"Adam, I – "
"What, do you sense anything?"
"I –" Emma looked confused for a moment, and shook her head. "No, I, I thought I felt an echo of something wrong, but maybe it was nothing."
"Or maybe it was something," Shalimar said. "Maybe we're headed in the wrong direction, getting further away from where we need to be."
"But we'd be going over old ground," Brennan objected, but at Shalimar's glare quickly changed tack. "I guess I could fly a parallel vector back the way we came so we at least see some new scenery."
"And it's the only lead we have," added Adam. "I can't see how we can ignore it."
*****
In small brand new clearing, so new that the smell of resin from the fallen trees was heavy in the air, two bodies lay entwined in the debris. One, the younger, was motionless, but the older stirred. Both were covered in blood and ashes, almost unrecognisable as human.
There was no one to see, not even a bird or rodent, as the older man shuffled himself around enough to hold the younger man in his arms. To see the tears the older man shed as he cradled the younger man's head, stroking the grimy, sticky hair.
For a long while only a whispered muttering, and harsh sobbing could be heard, even the wind and drizzle having temporarily subsided.
Nothing witnessed the older man pull a small box and a palmtop from his pocket and place them in the younger man's lifeless hands, or the silver ring that glinted in the sunlight as he put it on the younger man's finger.
And perhaps only insects heard the older man's murmured prayers as he crawled into the trees, thanking providence for the special powers his son possessed that had saved his life, and entreating fate to let his son be found in time to save his own.
*****
"Brennan, new course!" Adam suddenly snapped. "I'm inputting now!"
"Got it!" Brennan confirmed, banking the Double Helix slightly to amend their course. "What's up?"
"Jesse's ring has just been activated," Adam said grimly, "but he's not responding." He called Jesse's name a few times to be certain until Shalimar interrupted.
"How far away? How long until we get there?"
"A long way. We've gone way too far South. Even at the Helix's speed, it's going to be not much short of an hour."
"Well, I'll just have to see how fast I can push this baby," Brennan said with determination.
Forty-eight minutes later, the Double Helix was coming to land to one side of the large patch of scorched earth. Debris littered the place, and the ruins of an aluminium track ran away from the area to disappear into the brush a short way up a mountain.
Signs of life were gathered at the far side of the mountain, although none of those had made it around this side. However, cloaking the Helix, they knew that they had to be quick. There was only a single life sign showing up at this side of the mountain, at the edge of the scorched area. And it was attached to a silver ring.
There were no other survivors to be found in the area so, gently and carefully, they put their unconscious comrade on a hard stretcher and loaded him onto the Double Helix, before heading for home.
The soldiers that spent the next twelve hours scouring the area could only find evidence of three bodies, though with the plain black clothing they'd all worn there was no indication of who they had been.
*****
Brennan stared at the Palm Pilot and the box with the syringe. He wasn't really a computer nerd, but he was no slouch and he had to do something while the girls hounded Adam and his doctor pals.
The Pilot and box had been put to the side, but now he had time to study them his thief's eye was impressed with the security on the box. He was uncertain whether even he could have got into it without the codes on the Pilot.
But now things were looking a little tricky. He was trying to read the guff about the drug in the syringe, but it made little sense. Something to do with the halting of genetic disorders, and there was a list of names that had been guinea pigs for it. Interestingly enough, at the top of the list, the first guinea pig, some twenty-five years previously was a Sylvia Kilmartin, and much more recently, just a year or so before, had been Anya Sorensen.
Deep in thought, he wandered towards the medlab, stopping when he saw Emma sitting outside with her head in her hands. "That bad?" he asked uncertainly, and she nodded.
"Jesse's doing fine," she explained. "He lost a lot of blood, broke a few bones and oh, god, he's in a hell of a mess, but he'll live. They've replaced the blood and there's really just such a lot they have to fix up, but mostly its just infection they're worried about."
"So what's so bad?" Brennan asked, sitting beside her as she trembled.
"I hate all this," she said miserably, eyes huge with unshed tears. "There's you and Adam, both trying not to worry. But you're so angry, and Adam's so frustrated. Then there's Shalimar who's all of the above. And then there's Jesse who's in such horrible pain and he's so, so incredibly angry and this," she raised her hands wide apart to demonstrate. "This huge guilt trip he's on. I can't cope with it all, it hurts!"
Brennan stroked her back, as reassuring as he could be. "So," he said, at length, "you wouldn't be wanting to take a little trip with me for an hour or so would you?"
"Taking pity on me?" She gave a watery smile.
"Nah," he replied sheepishly. "I want to talk to Anya, and I need you for protection. She scares me."
*****
Jesse came slowly back to a form of awareness inside a bubble of his own making. Eyes open enough to see, ears to hear, nose to smell and even nerves to feel, but there seemed to be a buffer between all these things and his brain. Very far away, Adam asked how he felt, and Shalimar smiled, and he managed to mumble something, but had to turn away. He was too tired, and they were too alive to deal with right now.
Everything hurt, parts of him he never knew existed hurt, but with that cosy almost-numbness that fools you into thinking that nothing hurts at all. Yet you also know that one tiny muscle twitch will send you into paroxysms of agony.
He could see the machines on the side, the dermal regenerator, skeletal accelerator, sub-dermal dilator as well as the familiar vials of antibiotics and local anaesthetic that told him that most of his injuries would be almost gone by the time he'd had a good night's sleep.
And it was all far less than he deserved.
He no longer wholly trusted Adam; he'd seen too much in recent months to believe that he was quite as altruistic as he liked to pretend. But equally, he didn't believe that Adam had given him over to Horatio easily, or without some duplicity on Horatio's part. The only thing that hurt was that he'd always seen Adam as a father figure, even though he'd only just realised it. But Adam fell somewhat short of the Captain who had loved his own son so much.
Noah - now there was a bad memory he wished he could wipe away. He thought that he should feel something for his father, but strangely there was nothing. Not even hate. Perhaps somewhere in the middle of all that, he'd ceased to think of Noah as anything more than a bad news acquaintance.
But what really scared him were his own actions. Or, not so much what he'd done, as the fact that he'd done it without rancour or remorse. He was actually damned proud of his achievements with his powers. He'd learned a lot, was more confident in what he could do. But when he'd decided to set in motion the destruction of the experimental craft, he'd done it knowing he wouldn't survive. Knowing his own father wouldn't survive. But he'd done it anyway, and thought nothing of the fact that he was committing a heroic suicide. He'd never thought of himself as having a death wish before. But now that he thought about it, maybe he did, maybe he always had.
Lying there while his body was being repaired gave Jesse time to think, and the more he thought, the more things clicked into place and allowed him to realise some truths about himself and those around him.
That Adam was not infallible, that Noah had never been on the pedestal that Jesse had previously thought he'd fallen off, that people didn't come under the banners of 'good' and 'evil', but wandered around lost somewhere in between. That if he set himself no limits then he could do anything, and that if he stopped believing in those around him, then there would be no one to hold him back. A cynical way to look at things, but then again, cynicism was new to Jesse, and when he found something new he always did his best to explore it to its extremes.
*****
"Anya?" Brennan tried the door and it was open.
The rainbow haired girl was curled up by the window, staring lethargically out into middle space. "I don't want you here," she said softly, without looking at them.
"Anya." Brennan walked slowly over to her, and sat on the ledge, within touching distance but never touching, while Emma hovered discreetly in the background. "Anya, I need your help."
"You don't need me," she replied flatly.
Brennan bowed his head as he tried to formulate the words that needed to be said. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry that I can't love you the way you want me to, I really am, but I can't help that. You're very attractive, and…"
"Don't you dare say there's plenty more fish in the sea, or whatever contrite cliché you don't mean!" she spat.
Brennan smiled. "I was going to say you should be having a ball, instead of moping up here. You're barely in your twenties, you have decades to find someone else."
"Hah!" Anya's attempt at laughing was a hitching sob. "And that's where you're wrong! I have months at best. Bralinger's isn't kind, and I just wanted someone to love me and for me love and at the end hold me, so I don't die alone."
Brennan didn't know what to say for a moment, but decided that honesty was the best policy. She certainly needed comfort and, for the short time she had, he thought that maybe he could give it her. "Bralinger's. Anya, did you have treatment for it?"
"Sure," she snorted. "And all that did was bring it on early. I volunteered to test it out, but I was a failure. Nothing new there."
"What is Bralinger's and how do you get it?"
"It's, uh, it kinda eats away at your nervous system. Lies dormant for years, decades sometimes, but once triggered it's slow enough to torture, fast enough that you're not quite sure what hit you." She held up her hands, which were visibly trembling. "That's not nerves," she joked.
"And how do you get it?" Brennan asked, a bad feeling growing inside him.
"Well, you know what they say about your parents will always be the ones to screw you up? All it takes is one of them to have it and the kids are guaranteed."
All of a sudden the notes on the Palm Pilot began to make sense. Whatever Jesse had been through, it had to have been in order to get a cure for the disease that was lying dormant inside him. He needed the contents of that syringe.
"Anya," Brennan leapt to his feet, "we have a cure, they've refined it, you can come with us and…"
"No!" Anya stood and faced him directly, a curiously calm serenity about her. "No, I can't go through that again. You go on. I have plans."
Brennan cupped her face and kissed her on the cheek. "I'll be back."
Anya waited, until they'd gone before whispering after him, "But I won't be here."
*****
Jesse leaned over the balcony railing above the garden, unable to find any kind of peace in the tranquil surroundings. It was a given that Shalimar would find him there. She didn't say anything for a while, but he found that her warmth melted the cold darkness inside him a little.
He was still convalescing, first from his injuries and then the cure for the disease he hadn't known he had, a cure which had been almost as bad as the disease by all accounts, just a little less permanent.
"It won't be long before you'll be back out there, fighting the good fight," Shalimar said eventually, looking for a conversation starter.
"Who says it's good?" Jesse asked. "Adam? How do we know he's right?"
Shalimar pulled away a little, clearly concerned. "Jesse, I know you've been through hell, that you must be pretty angry right now, but give it a little time and it'll all turn out in the end, trust me."
Now it was Jesse who pulled sharply away. "Shalimar." His face was determined and honest as ever, but with a hardened edge that frightened her a little. "I love you more than you can know, all of you. And I'd do anything for any of you. But don't ever ask me to trust. Ever."
And as she watched him limp away, it was Brennan who was there to offer her some small comfort. "He'll come round, give him time. He's just hurting."
She shivered as she considered. "No," she sighed eventually. "He thinks he's found the way to stop the hurt. It's up to us to prove him wrong. And that really is going to take time."
*****
Horatio stared down the bedraggled man standing defiantly before him. "I should kill you," he said softly.
"So kill me," Noah replied. "It's not like it would be any great loss." Only a minor tremble gave away his fear that Horatio would take him up on it.
"You do put yourself down, don't you?" Horatio remarked. "You have cost me so much, yet you are far more valuable alive, if only I had realised it sooner."
"So, what happens now?"
Horatio smiled, and shivers crawled down Noah's spine. "You'd do much to keep your son safe, wouldn't you?"
"No, you can't do that again! You can't!"
"What, restart the Bralinger's? How I wish I could - it's such an effective motivator for you."
Noah's sigh of relief was audible.
"But there are other methods of motivation," Horatio continued. "I have the power to keep him safe, give him a fairy godfather, if you will, and he need never know."
"Or have the fairy assassin do nasty things, I bet," Noah scowled.
"Well, now that you come to mention it…"
"There is no choice, and you know it," Noah muttered, and Horatio chuckled soundlessly.
"Ah, but you will be amply rewarded, Mr Kilmartin, never fear. And money is something as close to your heart as your son, is it not? Then I would think this is a win-win situation, wouldn't you?"
And as the thugs took away his handcuffs, Noah felt the noose around his soul choke it to death.
FINIS