For Miss Parker, the downside of heading back the way she'd come was the seven hours of road she'd covered on her ill-fated trip east. Seven hours more behind the wheel, running ever lower on road trip snacks, the ache in her legs growing from seven hours of disuse. The task of teasing apart the convoluted network of back roads and unpaved mountain paths leading back to the rancher extended the return trip by a good half-hour, even with the benefit of a map. She told herself this was a good thing, that the house being hard to find was a positive sign for Jarod's long-term survival, but her eyes ached in their sockets by the time she got back, all the same. The sun had long since set, and Miss Parker found herself trying to be as quiet as possible as she pulled up to the darkened house and parked. It was almost as if she'd skipped ahead a day in time, the house in the same state she'd left it in: still dark and quiet, still illuminated by the single light in the kitchen, still guarded by Emily's and Margaret's respective cars in the driveway.

She was reminded vividly of a scene out of her childhood from before her mother died, when she'd been annoyed at some inconsequential and long-forgotten slight and decided to run away from home. Her parents hadn't successfully tracked her down, not for lack of trying, and in the end she'd slunk back of her own volition. She felt just as sheepish and defensive now as she had then. She also felt oddly deflated, having driven like hellfire across the state to warn Jarod that his old kidnappers were now out for his head, only to find everyone… asleep. And, if she was being honest, the news could wait until morning. Just because the Centre had ordered Jarod's murder didn't mean they'd found him yet.

Miss Parker tried the door: unlocked. She was glad for the excuse not to wake the whole house up; at the same time, a team of Centre sweepers would be able to get into an unlocked house as easily as she was doing now. She made a mental note to say something about it.

She made up her mind to go up to her bedroom and not bother about announcing herself until the next morning. Awake bright and early, Jarod and his family would likely notice the Westfalia in the driveway long before she woke up, avoiding any impetus to explicitly admit her mistake in leaving. Ideally, by the time she came down for breakfast they would already have come to terms with her return. No dramatic hashing-out, just slipping back into the fold as before.

She got as far as the base of the staircase to the third floor, when a sound made her freeze in place, one foot on the first step. The sound came from the second-floor bedrooms, a sound like a series of frightened shouts, but muffled by a gag. Miss Parker's mouth twisted — Jarod must be dreaming again. The most rational thing to do would be to continue upstairs, cram in a pair of earplugs, and go to sleep. She definitely should not check in on him. It was an uncomfortable chronic truth that Jarod had nightmares, there was nothing fixing that. By his own description — "you were the face of the dogs at my heels for years" — she might feature prominently in those nightmares herself. Her presence would not help matters.

Nevertheless, she drifted down the hallway towards the sound.

The door to Jarod's bedroom swung open easily under the slightest pressure from her fingertips. A personal work table stood closest to the door, surrounded by shelves upon shelves of curiosities and passing interests. There was a lit desk lamp at the table. Its warm glow fell across a stack of board games, all wrapped in their original plastic wrap save for one, Chutes and Ladders. A sticky note was stuck to the lid of the first untouched game: 'Enjoy! — Em'.

Miss Parker's gaze gravitated to the restless, contorting shape of Jarod in the bed at the far end of the room. His breath came in stricken gasps, laboured and loud. Pain, Miss Parker realized with a frown. He wasn't afraid or upset, he was in pain. She stepped closer. His eyes were closed tight and his hands grabbed convulsively at his leg, at the thigh that had been injured in his encounter with the racketeer in Philadelphia. Why would it be giving him so much pain now, when he seemed to have dealt with it just fine since leaving the hospital? A face swam into memory, a five-foot-nothing doctor with a permanent grimace of pity on her mouth.

"Unfortunately, I cannot promise the muscle spasm won't happen again," she'd said. His leg was spasming. By the twisted, strained cast to Jarod's face, it looked like agony. Again she stepped closer, and again closer still, until she'd reached the edge of the bed. She told herself she should back out now, that she wouldn't be able to help and would be much more likely to hurt, but her feet didn't seem to work that way. She sat down, the mattress bowing slightly under her weight. Her hand drifted with a vague intent to comfort, across the space between them, alighting hesitantly on Jarod's shoulder.

The second her hand made contact with Jarod's shoulder, Jarod's own hand shot out, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her towards him. Taken off guard, she lost balance and caught herself just short of falling against his chest. His eyes slammed open and he looked at her without recognition, still half-immersed in his dream. He was terror-stricken, eyes wild and rolling. Seconds passed; with it, recognition bloomed but terror persisted with a not insignificant lag.

"Miss Parker!" he gasped. Then he gasped again, not so much with shock but with pain. The hand on her wrist clenched, hard.

"Ow! Let go, Jarod," she hissed. He did so, his fingers peeling away and letting his arm fall limp against the bed.

"Sorry," he said, a hiccup of pain making his voice waver. "I thought yo-ou — agh! I thought you left." His voice was rough, strained by the effort of holding in a scream, and beads of sweat stood out along his hairline.

"I did. I came back." Now that she was face-to-face with him, it was difficult to even begin to tackle what had driven her back. As she struggled to foreground her priorities, the surrealism of the situation barraged her from all sides. The fact alone that she was sitting on Jarod's bed was distracting enough to begin with. Best to start with the concrete. He needed to know about the new level of danger from the Centre. "I made it all the way to Casper, but Jarod, I —"

Jarod cut her off with a fresh shout of pain. From the room next door came a snuffling snort, the sound of someone startled but not quite awakened. Emily, Miss Parker guessed.

"Your leg," she said. "It's the muscle spasm issue they talked about back in Philly?"

Jarod nodded his head mutely, his mouth pressed closed.

"Hurts."

"Yeah," she breathed. "Yeah, I'll bet."

Her mind churned. He was in so much pain, it hurt to look at him. But if he couldn't help himself, who could? He grabbed at her hand, seizing it on his second attempt and pulling it into his core, like a comfort blanket.

"I don't know why you came back," he said. "But I'm glad you have."

On another day, in another life, the painful earnestness of his comment might have prompted an eye-roll, a sigh, a gun muzzle in his face, etcetera. In the here and now, however, cynicism could wait. How could she possibly help him? Bouncing from idea to idea, her thoughts landed on her brief experiment with track and field back in elementary school. Even now, she was a pretty fair sprinter when she wasn't wearing heels — never fast enough to catch Jarod, but then, that had never been a contest of foot speed. A young Marcelle Parker had thrown herself into sprinting with little knowledge of how to approach it safely, and her bad habits had turned out more than a couple of charley horses. Whenever she'd been stricken with one, clutching her leg like her whole world was ending, only one thing had ever helped her. Then again, a charley horse was not a bullet wound. Was it remotely comparable?

She raised both hands so that Jarod could see them, and made sure he was watching as she slowly reached for his leg. If he objected, he'd have to say something or pull away.

"I'm going to try —" She didn't finish the thought aloud. Jarod caught her eye. He didn't speak, didn't even nod, only let his head rock back onto his pillow. She took it as permission enough, and pushed away what blankets obscured the injury.

Miss Parker refused to let herself think through the implications, the tangled motivations and ulterior motives involved in having a half-naked Jarod under her hands. There was a time and place for that, and it wasn't (couldn't be) there and then. All she had was the job in front of her. She laid her hands on the skin of his thigh, a stab of awareness running through her before she could stamp it down — Jarod, Jarod, Jarod. She moved her hands, trying to recreate how her mother used to massage the pain out of her legs post-run. Outside of the obvious necessity of avoiding the gunshot wound itself with her tentative fingers, she was in the wilderness without a map. And indeed, at first it seemed to be having the opposite of the intended effect. He tensed under her hands, tried briefly to squirm away.

"Keep still," she said, sharp and business-like. Jarod choked out a pained laugh. He watched her with reserved skepticism as she let instinct guide her to the muscles that had clamped down past endurance, and rolled the muscles under her hands. As she worked, Jarod's breath came in choked gasps; little by little, however, his breathing slowed. Little by little, he relaxed.

"It worked," he said, once she'd finished. He didn't sound surprised, only grateful. He smiled. "Thank you, Miss Parker. That was… very painful."

"Don't expect that again," she said, not meeting his eye. Her hands hadn't left his leg. "You were distracted, and we need to talk. You can fix it yourself, now, if it happens again. Next time, well. Next time you let me sleep."

"Next time…," said Jarod slowly, something like a tentative awe creeping into his voice. "Next time I should let you sleep?"

"Yes? Am I in an echo chamber?"

"Miss Parker."

She made a noise of exasperation. "What?"

"… Are you staying?"

Ah. Yes, that had been implied, hadn't it? She didn't remember explicitly making the decision, but suddenly it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. She considered him for a long moment. They'd been through so much, both in parallel and together. Would it really be the worst thing?

"Yes," she said. She stared hard back at him, daring him to argue. Not that she thought he would. "Yes, I'm going to stick around."

"Here?"

Where the hell else?, she pointedly did not say, because it was a fair point to raise. Here, at Jarod's mother's house, for the long term? It was a recipe for chronic awkwardness and, when the Centre found them, inevitable tragedy.

"Depends," she said instead.

"On?"

"Where you are." She didn't expand, because it was too early to jump into emotional vulnerability with both feet and admit in so many words that her decision to come back had nothing to do with charming Wyoming mountain vistas and everything to do with him. Whether it was about his safety, or his offer to find her a way out from under the Centre's thumb, or just about him, about Jarod-and-Miss-Parker, she didn't care to examine the nature of the pull at her gut too closely.

"Oh," said Jarod, soft and pleased. "Well. I'm here."

"I can see that, genius." She cleared her throat. "You said you had an alternative to working with the Centre that didn't involve constantly being on the run. I've seen both of those options now — working for the Centre and being on the run — and they both blow chunks. I want to believe it might be worth my time to hear you out."

Jarod sat up in bed. The blankets shifted and bunched up against Miss Parker's leg.

"So… did you leave because of Emily? I've seen you shout down armed bank robbers, I wouldn't have thought you'd be cowed that easily."

"I wasn't cowed, shut up," said Miss Parker. Jarod pressed his lips together, an aborted smirk. At the reminder of Emily, Miss Parker conjured an image of Jarod's sister pressing her ear against the wall between their bedrooms, growing progressively more angry listening to her brother and his long-time arch enemy murmur in the dark. "I just didn't want — it doesn't matter. I need to warn you, things have changed at the Centre. Sydney was in touch. They've changed protocol for the Pretender project. 'Shoot-to-kill' is on the table now. You have to be careful, Jarod. Any time you go hopping over to the next state to rescue a cat from a tree, there's every chance that a half-dozen sweepers will be there to use you for target practice."

She half-expected him to nod along and later reveal he'd known this new development for days. For once, Jarod did not deliver on his reputation for omniscience; at least, not entirely. He frowned.

"The reason for Raines's absence must be more serious than I thought," he said, partially to himself. "Lyle must feel pretty comfortable in his leadership role if he's already introducing such drastic changes."

"Should I bother to ask how you know Lyle has taken over for Raines?"

"Sources." Miss Parker shot him a look. He relented. "Mostly Angelo, though as you know, he hasn't been at the Centre recently. I'm not as informed as I usually am. If Angelo hadn't told me, though, signs would still point to Lyle running the Centre. He's never found catching me alive to be particularly important."

Miss Parker remembered unearthing the footage of the first ever Pretender experiment involving her brother: testing a procedure for killing and resuscitating Jarod. A fair point. She swung her feet up onto the bed and sat, criss-cross applesauce, on the top quilt.

"We'll have to make a plan for what to do if the house is found," she said. "First off, we need to start locking the doors. What kind of self-respecting fugitive doesn't lock their front door?"

Jarod ignored the crack, but smiled a soft, genuine smile.

"We," he echoed, mouthing the word like a personal prayer.

"Yes, we," said Miss Parker, refusing to be drawn into the sentimentality of the moment. "My bed's upstairs. Along with my duvet and toothbrush, my pyjamas and my favourite coffee mug, and everything else you smuggled out of the house in Blue Cove. I don't want to get smothered by a sweeper in my sleep any more than you do. Or, I don't know, maybe that's your thing."

Jarod barked a laugh, smothering it quickly with a quick glance at the wall between his bedroom and his sister's.

"I'm surprised you didn't bring the rabbit," Miss Parker said, half-serious. "You brought everything but the kitchen sink and the rabbit."

"I thought about it," Jarod admitted, scratching at his chest. "But she's happy in your outdoor hutch and she wouldn't have been safe from predators out here. I set her up for a while, but we could ask Sydney to check on her in a week."

Miss Parker shook her head. "Jo hates Sydney."

"Joe? You know it's a girl rabbit, right?"

"Jo, like Josephine. Named her after the character from Little Women." She'd never told anyone that. She cleared her throat. "By the way," she said slowly. "Jarod, you told me that's your dad's room, up on the third floor. Is your father — did the Centre…?"

"He's alive," said Jarod. "He's just grieving. He's having a hard time losing… oh, I guess you don't know his name, do you?"

"Major Charles? Of course I know his name."

"No, not Dad's name. The child who was created at the fertility clinic from my parents' samples. You met him."

She remembered, yes.

"You're awfully bashful about the word 'clone', huh?" Her brain caught up with her mouth. "Grieving, you said. He's… dead?"

Jarod nodded.

"As Dad tells it, he started getting sick not too long after they went off on their own. Poor Dad, he really loved that kid."

"Like he loves you?"

"I wouldn't claim to know whether that's the right comparison to make, but I do think not being able to save him hit him in the same spot struck when Kyle and I were kidnapped." Jarod let out a long, shuddering breath. "He'll come back one day, he just needs time to grieve. A bit of revenge probably wouldn't hurt, either. We're all a little angry here. Including Emily." He glanced up and caught Miss Parker's eye. The implication was clear.

"So I should forgive her for holding me at gunpoint, is what you're saying," said Miss Parker. Jarod hummed in confirmation. Miss Parker clucked her tongue. "I'll think about it."

"That's all I can ask," Jarod murmured with a sleepy smile.

After a comfortable beat of silence, he gave her a look of cautious consideration. His hand rose towards her face, fingertips leading. He watched her expression for signs that she'd spook and dodge his touch — they'd really only just begun, and she'd be well within her rights to swat his hand away — but they never came. His first attempt faltered, but on second pass he grazed his fingers along her jawline, his calloused thumb swiping at her cheekbone. Miss Parker would be lying if she said she minded; if he'd pushed forward, pulled closer, closed in, brought his mouth to hers, she might have gone with it.

Next door, Margaret snuffled loudly in her sleep.

Jarod and Miss Parker caught each other's eye and the moment dropped off a cliff: Miss Parker started to snicker and Jarod followed close behind with a low, rumbling chuckle. Somewhere in the confusion, Jarod's hand dropped away.

It was the least hostile conversation they'd had since they were kids. Miss Parker's mind time-travelled back to their childhood in the sub-levels, to that day when she'd wrapped her arms around a much younger Jarod and sobbed her heart out over a dying girl she'd known for all of four combined minutes. That had been natural, comfortable. Even after all the hate and mistrust and frustration the Centre had shoved between them over the years, that potential for existing naturally, comfortably with each other was still there. It was why, whenever they'd needed to, they'd been able to throw away the bulk of their enmity and become allies at a moment's notice. They'd been playing the roles of enemies for so long, but the real thing was still under there somewhere.

For years, he'd kept up a barrage of torment, playing with her life like his own personal dollhouse. He'd had his reasons, but they'd been no consolation on her end. For years, she'd kept him on the run, doing her damnedest to rip away every scrap of freedom he could get his hands on. If it hadn't been her, it would have been someone else; but the point was, it had been her.

How the hell could they extract something positive out of the wrongs they'd done to each other? It was daunting, near impossible.

But that wasn't a reason not to try.


Sydney had a new home on sub-level twenty-three.

When he'd refused to help set a trap to catch Jarod, he'd done so with clear eyes and no real optimism. Sydney hadn't ended up in front of a firing squad, proverbial or otherwise, which on some level was a surprise. There was nothing off the table these days when it came to Lyle's reactions, but for once he hadn't gone for the nuclear option. He had seen fit to keep Sydney alive… but confined to the same floor that housed Raines's stroke recovery unit.

Why? Sydney had a couple of theories. Perhaps Lyle genuinely thought he would be useful in getting Raines back on his feet, both literally and figuratively. This would be a misguided hope — Sydney had little to no experience in rehabilitative medicine, and could only recall scraps from what little exposure he had. Another possibility was that he hadn't decided what to do with Sydney. This was unlikely, in Sydney's opinion. Mr Lyle was a decisive personality, or at least enjoyed being perceived as such. The third and final possibility was that he was saving Sydney for a later purpose, and was merely putting him on ice in the meantime. This was the option that most troubled Sydney's mind when he put his head down at night on the too-thin pillow at the head of his relegated cot. So, according to Murphy's Law, it was likely the truth.

His first night down on SL-23, a physiotherapist named Matt briefed him on the run of the place. Sydney soon realized that he was far from the only person for whom residence of SL-23 was a case of mandatory confinement. None of the rehabilitative staff were allowed to leave; nor, of course, was Raines. Nobody up top could know their boss had fallen so far.

And indeed, Raines had fallen the cognitive equivalent of a plummet off a skyscraper to the sidewalk below. From Sydney's limited capacity for assessment and the snatches of conversation he'd caught from inter-disciplinary meetings, the best that could be said for Raines was that he'd progressed past a phase of post-traumatic amnesia. This was cheering up the rehabilitative staff immensely, as it meant that what they taught him in the morning wouldn't necessarily be forgotten by the afternoon. He'd also stopped trying to flee at every given opportunity. This was a relief, though not for the reasons Sydney might have anticipated. Raines was much more likely to hurt himself in an escape attempt than to get anywhere he shouldn't. He was largely ignorant of the fact that he had a right side to his body, so even with his walker, he tended to veer into walls. He seemed to understand the gist of what was said to him as long as the information was delivered in small chunks, but he could not get anything coherent out no matter what he tried to say.

The worst part in Sydney's book was that Raines seemed to have actually grown attached to him, in his own way. He wasn't sure if Raines knew exactly who he was, only that his was a more familiar face than those of his usual cycle of therapists.

"Hi," he greeted Sydney, for the thirty-fourth time that day. It was a word that came out easily, and it got used a lot. "Hi. I - want - some. No. Damn. I - want." He broke off with a growl of frustration. He pointed behind Sydney. Sydney looked around, following his finger: the elevator.

"Me too, Raines," Sydney sighed. "You hypocritical bastard. If anyone deserves to be trapped in a secret basement level, you do. A dose of your own medicine, straight into the IV."

He walked away, intent on putting as much square footage between him and Raines as possible, which wasn't saying much given the confines of their single isolated sub-level. He wouldn't allow himself to feel sorry for a man he loathed. When Sydney's brain teased him with the possibility of pity, he smacked it down with prejudice and forced into his mind's eye the memory of every atrocity Raines had ever dropped into the bottomless well that was the Centre. This worked like a charm. What didn't help, however, was the squeeze of guilt and disgust in his throat whenever he'd look at the fallen form of William Raines and have to put deliberate intent into hating him.


"Okay, fine, Miss Parker. Which time was the worst?"

"The worst or the weirdest? I don't think you want me opening a Pandora's box labeled 'worst torments'."

The rustle of blankets.

"Hm. Weirdest, then."

"Give me a sec." A pause. "No, that's obvious. The damn guillotine."

"… Oh. Ha. Yes, that was… certainly something."

"Was it? Was it? Shall we give it a rundown?"

"We don't need to —" Despite protests, a smile in his voice.

"First, you send me a deliberately obscure note with some fish guts dribbled on it."

"Geographically unique oyster liquor."

"Po-tay-to, po-tah-to. Fish gut note, along with a wax head. Then you send me little scraps of wax flesh, bit by bit, wasting the finite number of days I have on this earth. Meanwhile, I'm just hoping against hope the finished product will be worth it but no, nah, it's some guy I've never met before."

"You were going to meet Cox."

"But I hadn't before, so that's hardly an advance warning, is it? Stop interrupting me. Then you invite Sydney, Broots and I to the other side of the country, to attend an execution-by-guillotine of ourselves in wax effigy. You tell me, Jarod, what's that supposed to tell me? Is that supposed to be helpful?"

"I —" He breaks off into laughter. "I was telling you to be careful of him! That's helpful."

"It is not. And even if it was! Jarod? That could have been a voice mail. A letter, even. 'Watch out for the taxidermist OB/GYN, he's exactly as creepy as he looks.' No shit, Sherlock. You never could tell me anything helpful with any kind of efficiency."

"You already know I was wasting your time on purpose. That was the point, keeping you busy while I finished up my work."

"What was so important that time?"

Silence.

"Don't clam up now, oyster boy. Who was the mark?"

"It… um, he was a goth magician cult leader. He — stop laughing! He —" A chorus of sleepy giggles. Miss Parker's are muffled by a pillow. "He almost killed a girl."

"Damn. A true villain. How does one Pretend their way into a goth magician cult? Lots of black clothing?"

"And hair gel. And way too much eyeliner."

"Wait." An undignified snort. "Really? Do you have pictures?"


When the elevator dinged, Sydney was sitting at Raines's bedside, watching him cut through play-doh with a plastic knife and fork. Currently he was being tube-fed, but his rehabilitation team wanted him to eventually be able to get back to chewing and swallowing solids, and one of the steps was learning how to use utensils again. The main problem that morning was that he kept dropping the knife.

SL-23 was almost completely isolated from the rest of the facility. The operative word was 'almost'. The typical flow of the workplace rumour mill had slowed to a trickle, but each drop helped create a picture for Sydney of the current mindset of Centre employees. Things were restless up on the main levels. Up until Angelo's disappearance, Sydney would have guessed that the vast majority of employees would not be able to pick Angelo out of a line-up. In fact, the majority had likely not even heard of Angelo. Now, however, the news of Angelo's escape had compounded with the anniversary of Jarod's escape to create a vortex of derision for the Centre higher-ups.

"It's nothing but nepotism," Sydney had overheard an occupational therapist grumble as she cut out some flash cards for Raines. "He doesn't know the first thing about running this place, he just inherited the position. Like we're in England or something, and Mr Parker was the old king. The king is dead, long live the king!"

The therapist team had a whole range of complaints about Mr Lyle. It was their favourite topic, if Sydney was any judge. The sorest points tended to be the nitty-gritty of everyday office work, and how Lyle's unpredictability tossed dozens of tiny, hail-like inconveniences into the machinery of the average employee's day. Tiny inconveniences didn't sell when decorating a smear campaign, however, so the favourite topic was still the Centre's failure to re-capture Jarod and to prevent Angelo's escape. Really, they'd take any opportunity to kvetch. The only time Raines's rehab team stopped complaining about Centre administration for more than ten minutes out of their waking hours, was when Lyle was around.

Speaking of which, the elevator dinged.

The elevator hadn't dinged since a pair of mute sweepers had escorted Sydney down to SL-23. There was a code above the button that summoned the elevator, and none of them knew the code. Needless to say, signs of life from the elevator were cause for comment. Sydney tore his eyes away from the sight of William Raines dropping his knife for the sixth time in as many minutes, and looked to the door, listening for telltale signs of the visitor coming down the hall to Raines's bedroom. Moments later, Lyle appeared in the doorway, relaxed and smiling.

"There's my favourite stroke survivor," he said jovially. Sydney scowled.

"Hi," said Raines. "Ah - ahm. March. No. No." He pointed at his temple and shook his head.

Lyle clapped Raines on the back.

"I know, champ. You know what you want to say, you just can't get it out."

Raines nodded vigorously in an expression of such profound relief, it was embarrassing to witness. He's imprisoned you, Sydney wanted to shout, but what would be the point? For one, Raines was just as much of a bastard as Lyle was. Any instinct to favour Raines over Lyle was only Sydney's natural inclination to root for the underdog in any given conflict.

"To what do we owe this honour, Mr Lyle?" said Sydney.

"I came down to talk to you, actually, Sydney," said Lyle. Just like that, Raines faded into the background. "I wanted to let you know that you don't need to worry, your misjudgement concerning Jarod has not ruined things for us nearly as much as we feared."

Sydney's mind went to one of the images from the dream he'd had the night before: Jarod, bleeding out on the floor of an office building, a fusion of Sydney's worst fears and the recent memory of stumbling upon a gory crime scene in Philadelphia. In real life, the body had been Lorefice's; in the dream, it had turned out to be Jarod. The sight of Jarod on the floor with a pool of blood collecting under his perforated gut was burned into Sydney's retinas.

"Is that right," said Sydney flatly, maintaining an air of disinterest.

"Your refusal to cooperate has given me time to assess possible employee response if Jarod were killed by the Centre. If the projections are accurate, there would be some less-than-pleased reactions from the workers behind desks here in particular. The office staff see Jarod as a symbol of the glory days of the Centre, I'm told, whenever that was supposed to be. They want to see him under lock and key, not dead. Employees who are out in the field understand hard decisions when it comes to Jarod a little better."

"Since when are you interested in currying the favour of the employed masses?" asked Sydney.

"Jarod is just a ticky box to check as it is, Sydney. We're bigger than one basement savant. I know when to toe the line when it will keep the mob placated. Anyway, you'll be pleased to hear that, with help from a vital informant, I'm working hard on a plan to bring Jarod in. Relatively unharmed."

Sydney shuddered. He'd seen a 'relatively unharmed' Jarod before.

Lyle caught the reaction.

"Someone walk over your grave, Syd?"

"Get to the point," said Sydney, barely audible. "You have a plan?"

"Oh, that was the point," said Lyle. He granted Raines a patronizing grin, a token gesture to include him in the conversation. Raines grinned back, baffled. "I'm not telling you what I have in the works. This may come as a surprise, Syd, but I don't trust you. You showed me your true priorities when you refused to play ball on the whole shoot-Jarod-in-the-head thing. No, you'll have to wait for the results along with everybody else."

"Jarod," said Raines, latching onto the familiar name. "Jarod. Find Jarod."

"That's the plan, Bill," said Lyle, with another companionable slap to Raines's back. He looked at Raines's butchered playdoh. "Tell you what, I'll see about getting you some better food provisions before I leave. That stuff looks awful."

Sydney didn't bother to correct him. Before I leave. Lyle was leaving… somewhere, with a plan in place to find Jarod. It should have been business as usual, with Sydney's years-long history of chasing after Jarod himself. Instead, the thought filled him with tar-like dread.


To Miss Parker's horror, she woke the next morning at the foot of Jarod's bed. The two of them had talked into the night. Their rehash of old, mutual slights had started out as intentionally aggressive catharsis, and had ended up with Miss Parker wheezing silently, tears of mirth streaming down her cheeks. At some point, she must have set her head down on her arm, must have closed her eyes while listening to Jarod talk. She wouldn't be telling him so anytime soon, but the man had a wonderful voice to fall asleep to.

She'd woken up alone. The bed was empty and unmade, the top quilt pinched around the outline of Miss Parker's sleeping form. Jarod must have woken early again, and he wasn't the only one. Miss Parker could hear someone downstairs, whistling tunelessly, and another set of footfalls on the second-floor balcony. She cursed internally, and then for good measure, she cursed externally.

"Shit," she said.

Nothing had happened. A lot had happened, but not in the way Margaret or Emily might think if either of them spotted her creeping out of Jarod's room first thing in the morning. Well, Margaret might assume they'd had sex. Emily might assume that Miss Parker had made an unsuccessful play for a roll in the sheets, or more likely that she'd been rooting through Jarod's things. She wasn't sure which assumption would be preferable. Either way, she didn't want to get caught in that part of the house, let alone on Jarod's bed.

She listened hard at Jarod's door for a solid minute before she tried pushing the door open. As long as she could make it past the threshold and into the living room, she'd be home free. She tip-toed down the hallway, and was rounding the corner when —

"Good morning."

Jarod had let himself in through the door to the balcony, soundlessly.

"Morning," said Miss Parker, voice croaky with sleep. To her surprise, she was smiling. Nothing had happened, not a thing had happened, except for that vital first step. They'd started to repair something that had been dented when Miss Parker left for boarding school, and shattered when she took the assignment to bring him back to the Centre.

"How'd you sleep?" he asked.

She was deprived of the chance to reply when Emily shouted up from the first floor.

"Jarod, is that you? Could you come give me a hand?"

Jarod and Miss Parker exchanged a silent look.

Jarod tried again, "Did you —"

"Jarod!"

Emily was persistent, damn her.

"Later," said Miss Parker. They filed down the stairs into the kitchen, Miss Parker following closely after Jarod. Downstairs, every available inch of counter space was covered in steaming, newly-sanitized glass jars.

"Morning, J. Could you clear off the table for me? I'm making huckleberry jam and I need more — oh." Emily turned, double-fisting two spotless jam jars, and spotted her new nemesis. "You're back."

"A stunning grasp of the obvious must be a genetic trait," said Miss Parker. She managed to keep active hostility out of her voice, but only just. While she controlled her tone, her words ran amok. "Since you two weren't raised in the same environment. We've solved the nature versus nurture debate. I'll make a note to tell Syd."

"I saw the Westfalia but I hoped… well." Emily made a long-suffering face. "You know what I hoped. Is that what you were doing while you were gone, then, reporting back to Sydney? Jarod might have a soft spot for that man but I don't have my brother's biases. You want to stay with us? Step one is cutting off contact with those child abductors at the Centre."

"You don't have my biases, true," said Jarod, with a slight frigid edge to his voice. "You also don't have the information or experience that I do, Emily. Miss Parker wasn't reporting back, she was getting information on what the Centre is up to now, regarding the Pretender project." This wasn't true at all, but Miss Parker refrained from correcting him. It could wait. "Apparently her brother has introduced a shoot-to-kill protocol."

Emily went pale.

"For you," she finished, voice breaking on the last word. Not for the first time, Miss Parker was forced to reconcile the fact that Emily's hostility stemmed from protectiveness and fear for the safety of her family. It wasn't a palatable thought.

"Yes. Don't tell Mom," said Jarod. "It will only worry her."

"Yeah," said Emily through a humourless half-laugh. "And I thought I couldn't get any more on-edge." Her eyes flicked to Miss Parker and gave her a look of assessment so thoroughly Jarod-like, it was a little eerie. "So, you were doing reconnaissance all yesterday?"

"Yep," said Miss Parker, popping the P.

Emily nodded slowly. "Right. Here's me assuming the worst. And you needed to bring your suitcase along with you, because…?"

Jarod looked ready to interject, but Miss Parker had had enough.

"Reasons," she spat. "You don't have anything better to do than interrogate me, officer?"

Emily smiled sweetly.

"You know, Miss Parker," she said. "I really don't."

In her mouth, Parker sounded like an insult.