There was hesitation in the body language of the woman leaning on her car. She was near the back of the parking lot, in sight of the playing fields, but away from all cameras. Gen had mapped out all the camera angles her first week at the school, planning her escape routes should she need them; the woman stuck to all the blind spots Gen had memorized.

That had been enough to draw Gen's knowing, calculating stare the first time she saw the tall woman. The second time she showed up, Gen took a more active interest. She holed up in the highest turret of the school's playground equipment, absent-mindedly pushing kindergartners' sticky, wondering fingers from her mirror as she directed it toward the woman. The brunette stood, dressed in funeral black and motionless, in front of her car, a different car this time than before. Then the woman seemed to look directly at the mirror. Even though it was unlikely she could really know what Gen was doing, Gen gasped. She tucked the mirror away in her plaid skirt's pocket, so inadequate for all her equipment, and swung herself down the gaily-colored metal bars. She used all of her eleven-year-old cunning, learned both on the street and on the playground, to camouflage herself in the other children that swirled like schools of fish through the grassy grounds.

The third time Gen saw her, she was no longer in front of her car. She was not even in the parking lot. No, the next time Gen spotted the woman she had come to think of as her next target, it was when her bright, suspicious eyes met sad, depthless ones, and her house-mother said sweetly, as if she did not even know the meaning of the word 'pain,' "Gen, your Aunt Sam's here to see you! Isn't that lovely?"

Gen glared defiantly at the tall woman, standing so out-of-place in the colorful, messy common room. Through the outer layer that pretended to be a caring relative, past the inner lay of pain and grief, Gen glimpsed a hard core that stared out at her in a silent challenge. There was something familiar about it.

Without a word to either adult, Gen swung her legs down from the sofa and strode out the door. As she turned to the right, she paused and heard her house-mother say saccharinely, "She must be so happy that you're here. She's never had any visitors before." There was a question there, too, a where have you been? that Gen vaguely appreciated, even if she did not need to be protected, but the stranger ignored that.

"Well, I'm very happy to have found her here."

Root initially had difficulties stretching the edges of her mental picture of Shaw to wrap around the idea of a child in her life. Or not in her life, not quite, but obliquely related to her life, a blurry figure in motion caught in the background of a snapshot by accident.

Her face knitted in confusion, in disbelief, when John told her. She filed away the name for later research, more interested in that moment in clarifying the picture in her head.

"This belonged to a child." Though she made statements, he answered as if they were questions. It saved both of them some face in the underlying battle between them, the one with loud clashes that had quietened to mere whispers when Shaw disappeared, but which would never quite die out.

"Yes." John continued to study the medal, much as Root had done. She would never tell him that their instincts in this instance were identical.

"And she gave it to Shaw." Her voice took on another layer of disbelief. John looked at her with a hint of annoyance. He had never been one to romanticize Shaw, but any insinuation, intended or not, that Shaw had not deserved every tiny gesture of gratitude she had ever gotten put his hackles up.

"Yes." He put warning in his voice, and Root raised her head to meet it as it came.

"And Shaw kept it." The challenge was returned in a voice that dared him to question her good opinion of Shaw.

"I guess so." His shrug seemed to say that he could not care less, but as Root had once written in her files on the team, his fault was that he cared too much. That was as true now as it had ever been.

Root hung back as she followed Gen down the hall. She was struggling to keep everything under the surface, to act as confidently as the smooth hacker of both people and machines she had been for over twenty years. She paused in mid-stride when she realized she could no longer see Gen. She looked around in mild confusion, then heard a sarcastic voice from her left.

"In here, Aunt Sam."

Root turned toward the open doorway from which she had been so mockingly hailed. She followed the arrow of hallway light into the dark room, a classroom by the look of it, and turned on the lights. Gen sat perched on the large desk at the front of the room, and for a moment it all looked a little too much like the last time she had entered a classroom with a child. She shut the door carefully, both on the room and those thoughts, and turned back to the reason for her visit. Before she spoke, though, she walked swiftly to the computer in the corner and yanked the power cord from the wall with a jerk. Then, with a smirk, she nodded gracefully and accepted her seat atop a too-small front-row desk.

Gen had carefully schooled her face into an expression of disinterest, but Root could see the muscles twitching in her jaw, the questions ready to overwhelm her.

"You're not my aunt." It was not a question, but an opening gambit.

Root tipped her head in admiring acknowledgment of the sally.

"No, I'm not."

Gen cocked her head to the side in silent response to Root's motions, kicking her legs against the desk. Between thumps, she continued.

"You work with Harold."

Root raised her eyebrows to display mild surprise, even if that was not quite adequate for what she really thought. The child was more perceptive than she had expected.

Of course, it had been difficult to draw a complete picture from the distance of the parking lot. The idea she had of Gen was more of an incomplete sketch, with words and observations and data gleaned from impersonal computer records providing the suggestive grey lines for what the girl might be like. Perhaps the best indictors she had been able to find were Harold's notes from when Gen's number had come up, and John's offhanded comments.

"I guess she had to be a pretty weird kid, for Shaw to like her that much," he had said while eying her pointedly. Root had let the implied comment on her own weirdness pass so that he would keep talking, although her narrowed eyes let him know that his meaning had not gone entirely unheard. "I'm just saying, Shaw was impressed, okay?" he added. "At the beginning, when you weren't—" he had paused, then given her an amused look "around, she wasn't—" He had paused again, this time not to tease, but to think.

"She didn't care before that. About the numbers," he had said slowly. "But then… she didn't stop until this kid was safe. And then she never stopped again." His eyes had dropped away from hers not long into his short monologue, and so both of them had sat staring at the ground for a long time, trying to reconcile a soldier who could not care with a warrior who would have, and perhaps had, died to protect others.

So when Root had first gone to the school, she had not quite known what to expect. There was the possibility that the kid would be a mini-Shaw, or that she would be completely normal. Root could not discern whether she would prefer the pain of the first or the disappointment of the latter.

And then the girl had seen her, and furthermore, had proceeded to spy on her. Expertly. Harold's notes had not been exaggerating. The way she had faded into the background of the playground tableau, utilized the crowds and similar clothing to distract long enough to slip away, was nothing short of beautiful.

It was almost like the particularly-admired skillset of another small force of nature Root knew. Almost like watching what Shaw might have been like as a child, had they known each other then.

And so when she had forged Harold Wren's signature on the forms adding her alias to school records, she held her emotions carefully in stasis. This could not be anything more or less than an information-gathering mission.

But then she saw Gen's mistrust, so like Shaw's, and she was in shock. She nearly failed to respond to the maternal figure's carefully veiled admonitions in the common room. She was too busy watching, then following a blurry little ghost down the hallway. She was going into another classroom, for another conversation that she was not sure she wanted, and it was grim work to make herself do so calmly.

Root surfaced from her thoughts, replaying in her head like old home videos, to smile at the skeptical girl.

"Yes, I work with Harold." She waited patiently for the next words.

"So you know Shaw." Unexpected words.

Root's breath caught in her throat. Of course the girl would ask after Shaw, of course she would, but Root had not been prepared for that. Had somehow forgotten, in the struggle of this whole pointless chase to understand a single element of Shaw's storied life, that she would have to explain why Root, a stranger, had come in place of a small, angry, and somehow beloved spy.

"Yes, I- I did." With that cowardly whisper, Root destroyed the bravado in Gen's eyes in a way that condemned her to yet another layer of self-hate over the thick sediment she had accumulated over the years.

Gen stilled, then slipped from the desk, casting energy off herself in ropes of surprise and panic, ropes that wrapped around Root's head, immobilized it, forced her to watch destruction once again.

"You—you did. So she's—" Once again, Root could not look away. Once again, there was nothing she could do.

She shook her head helplessly even as her traitorous lips whispered, "She's missing. We don't know."

Gen shook her head too, but violently, as if to shake Root's words from her ears like water droplets. She stood with hands clenching and unclenching quickly, exuding dreadful electricity that brought chills to Root's skin like static.

"How can you not know?" she demanded vehemently.

Root could only stare at her helplessly. It was the question she had tried desperately to avoid for weeks, even though it seeped through her skin while she slept and poisoned her, weakened her. It was the question she had thought, but never voiced to the Machine, too afraid of what her God might reveal of Her own weakness, and Root's. It was the question to which she could not reach an answer, and she hated herself for it.

All of that, however, would not placate the angry hurricane currently staring daggers at her shamed silence.

Gen hit her like a sledgehammer, and she welcomed the too-tight arms wrapped around her wounded midriff and the pain they brought with relish. The scene began to blur with her tears, although she was not certain if the muffled sobs she heard were her own or Gen's.

This chapter was approaching 2,000 words with a lot more to go, so I decided to split it in two. Therefore, the fifth and most likely final chapter will follow in a few days. I hope that you enjoyed this, and please, if you have any comments or suggestions please leave reviews, as I love hearing from all of you lovely people :)