Author's Notes :For anyone who's curious about the time passing while all of this is going on, everything from the first chapter up to the end of this one takes place in the space of a single day. If there are any significant gaps between scenes or chapters, they will be noted.

Even though Ames White put in an appearance in the last chapter, he probably won't be seen again for a while. He does have an important role to play in the story, but there's a lot going on.

The instant he exited the tunnel leading from the house Logan had bought for those inside Terminal City to come and go without being noticed, he found himself staring down the barrel of Mole's old Mossberg.

"Name," Mole spat.

Sam was a little more used to the bizarre than most Ordinaries, having been called in to help with Zack when he'd been donning his short-lived cyborg look, and met Joshua face-to-face when Logan had been in need of a blood transfusion. It also helped that Mole's face had been popping up on the news lately, from the Jam Pony crisis to today's bombing. The lizard-man's appearance didn't unsettle him at all.

He was not at all used to having guns stuck in his face. This unsettled him quite a bit.

"Umm, Carr," he responded shakily. "Carr, Sam, uh, Sam Carr..." Pausing for a moment to try and regain a little composure, he continued. "Logan sent me, to che-"

"Let's go." Resetting the safety on the shotgun, he moved behind the portable MRI Sam had dragged with him down the tunnel and began pushing. "Will this be enough to figure out what's wrong with him?"

"Should be," Sam supplied hopefully. "It'll help point to most intracranial injuries as well as any CT scan, assuming you know what to look for."

Mole placed the shotgun on top of the machine, then reached into his jacket pocket. Finding an already cut cigar and his lighter, he held the cigar in his mouth and spoke around it as he used his free hand to light up. "Uh, you do realize we're not listed in any of the standard medical texts, right?"

"Yes, but I'm hoping the more vital anatomy of the brain in a Transgenic is more or less the same as in everybody else. I've yet to perform a brain scan on a Transgenic. Odds are your brains have far more active areas than a normal person, but the basic functional areas ought to be the same, or close. No point having one portion of your brain saying you can leap tall buildings in a single bound, if the basic stuff that lets you walk around in the first place doesn't work. How's Max? I hear she was pretty shaken up."

"Pretty big understatement," Mole huffed, blowing an aura of clove-smelling smoke around his head. "She's hardly said two words except to tell everyone who got close to get out of her way. Odds are she's still hovering over him. I think she's losin' it."

"I'll check on her once I've got some answers about Alec."

The entered what seemed to be an old warehouse. Inside were a bunch of long tables with thin mattresses and pillows on them. On counters lining the walls were collections of odd scraps of basic medical materials, and stacks of pill bottles filled mostly with Tryptophan. Although it wasn't exactly a sterile environment, Sam looked around and imagined it was about as clean as any place in Terminal City was ever likely to be.

Only two of the makeshift sickbeds were occupied. Alec was laid out on one, his clothes removed, with a thin blanket draped over him, and a bracing collar around his neck. On the one immediately next to it, Max sat with her knees drawn up to her chest, her dark eyes fixed intently on Alec, as if hoping to force his eyes open by sheer force of will.

"Hi, Max," Sam greeted. "How are you feeling?" he asked, not really expecting a response, and not getting one. She looked fine, except for a gash above her right eye, but she never so much as glanced up.

"Where's the goddamn cord?" Mole asked.

"There is none. Portables have a six hour battery life. Let's just get him into it. Gently, we don't want to cause any more damage to his clavicle."

Once the machine was powered up, Sam checked to make sure all the display screens were working, and entered the keypad command to extend the bio-bed, which Mole helped to lift Alec gently onto. Even before he keyed in the command to retract, Sam noted that apart from his neck the only visible injuries were a few small cuts and a large, purple bruise on his left cheek, and wondered how bad things could really be.

Pretty soon he had his answers. "See this grey area?" He pointed to an area on one of the screens that seemed isolated from most of Alec's brain. While most of what was shown was clearly very active despite his apparent comatose state, this one grey patch was one of very few areas that seemed dead by comparison. "This swelling is constricting the blood flow between both hemispheres of his brain. Any normal person would have been dead in minutes from the impact needed to cause swelling of this magnitude.

"Also, in this condition, anyone else would be showing activity in less than two percent of the brain. Even under optimal circumstances, the average male of Alec's age, fully conscious and working on complicated arithmetic, likely wouldn't be showing anything over six percent activity. Alec's brain, right now, is showing over twenty percent, with blood flowing almost everywhere, on both hemispheres."

"What does that mean?"

Sam almost leapt at Max breaking her silence. "It means it's not a coma," he responded after a moment. "I don't care how much more advanced Trasngenics are, his brain is far too active for a comatose state. High response to painful stimulus; his pupils seem alert. It's more like a mild catatonia than a coma."

For a time nobody said anything. Sam stood over the VDUs biting his lower lip, Max turned back to Alec, and Mole, having already burned right through his cigar, began searching his pockets for another.

"It's the nanites!" Sam exclaimed suddenly. "X-5s have nanites in their blood. Maybe some others do too, I don't know, but X-5s do. Nanites use blood-flow to move around the body and brain. That's why everything seems so active. The nanites are focusing on his brain, dulling his senses, keeping him asleep."

"Why?" Mole asked.

"Maybe to help give his system the chance to start healing the repairing the damage," the doctor suggested. "But I don't think it's going to work." He again indicated the grey area. "I don't think even X-5 physiology is capable of repairing this kind of neurological damage unaided."

Max leapt up from her bed. "There has to be something," she said pleadingly.

"There is. Usually I'd suggest removing a portion of the skull cap in order to relieve the pressure, but this," he held out his arms and glanced around the warehouse, "isn't exactly the ideal setting for something like that. Given the givens, I'd recommend burr holes. Three holes around the edges of the bruising ought to be more than enough. That done, the blood – and the nanites and stem cells – should flow freely enough through the damaged area to make repairs."

Sketchy had just finished his last run for his short shift, and was chatting animatedly with a short black girl with afro puffs. Across the street, the blonde girl sat on her silver Kawasaki, munching on a cold hot dog from a nearby vendor. 24/7 security duty didn't leave a lot of options when it came to food, not to mention other essentials. Sketchy had a habit of dropping whatever he was doing and disappearing for no good reason, so she couldn't risk dropping in anywhere to get something a little more appetizing.

She knew from Logan that the girl he was talking to was a good friend of Max, and had been her room-mate until the siege had forced her to move into Terminal City full-time, and imagined that Sketchy was bragging about the story Logan had left for him, and his new promotion at the magazine. The conversation ended with Cindy saying something Sketchy apparently didn't appreciate, and strutting off while he stood there looking confused and a mildly upset.

"Hey."

She turned and found a girl with close-cropped blond hair standing in front of her. She'd met her once at Logan's place, and hadn't really though much of her. "Asha, right?"

"Yep. Logan asked me to bring you this," she announced, and handed over a small shoulder bag with a logo for some old band on the front. "Your new I.D and background information, all tailor-made."

She instantly plucked out her new Sector Pass, and tossed her old one, a cheap forgery her Tryptophan supplier had been able to get her, into a barrel full of garbage. She read her new name off the card Logan had made for her, apparently on the Sector Police's own stationary. "Why do I need a new identity?"

Ten minutes later, Sketchy was talking to Cindy again as they were leaving, Cindy on one last run before closing, Sketchy headed for Crash. As Cindy hopped on her bike and headed south towards the nearest checkpoint, Sketchy walked in the opposite direction, leaving his own bike chained to a pillar inside Jam Pony for the night.

As he got inside he spotted a couple of other guys who'd finished at the same time as him over by the pool tables. Sky held up an empty pitcher and pointed to the bar, prompting Sketchy to go get another.

When he got over to the tables with a full pitcher of heavily watered beer – heavily watered because it was the bartender's own brew, strong enough to drop most patrons before they had a chance to empty their wallets – there was a girl he didn't recognise standing with them, chalking a cue as Sky racked a game.

She smiled at Sketchy when he got there, and he realised he did actually recognise her, though couldn't quite place it. "The coffee shop today," she told him by way of greeting. "You were with the faceless guy in the bad suit."

"Uh, yeah. He...he works for me!" Sketchy piped.

She laughed a little, clearly not believing him, but didn't call him on it. "What do you do?"

"Most of the time I work with these guys at Jam Pony, but I'm at New World Weekly part-time too."

"The magazine?"

"Yeah. Up until now I was just taking photos, but I just got promoted. The boss is giving me a chance to write my first story," he bragged. "You?"

"Nothing at the moment." She lowered her eyes. "Trust-fund baby," she added, embarrassed.

"Nothing wrong with a life of leisure," Sketchy told her. "I tried it once. I was broke within three days, so that didn't work out too great."

Sky whistled and tossed the cue ball. The girl caught it and slapped it down in the semi-circle.

"I'm Sketchy, by the way."

The girl took a forceful break shot, potting no less than three balls. She looked up at him, as if sizing him up, and smiled again. Sketchy was having trouble looking her in the eyes, and wondered if he looked as flushed as he felt. Somewhere behind him, he heard Sky chuckling.

"Melissa."

Back in Terminal City, Sam dropped a blood-stained steel hand-drill into a sink full of boiling water. The MRI was powered down, and Alec lay on the bed again. Max stood by his side, holding his hand in one of her own, while she nervously bit the nails of her other hand. Mole was on his seventh cigar for the past hour.

Sam watched them both as he scrubbed the drill. He'd seen Max by Logan's side when he'd been ill, and even then she hadn't looked nearly so distraught. Mole watched them both pretty nervously, clearly worried about Max. Or maybe just afraid of her. He'd mentioned before to Sam that he thought Max was losing it, and Sam wasn't sure he was exaggerating. He thought about everything that had gone in the past few months, from the disaster in the sewers, the dog-boy who was involved being a friend, to the Jam Pony siege, and a Transgenic serial killer who'd targeted her friends in order to get close to her.

Now Alec lay unconscious with a loose bandage covering the three holes drilled in his skull. They'd put Alec back in the MRI after the burr holes had been drilled, and already a slight improvement had shown. The swollen area looked slightly brighter, indicating decreased pressure, and a slow thin trickle of blood had been seen passing right over the centre of the grey. Sam was confident that Alec would wake sometime tomorrow, and had said as much, but this had had little effect on Max. Sam could tell by looking at her that she had somehow figured out a way to blame herself for this, just like she'd probably managed to reason that everything else that had gone wrong in the world lately was somehow her fault.

Logan had asked Sam if he could talk to Max, and find out how she was doing. It seemed that she hadn't been saying much to anyone lately, and the only times she and Logan had spoken was when he'd called her.

Not for his lack of trying, but Sam had barely been able to get two words out of Max as he'd checked her injuries. Apart from the cut over her eye she had a pretty big bump on the back of her head. While any ordinary person would probably want to sleep that off with some hefty painkillers to help, Max ignored it, wincing only slightly when Sam touched it. Her only response to all his questions, not just about her injuries, was "I'm fine."

He left the drill in the hot water and dried his hands. "I'll leave this here for now," he said, nodding at the portable MRI. "I doubt we'll need it again, but in case we do, I had enough trouble sneaking it out the hospital once. Twice would really be pushing it. Hopefully by morning he'll start to come out of it," he repeated for Max's benefit, "just don't expect any hand-sprints."

"He's gonna be pissed when he sees those bald patches," Mole chuckled, trying to lighten the mood a little.

"Well, they're pretty small," the doctor suggested. "He can wear a baseball cap for a while if he's worried they'll ruin his chances with the ladies." Even Max smiled a little at this.

"I'm in the hospital at noon tomorrow," Sam told them. "I'll drop by around ten to check on him."

"Thanks, doc. I'll go with you as far as the house," Mole offered. He looked somewhat pointedly at Max.

When they got outside, Max caught up with them. She said nothing, but hugged Sam briefly by way of thanks, before returning inside. When she got back to Alec, she sat beside him on the bed, holding his hand.

"Girl's a wreck," Mole commented as they set off.

"How long has she been out of it?"

"Well, obviously it wasn't this bad before today, but she's been keeping to herself since the Kelpy thing. Probably why Logan wants to meet."

"When are you meeting him?" Sam asked.

"Now. He's up at the house."