This is a short chapter, but it's kinda mysterious and fun... I hope. Anyway, enjoy it! And as usual, please leave me a comment. :-)

Chapter 7

"I am so getting fired for this," Angela said as she hacked past a password she shouldn't know to light up a screen she shouldn't be able to. She and Dr. Sweets were back in the surveillance room, darkened, now with thirteen screens fully up and running. Virtually every corner of the Jeffersonian, including all gardens, parking lots and grounds, were visually accessible to her with the click of a mouse.

"What's the big deal?" Sweets said, leaning back in the chair next to her. "Cam's the one who told the guards to go home. If anyone asks, she'll go to bat for you."

"Yeah, I hope you're right," she said. Changing the subject suddenly, she asked, "Are you really six-foot-one?"

"Yes. Why?"

She turned and looked him up and down. "Hm," she shrugged. "I guess I always thought of you as a kid."

He sighed with exasperation. "Why does everyone see me as a kid? Over time, I've more than proven..."

"Sweets, relax," she chuckled. "It's a good thing. When you stop getting carded, you'll long for the days, trust me."

They were silent for a few minutes while Angela did as the Doctor had asked, and inspected the far corners of the Jeffersonian for out-of-place shadows. She had a good eye, and didn't see anything untoward. Sweets had a less-good eye, but he tried to help. She assessed that any route to an outside exit would be fine for the Doctor and Booth to take, but she decided to direct them toward the south, to the museum patrons' entrance. The tourists' terra-cotta-floored lobby, with its grand, steep staircases, two-hundred-year-old grey brick and six-story-high glass ceiling had a kind of grandiose poetry about it, ideal for the macabre ruse they were going to perpetrate.

"Why did the Doctor want to know your height, anyway?" she asked.

"Booth said there were only four sets of body armor," Sweets answered, distractedly staring at the screens, not realizing that he wasn't really answering the question at all.

Brennan and the Doctor were making their way down one of the dusty grey hallways that ran between the Medico-Legal lab and the Archaeology/Anthropology research bays. Part of the Anthropology bay was the gigantic, cavernous bone-storage room, where the remains of thousands of individuals rested in labeled drawers, waiting to be identified.

"Do you really know as much about human bones as you say?" she asked him. For the first time since he arrived, she sounded something other than hostile.

"I do," he said. "Sorry. Does it help to know that I'm not human myself? So you still know more about bones than any other human being."

She smiled in spite of herself. "How are you not human?"

"I'm just not," he said. "Born on a different planet."

She looked at him with a whimsical smile that let him know she thought he was completely nuts.

"It's okay, you don't have to believe me," he said. "But if you want, when this is all over, assuming I survive, I'll prove it to you."

"Well, then," she let out a puff of exasperation and then stopped in her tracks to face him. "What are we doing this for?"

"Come again?" he asked, having stopped to face her as well.

Without warning, she reached forward and squeezed his shoulder. He was surprised, and looked at her hand on him with a questioning frown, but he didn't say anything or try to pull away.

She boldly reached forward with the other hand and slid it inside his suit jacket up to his other shoulder, and he could then see that she was feeling his bones. Her fingertips traced and probed all the way across his clavicle, then down the sternum, stopping where bone gave way to guts. He studied her face as she did this, and it revealed nothing except deadly seriousness.

She reached around with both hands and felt for bones around the back of his neck, then moved them forward to press at his jaw.

She stepped back and looked him over. "I'd have to examine you fully to know for sure, but I'd say that your skeletal structure is humanoid."

"My skeletal structure is identical to a human's," he replied. "All 206 bones are there, including the inner ear. It's my organs that don't quite match up."

She wrinkled her nose and said, "I don't want to know what that means." And she turned on her heel and made her way further down the hall.

"No, no, I didn't mean..." he called after her nervously, but she was already on the move, and probably didn't care anyway. He chuckled to himself and followed her through a set of double doors into the largest room full of sterile plastic drawers he had ever seen. Before they'd left the bone room, Angela had told him that some of the Jeffersonian employees called this room "Limbo," where souls are neither alive, nor at rest.

"It's organized by date," Brennan sighed. "So it might be difficult and time-consuming finding one that is congruent with your physiology, especially given the unusual length of your neck. But if anyone can find it, I can." She looked at him to see if he would insinuate himself into that comment, but he did not.

He gestured forward and said, "After you, Dr. Brennan."

Agent Booth watched as Dr. Saroyan slid a body out sideways from cold storage in the Autopsy Room, also known as her office.

"Are you sure this is all right?" he asked, wincing as she pulled back the white sheet, revealing the man's shattered face. He was partially decomposed, and bits of displaced flesh and body were both still attached and detached from the main trunk.

"Yep," she assured him. "Confirmed suicide. There are two highly-regarded psychiatrists who treated the man as a patient and both have signed sworn statements that the victim was severely depressed and suicidal. And there is surveillance footage of him throwing himself off of the roof of a twelve-story building at three-thirty in the morning. He fell through a sewer grate in an alley - his body wasn't found for four days."

"No-one noticed, even on the footage, for four days?"

"Come on, you know no one watches that stuff unless a diamond goes missing or something. Or unless there's a mysterious death discovered - case in point."

"Yeah, I guess."

"We were going to clean the bones this morning so he could be released to the family, but we got everyone working on the Hasbrook case, and we don't have a squintern at the moment, so... two birds."

"Still..." Booth protested, wincing again, looking at the body with pity. "He's a person. Family, neighbors, a life. And we're going to use him as a prop?"

"We're not using him. You don't believe he's still in there any more than I do. We are going to use a dead body, a shell, Seeley, to help save our lives, and the lives of everyone in this building," she reminded him, with a humoring smile. "Granted, it's on the word of a potential nutcase, but given what we've seen of Charles Hasbrook's totally-stripped skeleton and the crazy-ass shadows outside... I say, better safe than sorry."

"Okay," he said reluctantly.

"Trust me, Seeley, he won't feel a thing."

Dr. Jack Hodgins was working remarkably calmly, considering how on-fire his insides were. In order to help The Doctor, the alien anomaly he had been following on the internet ever since there was an internet, he had taken his entire "stash" of Psilocybin mushrooms and puréed them in a saline solution.

However, as it turned out, his stash had proven not to be as abundant as he had thought. "Could've sworn I had more of these," he said to himself as he poured the 'shroom/saline solution into a beaker, confirming its volume. He made a mental note to scour the surveillance files of his ookie room, just to see if someone had been dipping their hand into the 'shroom jar, as it were. Maybe he could get Angela to help...

In order to make enough psychedelic solution for the Doctor's plan to work, and to give it the correct viscosity, he was going to have to dilute the concoction even more, almost to the point where it wouldn't have much effect. But then again, what did he know about the toxicity constitution of the Vashta Nerada?

"Ah, but!" he said aloud, again with glee. He hadn't been much of a drug-doer, even in his college and grad-school days, but he did know his chemistry pretty well, and he'd been to enough crazy parties to know how to boost the effects of mind-altering drugs.

He opened a large door on a storage unit, containing myriad chemicals that he sometimes used with the squinterns for their experiments. He pulled a rubber stopper out of a four-ounce test tube filled with hemp oil and added it to the solution. This would boost the psychedelic effect, give the solution more volume and viscosity, and its potency would give him more room to add more saline to reach the desired amount for the Doctor's plan.

"Hodgins, you genius, you," he said to himself.