Lights Go Out

June 7, 1999
Somewhere in Nebraska

Scully has been on long car trips before, of course. Six years in the X-Files and a childhood in the Navy have left her with snapshot memories of America in various geographies, faces, personalities. She has a good memory, not photographic but still sharp enough. She can pick a state and name an X-File, or a school friend, or an address in the housing area of a base. From Washington to Florida, Maine to California, her entire life has been spread out on a map in latitudes and longitudes.

In the driver's seat beside her, Alex Krycek makes a small throat-clearing sound, but when she turns he makes no acknowledgement. So she looks back out of her window and watches the scenery again, cocooned in silence.

The Great Plains of Nebraska unfold through the glass, golden in the afternoon sunlight. The landscape is not flat, but rather rising and falling, like huge ocean waves. They move north into the horizon, the car eating the miles and leaving them behind on the empty highway. The horizon also is empty, washed with the rays of the late sun and nearly cloudless.

Memorial Day weekend. Hard to imagine that the sky over the rest of the world has been torn apart, that as far as these two people are concerned, the rest of the world doesn't even exist anymore.

They ride without noise, Krycek's tiny interruption forgotten already and lost in the silent minutes. Scully loses the minutes herself, floats in and out of a doze, in and out of memory. Sometimes she is here in the car, watching the endless fields. Sometimes her daydreams take her to childhood, to girlhood.

Sometimes she is back in DC, back with...with...

Several hours earlier she'd switched off the car radio, because the only things coming over the static were rebroadcast transmissions from terrified journalists. Listening closely in the humming quiet of the car, she had heard screams and explosions in the background. That was when her hand had lashed out, twisting the off button.

Colonization has begun in the cities -- and, as Krycek has explained, Rebels have arrived in equal force to stop it. Reports pulled together yesterday have shown that most urban areas are the major targets in the most widespread holocaust in the history of human life. Bees, infection, gestation, destruction. The aliens themselves, Colonizers and Rebels in equal force seeming to have landed out of nowhere. Their black ships, hovering like storm clouds, raining fire down with their bright lights. Both tearing the sky and earth, burning cities and civilization, engaged in their fiery war with all the Earth sandwiched between.

She has already seen it on TV anyway, in the Texas motel last night when it first started and then again this morning, on the rebroadcasts. Amazing how tenacious the press is; while the rest of the cities are being exterminated with ruthless efficiency, they still manage to send out information -- not that the rest of the world needs to know what they are already experiencing. She had been able to hear the fear in the reporters' voices, the panic close to shock, the utter inability to comprehend what has happened -- the end of human civilization, and she wonders why the hell they're still trying. She'd never have thought journalists could be so brave.

But of course, if she turned the radio on now, at the end of the second day, there almost certainly would be only dead silence or static.

On the TV she has seen the Colonizers themselves, through snowy satellite transmissions sent right from live coverage on the streets, and the Rebels as well. Human forms without faces, and faces with alien forms.

Somewhere in the dark depths of her memory, she knows she has seen both kinds before. In the flesh.

<Your proof, Mulder. It's fallen from the sky and you were right, you were right all along -- >

But thinking about Mulder.... Thinking about him is like walking in a minefield made of glass. She pushes it away, pushes *him* away, because to go there...to go there....

But of course, immersed as she is in the dream memories, he keeps creeping up on her. And although Dana Scully has made a practice and a career of refuting what she deems unbelievable, this is something staring -- no, screaming -- her in the face.

Mulder is gone. After seeing the television reports she had dialed his hospital, and slammed the receiver down on the automatic out-of-operation message. She had dialed Skinner, every number she knew in the Hoover Building -- same automated voice. Her mother, her brothers, the Lone Gunmen, half-remembered numbers of friends scattered throughout the US. All gone.

"We have to go back," she had told Krycek, frantically repacking her clothes. "We have to go back to DC."

He had stood there with his one hand on his hip, looking at her like she was speaking in tongues. "What the fuck are you talking about? Do you see what's happening on that TV screen? That's the fucking Washington Monument exploding like a goddamn bottle rocket."

"I have to be sure," she spat. "I can't just accept -- "

"Scully," Krycek said, his voice flat, "he's dead. Mulder is *dead*. They are *all* dead."

The words slashed at her heart, but she pressed on, glaring at him. "How do you know? There could be survivors, there could be -- "

"Not for long. Those bees are sweeping the country. You know what they do. And if *we* want to survive, we need to get to where it's safe."

So early this morning, they had gotten into the car and driven north. And north. And north. And with each mile, the distance between Scully and the world had steadily increased.

<Gone.> The word writes itself on the tall-grass prairie moving past, on the sky hanging overhead and motionless like a brilliant blue canopy. A wail swells in her throat, ready to break free and escape her, into that sky, from which the end of the world has so recently been born.

The horizon is empty, all right. The future is empty, too.

From the driver's seat beside her, Krycek breaks the quiet again, speaking for the first time in hours. "Scully."

At the sound of his voice -- even as her body comes awake from its doze -- her mind shutters down, goes blank again. The scream in her throat, with no thought or emotion to voice it, dies as she turns from the window to look at him.

His jaw is unshaven, dark and stubbled. Without looking at her he speaks again. "We should reach the compound before night."

After hours spent with him in this car, after spending well over a week sitting beside him on other such car trips -- although admittedly, none this dire, running for their own survival -- she knows he expects a response. She knows, but there is no one here to give him one. Just her body, a newly-formed vacuum, because Dana Scully has left, has gone down to hide, and taken the screams with her.

Her body knows what to say anyway, though, and her vocal cords compress and vibrate. Normal volume, normal word. "Fine." And again, "Fine."

She turns back to the scenery, to the fields unrolling outside.

May 24, 1999
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

After the inferno that burned the Consortium elders, Alex Krycek had gone into hiding. He had known it was no use believing that their end meant the end of the entire organization. There were, after all, elders-in-training and handymen of a lower rank than himself, all over the world, who had never been included in the plans for hybridization. Those ladder-climbers had probably begun moving into place with the first word relayed by scrambled cell phone.

He had lain low for weeks, assuming a new identity and moving back to Philadelphia, the city from which he had first emerged. He let the rumors spread that he had perished with the rest, hoping no one would notice that none of the blackened bodies was missing an arm. He kept his ear to the ground, eyes on the news, ticking off the names of each body identified and buried. None of the obituaries made any mention of conspiracies or shadowy maneuvers amongst the requisite surviving relatives (very few) and career highlights.

There were two he didn't find. The Spenders. Husband and wife at one time. And that meant, of course, they might somehow have survived.

If Cassandra had survived, she was with the Rebels. They would use her hybridized anatomy to unravel what the Colonizers had been planning with the Syndicate. If the smoker was alive --

Oh, but there was no way, no fucking way he'd be under that nicotine-sucking bastard's thumb again. The years of hell with the old man had been eating at his insides since the beginning, since he had first been yanked from the dark, crime-infested streets of Philly. He had been promised rewards of wealth, power, adventure. Never mind that the old man had snared and caught him as well as any helpless prey.

He was getting those promises, though -- without the old man. He'd been laying plans for over a decade. And he knew that now the time had come. He would act, but he would act from the shadows. A ghost, invisible and deadly. Careful, oh so careful, strengthening the foundations of his end goal. His dynasty. He would be the only one left upright when the Colonizers came.

Because come they would, if the Rebels could not work fast enough. But Alex Krycek would kneel to no one, alien or not.

It had been a simple matter to infiltrate the labs he'd done cleanup duty at before, in his past life as the Consortium's assassin. Simple, stealing technology he'd killed men and women for in the past to keep the secrets of their work on the Projects.

After his excursions there were no ripples in the Consortium, which was still rallying the remnants of itself. There were no visits from the cigarette smoking man, who had always seemed to pop up from the shadows like a cockroach. Even so, he stayed low. He kept contact only with Skinner in the months following the inferno, cementing the hold he'd so fortuitously gained on the assistant director. He didn't dare try anything else.

Until he heard of Merkmallen's death, and the discovery of the second artifact. No one had thought that there would be any left to find. In this Alex realized a sign of the coming time. He knew the timetable would be shortened now, once the Colonizers were alerted to this most recent exposure. And with Mulder and Scully stumbling yet again into an area of which they had no comprehension, the stakes were even higher.

His mistake was in trying to clean up the loose ends, to keep the discovery from the new Consortium. He was naive enough to go back to the same murderous tactics that the old Consortium had so long employed, instead of being creative, instead of warping the events to benefit himself. And even as he pulled the trigger on Sandoz, he'd known it was the beginning of the end. Perhaps that was why, in the next few seconds, he had dug himself even deeper into his hole.

His voice was harsh going into Sandoz's cell phone, cutting through her puzzled silence. "Seek your truth elsewhere, Agent Scully." Even as he husked the words he could feel them floating into the air, open and scannable to any instrument that recognized his vocal patterns.

So he had not been surprised when, the night after his return from New Mexico, he walked into his Philly apartment and was stopped by the ratcheting of a gun's safety. He had reflected, feeling the heavy coldness of the barrel pressed to his neck, that he should have known better.

After all of this time, he should have known better.

Marita's voice was familiar as death in its iciness, despite the strange new rasp. Her accent was cold and lisping. "Found you at last, Alex."

Those five words. They might as well have been rounds in her gun, thundering into his flesh. There was only one person who could have gotten her out of that base, and it wasn't Spender Junior.

Her bony fingers dug at the small of his back as she removed the heavy weight of his gun. "I thought you'd come back to your old stomping grounds, but I had to wait for you to get back. Took a little trip, I see." Her blonde hair flashed in the corner of his vision as she perused the dim apartment. His gun cases were laid out on his bed; the aluminum surfaces gleamed in neon light from the window.

"You could say that," he'd said, forcing his voice around the lump in his throat.

"Don't start unpacking yet," Marita told him. "You've got a little meeting to attend."

He calculated how quickly he could thrust himself across the room, away from the gun, rolling with the plastic of his artificial limb held up like a shield. He thought if he could just unravel her a bit, he could overpower her. The last time he'd seen her, cowering behind the younger Spender, she'd looked weak as a piece of paper.

But he didn't know what reserves were left in her after all of the tests, or what might have been put in.

He'd had no choice, really. She was dead to him, gun trained without emotion. So he'd walked out of the apartment with her, locking the door behind them -- as if that could do any good now. All the while feeling her aim on him like a winter wind, he let her guide him back out to the street where her car waited.

June 7, 1999
Nebraska

Alex shifts in his seat, trying to ease the muscles in his ass and thighs, grown numb from sitting so long. His right hand moves on the wheel, and the car swerves. Prairie fields loom towards them.

"Shit!" he exclaims, correcting the direction. When the car is straight again he glances over at Scully.

She is still staring out the window, her expression blank as if she hadn't even registered there was a problem.

He looks back at the road again. They are at the top of a rise and he can see ahead of them for miles, how the land stretches on with no end, it seems.

Scully has not been talkative at any part of the trip, which is what Alex prefers, but there is something in her silence that has been gradually unnerving him all day. Glancing back at her again he notices the unkempt appearance of her hair, the sheen of sweat on her forehead, the wrinkles in her clothing.

Wrong. It all strikes him as wrong. Because this is not Agent Scully, this is not the logical and meticulous woman he has become accustomed to over the past ten days. There is no ferocity in her slumped posture, no strength in the listless way she gazes out the window. As if she's not really paying attention to what passes before her eyes.

Scully is hiding, hiding inside herself, and he knows why, because the world has been turned upside down, and she with it. She has tucked herself into a tiny ball, presenting the same blank face at every degree, so that it won't matter which way she's oriented, now. She'll simply roll whichever way she is pushed. And she says nothing, does nothing. Just sits and stares at the scenery.

They might be the last two people in the entire world still sane and alive, for all he knows, but the real truth is that Alex Krycek is traveling by himself.

Suddenly the wide space surrounding the car and the...the sheer *brightness* of it all -- the sun, the sky, the golden plains...suddenly it's too much for him. It's too much for a man who has spent his life in the dark and fighting his way out of tight spots. The silence is too much for him, one who has sealed bargains and betrayals in more languages than one.

He slams on the brakes, almost relishing the way Scully's body jerks forward and snaps against her seatbelt. The tires make a satisfying screeching sound that rips into his ears. And he realizes he's grinning, teeth bared.

The car halts in the middle of the road, throwing them both back in their seats with the end of inertia, and he's already got the door open, scrambling out of the driver's seat. "Get out," he throws to her, over his shoulder.

There is a wind outside -- he hadn't known, they'd been driving for so long in their closed steel compartment -- and it kisses his face, bringing scents of grass and something sweet and earthy.

"Did you hear me?" He raises his voice towards the car, where his door is still open. "I said get out."

But she just sits there, a body at rest and unmoving.

"Fuck." He stalks over to the passenger side, loving the feel of blood rushing back to his lower limbs, yanks her door open and undoes her seatbelt. Grabs her arm with his one hand and pulls her, too hard so that she stumbles on the road. She follows her own inertia now and lands in the tall grass on her shoulder, rolls with the weight of her body onto her back.

Oblivious, he stands straight with legs spread, head tilted, and lets the wind caress him.

"God, this is beautiful. Who needs a fucking city. Where the fuck have I been my whole life?" He speaks aloud, the sound of his own voice rising up into the sky.

What brings him back down is a natural urge, a press in his groin telling him to urinate. He almost laughs, the irony of Alex Krycek coming into this heartland to piss in it.

He walks to the side of the road, close to where Scully lies on her back in the light brown grass, unzips and lets himself go. He watches her. Her eyes are closed and she looks too pale, too still.

<Jesus, she looks dead.>

It shocks him. Had she fallen the wrong way or something? <What the fuck, Alex, can't you pay any attention to something as important as this?? What are you going to do if she IS dead?> Finishing up in a hurry, he takes an apprehensive step toward her, penis still hanging out, to get a better look. But as his shadow falls over her eyelids she opens them.

The moment is ridiculous and embarrassing, Alex stuffing his dick back into his pants as she looks up at the sky with unsurprised blue eyes. Zipping and avoiding her gaze -- not that she's making eye contact anyway -- "You need anything?" he babbles, as if it hadn't even happened. "Want to stay here a little longer and rest?"

No answer, but at least her eyes are open and blinking, at least there is that small movement now. Finally he stops talking, closing his mouth with the realization that it's a useless activity. She's not registering anything, not his questions, not his penis hanging over her.

<What if I did leave her here?> he thinks. <I bet she'd just lie there. She wouldn't even realize I was gone.> He imagines her body, dead and decomposing in the same position, because she still hasn't moved.

But of course, instead of leaving he sits down on the other side of her, watching her eyes watching the sky, and notices that the two blues are the same color.

May 24, 1999
Philadelphia

Marita had gotten out of the car when they stopped under the bridge, but apparently the plan was not for her to accompany him further. She motioned with her gun that he should walk. He kept his head up as he moved, his stride confident.

Cigarette smoke burned the air, a scent he knew in the bones of his memory. The smoking man stood in the shadows. Darkness emphasized the stoop of his shoulders.

<Of course>, Alex thought. <The king of the weasels always comes out on top.> Had he really dared to hope the old man might have burned with the rest?

God, the bodies. Char and ash as if the bastard had smoked them himself.

In a way, he had. They had each gone to a personal hell because of his plans, his lies. And true to form, he had walked away from it unscathed. And still holding the reins, if Marita's new errand-girl status was any indication.

The voice was silky, almost happy. "Well, long time no see, Alex. You've been busy, I hear. But...not too busy to conduct a little errand for me, I hope." He took a drag on his cigarette, expelling smoke as he started to speak again.

His orders might have been shocking if Alex led a different life.

Through his anger Alex listened, wondering at the future in the black words. How the hell had he ended up here, anyway? It was as if nothing had changed in the past weeks, as if he was still someone the smoker could order, with impunity, to kill.

When the smoker paused, he asked, "Why? Why now?"

"She is the last survivor with a chip. Cassandra Spender is dead. And it is imperative that *all* of the evidence be destroyed. That's as much as you need to know."

Jesus, spoken just as if it were years ago, when the smoker could just say gun and Alex shot. His mind raced. He had no idea if this was the new Consortium's agenda or the smoking man's own. He had no idea if the new Consortium even realized the smoker was still alive.

"And if I don't?" he muttered, snorting defiantly at the wafting cigarette smoke.

"It's just as easy to assassinate the assassin, Alex," the old man hummed around the glow of his cancer-stick. "You know that."

Alex glanced back at Marita, the glimmer of moonlight on her pale hair. He stayed silent this time, listening again.

"You have a week to complete the assignment. Afterwards, we'll meet in New York and I'll inform you what to do next."

"She's in Africa," he interjected.

"Not for long. She arrives back in the States tomorrow night."

"And Mulder?" he asked.

The old man paused, dragging on his cigarette. "Mulder will be handled. He's not your responsibility."

Not his responsibility. As if *she* could be, in any normal world. But of course, this wasn't a normal world, not the one Alex knew. "What you're having me do will change everything," he said. "Is it really -- "

"You know only what you need to know. The rules are different now. I'm the only one you answer to."

<The fuck he says!> "So they're all dead, then? The other test subjects? You're sure of it?"

"All of them." Another drag.

Alex shifted. "Why me?" he asked finally. "Why not her?" He jerked his head in Marita's direction. "Or Fowley?"

"Think of it as...your reparation for past mistakes. A week, Alex. Don't disappoint me."

The cigarette dropped, a fall of orange spark crushed into the gravel beneath the old man's foot. More gravel crunched as he walked away, melting back into the shadows towards the car Alex had driven in with Marita, silent and wraithlike in the passenger seat, her gun still aimed. He watched them, she now in the driver's seat, heard the car doors shut and the ignition start. Heard the spin of tire wheels as they drove off.

Back in his apartment, Alex locked the door and stalked over to his bed. His gun lay next to the other weapon cases. He hadn't realized Marita had left it there. He picked it up, caressing the grip with a thoughtful right hand. There were nine rounds left in the cartridge, he knew. And if he followed the old man's orders, by the end of the week one of them would pierce the back of Dana Scully's neck, smashing the chip and ending her life.

June 7, 1999
Nebraska

The sun burns the vision behind her closed eyelids into a fire of orange, jerking her out of her doze. Time passes for her not in lucid minutes but in great flashes. She loses long periods in the endless drift of miles they travel.

The car moves west now. After staring for hours the Great Plains have become only a blur rushing past the window. Krycek speaks, but she no longer makes any move or no visible effort to respond. Most of his words don't even make it through the fog surrounding her. At times she senses him turning to look at her, moving his mouth, disturbing the air with his sounds, but the part of her brain that interprets language now works only on an intermittent basis. So only occasionally does she understand something he says.

She drifts in and out of comprehension, in and out of herself sitting in the car. When she is there she hears him, his velvet voice covering the edges of her consciousness. When she is not she is anywhere and everywhere, lost in the ocean of memories that beat against her, threatening to pull her down.

For a moment out of reality she floats in the past. She is once again walking down that dark basement corridor for the first time, knocking on the door to the X-Files office, hoping her nervousness doesn't show. Feeling the swell of curiosity and excitement, the cusp of something new and important she's going to reach despite the dimness and distance of this dark hole in the Hoover Building.

Mulder's voice, reedlike and God -- the sound of it so achingly familiar to her in the seashell echo of memory. But can she recall the first words they ever exchanged? What had he said? Something like -- "Nobody here but the FBI's -- "

The ocean spits her back onto the shore.

" -- gone, New York -- gone, Philly -- gone, every fucking city in the world now -- gone, I'll bet." Krycek glances over to see her reaction, but of course there is none. She stares out the window, lets short-term memory file away his words.

In the middle of a field, all of a sudden, she sees something. A farmhouse and a pale metal silo, breaking the waves. She sits up straighter. Krycek notices the movement. Sees what she sees.

"We're here already," he says. "Guess I drove a little faster than I planned." And why not, with the roads empty?

He slows the car down, then turns off right into the grass, not even bothering to look for a driveway. They drive straight in, invading the plains she has been staring at all day.

The grass here is tall and brown. Some of it brushes against the car, making her draw back. Her mind transforms it into reaching strands, something alien, foreign -- trying to grasp at her. She shivers.

The buildings loom, thrusting up out of the field as they draw nearer. Except for the ghost town where they got gas that afternoon, the farmhouse and the silo are the only signs of civilization they have seen all day.

But the buildings also have the same desolate, deserted feel of the Texas motel from last night. They had woken this morning to find it empty, unstaffed. Krycek had said -- casting his gaze around the lobby with its absent clerk and interrupted feel, the TV at the desk tuned to news coverage of Colonization -- "Everyone's gone to ground, gone home. Hiding with family and valuables. Either that or they're already succumbing to infection." His face was blank, betraying neither worry nor concern. "The Syndicate predicted this."

So they had packed and left without bothering to search for clerks or cleaners, skipping town with about $50 less on Krycek's fake credit card.

Or rather, Krycek had packed their belongings, while Scully stared at the television.

Eight hours later, in the waning sunlight of late afternoon, she is still staring.

Krycek stops the car in front of the farmhouse, and the cessation of movement jars her back into reality, Dana Scully pushed without grace into the present. He looks at her, unbuckling his seat belt. "Are you going to get out now, or are we going to have problems again?"

Her mind struggles, recognizing his question, not knowing the answer. What is he even talking about? "Wh-what?"

His eyes are green, searching her face, and remind her of seaweed, floating on the ocean. "Never mind. Welcome back to the real world."

He cuts off any further response by getting out of the car, and not knowing what else to do, she gets out of her side as well. As he walks up to the farmhouse, his head swivels, taking in their surroundings and possible hidden dangers.

But still everything has that empty, lonely feel to it. The only movements are their own and the grass under the wind.

He pulls his gun anyway, held pointing to the sky in his right grip, and walks up the porch steps to the front door. Coming up close behind him, she sees that it is not latched and swings open easily under the pull of his plastic hand.

"Wait out here," he tells her, and disappears into the dim interior.

She does as told, turning away from the house and its gaping mouth of a door. She shuffles back across the porch and descends the steps, stepping back out into the yard.

The house is a large, rambling two-story affair, and to the back right side of it the silo rises in a modest metal tower. Probably used to store products of the farm -- anything from wheat to corn to hay -- she muses, unable to recall much about agriculture.

The trunk of the car is warm, and the heat suffuses through her body as she sits, facing the plains. The last of the sun is setting to the west, disappearing behind the waving grass, leaving everything in a wash of purple dusk.

<God, I'd love a cigarette> comes a thought, unbidden, surprising. It stays with her, as she waits for Krycek to come out -- the inexplicable urge to drag a deep breath of the sweet burnt taste, to expel it in a cloud and watch it disappear into the encroaching twilight. Once upon a time she spent a summer or two like that, sneaking off with the other kids in base housing and smoking in the woods, in backyards when adults weren't at home. The feel of the air on her skin now is the same as it was then, despite the fact that this is the Mid- West and not near the coast at sea level.

And if only she could feel the same air in her throat and lungs she might be transported back, back to those days when she had no other worry except for her parents finding out what she was doing.

Tired of watching the house, she leans over, resting her head on her knees. And just then a breeze catches her hair, making it cover her face, so that she smells herself. Her unwashed hair and body, the clothes perhaps several days old.

She sits up straight and frowns, lifts her arms and takes a whiff on purpose. Runs her hands along her scalp and the skin of her face. Then rubs her fingertips together, feeling the oil that makes them slick.

<What the hell, Dana?> she asks herself. <What is going on with you?> She pictures herself at the motel, staring in shock at the TV. Had she forgotten to take a shower then?

Somehow the question is too confusing to answer. After a moment she loses interest, raising her head again to breathe the wind from the plains and the coming night.

When the third star has already blinked into the sky, Krycek strolls out from behind the corner of the house, gun tucked into the front of his jeans. "All clear," he tells her. "There's no one here." A note of -- what? confusion? frustration? -- slips into his voice before he regains control, makes it into the same deep toneless velvet she's become so familiar with during her time with him. "I checked the silo too. But there's plenty of supplies. So we'll stay here for the night, decide what the plan is for tomorrow."

Without waiting for her to respond, he walks to the back of the car and opens the trunk, lifts out his bags with his right hand and starts carrying them to the house. Their weight pulls him to the side, shortens the stride that is usually long and muscular.

Tomorrow. What the plan is. Jesus, what if tomorrow doesn't even come? She gets her own bags out of the trunk, slams the door shut with a *thunk!* that makes a satisfying interruption to the quiet. Krycek has already gone up the porch and been swallowed by the house again. She moves at a more leisured pace, looking up at the stars beginning to peek through the blackening sky. Tomorrow, they will disappear again in the bright new daylight. And what will the sun shine down on then?

She shivers, then climbs the porch steps.

May 24, 1999
Philadelphia

Alex had waited a few minutes after Marita and the smoker pulled away before hiking back up to the top of the bridge, turning towards Philadelphia. He had barely noticed the city's skyline, how the electric lights lightened the sky. All he knew was the rhythm of his feet and the occasional car passing. His thoughts were buzzing, angry and confused.

It made no sense. Why? Why Dana Scully, and why did he have to be the one to do it? And now of all times, with Colonization most likely to be accelerated because of what Mulder had stumbled upon.

He had entered the city, seeing it through the eyes of memory. A lifetime ago, he'd run through these streets, stealing anything from cars to guns to drugs -- witnessing more urban nightmares in real and living color than any teenager had a right to. Than any teenager should be cursed to.

One night, he'd seen a man killed in an alley, stabbed in the back of the neck. Only it wasn't a man. It couldn't have been, the way it had disintegrated into green ooze before his eyes. Another man stood nearby and watched it happen, dressed in a dark suit.

The killer bent and pulled the knife out with a rough yank, only it wasn't a knife, either. It was a retractable metal spike, and when the man looked up and saw Alex hovering in the shadows, it disappeared with a sound like death hissing.

With his other hand, the man pulled out a gun, one type of weapon Alex recognized better than his own reflection. He ran, and the men chased him.

He knew the streets, knew his weapon and his own body. He knew the stakes of his flight from the gun the man carried. He took cover in another alley as a deadly calm coldness slipped over his senses. He dived behind a dumpster, heard gunfire open up as the men pounded into the alley behind him.

Crouched in his hiding place, he drew a bead on the man in front, the one with the strange knife. His aim was true, despite the moving target -- Alex had had more than enough practice at this sort of warfare already.

The lead man dropped, and the other darted to the side of the alley, hiding in the shadows. Gunfire flared from his position -- the second man must have a gun, as well. Alex fired back, forcing the panic away, feeling only the pull of the trigger and his weapon's recoil. The shocks drove deep into the muscles of his arm, spreading a warm and painful tightness along his bicep and below his elbow.

And fuck, now he was running out of ammo. Only three rounds left. He hunkered down, waiting as the shooting ceased.

Silence filled the alley for a few moments. Alex's nerves were strung tight and high. His breathing was raspy and shallow. He swallowed, trying to pierce the darkness with his eyes, searching for movement.

There! A motion, just before another gunshot rang out. The bullet pinged against the corner of the dumpster, just above his head. He took aim where the shadow had moved and fired, and a body slumped to the ground.

In the rush of adrenaline his finger had squeezed the trigger twice more before he could stop himself, and then his gun gave off nothing more than an empty clicking.

He was the only thing that moved in the alley as he slipped from his hiding place. He put his gun back in his belt and went to the killer's body, bending over it with a boy's curiosity. Alex, at his age, had already made close acquaintances with death -- enough to realize the futility of guilt -- but never had he met it in such a thunder and lightning fashion.

The man with the metal spike had died clutching it. Alex took the weapon from his hand, balancing the weight, the strange heaviness in the handle. There was a button. He pressed it, jumping back when the spike hissed out. He pressed the button again, and it retracted.

He bent back over the body, making a quick search of the pockets. Nothing valuable. No wallet or ID. He straightened and backed a few steps away, ready to leave.

A soft sound nearby -- a match striking -- jerked him around. Someone else was walking up the alley towards him. Lighting a cigarette. Another man in a suit, older and thin.

"You're lucky they're human, and not something else," the man called, gesturing at the bodies with the cigarette. He drew closer.

Quick as lightning, Alex raised his gun, aiming at the man. <Fuck! Last two rounds wasted! Should have taken the other guy's gun!> He glanced around the alley. If the other man was armed as well, he might pull his own gun, and then he might figure out that Alex himself had exhausted his rounds. And he was cornered; there was no way out of the alley except the one blocked by the smoking man.

The man's words registered suddenly, just as he began coming forward again. Alex called out, "Don't move. Whaddoyou mean *something else*?"

"Like what you saw in the other alley."

Alex scowled, hefting the metal spike in one hand and the gun in the other. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"But I think you do," the older man said. He had not stopped, only slowed his pace. "I watched you, watching them."

Alex tensed as the man came near enough that he could smell the cigarette smoke. "Stay where you are, fucker. Don't think I won't do you just like I did these guys." He gestured with his gun.

The old man spread his hands, showing he was unarmed except for the cigarette. "But that's another thing we should talk about. Somehow, you managed to kill two of my men."

Alex glanced past the man. If the guy thought his gun was loaded, he could just walk right out of the alley --

But suddenly, the darkness was torn apart by car headlights. A dark sedan had pulled into the alley behind the smoker. Alex was blinded by the brightness.

He heard the car door open. Someone scrambled out, and then a deep male voice said, "Drop the gun."

Alex could see nothing but the light. His breath came in pants, panicked and short. <Kill him, kill that smoking fucker NOW Alex!> his mind screamed, and something animal and unreasonable clawed its way out of him.

He raised the metal spike in his hand, thumb mashing the button so that it unsheathed itself, and rushed forward.

The sound of a gunshot rang out from behind the headlights.

When it entered, the bullet pushed his shoulder -- already weak from the shootout before -- back with a white hot pain. The force of it flung him down, and as he fell he realized what had happened. He landed on his ass with a grunt and flopped onto his back.

Someone pinned his wrists above his head -- <fuck! my shoulder!> -- and yanked the gun and the metal spike from his hands. Then the smoker knelt carefully beside him on his other side, filling his vision. The headlights illuminated him from behind, so that his face was shadowed.

"There are no rounds left in this gun," the deep voice said from behind the smoker.

"Well, so he's a decent bluffer as well as a good marksman." The scent of cigarette smoke filled Alex's nostrils, burning the air he breathed. "Now then," the smoker continued. His voice filtered through the sound of Alex's pounding blood. "I think we've taken care of any foolish impulses in the future. Why don't you get in the car?"

Alex glared. "Fuck you."

"Think, boy. You came out on top with my men, but you've got the short end of the stick now. You didn't watch your back, and now I've got better plans for you."

"Yeah, I'll bet."

Again, the chuckle, husky and melodious. "Get up. Get in the car." The foot on his wrist lifted, and the two men backed away from him.

Wincing against the pain that screamed in his shoulder, Alex stood. There was a man a few feet away pointing a gun at him, holding Alex's weapon in his other hand. He was huge, suited as well, and his face bulged beneath light brown hair.

<That fucker shot me>, Alex thought, realizing he could feel blood soaking his clothes. He felt lightheaded, dizzy with the blood loss. He'd be unconscious soon, he knew.

The car's back door was open and Alex crawled in. The smoker followed, pitching his cigarette. The inside light turned on and illuminated the caverns of his face.

"Don't worry about the gunshot wound. That can be taken care of soon and you'll be as good as new," the smoker said. "What's your name, boy?" His tone was completely expectant of an answer.

The driver's door slammed shut, and Alex felt the rumble of the car starting, the painful bumps that jarred him as it backed out of the alley.

"Alexei," he muttered, sullen. The waves of fire in his shoulder tried to pull him down, down into darkness.

"Do you have a last name?"

He swam through the haze in his head, searching for the memory. It had been so long, and he was so tired all of a sudden. "Kritschniskaya," he whispered. He looked down at his arm in the dim car light, looking at the dark wetness. <That's my blood. Mine and it should be inside me, ME, not outside on my clothes. That's wrong, the wrong place.> His eyelids drooped and he felt himself slipping.

"Alexei Kritschniskaya." The old man nodded, studying him as he fainted, head lolling against the car seat. The coppery smell of the boy's blood filled the car, and he cracked the tinted window down a bit. "You're young yet," he said to the unconscious form. "But you'll get more than enough growing up with me."

June 7, 1999
Nebraska

There is food in the farmhouse, canned soup and vegetables stocked in the pantry. But the rest of the house doesn't look like a house at all; there is no sign that it served as a home to anyone. On the walls there are no decorations, no curtains at the windows, no personal furniture of any type. Every room, whether the dining room or the master bedroom, has been stocked with bunk beds, as many as can fit with space left to maneuver. The only exceptions are the kitchen and the bathrooms, and one large room off the back hallway, which has been equipped with chairs and desks.

Walking through the house, counting the beds, Scully estimates that the place could hold over fifty people. Yet, she thinks, standing in the strange room with the chairs and desk, where are they?

"Most likely," Krycek says from behind her, "they're all dead."

She whirls, sees him standing just inside the doorway, looking around with a strange blank expression. She realizes she must have spoken aloud.

"This house was prepared for emergencies," he says. "In case the Syndicate had to leave headquarters in the cities, go underground, so to speak." He pauses. "And there was also the need for a place to live after Colonization, because the deal was that they got to be hybridized and kept alive, separate from the rest of the human race."

She holds silent, not interrupting him despite the questions bubbling. He's revealing to her now information she and Mulder spent years searching for, but what good does it do? The truth at the end of their quest can no longer serve as protection or defense, because the truth has shown its monstrous face before they ever found it. Arrived from the sky to break the earth before she had even really believed. And now, now -- the truth can be used only as a lens to look at the past.

And when all is said and done, the past can't be rewritten.

But she shivers anyway, at the thought of what *could* have been -- this house serving as a haven from the Colonizers, a haven for those who had sacrificed their own humanity.

"We must be the first people to actually use this place. It doesn't look like anyone's been here."

She lets a question escape her, phrased in the form of a statement. "But you were expecting that someone would be."

His eyes are impenetrable, green. "Yes, I was."

<Who?> she wants to ask. <Weren't they all burned to death? What aren't you telling me?>

But of course, the answer is that there are volumes he isn't telling her, all of it hidden behind his emotionless facade. There *are* cracks in the mask, but they are only moments where she catches glimpses that add nothing, really, to her whole picture of him.

Another question, general and nonspecific, but not enough to get past his wall. "What are we going to do?"

"Let's talk over dinner," he says. "We haven't eaten all day."

Nothing to do then but follow him to the kitchen, where she watches as he sets up pots on the gas stove, picks out cans of beef vegetable soup and yellow corn. She stands in the doorway watching, studying the movements of Alex Krycek. Was it only a week ago that she had thought him so far removed and foreign to her, an entity of evil she didn't dare come near except with a gun in her hand, with Mulder beside her?

Again, the thought of Mulder has to be wrapped and hidden, like a jagged piece of glass.

Now, observing Krycek attempt to open the cans with one hand, observing the way his shoulders fill his dark collared shirt, the muscular stance of his legs.... It no longer brings that sense of distance, those questions she used to ask herself at the start of their long journey -- <What are you doing, Dana? Why are you with this man? How can you even share the same space?>

Things change. Now all she says is, What are *we* going to do?

Noticing his trouble, she asks, "Need some help?"

He doesn't even bother to voice a reply, simply shaking his head. He has been using his prosthesis to hold the can of corn in one place, while he operates a can opener with his right hand, but as soon as he manages to puncture the top it slips away and falls off the counter, hitting the floor. A spray of white juice shoots out with the force of impact, splattering the floor and his pants.

"*Fuck!*" The expletive is a thunderclap in her ears, making her wince. He has not often gotten angry in her presence, and she is not afraid of him when he does, but what it signifies to her is a loss of control. She has to fight the urge to close her eyes, to deny the event.

He throws the can opener down on the counter with a crash, sending it skidding onto the stove and knocking the pots off of the burners.

"Fuck!" he shouts again amid the noise, "fuck, fuck! Where the fuck are they? Where the fuck!"

It's that pharmaceutical company in Atlanta all over again, the one they broke into after Skyland Mountain. She might as well be standing in the bowels of the building once more, watching Krycek stomp around the lab, destroying everything in his path. "Where the fuck are they?" he kept shouting. "What the fuck did that bastard do with them?" Every malevolent muscle unleashed in a storm of fury.

They had broken into the company because Krycek had said it was one of the centers of experimentation on the alien DNA. The samples and documentation were supposedly all there, the lab located in an underground section. Once they had the raw materials, he told her, she could use them to manufacture Mulder's cure. She had swallowed enough of her distrust and disbelief to follow him as they slinked past the cameras he had disabled, through the security doors he had decoded.

But in the end, of course, there was nothing to be found, no evidence of the kind he had promised. The only lab notebooks they found had recorded routine experiments on chemicals she recognized as components of cold medicines, and she wasn't surprised, wasn't angry or indignant, even. The years with Mulder had immunized her to the fury of disappearing evidence. She had believed Krycek, enough at least to follow him, but the tangible results of her belief were the same as they had always been since joining the X-Files.

That time, she had let his fury run its course, had not stepped in to interfere. She had simply stood there and let him destroy, understanding his anger only on its surface. And really not caring for *his* frustration, but concerned only that they had not made any progress for Mulder.

Now, in this strange kitchen in this strange house, in this terrible place where Mulder doesn't live anymore, she is again witness to his anger. His back is turned to her as he punches his fist into the kitchen cupboards, lifts pots and hurls them away.

But instead of standing aside, she takes a step forward, moving herself into the vortex of his rage. She reaches out, places her hand on his right shoulder.

His arm, raised and ready to throw another can to the floor, stills at her touch. Beneath her palm she can feel the muscles, hot and tense. Silence now in the kitchen, broken only by his heavy breathing. The scent of his sweat and the stench of her own body makes her nostrils flare.

Finally his arm drops, making her hand fall away as he turns to face her. His expression surprises her. It is not a blank mask but an open door, showing her a despair and a...a yearning she hadn't thought possible for him to possess.

They stand close enough now to breathe the same air. She meets the emotions newly revealed in his eyes with her own calm gaze, as if the life he exposes now weren't something raw and bare and immediate. They remain locked in their stares until his breathing is as slow and quiet as hers. Until she can't remember any other eye color but green, deep furious green.

And then he breaks the moment, shouldering past her and out of the kitchen. The warmth of his body brushes against her for the briefest of moments, but still it is a physical engulfing of her senses compared to the feather lightness of her hand on his shoulder.

She is left standing in the wake of his storm.

May 24, 1999
Philadelphia

There were other things besides Skinner's micro-organisms that he'd raided from the Consortium labs. When he first gained access to them he'd occasionally just pick things up at random. It was impossible to tell what might be useful in the future, even things like unmarked videotapes. The one he'd stolen from the DC lab turned out to be a routine surveillance on Mulder and Scully. It was something he thought a strange coincidence to find, considering all of the other things that had probably been preserved on the Syndicate's home video.

Back in his apartment after the meeting with the smoking man, he put the tape in. It had been quite some time since he'd even seen Dana Scully, either in person or on film. In the video, she and Mulder were sitting in the bright window of a diner at night, conversing over the table. There was no sound, and the camera watched from across a semi-busy street, but the picture was clear and in color. He sat in the dark of his apartment, nestled like a viper in the shadows of his temporary home, and stared at the TV.

<Mulder leans toward her, gesturing. She shakes her head, red hair brushed sleekly back from her face. Her arm is extended across the table's surface, clad in the usual business suit, and she taps her hand in rhythm with the movement of her lips. Beneath the table her crossed leg is visible swinging lightly, just missing Mulder's knee.>

At the sight of her, Alex shifted. It seemed a lifetime ago when he was supposed to have killed her the first time. That week he had traveled up and down the East Coast, meeting murder in every city where he stopped -- Bill Mulder among them. His nerves were strung tight, suspending him between the dark nights, naked and visible to the other killers prowling. They were there, slinking about. Some of them were the same brand of killer he was, bound to the Syndicate and sent out to hunt because of the digital tape Fox Mulder had stumbled upon. On a fateful evening he'd let one of those others pull the trigger, and it turned out it was the wrong woman he shot.

Cardinale had muttered, as they got into the car and drove off, "Pretty. Pretty woman. Too bad she's dead."

He hadn't answered, swimming in the nausea of fear. That red hair, surrounding a stranger's face.

But by the morning, he was over it. She wasn't the first innocent who had fallen during this long war, certainly not even the first he might share responsibility for. And soon, he had other things to worry about, like the consequences of a car bomb explosion.

He realized, watching his TV as she and Mulder got up from their table, that she'd probably escaped death as many times as himself, perhaps even more. Those were the consequences of pursuing the truth in high visibility. If you hid yourself well enough, as in his case, some wouldn't even realize anyone was there.

Mulder walks just behind her, hand positioned at the small of her back. As always, he was at once more familiar and more intriguing to Alex than the serious rigidity of Dana Scully, but his business was not with Mulder anymore.

<The other man makes his goodbyes to her just outside the door of the diner, crowding her space even though his hand has fallen away and he has stopped touching her. Her face is luminous, turned up towards his.

They separate finally, and Scully walks to her car. Just as she unlocks the door, her head jerks up -- probably something catching her attention -- and the camera zooms in on her face.>

Alex paused the tape there, so that her expression filled the TV screen. Her eyes were blue, so blue, directed over the roof of her car, still unaware of the surveillance. He got off of his couch and knelt in front of the television so that he could touch the screen, running his fingers over the arch of her brow, her curving lip. Except for that time, years ago when she was centuries more innocent, when she came to help Mulder with Duane Barry, this was the closest he had ever seen her.

The last survivor with a chip. He knew what that meant. He knew what was done to her, what was put into her body and what was taken out. Some of it he'd known about as it happened, on the other side of the wall from him when he'd hitched a ride on her train car from DC to Pennsylvania. So he knew, more or less, what evidence she embodied.

And because of that, he knew also that he couldn't kill her. As a result of her abduction, she was too important, too useful. The cigarette smoking man must have recognized this. In a flash Alex understood. He had been ordered to kill Dana Scully because her death would be a blow to both the Colonizers and the Rebels. The smoker, in his newfound status as the last member of the old Consortium, was trying to remove this human contribution to their struggles.

Alex didn't pretend to understand why. The time he had spent with the old men in the Syndicate -- and the smoker especially -- had taught him how to figure out their motives, but where those motives came from, he never knew.

To keep Dana Scully alive, then, to be the one who had her in his possession, that would be the ultimate stacking of cards in his favor. The smoking man was wrong to want her dead. Alex turned the tape off and began to move around his apartment, packing his belongings. All of a sudden, his plans had changed.

June 7, 1999
Nebraska

Listening to her clean the mess in the kitchen and start a soup on the stove, he remembers when it all went to hell, those plans of his. That night, waiting with her in the clearing on top of Skyland Mountain.

She hadn't known, she'd thought they were waiting for a man to bring them a cure for Mulder, she hadn't known that it was really a Rebel that was supposed to meet them. Alex had decided, not really wanting Colonization to take place, that he would offer her to the Rebels to take Cassandra Spender's place. One of them was supposed to meet them at the abduction site on Skyland Mountain, to test her and ensure that she was what Alex claimed. It would then let the rest of Its race know the deal and contact Alex later. They would let him know if they could use her to win their struggle against the Colonizers.

Only the meeting had never happened.

After only an hour of waiting she had started to get restless. She had not betrayed much nervousness at being here again, this place that had started all of her troubles, but now some of her reserve had slipped. He couldn't see much of her in the dark, but he could hear her pacing back and forth. He had told her there would be a ship, that it was supposed to rendezvous with a member of the Consortium and that the cure for Mulder would be exchanged between them. That they would take it from the human receiver as soon as the ship was gone.

Lies, all lies. He still wasn't sure how much she believed him, but it was enough. She was there waiting with him, wasn't she?

But where the hell was the Rebel? Something was wrong, and he knew it with a piercing dread that cut his very bones. They couldn't stay here much longer if it was a trap. Fifteen minutes, he decided, and looked at his watch, trying to suppress his anxiety.

"Think you might have gotten your flight schedules mixed up?" Scully asked then, and her sarcasm bit hard enough that he almost broke his silence, opening his mouth to answer.

That was when it happened -- the gunshots erupting out of the night, cutting his words off. He lunged and pushed Scully away towards the trees, feeling a bullet shoot past his ear in a hot rush.

He moved fast, but she was smaller and less sure, and he knocked into her, tripping them both up. They landed on the ground in a painful tangle. "Fuck!" he swore, yanking out his own gun. He maneuvered them behind a tree and covered her body with his.

As far as he could tell, she barely batted an eyelash. "Guess this wasn't the ship you were expecting," she said, pulling out her own gun. "Now who should I point this at?"

"Just not me," he told her. He'd decided in the end to let her carry her weapon, knowing it would make her feel safer with him, knowing that if the Rebel ship showed up it would render her weapon useless anyway. Now he was glad she had it.

Alex rolled off her, listening to the sudden quiet that had fallen. The hairs on the back of his neck stood at attention. But everything was cloaked in the black of night. His eyes searched the darkness but he couldn't see a damn thing.

His mind raced, touching on all the points he needed. The shooter was probably hiding in the trees surrounding the clearing, probably using infrared or night-vision goggles.

Dammit. He couldn't see shit in these black shadows.

He had a pair of night-vision goggles in his knapsack, but his only arm was occupied already with his weapon. How the hell would he get the goggles out of the bag and on his head without dropping his gun? He listened to Scully's accidental sounds, her fumbling in the leaves and pine needles as she sat up and crouched behind him, knew he didn't have a choice. <Fuck.>.

"Scully," he said. Her movement stopped. He made his words curt. "Take my knapsack off my back. Feel around inside for a pair of goggles."

He could tell she hesitated, surprised at himself that he could sense her taking a breath and disturbing the air as she reached out to find him. He felt her hand on his face even before it happened, was already jerking away even as she withdrew it.

"Sorry," she muttered, and the hand drifted down, pulling the straps of his knapsack from his shoulders. She eased it first down his prosthesis -- he could tell, somehow, that she gritted her teeth -- then down his gun arm, careful not to disturb his grip.

She searched through the contents for a minute, in the process probably touching everything he'd hoped she'd never find, before pulling out the goggles. "Now what?" she asked.

He debated a moment, but really there was no question. One arm or not, he still considered himself the real gunman of the two of them. "Put them on me," he said.

Her hands were cool, gentle as they settled the straps of the goggles around his head, adjusted them over his eyes. He could see her face in a wash of electric green now, her eyes wide and focused somewhere to the left of him as she worked. There was no fear in her expression. Only determination.

"Okay, that's good enough," he said, and got into a crouch, peering around the trunk of the tree. "Stay down," he told her.

The goggles illuminated the clearing in shades of light and darker green. He scanned the trees on the other side, but nothing moved except the wind in the leaves. Still his sense of danger remained, almost palpable.

"Do you see anything?" she whispered, and her breath was a tropical heat wave in his ear.

"No. Be quiet and don't move."

There! Something pale, peeking out through low bushes. His choice of action was quick, decision snapped out with a survivor's logic. His finger tightened on the trigger, and he fired a shot off at the target.

Movement now on the other side, and he shot again toward it, lightning fast. A body stumbled into view, face eclipsed by another pair of goggles. He shot one more time and watched it fall.

He watched the clearing for another few minutes, but there was no more to be seen other than the stirring leaves. "Let's go," he said to Scully, and rose.

They moved around the perimeter of the trees, dodging behind them to keep out of the open. Sometimes he heard her cursing, as she stumbled over things he saw and avoided with his night-vision. But he didn't stop to help, only slowing their pace once they neared the area where the shooter had fallen.

He allowed himself a moment of surprise when he removed the goggles from the body with his gun grip. Her torso was punctured with three bullet wounds -- he must have hit her each time.

Marita's face was pale green from the goggles he wore, the blood that trickled from her mouth a thick stream. Her eyes fluttered. He crouched low and pushed his face near hers so she could tell it was he despite the goggles.

"What are you doing here?" he asked in Russian.

She gulped air, trying to speak.

"You knew what I was going to do, didn't you? Did you kill it?"

Marita rolled her eyes toward him, and pain slashed across her gaunt face. "Learned from the best...didn't I?" Her accent still butchered the Russian, just as he remembered.

"Did that smoking bastard send you? Does he know, too?"

She blinked, and when she opened her eyes again they were blank, unseeing. "You're dead, Alex," she whispered. "No vaccine.... You're dead," she repeated, her words fading.

Through the cloud of his fury, he heard Scully nearby, demanding he use English. He ignored her, still speaking Russian, mind racing on Marita's words. "What do you mean, no vaccine? What are you talking about?"

Something like a smile twisted her face, and maybe it was pain, maybe amusement. She wheezed out her broken accent between struggled gasps for breath. "Sorry...about the boy -- Dmitri with black oil. All those tests...they did to me. Tunguska...vaccine wears off. Syndic...made...new version. Med base...two four one." She choked on the last word.

"Which one is that?" he shouted at her. "Which city?"

But she didn't speak, and her eyes remained closed. Scully brushed past him, blind fingers feeling for a pulse.

"Marita!" he shouted. "Answer me, bitch." He pinned her shoulder with his gun, anger making him illogical. Her goggles swung from his hand and hit her breast.

"Stop it!" Scully pushed his hand away, her voice like dry leaves. "She's dead."

Alex let his hand fall, let his breathing come back to normal. "Are you sure?"

"I know death."

He looked at her, the transformation of her face to pale green in his night-goggles. "So do I," he said. He stood, looking back at the clearing. The sense of danger was still there in muted form, as if hovering just past his vision. They had to leave, quickly. He looked at Scully, the bargaining chip for a deal that Marita had destroyed. There were questions in her eyes, questions he knew he couldn't answer. Not to her.

Shock flooded his head -- <the vaccine wears off? it wears *off*?> -- but he pushed it down. He had to think. Where the hell was the medical base? It could be any of two hundred and fifty cities around the US that the Consortium had entrenched themselves in. His mind raced. The closest one to Skyland Mountain was...Atlanta.

He shoved the goggles into Scully's hands and pulled her to her feet. "Let's go." He waited until she'd fitted them over her eyes and adjusted the tightness, then pushed her ahead. "Run," he told her, "back downhill to the car." She nodded -- still no fear in that hard expression, and he followed her through the trees.

June 7, 1999
Nebraska

Dinner, unlike its preparation, is a quiet affair. She carries the bowls of soup on a tray, out to the room with the desks. He has dragged one of them between two chairs, and she sets the tray in front of the place where he sits. He motions with his one hand for her to take the other seat.

They eat facing each other, avoiding eye contact, and the tension in the air is enough that she finds it hard to swallow, hard even to lift her spoon to her mouth.

Since there is no conversation, she tries to think of other things, to distract herself from his dark presence. She tries to think of something happy, to buoy her up and out of the depression of the day. But one truth of the human mind is that memory only works backwards, and everything in the past may be linked to something else in the past. Happy to sad, joy to sorrow.

The bland taste of the food reminds Scully of her brother, Charles, who made a living as a chef in one of Richmond's finest four-star restaurants. Cooking, and family. Charles was the youngest, but the first to settle down, with his college sweetheart Jen. Two boys, and a girl born just this past year. Her heart aches at the thought of the newborn, Melissa Rose, barely old enough to learn the world before it became a nightmare.

The last time she saw Charles and his family.... Was it Christmas? With everyone already assembled by the tree when she finally arrived at her mother's, late because she hadn't left Mulder's apartment until after two in the morning, after their exchange of presents. She had sensed that Charles was annoyed, just like Bill and everyone else, but unlike their older brother he hadn't shown it. And by the time he'd left at New Year's, they'd been just the same, the two youngest Scullys with their bond that had survived despite their physical distance, simply dusted off and shined anew.

Then she was sent to New York, and she'd gotten shot, forced to recover at home, with only her mother dropping in now and again and Mulder just about moving himself in. Charles had phoned to wish her well. And after they'd gotten the X-Files back, and her life again became the busy, case-filled whirl of days and weeks that went by too fast, there was a card for her birthday, a card for his. And then nothing. Silence and the ceasing of communication that happens between people who live completely different lives.

And now it's too late to do anything about it. She has only memories. There will not be opportunity to make new ones.

And she's so far away from any place she might consider home, sitting in this island of a farmhouse in the Great Plains of America, trying to avoid Krycek's hooded green eyes.

Why the hell has she followed him this far? She feels like a boat without a rudder, floating only where the waves push her. Where has her direction gone?

Well, she does know that. She followed him at first for Mulder, to find that elusive cure Krycek promised would silence the voices in her partner's head, but when the sky came down a week later in the cities, they still hadn't found it. By then, it didn't matter of course, because Mulder was still in DC, in the middle of it all, and you can't cure a dead --

Fuck, what is wrong with her? Back and back, she keeps coming back to that. Her mind circling it like a shark with blood in the water.

She remembers...she remembers waking up this morning, the sunlight being too bright on her face. When she got up to close the blinds, Krycek had walked in from the connecting door to his room, and said to her, "We're leaving."

If she hadn't gone with him, what *would* she have done?

Her mother's face floats in the waves of memory as well, soft and sad. God -- her mother. When she was dying of cancer, during one of those long despairing nights her mother had sat beside her on the hospital bed and stroked her hair and hummed, just like when she was a child with a fever.

<Only, this is something you can't cure> Scully had thought then.

But there had been a cure, hadn't there?

Sitting in front of Krycek now, she lets a hand drift to the back of her neck, her fingers brushing the scar there. <This chip means more than that. More than a cure.> She remembers Cassandra Spender and the burned bodies. And part of her wails, <No! I don't want to go that way! Not like that! Not to *them!*>

"You..." and her voice is sore, for some reason, and she has to clear her throat. "You know I still have this chip in my neck, right? You knew about that, didn't you?"

He looks up, dropping his spoon in the bowl. She holds still as his eyes search her face, but she does not meet his gaze. "I knew about it."

"So you know what they're for?"

His eyes narrow, she senses, maybe a millimeter, but as always his voice is a smooth blank. "Cataloguing. Keeping track."

"As...as a tracking device?"

He shakes his head, slow, deliberate. And for a second she thinks he's lying to her. But something in the tone of his voice bespeaks knowledge, experience. "No," he says. "They're not like homing mechanisms or anything, although they can be used to communicate impulses to the bearers."

She nods. Ruskin Dam. "So what should I do? Take it out?"

"Well, if you do that, you'll get cancer."

He says it so casually, she almost shudders. His voice is so matter-of-fact it's an offense against the memory of the day she found out, staring at the CT scan with parched eyes, seeing proof of the doctor's words and her own suspicions in sophisticated X-ray. Staring for almost an hour before finally pulling her cell phone out, not dialing Mulder's number until she could be sure her hands didn't shake. Until she could take a breath without shuddering through unshed tears.

"Then, what?" And damn this constant, cloying stream of questions she can't help but ask, damn the fear and this situation where Alex Krycek is the only one to turn to for answers. "What if *they* try to call me again, like those first mass incinerations?" Why is she even asking *him* this, as if he could give her some reassurance?

He keeps looking at her, and finally she meets his eyes. She has to control the thought, the feeling, of being sucked into them, as if they were dark whirlpools. He speaks finally over her thoughts, "You're asking what I'm going to do. If I'm going to just let you go if that happens."

That's *not* it, really, as a matter of fact his words imply that she should expect a future with him. She doesn't want to know if *he* will let her go. She wants to know what will happen if she is forced to let *herself* go.

He keeps talking, "No, I'll take care of you. I know some of their plans for the test subjects, and believe me you don't want to be part of them."

<I'll take care of you.> Jesus. She opens her mouth to speak, to say anything, but he stands, holding his empty soup bowl.

"Look, before we talk anymore about this," he says, "I've decided we should leave here in the morning. We can't stay, they'll find out about this place somehow. And the best place to go is north."

She finds her voice amid the swirl of her mind working. "Why?"

"They have trouble maintaining a satisfactory rate of gestation below a certain temperature, below about sixty five degrees Fahrenheit," he explains, walking towards the kitchen. "And there are enough warm climates on Earth to facilitate their needs, so they won't try to infect much of the populace in cold areas. They'll just kill them to squelch any resistance, then leave. By the time we get far enough north, that phase of Colonization will be over."

She hears him putting his bowl in the sink, the sound of the faucet. How much longer, she wonders, will there be running water? How long will it take for them to get as far north as will be safe? How long will it take before she begins to feel them calling her, through the chip? She shivers. For that matter, why haven't they tried to call her already?

She feels the waves of persistent memory trying to crash back over, to cover her head so that she can float again in the non- reality, back where it's safe. But at the last moment she gasps for air.

It feels like the last attempt of a drowning woman.

What comes back out is half a sob, but the sound of Krycek in the kitchen is close and she clamps back down on it. She will not cry. She will not cry.

Instead, she stares dry-eyed into her half-empty bowl, as if that could give her better answers to her questions. But as she sits there, her thoughts move only in circles.

June 7, 1999
Nebraska

Once, when he was locked in the missile silo with the ship, Alex had regretted that so much of his life was paved with lies. It had struck him before, of course -- that notion -- most notably when he and Mulder were partners, knowing that Mulder's quest was for his ever-elusive Truth, and that in actuality their lives had been woven into a web of deceits. Mulder had had no real knowledge of his presence in such a web, at least not to the degree Alex did, living the lies day by day. He had reflected on the irony then, but the only time he truly wished he had lived his life differently, wished he had lived Mulder's way rather than his own, was in the missile silo in North Dakota.

Of course, once he was freed, he didn't have any more time -- or use -- for regrets.

Now, though, at the end of so many other things, it seems fitting that he should re-evaluate what he has time for.

For something to do, he starts packing the car with what supplies he can find in the house -- canned food, gasoline, bedding stripped from bunks. First aid kits, making a mental note to find a pharmacy at the next town they come to. He doubts anyone will be there.

He shuts the trunk of the car, thinking he should ask Scully what would prove most useful to pick up at a drug store. She is a doctor, after all.

Ah, but they'll need more than just bandages and ointment to fix all that's wrong with them -- such damaged and desperate creatures as they are.

The night sky spread out over the farm is a heavy thing, reminding Alex of a cloak, a blanket. The stars could in fact be holes cut in the fabric, places where bits of light from the outside shine through. If only one could break out, get to the other side of the darkness, what might he find?

The half moon glimmers like a window, beckoning him.

Instead of answering the call he sits on the trunk of the car -- his weight makes the entire thing sink a little -- and tilts his head back, looking up. He has spent much of his waking life in the night, perhaps more in recent years than he has spent in the day. But he has never really had the time or the use for stargazing, either.

It is hard to imagine how one of those stars, looking so promising in such twinkling brightness, could be home to the Colonizers. It is difficult also not to get philosophical, although Alex is good at keeping his mind on the action. He had never thought, before he met the smoking man, about the question of other inhabitants of the universe -- of aliens. It was a question only for science fiction movies and stories, and Alex made a hobby of neither.

But once he had learned the truth of the question, he had simply taken it into his stride. Of course, it was shocking. He hadn't lied to Jeffrey Spender about initial reactions. But once accepted, the knowledge he carried was surprisingly easy. Perhaps this was why so many people like Mulder believed without ever having proof.

What it came down to for Alex Krycek, though, was that the Colonizers and the Rebels, for all their physical differences and alienness, were very much like the creatures of Earth. The basic urges, procreation and self-preservation, were at the heart of every agenda. The Colonizers needed space and resources for their ever-expanding species, and the Rebels sought to gain their own independence by battling the Colonizers at every turn. The motives were nothing that human civilizations, and animal species as well, hadn't used on Earth for as long as they existed.

Because they were so similar in these aspects, Alex was able to deal with them, to make bargains just as if they were humans as well.

Scully had stopped him for a moment there, wondering if she should take out the chip. Bad enough that the one in her neck is not the one she originally started out with. But a subject without any chip at all is an experiment with no results.

Perhaps the deal with the Rebel had fallen through -- <damn that icy blond bitch anyway> he growls to himself -- but it's just as well. Colonization is under way, and from what his knowledgeable eye could tell on the last television reports, the Rebels are losing. The Colonizers could use Dana Scully to finish the hybridization project that Cassandra Spender's death had sabotaged. He'll just have to make his deal with them.

Thank God they'd made it here before the shit hit the fan. He doesn't want to think what might have happened to him if he'd been stuck in one of the cities yesterday, caught up in the confusion and destruction. Now all he has to do is get her to the last remaining silos, nestled up in the heart of North Dakota. The Colonizers would already have sent a dispatch there to claim the last of the ships the Consortium had been storing for them. He'll contact them, arrange to meet and attempt to make a bargain...

<Alex>, something in him whispers. <Are you...are you sure about this?>

He's heard this voice before, speaking to him when he was trapped in the missile silo. It had said to him, stronger-voiced then because he had been weak and nearing desperation, <You wouldn't be here, buried alive with that monster-thing and that monster-ship, if you lived a different life.> He had listened to it, in between screaming, vomiting his throat raw, and banging on the metal door.

Now he just tries to push it down, to silence it. No time for regrets.

But the voice slithers around in his head anyway, escaping him. <You know what they do to them. You know what they do.>

<Fuck!> He gets off of the car, bowing his head and turning his back on the stars. <I can't help that. I'm looking out for me, Alex Krycek.>

<Oh but who did you used to be? Alexei Kritschniskaya. Your mother used to sing you to sleep, your father once bought you a set of toy race cars, and it wasn't even your birthday, it wasn't even Christmas. You played with them all day, and snuck out of bed that night to play some more.>

<Dead world> he hisses at the voice. <And they died a long time before all of this, anyway.>

There's an image of Scully now, her face turned up towards him in the kitchen. For a moment he had wanted, out of some inexplicable urge, to touch her, like he had touched her face on his TV screen. To fit his palm gently to her cheek, to smooth the delicate arch of her eyebrow with his thumb.

<Jesus!> He obliterates the image, blacking it out through force of will alone. He lifts his gaze, as if by filling his vision with stars he might clear his head.

<This is who I am. No regrets.> He pushes away from the car and stalks back into the house. But still, he can sense the voice following him, waiting for another moment to speak.

May 25, 1999
Georgetown, Maryland

Her apartment is empty, of course, but he makes a quick search of the rooms anyway, not bothering to turn the lights on. The layout is different from what he remembers -- it is a different place, after all, from the scene of Cardinale's mistake -- but most of the furniture is the same. He opens her closet and runs his gloved hand along the line of severe suits.

His senses are alight tonight. The bedroom and bathroom are permeated by a distinct scent, feminine and.... His mind mutters to him, trying to place the perfume. <White Linen.> He finds a large bottle of it on her dresser.

Back in the living room, the clock tells him it is almost eleven. Her flight has touched down and she should be on her way home at that very moment. He does not sit, but continues to walk through the rooms, keeping the nervous energy at bay.

He has a plan, but as with anything that depends so on the emotions and reasoning ability of another person, nothing is sure. His gun nestles its heavy, familiar weight at the small of his back, but he will only use it in self-defense. He is here tonight not to kill, but to ensure his own survival.

She is the last one. The last piece of evidence. She is the only woman left from the tests, the breeding experiments to create the alien-human hybrids. And so perhaps the only human of any value to the Rebels. Or the Colonizers, once they arrive.

Alex Krycek is nothing if not adaptable. And nothing if not a master at making deals, making bargains.

June 7, 1999
Nebraska

From her perch in the back room Scully hears him banging in and out of the house, carrying things out to the car. Finally he comes in for the last time -- she knows by the finality of the door slamming -- and she listens to his heavy tread as it clumps into the kitchen.

Scully is going on a trip through memory, sitting in this farmhouse in the middle of Nebraska. She is remembering the time before, when her world was not turned upside down but only a little bit sideways in comparison.

God, after Africa she'd been so tired. The plane had landed at Dulles, jarring her out of a restless sleep in which Mulder screamed incoherently and she was swallowed by quicksand on the wrong side of the Atlantic. That thing, that huge frightening *thing* the diminishing waves had revealed.... She'd actually touched it, with her bare hands and feet. She'd actually taken the piece of metal with the Navajo on it, the *artifact*. It was in her carry-on bag, having had to be removed from her suitcase so that the customs officials could inspect it after the metal detectors went berserk.

What did it mean? Something so obviously unnatural, embedded in the western coast of Africa. She had been unable to secure the funds or manpower to bring in a site evaluation team. The staff at the US Embassy had lost patience when she was unable to pin a label on what, exactly, she had found. And, they informed her, she was wasting her time. They could not send anyone, anyway. She was told that it was outside of their jurisdiction, tied up in paperwork. The Ivory Coast government had even filed an official complaint with the Embassy the third time she'd gone to the capital, searching unsuccessfully for someone who *could* lay claim to whatever was buried in the beach.

But truly, even as she badgered bureaucrats and ambassadors, she hadn't been able to answer their myriad questions with straight answers. "So what would you say it is, exactly? And is it dangerous? Does this constitute an environmental emergency? How long has it been there?"

She had hidden behind her scientific demeanor, refusing to commit either way. "That's what I'm trying to find out."

She knew, though. She knew exactly what it was. But to accept it was to accept a multitude of other horrible, impossible things.

Eventually, she'd had to leave it there, parts of it covered and uncovered by sand with each tide. More of it revealed each day.

She would be back within a week at the most, she'd decided. Fuck it, she'd bring an army of scientists to study the...whatever it was. If that was what it took to get it out of the beach --

She strode through the tunnel and into the airport, then out to her car.

The nurse on the phone was polite, but firm in her admonition that it was past eleven o'clock, well past lights-out hours for the patients. All she would say was that Fox Mulder was stable, his condition -- <his condition!> Scully's mind repeated -- was the same as the last time she called, less than twenty four hours ago. But the nurse would tell her nothing of whether there had been change or upheaval in between now and then.

Scully thumbed off her cell phone with a sigh -- no one was left to call her on it now, really, not this late at night. She put her key in the ignition, starting the car up and letting the rumble of the engine push aside her heavy thoughts. She snapped the radio off as she pulled out of the parking lot, listening to the hum of the car on the night street.

<It is a hypnotic sound, drawing her mind into a blank. She drives with unseeing eyes, letting her body's memory guide her home, to Georgetown. Home where she can shed her clothes, slip into a bath -- God! Clean water! -- and then into bed, closing her eyes on the past two weeks of hell.

She's so tired that she doesn't even notice the van following her, cutting through the darkness like a ghost.>

June 7, 1999
Nebraska

Entering the room he catches Scully in the middle of a shiver, but though his eyes flick sharply towards her he doesn't speak. Instead, he stands just inside the doorway and says, "We should get some sleep. We've got a long drive north tomorrow."

She finds herself nodding, head bobbing like a dandelion in wind, like the grasses of the land outside. But she doesn't make a move until he turns around and looks at her.

"Christ, not this again," he growls. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

Is he saying this to her now? Or is he saying this through the fog of memory? Is it now or this morning, when they first started driving?

"How do you expect us to get anywhere if you're just going to flake out like that? You need to get it together -- "

The words are coming from somewhere far away. No one has ever spoken to her like this, she recognizes. She should know, she's in the memories now and that has never, ever happened. She has always been in control, always been aware.

<no not always you weren't always Duane Barry>

No, of course not, no one can maintain that sort of iron hold, of course not, but in her lifetime Dana Scully has given it a damn good try. There were so many times, for example, with Mulder --

"Scully let's go to *sleep*!" The voice is hard and the hand that pulls at her shoulder is much too rough --

"Don't touch me!" she screams. Her voice rips the air.

"What the fuck..." He recoils back from her, shock twisting his face.

She jumps up and makes for the door. He follows her down the hall, into one of the rooms with bunkbeds. She flops down onto the lower bunk of one, turning her back to him so that all he can see of her head are locks of oily red hair.

"Shit..." he mutters as he unholsters his gun and turns off the light. "You'd better fucking be normal tomorrow morning or - - " But the rest of his words are muffled as he gets into one of the lower bunks, stretching out on his back with his gun beside him. The sheets rustle, covering his voice.

Lying there, with her eyes squeezed shut the way she once did after childhood nightmares, Scully remembers the first time she saw Krycek after coming back from Africa.

As soon as she had stepped into her apartment she had known something was wrong. Just a feeling, a shiver of nerves she'd had too many times to count since being partnered with Mulder.

A dark bulk moved in the corner of her vision, and when she turned her head she saw him. A man, face hidden by shadows.

Irrational fear. God, was this what Melissa had seen? Before she --

<oh God PLEASE>

Her hand was already on its way to the light switch, an automatic gesture. The lamps around the living room cut on just as he said, "Don't move."

His face was enough to turn her blood to ice water. She'd last seen him several years ago, just before that time Mulder disappeared into Russia. Alex Krycek stood not ten feet away in her living room. With a gun in his hand.

She held very still, watching his eyes as they flitted over her, dark and impersonal.

"Drop your bags," he said. "Slowly." His voice was low and throaty. Calm.

He was close, closer than she'd ever thought someone like him could get to her alone. There was no one to save her if he decided to pull the trigger.

Her body didn't exist anymore, numbness flashing through all of a sudden. It was as if everything below her neck had disappeared. There was a rushing sound in her ears. She could only stand there, staring.

Something crossed his face, like a ripple of water, and he stepped closer. "Do it, Scully." The gun was black and huge in her vision.

From far away, her knees bent, and her hands opened to let the bags go.

"All right," he continued. "Now sit on your sofa. Sit on your hands."

Memory shivered, remembering a time long ago when she had said something similar to someone else. When she'd still been naive enough to think that three months of missing time was the worst they could do to her.

Forcing her legs to move freed her voice. She took a breath. No trembling, good. "What do you want, Krycek?" She sat on the edge of the sofa, hands as near to her knees as possible in case she had a chance to move, do something, lunge for his throat...

He perched on the arm of the armchair across from her, pointing the gun in her general direction. His motions were fluid, muscular, but she noticed his left arm hung strangely. "I'm not going to shoot you unless you do something stupid." She met his eyes. The murdering bastard -- he had the nerve to grin. He looked like a ghoul, face round and smooth- cheeked. "I'm actually here to help you, to give you some options." He rested his left arm on his knee, and then his gun hand on top of his wrist, watching her. "I heard Mulder's been indisposed."

She put poison into her voice. "Do you know something about it?"

"Enough to tell you he hasn't got a chance in hell of recovering without me."

She stared; he was black-leathered death in her living room. "You're a fucking liar, Krycek."

His laugh was a knife cut. "Funny how I'm only called that when I'm telling the truth."

"All right, then, explain what you're talking about." She watched his eyes, wondering if she'd really be able to catch a lie.

He shook his head. "It would take too long to convince your scientist's mind, to just talk about it. I have to show you."

"Show me what?"

Krycek snorted, as if it were obvious. "You know what. His cure."

May 25, 1999
Georgetown

It's written all over her expressive face. Of course she doesn't believe him. There's no reason to. He can't remember if he's ever said even one true thing to her in the few cataclysmic times they've had contact.

But, he thinks, all she needs to do is realize how desperate this situation really is, how impossible it is for her to reach Mulder now. She'll understand then that he's the only one with any means or information to help her.

"You're full of shit," she hisses, blue eyes sparking fire.

"Do you really think Mulder's condition took anyone by surprise?" he asks her. "If it did there would've been Consortium goons all over him at the first indication, and you'd probably have no idea where he was right now. They would have taken him, just like they took you, for tests. Just like they took Gibson Praise."

Her eyes widen in recognition before she regains control. "The Consortium doesn't exist anymore. Those men were all burned to death."

She's bluffing, and she's terrible at it. "You know an organization that powerful would have more members than just the old men," he tells her. "It's far from over."

She raises her eyebrow. "So what's wrong with Mulder then?"

"He told you, didn't he, what happened to him in Tunguska? How there were other men subject to the same tests?"

"That and a lot of other things about your involvement with them," she snorts. Her head is so high, so defiant, one could never tell he had a gun on her.

"Those experiments have been going on for years, and similar ones in the US, although they were unsuccessful. Infection by the black oil, an alien race, the same one that's poised to colonize in the immediate future. All the men infected with the Tunguska strain would still have lingering effects because of the alien DNA that was put in their bodies. No matter if they got the vaccine or not."

"Why that strain in particular? Weren't you at Tunguska?"

His eyes narrow -- perhaps with impatience, perhaps with the memory. "I don't *know* why. It's an alien life form, for Christ's sake. But I was never infected with it. I received the vaccine, like all the people there, but I was never a test subject."

There's recognition on her face, but still disbelief -- of him, of what he's saying. God, he knows she's seen enough things that this is making sense to her. Can she still not believe an inevitability he came to accept years ago?

He leans closer, making sure she can hear every word as clearly as if it's inside her own head. "But the thing is, Agent Scully, the thing you've gotten hints at with your DNA tests and your artifacts, those aliens aren't the new kids on the block. They're not just colonizing. They're *re*-colonizing."

She just looks at him with a poker face.

"And that is actually the only correct thing you'll ever learn about the existence of life before humans. *They* were first," he enunciates.

He watches her expression cloud as she struggles with some inner voice. "What does all of this have to do with Mulder?"

"Scully, artifacts like those have been found for years before Merkmallen and Sandoz were even born. Their effects on men like Mulder, men who've been tested on with the black oil, have been well-documented. But it seems like these new pieces, which no one ever foresaw finding, are different. Even just a rubbing of them can make someone who had the Tunguska strain go apeshit. That's how Mulder got into all of this."

She's seething. "So this...this *Consortium* has known about this kind of reaction for over fifty years, long enough to develop some kind of -- I don't know, a cure or a treatment -- for it, but instead of helping Mulder they're trying to cover it up?"

"Now you're getting it." God, if her gaze could actually cut flesh, he'd be sliced to ribbons now. "Mulder's run out of supporters in the Consortium. The new generation could never understand why the old men kept him alive for so long. They never knew his father. They've probably decided that the next mess he gets himself into will be the last."

"And that's this one." She watches him nod, her gaze suddenly cold. "So why do *you* want to help him? You killed Bill Mulder. Aren't you part of the new generation?"

He laughs, a sound like rasping sand. "Hardly. I'm probably the only person left who recognizes Mulder's usefulness. *Your* usefulness."

Her voice is an ice chip. "I don't trust you."

"You don't have to. But coming with me is the only way you'll save him."

He stands and bends slightly, still holding the gun, and uses the gloved prosthesis to push a piece of paper across the coffee table to her. She watches his hand, and he sees her register puzzlement at its stiff movements.

"When you decide, page me at this number. I'll call your cell phone then and give you directions on where and when to meet."

She picks up the paper, glancing at the number written there. "Where would we go?"

He half-smiles. "You'll have to page me to find out." Keeping eye contact, he holsters his gun in the front of his pants. She's still sitting on her hands. If she makes a move, he will be faster than her. He warns, "You've got twenty-four hours to contact me, and then I'll be gone. Don't let this chance slip by, Scully. I'm Mulder's only hope."

Then, lightning fast, he opens the front door and slips out. The door slams shut behind him, leaving her sitting on the couch, still defiant.

June 8, 1999
Nebraska

Everywhere around them the farmhouse is quiet, but her dreams... Her dreams are not. She is not in Nebraska. She is home. Georgetown. The morning after Krycek spoke to her.

In the dream the streets outside are gray with fog. Her car slices through it, headlights on low.

<He's lying. He has to be lying. He's a snake, a rat, and that is the nature of such creatures, to hide the truth and weave lies for their own advantage.

He's a murderer. He's the embodiment of wrongful death. The symbol of all the evil committed by those men who ripped out pieces of my life, one by one. Each of those pieces can be linked in some way to him, to the time he let Duane Barry take me.>

Her hands on the steering wheel are clenched so tight she can't feel them anymore. She pulls the car over to the side of the road, turns it off, and forces herself to relax, bit by bit. Her own harsh breathing is the only sound she can hear.

When her hands rest finally in her lap, she sighs and leans back in the car seat.

What would Mulder do? She had tried to ask herself that last night, but she hadn't liked the answer.

<I know he's trusted Krycek before. Enough to travel to Russia with him, to take his advice and go to Wiekamp Air Force Base. And he's come back every time somehow.

But I don't have his ability to believe, his faith that he can find the truth no matter what the danger. And I don't have his knowledge of Alex Krycek.>

The clock on her dashboard says that it's just past six in the morning, still too early for visiting hours. But she doesn't care. She hasn't seen Mulder in two weeks, and she has to know. She has to try and talk to him, find some way to prove that he doesn't need Krycek. <That he'll be all right, that I'm not desperate enough to take help from a killer.>

She wants to yell at her dreamself, <No, stop, don't go there! Don't go!>

But this is not really a dream. This is, of course, memory. And what is past cannot be erased. It can only be linked to other things, other sorrows. She can only stand outside of the dreamself and watch. There is no way to close her eyes here.

<At the front desk she flashes her badge and a fierce expression, and the kid-masquerading-as-nurse opens the barred metal gate. She lets an orderly lead her down the sterile halls, refusing to let the chill air draw shivers.

This is the hospital she had Mulder transferred to just before she left for Africa, but looking around at the blank whiteness - - she hates it. Hates it with a cold fire born of fear. How could she have left him alone in a place like this? How could it be that she would even *need* to put him in a place like this?

<Oh, God>, she thinks. <What is happening to us?>

Yes, indeed, what is happening to them, as the orderly stops in front of room eleven, pulling out an electronic key card for the lock to the steel door. Anxious, she steps to the side and tries to see through the entry as he opens it.

Just behind the door is a small area, separated from Mulder's room by a floor-to-ceiling plexiglass partition. It is punctured at spaced intervals with air holes smaller than her thumb.

He is awake, her heart leaps in glad surprise because he is awake. Somehow she had not expected him to be up, waiting for her.

But something's different -- different from the times she saw him before Africa. She steps closer to the partition.

He is huddling against the plexiglass in nothing but a hospital gown. His eyes travel up her figure until locking with her own. His face is expressionless. There is no recognition.>

In the farmhouse in Nebraska, sleeping through the memory, Dana Scully whimpers. "No, get out, get out of there...."

<Trying to reach him, she kneels until her face is level with his. His eyes track her movement, until she is close enough to see light reflecting in his pupils. If the partition were not there, they would be breathing each other's air.

"Mulder," she whispers. "It's me. Scully."

Now finally there is something on his face, but it's an echo, an expression not quite fully formed. Her breath catches as she realizes what it is.

Suspicion.

"Mulder," she tries again, "do you re -- "

And the next thing she knows he is attacking the partition, screaming at the top of his lungs as he throws his entire body against it. Again and again, he hurls himself towards her. His angry cries, pound, and pound, and pound, and the squeal of his skin against the plexiglass -- the noises rip through her ears, split her head.

He snarls, pure hate twisting the lines of his face, his face so familiar --

<oh God, Mulder, what -- >

-- and throws himself against the glass again. She feels the steel door against her back, realizes she has recoiled and backed away from the attack. She is shouting, as well.

"Mulder! *Mulder!*"

The sounds tearing from him do not make sense. There is no coherence, no sign even that he feels pain, despite the heavy thuds of his body hitting the partition. His screaming is raw and unintelligible.

Each charge he makes ends in a harsh thud as he bounces off the partition. He uses his fists as well, knuckles first, and she cringes when she sees that some of them have split open. He is bleeding, Mulder is bleeding, dripping his blood on the plexiglass.

The steel door swings open all of a sudden, taking away its support, and she stumbles backwards. Three orderlies barrel past her, yanking her back out into the corridor before she can finish yelping, "No!" The door slams behind them.

She plasters herself against the cold steel, watching through the window and knocking with the side of her fist.

They open part of the partition -- she hadn't noticed there was a door for that -- and tumble through, grabbing Mulder with a force she can feel even through the steel and glass. Two muscle him down as one administers a hypodermic to his arm.

He is writhing on the floor, all visible skin sweaty and flushed red. His legs kick and the hospital gown -- blood-spattered somehow from his knuckles -- falls back, exposing his buttocks and genitals. There is no shame, no dignity as he heaves against the other three men. Through the door she can hear the faint voices of the orderlies and Mulder's incoherent screaming.

She closes her eyes, pressing her forehead to the window.

God, what have they come to?

The cold of the hallway wins out finally, and she can't fight it anymore. The shudders thunder through her.>

"No!"

Her cry breaks the silence of the farmhouse, dragging Alex from his sleep like a claw. He's off the bunk and standing, eyes darting from side to side in the dark, before he understands that the sound has come from her. She is sobbing. The sound is harsh, wounding the night air.

It takes two steps to reach her bed. He stretches out his one hand, sensing that she is just in front of him. As he grabs her shoulder he crouches, coming in close enough to feel the change in air temperature generated from her body.

She is struggling, limbs thrashing against the sheets, but he realizes that she's still asleep. She is in the middle of a nightmare.

Alex never has nightmares. His world is frightening enough without them.

"Scully," he says loudly to wake her, shaking her shoulder. "Scully. Come out of it."

"Mulder," she moans, and the name stops him for a moment.

"I'm not Mulder, dammit. It's Alex Krycek. Wake up!"

"Stop, stop..." More twisting, almost dislodging his hand and making him lose his balance.

"Scully," and now he's shouting, "wake the fuck up!"

He senses her eyes come open at the same time she gives one last heave on the mattress. Her movement shifts his hand, so that it lands on her breast. His palm, his fingers, are spread out flat on top of her, and her nipple stings him through her shirt.

<Jesus -- >

She holds absolutely still, awake now, but her breathing is deep and ragged.

For some reason he doesn't understand, for some reason he can't think of, his hand remains where it is. Her breathing is a thing he can feel, heaving, trembling, all the way through his arm and into his own chest.

The moment is an eternity, a rip in both his conscious mind and his own sense of time. There are no thoughts in his head, nothing but blank rushing wind.

And then she breaks it, bringing up both arms to grab his wrist. And -- <oh God> -- she's pushing his hand down, down....

Down the curve of her breast, down her stomach, over the mound of her sex, pushing it between her legs where he can feel now, even through her clothes, her heat burning his skin. She closes her thighs around his hand.

Now he can think, now he can make sounds. "Scully, what..."

"Shut up," she moans, and her voice is tearful, full of rain but still strong. "Don't say anything."

He gulps, tasting something acid in the back of his throat, something dry. He can't feel anything with his hand but the heat and the unyielding seams of her pants, and God, her hips are moving now, thrusting against his hand. There is an answering throb in his groin. His breathing shallows.

As a test he flexes his fingers against her, and the catch of her breath is a gunshot in the quiet house. He leans closer, bringing his head down. His mouth finds the delicate skin of her neck and fastens there.

From somewhere above his head her voice moans, "Oh God," and he takes advantage of the moment, lightning quick, to slide his hand out and then back down, under the waistband of her pants. No delicacy, shoving his fingers back into that furnace, only this time there are no clothes to separate, and what he touches is moist and searing.

He leaves her neck, travels down to her breast, closing his mouth over the material of her shirt. He breathes hot air onto her, then suckles through the fabric. He uses his teeth, nipping at the hard bud.

Her movements are frantic, they are both panting, her hands have come up to his head and her fingers curl through his hair. His own fingers curl against her at the juncture of her legs, delving into her, flicking her clitoris with more harshness than care. She thrusts so hard he can feel the strain of it in his wrist.

Somewhere in the back of his throat a moan is swelling, threatening to break. He still can't even see her in the darkness, but perhaps that is because his eyes are closed, perhaps he is still dreaming.

But no, he had been the one to wake her from the dream.

Fuck, he's about to burst, about to come right where he's kneeling, and if he doesn't get himself undone and thrusting into her in the next minute --

He raises his head and yanks his hand away from her, intending to unbutton his pants, but then all of a sudden she stills.

No," she says. "*No*."

He almost doesn't understand the word through the red haze of his lust, and it takes a second, but he drops his hand. "Wh- what?"

"I said *no*." Her voice is breathy but strong, punctuated by the force with which she pushes herself up from the bed and stumbles around it in the darkness. No other words, just the slap of her bare feet on the wooden floor as she runs out of the room. A moment later, he hears the front door slam.

He is shocked, too shocked to follow her. Still in his awkward crouch, erection still huge and throbbing and hidden, unable to comprehend the last few minutes. <What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck -- > The thought whirls through the confusion in his head.

When he finally lowers himself to sit on the wooden floor, his legs are numb from holding the position so long. He lands on his ass in a graceless thump; it would almost be comic in another situation. Part of him feels like laughing anyway, great dark whooping howling laughing.

But instead he succumbs to the silence of the house, sitting on the floor without motion.

May 26, 1999
Washington, DC

What the doctor told her, in the polite matter-of-fact tone of one professional to another, was that he didn't know what had caused Mulder's outburst.

<Outburst>, was her bitter thought. <Was that all it was.>

She demanded a blood test and a look at his chart.

Mulder had been stable while she was in Africa. The hospital told her there had been no more screaming fits like she saw with Fowley and Skinner. She'd checked on him periodically and the reports were all good.

So unless they were lying to Scully, this was Mulder's only violent episode in two weeks. And if one were to apply logic to the situation, one would conclude that it was because he had seen her.

After the blood tests came back -- nothing abnormal other than the tranquilizer, and that a formula she recognized -- she checked on Mulder again.

He was sleeping peacefully on his bed, knocked out by the drug. His chest, arms, and legs were bound with buckled leather straps. She stood there and studied his form, picking out all the differences that seemed to take him over even while sleeping.

He was too relaxed, zoned out from the drug. The Mulder she remembered twitched in his sleep, beset by dreams and memories. His hair had grown, also, while she was gone. The hospital gown was back in place, but his legs were still bare. Vulnerable. And there were bandages on his knuckles. A bit of blood had seeped through and stained them a dark red.

She refused to let the tears flow. He did not waken to see her again, even though she waited hours, until the afternoon painted the white walls of the building through the window shades. But when she finally turned her back on his room to walk down the hallway, to leave him in the hospital --

The crying started in the car and didn't stop, even when she got back to her apartment.

June 8, 1999
Outside the farmhouse

Scully runs, trips, lands on her hands and knees, grass whipping her cheeks.

Pain in her lungs, a knife slashing, her chest a vacuum --

<I can't breathe oh God I can't BREATHE>

-- blackness around her head and in the night, from far beneath the surface she can hear ocean waves crashing....

<undo undo undo>

No, you can't take back the past. There is no rewriting here.

Dana Scully, what will you do?

<drown>

Mulder, "But you're okay, aren't you Scully?" Mulder, face shocked in the white light of the cancer ward, "No, I refuse to believe that."

Believe it. I will chase the world, because it's left me behind.

Stupid girl, you can't run underwater.

She rolls, forcing her body to face upwards. A light breaks over her face, something cold and wet. She opens her eyes.

The moon hangs huge and luminous through the dewy grass. Unblinking, white with promise.

And she opens her mouth. And she breathes.

May 26, 1999
Outside Dana Scully's apartment building

Scully does not sleep tonight. The heat-seeking radar tracks her restless movements; on the screen she is a mass of red, orange, and yellow moving amongst greens and blues. The FBI agent makes little noise, not enough for the long-range microphone to transmit to the speakers in the van; but occasionally she scuffs her feet, or brushes against something.

The entire encounter with Krycek the night before has been recorded and copied onto tape, and in a moment Marita will be ready to transmit all of it to the smoking man. Sitting in the van with headphones hooked into the surveillance system, she adjusts a few more controls, eyes focused on the radar screen.

Does she feel surprise? Regret? Elation? She now has hard proof of betrayal by the old Consortium's most dangerous agent. He's caught in a snare he'll never be able to slither out of. The force of his will is not strong enough to break through this one.

But in the end it doesn't matter, because the old Consortium is dead, and the only other person who will hear the tapes is the smoking man. Krycek is as good as dead now, but she will not have the satisfaction of seeing him splayed out and defenseless before all of the others. Because those men have already met their fiery ends, and Krycek has survived them.

Part of her howls at the unfairness of it, that Alex Krycek could have come through the old Consortium's demise intact, still on his feet. While she, she has been swimming in nightmare and horror since that last time they were together in New York, the last time one of them betrayed the other.

Oh, she has paid for that one. She has paid in blood and sanity and self.

Now, despite her time with the smoker, she is only a broken shell. He has told her the oil has been expunged entirely, but sometimes when she blinks the world hides behind an unexplainable film of blackness. As if her body is remembering something her mind can't.

She has dizzy spells, she has screaming spells. Her voice has been torn to irreparable shreds.

God, she once had a voice.

A new sound comes over the speakers and through her headphones now. She turns the volume higher, listening.

Scully is weeping. The sobs that transmit from her apartment are broken and whispery, shuddering and sorrowful. "Oh, God," she sighs. "Mulder, Mulder..."

Marita listens, her face chiseled from ice. The tapes keep recording.

Eventually, Scully sits in the middle of her couch, head bent. Her crying has stopped and she is silent, not even sniffling. She sits for perhaps twenty minutes, neither moving nor making a sound.

What is she thinking, Marita wonders.

Then, motion. Alerted, Marita sits up straight. On the radar screen the red and orange blob that is Dana Scully reaches out an arm. The speakers transmit a familiar sound -- a phone being picked up. Another set of tapes, tapping Scully's phone line, clicks on. Scully punches in numbers, and there is ringing. An automated voice answers.

A paging service. She is calling Krycek.

Scully presses the buttons for her own telephone number, then hangs up when the page goes through. And five minutes later, her phone rings.

She picks up in the middle of the fourth one, as if she had changed her mind at the last minute. "H-hello?"

"Two hours. Rest stop on I-95 south, after Virginia exit 103. Page me again when you get there." It is Krycek's voice, brief and curt.

"O-okay." And then a click as he hangs up, as she lets her own phone drop back into its cradle.

Marita leans forward in the surveillance van, watching the screen as Scully begins to move.

June 8, 1999
Nebraska

Just before dawn he hears her come back into the farmhouse. Lying on his back with his eyes closed, he listens as she makes her tentative way through the dark. His muscles are tense and ready, in case her noises indicate she is planning something amiss -- <leaving me? finding her gun and shooting me? trying to fuck me again?> -- but his breathing is deep and even, so that she will think he is asleep.

When she enters the room, she shuffles over to her bed. He opens his eyes a slit, to let them adjust to the darkness in case there is to be some action.

But no. She pauses in the space between their bunkbeds. He can hear her breathing over the sound of his own.

"I know you're awake," she says, and her voice is clear. "I just want you to know that I.... What just happened here...it won't happen again. I was upset and...." She takes a breath, then repeats, "It won't happen again. I'm sorry."

He remains silent, listening.

"We should just forget it. Move on. Because...because I'm not leaving." Another breath. "I mean, I'm not leaving without you."

He doesn't answer. What does she mean?

"I..." and she falters for a moment. "I want to live. I want to live for as long as possible. And I know there's no way I'd...there's no way I'd survive alone."

Part of him, the part that makes him finally sit up and turn to acknowledge her, recognizes what strength it required of her to say those words aloud. The Dana Scully he remembers would never have admitted weakness -- not to him, not to anyone. She would never have shown that part of herself.

But of course, as he keeps discovering, this Dana Scully is different from what he thought he knew. She is a much more adaptable creature than he had expected.

<Not adaptable...> that voice whispers, the one from before, from North Dakota. <Not adaptable. She still doesn't know the whole truth, does she?>

No, she doesn't. In the dark her figure standing before him is just a dim outline. She could be a ghost, for all he knows, if not for her breathing, if not for the fear radiating from her in cold waves.

"Kr-Krycek?" she half-whispers, when he doesn't say anything.

<Alexei...> The voice, a murmur of memory. <My family called me that, once.>

But instead of listening further he stands, towering over her. His voice is blank, without expression. In control once more. "Then we should leave," he says. "No use staying here any longer."

After a pause he can sense her nodding. "Okay."

He waits a second more, in case she wants to say something else. But after a minute, they both begin to move around the darkened room, gathering their belongings.

May 26, 1999
Georgetown

So now, she wonders, pacing in her bedroom, how does one pack for a trip with one of the most dangerous men walking the earth?

Lightly, she decides, and comfortably. She leaves the business suits and dresses hanging in her closet, leaves the dress shoes and the pumps in a neat row beneath them. In the back of her closet she finds her hiking boots and an old knapsack from some long ago middle-of-nowhere case with Mulder. These she dumps on her bed with an athletic bag.

She packs jeans, a pair of loose khakis, t-shirts, sweaters, socks. Underwear. From the suitcase she still hasn't unpacked from Africa, she scavenges travel-sized toiletries. She's packed for trips so many times it's second nature to her, the items she needs. But the thing that keeps creeping up from the corners is that this time it's a very different kind of trip.

The last thing she puts in the knapsack is extra ammunition, and she checks that her gun is in full working order before holstering it at her back.

When she checks the mirror, her face is pale and sick-looking. She touches the area around her eyes, the only bit of color with their red puffiness.

<Get control, Dana. You cannot let him see you like this.>

In the bathroom she splashes cold water on her face and lets it drip down her neck, under her shirt. The sound of her breathing is thunderous in her ears.

<Am I doing this?> she asks her wet-cheeked reflection. <Am I really?>

There is no answer. After a moment, she shuts off the bathroom light and goes to finish packing.

May 27, 1999
Virginia

The rest stop is one of the smaller ones on the I-95 in Virginia, and at half past midnight the parking lot has only three cars -- one of which is Scully's rental. The other two belong to families, typical middle class sedans.

She sits in the dark of the driver's seat, listening to the passing cars on the interstate. The windows are cracked just a bit, enough to feel some of the summer breeze on her skin every now and then.

The clock on her dashboard changes to 12:31, and she glances down at her cell phone. It's on, the display green and glowing. Krycek's pager number is already dialed in. All she has to do is press the *snd* button, punch in her number at the signal, and wait for him to come.

But instead she just sits there. Apparently, she's driven all this way through Virginia just to stare at her cell phone.

To others, it's one of the most useful inventions ever to hit the working public. To her, it looks like the gate to hell.

<I wonder if my sister had owned a cell phone, if she'd still be alive. If I'd just been able to reach her that night...>

But she hadn't. As savvy as Melissa was, she had not believed in much of the new technology out there, things like email versus a hand-written letter. Scully doesn't know if her sister's personal philosophies extended to cellular phones, but it's an irony -- to say the least -- that a common piece of machinery, a staple of her own occupation, might have saved Melissa's life.

People live dangerous lives these days, unaware that one day they could become targets mistaken for family members.

<Most of the world is probably also unaware that one day a piece of metal with a Bible verse etched on it in Navajo might unbend them a little.>

Scully sits waiting in the car, and it seems there are ghosts and almost-ghosts sitting with her. Their faces -- Melissa, Emily, Mulder -- beseech her to find answers for them.

She closes her eyes, defense against the assailing memories, and her thumb presses *snd*. The sound of the other end ringing floats up to her ears.

First step through the gate.

Thirty minutes later he pulls into the rest area in a nondescript Bureau-type car. She watches him park it at the other end of the now-empty lot, watches him step out and stand. His head turns toward her, and although she's too far away to see his face clearly, she shivers.

He is clothed in some dark color, perhaps gray or blue, a sports coat and slacks, collared shirt unbuttoned at the top. From the passenger seat he pulls a black athletic bag and a knapsack not unlike her own, which he slings over his shoulder. Then he strolls to the trunk and removes an aluminum case, and from the way he hefts it out she can tell it's heavy.

He walks toward her, tall and graceful despite the weight of his luggage pulling him to the side. Radiating some dark energy with every sinuous movement. As she looks on the air seems to ripple around him, as if she can see the wave of molecules he displaces as he draws close.

Before he gets to her car she remembers herself and unlocks the doors, steps out herself to stretch her legs --

<to meet him on my feet>

-- and blood rushes back to her thighs, her ass, as she meets his eyes over the car's roof.

"I was going to leave in another half hour," she remarks, trying to ignore the kick in her heartbeat and the sudden shallowness in her lungs.

"Guess you're glad I showed up then," he says, his voice a rich red velvet.

"And are you glad I showed?" she counters.

"Yes." He grins, a flashing of straight white teeth in the night. "Very."

When she helps put his bags in the trunk, she pays attention. The realization hits as soon as she sees the prosthetic hand, ungloved now. But she can hardly wrap her mind around it -- so much danger embodied in this man, and he's missing something so vital.

Unable to control herself, she points to the plastic hand protruding from his coat sleeve. "That happened in Russia, didn't it?

His face is blank, expressionless now. "Yes."

"Mulder never told me you might be subject to that as well," she says, half-relieved he hasn't become angry. She doesn't know if she's prepared to face such a thing.

"He probably didn't realize it himself," he says, shutting the trunk. "Not until later."

"Because you were supposed to be working with them."

He nods, but doesn't volunteer anything else.

They walk back up to the front of the car, she on the driver's side and he on the passenger's. Before getting in, she asks him over the roof, "Where are we going?"

Now there is a flicker of expression, something in the way his eyes study her face. As if he's wondering what her reaction will be. But part of her, somehow, expected his next words anyway. Expected something like them, at least.

"We're going to Skyland Mountain."

June 8, 1999
Nebraska

When the list of possible necessities they can take from the farmhouse is exhausted, and Krycek has finally shut the trunk, pink tinges the eastern horizon with encroaching sunrise. She leans against the side of the car, watching the sky, but before she can discern any actual in-progress change of colors, he opens the driver's side door and gets in. The ignition rumbles a moment later, her cue to follow his lead.

She takes a breath first, her eyes lingering on the shadowy shapes of the farmhouse, the silo, the tall-grass plains extending outward. Another memory, another snapshot of America. Another chapter of her life closing. She can feel it happen, like a door around her heart, latching shut.

Last night she had told him, "This won't happen again." She had said the words, but it had surprised her that she had even acknowledged the event out loud. It is easy to say, "We should forget," but to actually erase the memories is another matter entirely.

She cannot deny their actions. She had known that, running blindly through the grass around the farmhouse.

She remembers Krycek's face in the kitchen last night, how she had glimpsed the emotions behind his mask for a few brief, thundering moments. The brush of his body against hers.

No, she cannot deny their actions.

She cannot deny either her survival instinct. Hours spent drowning in memory, yet in the end she has swum back to the surface. The world as it is now is foreign to her, dark and loveless. But she wants to live. Death, although a close acquaintance for the past few years, is not welcome here.

Perhaps later, when they reach a safer area, she might be able to strike out on her own. Later, when the memories of life before have lost their jagged edges.

She gets in the car, buckling her seat belt. Krycek is silent as he pulls them around in a tight circle, driving back the way they arrived the previous afternoon. This time when the grass brushes her window, she does not draw back. Instead, she lowers the glass and reaches out, skimming her hand along the top of the strands. They are damp with morning dew, and when she touches her fingers to her face the wetness smells fresh, living and earthy.

By the time Krycek finds an intersection the sky has lightened enough that he turns the headlights off. The sign for the northbound road indicates it is a state highway. As far as they can see in either direction, the land is deserted. The horizon in the east is streaked red and purple, in the west a gradually lightening blue.

He turns the car north, and the sunrise fills the view of her window. Here in the middle of the country, they are experiencing what those in the east -- whatever species they may be -- have already witnessed, several hours before. She wonders what sights the morning has illuminated already as it spread itself over the world. What it will illuminate for her today.

Then, like a child, she presses a cheek to the glass, letting the first rays of daylight caress her face through the window.