instructions." He said respectfully. The man hung up the phone and went back to making his dinner.

His superior was stationed in Washington, but he kept his eye on various subjects as they carried out their individual goals for the project. The man has just received the confirmation that his goal was to be carried out in a few days time. He grabbed his coat and left the apartment, heading to the local ammunition store.

**

The last day of finals had long since come and gone, so Gibson had free range of the city, as long as he kept Reyes informed of where he was going to be for the day, and kept a cell phone with him for emergencies. Most poor weather days he spent in museums and historic sites so he could learn something even while forced to behave like a more or less normal kid so he didn't stick out. Usually he struck up a conversation with some elderly people, who always took a liking to him, so he'd look like a bored grandson forced to tag along.

Since it was a nice day, for once, he decided to surprise everyone so he met Reyes, Doggett and Skinner at the front doors of the Hoover building as the three of them left for the day. He had only had a two minute wait before the door swung open and they were walking down the stairs towards him.

"Hey Gib, how are you?" Doggett asked, giving the boy a smile.

"Great thanks." Gibson then turned his attention to Reyes and asked, " 'Aunt' Monica, do you think it'd be ok if we got some soft pretzels from the vendor before heading home? I promise it won't ruin my appetite."

Reyes smiled in spite of herself. "Sure. You guys want some to get some too?" It didn't surprise her much when both men eagerly agreed to get them too. She knew them well enough to realize they were both junk food connoisseurs.

Gibson was just taking the first bite of his pretzel when his blood went cold. A man, who had come out of the Hover building walked by him, thinking terrible thoughts. He stared after the man for a long while, and for a moment expected the man to confront him, but he kept walking down the street without so much as a glance back at Gibson.

Reyes looked sharply at the boy, and watched as Gibson's brown eyes filled with sadness. "Scully's child is in danger and needs her." He told them flatly.

"What do you mean?" Reyes asked him. "William is with Mulder and Scully. You know that."

"Not him, the other child." Gibson said in frustration, not having heard enough thoughts to puzzle out what child the man had been thinking about, just knowing that it wasn't William.

"Scully doesn't have any other children." Doggett told him with a bemused look on his face. "William is so important to her precisely because he's the only child she could ever have."

Reyes wonders for a moment if she should mention what Scully learned about her fertility, and perhaps suggest that Scully might be pregnant, but Skinner spoke first. "William isn't an only child. Wasn't, that is."

"What?" Doggett and Reyes ask simultaneously. Gibson just looks at Skinner and nods with understanding, reading what's on the man's mind.

"Scully had a daughter." Skinner told them quietly. "Several years back she learned that her eggs had been harvested, and that the victim's eggs had been used in a genetics experiment. An experiment that produced a little girl named Emily, who was gravely ill her entire, short life. She died five years ago at the age of three from a rare form of anemia."

Doggett's heart went out to Scully when he learned that she too had lost a child. "Did she find out about the girl before or after she died?"

"Mere days before." Skinner said with a sigh. "She has rarely spoken of the girl since, because there was just enough time for her to become attached to the child before she died."

"But she didn't." Gibson objected, throwing them a portion of the stranger's dark thoughts as evidence. "Ask Scully about the coffin full of sand. She's known all a long that they took the girl's body, and assumed they destroyed it to hide the evidence of their experiments. However, the girl didn't die then, but is in danger of doing so now." He said, worry etched across his young face. Skinner took one look at the boy and reached for his cell phone.

**

That Afternoon in New York...

The summer sun beat in through the window, and Emily sighed. Unlike most seven and a half year-olds, Emily hated the summer. Summer meant endless days of being in the home, away from her school friends, and having new medical procedures designed to "cure her" being done because they didn't get in the way of her schoolwork then if they backfired and made her sick instead of helping her.

It wasn't the tests and treatments that she minded, though many of them hurt, since that was an everyday facet of life, but it was not being able to be in the classroom that she missed. She loved school and everything that went along with it, and applied herself so diligently that she would be starting the fourth grade two months shy of her eighth birthday.

Her caretakers encouraged her lively curiosity, but perhaps only because they didn't realize what it was that she so desperately wanted to learn: how to become a normal girl. It was one of the only reasons she submitted so willingly to the doctors, they had improved her condition considerably since she "died," now she even bled red.

Every night Emily had the same dream: she became normal, so someone would love her again, just like her dimly remembered parents did. Once she was normal she'd have two happy parents and a covey of brothers and sisters, who would all be glad that she existed. In the summer, the dream was broken by nurses before she ever saw the dream-parents faces. At least during the school year she'd get glimpses of blue and hazel eyes, looking at her with love.

**

"Coming!" Mulder called at the closed door as he hurried to it, with William tucked under one arm. The insistent pounding on the door made him nervous because it sounded urgent, and he wondered if there was a significance to the call he'd missed while changing his son. "Uh, hi." He said to the agents standing on his doorstep.

"hi. hi!" William repeated, smiling at them. His smile faded when they didn't smile back. "Dada?" he tried again, and felt better when Mulder tickled him and made him giggle.

"Mulder, we need to talk. Is Scully home?" Skinner asked as the four of them entered the house in a tense group. The look on Gibson's face made him especially nervous.

Before he quite realized it, Mulder had handed his son to Reyes, who was cuddling him. "No, she started her new job this week, and is at the hospital right now." Mulder said with a bemused look on his face.

"Will she be home soon?" Skinner persisted.

"Uh...in about fifteen minutes." Mulder said, giving him an expectant look. To his disappointment, no one said another word to him as the minutes passed with an agonizing slowness. He found the silence unnatural and disturbing.

Scully noticed the car in their driveway, but she thought it was a social call. Until she saw their faces. Her first thought, as she looked at their morose expressions, was that someone must have died. Mulder and William were in the room, safe and sound, so her mind raced, trying to think of someone the agents might have come to talk to her about. When she came up with no names she finally asked, "What's going on here?"

Mulder gave her an apologetic look. "I wish I knew. They wouldn't tell me why they are here because they wanted to wait for you to get home."

Reyes gave Scully such a purely sympathetic look that Scully felt fear race up her spine even before Skinner began to speak. "Scully, do you believe in Gibson's ability to read minds?"

"Yes of course. He was tested intensively, and it was proven without a doubt that he reads minds."

"Do you believe he's accurate?" Skinner added, looking at Mulder.

"As Scully said, without a doubt." Mulder replied as he stared at the boy who was siting between Reyes and Doggett.

Skinner sighed and massaged his forehead. "I wish to God that we weren't here to tell you something that will disrupt your lives now that you've finally settled into something like normalcy, but that's not the way it has worked out."

"With all due respect, Sir, what the hell are you talking about?" Mulder asked, forgetting for a moment that the man was no longer his superior so he could have called him Walter.

"Tell him." Skinner said to Gibson.

"I met Monica, John, and Walter at the Hover building today and while we were standing around having pretzels, a man walked by and I read his thoughts."

"And?" Scully asked, reaching for her son, whom Reyes quickly handed over.

"And he was thinking about a plan to hurt your child." Gibson said, not quite looking her in the eyes.

Scully tightened her grip on William until he whined to protest. "Someone else wants to hurt William?" She asked in a strangled voice.

"No. He wasn't thinking about William." Gibson said softly.

"Emily??" Mulder blurted out the only other possibility, blinking in surprise. "But Emily died almost five years ago."

Gibson shook his head. "She didn't die. The ones who made her took her back and made her better."

Scully looked at him, feeling completely overwhelmed. "If they made her better, why would they want to hurt her now?" She asked him, her voice threatening tears.

"The ones who want to hurt her aren't the same as the ones who made her." Gibson said.

"I don't understand!" Scully cried.

"No, Scully, it makes sense. Right before William was born, the replicants, like Billy Miles, set about to destroy all people creating the hybrids, because they consider hybrids 'abominations.' We know that Emily bled green, the same as the aliens-human hybrids we encountered early in our work in the x-files, so chances are she is one of the hybrids too." Mulder told her.

"Which puts her in danger." Scully says, looking at her hands.

"Don't worry, Scully, we'll find her in time." Mulder told her with more confidence than he felt.

"Do we even know where to look?" Scully asked plaintively, and no one said they did.

"No, I have an idea how to find out, though." Gibson told her.