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The Not-So-Average Girl

"You think that Zane is Sylar?" Mohinder looked at Audrey incredulously as the three of them sat in a small diner.

"There was a body found in that apartment a few hours after you left it, and police reports positively identified it as Zane Taylor," the FBI agent nodded.

"How did-?" Mohinder began.

"The same M.O.," Matt nodded grimly. "Top of the head removed and the brain… well, it had been picked at, certainly."

"Which means that Sylar can do what Zane could do," Mohinder sighed. He found himself hoping that Zane's ability only worked on inorganic compounds; Sylar had only focused on taking or analysing his victim's brains so far, but if he chose to 'step up' and had the ability to do something like that to his targets…

"I've got some of my contacts at the agency keeping the reports quiet so the news doesn't go blaring it out and tip the guy off that we might know about him," Audrey said, her grim expression making it clear that she wasn't comfortable with the situation. "If he thinks you don't know about him, that might just give us an edge in working out how to stop this dick before he kills anyone else."

"I… might have an idea on that front already," the Indian doctor nodded tentatively. "Zane- Sylar- suggested that he could join me in trying to make contact with other people with abilities as part of my research."

"You agreed?"

"Keep in mind that when I accepted that offer I didn't know he was anything other than a young man with an ability he was trying to adjust to," Mohinder said defensively. "My point is that I didn't tell 'Zane' about you or my concerns about Sylar; if we can find another person with an ability, we might be able to… well, set a trap?"

"Set a trap?" Matt repeated. "You mean we use a person as bait?"

"Could work…" Audrey nodded carefully.

"You're not serious?" Matt looked at her in shock. "We've seen what this guy can do-"

"We've seen what he can do when he at least has some idea what he's up against and has no reason to think anyone's going to fight back," Audrey corrected him. "If we can set up a situation where we know who he's going after and he doesn't know we're waiting for him, we might be able to catch him off-guard."

"With all the powers he has to have by now?"

"We know he can't do what I do or he'd have probably already worked out that you're working with us," Matt pointed out. "Add in that whatever happened in Odessa saw him apparently get hurt, and we have to assume he's still got human vulnerabilities; the trick is hitting him hard enough so that he can't defend himself."

"Got to be worth a shot, right?" Audrey shrugged as she looked at Mohinder. "Trust me, I'm not happy that we're going to have to put someone else at risk than you are, but right now it's our best bet if we're going to smoke him out."

Mohinder looked solemnly at the FBI agent for a moment, but finally nodded in grim understanding.

"Very well," he said. "How shall we do this?"

"Hah!" Peter yelled, ducking under a swipe from Claude's improvised staff and firing a quick burst of green fire at the weapon. Claude ducked around the blast and countered with a kick to Peter's chest, only to overshoot when Peter shrank down just enough for the blow to pass over his body, following the dodge up by lashing out with a burst of enhanced strength that sent the invisible man staggering back.

"…Nice job," Claude said, rubbing his chest as he looked at Peter in grudging admiration. "You really got all those just last night?"

"Ran into them all in a club," Peter nodded, looking thoughtfully at his hand as he generated the green flame from that dark-haired girl had used when fighting with Kim. "I think that's why it's so easy for me to tap them all at once; I met all four of them at the same time, so I think of the same emotions when I'm trying to tap their abilities."

"Four?"

"Well, the fourth guy had some ability to make copies of himself, so… well, I'd rather not try to tap that one," the former nurse shrugged awkwardly. "I don't know how much independence any clone I created that way would have, but I think we've got enough trouble making sure I get my head around these abilities without adding even one more me to the mix."

"Good call," Claude nodded. "So long as you know how not to tap that particular gift when you don't want to, that's probably the main thing right now."

The invisible man looked Peter over with a surprisingly serious grin. "Got to admit, you're already better than the other empaths I've met before; hard to be sure how you're matching up in terms of strength, but you've definitely got them beat for variety."

"Strength?"

"Thing you've got to realise about copying powers is that they're never going to be quite as strong as the original one," Claude explained as he leant against the wall with a thoughtful smile. "Never got an exact figure, for obvious reasons, but it's always been agreed that anyone just copying an ability can match the other guy when they're in the same room, but you're not going to be able to do everything the original owner can do with it when you're away from him; generate less electric oomph, can't move quite as fast as the original speedster, that kind of thing."

"Huh," Peter nodded at that bit of information, raising his hand to generate a brief green blaze before he snuffed it out. "Well, that's something to keep in mind."

"Don't use it as an excuse to get cocky," Claude observed, his smile shifting to a more solemn stare. "Just because you can't pack the same level of power as the original on your own doesn't mean that you couldn't tap a fair portion of the wrong power if you lose your focus; we still need to be sure you know what you're doing with all this."

"Good point," Peter nodded, moving into a new combat stance while trying not to think about a problem with Claude's description.

The idea that he could only equal the people he copied at best made sense, and it made even more sense that he found it easier to copy their power when he was right next to them… but if that was the case, how had he been able to beat that Haitian guy when he was tapping into the other man's negating ability? He understood that Kim's ability made it easier for him to access the powers he'd copied (he still wasn't sure who that 'giving orders' thing had come from), but he didn't think that would make him more powerful than the original owner…

"This is about Miss Evans, right?" Bennett looked curiously at Thompson as he walked into the other man's office.

"Good guess," the other man nodded.

"Hardly a guess; she's the only new prisoner in Level Five right now, and you and I are the senior operatives on-site right now," Bennett said, folding his arms as he looked at his colleague; he didn't like being kept away from his search for Claire or Peter Petrelli, but the best way to avoid attracting attention was to keep acting as normal. "So what's she capable of?"

"Well, she's no Sylar, but she's an interesting specimen, certainly," Thompson observed with that slight smile that Bennet doubted anyone in the company could interpret fully. "She has a uniquely malleable bone structure, and she can even reshape her internal organs as appropriate for the person she's impersonating. There appear to be certain limits in terms of how far she can change her size, but how much of that is an actual limit and how much it's just psychological we don't know."

"Psychological?" Bennett repeated, curious despite his current personal concerns.

"Miss Evans prides herself on her appearance above all else; some of our on-staff psychiatrists speculate that she can't, for example, make herself fatter because she just doesn't want to be fat rather than because she can't change herself that way. That said, there are also some theories about her actual limits; research seems to indicate that she's only able to turn into people she's met in person, but there's some question about if she could become someone if, for example, she saw a photograph of that person with someone she'd become already."

"Which would allow her to compare a known form to an unknown one and imitate it without direct experience," Bennett nodded in understanding. "But your point is that she can't just imagine someone to look like; she always needs to imitate an existing template?"

"As far as we can tell so far," Thompson said. "With that in mind, I had the idea that it might be interesting to see what would happen if she and Miss Wilmer had a chance to compare notes in terms of their adaptability."

"You think she's worth recruiting?"

"I think she's worth testing, certainly," Thompson nodded. "She's not a candidate for permanent residence in Level Five, but whether she has the right mentality to be an asset is another matter."

The situation with Isaac Mendez's paintings were still his priority, but Bennett had to concede that this kind of mystery was one reason he'd stayed with the Company this long; in a grim way, it was morbidly fascinating to see what people could be capable of once they manifested…

Standing alongside the man he was increasingly starting to suspect was Sylar, Mohinder wondered if it would have been better to remain in ignorance. Matt and Audrey had each assured him that it would be safer to avoid doing anything to tip the man off that they might know about him before they were ready to stage their trap, but the idea that he might be standing right next to the man who'd killed his father…

Even as Zane/Sylar 'confirmed' that he was ready, standing outside Smither's Garage, Mohinder wasn't sure if he was going to be ready for what was coming up; actually trying to set a 'trap' like this wasn't something he'd ever trained for…

"Excuse me!" he called out, trying to force down his fears as he walked into the garage, eyes quickly falling on the woman welding at the back of the building beside a battered car. After Mohinder repeated himself, the woman lifted her welder's mask to reveal that she was wearing earphones under it, smiling apologetically at the visitors.

"Oh," she said as she removed the earphones. "Rap music; can't stand it, but it's the only thing I've found that cancels out the… can I help you?"

"We're looking for Dale Smither," Mohinder asked.

"You found her," Dale said.

"O-of course," Mohinder nodded. "I'm Mohinder Suresh, and this is Mr Taylor."

"Zane," the other man said, still demonstrating a strangely shy manner that Mohinder couldn't entirely believe was faked. "Actually, it's just Zane."

"I left you several messages this week," Mohinder said, as the woman walked over to another desk and removed her gloves.

"Yeah, I got 'em," Smither said.

"I believe I can help with what's happening to you; I'm sure you have lots of questions."

"Yeah, only one," Smither tossed her gloves down and turned to look at him. "How'd you find me?"

"You gave blood eleven years ago," Mohinder explained. "Signed a consent form to have a sample used in a program called the Human Genome Project."

"You dialled the wrong number," the welder said.

"Look," the man who may be Sylar or Zane said. "I know what you're thinking right now, that you've got nobody to talk to, nobody that understands what you're going through. But that's not true. I-I understand."

"Yeah?" Smither looked sceptically at him.

Mohinder and the other man exchanged brief glances, after which the other man emptied out a glass jar full of nails and dropped a wrench into it. He held his hand over the bottle for a moment, and then the wrench melted into the jar, Zane looking at the mechanic with a casual expression.

"Damn," Smither said. "That was my best wrench… so there really are others, huh?"

"Yes," Zane nodded. "I'm proof of that."

"That's why we're here," Mohinder affirmed; whatever his other motives were, he was genuinely interested to meet with Dale and learn what she was capable of.

"I-I…" Smither began, sitting down on the edge of the bench. "I thought the headaches at first were gonna kill me. I'd lie awake at night thinking that my head was gonna explode. A cockroach crawling across my neighbour's floor was like a marching band parading through my house."

"I'm sorry," Mohinder said. "It must be quite the burden."

"Burden?" Smither looked at Mohinder with a grin. "Hell, no; this is the best damn thing that ever happened to me. Now that I've learned to control it, I'm like… Superman or something. I can hear rain coming from forty miles away. I can even hear someone's moods; the tiniest changes in a heartbeat."

She turned to look at 'Zane' with a curious intensity. "Yours, for instance. It's racing kind of fast. You nervous about something?"

"Um, no," the other man replied tentatively. "I'm just excited to meet somebody like me."

"Well," the woman observed, "if you've come to try to take it away from me, you're gonna have a hell of a fight on your hands."

"I can assure you we only want to help," Mohinder affirmed. "Uh, I'd like to perform a few tests, some questions, really, that's all. Shouldn't take more than a couple of hours."

"I'm kinda backed up today…"

"We can come back in the morning."

Even as Dale nodded in agreement, Mohinder could see the expression on the face of the man he had been introduced to as Zane Taylor. If he didn't have a reason to suspect otherwise, he might have passed it off as a new superhuman grateful to have evidence that he wasn't alone, but with Agent Hanson's information about the body discovered in Zane's apartment…

"What's this all about anyway?" Peter looked curiously at Claude as the invisible man took a pigeon out of the coop. Standing around on a rooftop at night talking about pigeons wasn't something he'd ever seen himself do, but it was frankly the most normal activity he'd had during the day; even eating had involved testing a couple of his abilities, eating a sandwich or snack while trying to keep time frozen and then rewinding it a few seconds so that the sandwich was still there (not something he'd use that ability for regularly, but it was a good way to practise that particular power right now).

"What's what?" Claude asked, closing the door and walking to the other side of the coop.

"The birds," Peter clarified. "I mean, you… you sort of hate everything, everyone. Except you treat these pigeons like they're family."

"Charles Darwin bred pigeons when he was working out his theory of evolution," Claude replied as he put the pigeon back and closed the door. "Married up various permutations to get maximum potential."

"When you say 'maximum potential'… are we talking about me or Sylar?"

"Considering what I've heard about the bastard so far, I'm inclined to think you," Claude said with a thoughtful smile.

"You used to care, didn't you?" Peter said, indicating the city spread out before them. "About all this?"

"All right, sharing time's over," Claude said. "Time to get-"

The invisible man let out a yell and fell forwards, the sound of electricity crackling through his body as Peter moved forwards to catch him. Looking up, Peter saw the quartet he'd met at the club the night before, accompanied by an unfamiliar man in glasses and the dark-skinned man who'd tried to question him and the others the night he had saved Claire from Sylar, standing by the door to the roof wearing what had to be infrared goggles.

Seeing the dark-skinned man raising another taser gun towards him, Peter quickly launched a green fireball at the man while trying to focus the man's own ability on his colleagues. Judging by the way the woman generated a small green flare in her palm and looked at it with a growl on her lips, Peter had a feeling he wasn't going to be able to shut them all down for long, but the surprise was enough for Peter to grab Claude in his arms, thankful for whoever had given him enhanced strength, and leap off the building, focusing on Nathan as he flew into the night.

He didn't know if whoever those people were had been after him or Claude, but for the moment his apartment was the safest option he could think of. When he reached his building, he opened the window and slipped inside, laying Claude on the sofa to take a quick check. His teacher didn't seem to have anything more serious than being temporarily knocked out, so he'd give the man a little time before he started being concerned about this turn of events.

After preparing himself a quick cup of coffee to keep himself refreshed after that close call, Peter tried to keep himself occupied by reading a book, but he couldn't relax his mind enough to concentrate on the words on the page. After waiting for a couple of hours, Peter was starting to have to fight off the urge to sleep when he heard a groan from Claude, relieved to see the invisible man slowly blinking his eyes open and sitting up.

"How you feeling?" Peter asked, looking anxiously at his mentor, only to be met with a punch to the face and being slammed into the wall before he could react.

"You knew they were after you!" the older man yelled at him.

"Who?" Peter protested. "Hey, I told you I ran into those guys at the club-!"

"When I thought it was just a bad bit of luck for you to find a family of powerhouses all at once, not that it was part of some goddamn… coordinated strike!" Claude yelled. "I was invisible all those years because of them, and now you've brought the bastards right to my door!"

"And I just saved your ass from them-!" Peter protested as he knocked Claude back.

"You've no idea what you've done," Claude looked bitterly at him as he got up from a chair and began to frantically look around the apartment. "Your mate, that painter; he took the girl to the roof, so he must have been able to work out we were up there."

"Isaac?" Peter repeated, suddenly recalling the lack of contact from Isaac even after Kim and Claire had started using his loft as a refuge. "You think they got to him?"

"You don't know where he is right now; odds are they got him," Claude said. "That's how it worked in my day; you drop off the face of the earth for a few days, wake up with a memory hole, a killer headache, and a souvenir." Peter was saved from asking what kind of 'souvenir' Claude meant when the man showed him a distinctive scar on the back of his shoulder. "And this is just if you're lucky."

"So… what do we do now?" Peter asked, trying to collect himself as Claude turned for the door.

"We?" Claude turned around to look bitterly at him. "You watch your own back. I do what I always do; disappear."

"I need your help; we're getting somewhere with this-!" Peter tried to grab his arm.

"You should have thought of that before you brought your baggage to my roof," Claude countered, shrugging his arm free and storming for the door. "You might want to consider if you're protecting or hurting those kids while you're at it."

The kids…

Peter's blood ran cold at the thought of what might have happened to the girls.

If Isaac turned the Company in their direction… God, if he'd gone back to the apartment and found them...

As he carefully made his way into the garage, Sylar smiled at the thought of how easily his whole plan had just fallen into place. The decision to pose as Zane to meet with Doctor Suresh's son had been an impulsive move by any standard, but so far it seemed to be paying off in terms of helping him add more names to his list. He appreciated that he couldn't make a regular habit of doing this- Suresh might be gullible, but even he'd notice if everyone they met on his father's list kept dying after they met- but he couldn't resist the possibilities of acquiring such a useful ability as this one. He'd get past any side-effects easily enough once he properly understood just how to make it work- Smither was only having trouble because she wasn't meant to have it- and then…

His smile faltered when he entered the garage and saw no sign of the woman he'd come here to assess. The garage had officially closed an hour ago, but the woman gave every sign of being one of those people who lived for their work- something that he could almost 'respect', considering he'd been the same before he realised their potential- and the fact that she wasn't here now…

The sense of something striking his back left his body juddering in shock, and Sylar didn't even have the time to curse at himself for not keeping his usual telekinetic shield up before he hit the ground.