Takes place just after Firewall (1.23) and during The Contingency (2.01).

This is the real new chapter as of 14 Nov 2015! One more round of this backwards updating and then we'll be all set. Again, I apologize that this happened. I'm very unorganized. But faster to update this time! Next chapter should be up next week-ish, and then we'll be done with this weird updating style that came about because I started writing in the middle.

Also, all the thanks to lazyroughdrafts, who is The Best™.

Enjoy!

"Pull over." Root spoke softly, trusting the light gesture she made with the pistol to convince Harold. He gave her a sidelong glance and obeyed. Their tires scraped across Jersey City gravel and slowed to a cautious stall behind a parked sedan. "Get out."

Harold unfolded warily from the seat. He glanced around as if testing theories of escape, but deflated minutely when he met Root's smiling eyes. She tucked her gun away. Only ten minutes after meeting, and already they understood each other.

"That one." Root gestured to the car in front of them. When Harold limped over to the passenger side, she shook her head. "Why don't you drive, Harold?" He glared. "I'm sorry. I know it probably hurts your leg. You'll just have to drive faster. Promise we'll stop to stretch," she simpered.

Without a word, Harold walked to the opposite side of the car and stood still, hands dangling listlessly from the sleeves of his customary suit jacket. The tweed was looking a little rumpled, but overall, he might have been a professor driving home to one of the smaller hamlets that hung from New York's apron strings.

"Let me," Root offered solicitously. After pulling a set of keys out of her back pocket, she unlocked the door, yanked it open, and leaned on it. Harold stared at her for a moment longer before climbing stiffly into the driver's seat.

When Root settled into the worn upholstery of the passenger seat, Harold was still sitting exactly as he had come to rest moments before: hands in his lap, shoulders curved in just a bit, gaze straight ahead. The picture of non-violent resistance to a sociopathic kidnapper bent on finding and releasing a dangerous artificial intelligence. Alan Turing had never seen this coming.

"Pardon the intrusion." Root wrinkled her nose sympathetically as she reached over and into Harold's coat. He recoiled visibly at the incursion on his person, but Root's hand had already slipped another phone out of his inner pocket. "Nice try, Harold." Her reassuring tone did nothing to comfort him.

Root remained closer than was comfortable for most people to study Harold's face. He stared back, still aloof and a little defiant. With a smirk, Root bent at the waist to tug at Harold's shoes.

"What are you-" Harold's shock exploded as if a small bird had taken flight in the car; his arms flung out and his knees came up, nearly striking Root in the eye. Root fended off his awkward limbs with her arm and straightened.

"I'm going to have to ask you to throw your shoes out the window."

Harold looked at her blankly. Root sighed and produced the pistol from the small of her back.

"Now, Harold."

His head drooped the barest inch, and then his resistance was gone. Slowly, he bent and loosened first one set of laces, then the other. Finally, he tugged off each shoe, rolled down the window with the ersatz hand crank adorning the car door, and dropped the pair of brogues onto the pavement outside. He cranked the window back up and turned back to glare a challenge at her, but it was nearly empty. His hope of being tracked had fallen out the window with his shoes.

Root tipped her head toward the beaten leather steering wheel and dangled the keys between them.

"I'll tell you where to go."

Harold's jaw twitched, but he carefully extracted the keys from Root's hand, without touching her, and started the car. He eased glacially away from the curb.

"Take a right at the next light. You'll want to get in the left lane then," Root informed him cheerily. "Then take the exit to the interstate. South."

Not long after leaving New York, Root directed Harold to an off-ramp and then to a nearby department store. The sun fell weakly onto the thin array of cars littered around the vast parking lot as Harold pulled into a vacant spot. He glanced at Root with pursed lips, as if dying to ask her what they were doing, but held his tongue.

"Come on, Harold," Root chirped. She exited the car and waited for Harold to join her. He limped along a few feet to her left, and she let him maintain that distance for the moment.

The pneumatic doors closed behind them with a whoosh. Root searched the placards marking each section of the store and found the one she sought.

"Let's go." She turned to the left and caught the tail-end of a mixed expression of confusion and annoyance on Harold's face. "Not a K-mart shopper, Harold?" He looked at her askance, clearly distubed by her levity. So many people were; no one expected a criminal with the manner of an off-duty kindergarten teacher.

Root led the way to the back corner of the store. As they approached, she sensed Harold falter for a moment behind her when they passed the electronics section. She slowed until he walked abreast of her. His eyes flicked guiltily to her, and Root smiled at him.

"So, Harold." Root gestured to the racks of shoes in front of them. "What size?"

Harold still seemed bent on silence, but it was clear when he simply walked away and started to peruse the size tens that he had accepted what was happening. It must have been surreal: buying shoes at a discount department store with the woman who had kidnapped him. Like a strange dream; not a nightmare, but something that was likely to stay on the mind after waking.

After a few moments, Harold turned around and wordlessly held up a pair of brown leather shoes. Root held out her hand for the box and began to walk away.

"My treat," she volunteered cheerily.

At the register, Root paid with cash, and Harold looked disappointed. The carefully-maintained neutrality was beginning to seep away from his face, leaving behind mild panic and a touch of shock. More of a bad dream. He glanced back and forth between Root and the inattentive cashier frantically when he thought she was not looking, but Root could see him weighing all options and finding each lacking. His eyes tracked to the small of her back, where the gun was tucked, and Root knew that he understood at least this small part of the situation: there was nothing he could do.

Or she thought he understood, until he brushed past the counter on his way out. Root palmed the scrap of paper he had dropped and glanced at the plea for help. With a speculative look at Harold's retreating back, she followed him out the automatic door.

On a bench outside, Harold bent over to put on his new shoes while Root waited. When he finished, Root clapped her hands enthusiastically.

"Where to next?" she asked rhetorically. Harold frowned and turned toward the car. Without prompting, he opened the driver's side door and sat stoically. Root had barely gotten her door shut when he pressed the gas pedal.

Washed-out colors faded into rural roads as they sped through New Jersey. After a few hours of intermittent questions, they passed a sign proclaiming that they were passing Wilmington, Delaware, and Root finally indicated with a lazy suggestion that Harold might pull over at the next restaurant. He maneuvered into a gravel lot outside the Gas and Grill. When he slid in next to the police cruiser near the back of the lot, he looked at Root defiantly, but she merely quirked an eyebrow and said nothing.

Harold nearly stumbled, leaning on the door heavily to keep from falling. Root rounded the car and reached out to steady him as he pressed away from the frame, but he ripped his arm from her grasp and scowled at the ground. Root stood back with approval in her eyes.

"It's not quite up to your high standards, Harold, but I'm sure you'll find something you can choke down." The slightly mocking smile tugged again at her lips as she matched her pace to Harold's progress a few feet away.

Harold's eyes darted from corner to corner of the diner when they entered, briefly searching the face of each patron for someone who might be able to help. Root simply watched Harold from across the booth. She leaned back against the padded faux leather and looked at him over her menu.

"You look famished, Harold." He remained silent, as he had for nearly the entire drive there. "What are you gonna have?" Still he refused to speak. She leaned in and wrinkled her nose, as if notifying him of a social faux pas. "No offense, but for a billionaire genius you are lousy company."

Harold looked at her sharply, and she chuckled as she settled back in her seat. She followed his eyes to the highway patrolman taking his seat at the next table, then tracked her eyes back to Harold. His predictability was not nearly as irritating as most people's, perhaps because she could not only tell what he was thinking by the light in his eyes, but because it was a course of action she would have considered, too.

"Every system has a flaw," Root stated with a smile. "I'm pretty good at finding them." She gave him an arrogant smirk. "You care about other people. That's your flaw. So if you try to call out to that police officer, I won't shoot you." She tipped her head to the side, happily capturing every moment of Harold's silent insistence that they were nothing alike. "I'll shoot someone else." She leaned in again, and her smile was a warning wrapped with a bow. "Please don't make me do that."

"I get it," she intimated. "You're not talking because you don't know how much I already know." The one-sided conversation was growing irksome, but she was was still far from true anger. "I know enough. Enough that you should be trying to figure out what I want and where we are going." If prompted, maybe that would be enough to-

"Where are we going?" His eyes flicked to her. It had been enough to pull grudging words from Harold's mouth, drawing him into her game.

"The future, Harold," Root rejoined, pleased by their progress. "Although I guess thanks to you, we're already there. Not that you'd have any of us know." She spoke reprovingly, a friend disappointed to be the last to know his secret.

And Harold, oh, Harold, who was desperately trying to convince himself that he was not yet in over his head. Danger lapped at his shoulders, maybe, but he was not dead yet. "I don't know who you think I am but you have made a mistake."

He would not even look at her. No. No, he had not, but he had tried to talk to her like one of them.

"Don't treat me like them." Root frowned, the brightness of her eyes clouding under nearing anger. "It must be like talking to ants to you." Her voice nearly shook under the acute strain of rejection.

"They wouldn't grasp what you'd done even if you'd told them, but I've been waiting for you my whole life, and you and I share an understanding." After everything she'd done, becoming Caroline Turing, putting up with John for god's sake, to be gaslighted by the one person in the world who could possibly understand her. Oh, but he'd come around.

"Do we? You're a murderer and a thief." His voice held the tremor shaking his conviction.

Root smiled. That was it, then. Harold simply wanted to distance himself from the situation, and from her by extension. He recognized that she was his equal, but hated the situation. Perhaps if they'd met under more conventional circumstances.

"My mom told me to follow my talents," Root told him with a sly smile, "and I'm good at what I do." She shook her head in admiration. "Except this one time, when someone stopped me, someone who knew what I was about to do."

"How did you know, Harold? For months, that's what I couldn't figure out." Root itched to tell him how, exactly, how she had followed each scrap of information back to a logical origin in the ether, how she had pieced together the shredded files gleaned from the wreckage of his foray into the honeypot, everything.

Instead, she settled for the short version. "I don't believe in magic, and I knew that the government had spent years trying to build something to protect their panicked little flock." Her voice took on an all-knowing quality gained by the simple truth of her superiority.

"I also thought that they'd never pull it off." She watched Harold carefully now for any sign that her words meant something to him. "Because they didn't know about you." But I did went unspoken; she had found the unfindable man, and that was an inside joke she was not likely to let go of.

"And you pulled it off, didn't you? Something to watch for all of us." She raised her eyebrows and settled back complacently to deliver the punch line.

"The only question, Harold, is why it didn't protect you."

The waiter arrived just after Root's question, putting a temporary end to her one-sided conversation with Harold. While she ordered, he studied her shrewdly, as if assessing something about her. How much she really knew, perhaps. Or how much she should know.

"And for you, sir?" Harold appeared startled by the server's question, and Root stifled a smile. Already he had become accustomed to her taking charge.

"Oh," he exclaimed. "I'll-"

"Lasagna," Root ordered firmly. She smiled and handed both menus to the waiter. "I've heard it's wonderful. And two waters, please." She turned her smile onto Harold, who had yet again adopted a non-reactive expression, staring into the space by her left ear.

The server looked at them both searchingly for a beat before offering a bright 'okay!' and retreating to the kitchen.

Twenty silent minutes later, Root was still studying Harold over her plate. He sat, still and quiet, staring out the window as if pretending he was anywhere else. Abruptly, Root put down her fork with a clink.

"Do you really think you can hold out, Harold? Wait for the cavalry?" she asked. Her voice was low and serious, all pretence of the smiling psychopath gone. "John can't find you. You made it so your Machine can't help him, and no warrant or missing person's case from the NYPD is going to help." He looked up at that, and his eyes reflected confusion over how she had known that the Machine would not dispense his number.

Root leaned in ever further. "You don't exist, Harold. You wiped yourself out." She laughed. "I should know, I've looked everywhere." She leaned back and smiled sympathetically, proudly. "We're ghosts. No one can find us."

"You're insane," Harold whispered, looking truly lost.

Root shook her head. "That has so little to do with this," she sighed. "I expected more from you, Harold." She picked up her fork again and used it to point at Harold's plate. "Are you going to eat your lasagna?"

Harold just stared at her incredulously. Root shrugged.

"Suit yourself."

Her head lolled back against the nubbly velvet seat. Every few minutes, Harold glanced over to ascertain whether or not she was still alert. Even if she had wanted to, the unwonted adrenaline that flooded her body would not have allowed her to sleep.

The highway through New England and the Atlantic Coast area was not nearly as featureless as the endless expanse of Texas fields and intersecting skies that Root had grown up with, but neither had natural wonder ever been enough to capture her attention for long. And now, she sat next to a man who held in his mind enough entertainment for a lifetime. Or, if not an entire lifetime, certainly enough to last the rest of the way to Maryland.

"When did you know?" she asked abruptly.

Harold risked a silent look out of the corner of his eye before returning his gaze to the road.

"Know what?" he answered begrudgingly.

"That you were different," Root explained.

Harold remained silent, but his hands tightened on the steering wheel.

"You had to know early," Root prompted. "No offense, Harold, but you're older than I am, and computers were new when I was growing up. Someone like you learned early, and they taught themselves." She settled her back against the door, where the bumps in the road hummed up through the handle to rock against her spine. "I just want to know when."

Still, Harold refused to answer.

"Early teens," Root hazarded. Harold's lips pursed in silent confirmation. "Did you see an expo? Read about it in the paper, find out more at the library?" Her voice settled into the unfamiliar cadence of a teen gushing to a friend about a newly discovered shared interest.

"That's it," she continued approvingly. "You read about them. And then you built one. What did it do, Harold?" Root folded her leg up beneath her, although her admiring eyes stayed on Harold.

"Who did you want it to think for?"

The car door rocked harder against her back as the car swerved a few mere inches. Harold's hands whitened and relaxed.

"We're not the same."

Root grinned at the response.

"No," she admitted. "But we're more alike than you're comfortable with." She leaned her head back against the window. "But I'm not as strong as you."

Harold darted questioning eyes toward her.

"How can you do it, Harold?" Root asked, shaking her head. She leaned forward. "Day after day, surrounded by idiots. How much fear is in that head of yours that you pretend to be normal to avoid what you've made?

"I pretended for years, Harold," Root continued. "I made them think I was normal. Growing up was the hardest thing I ever did, but not because of puberty or confusion or those stupid things other people struggle with. I had to hide, Harold, in plain sight. For years. Just like you," she added. The seatbelt cut into her neck as she leaned forward.

"I lived for the times I could let someone see who I really was." She smiled. "Sometimes I was stupid about it. Too proud. I bet you know something about that."

Harold looked at her again, alarmed. Root tucked that away in her head as a sign that he had done something stupid, when he was younger. She resolved to find out what it was, but later.

"When I first came to New York I did this long job. I didn't have the same reputation I have now, and I had to start somewhere." Root draped an arm over the back of her seat and stared out the windshield, reminiscing.

"There was another hacker I knew, from a dark net forum, and he hired me to take out a rival of his. I didn't know why they were rivals," Root explained. "Never bothered to find out. Do you know how to make people trust you, Harold?" Root wondered aloud, tipping her head.

Harold looked at her sharply, then back at the road.

"You reward them," Root supplied. "Condition them to associate you with good things. Mostly money. I gave him jobs, little ones at first, then big ones. They all went well, and I didn't lie to him once." She considered Harold, hands rigidly positioned exactly at ten and two on the steering wheel. He could probably give a good analysis of B.F. Skinner's groundbreaking study, but even if he had used that knowledge, he undoubtedly did not consider himself that manipulative.

"But hackers are suspicious," Root continued. "Like you, Harold. So I had to make him think he was smarter than me. I slipped up a few times, on purpose. So then, when I hired him for something big, he went for it. But that was when I lied." She grinned widely. "Do you remember the Micropatent extortion scandal?"

Harold's wide eyes met hers, and the thunder of road-side rumble strips filled the car.

"Focus, Harold," Root scolded before she continued. "I laid tracks, just enough to nudge the FBI to him. But see, then I made a mistake. I wanted credit. I needed to build a reputation. You know what that's like."

The set of Harold's jaw told her that he was determined not to agree, even if his head had unconsciously declined in the barest of nods.

Root rested a hand on her right thigh.

"That was the first time I got shot," she admitted. "It's not a huge scar, but," she sighed, "it reminds me how stupid I've been. And now," she finished brightly, "I know to check on the gang connections of my targets before I gloat. It did give me what I needed, though. The right people learned what I was capable of, especially when the hacker was, tragically, killed in a prison brawl before his trial." She laughed at her own punch line.

And still Harold said nothing.

"Are you wishing I'd died, Harold?" Root wondered aloud. "And here I thought you weren't a killer. But you'd let me die, if it was convenient. That's how you work. I have a bit of a flexible morality myself."

Root chuckled to herself as Harold's hands tightened on the steering wheel and his nostrils flared. Whatever he had done, his hands were hardly cleaner than hers, if one were to measure guilt that way. She was wearing away at him, like the passage of information eroding a transmission cable, until finally he would no longer be able to deny their similarities. She turned lazily and watched the green highway signs as they flashed past, until she found the one she was looking for.

Welcome to Maryland.

Nearly there.