A/N: Can you feel the angst yet? I can!

-----

When the rapping on the door echoing up from the bottom of the stairs would not cease, I slowly pushed myself up into a sitting position. I had no recollection what time it was, or what time it had been when I had gone to bed, and was waking up in one of those confused states where it was difficult to remember anything from the night before. I had been that exhausted, and was still not quite feeling rested.

Dragging myself out of bed and putting on a robe over my night gown, I carefully made my way down the stairs from my bedroom to the door in the foyer. Upon opening the door, I was greeted by the sight of two unofficial messengers, both of whom I recognized as being employed on the staff of the queen. They seemed disconcerted with my disheveled appearance, but at that point I honestly didn't care what they thought. I just wanted them to go away so I could return to my bed.

One of them handed me another note that resembled the one I had been brought by the little girl the afternoon before, marked once again with the same authentic seal of the queen herself. I opened the letter and read it carefully; the messengers waited patiently. It seemed the queen was eager for my assistance on some kind of new project, and it seemed to be related somehow to the Ancient weapon that she used to protect our city. The letter certainly intrigued me, and the queen obviously knew just what she had to do in order to get my attention.

"Thank you," I said to them, crushing the letter into a ball and tossing it behind me, determined not to let this distraction keep me from my desire to go back to bed. "I'll go to see the queen about this matter as soon as I've had a chance to set some things in order."

But before I could hastily shut the door on them, the one who had handed me to note put her hand on the doorjamb, halting it in place. I gave her a genuinely fatigued glare.

"I'm sorry, Ma'am," she stated politely. "But the queen has asked us to escort you to your office in the palace as quickly as possible. I'm afraid that I must insist that we wait here for you."

It figured. I just couldn't get a moments rest in, not when work assigned by the queen herself had to be done. I had been hoping to have a moment to stop by the inn to keep Teyla and Colonel Sheppard apprised of my efforts. Not that I had made much leeway in discovering the truth behind Carson's disappearance, but I felt that they deserved to be assured that I was doing everything I could.

I was already starting to become accustomed to referring to him by his first name. If not for the fact that someone had brutally murdered my best friend, I might have suspected that I was taking the matter of his disappearance too personally. A visit to the inn would just have to wait until after I had discovered the intentions behind the queen's new assignment for me.

Choosing to ignore the messengers further rather than allow anyone else to succumb to my already foul mood, I returned to my bedroom to change my attire. The two women at my door stood patiently in the foyer to wait for me, and not long later they were at my side as I made my way through the streets between the roomy two-story homes of the neighborhood I lived in.

The palace was relatively empty today, which was unusual. The courtyard and the adjoining rows of offices nearby were always bustling with activity, full of military and civil servants fulfilling orders and other duties associated with organizing the proper function of the city. But today those offices were barren and devoid of the noises of everyday life that I was accustomed to hearing echoing through halls.

I was about to turn into the hallway that led to the lab that I customarily worked in, but was turned away from it with a very rude nudge from the messengers. Where exactly they expected me to do my work, I had no clue. Being led through a series of corridors through the inner bowels of the palace, a part of it that I had always known was reserved strictly for the use of the queen herself, I was inconsiderately shoved into what appeared to be some kind of waiting room and was left there for some time.

About ten minutes later, I stood respectfully as the queen and several of her handmaids strode into the room from the door I had arrived in and, without even a glace in my direction, walked right past me and through a door on the opposite side of the room. But when I caught a glimpse of what lied beyond that door, my heart almost stopped in my chest. It was filled with gadgets and machinery the likes of which I had never before seen. The lighting was subdued, almost as if the fire that must have lit the strange box-shaped objects emanating the steady light on the ceiling were dying.

"Come inside, Cousin," she said, not bothering to turn around as she made her way to an oddly shaped chair in the center of the room. I was too awestruck by all that wondrous technology of the Ancients that lied before me, just waiting to be discovered, to properly answer her before she continued. "I summoned you here for a reason: You are the only woman of noble birth that I know of who has ever humbly admitted to having an interest in both science and medicine."

Closing my mouth that had been hanging agape for several seconds, I was more than honored to oblige whatever her need was, my lack of sleep instantly forgotten. "Yes, Your Highness, I will admit to it."

"Good." She whispered into the ear of one of the handmaidens who promptly ran off to do her bidding, then sat down in the chair, which began to glow ominously as she sat back and manipulated its controls. A smooth map-like representation of the palace appeared before this chair, and I watched, completely spellbound, as three pale-green dots surrounded by white dots blinked on the map before me. "I am in need of someone with your talents, Ky. The same blood flows in your veins as in mine. You see those two dots in the center? They are representations of you and me. There are no others like us that live in the city."

"But," I began tentatively, "if we are represented by those green dots, how is it that we are the only two? This map seems to show a third, and it is located here in the palace."

"You are observant," she commented softly, her voice tinged with surprise. It was at that moment that several well-armed guards dragged a prisoner through the door and forced him to his knees. He had been stripped practically naked right down to his underclothes, with his hands bound tightly and securely behind him, and must also have been gagged under the sack that had been placed over his head. The queen's handmaidens straightened their liege's gown as she rose from the chair, its light going dark, and the map which had been showing the third green dot to be moving just a moment ago blinked away into nothingness.

"This male somehow has the same ability to activate these machines that you and I do," she explained warily, not giving the poor man even a moment's consideration. "I want you to find out how and why."

I was somewhat appalled by the harsh treatment he had been given; it was the reason that I never chose to own any men, which had too often singled me out to take the brunt of cruel comments and jokes. People who knew me understood that there was only so much I would tolerate before I would walk out, but I had never before witnessed the queen mistreat her slaves like this, nor had I ever had access to such technology before. I could only presume that he had been purchased for the express purpose of being dissected and studied in such a manner, and gauging by the way he shivered in the grip of the guards, he could have been hypothermic or fully aware of this fact, or both.

I didn't think I could bring myself to kill him, regardless of whether I might have recognized his face from the slave trader's market or not. When the guards dragged him to the makeshift cot that was to be used during the experimentation and strapped him down to it, he struggled against them and whimpered with fear. I tried to fortify him against his rising panic with a hushed whisper of assurance that I would not harm him, but it did not seem to help. As I put on a pair of gloves and readied a syringe to draw a sample of blood from his veins, I slipped the sack off of his head, intending to look him directly in the eye.

The syringe shattered on the floor where I dropped it, echoing throughout the room with a distinctly soft crash. I willed myself to stay perfectly steady and seemingly unemotional as I looked into the face of a wide-eyed and terrified Dr. Carson Beckett. A strange pounding began to rise in my ears as I swallowed back the taste of bile in my throat.

"Is something wrong?" the queen asked impatiently, watching intently and waiting for me to begin.

"This is one of the off-worlders," I gasped with shock as I turned to face her, trying to hide the anger rising within me.

But the queen was unstirred by my look of shock and surprise. "Yes, he is. What of it?"

"I am certain that his comrades would consider his kidnapping an act of war, Your Highness." It took every bit of willpower I had to speak my words evenly and without inflection.

"I have already arranged for a rogue band of slave-traders to be implicated in his kidnapping and then executed," she said impassively, without a hint of emotion or remorse. "All you need to do is tell his previous owner that we are still investigating where and to whom he was sold off."

I'd had no idea just how corrupt the queen had become over all the time she had ruled our city, but the manner in which she casually sentenced this stranger, a kind and caring visitor to our world that had generously offered his skills to our service, to a short life of experimentation or servitude was the proof of her corruption that I had dreaded. At that point, a vile choice had been set before me; a choice that I instantly knew would not let me through this horrific situation unscathed. Would I sacrifice poor Carson to a life of servitude at best, or a painful death at worst, in order to save my city and its queen from her own ruthless nature? Or would I choose to help him, thereby sacrificing my life and my family?

It was a long moment before I found myself able to speak again. It was during that moment that I made my choice and mentally prepared myself for the consequences of it. I am sure that the queen had been looking for that resigned look from me, and she was in fact quite pleased to see it as I retrieved another syringe and did not hesitate in taking a sample of blood this time. "Yes, Highness; I'll see to it immediately."

Carson looked up at me pleadingly with those thoughtful slate-blue eyes that I had come to know so well, the gag preventing him from speaking with words, but I was forced to ignore him. He could not have known how hard that was for me to do.