Carolyn Wheeler, TranStar Director of Public Relations, woke up on the floor of a secret medical laboratory tucked away in the depths of a secret research installation. Remarkably, she wasn't strapped to a bed or the subject of an experiment. At least not someone else's experiment. No, her situation had been largely her doing.

Well, some anyway. The other day, Carolyn had met a Typhon that looked and behaved like TranStar's CEO, Dr. Morgan Yu. Within an hour of that meeting, someone tried to kill her. That someone had evidently been the real Dr. Morgan Yu, except when confronted she'd turned out to be a Typhon as well. And after shooting Carolyn, the original Typhon Mimic had saved her life.

By turning into a Neuromod that she'd injected herself with.

"Bloody hell."

Carolyn sat up. Her first surprise was being able to do so. Dr. Yu had shot her with a gun, a fatal wound that evidently hadn't killed her after all. She reached up to her chest, pressed fingers into the rent fabric of her corporate uniform, and found only smooth skin beneath. Well now. Evidently Neuromods were more potent than even most of TranStar knew.

Especially when the Neuromod in question had actually been a Mimic that thought of herself as human. Humanish, anyway. And speaking of, Carolyn's next surprise was spotting the Typhon in question bent over Dr. Yu's terminals, scanning through hundreds of lines of code.

Carolyn stiffly rolled to her feet as she spoke. "Right. Morgan. Seems your plan worked. Still alive anyway. What are you-"

At that point, arms embraced her. Morgan had almost leapt from her swivel chair and now clung to the other woman, those warm arms evidently stiff with pent up fear and relief. At least, emotional tension was usually the reason for that kind of rigidity.

"I didn't know if it would work," Morgan breathed out.

Her lips were centimeters from Carolyn's ear. And all of a sudden, a rush of the most unexpected kind blossomed in the pit of her stomach, uncurling through her middle like a flower bud spreading it's petals for precious sunlight. She genuinely couldn't remember the last time she felt this...interested. Or was this aware of a lithe, fetching figure pressed against her.

"Where's that famous Yu confidence?" Carolyn said, chuckling because laughter was her only defense.

Morgan released her, or at least drew back enough to only be at arm's length. Literally, for she'd left her hands on Carolyn's shoulders. That face, so easily given to firmness, scientific detachment and even anger, was almost unrecognizable with the obvious relief there now.

"There's confidence and then there's crazy. I think we crossed the line between the two some time ago."

"Very possibly. How long was I out for?"

"About a day."

"What?"

Wait, what? A day? She'd had a schedule to keep. TranStar took it's scheduling and its security seriously! Doubtlessly, they'd have gone looking for her yesterday afternoon and, by nightfall, would have turned out search teams. How the hell could she possibly explain this away?

"How do you feel?"

"How do I feel?" Carolyn repeated, stunned. "How the bloody hell do you think I feel? I feel-"

...How did she feel? To this point, she'd been reacting for just about every moment since waking. But now she had the chance to actually think about that question, she realized…

She realized she felt extraordinary. There was a vitality there now she'd never felt before. Despite a day's sleep, she wasn't the least bit fatigued, not groggy or slow in any way. No pain in her injuries. No pain at all. Not even the slightest discomfort.

"First class," she finally replied. "Enough about me, though. We have a problem."

"We do and we don't. Why don't you have a seat while I get you something to drink? Any preference?"

"Tea."

"...I don't know how to make that."

Carolyn sighed and waved a hand towards the terminals. "Right. Have a seat yourself and I'll sort it. You look like you were in the middle of something important, why not finish that?"

With a wary nod, the Typhon sat and returned to reading line after incomprehensible line of code.

Except it wasn't incomprehensible. As Carolyn narrowed her eyes, she realized she was looking at some kind of trace log of every bit of Dr. Yu's correspondence for the last year. The locations didn't make sense, but not because she couldn't read them. No, they didn't make sense because there were emails being created and routed out of differing TranStar facilities, within seconds of each other in some cases. Each was staged to a central server and then pushed from it, so that receiving transcribes would only see a singular origin, but the back-end tables told a wholly different story. An impossible story.

She shook her head. It didn't make sense. It shouldn't make sense. There was only one thing for it.

Dr. Yu's lab had a small kitchen attached to it and Carolyn went to work, putting on a kettle and scrounging up some Darjeeling from a...well, from a box but needs must. Waiting for the water to heat provided an entirely different diversion, of course. For as Carolyn looked at the stove, she realized she understood its ignition system, understood the circuit that passed electrical current through the coil to create heat, understood the resistors that allowed the heat generated by that current to vary.

She shouldn't know that. Shouldn't know any of that. What had Morgan given her? Beyond healing, what more had she been left with?

Was she even human anymore?

The uncomfortable questions rattled around inside her head as Carolyn shuffled back to the terminals, two cups of tea in her hands. She set one down next to Morgan, on the desk, before pulling up a workbench chair and perching on it. The Typhon swiveled in her office chair, turned to face her and smiled again.

There seemed to be a little more there to that smile, each time Morgan gave it.

"I take it we're hidden down here?" Carolyn asked.

"Yes."

"No one's come looking for me?"

"I checked Dr. Yu's calendar," Morgan said. "She'd already updated your schedule to show you were in meetings with her for the rest of yesterday, before blocking out your calendar for today."

"She didn't want anyone wondering where I was," Carolyn muttered. She frowned into her tea cup. "So, she'd planned to kill me from the start."

The Typhon echoed the frown and cast her eyes towards the floor as she thought it over. "I think she never expected Project Cobalt to work at all. Now that it has, she arranged for Alex to be off-site, arranged for me to be eliminated, and likely planned to kill you to frame me. Or at least eliminate someone else who knew it'd been successful."

"...But it already was, wasn't it."

Morgan's gaze snapped up to her. "What?"

"That wasn't actually Dr. Yu you killed, was it. It was a Mimic. Like you."

"A Mimic like me," Morgan agreed. "But not Project Cobalt."

"What?"

"That's not the really important question," Morgan said, finally taking up her tea cup and sipping from it. It should still be too hot but it didn't look like the Typhon minded at all. "What is her actual end goal?"

"Killing all the Typhon, I should think." Carolyn lifted both eyebrows at the sudden sharpness in her ally's eyes. "Well, maybe not all…"

"I don't think so." Morgan gestured with her teacup towards the terminal monitors. "If she really meant to eliminate them all, she wouldn't be spending time on this pathogen idea, or making Mimics into...whatever that one was. A tool perhaps."

With an amused tone, Carolyn said "What would you do if you were her, then?"

"I know how to build a Nullwave Transmitter. Not just the hand-held variety, I could build one right now that could probably neutralize five kilometers of Typhon. Given the resources and a year, I don't see why I couldn't clear whole cities of them."

Carolyn sat there, stunned, her tea slowly cooling untouched. For the Typhon had made an incredibly good point. In the two years she'd been back on Earth, she'd known Talos 1 had contained it's Typhon outbreak with a massive Nullwave transmission. In her department, she'd heard of several other deployments on Earth but never in any sizable scale beyond securing specific footholds for military or scientific purposes.

Why hadn't TranStar just built swarms of Nullwave Transmitters?

"What do you think she's doing?" Carolyn asked, more to distract herself with conversation than out of any desire, or capacity, for thinking further on the topic.

"I have some guesses," Morgan said. She looked strangely reluctant to voice them, though, and at last she just shrugged. "The better question is what we should do next."

"Find Alex."

"Maybe." Carolyn knew the sound of that 'maybe'. It was the tone of someone who disagreed but didn't want to say it to your face.

"What do you think we should do next then?"

"I'm not sure," Morgan admitted. "I don't like you being mixed up in this, Ms. Wheeler. I want to keep you safe and-"

"Carolyn."

"What?" Morgan looked up from her tea cup again and stared.

"Morgan, after what we've been through in the past few days, I think we're on a first name basis now. Don't you?"

"...Carolyn." There was a testing quality to Morgan's voice when she said it but that smile told another story. The Typhon was pleased.

"Morgan," Carolyn said, returning the favor, watching that smile grow. "Now, to business. If I wasn't a factor, what would you do next?"

"I think-". Again, there was that tell-tale pause, the kind people used to give the appearance of deliberating over whether to admit something they'd already chosen to talk about. It was a way to add emphasis and Carolyn didn't mind its use for all that, but neither was she fooled. She simply waited. "I think I would find some Coral."

"Sorry?"

"I'm supposed to be a bridge, Carolyn. A way to get the Typhon to see humans as...not prey."

"And you can do that?"

"I'd like to try." Morgan's face grew implacable, full of the same determination that Talos 1's Director of Research often had.

"Well, there's no shortage of it. I imagine Idaho Falls has plenty."

"Seattle."

"Beg pardon?"

"It's not that far from Idaho. It's a major population center. It's also where the first outbreak happened. I'd like to start there."

Carolyn nodded, her eyes drifting to the terminals. "What do we do about Dr. Yu in the meantime?"

Morgan's face grew distant once more. There weren't many times that the Typhon reminded her strongly of the woman she was based on, but occasionally she had that look that Dr. Yu always had. Not quite cold, but definitely calculating. Theory leaving morality behind, intellect trumping compassion.

Except this Morgan had yet to be callous. Had yet to take a life, even, beyond killing the two Mimics they'd encountered. In fact, she'd been more careful about human life than most humans. Carolyn's lips twisted in ironic self-awareness as she had to acknowledge that humanity nearly rivaled the Typhon in terms of its tendency towards predation.

"I don't know what she's doing," Morgan said at last. "Until I do, Carolyn, I think it's best we avoid her."

"Any guesses?"

The Typhon's lips curled into a mirror of Carolyn's own smirk. "In this instance, I wouldn't care to guess."

"How long until she notices this one's missing?"

"We have as much as a week," the Typhon said, losing her smirk for a frown. "Possibly no more than a day. It depends on what exactly this Mimic was tasked to do. I have a good idea after reviewing her records but I don't have her memories so I can't say for sure."

Carolyn felt her smile slip off her face, this time mirroring Morgan. "Don't you?"

"Only the non-declarative ones. And only a subset of those. She's had several years of independent work, I believe, and while I can guess at what she's doing, two years is a long time for divergence to set in."

"Lovely." Carolyn downed the rest of her tea in a long swallow before turning around, facing away from the Typhon while she used a sleeve of her uniform to wipe the wetness from her lips. Even if she'd worn lipstick the other day, it would have long since worn off so there wasn't a trace of discoloration on the TranStar Industries corporate uniform. "So, how do we get there then? Just requisition another plane?"

"I don't think so."

Morgan pushed away from the computer terminal and powered off the display. Carolyn could see the other woman wore Dr. Yu's pistol now, neatly attached to an anchor point on the TranStar corporate uniform along the waist. The Typhon gestured up the stairwell leading out of the lab before deciding to go first after the human in the room hesitated.

This lab had been the only bit of privacy, only bit of real security they'd had since she'd woken up the other day and been paged down to meet with Alex Yu. It was tempting to stay another day. But that would only delay the inevitable. Which, frankly, had its appeal. Carolyn knew herself well enough to know that appeal was illusionary, though. Every hour they stayed, her anxiety would only grow, amplified by inaction and the growing certainty of discovery.

"Well, how are we getting there then?" Carolyn asked, still a touch disconcerted when she realized Morgan's answer had been a non-answer.

As she followed the trim figure of Dr. Morgan Yu up the stairs, the Typhon flashed a smile back over her shoulder.

"Come and see."