Title: A Twist in a Relative Timeline
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: I don't own anything anyone recognises and I'm not making any money from it.
Rating: PG, maybe PG-13
Summary: When time travel's involved, you never know when you'll meet up with old friends.
Notes: So, I'm warning you all now of two things. This is not a slashfic. It's not going to have much, if any, romance in it, definitely no smut. Second, I will be reusing some concepts from this in another fic when I'm done with this one, and it'll be weirdly derivative. Anyhoodle, this is just so everyone knows now.

Stephen Hart had a more or less normal childhood as these things are reckoned. Two parents, reasonably affectionate, not overly affluent, but not poor either. Both fairly well-educated, but neither one an intellectual. He played football and rugby, more football than rugby, grumbled through his dad's cricket, put up with being dragged to art museums and plays and things by both parents and went through the normal childhood stages of interest in cars and lorries, cartoon superheroes, obsessive sporting collections of football jerseys and the like and some stupid extreme sport junkets. He was good in school, though hardly one of the swots at the top of the class, was never bullied because he was too popular and good looking to stand for it and was usually well-liked by his peers and teachers.

There was one thing that made him a little odd, though. And it could be traced back to a single childhood event. It always left his parents baffled how one incident of a really weird dream, sleepwalking into a mud puddle in some clothes they simply could not recall getting for him in the dead of night, had wrought such a change in little Stevie Hart.

He'd woken them at three in the morning, screaming the house down from outside, claiming he'd been kidnapped by someone, taken from the house, held captive for days and had only just returned. The story, while imaginative, was ludicrous. But it had a tremendous impact on the young Hart. For nearly a year, the five-year-old had insisted that the whole story was real in the face of his deeply worried parents, child psychologists and educators. They'd pulled him out of school right quick when the other parents got upset with his cockamamie stories, arranging for homeschooling until the issue was resolved.

Stephen did eventually give in. But the whole strange episode created an obsession for him, with animals, hunting, tracking and guns that left his family (generally quite pacifist) baffled. They were proud of his accomplishments, the shooting titles, the skills that he showed off to younger cousins in following foxes through the brush back to dens and all the time he spent getting his degrees at uni in biology and chemistry.

He'd mostly forgotten about it, letting that part of his childhood go by the wayside, because the whole notion of what he'd believed at age five was too ridiculous for words, really. But he nearly had a heart attack when, in his position as Nick Cutter's assistant, he was delegated the task of teaching an eager class of post-graduate students.

It was a perfectly ordinary day, he was shuffling the papers he had lined up for the lecture in front of him when he saw him. A young man that looked like a ten-years-older version of the imaginary teenager who'd been his idol when he was five. The face was the same, and there was something in the way he moved that put him in mind of that boy as well. Stephen was nearly on his way over to ask, when the student managed to fall all over his own feet, sending papers and books and bag and laptop spinning in every direction.

Obviously it wasn't him. His imaginary hero remained imaginary.

As ever, he put the whole thing from his mind and concentrated on the present. That didn't help him, because he'd studiously avoided contact with the student in question out of fear he'd say something idiotic, when he came bumbling up to them, declaring his name to be Connor Temple.

"Hey, there. What's your name?"

"Stephen. But my mum and dad call me Stevie."

"Stevie or Stephen? Which do you prefer?"

"Stevie. What about you? Who're you?"

"I'm Connor."

He just couldn't help himself. He'd let slip about Helen's disappearance, and the sympathetic look was the exact one he'd remembered. But this was stupid. And it only felt increasingly idiotic as the day went on and this Connor faffed about, making more noise than anything should be able to make just walking, doing stupid things and generally annoying everyone about.

"It's a gorgonopsid. It's a compact killing machine, and it's got incredible power. Stephen, if it is still out there, then you have to find it. Fast." There it was again. Serious, sharp, clearheaded and brilliant. He'd seen that look before.

"I need you to watch, Stevie. There isn't much time, and I need to know if anything changes. Climb the tree, and if you see anything weird in there, anything at all, blow the whistle. More important, if you think something bad's about to happen to you, use it. I'll come."

It made him ask, taking him seriously, "What about you?"

No. It wasn't him. "You, mighty hunter. Me, I'm more logistics and, you know, backup." The cheesy smile and back pat made him grind his teeth.

The whole back and forth, yes and no, it hurt oddly. As if he were to see his father turn into a stranger. Not to mention, the Connor, the one from his childhood hallucination, was his protector, the adult who'd kept him safe from the monsters as a child. He'd been a bit of a talisman when he was scared of the dark. Connor wouldn't have been scared, and would protect him if something horrible happened.

But this Connor was eight years younger than him, was clumsy and foolish and could never have done for little Stevie what the other Connor had. No, it was his imagination run wild.

He just kept getting confused, though. Because the glowing portal was the one he recalled going home through, which lent credence to his year of certainty that he had been taken. Connor's face and voice, so familiar, began to haunt him. And with everything, he'd see these small moments where he was certain flashes of that boy he'd wanted to begrowing up would appear.

Driving off a mosasaur with nothing more than a paddle.

Fearless as he stood between gun sights and his mad, dying friend.

An awareness of the attacking future predators that seemed to almost presage the dogs and the sound of the oscilloscope.

Outrunning a raptor, diving under the metal barrier at the last second.

Genius with technology that allowed improvisation and instant adaptation.

The hallmarks he'd associated with his Connor, bravery, physical skill, brilliance, they were all there.

Intermittently.

Because every time he was sure, every time he thought he'd approach and ask, he'd be filled with doubt all over again.

Running across a golf course, accompanied by a lizard, chased by a pteranodon.

Mistaking a man in a mascot suit for a real cat.

Every bit of his silliness about Abby, Nick, himself and Jenny.

They couldn't be him. They weren't Connor. But the flashes of what he once was made Stephen let him in closer. Let him cling, foolishly. Because some childish part of him saw Connor's face and felt safe again in ways he hadn't since he was five and terrified, alone in his bedroom, certain they'd come for him again. And maybe, just maybe, this Connor was his Claudia Brown. Lost in time, due to time and paradox, someone he'd never get back again, left with only the pale imitation.

After the initial confusion with Nick over the imaginary woman, he'd let Nick's obsession go, because he was faced with the same every time he spoke to the endearingly smiling and clumsy young man in the waistcoat and fedora.

He never told anyone, though. Partly from habit and partly from a certainty they'd think he was mad, and partly out of fear they'd all believe him. Because if it was true, what did that mean for who and what he was, and what Connor was to him?

He'd been distracted from his issues with Connor when Helen came back again, worming her way into his life. He thought he'd seen Connor looking at him reproachfully the first night he'd let her into his flat and his bed again, but that had to have been his imagination, because if the Connor he worked with were thatConnor, he'd have said something, wouldn't he? But then again, Helen had seemed to bring out something overtly and madly klutzy in Connor. If he didn't know better (did he or didn't he, though? He didn't know) he'd have thought Connor was hiding behind his nerd persona around her for some reason.

None of it mattered now.

He was going to die, torn apart by the animals his Connor had saved him from, had showed off to him from the safety of treetops and piqued his interest in them as a child. It almost felt appropriate. Connor had risked everything to do what he'd done, for Stephen and the other children there, and now Stephen had thrown everything away for Helen. He'd earned this.

Only one thing left to do. "Tell Abby and Connor . . ."

"One last thing, Stevie."

"Yeah, Connor?"

A cheeky grin that made him feel better about walking through the glow all by himself. "Stay out of trouble."

". . . to stay out of trouble." He hoped Connor would get the message.

He backed away from the door, locking his eyes with Nick's and waiting for the end. But it didn't come, not right away. Because the alpha predators wouldn't share with each other. Not when there was only him there. They fought, and Stephen ducked and wove, because he didn't wantto die, he'd put it off as long as he could, and he didn't want to do that to Nick, either. It felt like an eternity until he was faced with fewer predators, but they seemed to have momentarily paused in battling each other.

Then a door to the side cracked open and Connor came through. The animals came on point, but Connor, no longer wearing shoes or socks, a scarf now tightly wrapped around one forearm dropped into a crouch, and told Stephen sharply, "When you can, get behind me. And when this is done . . ."

". . . If I'm not . . . me . . ."

He was creeping forward, producing pills from a pocket, which he dry-swallowed, ". . . If I'm not coherent . . ."

". . . Do whatever you have to do . . ."

". . . To stop me." Then he dove at the raptor, teeth bared, and Stephen knew, it wasthe same Connor.

He hurried for the door, giving an experimental yank, but Connor had locked them both in, making the same sort of gambit he had years before. All or nothing. And Connor was talking, blood that wasn't his already staining his face and clothes, "I really hadn't expected to have to play Roman Circus again," he nearly growled, ricocheting off the walls like the future predators. Five-year-old Stevie was crawling his way out of thirty-two-year-old Stephen's brain and cheering on his hero.

Then the SFs burst in, armed to the teeth, their automatic weapons dealing with the last of the creatures, and the only creature left was Connor, who looked feral, and reacted to the sight of the guns with widened eyes and a furious launch of himself at the soldiers. Better trained than the heavyset clones of the compound, they got out of the way, jockeying for a position to shoot Connor from.

"No!" Stephen hurled himself in front of Connor. "Don't! Put the guns down." His heart was pounding as he hoped Connor wasn't too far gone, wouldn't misread the situation in his unthinking and instinctive state. They didn't, and Stephen found himself suddenly assaulted by Connor.

"Stephen!" he heard Cutter shout. Heard the orders to do what they had to in order to save Stephen.

He wrenched free and scrambled back. Connor's eyes weren't showing anything but deadly intent, only a recognition that adult males like Stephen had done this to him, unable to differentiate between people, just adults and children. He hurled himself forward, as fast as any of the future predators could move, too fast for a normal person to take aim, Stephen closed his eyes, waiting for the impact . . . which never came.

Connor didn't show any sign of human intellect, but he did show recognition. His nostrils flared as he stood, frozen inches from Stephen. "That's right, Connor," he murmured. "You remember me? Stevie Hart?"

Unfortunately, the moment was broken by Jenny, who sometimes seemed to have the survival instincts of a lemming, squawking, "What?"

Connor whirled, his whole being now focussed on protecting the person he recognised as his charge from a decade before. But whereas lost in a prehistoric forest, running from a mad scientist's lair, a feral semi-human guard dog was a useful thing, faced with otherwise normally friendly soldiers and teammates, those instincts pressing Connor to defend his packmate at all costs were a liability. He was crossing the space, and Stephen was desperately trying to reach after him, to stop him, Jenny's hands lifted the gun she still carried, the SFs followed suit, smarter and faster than the ones from before . . .

Connor went down in a hail of bullets.

"No, no, no, no, no," Stephen moaned, running to Connor's side. "Get a medic and tell them to put restraints on him," he snapped. "Hurry!" He knelt next to Connor, who was barely conscious, but still lost to any sort of human interaction. He stroked the hair on the younger man's head, the way he'd once done when he was five and Connor fifteen, the older boy still feral and mad, but protective of Stevie to the detriment of anything else. "It's okay, Connor. I'll make sure of it."

His friend, that childhood idol he'd only just found again, whined and struggled as Abby, Cutter and Jenny closed in. "Back off," Stephen told them. "It'll be bad enough when the medics get here. He won't remember you. Not right now."

"But he remembers you?" Nick asked, volumes of bafflement in his voice.

And he was five again, faced with doubting grown-ups who couldn't believe a true story if it bit them on the nose, knowing that there was one person he'd trust without reservation, no matter how dangerous he was, no matter what was wrong with him, and that he wanted to make his hero proud. "Of course he does," Stephen said, blinking away tears. "He always did."

Unsurprisingly, when the medics came and put Connor onto the trolley, he began to panic. He was clearly pushing through the pain, and Stephen cursed, then ignored everyone's protests to hop on with him, wishing, for the first time in his life, that he was a smaller person, physically. It did the trick, Connor recognising that Stephen wasn't leaving him to vultures, soothed by the presence of someone he'd identified as a packmate, he let the medics start to treat him and strap him down.

He didn't get off the trolley until they'd sedated Connor and he'd fallen asleep. Then, ignoring Jenny, who was demanding answers, he headed straight for the car, Cutter and Abby in his wake.

"Stephen," Cutter demanded, finally grabbing his arm and spinning him around. "Just what was that with Connor back there?"

"I'll tell you on the way to the hospital," Stephen said tersely, yanking the door open and getting in. He barely waited for the other two to get in before he started it up and got on the road.

"Well?" Abby asked.

He sighed. "Connor was the victim of some very strange experiments when he was fifteen," Stephen told them. He really wasn't sure how they were going to take his revelations, so he was starting slowly. "I was never quite certain, and Connor didn't go into overmuch detail about it, but it seemed to be an attempt to create a sort of berserker super-soldier."

"Connor?" Cutter and Abby chorused. Abby was baffled, but Cutter's voice was derisive. "Who would try to turn Connor into a soldier?"

"The only reason she didn't succeed, Nick, is because Connor's brilliant and had read and watched too much science fiction," Stephen told him. "I can only guess that half the reason he's the mess he is, is because he's been self-medicating to control himself." A thought occurred to him, "Abby, can you look through his things at home? He'll have to have kept some notes somewhere in hard copy. Just in case."

"Sure," Abby said, taken aback.

There was a long period of silence. Then just as Nick was about to ask something, Stephen dreaded having to go through more questions since he'd been down that route twenty-five years before and hadn't much liked it the first time, they thankfully got to the hospital. Connor was already in surgery, and Stephen was cautioning them to leave Connor restrained and put on more anaesthetic than would be healthy in a normal human. He lied through his teeth about Connor being the victim of experimental drugging that would counter the most commonly used anaesthetics, warning them that Connor would be violent if he awoke in a strange place with doctors experimenting on him.

Then he went to wait outside the operating room and pace anxiously. He had to be there every step and he had to make sure they let him wait with Connor.

Clearly finally sick of waiting, Nick grabbed his arm, manhandling him into a chair. "You're going to explain, Stephen, and I expect it to be a complete explanation," he said. "You're on very thin ice with me. What happened to Connor and why the hell did he tell you about it?"

"He never told me," Stephen said, taking a deep breath and resolving himself to reliving those terrifying days. "He didn't have to, because I was there."

Cutter snorted, "You'd barely started your master's under Helen, Stephen," he said. "When the hell did this happen in between all that?"

"Anything's possible with time travel, Nick," Stephen said.

Abby gasped. "You went through an anomaly? When was this?"

"1980."

The pair froze. "But . . ." Nick frowned. "Why didn't you . . . I mean, when Connor brought the article with him you didn't seem to think it any more real than I did."

A little bitter, now that he knew everything was true, everything that he'd made himself believe was a lie, Stephen ran his hands through his hair. "I was five years old and bloody scared when I finally got home. It took a lot of child psychologists and a year of homeschooling, but I 'got over' the nightmare and sleepwalking incident."

"Oh, Stephen," Abby said, sympathy all over her face.

He looked at Nick earnestly. "It's part of why I hate that we hide the anomalies," he explained. "I spent so much time being told I was a liar, and then so much more time dealing with it and having no way to explain anything . . ." he trailed off. "But it doesn't excuse my believing Helen over you, Nick. I amsorry for that."

Cutter didn't say anything, but the harsh lines his face had taken softened a little. "So, what happened then? You wandered through one?"

"I was taken," he clarified. "I didn't even truly know about the anomalies until I was on my way home. I went to bed and woke up being hauled along like a bag of potatoes by some man in black, armed to the teeth." He looked at the other two. "You'll have to pardon any melodrama. I was only five, so some of my impressions may be a bit . . . er . . ."

His best friend's mouth quirked into a small grin for a moment, and Abby rolled her eyes. "So, then what?"

"I was being hauled through a Triassic forest, though I didn't know it at the time," Stephen said. "God, that was terrifying when we got attacked by a pack of coelophyses." He shook off the memory of darting bodies and snapping teeth. He'd been hard-pressed to hide his blind terror of the raptors in the mall. Hell, he'd had a bad time of it when he'd watched Jurassic Parkthe first time he saw it in a cinema. It really was too close to memory for him. He didn't even like watching large birds like ostriches.

"My God," Nick said, despite himself.

Abby was silent, but listening raptly.

"There was a lot of shooting and not long after I was dragged into a compound and taken to a block of what seemed like holding cells or prison cells." Stephen was half lost in the memory of the dark halls and the grim line of cells, each with its pair of occupants. "They were all holding children. One teenager and one young child per cell. In pairs, all of them. I was tossed into the last one, the only one which only had a teenager alone in it."

"Connor?" Abby asked.

Stephen nodded. "I remember, they just heaved me in, and he flung himself forward to break my fall." He shook his head. "Some of the other children weren't as lucky. A lot of them had sprains and bumps, I remember Hester had a broken wrist from where she hit the floor."

"Hester?" Nick asked with a frown.

"They didn't stop us from talking to the others, and Connor talked a lot," he said with a smile.

Chuckling, Abby said, "That doesn't surprise me."

"He wasn't being friendly, Abby," Stephen said, "Or at least, so he said. He'd claimed he was trying to pick out some pattern to what was being done and why we were there. And why us and not other children and teens." It was harder now to tell this story than when he'd been a child. Back then he'd been desperately trying to convince people of the truth. Now, he just didn't want to relive it all if he could help it. "I was the last brought in. The teens had been there longer. Connor said some sort of experiments had been performed on them."

"What's that on your arm?"

"Hmm?" Connor turned to look at Stevie. "What're you . . . oh, this?" he asked, pointing to the bruises and small spots, the track marks. "They're doing things to us," he said darkly. "I don't know what, but . . . have your mum and dad ever taken you to the doctor for a needle? Something to keep you from getting, say, the measles?"

"I didn't like it," he said with a pout. He hadn't either. A lollipop did not make up for having a great big piece of pointy metal poked into your arm.

Connor smiled. It was a nice smile and it made Stevie feel better when he smiled. If he was smiling, things couldn't be all awful, could they? "No one likes it," he agreed. "But I think they're using their needles to put bad stuff in, not good."

Eyes wide, Stevie said, "But why?"

"I don't know," said his new friend. "That's why I'm worried."

"I remember being terrified every time they took him away, wondering if something bad would happen to either of us during the separation," he said, feeling those chills again as if it were the first time. "And when they started testing whatever it was they'd done to him, to all of them . . ."

Nick had dropped even the faintest pretense of hurt feelings. "What did they do?" he demanded. In his voice was outrage. What did they do to my student? How badly was Connor hurt? Underneath that were questions Stephen hadn't been sure he'd hear again. What did they do to you, Stephen? Why are you still so frightened after all these years?

"Locked them in rooms with a pack of alpha predators," Stephen said. "Rather like what just happened earlier." He closed his eyes on remembered grief and fury when some of the cells were emptied. "Some of the teenagers didn't come back from it, and the children in the cells with them . . ." he took a shaky breath, Connor's rage, the first time he'd seen it, roaring in his ears as he finished, "We never knew what happened, just that they were taken away." Then he corrected himself. "I never knew, but the treatments Connor underwent improved his senses, his sense of smell, taste, eyesight, hearing. I'm fairly certain he heard what happened, and I'm also certain that he protected me from knowing because it was that horrible."

"Oh, no," Abby moaned, her hands over her mouth, eyes filled with tears as she imagined the scene.

Nick was frowning. "How could all those children go missing at once, though?" he asked. "Someone would have noticed that many kidnappings."

"Not if they weren't all from the same time," Stephen pointed out. "Hester I know was taken from America in the midst of the Civil War there, and Jim was living in Ireland in the 60s when he was taken. Don't forget also, I'm older than Connor, but he was fifteen and I was five in that place."

"Jim?" Abby asked. "Another one of the kids there?"

Stephen nodded. "Ursula and George, Jim and Bernie, Violet and Bess, Jed and Peter, Quinn and Fatima, Hester and Wendy . . ." he sighed. "It's been so long, I can't remember all the names. Connor might recall more."

"If he ever gets back to normal," Nick said darkly.

That was one thing Stephen was confident of, though. "He will. He has before and he can again."

Then the doctor came out, informing them that Connor had come through the surgery repairing all the damage from the bullets, and that he was being taken to a private room. Stephen followed, the doctor ignoring all his demands regarding Connor's room, until Connor, waking up now that the constant stream of drugs into his system was gone, nearly flew off the trolley, throwing the nurses and porters out of the way.

"Connor!" Stephen shouted, racing after him, risking a broken ankle vaulting over the stair banister to get in front of him.

Connor couldn't stop in time not to bowl Stephen over, but he was fast enough to catch Stephen before he hit the ground and set him gently on his feet. His head whipped around in confusion, no doubt the sterile scent of the hospital setting off alarms in his head that he wasn't safe, but the fact that Stephen was there and not stressed about their surroundings would have conflicted with that. "It's okay, Connor," he said, trying to sound soothing.

"What the hell is wrong with him?" squawked the doctor, who had come running up after them.

Stephen immediately got between the doctor and Connor, cutting off the no-doubt inevitable aggressive move, and found Connor yanking him back. While it was nice to know the Connor he'd got to know in the compound was still there, now that the worst of the crisis was over, it was going to get a little galling being protected by someone eight years his junior. He tamped down a part of him that thought it was nice that someone didn't just expect him to fearlessly nearly kill himself to protect others. "Nowwill you arrange somewhere for him to be that he's less likely to cause damage from?"

Lester's voice issued from behind them. "He will if he doesn't want to deal with the repercussions of failing to properly treat an agent of the Home Office injured in the commission of his duties."

It still took a good half hour to ease Connor through the hospital and into a padded room. Stephen point blank refused to leave him alone. "He won't hurt me," he assured the others, "And he may be worried if I'm not there." He sent Abby off, telling her to do what she could to find Connor's notes and get them to the scientists at the ARC so that they could come up with some sort of treatment for him, then ducked into the room where Connor had been getting increasingly agitated.

For a while Connor paced around like the caged animal he was, poking at the bandaging on his body and growling. Eventually the long day took a toll on him and he joined Stephen, who hadn't even noticed until then that he'd taken up the same corner that he'd considered 'his' back when he and Connor were locked up together. With a sort of nod of satisfaction, he lay on his side, facing the door and leaning on Stephen's legs as if to reassure himself his packmate was still there. Stephen had had an equally long day and let it all catch up to him, drifting to sleep with the reassuring knowledge that Connor was there and would never let anything happen to either of them.

Stephen woke to Connor staring at him from inches away. He started, then shook his head, smiling in amusement. By the time he and Connor had parted ways all those years before, he'd actually got used to Connor doing that. The way Connor had explained it to him, once he'd regained enough coherency to do so, was that the instincts he ran on were no longer human, but a mixture of the cocktail of genetic alterations based on various animals. It meant that there were polite behaviours he'd had to fake the whole time, and on thinking about it now, Stephen wondered if Connor had been forced to relearn human social behaviours when he'd got home, partially accounting for his strange behaviour as an adult.

Seeing that he was awake, Connor grinned happily and playfully nuzzled Stephen. A muffled thud from the door brought both their attention to it, and Connor's face immediately darkened. "Hey," he said, petting Connor like a cat. Connor's hackles lowered, so to speak, but he still looked suspicious. A moment later, Abby and Cutter walked into the room bearing a tray. "Tell me that's not hospital food," Stephen said to them.

Connor's eyes narrowed and he watched the interplay with great care. Then he edged over toward Abby, his nostrils flaring. Abby and Nick were both watching him cautiously now, and Stephen waited, because as much as he trusted Connor with hislife, he really had no idea how Connor would react to people he didn't recognise from when he was fifteen. "No," Abby told Stephen as she eyed Connor. "There's an Italian place nearby, and we didn't know how Connor'd be, so I got peanut butter sandwiches for Connor. They're his favourite."

As the suspicion eased away on Connor's face regarding Abby, he approached Nick, staring at him very hard. Abby's jaw dropped. "Does he think he's a wolf or something? He's playing dominance games with Cutter."

"Well, since right now he could tear Nick limb from limb without breaking a sweat, and I've seen it happen," Stephen said trying not to laugh, "I expect he might have a bit of a point on a purely primitive biggest stick sort of way." Connor's nostrils flared again, then suddenly his eyes lit up. Stephen felt himself relax. "Oh good. I'd hoped he'd recognise you both as part of the pack, but I didn't know how well that part of him had been working over the last year and a bit."

"Pack?" Abby asked as Connor bounded over to her and nuzzled at her. "Does that . . . I looked at the notes. Does that mean he's got, sort of, canine or feline instincts?"

"I don't exactly know," Stephen admitted. "This is all from after Connor got back to, and I quote, 'sort of normalish'," he told them. Then he sat on the floor, pulling the tray over and tossing Connor the sandwiches. Connor tore into them happily, offering bits to Abby, Stephen and Nick, but trying to sort of mother Stephen until Stephen started eating his pasta. "He had trouble then, sort of running with human socialisation but with animal instincts. We didn't know at that point, and I still don't," he told Abby pointedly, "What animals had gone into this. So, Connor was trying to verbalise something without a framework."

When Connor offered her another bit of sandwich, Abby gravely considered it, then accepted it. "So, he's trying to bond with us like packmates," she said, her face set in concentration as she looked at what Connor was doing, "And right now," she told Cutter rather severely, around a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly, while Stephen tossed Connor a bit of ravioli, "He's doing what he feels is the polite thing, and offering the other pack members a share of the food."

Nick sighed and took the sandwich piece, eating it with a look on his face as though he was eating dirt. Connor looked chastened. "How did you escape?" he asked Stephen.

"Well, all along Connor had kept track of guard shift changes and what they did to get the doors open, how the doors opened and what little he could see when they dragged him off to what he called the gladiatorial pit," Stephen said. Connor had snuggled up to Abby, who had clearly decided to treat Connor like a big puppy, and was stroking his hair while she listened, clearly parsing through his actions with a behaviourist's eye. "But he also noticed, and I think this is what saved us both, that the food we were getting, and the bowls were very specifically directed at one or the other of us, was different. It tasted even worse, but he'd try to distract the guards and mix them together, to see if he could defray the effects."

"So they weren't just using some sort of shots," Nick said speculatively, "They were quite possibly doing something to the food." He frowned in concentration.

Stephen nodded. "We didn't know for certain, of course, but I think so, because the other teens got more and more short-tempered as time passed. I think I was the only one who didn't get hit."

Abby's breath hissed sharply at that. "They were hitting the younger ones?"

"You have to understand," Stephen told her, wanted them both to not judge too quickly, "Their brain chemistries were off. Or wrong."

"You bloody brat!"

The slap echoed in the hall, and Connor snapped, "Jim! Get ahold of yourself! It's the drugs!"

"Jesus, I . . . Bernie, I'm sorry. I didn't . . . God, why?" The last was a plea to a higher power that wasn't answering.

Bernie's soft voice, proud Newfie, whatever that meant, said, "It's okay Jim. I know you don't mean to."

Connor whirled, a roar a fury erupting out of the teen as he buried a fist in the wall. His knuckles came away bloody, but a small spiderweb of cracks radiated from the point of contact. His eyes focussed on that, suddenly concentrating.

"I think that was when he got his idea for escape." Stephen told them. "He'd hit the wall before, but it was the first time he'd caused damage. He was getting stronger." Connor sat up, looking at him, then was at his side in a moment, maybe having heard the shaky undertones to Stephen's voice. He crouched beside his former charge, then wrapped a comforting arm around Stephen's shoulders. "But everyone else was getting worse."

"Worse?" Nick asked. He looked and sounded shaken. "Worse how? How much worse if these kids were being made hyper-aggressive?"

"It happened to Quinn and Fatima first," Stephen said bleakly. It had been horrible. Because it was his first real experience with death. Not the way the goldfish was found one day, belly up, and his dad had explained about things sometimes going to sleep and never waking up again, not even the knowledge that Jackie down the hallway wasn't coming back because her teenager Elsie wasn't coming back. "They'd taken Quinn for another round with the scientists, and when she came back she was . . . worse. Edgier." It had haunted his nightmares for years, still did, and he couldn't help but lean into Connor's steadfast presence.

They bolted awake to screams, to the sound of Will and Donnell shouting at Quinn to stop, pleading with her. An awful tearing sound seemed to make the whole world stop, even around the snarling coming from the end of the line of cells. Sobbing could be heard and sharp voices telling the younger ones to look away.

Quinn was dragged past them by two of the heavyset soldiers. Connor tried to stop Stevie from seeing, but he had to know and managed to squirm enough to see around Connor. Quinn was coated in blood, enough to make her arms slick and hard to hold as she tried to bite her captors, and behind her a guard carried a bag, out of which poked a bit of dark hair, still in the ribboned braids Quinn had done the little girl's hair up in. The ribbons, supposed to be pink, had been stained red, too.

"One by one," Stephen told them, "They'd break. Connor was the only one who hadn't so much as hit me, and I couldn't . . . I had to believe he was stronger than that, because it was . . . terrifying."

Abby was crying. "Oh, Stephen. And Connor was . . . they were trying to make him like that?"

"Christ," Nick managed to rasp out.

"Then they took him, and he was . . . angry. Tense. For the first time I really thought he'd hurt me," Stephen confessed. Because Quinn had been the sweetest girl until they'd done what they'd done to her. "But he just told me that I'd know when, and to run straight, take the last left, then straight again and not to stop for anything." Connor whined anxiously, and Stephen ran a hand over Connor's head to soothe him.

Hours passed and Connor was pacing, the other children funereally silent. They all knew what was coming, and Stevie could hear the sniffles of the younger ones. Just as suddenly though, the wait was over. Because the soldiers were there, and Connor hadn't done anything to him, merely sat in the corner, his fingers laced into his hair, muttering to himself. As the door cracked open, though, he exploded into motion.

The two soldiers went flying back, their machine guns clattering down the hall. Stevie knew that this was what Connor had meant and ran for the door. Connor, preoccupied with one soldier, couldn't stop the other from grabbing at Stevie. But the five-year-old had had enough himself, and kicked the other man as hard as he could, getting the grip to loosen, then dove unexpectedly for the pistol at the man's hip, got it, and took off running the way Connor had told him to.

He was nearly to the door when suddenly Connor was there, scooping him up and his longer legs carrying them both out of the compound and into the outdoors. A curtain wall rose in front of them, but Connor seemed to barely notice it as he scrambled up it one-handed, vaulting and landing from a twenty-foot drop as easily as stepping off the pavement an onto the street. They whipped through the strange forest, finally coming to rest what felt like miles and miles from where they'd started.

"Wow! Connor! We're safe!" he'd exclaimed excitedly. They'd got away. Now it was only a matter of time before they got home and got help for everyone.

His only response was Connor's uncomprehending eyes and an inhuman-sounding growl.

"I was pretty sure then I'd just managed to escape only to finally have Connor turn like Quinn and the others," Stephen admitted.

Connor's voice, sounding disused and raspy spoke. "You were lucky. I had. I'm pretty sure I atesomething I'd ripped off one of the guards."

They turned to look, and Connor looked back at them, pale, nauseated and sick at heart.

"Connor!" Abby exclaimed and threw herself at him, hugging him. For a moment he devoted his attention to holding her and, Stephen could see, taking in her scent. "Were you sniffing me?" she asked curiously.

He flushed. "Er . . . yeah. It's sort of hard not to," he told her. "I mean, I just . . ."

She gave him an understanding look. "I saw your notes," she told him. "Stephen suggested we see if there were something the ARC specialists could come up with to help."

"Connor," Nick interrupted. "I know this might have been . . . hard, but why didn't you . . . why wouldn't you say anything?"

"You mean before, when we didn't know for sure we could trust Lester? To Leek?" Connor's eyes began to snap and he advanced on Nick. "Or just when-"

Stephen interposed himself between them. "Don't do this, Connor."

"He's not . . ." Stephen saw the struggle Connor was going through, his human intellect warring with the instinct to take on the pack's alpha. "I . . ."

Unlike Cutter, who was angrily meeting Connor's eyes and pushing all his buttons, Abby saw what was going on. "And we'll be going," she said hastily. "I'm sure Jenny and Lester'll be glad to hear you're better now." And with that, she manhandled Cutter out the door. Just before it slammed shut, the sound of a lecture about wolf pecking orders came drifting back.

Connor relaxed at once. "I'm sorry," he said miserably. "When I'm by myself I can tell what I'm supposed to be doing, but he just . . ."

"It's alright, Connor," Stephen said. Then he braced himself to confess something. "I know how that feels."

"How can you?" Connor snapped, his eyes distressed. "No one ever did anything to you, I made sure of it. Even the food . . ." He trailed off. "The food. You . . ." the realisation seemed to seep through him. "That's why you're so good."

Stephen nodded. "I wasn't as badly off as you," he said. "How could I be? But sometimes I know I'm hearing and seeing things no one else can. I shouldn't be able to do some of the things I do. And-"

"You always know just the right thing to calm me down," Connor realised. "It's not a lucky guess, it's instinct." Stephen sank to the floor and watched as Connor sighed and shed the delicate balancing act he'd been doing, pretending to be normal, and let Connor drape himself protectively over his lap. From the outside, it might have looked romantic, and Stephen had no doubt that rumours would run rife in no time, but instincts he'd long suppressed just sighed over his alpha being back. Cutter was the team leader, but some small part of Stephen had accepted Connor as his pack alpha.

With Connor no longer violent and irrational by normal standards, they were quickly transferred to another room, however. A private room, but one with a door they could close and open from the inside at will, and Connor let the nurses change his dressings and cluck over the bullet holes, which were closing up far faster than would be expected if Connor had been all he appeared to be. When they were finally alone again, Stephen broached the topic he knew he'd have to. "You know that first day in class? I recognised you, and then you managed that spectacular fall and I was sure it was just coincidence."

"I thought you were familiar," Connor admitted, "But, well, you're not as short as you were then, for one." He grinned.

"I'd hope so," Stephen told him dryly. "I have to say, there had to have been less painful ways for you to pretend you weren't a . . ." he searched for a word that was accurate, but wasn't hurtful.

"A mutant," Connor said placidly. "Like the X-Men. Or maybe the Hulk, since that was done to him."

"Thinking of giving Hugh Jackman a run for his money?" Stephen asked.

Another happy grin, "That could work." Then he sobered. "But I wasn't faking, Steve." He cut himself off sharply before he added the extra syllable. Stephen was grateful for the restraint. "Sorry."

"It's okay."

"I wasn't faking," he started again, "Because the stuff I took to amplify my serotonin and dopamine levels and even out everything else so I could cope with things, it messes with your equilibrium and stuff."

He groaned. "All this time I couldn't tell if it was you," Stephen told him, "Precisely because of those things. I mean, you'd never have lost track of Rex or mistaken a mascot for a real cat, but there you were."

Connor winced. "I'd overdosed that day," he admitted. "I was thinking I'd be spending the whole day in the ARC, having to stare at the ADD and not break Leek's skeevy little neck for being a skeevy little weasel."

"You could tell?" Stephen asked. "That he was behind things?"

"Nah," Connor told him. "I just knew he was up to something and that I couldn't trust him."

And then Jenny and Lester were in the doorway, and if Stephen hadn't known Lester was a bloodless bureaucrat, he might have thought the man looked tired and saddened by the turn of events. "I do wish you had said something," Lester said. "It might have saved us all a great deal of trouble with things."

"Or," Connor countered, his hackles rising, "I might've wound up trapped in some lab for the rest of my life being pinned down by people wanting to know what made me tick, or if I was just mad."

"Don't be ridiculous," Jenny said. "That would never have happened."

"Yes," Lester said with something that might have passed for an anemic little smile, "Most likely you would have had the run of the ARC, so that we could utilise your skills to their fullest potential." He turned to Stephen. "So, the unusual markers in your bloodwork, that match the ones in the bloodwork Mr. Temple has finally deigned to give us, they wouldn't happen to indicate a similar set of . . . issues to his?"

His head snapped up and his eyes narrowed at Lester. "You have a point?" He felt Connor tensing beside him, readying himself to do anything he'd need to in order to protect Stephen. Stephen very deliberately forced himself to relax, putting a hand on Connor's shoulder. "Don't. Please."

Jenny was looking a tad gormless, which made her much less irritatingly snide, and Lester had that infernal eyebrow raised at them. "I simply wondered if your feat the other day of singlehandedly capturing that scorpion rampaging about the beach had anything to do with it."

"Scorpion?" Connor asked interestedly. "You mean from the Silurian?"

"It's nothing," Stephen waved it off. "Just something Connor showed me once with a coelophysis."

"Meaning?" Jenny demanded impatiently.

Stephen grinned at Connor. "It's just a matter of timing," they chorused.

"Can I take this to mean that you will, perhaps, begin to demonstrate Mr. Hart's particular skill set, should an effective treatment balancing your brain chemistry be found?" Lester asked.

The strain of trying to act like he was normal began to tell, and Connor said offhandedly, "Oh, hardly. I still can't shoot any better. I just know how to kill things with my bare hands and a rock."

Stephen shot him a reproving look, which he got away with only by sliding a little lower where he sat and tilting his head to bare his throat in submission. Once Connor was closer to normal, they'd hash things out between them, because like hell was he playing beta to Connor Temple, but this wasn't the place or time. Connor took the message, then shot him an amused look, one which was echoed by Lester. Damn the man for being so bloody intelligent. But Connor relented and let it go. "I can see this will be an interesting readjustment period for us all," Lester told them. "I would be rather interested, however, in any details about this compound Cutter informs me you were both kept at."

"Connor would be the better one to ask," Stephen admitted. "Not only was I only five at the time, but he spent a lot of time making sure I didn't see things."

"You would have been mentally scarred for life," Connor told him. "You don't want to have seen what happened to Jackie or Will. You don't."

"Nonetheless," Lester said, "If there's some madman running about kidnapping children, I'd rather be informed of it in the hopes of stopping him."

"Her," the pair chorused.

Lester's attention sharpened. "Her?"

"I don't know," Stephen said. "But Connor always talked about 'her' and 'she'."

"And?" Lester asked.

Abby and Cutter arrived at the door just then. "And what?" Nick asked.

"And who's the woman behind the Triassic compound," Stephen told them. "Connor?"

Connor sighed, looked around, his gaze fleetingly and worriedly crossing both Stephen and Cutter's faces, before he softly admitted. "Helen Cutter."

"No," Cutter said, shaking his head. "I know Helen's gone a little . . . off. But she'd never-"

"She watched us fight and she watched us die," Connor said baldly. "I remember seeing her there. I remember seeing Elsie too tired to do any more and that . . ." he searched for a word.

"I think," Stephen said, feeling even worse than he already had for being suckered in by Helen, "The word you're looking for is the one Jessalyn used. 'Bitch'."

Connor smiled. "Jessalyn was brilliant, even if she did swear like a sailor."

Then Stephen sighed. "I knew you knew."

"I did," Connor said. "I just . . . I can't understand . . . actually, no. I can. There's a reason I didn't just lose my mind that day when you," he nodded at Lester, "Sent the SFs in after her. I saw her and I knew it was her. I don't know if it was aversion therapy or something she managed to write into the mutations, but whatever it is, I'm just . . . I can't . . . it's atavistic fear," he came out with. "Mixed with a sick sort of attraction."

Stephen nodded slowly. "You know, that . . . I didn't know it was her, but that . . . it describes it perfectly."

Abby looked at them, eyeing them both very carefully. "You . . . you ate the food that was supposed to go to Connor," Abby said as she stared at Stephen. "And it's affected you." They both nodded silently at her. She shook it off and said, "You think she did something, some sort of pheromone thing or other that could be used as a . . . a failsafe maybe?" she offered.

"That would make sense," Connor said slowly. "She wanted an army of us. Something a little more dynamic and deadly than her clones."

Identical faces again and again trundled down the hallway. "Are they twins?" Stevie asked. "Not twins. The . . . when there's more than two babies?"

"Triplets," Connor offered. "That's three, quadruplets is four, quintuplets is five. It's all out of Latin after twins," he explained. "Tri means three, quad means four, quin is five."

"They're not quintuplets or sextuplets," Wendy said from across and down. "They're not even human. I've seen her talking to them. It's like they're robots or something."

"Some sort of mutant clone," put in Jim. "Like in the comics."

Connor nodded, even though some of the others couldn't see him. "I think that's right. I think they're not machines or cyborgs or anything mechanical. I think they're totally biological, just . . . built to be nothing but guards."

"I'd much rather they were clockwork men," Ursula admitted. "If they were purely a matter of clockwork and electricity I could feel much less like I ought to be able to get through to a human sentiment beneath."

"They're too horrible to be human," Bess said.

As the memory freed itself from being so long buried, Stephen's jaw dropped. "The soldier in the Silurian."

"The Cleaners," Connor agreed. "Helen's mutant clones. I didn't recognise the one in the shopping centre. I just thought I'd maybe scented him before. I go to that one a lot."

"God, I hadn't thought about them in so long," Stephen said. "I just . . . when all the psychologists had done with convincing me it was all a dream, I just . . . pushed it away."

He was still slumped in his chair, not wanting to push Connor's buttons until he was recovered enough and back on something to deal with his off-kilter brain chemistry. "Stop it. You were five, you can't be expected to remember everything from when you were five, and stop slumping like that, it's silly that you're trying to play beta to me. We'll figure it out, but you don't have to, Steve . . . Stephen."

Straightening up at once helped, in fact. "Sorry. It's just that, between Lester and Cutter, you were getting a bit . . ."

As he shrugged, leaving them to fill in the rest of the sentence, Abby smirked at Cutter. "I told you."

"Yes, yes," Cutter waved an irritable hand at Abby. "What does all this . . ." he looked aggravated as he searched for the right words.

"Pack pecking order stuff?" Connor offered with a grin. "What does it mean? Nothing, really, if I can just get my head on straight." He nodded at Abby. "Thanks, by the way. For telling Cutter not to try staring me down."

"I do not," Cutter sputtered.

Stephen laughed. "You do, Nick. I play beta to you most of the time, not just because I'm your assistant, but because of that habit you have of not realising you're playing dominance games with people."

"It's in the body language," Abby piped up. "You set your shoulders and look people in the eye, which in most species with forward-facing eyes is a challenge."

Nick, clearly wanting to get off the topic of his native obstinacy, said, "So, you think that Stephen slept with Helen because there's some sort of genetic predisposition?"

"No," Stephen said regretfully. "I believed her when I shouldn't have because of that, because something sets off a feeling I ought to do as she says, but no. I slept with her originally, because she's a very attractive woman who told me your marriage was effectively over."

"Why didn't you say anything?" Lester asked Connor. "Why keep it a secret?"

Connor sighed, beginning to look distressed. "Because I was frightened," he said pleadingly. "Because I was terrified I'd find myself locked away again, this time so that you could have the ARC's scientists try to take me apart and find out how I ticked. I didn't know if the Helen at the mosasaur anomalies was from far enough along her own timeline to have already done those things." He shook his head. "Then when the future predators showed up, I knew it was her-"

"How?" Cutter demanded.

"Because she made them," Connor told him. "I'd never seen them before, but I didn't have to. They smell like . . . they smell like what she did to the rest of us. Whatever compounds she used on us, she also used on them. They movelike we do, like I do."

Lester looked irate. "You mean she brought those things with her deliberately?"

"She might have been running scared," Cutter suggested.

"No," Stephen found himself saying with Connor. "She wasn't."

"Helen never liked to show nerves," Cutter said.

Connor was shaking his head. "That day at the zoo, when I knew something weird had come through, I went partly off the meds. She didn't smell scared," he said, getting weird looks from Cutter and Jenny. Abby nodded and Lester's face was a study of concentration and annoyance, however. Connor was concentrating, his eyes slitted as he thought back to impressions that had no words because humans didn't need words for them. "She was . . ."

Stephen thought back. Thought of Helen leaning casually against the tree with her knife and apple, the way that Connor had been warily moving and let the images drift over his mind. Sometimes, because he hadn't been changed like Connor, he'd get an impression that would only come across in a strange flash of thought, an association that made no real sense.

Black widow spiders.

"Excited," he said suddenly.

Connor's head came up and he shot a raised eyebrow at Stephen. "Excited like . . . ?" The abortive gesture in Abby's direction and back again nearly made Stephen laugh. "No taking the mick right now," he said in exasperation. "Make fun of me over it later."

"Fair," Stephen nodded. "Yes, like that."

"Like what?" Cutter demanded impatiently.

"She was . . ." Jenny had picked up on thatsubtext, but clearly had enough prudery not to say it.

Lester sighed. "Why is everything with that woman about sex?"

"Bet she was always a nymphomaniac," Connor muttered.

Abby looked sick. "She was excited about the future predators?"

"She was excited about seeing what they could do," Connor corrected her. "She was always like that when she was watching us, the teenagers, in her little circus."

Lester abruptly stood. "I want a full report on this compound of hers, but in the meanwhile, I believe I can get the Minister to have her put on every possible watchlist. Detain if possible, shoot if necessary."

Stephen felt himself flinch, but it was almost reflex rather than true emotion. Because if Helen was the notorious she, he wanted her locked away, hurt, dead, something. Anything for the fear, the nightmares, the deaths he'd seen that were at the hands of her clones, her monsters and the monsters she'd made those children into. Because while at five the teens had seemed ever so grown up, had seemed like adults to him then, now that he was thirty-two, he could look back and feel sick on behalf of the older ones, not even adults yet, and what had been done to them.

"Good," Connor said savagely.

Lester turned, heading for the door, Jenny, looking rather discombobulated by the whole thing trailed after him. "I'd best be getting on with arranging for her to be dealt with." He paused in the door. "And Connor?"

"Yes?"

"There will be no experimentation on you beyond what is necessary for your treatment and establishing a new baseline for the ARC's medics to work from," Lester informed him, something that looked like a remarkable facsimile of compassion on his face.

Connor stared hard at the man a moment, then sighed, nodded, and said, "Thank you."

Lester nodded back and left.

Once he was gone, Connor sagged, paling, and whined at the back of his throat. Stephen bolted to his feet, then onto the bed next to Connor, who put his head in Stephen's lap with a sigh. "I can't wait until I get something for this. I bloody hate instinct."

"You were putting up a front the whole time?" Abby asked, aghast. "Connor! If you're hurt-"

"I know, I know," Connor groaned. "But it's like I can't show weakness in front of him. Something in m'brain keeps thinking he'll want to put me down with prejudice if I do."

Stephen just concentrated on carding his fingers through Connor's hair, reassuring Connor that he wasn't alone, and that someone would stand watch while he slept. Connor sighed and nuzzled at Stephen, garnering a very strange look from Cutter, then relaxed into a doze almost immediately. "No need to worry," he murmured, bending over so his lips were just brushing against the side of Connor's head. "I'm right here, and if I have to leave, I'll make sure Abby or Cutter's here instead."

"Jus' Abby," Connor mumbled back. "'S'nice. Smells like Rex and protokiwis."

Stephen grinned. "That's a compliment, if you're wondering," he said to Abby.

"The nurses are going to think you're sleeping together, you know," Cutter told him.

It didn't matter, Stephen thought as he shrugged. What mattered was that Connor be better enough that he could stop being worn out simply by sitting up and alert. "Then they will." He looked at Nick seriously. "Nick, this isn't something that I can fob off and pretend didn't happen. Connor saved my life. He saved the lives of a dozen children and teenagers. He's half the reason I chose to be who I am today."

Nick's look was oddly unreadable, but he just said, "You should get some rest too, Stephen."

"I will," he replied. "You mind closing the door on the way out?"

"No problem," Abby said.

Once they'd left Stephen stared into the middle distance, finally taking the time to go over in his own mind everything that happened to him in those terrible months he was trapped in the past. He'd spent so long convincing himself it wasn't real, that Connor hadn't been real, then that Connor Temple wasn't theConnor, now that the worst of the crisis was over, the shock was setting in. He tried to control the shaking, not wanting to wake Connor, not wanting to crack in a hospital where anyone could come in at any time.

The soft rumbling and vibration under his hands brought him out of it, and he looked down to see Connor's dark eyes staring at him in concern.

"I just . . . when I'm scared, I like to pet our cat, Sher Khan. Daddy named him that because he looks like a tiger," Stevie confessed as the coelophyses circled the tree below, frustrated by their prey's refusal to leave its refuge. "I pet him and he purrs and I feel better."

Connor smiled sadly at him. "I'm sorry that I'm fresh out of kitty-cats, Stevie," he said. Then he suddenly tilted his head a little. "Let me see. You said I growled before, yeah?"

"Yeah. It was sort of scary," Stevie told him, feeling awful, because Connor was brilliant and had kicked the giant scary lizard in the head, even when he'd been all weird and cave-man-y. He shouldn't think that Connor was scary.

But suddenly, a funny rumbly sound came out of Connor's chest, one that was deeper and a bit louder than Sher Khan's purring, but it was purring. And he curled up on Connor's lap, and let the purring drown out the scary snapping and growling from below.

"I'm a little old for kitty-cat comfort, don't you think?" he asked, laughing.

Connor smirked. "Made you laugh."

It was so ridiculous that Stephen threw his head back, relaxing into the first real laughter he'd had since Nick had knocked out that actor, thinking he was a real Neanderthal. "Thank you."

"Now stop thinking so hard, Stephen. This doesn't change anything. I'm still a geek, I'm still the Star Wars fan you take the mickey about and I still get into arguments with Abby about whether or not I get to use the microwave to heat up my boxers in winter," Connor said sternly with that smile still playing around the edges of his mouth.

"Connor?"

"Yeah?"

"I really didn't need to know that last one."

With the sort of bustle in the hospital, the nurses in and out, curious doctors who wanted to stare at the medical wonder that was recovering from bullet wounds in a matter of days that should have taken weeks, no one really wanted to risk being overheard asking Connor and Stephen about things.

Cutter, and incidentally Stephen, had been right, and all the nurses thought Stephen and Connor were a gay couple. Connor had nearly burst a few stitches he laughed so hard when Stephen wasn't able to flirt his way past the nurses because, "Now you just stop that. Your boyfriend's a lovely young man and there's not a single reason for you to be doing this behind his back."

"Oh, let him," said a much younger one. "After all, he just wants to stay together. It's sweet and romantic and they're not making a bit of trouble, unlike Ms Campbell down in 46."

Stephen sighed and took the advantages offered by the misapprehension, but looked quite dour as he walked into Connor's room and worse as he saw the amused looks on Cutter and Abby's faces. "Connor's been giving you the blow-by-blow description?" he asked.

"Uh-huh," Abby said.

Nick just smirked.

When Connor opened his mouth, Stephen declared, "You know you're about to get out tomorrow, and if you say a word I will stage a breakup and leave you to the mercy of the nurses."

"They'd probably just pet him and spoil him and call you a berk behind your back, you know," Abby told him. Then, with a fascinated look on her face, she slipped a massaging hand under Connor's shoulders, making his eyes shut briefly in contentment and a purr rattle in his chest.

Then he turned and shot her a look. "Are you going to keep doing that?" he asked. "It's sort of distracting."

"It just makes me wonder what sort of physiological changes happened," Cutter said from the other side of the bed. "The mechanism that would allow purring and growling, in that way isn't something contained in human anatomy."

Before Abby could get at that spot, Connor moved away from her. "Abby!"

"You like it," she said. "Now I know you're just taking advantage when you ask for massages."

"Hmmph," Connor grumbled. "Anyhow," he turned back to Cutter. "I've got a lot more of their database saved. Once I'm out of here I'll go to the safety deposit box I keep the information in and get it to the ARC's techs. There's some really weird stuff there in terms of data about various environments and species."

Cutter's eyes narrowed over Connor's having held back potentially important information, and certainly interesting information. "I assume you have a reason for not having produced this?"

"The same reason I had for not telling you all I'm a mutant freak," Connor replied pointedly. Then he started purring. "Abby, cut it out!"

"I notice," Cutter having had his ire appeased, was able to relax a tad and say, "That you're not nearly as tetchy as when you first got in."

Connor nodded. "I know that I don't have to sit here pretending that I'm not entirely normal, physiologically and all that, so it makes it easier."

"And he's healing, so he doesn't feel so vulnerable," Stephen added, shrugging over Connor's glare. "It's true, you know. You're much more able to put up with things when you know that you're not coming from a position of weakness."

Thinking, Abby said, "So, he's been a bit like an angry badger caught in a trap."

"Badger," Connor grumbled. "I never get to be anything cool."

"He's a Hufflepuff on all of the Harry Potter personality quizzes," Abby informed them with a grin.

"You're just plain mean," Connor told her.

The next afternoon was much less lighthearted. Despite Connor being home, on a much more even keel mentally speaking thanks to some far better balanced injections of hormones and other chemicals and snuggling a cheeping Rex, the atmosphere was heavy with the fact that he and Stephen both had to finish the story of what happened to them.

Stephen, clutching the beer bottle far tighter than he needed chose to start. "I remember when I saw Connor standing there, growling and just looking . . . gone, I was terrified. I was sure he was going to rip me apart."

"It's hard for me to remember clearly sometimes," Connor admitted. "When I'm like that my perceptions, my thought processes are . . . they're much less conscious and much harder for me to translate into a sort of human paradigm." He shrugged. "I knew we weren't safe and that Stevie . . . Stephen was . . ." he frowned, reaching for the words. "Not like he was my . . ." he shot an apologetic glance at Stephen. "Keep in mind, Stephen wasfive then, yeah?"

Cutter's eyebrows raised. "You're saying you felt like five-year-old Stephen was your son?" he asked. This whole conversation was not sitting well with the Scotsman.

"Not my son," Connor told him. "More like . . . like a cub is communal property. Belongs to the whole pack. The pack being Stephen and me and the others there." He smiled wryly. "It's sort of weird, because I kept thinking of Stevie as the five-year-old I knew then, and part of me is trying to work through the fact that he's not that."

Nodding, Stephen added, "It's the same in reverse for me, of course. Because I was five, and when you're five a teenager seems like an adult by comparison." He shook his head. "It's strange, because I'm just so used to thinking of . . . of two Connors, I suppose. The one that rescued me then, and the one here and now. The fact that they're the same person, it's confusing."

"That does sound a little weird," Abby agreed. "But you were saying, you were thinking of Stephen, and I guess the rest of the children as . . . sort of the pack's cubs?"

Connor shrugged. "It's hard to put into words, and I'm using that sort of terminology, because I need to keep it clear for everyone else when I'm, sort of, thinking like that. And Stevie - Stephen, was sort of more mine that the others."

"Not that I was aware of that in any way, at first," Stephen clarified. "He was . . . well, you both saw him in Leek's compound."

Connor snarled and advanced on Stevie, who cracked and began to cry, even though he was a big boy and was supposed to be brave. But it was scary, and being torn apart like the others would hurt so much. He stumbled back, then tried to take off running. But Connor was on top of him, one hand on his shoulder, eyes blank as he leaned in. Stevie's hand came into contact with a rock, and he grabbed it, frantically bashing it against Connor's head, making the older boy rear back in shock and pain, giving Stevie the chance to run. He'd forgot about the pistol he'd taken from the soldier, all he could think was that he had to get away.

Which was when he ran into a batrachotomus. The carnivorous archosaur growled, its head lowering to stare at the unusual creature in its territory. Stevie crab-walked backwards, now even more terrified. He'd gone from the frying pan to the fire to some other horrible and certainly lethal place. As the creature lunged, a roar came from behind him, and Connor was there, slamming feet-first into the animal, sending it tumbling with the force of the blow.

It was on its feet in moments, but Connor was now between it and its prey, dodging and weaving, blocking the thing from getting anywhere near to Stevie. He managed one final leap to its back, and with one perfectly placed concussive blow, slammed a fist into its neck and felled the thing. Then he climbed easily off and stalked up to Stevie, cuffed him sharply on the ear, then picked him up, carrying him away again.

"Discipline for running away?" Abby asked, shrewdly.

"Yep," Connor popped the 'p'. "I mean, he wasn't wrong, because when he started running I was pretty much likely to kill him, but I wasn't in my right mind, and by that point I'd recalled he was my cub and I got a little angry he'd run away from me."

"Bloody hurt," Stephen muttered, rubbing at the side of his head in memory.

"You saw a batrachotomus?" Cutter asked, curious.

Connor nodded. "I'm not totally sure, but I came back later, after I'd got Stephen into a tree somewhere sort of safe and came back and butchered it, sort of. The characteristics in the bones look about right, but I wouldn't stake my life on it, really. Definitely an archosaur, though."

"Butchered it?" Abby asked hesitantly.

"I'd killed it," Connor replied with a shrug. "Broke its spine with that hit, and I knew I had to feed Stevie."

"By the way, Cutter," Stephen told his long time friend. "You wondered where I learnt to eat anything, it was in the Triassic." He winced. "That cured me of picky eating."

Connor was munching away on his raw scary lizard meat, but Stevie was more cautious. Wasn't meat supposed to be cooked? His mum had always got all weird when his dad left pinkish bits in the middle. On the other hand, Connor wasn't at all normal right now, so this might be all that Stevie got, and at least meat wouldn't turn out poisonous. They'd had that lady come in to school and tell them all about why they shouldn't eat any old plants, because they might be poisonous, but she'd never said that about meat.

Eventually, though, Connor noticed he wasn't eating and separated out a strip, shoving it at him. Stevie pursed his lips and took it, finding himself faced with an anxious-looking Connor, who was sniffing at him, which was so silly he couldn't help but giggle, then pinched his nose like he was eating sprouts, like his granddad had suggested that time, and bit off some and ate it. Connor sat back, satisfied, but still watching him carefully, and Stevie sighed and ate more.

It was still better than the weird food in the scary compound place.

Cutter nodded as if some long-held theory of importance had just been confirmed. "So that explains why you'll eat anything from anywhere."

"Sushi, Nick, is hardly what I'd call inedible strangeness," Stephen said, shaking his head.

"It's raw fish," Nick protested. "When things are meant to be eaten raw, they don't require preparation to do it safely."

"You're just sickeningly conventional," Stephen informed him in the steps to this familiar dance between them. "At least save it for the next time I'm having crickets, would you?"

"As interesting as Stephen's inability to eat like a normal person may be," Abby said, "I'm interested in knowing how they made it home."

The mood darkened again and Abby looked both chastened and defiant at that. She still joined Connor on the couch, carding her fingers through his hair, making him sigh, put his head in her lap and purr.

"It took a lot longer for Connor to come back to normal there than it did here," Stephen said. "Probably partly because it was the first time he had to do it, but also, everything was so dangerous that he was constantly on alert."

Connor nodded into Abby's thigh. "I spent a lot of time reacting to things, protecting Stevie - sorry, Stephen, and just making sure we didn't die."

"That was when I first started to figure out something was different with me, as well," Stephen said. "When Connor got tetchy or did something I thought was weird, it was as though something knew instinctively what was really going on. Eventually, though, he started talking again."

"Steve . . . Stevie? I . . . oh my God. Are you alright? What did I . . . did I hurt you?"

"Connor?" he asked, hesitant. Then for the first time in what felt like forever, Connor was looking at him like he did before. "Connor!" he flung himself at the older boy hugging him, just happy to have him back to normal. "I was scared. You got weird and I thought you might . . . might hurt me like Quinn did and-"

Connor hugged him back hard, saying, "I'm so sorry. I didn't . . . I didn't want to, you know?"

"You didn't," Stevie said firmly. Connor shouldn't feel bad for being a superhero like the Hulk. It wasn't his fault. From below them, they heard rumbling noises and something that looked sort of like a crocodile and sort of like a frog poked its head out of the lake they could see from the tree.

For some weird reason, Connor looked happy. "That . . . that's a mastodontosaurus," he said. "If that's . . . then we're in the Triassic. How . . . that's mad," he said. "But sort of incredible."

"I thought mastodons were like big, furry elephants," Stevie said, frowning.

Connor laughed. "That's because this isn't a mastodon, it's a mastodontosaurus. The Saurus part means lizard. Although it's really more of an amphibian, like a frog or a newt."

Stevie looked up at Connor, awed. Did his adult friend know everything? "So, what does Tri . . . erm . . ."

"Triassic?"

"Yeah," Stevie nodded. That was what Connor had said.

"Triassic means we're somewhere about 200 million years ago," Connor explained. "Dinosaurs were only just starting to appear."

"But I thought dinosaurs were 65 million years ago," Stevie frowned. Everyone always talked about dinosaurs and 65 million. And wasn't 65 million more than enough? It was such a big number already.

Grinning at him, Connor said, "That's not bad." Then he explained all about different names for different times in prehistory, and how there were three with dinosaurs, and that the Triassic was the earliest. "It still doesn't explain how we went back in time, though," he said. "And I think we have to, because there's no grass, and there isn't anywhere on Earth in the present that doesn't have grass, pretty much."

"That was when I knew we had to break back in," Connor said. "Not only to rescue everyone else that we could, but also because that was the only place we'd find out answers about how to get home."

"And you were so eager to talk about dinosaurs," Stephen said, shaking his head. "I never knew."

"You weren't exactly asking hard questions," Connor pointed out. "I mean, the difference between common species of the Jurassic, Triassic and Cretaceous? What were the names of things? Sure there was some stuff we saw not from the fossil record, but it's not like you were asking comparative anatomical differences between closely related sauropods or something."

"I feel like I should be insulted," Stephen told him.

Connor shrugged. "You were five. They were good questions for a five-year-old." Then he turned back to Cutter. "Anyhow, I felt awful about it, but I had to leave Stephen alone when I went scouting out the compound, just to see what was happening." He closed his eyes, grief on his face a moment. "I remember seeing the others that had been . . . had been totally changed. They were in cages. Like animals. No," he took in a shuddering breath. "They were animals. I got close enough, once, to try to reach them. They were just . . ." he swallowed sharply. "Gone."

"You never told me," Stephen said.

"I couldn't," Connor told him. "I just . . . I tried and tried. I couldn't reach them, it was like there was nothing left. I . . . Jim, Wendy and I, we had to kill them. It was . . . awful."

Abby was crying again and reached out to twine her fingers with Connor's. His eyes were closed as he reached for some sort of self-control. "I'm so sorry," she murmured into his hair. "I'm sorry you had to go through that."

When Connor seemed disinclined to continue, Stephen picked up the thread of the narrative. "Connor bodged together a whistle out of a tree branch for me, and he'd leave me the pistol-"

"Which was probably a better teddy bear for him than I ever was," Connor interrupted. "It took me a bit to make sure the safety was on, and things like that. I'd never so much as seen a gun for real before that, so I was just experimenting to be sure I knew I wouldn't come back to him missing something because he'd shot it off. But if I was leaving him alone there, I didn't want him not to have anything, you know?"

Stephen shrugged. "He didn't do badly, considering, as Connor said, he'd never even seen a real gun before."

"He killed a pterosaur," Connor put in. "I heard the shot while I was double-checking the timing on the guard shifts and the like, and came back to see him looking completely freaked out but really proud."

"I think the recoil sprained my wrist," Stephen recalled. "I slept with that thing every night. When I got home, I used some of my Christmas gift money to buy a toy gun, and I slept with that until I was seven. Scared the hell out of my parents."

"I can imagine," Cutter said, picturing the scene all too easily. Stephen had risked arrest more than once, carrying pistols on him into places he never should have done. He could far too easily picture Stephen as a child, carting around a gun in fear of a teratosaur or coelophysis coming to kill him.

"Eventually," Connor said, "I decided we had to risk it. We couldn't stay there forever and the only way to get home was going to be in the compound. I also thought we owed it to the others to get them out."

It was an all-or-nothing strategy. Connor had asked what felt like a hundred times if he was sure he didn't want to stay behind. But Connor's plan needed two people, and Stevie was the second. Connor was going to go in and do this, and Stevie had to help. If anything happened to Connor, after all, Stevie wouldn't last long anyways in the terrifying jungle out there.

The stolid clones never deviated from their patrols, never really noticed much and were stupid as anything. Stevie was perched on the wall, standing watch with his whistle and pistol, and Connor slipped down the rest of the way, killing the guard and creating the hole to get them in quietly. There was almost no security, because there was no need to worry about break-ins or anything else. The scientists were all horrible enough that they didn't care so long as they got to do their experiments.

Once inside, Stephen remembered the way back to the cells and waited for the signal. The noisily dying guards, the alarms raised and pounding feet told him Connor had started his diversion. Now it was his turn. He ran to the cells, frozen a moment at how many were empty except for the sight of old blood and the scent of rotting viscera. Then he pulled himself together. None of the guards were there, and he had to hurry.

"C'mon!" he hissed at the first two as he unlocked the cell door. He turned to Jim. "You've gotta help Connor! He's trying to get the guards. It's down that way, left, then the next left, and straight should get you out."

Jim's face lit up savagely. "Right. Bernie, stick with Steve here, and I'll come back, I promise."

Stevie hadn't been close to someone his own age in forever and he grinned. "Come on, I've got the keys, let's get everyone out."

Bernie followed, saying, "I'd thought they'd got you both. We all did. I'm glad you're okay."

"I'm sorry we didn't come back sooner, but Connor wanted to be sure," Stevie said as he fumbled with the next door, letting Wendy and Hester out, "That he knew where the guards were and stuff."

Wendy was off a moment later, chasing after Jim and Connor. Soon the kids were all free, and Stevie said, "Connor said we're supposed to find someplace to bar . . . barricade," he said proudly as the harder word came out okay, "Ourselves in."

"Will said he saw a canteen one time," offered Nate, who was the oldest of the younger kids at seven. "We should go there. I bet there's better food there."

"Anything's better than a batrachotomus," Stevie muttered. "I never want to eat any more dinosaur again."

They found the canteen, thankfully deserted, and did what they could to block the doors, then plundered the fridge. When the teens came back, there was food all over the tables and the kids, who had been glutting themselves in delight at the tasty things. Wendy and Ursula had taken them in hand, then drafted Donnell to help, grimly turning themselves to giving the children showers in the facilities over the protests of the boys in particular, who had been enjoying living without having to be dragged to the bath.

"I remember hearing that," Connor snickered. "I could hear you lot all the way in the operations hub."

"I have a vague recollection," Stephen told him, "Of someone being dragged away from the computer banks by two very determined teenaged girls who stripped you to your boxers and scrubbed you down because you wouldn't stop working long enough to havea shower."

"He still does that," Abby informed them.

"You're a cruel, cruel roommate," Connor told her. "And that was once."

"No," Abby told him. "I just drop food down the back of your shirt now before it gets that far."

"That's deliberate?" Connor squawked.

Cutter sighed. "As entertaining as the Temple-Maitland mating rituals are, I'm somewhat curious as to the rest of the story."

Flushing, Abby shut up, and Connor continued, trying to pretend he wasn't lobster red himself. "There's not much more to tell," he said. "We killed the guards, because there wasn't anything else we could do with them, and once I'd figured out the programming for the anomaly generator, the first thing we did was strip the scientists naked and shove them through into some stretch of time after humans had evolved."

"Then Connor programmed it to send us all home, within hours to days of when we were first taken," Stephen said. "It turned out that the changes that had happened to most of the teens were . . . if not reversible, not particularly worse than what happened to me, so he sent them home with some cautions about foods to eat that should counteract the worst of the brain chemistry troubles."

"I programmed the computer to send them all home and collected as much of the biological data as I could on what had been done to me," Connor finished. "I set it up so that after I went through the anomaly to home, the thing would effectively suck the whole compound back in time to the stretch when the earth was first forming, pre-Precambrian, if you will. So it should have been effectively destroyed by lava flows and the like."

"And I screamed the house down and my parents decided I'd gone mad," Stephen told them, feeling somewhat less bitter now that he was believed.

"Did you ever look up anyone else from there?" Abby asked curiously.

"A few," Connor said shrugging. "But some of them haven't been born yet, or haven't been and come back yet, and some were too young to really give me much to go on in looking, like Stephen, and some died before I ever got home, in effect. About only Jim's still around that I was able to track down. I did contact him a few years after I got back, but he's in his fifties and it's a little weird." He sighed. "But it would have been nice to have someone around who knew."

"It would have," Stephen admitted.

Back at the ARC finally, everyone had to get used to this new Connor and Stephen. While some aspects of the group remained unchanged, the techs in the ARC had to become used to the way Connor sometimes didn't bother using stairs, preferring to simply hop over a banister and drop ten feet to the floor. Everyone had to become used to the fact that getting out of Connor's earshot was virtually impossible without putting real thought into it and Abby had to get used to a much more tactile Connor Temple.

There was enough of a difference that Stephen asked one day when they were loitering about in Abby and Connor's flat, "How did you cope when you got home?"

"Hmm?" Connor said, lifting his head from where he was oddly pretzeled in front of the television. "How did I cope?"

Stephen gestured at the way Connor was sitting. "You're hardly in a position normal for anyone but a contortionist, and the way you've been roughhousing with Abby really isn't anything like the way you were before."

"Ah," Connor said and straightened out. "Well, when I got back, I programmed it for a couple days later. See, I'd been on a boy scouts camping trip when I got taken, so I made sure that people thought I'd got separated from the rest of the boys and got lost." He gave a grim sort of smile. "It was sort of a combined camping trip, a bunch of younger ones and older ones to keep track of things along with the adults. I knew there was supposed to be bad weather over those couple days, so I figured I'd just make myself missing, then stagger up to them all shocky. It'd give me a few days leeway to figure out what I was going to do."

It made sense. "What happened?" he asked. "Because I can't imagine that went over well."

"It didn't," Connor admitted. "Mum went mad while I was gone, and when I kept waking up, growling, she got scared." Connor sighed. "I bodged up something to handle things right quick, especially when all the traffic noises started driving me mad. I sort of pretended I was too traumatised by the whole thing to go back out, and a few of my rounds of treatments did some ugly things to my lungs and things."

"You'd mentioned asthma when we were tracking the gorgonopsid," Stephen recalled. "And allergies."

Connor shrugged. "It made a good excuse. And they did wreak havoc on my sense of balance. And smell. I felt like I had a muffler 'round my head all the time." Then he shot Stephen a look. "What about you? You mentioned the psychologists. What happened?"

"I'm not lying!"

"No one said you were, sweetheart. We're . . . concerned."

"You think I'm making it up. Why would I make it up? That would be stupid for me to make it up."

Stevie was getting very annoyed with his mum and dad. Not only were they not listening, they kept taking him to talk to these people who kept on making him look at stupid pictures of stupid ponies and things and asking him to make up stories about the stupid ponies. Then there were the ones who wanted to play stupid word games. "What's the first thing you think of when I say dark?"

He'd got so annoyed with it that he wrote down a bunch of stupid answers to stupid games like that in advance and deliberately answered them wrong, just because it was annoying and stupid.

"Up."

"Rhamphorhynchus."

"Black."

Mastodontosaurus."

"House."

"Tree."

"Father."

"Wanker." It slipped out before he could stop it and he saw the light go on in the stupid therapist's eyes. The pen went scribbling all over the page, but she kept on going.

"Pet."

He hadn't got one for this. He paused too long and she was about to say something. He blurted out the first word that came to mind as he recalled all those times he'd patted Connor on the head, keeping him calm, making him not panic or get all growly again. "Connor."

The pen stopped scribbling and she stared. Then she blurted out, "I thought Connor was the boy who rescued you?"

"Why should I tell you anything? You just think I'm mad. I'm not mad and I'm not making Connor up and you're just trying to trick me!"

Stephen sighed. "It was just so bloody irritating. But eventually, with no evidence, no proof that anyone existed, and no fifteen-year-old Connor Temples to be found anywhere in the UK I had to give in. Agree that it was all a figment of my imagination."

"You said my name when she came up with 'pet'?" Connor asked, sounding amused. "I like that. Did they ask if your goldfish was named Connor?"

Laughing, he said, "Actually, they asked my parents if they knew any Connors. Turns out I have a second cousin named Connor. They dragged me out to see him, trying to find out if I'd somehow learnt about him and worked him into the delusion."

"I can picture it now," Connor said, his lips twitching. "What did you do to the poor bloke?"

Stephen affected a childish, high-pitched voice. "He's not Connor. I bet he couldn't even beat a saltopus to death with a rock. Hester could do that."

"You didn't. Hello Abby."

"I did. I was horrible." Stephen waved at her as she dropped to the sofa.

She shook her head. "Should I ask?"

"Connor wanted to know what happened to me when I came home at five, insisting I'd been kidnapped and nearly eaten by dinosaurs and experimented on by a madwoman," Stephen said. "I was just telling him about the time my parents thought maybe I'd heard something about my second cousin Connor, and that was where I'd got Connor from in my head."

"Ah," she said. "Connor, I think you'd better be in the hub tomorrow morning."

He fully unpretzeled and sat up. "How come?"

"Lester's bringing in his replacement for Ryan," she explained. "And I'm thinking it'd probably be better for him to get used to you and all this sooner rather than later." As she talked, Connor joined her on the sofa, eyes narrowing briefly as he gave a quick sniff.

"Is Yertle feeling better?" Connor asked. "You've been hanging around him this afternoon."

Abby smiled, as she always did when Connor expressed his genuine interest in the welfare of the animals under her care, and dug her fingers into what she'd dubbed 'the purring spot' on Connor's back. He immediately melted. "He is, and thank you for asking."

"What do you want?" Connor asked suspiciously as he wriggled away from her fingers. Stephen mentally added a few tallies and notes to put into the relationship pools about Connor and Abby.

Grinning, Abby told him, "I'll trade an evening working your back over for you seeing if you can scare the living daylights out of the new captain," she explained. "I figure, if he stays sanguine when you're at your weirdest, he'll do fine and we'll know."

Connor thought about it, then agreed. "Fine. It's done." As Abby settled in, Stephen got to his feet. "Are you going?" Connor asked.

"I know it doesn't matter to you," Stephen partly lied, "But it probably will to Abby and you know it, and anyhow, I want to tell Cutter so he'll be there to watch tomorrow."

He was laughingly waved out the door. "You really are horrible, Stephen," Connor said.

The next morning Stephen, Cutter and Abby were faux-casually waiting in the hub and watched as a young man in black with an impeccable military bearing walked into the open space, making a dry joke about dinosaur wrangling on his CV. "So far so good," Stephen said.

They looked at him. It was nice to, like Connor, no longer have to normalise what he perceived. "He just said that he thought he'd got the job because of his extensive dinosaur wrangling experience."

"It's a good sign," Abby said.

Connor dropped from the roof, landing directly between Lester and the man. Lester merely looked irritated after the initial surprise, and everyone waited to see what the new CO would do. Connor deliberately ignored the byplay, leaning in to sniff the man. "No aftershave or other perfumey nonsense," he said, starting to circle the man, who still had a hand on his pistol. "Not overly startled, so he'll deal well when the things try for biting his head off."

"Connor, do stop harassing Captain Becker," Lester said. "I realised Miss Maitland will have put you up to this, but I would rather not have to go through the rigmarole of hiring someone new right after I finished the process for this one."

Ignoring their boss for a moment longer, Connor took one more long sniff, imprinting the scent into his mind, just in case. Then straightened and reverted to normal human social interaction. "Captain Becker is it? Nice to meet you. I'm Connor Temple, the resident semi-feral geek."

Captain Becker managed to look polite, sceptical, appalled and amused at once. "Do that to me again, Temple, and I'll shoot you."

"Fair enough," Connor told him cheerfully. "But you'll have to get in line after Abby. She still owes me for the time I shot her." He waved them over. "I think he's good!" Connor told them. "He's amused under all the stiff-upper-lipping."

Cutter, who couldn't take anyone's word for anything until he'd judged himself came over at once to be abrasive, and Stephen came over to mediate and play midway point between scientist and military. The small part of him that had been so neglected and confused for so long about who he was and what was truth or lies purred in satisfaction along with Connor.