Hezekiah Jackson gave him ten days. Ten days to rest and let his injuries heal before they left for Outside. Those ten days were torture for Sam. He knew the old man hated him, hell he'd feel exactly the same way if he was in the man's position, yet he was still being kind. And that kindness was killing him. By the third day he would have infinitely preferred a second beating to sitting sharing meals at the table of the man whose life he was irrevocably ripping to shreds.

Mercedes had pleaded his case and somehow managed to get her father to agree to keep his presence a secret. Sam now had free run to move about the house but was still a prisoner inside of it. Mr Jackson didn't like the idea of leaving his daughter alone in the house with Sam when he went to work, but figured the damage had already been done and his daughter had work projects of her own to finish before she left. But the thing he was able to ruin was their sleeping arrangement. The patriarch may not have been able to control what happened in the day, but he could certainly control what happened under his roof night. The camping mat was moved into the old man's room and Sam spent his nights listening to deep snores instead of late night whispered conversations in the dark. Her soothing voice and songs were no longer there to help him with the nightmares and the lack of sleep was making him cranky. It was also harder because whenever Mr Jackson was around, he needed to make sure he had the colored lenses in his eyes. Their story of her avoiding a green eyed golden haired man had to hold true, even for him if it was going to come over as genuine.

The more Sam spoke to Mercedes as the days passed, the more he realized that just how much thought and planning she'd put into what she was going to do. She'd sat him down and showed him the items that she'd already put together for the journey. They ranged from the water filter and purification tablets to toiletries, foot protection and the most amazing dehydrated food he had ever seen. It consisted of small individually wrapped cubes in different flavors, that, when mixed with either hot or cold water, made a more than generous and filling portion of a nutritionally balanced porridge. She even had four types of medicine, one each for pain, fever, allergy and infection. It pretty much covered most eventualities but it was difficult when they were limited in what it was physically possible to carry.

Taking him into her younger brother's room one day, Mercedes showed him his camping equipment. "He won't be needing these anymore so you can have them." Sam took the backpack, sleeping bag, and mat as well as both clothing and shoes that fit.

"Do you miss your brother?" He had to ask. She didn't talk about him much.

"Sometimes. But it's hard. I'm already used to him not being around. Training begins at the age of thirteen. He comes home for one month every year. That month ended a few weeks ago, which is why he has these things. Each time we see him he's grown so much that we buy him a few sets of new clothes but he always leaves them behind. They only wear simple robes at the Academy where he studies so he has no need for them there. I guess for us they're more for sentimental value than anything else. By the time he comes back he'd have outgrown them again so it doesn't really matter what you take."

She was sitting on his bed with a sad expression on her face as she slowly ran her hand over the bedspread and he felt bad for her. She wanted to go, but she was going to be leaving a lot behind. Only now was he really starting to see this. "How long will he be at the Academy?"

"Seventeen years."

Sam nearly choked. That was nearly as long as she'd been alive! "Seventeen!"

"It takes years of study and training to be a Minister. That's why they start so young. But it's a great thing to be if you can do it and a huge honor to your family. My dad wanted me to marry a Minister. In his ideal world I would stay at home for a couple more years to look after him then marry a newly ordained Minister and the both of us would live here with him. It would give me a good position in the community but… I know that personally it would feel like a death sentence. I would never be able to handle that kind of a lifestyle. It would literally kill me from the inside out."

It was the first time that she had spoken so openly about her feelings and Sam was starting to fully appreciate what exactly it was that made this girl tick. When she said that she didn't belong, she really genuinely meant it.

"Are there other things you need to get? Because... I have money. You're supplying everything and as we're travelling together I need to contribute." The gun wasn't the only thing he'd been hiding away.

"It won't be safe. I can't draw any attention to myself by buying things out of the norm right now. And anyway, I already said I've been saving."

"Well we can pool our finances." He didn't know where this bout of honesty had come from. He'd initially had no intention of declaring his money, but Mercedes was the most devout, decent and trustworthy person he'd ever come across. He wanted her to know and share it.

"How much do you have?"

He told her to wait while he retrieved the paper envelope. Handing it to her she gasped as she looked at the contents. She didn't even count it but he knew it would take her a hell of a long time to make that kind of money making and selling clothes and working a few hours in a diner.

"How come you had so much money on you?"

"It's the first part of my payment that I got at the beginning of the night you met me. The second part was what I should have collected afterwards in the alley but it wasn't there."

She looked hard at the money before suddenly throwing it on the ground as if it had burned her.

"What's wrong?"

"I can't take it!"

"Why not? It's just money."

"It's blood money. I can't accept it!"

"But it can still be used to do good!"

She shot him an expression that let him know how frustrated she was that he didn't understand. "That money is the value of somebody's life. I don't want it near me. It's your money to do with as you please. Buy yourself whatever you like with it but I want no part of it. I don't want you to spend any of it on me and I don't want to benefit from anything that was bought from it."

"But Mercedes!"

She stood. "It's not up for discussion Sam." Turning quickly she left the room, leaving him alone with his thoughts, staring at the envelope on the floor, knowing he had just screwed something up but not being quite sure what exactly it was.

"Do you ever wonder what it would be like if things were different?"

She eyed him carefully. "What do you mean?"

"I mean if that night never happened. If you'd left the diner on time and we never met."

"Or if you'd killed me."

He shot her a wry smile. "I could never have killed you."

She shrugged. "Either way I would have died that night. Whether it was from a bullet or being banned from returning to the Transit Sector by my dad – ultimately that would have done it too. Looking back I've come to believe that one way or another something was going to change that night. To be banned from the Transit Sector would still kill me, just slower."

"Is it really that bad?"

Her eyes filled with tears and she nodded. "Nobody understands. They think I should just be content with the way things are. But I can't be. It eats at my insides and burns through my soul. I can't do this life. It would break my spirit." Sam watched as she clenched her hands together. "I've seen what happens to people like me. The frustration eats them alive. They become sad, the bitter and angry then eventually insane because nobody can see what they do. I don't want to become one of those old women who everybody avoids. I don't want to be one of those women who randomly ups and leaves their family with no explanation simply because they just can't handle living a lie and having to conform anymore. I have to get out. The choice was taken out of my hands a long time ago."

Her voice rose with the passion of her speech and her desperation was clear. Her fear of being trapped was greater than her fear of him and her fear of death. At least through Zeben he'd always had the freedom of travel through the Transit Sector. She was stuck here and it was eating away at her like gangrene. It saddened him that this desire affected more women than men in a Sector where they were powerless to do anything about it. He wondered if people in other Sectors suffered the same fate. And how come only some people had this? What factors made it that way?

Reaching across he touched her arm. "I understand. I may not have Perception or fully comprehend what it entails, but I do understand frustration and feeling trapped."

She put her hand on top of his and squeezed it gently. "Thank you Sam. That meant a lot."

Then she turned and went back to her work with a grave expression on her face.

One thing he struggled with was the fact that she was only nineteen. She didn't come across as someone that young. Her knowledge was vast which he attributed to her extensive reading and exposure to different types of people in the Transit Sector. And when it came to her looks and her body… well there she was definitely all-woman! Her features were very different to the women he was used to but contrary to what he'd been told that didn't make her any less attractive. After eating her lunch she would often read for an hour or so before resuming her work. She would curl up on her bed with a book and he'd resume his position on her floor, looking through the illustrations of the many textbooks she owned, suddenly for the first time in his life feeling inadequate when it came to his levels of education. Often she'd curl up on her side facing away from him as she read, and in doing so, the fabric of her pants would tighten and strain against her ass making his mouth water. He couldn't help it. He was still a red blooded male. Women where he was from didn't have an ass like that, and just like her hair, he was aching to touch it, but knew better than to try. Plus the 'do not touch' vibe that she gave off wasn't just a hint of an aura, it was a whole damn force-field! It was a shame because her looks had him constantly reminding himself of her age and forcing him to keep his thoughts on track and wholesome like she was.

He only thing that really hinted at her youth was the innocent naïveté that she sometimes displayed together with her simplistic outlook on life. A perfect example of that had been his encounter with Michael's mother. Somewhere deep down she must genuinely have thought that they would be all hugs and butterflies and forgiveness. But real life didn't work that way and she'd seen that very clearly. You can't rip away a person's child and expect it to be shrugged off as nothing. Even a sweet innocent person can and does contain rage. The fact that a frail looking little old lady could beat the shit out him didn't surprise him at all. It clearly shocked Mercedes, but she hadn't seen as much of the dark side of people as he had.

That's not to say that he wasn't trying hard to be the person she wanted him to be because he was. He felt that being the good guy suited him. But every couple of days he'd ask her if she was still scared of him and each time she would say 'yes'. At first he liked the idea that she feared him but as time passed he felt the balance of their relationship changing and he could sense that this fear was causing her to hold back from him a little. It pleased him and upset him at the same time and he couldn't work out why.

By the seventh day his bruises were starting to fade. As he washed his face in the morning he still chuckled when he took in his appearance. It never ceased to amaze him that all of this damage was caused by a woman. An old woman. A tiny old woman. A woman who, in his own Sector, he would have had every right to hit back and faced no recourse whatsoever.

The chuckle stopped.

It wasn't funny at all.

Mercedes's words from the first night rang in his ears about how differently she would be treated in his Sector because of who she was. If the roles were reversed, she would have found nobody to shelter her or tend her wounds. His story of being beaten for standing up for insisting on being in love with her was a stretch, not because of the beating, but because in reality it would have been by more than just his father, and he wouldn't have been able to get up and walk away after it.

Those somber thoughts stayed with him all day. This world definitely wasn't right. Maybe there was somewhere better that they could be. There were so many things in his life that he'd never thought about or questioned. He simply accepted them because it was the way that things always had been. Mercedes' curse of seeing beyond the obvious was becoming clearer and clearer to him each day.

The final couple of days were the most difficult. He could tell that the reality of leaving was starting to hit Mercedes hard. She was going to have to say goodbye to her family. Forever. He wanted to reach out to her but she seemed to be shutting him out and it hurt more than it really should have. He didn't owe her anything. He was doing her a favor by going along with her, albeit a favor that also helped him too.

Even though it went against everything he was, the loner man of few words, he wouldn't have minded talking to her about it. Except that for the first time, the girl that he had nearly shot on more than one occasion simply because she wouldn't shut up, wasn't talking about the one thing that she probably should have been. And here he was feeling proud for opening up to her. In the two weeks that they'd been around each other, he'd opened up to her far more than he had to anyone else in his entire life. Zeben had clothed and fed him but he was in no way a confidante.

What he didn't expect was to meet her elder brother. Daniel Jackson had keys to the house and let himself in on their penultimate evening during dinner. When he saw Sam there he was pissed off for a whole heap of reasons, the worst being that he hadn't been consulted at all in this. They were going to let him honestly believe that she was dead. Mercedes's eyes welled up as she held on to his arm and assured him it was the best. The less people that knew the truth, the less who had to hold on to the burden of that lie. The grief would still be grief, one way or the other, but in this sense it would be more real. They sat him down and told him the same version of events as they had told her father. Daniel said nothing before asking to speak to Sam outside for a moment. This time Mercedes did look scared for him after having learned her lesson from the Michael incident, but her dad simply nodded and he followed the larger man through the door like a man walking towards death row. His only calming thought was than in this Sector, murder was frowned upon so he was unlikely to be killed by this huge muscular man.

What did happen was that he was pinned to the wall by his throat and threatened to within an inch of his life before being shoved to the floor as the unlikely sight of tears appeared in the other man's eyes and he suddenly turned and fled the house, slamming the door on his way out. Mercedes immediately came, looked at the front door and flew to his side as he sat against the wall, still regaining his breath from the chokehold. She looked scared for him and he didn't blame her. "Are you okay? Did he hurt you?"

Sam shook his head. "I'm fine." Yet again, the pain of the strangle hold was nothing compared to what Daniel must have been feeling right now. This time she looked at him with sadness and insisted on helping him to his feet, stoking his face gently as she looked at him intently to make sure that he wasn't hurt.

Her father came out of the dining room and stood in the doorway, just silently watching their exchange and saying nothing. Sam just wanted to lie down on his makeshift bed and be left alone with his thoughts. He'd never in his whole life he'd spent a fraction of the time thinking over the consequences of his actions, as he had over the last few days. Thinking about how different people were affected and what they would then have to live with forevermore.

He had just lain down and assured Mercedes for the third time that he was fine when he heard the front door again. Daniel had returned. Of course he would. He touched Mercedes's arm. "Go and talk to him. He loves you. He just wanted to make sure that I would always take care of you because he can't be there to."

Mercedes nodded, cast him one final sad look, and left to join the men again. The arguments continued and Sam winced at being constantly referred to simply as 'Other Sector' and his hear plummeted at the impassioned plea from Daniel as he reminded her that she wasn't even going to get to say goodbye to her sister in law and two year old nephew. Sam could literally feel all the hurt radiating from the other room. He didn't even bother getting changed as he curled up on the mat. He simply lay there and listened to the sound of their voices until he fell into his usual fitful sleep.

When the day arrived the mood was somber. They were up before daylight, the plan, to leave just before dawn, giving them the entire day to travel before her father would raise the alarm at nightfall. It would allow them the chance to cover as much distance as possible.

They ate breakfast in silence and Mercedes embraced her father for the final time. He touched Mercedes's belly gently and Sam again felt terrible for the lie that they were feeding him about her pregnancy. He then acknowledged Sam with a nod and Sam felt tears pricking his own eyes and he wasn't even sure who the hell they were for.

Mercedes took two steps before turning and flinging herself back into her father's arms. "Daddy I-"

"Shhh…" He pressed his finger to her lips and gently kissed her forehead. "No more turning back Mercedes. I've said everything I need. I want the last words you hear from me to be 'I love you'."

With one final kiss he wiped his eye and turned, not pausing until the front door shut behind him.