A/N: So ... thanks for the reviews. They certainly helped. We're moving along with the plot thing now.

Her arm felt hot. It couldn't be more than seventy degrees in the car and yet her arm felt like it was on fire. Cassie looked down at the spot just below her right shoulder and she knew why.

"I need a knife," she told Eliot, who sat beside her in the middle row of the sedan.

He frowned as he flicked one into his hand. He handed it to her with a question, "What is it?"

Cassie cut away the sweater in a clean slice, knowing she'd have to do the same thing to the other arm or people might notice. "The transmitter in my arm. They can track me using it."

"How's it work?" Hardison asked from where he sat behind them.

Cassie's hands were never idle as she attempted to tie the sleeve around her arm like a tourniquet. Eliot's expert hands stopped her and helped secure it with the right amount of force. She gritted her teeth as she thought about cutting into her own skin. "Like a GPS. It lets the SGC lock onto my exact location in case of trouble."

"And, like a GPS," Hardison nodded as he sat back down, "It can be hacked."

"Give me the knife," Eliot gruffly commanded as he felt her muscle for the small insert. The sensitive pads of his fingers finally found the slight irregularity. "Parker," he ordered, "Alcohol swabs."

The thief handed him the cotton and the rubbing alcohol from the back seat. It had been Sophie's idea to stop to get the basic medical supplies. "Because Hardison is so accident prone," she had reasoned to Nate at the time. Now Eliot and Cassie were only too thankful that there was less of a chance of infection.

Cassie closed her eyes and bit down hard on her tongue as Eliot used his paring skills for something other than fighting or cooking. The pain was intense and isolated, and yet not as bad as Cassie had feared. When Eliot poured rubbing alcohol over the wound after the transmitter was out, it hurt much worse.

"Good God!" Sophie took in a sharp breath in shock at the sight of Cassie's arm, and the locator now in Eliot's blood covered hand. "How long has that been in you?"

The younger woman tried to think through the slight fog of pain as Eliot undid the tourniquet and pressed a clean cloth to the wound. "Since I was sixteen. It was a lot less painful to put it in."

"You can have some pain killers in a second," Eliot promised as he handed the odd device to Hardison for a quick analysis before picking up the bandages Parker had thrown next to him on the seat. "Let me bandage it first."

"Don't bother," Cassie replied, knowing the naquadah in her blood would increase her healing time dramatically from experience. "The blood's already clotted."

Eliot frowned and looked at her, "How's that possible?"

She smirked back at him, "Alien, remember?" She took one of the wipes loaded down with rubbing alcohol and wiped her arm above the injury, the scab revealed beneath looked as if it had been healing for a good twelve hours, rather than the seconds it had actually been. "See?" she asked as she looked back up at Eliot with a smile.

"What are you going to do with the transmitter, Hardison?" Nate asked from the front seat as he tried to keep his attention on the road.

"Throw it in the river?" Parker asked.

"Toss it onto a car going the other way?" Sophie suggested.

"I was gonna study it for a while," Hardison mumbled.

"Give it to me," Cassie demanded, holding out her uninjured arm to reclaim the blinking device.

Once the hacker had reluctantly handed the device over, Cassie wasted no time in searching out the weakest part of the transmitter and crushed it to oblivion with naquadah enhanced fingers.

"Why'd you do that?" Hardison griped as his heart went out to the poor device that never even stood a chance.

Cassie sighed and was going to answer, but Eliot saved her the trouble, "Because it's a liability."

"But ..." Hardison started to protest, but he drifted off as he watched Cassie take a swipe at her injured skin a second time. This time the skin revealed beneath was the light pink of a new scar, "That is so weird."

"If Eliot could do that, then he'd be like Spiderman," Parker commented with a slightly gleeful look on her face.

"I think you mean Superman, Parker," Hardison replied.

Parker cocked her head to one side as she thought about it for a moment before saying, "Eliot can't stop bullets." She turned and poked his shoulder, "Wait ... Can you?"

Boston. The city of ... she wasn't quite sure. Her education on Earth hadn't included a rundown of the customs of all major cities. She knew about the Boston Tea Party, and the harbor close by but that was about it.

All she saw as she looked out the window at the passing buildings was a city full of desperate people in a desperate time.

They had arrived in Boston early that morning, somehow managing to catch a train in Michigan, dumping their rented car in a mall parking lot along the way. They had taken a train to Albany, deciding to drive the rest of the way after that. The car hadn't been ten miles from New York's capital when the sounds of snoring and soft, sleepy sighs could be heard from the back seat where Alec and Parker were sprawled forth. And now, here they were, driving through the great city of Boston as the sun came up to crest atop the high rises that lined the streets.

As Cassie watched out the car window as Earth's sun came into view, she couldn't help the solitary tear that slowly rolled down her cheek. She was thankful that Parker, Hardison, and Sophie had fallen asleep sometime before. She was sure Eliot would be asleep as well, if he wasn't taking turns with Nate driving.

"Are you okay?" Sophie whispered to her.

Apparently she wasn't as asleep as Cassie had thought. She turned to the grifter and nodded, forcing a smile, "Yeah, sure. Why wouldn't I be?"

Sophie gave her a look that clearly stated that she knew the truth of her feelings, if not her thoughts. "Other than the fact that you've just had to up and run from everything? And then you found out you were pregnant through no fault of your own?"

Cassie's eyes darted down to the safety of the upholstery between their seat belts. She gestured slightly with her head. After a moment she whispered back, "There's only one sun."

"How many did your planet have?" Sophie enquired with a tilt of her head as one of her hands covered Cassie's comfortingly. Like Sam had done after Janet had died.

Cassie's eyes went distant as she thought back to where she'd spent the first ten years of her life. "It has two." A small smile glinted across her face as she said, "In the summer we used to watch them travel across the sky ... it always looked like they were playing tag or something." She shook her head as she fell silent for a moment. She turned to face Sophie again, "I'm not sure I know how to be a mother. Whether I'm ready to be a mother."

Sophie squeezed her hand encouragingly, "You have nine months to prepare yourself for all that. Not to mention three to decide if you even want to be a mother right now."

The younger woman could feel her eyes well up again as she turned to look out the car window and the awakening city. After a while Sophie wasn't sure she was going to reply, so she was surprised when a few precious minutes later Cassie whispered, "I'm just not so sure that's even an option for me."

Nate pulled the car into a parking spot on the road in front of the bar where each of the teammates had an apartment. With little fuss, the group led Cassie up the stairs to Nate's apartment/their headquarters.

"This is a bad idea," Cassie reiterated again as she took a seat on Nate's sofa.

"Tea?" Sophie asked, purposefully ignoring the comment.

Cassie was beginning to feel the effects of hardly eating the day before and nodded her head before turning to Nate in her pleas, "If I stay here, they will find you. I don't want to see any of you hurt."

Nate raised his eyebrows as he studied the young woman intently for a few minutes. His eyes flickered to where Eliot sat in his favorite seat, noting the murderous glint in the hitter's eyes at the thought of Cassie being left to fend for herself and her baby.

"Yeah ... I'm gonna have to go with Eliot on this one," Nate said as he turned back to Cassie. His head was tilted to one side as he resumed his study of their new guest, "Your friends asked us to help keep you safe. So that's what we're gonna do. You can whine and complain all you want, but you're not leaving."

Her eyes grew as hard as the naquadah that flowed through her veins, "What makes you think I need your permission to go?"

Nate leaned back in his chair opposite her as Sophie brought in two cups of camomile tea, sweetened with just a touch of honey. She passed one to the pregnant alien and kept the other for herself as she took a seat on the other end of the sofa.

"Finding people is what we do," Nate reminded Cassie with a hard look of his own. "We're probably the only people around that can keep you safe."

She snorted as she glanced to where Hardison had settled down beside his computer and a two liter bottle of orange soda. Parker was no where in sight, but that didn't mean she wasn't there. "You can't keep me any safer than they can," she shot at the room in general, her hands desperately gripping the hot cup. She shook her head as she added, "You don't even know what you'd be up against."

"Worse than Russians?" Hardison asked, his fingers effortlessly flying over the keyboard as he hacked into God knows what.

Her mind filled with thoughts of pain sticks, staff weapons, memory recall devices, and all the other horrors the Goa'uld, and by default the Trust and Hera, had access to. She wanted to say something, but she wasn't sure what, so she just let out the shudder that was threatening to break forth, and took a sip of the piping hot tea Sophie had so kindly made for her.

"I can handle bad," Eliot gruffly stated as she fiddled with the infuser that held her tea leaves.

Again she shook her head, remembering how bad off Jack had been once Sam and the others had finally gotten him back from Ba'al. Her voice nearly broke as she said, "It would be worse than bad. Worse than awful. ... They have ways ..." she trailed off, not wanting to put words to the evils the Goa'uld were capable of.

Eliot shook his head, "I don't care. I can handle it."

Cassie's eyes came up at this and she drilled into his blue orbs, "They can make you betray everything you hold dear and think that it was your idea and that you were right to do so. It's not just about your body and how much pain it can endure -- it's about your soul and your mind. Things you should be able to trust implicitly are no longer sound. Do you really want to open yourself up to something like that?"

"Sounds like fun," Parker chipped in from where she was hanging upside down from the stair well that led up to Nate's bedroom.

"We've dealt with some pretty bad guys in our day," Sophie reassured Cassie with a smile.

"No," Cassie again tried to make them understand, despite how futile she knew it was. Her watery eyes looked now at Sophie as she said, "You've dealt with some pretty bad humans." Turning to look at Eliot she added, "But the people after me ... they aren't human. There isn't a single shred of humanity in them."

Eliot refused to back down as Nate answered her for the whole group, "So when the time comes, we fight dirty."

"And until then, we keep you safe," Eliot added, in what seemed like a bit of a role reversal for the team captain and the quarterback.

Cassie shook her head as her face fell to look into her cup of tea. "Don't say I didn't warn you."

A few hours later found Cassie attempting to sleep in the guest room of Eliot's apartment, as it was the only one that had a bed and wasn't filled with clothes, shoes, computer parts, or other forms of geekery and addiction.

She stared up at the white ceiling riddled with that horrible popcorn technique contractors seemed to favor. One of her hands covered her stomach, where new life lay growing beneath her skin. She drew random patterns over her skin, unconsciously drawing the Gate address of Hanka over and over again.

Her mind went blank and within a few more minutes she was asleep.

She was in the kitchen of what used to be her home. Looking down, she saw that in her dream she was much farther along in her pregnancy and a light cotton gown in the color of sunflowers covered her bulging figure.

Her eyes traveled to the worn wooden table settled in the middle of the packed dirt floor. A carved bowl and spoon lay there, as if their owner had just left them to go outside and meet their friends for a rousing game of stick ball. A tear slid down her cheek as she recognized them as having belonged to her sister, Mira. Next to the bowl and spoon there was a nick in the wood from when Cassie had dropped a carving knife.

The shuffling of cloth made her turn her back on the memories. She was faced with a woman who looked so familiar and so very foreign at the same time.

"You always did love that table," the stranger said with a fond smile that gently reached her light brown eyes.

When she smiled, Cassie knew who she was supposed to be and smiled in return, "And you always hated it after you went to the temple."

She shook her head, "I didn't understand what it was that you knew better than any of us: the importance of family."

Tears fell unbidden from Cassie's eyes as she shook her head at the apparition, "Why are you doing this? Why did you bring me here? Looking like this? While you look like her?"

The woman shook her head, "I didn't bring you here. This is where your mind went, Cassie. Of its own accord." She lifted her arms as she looked down at herself, "And as for my appearance ... granted I don't age like I used to, but I thought it would be best to look a little older than the last time you saw me."

Cassie shook her head fervently even as tears clouded her vision, "No. My mother is dead. She died the same day everyone else did -- in the same horrible way."

The other woman's head of short, dark brown hair fell slightly as she motioned toward the table, "Care for a seat?"

Despite the tears, Cassie glared at the apparition with venom scarcely found in humans even as she sat down before her sister's worn bowl and spoon. "My mother is dead," Cassie reiterated forcefully, even if her voice did waver a bit while speaking.

Her host nodded as she sat across from her. "That is both true and false, young Cassandra."

Her glare turned to one of confusion as her hands mindlessly glided over the grooves in the table. "What do you mean? It's either true, or it's not. It can't be both. And who the hell are you anyway? Invading my mind and looking like a dead woman?"

Soulful brown eyes met Cassie's from across the table as she said, "My name is Ganos Lal, although you'd know me better as Morgan le Fay, and Janet Fraiser was not the second mother you had the misfortune of losing. She was the third."

She awoke with a start. At first confused as to what had put a sudden stop to her conversation with (apparently) an Ascended Ancient Daniel had told her about a few years ago. She held very still as she listened for the noise to repeat itself.

"Psst. Psst."

"What is it, Parker?" Cassie asked, keeping her voice as low even as her heart returned to normal and her eyes focused on the smaller woman.

The thief hopping onto the full sized bed beside her as she asked, "Want to go jump off a building?"

Cassie thought about what she had just found out and she found the idea a great deal more appealing than it had sounded the day before.

"Let me grab my shoes."

A/N: For those of you unfamiliar with Stargate ... might I suggest gateworld (dot) com? It has very helpful section headings about weapons and alien races to help dispel any confusion you might face after this chapter.

Happy (not quite) Valentine's Day! Here's to another year of being single on purpose! In honor of V-Day, I'll try to get Cassie and Eliot snogging in the next chapter. Perhaps Sophie and Nate, too.