The road from D.C. to Reston went through a beautiful landscape, with trees, rugged rock formations and vast horizons at certain points. The sun was shining from a clear blue sky, and Edward had the top down. From time to time he turned his head and glanced at Danielle over the top of his sunglasses. She had her head leaned against his shoulder and she looked more relaxed than he had ever seen her before. The radio was playing in the background, and the music seemed to somehow fit their surroundings, making both of them feel like they were watching the scenery of a movie.

Danielle awoke from her haze when the car started bumping. She raised her head to see that Edward had turned off and they were on a bumpy dirt road.

When he made a left turn, a fence and a guardhouse suddenly emerged from behind the trees.

An armed guard walked up to the car, just as Edward stopped in front of the gate. Edward showed the guard an ID card and the guard held out a device with a screen.

"Hand on the form sir," he said.

Edward put his hand on the screen and Danielle watched as it scanned his handprint. A green light shone and the guard nodded at Danielle. Edward raised his hand.

"It's all right. She's with me."

The guard looked speculative for a second, then he signaled to the other guard to open the gate.

"Thank you," Edward said and drove through.

The Mansion was everything Edward had said it would be - and more. When Danielle got out of the car, she took a minute to absorb all the impressions she collected of the building. Then Edward took her by the hand and they entered through the front door.

They had barely gotten through the door before a man stopped in front of them. He was tall and slender and the look on his face signaled total self-control. Except when he looked into Danielle's eyes.

"A civilian, doctor Marcase?"

He stared at Edward:
"You brought a civilian here?"

Edward shook his head.

"Doctor Cassian, I can explain..."

"And I expect you to do just that. My office - now!"

Doctor Cassian disappeared down the hallway and Edward followed him.

Danielle was left standing at the door, feeling more alone than ever.

She had been standing in the hallway for about five minutes when the front door was opened and Michael entered, accompanied by a woman.

"Danielle?" he said with an air of surprise:
"What are you doing here?"

She smiled:
"Edward brought me. He didn't tell me why, but he thought this was the only place I would be safe."

"Well, where is he then?" he asked.

Danielle was about to answer, when she heard steps behind her. Before she could turn around, Edward had put his arms around her waist and he held on tight. The other man looked at her.

"Miss Campbell, you are more than welcome to stay here at the Mansion until we are back. Come with me and I'll show you to your room."

Danielle turned to look at Edward, and when he nodded, she picked up her bag and followed doctor Cassian upstairs.

When Edward turned around, Michael and Kimberly were looking at him.

"It's a long story," he said apologetic.

"Make it short," Michael said:
"What is she doing here?"

Edward walked up to Michael and looked him straight in the eyes.

"I think I know who has been following her."

He paused.

"Well, who?" Michael asked.

"The Dawn," Edward said in a calm voice.

"What?" Michael yelled:
"Have you lost all sense of..."

He stopped when he realized that Cassian was standing right behind him. Danielle was standing next to him.

"Are we ready to go?" Cassian asked.

"What about...?" Michael began.

Cassian raised a hand.

"We'll talk about this when we get back. Right now I've got a car waiting outside."

He got Michael and Kimberly out of the door and turned to Edward.

"You too, Doctor Marcase."

Edward nodded.

"I'll be just a minute."

Cassian walked out and left the door open. Edward smiled at Danielle.

"I guess this is it," she whispered.

"Yes, this is it - for now," Edward answered.

He took her hands after having looked out. Michael, Kimberly and Cassian were all looking at him, waiting.

"If you have a problem, any problem, you just call the guards."

Danielle nodded.

"I know. Doctor Cassian told me."

The car horn awoke them both.

"I have to go."

"I know."

Edward was halfway through the door when Danielle grabbed hold of him.

"I love you," she whispered and smiled.

Edward smiled back:
"I love you too."

He held her face between his hands and kissed her softly.

Then the horn was honked again and Edward ran to the car. Ten seconds later he was gone. Danielle was alone at the Mansion.

After the first couple of hours of adjustment, Danielle was actually beginning to enjoy herself. She'd found the kitchen and after a quick glance through the cabinets, she knew she certainly wouldn't die of starvation. The cabinets were stacked to the limit, mostly with canned food, but Danielle felt like a queen.

Cassian had told her she would be all alone in the Mansion. All the guards and personnel would keep to their stations around the perimeter. The only human contact she would have would be the mail call or if she should need assistance of some kind. He had demonstrated the emergency button for her. There was one in every room of the house and if she pushed it, help would be on the way immediately. After having seen the look on Edwards face when he returned from her apartment, it didn't make her calm down completely.

There had been something in Edwards' eyes, something she couldn't identify, and it scared her to death. It wasn't so much the fact that she didn't know what scared him, it was the fact that something scared him at all. In his line of work she thought he had to be fearless. But something made him look at her as if he thought she would die, the minute he turned his back to her.

She looked out through the window in her room. She could see the two guards at the other end of the garden, watching the gate. No one could get in before Edward, Cassian and the others returned. She was safe. She knew she was.

That night she ate alone in the dining room. She had said hello to one of the guards who came to check on her while she was in the kitchen. Their short conversation was a welcome change in her solitude.

Now she was sitting at one end of a long, empty table, eating canned ravioli. It wasn't the most interesting dinner she could imagine, but what the Heck, the dinner conversation left much to be desired as well. She smiled to herself when she realized that the most plausible cause of death she was facing right now was that of boredom.

She turned from the table to look around the room. It was very tastefully decorated. The walls were painted pale terracotta and the dark wood antiques fit the Japanese ink prints perfectly. Even the thin white drapes fit. In fact, everything in the house was tastefully coordinated and Danielle was more than convinced that an interior decorator had been assigned to do the job.

There was just one thing that stuck out in every room of the house. Somewhere in the wall, Danielle had found a computer display. They were in all the rooms on the first floor. The one in the dining room was next to a large wooden door without a handle.

She'd been wondering about that door ever since she first saw it. The display consisted of buttons with the numbers from zero to nine and an enter button. There was a light panel on top with red glass and she figured because of the color, it was supposed to signal danger when it was on.

Normally she wasn't especially curious by nature, but after meeting Cassian and after all the problems at her apartment, she couldn't help but wonder.

Who were these people and what exactly was it they did for a living? She wasn't sure exactly what a biohazard team did, and Edward had been so busy, she hadn't had time to ask him. She stared at the display. There had to be a code that opened the door. But how many digits? God, there had to be more than a million combinations. She figured that if the code was supposed to be entered in a hurry, it couldn't have more than four digits. It would be crazy to make the code longer, because it heightened the possibility of forgetting the code or simply punch it in wrong.

It wasn't that she had some crazy idea that she could figure out the code and open the door. Her curiosity had simply gotten the best of her. So she was shocked when she punched in the fourth code and the door opened.

She didn't believe her own eyes. It was an elevator with silver gray walls and a sharp fluorescent light hidden in the ceiling. She stepped in and the doors closed behind her. She didn't have to do anything the elevator started by itself and she waited in anticipation for what was to come.

The first feeling that she experienced when the elevator doors opened, was disappointment. All that was revealed to her were gray corridors with humming fluorescent lights in the ceiling. The sound wasn't loud, but it was persistent and it soon started to hurt her ears.

She remembered the one time she had been admitted to the hospital. They had fluorescent lights as well, but she remembered them as being worse than these, because not only did they hum, they blinked too. The hospital had explained it with faulty wirering, but Danielle had them under suspicion for conducting a secret experiment with the patients. She had witnessed the effect the constant blinking lights had on people.

She looked around again. This place actually reminded her of a hospital perhaps in a more sinister way.

Then she froze. There was a glass door in front of her and she recognized the symbol on it. A red flower with three petals. It was a biohazard warning level four and suddenly Danielle realized exactly what Edward worked with. He was a virologist and he worked with the most dangerous viruses of them all, the ones without cure.

Danielle closed the bedroom door and sat down on the bed. She was sweating – probably because she had run all the way from the elevator to the upstairs bedroom. She looked out of the window. The view of the garden revealed a beautiful evening but Danielle wasn't quite able to enjoy it. She was thinking about the symbol. Biohazard. Edward had said that he was part of a bio-crisis team, but he hadn't told her exactly what it was he worked with. Why? Because of an oath of secrecy? She didn't think so. She thought Edward might have kept it from her out of fear. Fear that his line of business would scare her to death and she would run away from him, screaming.

She took a deep breath. If she didn't get her act together, she was going to prove him right, and that was the last thing she wanted to do. She had been alone in the world when Edward had come along. All the family she had left was an uncle and she didn't have any friends worth mentioning. She had never, in her wildest dreams, imagined that loving someone would be such an overwhelming emotion. And she did love him.

She leaned back and looked up at the ceiling. She had just realized it. She loved Edward. She smiled to herself. The feelings that rushed through her body were strong enough to overcome any obstacles, any fears. Even the fears she had about Edwards' job.

She got up and opened the door to the balcony. When she stepped out, the setting sun hit her body and she felt better, happier and not at all worried about the future. She decided to stay on the balcony for a while and enjoy the magnificent view of the garden that seemed to continue forever. She had just sat down in a deckchair when she heard a knock on the door. One of the guards came in with a long white box in his hands. He was smiling at her, when she came back into the bedroom to meet him.

"A messenger left this at the gate. It's addressed to you."

He handed her the box.

Danielle accepted it looking a bit confused.

"How can it be addressed to me? No one knows I'm here."

The guard smiled:
"Maybe it's from Doctor Cassian."

He left the bedroom and Danielle to wonder about the box alone.

But she wasn't wondering anymore. She had just one thought lingering in her mind. Edward. Edward had been thinking of her. She put the box on the bed and opened it. It contained a dozen of the most beautiful roses. In color they were dark enough to resemble velvet. She picked up the bouquet to really look at it when she flinched in pain. She looked at her right index finger. There was a drop of blood on it. She put her finger in her mouth, trying to stop the bleeding while she walked downstairs with the roses in the other hand. She had been so absorbed with the beauty of the flowers that she had forgotten that roses had thorns. She entered the kitchen. First she found a vase for the roses and put them in water. Then she searched through the kitchen cabinets and drawers to find a Band-Aid. She found some in the broom closet and after having rinsed the cut she put a wide piece of Band-Aid on it. Then she looked at the roses again. They were truly wonderful. She picked up the vase and left the kitchen. She wanted the flowers to be on the table in the beautiful living room.

It was sometime during the next morning that Danielle came down with a fever. She had woken up with a killer headache that no amounts of pills seemed to cure. She had retired to the garden where she had spent all morning in a hammock, shielded from the sun by a huge oak tree. When she went back inside she still had a headache and she was sure she had a fever as well. Because of her commencing muscle pains, she figured it had to be the flu. What else could it be? She wasn't particularly hungry, so she dragged herself upstairs where she collapsed on top of the bed.

She didn't get out of bed the next day. She just lay there from sunup to sunset, staring out of the window with blind eyes. She was too tired to sleep, too tired to eat, too tired to pick up the phone and ask the guards to get her a doctor. She could feel how the sheets were soaked in sweat, but she got dizzy even thinking about changing them. She quietly dozed of to sleep again, leaving the real world outside.

When Danielle opened her eyes next, the sun was shining outside. Her entire body hurt. Her muscles, her head, her intestines, even her skin hurt. In her fever stricken state she remembered why she had been afraid of Edwards work. She had always been scared to death of getting sick. She hated diseases and hospitals and her threshold for pain was very low. She laughed on the inside; her lips and lungs wouldn't cooperate in a real laugh.

She tried to imagine what she looked like now. Beaten by a disease, she couldn't believe it. She felt an itch on the thin skin underneath her nose and gathered the strength to raise her arm and scratch it. Then she stared at her hand in disbelief. It was covered in blood. What, she thought to herself. What is going on?

She gathered all the strength left in her body and then some and pulled herself up and out of the bed. If it had been possible, she would have screamed when she saw herself in the mirror. She had a nosebleed. That must have been the cause of the itch. But as she stared at her reflection – mesmerized by what she saw, she realized that her nose wasn't the only thing bleeding. Blood was streaming from her eyes, eyes that looked bloodshot as it was. And when she saw the bloodlines running from her ears and down her neck, she knew why the songbirds outside had sounded strange for more than a day now. This was not the flu. This was something else, something dangerous.

Without warning she threw up. She hadn't eaten in days, her stomach was empty, yet she still threw up. She looked at the puddle of blood on the floor, not quite realizing that it came from herself. Help, she thought, I have to get help.

She didn't know where the strength came from but she managed to get all the way from the upstairs bedroom to the downstairs hall without falling down the stairs and break her neck. She was exhausted but she hadn't dared to stop and take a breath, fearing that her superhuman strength would suddenly disappear and leave her stranded, helpless.

When she first started her mission, the goal had been to make it to the telephone, but halfway down the stairs she remembered that there was a perfectly good telephone in her bedroom, and she realized that the phone hadn't been her goal at all.

She was a good person. She cared about other people even if they didn't always care about her. And no matter how scared she was of this disease, of the pain, of the possibility of dying, she couldn't risk someone else's lives. Her goal was the basement, one of the sealed labs where she could lie down and concentrate on staying alive until Edward and the others came back. Hopefully in time.

She was ten feet from the living room door when her feet wouldn't carry her anymore. She could see the elevator door clearly when her legs collapsed under her and she fell to the floor. She didn't try to get up. She knew it was useless. Whatever strength she had had was gone and all that was left was an aching, bleeding body that felt like it was falling apart. Although she got chills from time to time, her fever was still dangerously high and the marble floor felt soothingly cool through her thin clothes.

This wasn't exactly the quiet week in the country she had hoped for. This didn't match the wonderful dream she had had on her first night here. A dream where she and Edward were together. With that final thought in her head, she drifted into a coma and the physical pain disappeared.