Sydney struggled to process the words that had just come out of Sark's mouth. Did he really just say that Will Tippin, the man she trusted most in the world no matter what, was betraying her to the people she hated it? It was too impossible to even start to comprehend.

"I know it's hard to believe, and I know you probably want to kill me for being the one to tell you, but Will has been betraying you," Sark said again, interrupting her attempts to theorize why the words coming out of his mouth had to be false.

"How? Why? How?"

"I'm not sure. You know I've never liked the man, but I couldn't understand it either when I first found out. I still don't fathom it completely."

"And you knew all this and didn't tell me?"

"I can't explain that one. The least I can do is tell you that I wasn't in my right mind. If I had remembered what you and I had together, I wouldn't have hesitated in telling you. But the Covenant took that away from me."

"Don't start blaming everything on the Covenant," she warned. "They may have taken your memories, but you saw how much pain I was going through with this whole mole business. It was your choice, and your choice alone, not to tell me about Will."

"I know. I accept full responsibility. If you want me out, I'll go right now."

She rolled her eyes at him and sat back in bed. "I don't understand. It's just not possible for Will to betray me like that. You must be mistaken."

"Sydney, I worked with him. He was the one who set up your Tokyo mission where I was supposed to find and kill you."

"But he wasn't even supposed to be on that mission with me."

"No, he wasn't. I don't know how he got you to take him along as your partner instead of Vaughn."

"Amy," Sydney said, a realization dawning in her eyes. "He had Amy ask me if I could take him along. The bastard used his own sister." Sark could see the wheels churning in Sydney's head as she started to put it together. "His sister... Will stabbed his own sister?"

"I'm sorry to say that was a personal jab at me."

"How could that be aimed at you?" she asked. Before he could answer, she hopped out of bed. "I have to get out of here. I can't take being in this place with you sitting there."

"Where are you going to go?" he asked.

"I don't know," she answered as she slid on a pair of pants and a sweatshirt.

"When are you going to be back?"

"I don't know." She slipped out of the door without saying another word.

She didn't even realize where she was going until she got out of the subway car and recognized her surroundings as Brooklyn. Too tired to wonder, she let her feet lead her out of the station and down the street to the hospital that Amy was staying at. She had to see her friend's face. It might help her figure out how Amy's own brother could find himself stabbing her.

Wiping the tears out of her eyes, she signed in at the nurse's station under the pretext of visiting some patient in the long-term care ward. She knew there was no way they'd allow her to go to the ICU in the shape she was currently in.

After making sure that no one was watching her, she slipped down the intensive care hallway to the room she knew Amy was placed in a few days earlier. There was a figure sitting in the chair next to Amy's bed. It took Sydney a moment to be sure, but when it was clear that the man was not Will, she let herself into the room.

"I'm sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to see if Amy had woken up yet. There are some things I need to talk to her about." She looked around the room. "And she's really not safe here."

"It's all right, Syd," the man said without turning around. "As long as I'm here, she's safe."

The voice made her heart freeze in her chest. The last time she had heard that she was standing over him with a knife in her hands. "Noah?" she choked out.

Noah Hicks turned and gave her one of the half-cocked smiles she had always loved. "Hey, Syd. How are you doing?"

"You're supposed to be dead."

"And so are you. I heard you had been killed in that fight with Allison Doren." He looked down at the woman whose hand he was holding. "And Amy is supposed to be dead, too. There's a lot of supposed death going around these days."

"You're alive. And you're sitting at Amy Tippin's bedside." Sydney was trying desperately to grasp the situation she had just been thrust into. Why couldn't anything ever be cut and dry?

"Amy is my girlfriend, Syd. I love her with my whole heart, and there's nothing that will keep me from her side." He looked up at her, and she saw the genuine emotion he was speaking of reflecting in his eyes. "I can't believe that I wasn't here to protect her from whoever did this. I shouldn't have let her convince me it was a bad idea to meet her at the airport. I told her that it wasn't safe to meet you, but she wouldn't listen. She was too concerned with being a help to you."

"Wait a second. We need to rewind a few steps. So, you have been dating Amy? What about Jason? He was here with Will when Amy first got stabbed. He introduced himself as her boyfriend. He's been by her side non-stop since we brought her in."

"Jason is an old friend of Amy's. She convinced him to pretend like he was her boyfriend when Will first realized that she was seeing someone. Amy didn't want her brother to know that she was involved with me. She knew the history that we had, and she was afraid that you had told Will."

"This is why Amy has been acting so weird lately. She was trying to cover-up the fact that she was seeing you. Why wouldn't she want to tell me?" Sydney finally stepped into the room and closed the door behind her.

"Because you and I were in love once. Because I'm still a known killer. Because I'm supposed to be dead. Because you and I never resolved what we had. Do you need me to go on?"

"No. That's quite enough really."

"Amy and I have been meeting in secret for the past few months. It's clear that neither the CIA nor my multiple employers would be happy about our relationship. So, we see each other whenever we can find time. I hate the way that it felt like we were conducting some adulterous affair. Meeting in secret at her brother's apartment or keeping separate cell phones for our conversations with one another."

"I still can't believe that Amy was keeping her relationship with you secret."

"You need to get past that fact. Amy and I met on one of her missions. I was undercover on an assignment for my currently employer. We both got caught and shoved into the tiniest prison cell imaginable. Much to our surprise, we realized that we had something in common. Or someone."

"So you two bonded over me?" Sydney said. "This is unbelievable."

"You and I know that a relationship between us would never work, Syd. It just wasn't in the cards."

"How are you not dead?" Sydney hissed, tired of him beating around the topics she really wanted addressed.

"You had to leave Australia rather quickly the day that I got accidentally stabbed. A maid found me bleeding on the kitchen floor within minutes of you leaving the house and called an ambulance. It took me a few months, but I recovered."

"Does anyone ever die?" Sydney asked as she took a seat in the chair next to Noah.

"I decided that the career path I had chosen might not be the best for me. So I gave up the freelance killing. I've been mainly sticking to snatch-and-grabs jobs since then. I'm a whole lot less likely to get stabbed during those. And then there's Amy. Since meeting her, I don't want to risk my life anymore."

"Interesting development. But you still hire yourself out to the highest bidder, right?"

"It's a living. For now, it's a living I can't afford to give up."

Sydney shook her head as she realized that for a brief moment, she had forgotten why she came here in the first place. "I don't have time to sit here and try to figure this whole new development out. I have to find Will."

"Will's been out of the country on business for the past few days."

"Shit," Sydney said.

"Is there a problem?"

"Nothing huge. He just stabbed his own sister to keep her from telling me that he's been sabotaging me."

"Will stabbed Amy? Are you crazy, Syd? Will loves Amy. He would never cause her any harm."

"I thought the same thing, too. But I have a reliable source that tells me Will is the one who has been trying to interfere with what I've had to do the past couple of weeks. He even tried to kill me. I don't know why he's doing it, but Will is the one behind all this." Sydney looked up at where Amy was laying motionless. "If she would only wake up, she'd be able to tell me that it's the truth."

"If wishes were reality, she wouldn't be in a coma right now," Noah said with a sad smile. "Who told you all this reliable information about Will?"

"Julian Sark."

"The Covenant's little puppet? And you believed him?"

"He's not the Covenant's puppet. And yes, I do believe him." She glared at him. "You know some things have changed in my life since you were supposedly killed. You're not the only one keeping secrets from everyone else."

"You were never good at keeping secrets."

"Well, you obviously didn't know I was romantically involved with Sark so I must be getting better." As a look of shock appeared on his face, she added, "And I have been with him for close to three years now."

"If that was meant to prove a point, Syd, I think you did," he said as he rubbed the sides of his face.

"Things are different."

"Yeah, things are different."

The silence between them was awkward and would have become worse if Amy hadn't chosen that exact moment to start to groan softly. Sydney stood up and looked at her friend's vital signs closely. "I think she's waking up, Noah."

"Don't interrogate her the second she realizes you're here, Sydney," he warned.

"And don't you start issuing me orders after all we've been through," she warned back. "I've gotten a little more impetuous since you last saw me. I'm liable to act out violently if you continue to piss me off, Noah Hicks."

"Would you two stop fighting?" Amy grumbled, still keeping her eyes shut. "A girl can't get some decent shuteye with that racket going on."

"I bet this isn't the joyous welcome back party you were expecting, huh, honey?" Noah said, stroking the side of her head endearingly.

"Amy, it's Sydney."

"You're here... and Noah's here." She said as she opened her eyes a crack. "And you haven't killed one another? That's strange."

"Sydney and I can get along when we have to. How are you feeling?"

"Like someone stabbed me in the gut and put me in a coma which I've only recently come out of. So, on the whole, not too bad."

Sydney gave Noah a nervous look before speaking to Amy again. "I figured out what happened to you, Ame. I'm so sorry."

Amy looked up at her, and Sydney could see the tears of pain and hurt in her eyes. "I never thought he would do this kind of thing. Not in a million years. I didn't know that Will was capable of inflicting harm, especially on me."

Sydney let out a small breath of relief when Amy said her brother's name. Although she was still thrown off about how her attention was called to the idea that Will was her betrayer, she was glad to know that she didn't have to worry about the genuineness of Sark's words.

Now that just left her with learning how to deal with the fact that her amnesic boyfriend was just remembering how he felt about her, that said boyfriend had almost betrayed all the trust she had placed in him, that the man who had gotten her through the toughest times in her life was now the one causing them, that one of her best friends happened to be in the hospital because of her, that she still needed to take down the Covenant, that she still had to tell her boyfriend that she was currently pregnant with his child...

She shook her head. There was just too much for her to do. She couldn't be focusing on the big picture right now. It was too overwhelming. Her cell phone rang.

Giving Amy a weak smile, she walked out into the hallway and flipped the phone open. "Sydney."

"Hey, Syd. It's Will."

Her stomach churned at the sound of his voice. "Will. Amy woke up."

"Oh, she did? Did she have anything important to say? Like who the bastard was that did this to her?"

"Can we stop playing games here? I know it was you, Will. You don't have to keep fishing around to see if your sister told me. At least give her that much respect."

"That's ridiculous. Why the hell would I stab my own sister? If this is Amy's attempt to get me back for the prank I pulled on her last Halloween, tell her it's not funny at all."

"Cut the crap. You work for the Covenant, Will."

"I do not. Listen, Syd. I know these past few weeks have been hard on you, but you usually manage to keep your rational side in times of stress. Think. Why would I stab my own sister?"

"I don't know. That's something you're going to have to tell me."

"Oh god," Will said. She could hear him sit down heavily on the other end of the line. "You're not kidding. You actually think I did that to Amy? This is like that whole second double incident all over again."

"Except this time, you are who you say you are, and you actually did do it."

"Sydney. I did not stab my sister."

"Didn't you hear me earlier? She's awake. She told me everything. There's no way to hide it unless you want to start telling me that it's really her working for the Covenant."

"Amy is not working for the Covenant. And neither am I. I don't know what's going on, but I think you and I need to talk in person."

"I am not meeting you somewhere so you can try to kill me again."

"Syd, I did not try to kill you. I swear."

"Then turn yourself into the CIA. Maybe I'll talk to you when you're behind a prison cell."

"If that's what it takes, I'll do it."

It threw Sydney off that he was willing to turn himself in. Either he was extremely good at covering his trail or he really was telling the truth when he said that he wasn't the one who stabbed Amy.

But that would make Sark a liar.

She had seen the emotion on his face earlier that night. He wasn't lying to her. What he had said hurt him to tell her. He had given up a lot of information.

But on the other hand, she had seen Will's face when he came running into the emergency room the day she found Amy stabbed. He had been genuinely concerned for his sister. Unless he was an incredibly good actor, that concern was real.

"Syd?"

"We can meet. Two hours in my penthouse. You come alone, but I won't be." She flipped the phone before she could hear him say yes. She really didn't want to know if he was going to show up or not.

Rubbing her head in confusion, she went back into the hospital room, still trying to decide if Sark or Will or maybe both were lying to her.