Author e-mail: SpearmntXP@aol.com

<Prologue>

Annapolis, Maryland
11:14 PM
December 4
 
 *If there's one thing Mulder's taught me in five years,* mused Scully, *it's
how to pack.*
 *Quickly.*
 In fact, she'd learned never to unpack. The open canvas tote sat ready in her
closet, preloaded with underwear, toiletries, a couple casual jeans-and-T-
shirt combinations and one heavy-duty flannel shirt.
 With Mulder, she never knew where she'd end up.
 She often never knew where she was starting, even when he slapped that
Bureau-issue airline ticket or car-rental voucher down in front of her with a
lopsided, laconic grin.
 *Dudley, Arkansas.*
 *Cheney, Texas.*
 *Home, Pennsylvania.*
 Places that just weren't on your average Rand McNally map.
 Scully pulled out the garment bag and unzipped it open on her bed. She
grabbed the first four business suits she saw, all still in their plastic dry-
cleaning cocoons, and slid them into the bag.
 Pawing through the shoes on the closet floor, she took the first four pairs
she could make. She tossed them on top of the suits, along with a pair of
sneakers. She found her hiking boots and held them for a moment, thinking.
 *Will I need these?*
 She dropped the boots on the closet floor and zipped up the garment bag,
checking the bedside clock as she did so.
 11:21 p.m.
 *Not much time.*
 Scully looked around her bedroom. It had always been free of clutter; but in
recent years, it'd become spartan. She was never here. She couldn't remember
how many nights she'd spent in her own bed instead of on a lump-filled, odd-
smelling excuse for a mattress in one of the countless motels strung through
her life.
 *Sam Houston Motor Lodge.*
 *Victory Falls Drive-In.*
 On her dresser were three framed photographs, each held by a similar silver
frame. Ahab, a couple of years before he died. Melissa, during a long-ago
Christmas celebration. And Mom, Charlie and Bill, six years ago, during one of
the rare instances both Navy men were home.
 Scully gingerly picked each photograph up, handling them like glass, sliding
each deep into her tote bag, between thickly packed clothes.
 Without the photos, Scully thought the room looked truly empty, despite its
full complement of furniture: bed, bureau, nightstands and lamps.
 *I'll have to send for the rest. Or sell it somehow.*
 Her cell phone, lying beside her luggage on the bed, trilled.
 She knew it was him.
 "I should have shut it off," she muttered to herself, sitting down on the
bed.
 It trilled again, seeming louder, more insistent this time.
 *What will I tell him?*
 She picked up the phone, bit her lower lip, tried to think.
 The phone shouted at her, and she stabbed the TALK button.
 "What the hell's going on?" Mulder yelled from the earpiece. She could hear
the swish-splash of other cars plowing through the rain on the highway. He was
en route.
 She took a deep breath, surprised at how ragged it sounded.
 "Don't go anywhere," he said.
 She looked at the clock. 11:25. She *had* to go. She kept the phone to her
ear.
 "I'm on my way, at your exit. Stay there."
 *I can't see him.*  "Mulder-" she began.
 He'd already hung up.
 
 "Goddammit, Scully, goddammit." When he'd left his office, it was a litany,
something he whispered to himself in the elevator. By now, it'd become a
battle cry; he shouted the phrase at a motorist who cut him off at the foot of
the off-ramp.
 He shouted at himself.
 He should've known.
 He'd kicked her out of the office around nine that evening. They'd become so
immersed in the Doyle case that they'd fallen behind on their other paperwork.
A common occurrence--they were always behind on paperwork--but now dangerously
so, enough to get a U.S. attorney on Skinner's back. Consequently, they were
taking a short time-out to finish loose ends on other affidavits and 302s that
had piled up in their in-box. In her typical fashion, Scully had attacked the
manila-folder mountain, categorizing and classifying the appropriate
documents, completing the forms and reports and bundling them back up in their
own red tape.
 *Rigid, but wonderfully so.*
 Mulder made his decision when he looked across his desk at her. She was
tabulating some late expense reports, wrist-deep in motor-lodge receipts and
airline-ticket stubs. A runaway bang of auburn hair dangled near her eye, and
he could see the very tip of her tongue peeking out from between her pursed
lips.
 He must've been staring, because she looked up. Her blue eyes arrested him.
 "Go home, Scully," he said, reaching across, gently brushing the errant lock
back into place. Her eyes followed his hand.
 "But these expense reports-" she began.
 "Can wait until tomorrow."
 "No, they can't," she said softly.
 "Yes, they can. Get some sleep." Her face shone with a light film of sweat.
 "Are you feeling all right? Is anything wrong?" He placed the back of his
hand against her forehead.
 For a split second, her eyes cut away from his, and he then knew what came
next.
 "I'm fine."
 He narrowed his eyes in disbelief.
 "No, really." She took his hand from her forehead, gently squeezing it. "I
am. Just tired."
 "Then get out of here. See you tomorrow," he said.
 She nodded, gathering some papers. He flipped open a file folder and began
signing a final batch of requisition forms.
 "Mulder?"
 He snapped his head up. She was in her raincoat, one hand on the doorknob,
the other on her briefcase handle, her mouth partly open and wrestling with a
word.
 Somewhere in Mulder's mind, an alarm bell went off.
 He began to stand, reaching toward the coat rack. "Why don't I-"
 "No." She smiled wanly. "Never mind. Good night, Mulder."
 Her eyes dropped to the floor as she closed the door behind her.
 Mulder thought she was going home to a hot bath and bed.
 Instead, she had gone upstairs and laid her badge and gun on Skinner's desk.
 So when the Assistant Director had called down to ask why, Mulder forgot to
breathe for a moment.
 Just one moment. He then hung up, grabbed his coat and car keys.
 *I should've known.*
 *This is my fault.*

*I almost lost it when he touched me,* Scully thought as she rifled her own
desk. There was no time left to be neat. She yanked open drawers, dumped them
onto the floor, fishing out disks and letters and other personal documents and
thrusting them haphazardly into her briefcase. The mess stayed where it lay.
 Throughout the day, she'd maintained her composure-with difficulty, but she
had. Of course, it'd helped that she'd spent half the day hiding in the
SciCrime pathology lab, examining and re-examining the Doyle case evidence for
hours, stalling.
 But she couldn't let him know anything was different, anything was wrong, and
she had found him around lunchtime. She'd made her voice steady as her heart
jackhammered.
 She'd looked him squarely in the eye as they conversed.
 *This is all for the best,* she'd kept telling herself.
 But when he'd reached across and brushed back her hair, her throat had
swelled shut.
 *I'll never feel him do that again.*
 It was a little thing, but it was Mulder's little things she cherished most.
 The hand in the small of her back, the occasional kiss on her forehead, the
wink following a joke that he knew only she'd get-all tiny glimpses of himself
that he showed only her.
 When she left, she had turned ready to tell him everything that happened the
previous night-start to finish, damn the consequences. They'd figure out what
to do.
 Together, they'd always figured out what to do.
 But by leaving, she would give him something he'd never give himself.
 *All quests have martyrs,* she thought. *This one had too many. Samantha,
Melissa.*
 *Emily.*
 "Maybe I can be the last," she muttered.
 Her coat lay draped across her desk chair. She rummaged in its pocket for the
only thing she had taken from their office.
 Scully withdrew a large bar magnet and placed it on her computer's hard
drive.
 She snapped closed the latches on her briefcase. That's it. Checking her
watch, she took a deep breath-and frowned.
 *It still smells like smoke in here.*
 Scully was rummaging under the sink for the Lysol when she heard the car door
slam.
 
 Mulder double-parked outside Scully's building and sprinted for the front
door. A woman with a bag of groceries was standing outside, fumbling with her
keys.
 "C'mon, c'mon," said Mulder.
 "Hold your horses," she grumbled. "Who do you think you are?"
 Mulder pulled out his badge.
 She sniffed.
 Mulder opened his coat to display his holstered pistol.
 The woman became a little quicker with the keys.
 The door opened and Mulder brushed past her, charging down the hallway. He
pounded on Scully's door, rapid-fire knocks, as if his hand were spasming.
 "Go away, Mulder."
 "Whatever I did, Scully, I'll fix it. Just let me in to talk."
 A long pause. "No." She'd moved closer to the door, though; he could still
clearly hear her voice, softer now but still wrapped around the unwavering
tone she used to read perps their rights.
 "You've convicted me of something in absentia, Scully, tell me what it is."
 "Why does it have to be about you, Mulder? *Always* about you."
 *Something's not right,* he thought. Her voice was a little hoarse, a little
shrill, worn out and trying not to wave a white flag.
 "I'm not holding this conversation through a door," he said, digging into his
pocket for his key ring.
 
 Scully sat on the floor, her back to the closed door, arms hugging her knees.
 *Another minute, and I would've been out of here.*
 She knew he'd blame himself, the last thing she wanted. *Always about him.*
 But when she heard the jangle of his keys, her eyes narrowed and her jaw set.
 *Don't do it, Mulder.*
 He'd rarely come in without asking permission. Except if he was in danger,
like the time he hid in her dark bedroom while the rest of the world thought
he was dead. Or the other time, with Eddie van Blundht-he of the silent
"h"-when he thought *she* was in danger.
 *Aren't you?*
 Scully sighed and began to move away from the door. Their relationship,
undefined and unusual as it was, still had rules, one of which was that she
meant no. But Mulder always shattered rules if he felt they imprisoned the
truth-a perseverance that she loved.
 *How ironic he now uses it as a weapon against me.*
 But just as she opened her mouth to warn Mulder, the jangling stopped.
 A long pause. She found herself holding her breath.
 She jumped a little when her cell phone rang.
 
 He didn't speak for a moment, just listening to her breathe on the other end.
 The night before last, he listened to her make the same noises while she
slept, air skating across slightly parted lips.
 "Is it me?" he asked.
 A deep breath that hitched in a couple spots. "Yes and no."
 "Which parts are yes?"
 "All of them."
 "So which parts are no?"
 "All of them. It's complicated."
 Mulder leaned back against the door, closing his eyes. Over the past few
nights, he had half-slept through the same recurring dream: sinking into a
deep pool of thick black oil, crying out for help, and seeing Scully standing
on a ledge above him, reaching out.
 *Take my hand,* she says. *Let me help.*
 And each dream ended the same way.
 He takes her hand. And pulls. Hard enough to drag her into the pool. Her eyes
widen a little in surprise. But she doesn't say a word as she sinks with him.
 Mulder winced as he remembered. A tear leaked from the corner of his eye.
 *I've taken away so much from you, Scully. You could've been a doctor,
director of the FBI.*
 *I probably killed Melissa.*
 *I almost killed you.*
 She'd be safer away from him.
 "Mulder?" she asked. Her concerned voice: words hanging off their question
marks, normally accompanied by her hand around his, a gentle squeeze. *Take my
hand.*
 "Not this time," he muttered.
 "What?"
 "You said it's complicated, but it's simple. It just wasn't supposed to end
this way."
 He heard her draw in breath, almost a gasp.
 "I love you, Scully," he said. "And I'm sorry."
 *But this is for the best,* he thought, hanging up.
 
 Scully's right hand flew to her mouth. The cell phone slid from her left,
clattered on the floor.
 *Did he just say-?*
 Her whole body hummed with a high-voltage buzz. An emotional straitjacket
tightened across her chest as she stood.
 With fumbling fingers she undid the chain-lock.
 She didn't know what would happen after the next sixty seconds, but she had
to see his flickering eyes, his stubbled jaw, his unkempt hair, one last time.
She had to smell that wonderful eau de Mulder, somewhere between Eternity and
sweat, the soft soap-and-musk smell the sheets of their bed had a couple
nights ago.
 Finally turning the switch in the proper direction, she threw back the dead-
bolt.
 She had to hold his hand.
 She had to kiss him goodbye.
 She yanked open the door. "I love-"
 He was gone.
 She charged down the hall, flung open the front door. But he'd already pulled
away. Two taillights blinked at her from the far end of the street, and then
disappeared.
 "I love you too, Mulder," she whispered.
 Her hands clenched and unclenched at her sides. She stood alone on the
sidewalk until two boys sped by on bikes.
 "Hurry up, we're going to be late," shouted one to the other. "Mom'll kill
us."
 With a start, Scully twisted her wrist toward her.
 11:39 p.m.
 *I might still make it.*
 A teardrop splashed across the watch's glass face.
 
<1>
 
Three days earlier
December 1
The MCI Center, Washington
7:51 p.m.
 
 "Even *I* can't believe this," said Mulder. "Can you?"
 Scully just smiled.
 "These seats are awesome," Mulder half-shouted above the shrill sneaker
squeaks that rose from the basketball court's floor.
 She tried biting her lip but couldn't hold in a chuckle.
 "What?"
 "You," she said.
 "What?"
 She wanted to tell Mulder that he'd turned twelve, all drawn-out vowels and
firecracker eyes that flicked back and forth with undisguised glee from the
court to the rafters to his sunflower seed bag to her.
 But he looked so relaxed--more relaxed than she'd seen him for months--and
she wanted to revel in it, not ruin it. "Nothing, Mulder. Watch your game."
 "*Awesome seats.* Don't you think?"
 She shrugged. She hadn't been watching much of the back-and-forth on the
court just seven scant rows in front of her (but enough to know that his
beloved Knicks were up over the Wizards halfway through the second quarter,
32-25); she'd been more interested in watching Mulder smile, really smile, not
the lopsided smirk-and-wince she often got on the job but a real grin that
seemed to straighten out.
 She looked up at the scoreboard. *The clock's moving too fast.* For a pair
that seemed to live and breathe anomalies, tonight had been one they couldn't
explain. Mulder usually depleted the horde of sports tickets he acquired
somehow (a Lone Gunman had to be involved, Scully thought) as currency for the
black market of favors that was the FBI. But tonight he was left with two. For
his Knicks, of all teams. And for once on a Friday night, she wasn't knee-deep
in entrails in some formaldehyde-reeking autopsy bay, and he wasn't knee-deep
in decades-old files full of crabbed scribbles and blurry photos.
 *This is what normal people do on Friday nights.*
 And it was nice, just for a while, to pretend to be normal with Mulder, who
was now intensely concentrating on the game. "Shoot, shoot, shoot!" he shouted
as Ewing planted his feet outside the three-point line and flexed his body,
trying to fire off a shot. The Knick then changed his mind and passed
left--right into the hands of a speeding Wizard.
 "He should've shot," Mulder groaned.
 "No, he should've faked a left pass but then bounced it over to Camby in the
lane, who was open and could've laid it up for an easy two," Scully said.
 She swallowed her smile again and pretended to watch the game, basking in the
heat of Mulder's incredulous stare on her right cheek. She knew the look
without checking--a mix of surprise and awe and, somewhere behind the eyes,
something a little sexual. She first saw it when they were on a drydocked
boat, looking at some video footage from an underwater camera, and she
correctly identified an aircraft as a P-38 Mustang.
 *I just got really turned on,* he'd said.
 She never told him that she knew he'd react that way. Just like now.
 "So," said Mulder, "you played basketball."
 "Yes, I did. It's not inconceivable. What have you done with my partner, the
one who believes in extreme possibilities?" She looked at him, eyebrows
playfully arched. "In San Diego, my father installed a basketball net above
the garage door and the four of us used to play after school while we waited
for him to come home."
 "Did he play?"
 A collective wow rose from the crowd as the Wizard sank a trey from close to
half court. But Mulder's eyes remained focused on Scully, no longer flickering
but almost smoldering, more green than gold in the hazel now, and intensely
concentrating on her.
 *I just got very turned on.*
 What was happening here?
 "He and Mom," she said quietly. "She'd be on the boys' team, and he'd be with
Melissa and me. Sometimes he'd turn on the car lights so we could keep playing
after dark."
 Mulder's eyes grew cloudy for a moment, and he nodded, and in both Scully
inferred a lot: his alcoholic father, his two-timing mother and a missing
sibling. And now she knew why she loved seeing Mulder act like a 12-year-old-
because he'd never been one, not the kind that played basketball in the
driveway with his parents. He'd been the kind that went from house to house on
Martha's Vineyard, maybe riding his bike, maybe walking, handing out notices
he'd somehow, somewhere, managed to Xerox.
 She'd found one, once, in his office, buried in a folder.
 *MISSING,* it cried. *SAMANTHA MULDER. Age 8. Brown hair, brown eyes,
4-foot-7. Last seen in Chilmark. Please contact Fox Mulder.*
 He didn't trust his dad to take the phone call, even then.
 And now he was a 37-year-old who rarely smiled--and ate too many sunflower
seeds. He had been fishing his finger around the empty bag, looking for
stragglers; finding none, he crumpled it. "Want anything from the concession?"
 "No thanks," she said.
 "Something to drink?"
 "Nope."
 "You're a cheap date."
 "So this is a date?"
 She'd meant it as a joke, but the words gained weight as they fell from her
lips. Mulder wasn't simply a friend or a partner; he was *Mulder,* her other
half, the arms she knew would catch her when she fell, the hands into which
she could unhesitatingly place her soul without fear of damage.
 Sure, it was a bond that crackled with sex--a flicker when he'd reach across
a table to rub barbecue sauce from her face, a spark when her lips brushed
against his ear while she whispered something to him. She didn't find it
strange that the physicist in her was the one that often tried to explain her
attraction to Mulder, on all levels. *You ever wonder what positive and
negative ions feel like as they approach one another? Like you with him. That
sweet, frustrating tension that builds in your mind and body as you feel
yourself moving toward him--*
 But she knew ions made molecules when they collided; people, on the other
hand, often made messes. And she didn't want her and Mulder to do that. It
wasn't worth the risk.
 *Then why did that fall out of your mouth, Dana?*
 She had managed to continue looking at Mulder, whose eyes became a little
more gold. An amused look. Scully almost sighed.
 "You tell me, Scully," he said, turning back to the court. "Do you want it to
be?"
 *Oh, touche,* she thought--and then panic settled into her belly. What's my
next line?
 Angles began creeping back into Mulder's face, and his brow furrowed.
 "What's wrong?" she asked.
 Mulder stood. She followed his eyes.
 Play had stopped on the court. Ewing held the ball against his hip, towering
over a knot of referees. All of them stared at the seats across the court,
where one woman clad in soccer-mom wardrobe--sweatshirt and blue jeans,
scrunchie around a ponytail--appeared to part a sea of spectators, who were
shoving each other in a mad dash to get away from her.
 Paying no attention to the commotion she was causing, she moved toward a
phalanx of cops that had formed at the foot of the stands.
 Her left arm was draped lovingly across the chest of a preteen boy who was
marching in front of her.
 Her right arm held a .22-caliber pistol to the boy's right temple.
 As she reached the bottom of the stairs, Scully managed to get a good look at
the woman's face.
 "Oh my God," she said, standing up.
 "What?" Mulder turned toward her.
 But Scully had begun to brush past him, pulling out her badge as she moved
toward the stairs. "I know her," she said.
 
Mulder followed Scully as she elbowed and shouted her way through the flood of
panicked people trying to swim upstairs.
 She easily slipped through the crowd. *She might think it's the badge
talking,* Mulder mused.
 But he knew different. It was her eyes. When she wanted her way, they blazed.
 He could only remember vague snapshots of an emergency room in Alaska (one of
several global landmarks where he almost died; he often wondered if he should
set up a map, with pins marking the locations), but he remembered seeing her
eyes during one of the few moments he'd managed to struggle to the surface of
consciousness. She'd been shouting orders, something about his body
temperature. But her eyes flashed with fury.
 *The hottest flames are blue,* was the only thought he'd managed before
sinking back into the void.
 And the cop Scully was approaching was about to learn that.
 She tinned the Metropolitan Police officer. "I know her. She's Anne Doyle,
one of the deputy assistant attorney generals in antitrust at the Justice
Department."
 Mulder turned back to look at the woman, who had now stopped at center court,
surrounded by a loose ring of nervous security officers and, just beyond that,
another ring of television camera operators. In his mind, Mulder redressed the
woman in a conservative suit, put a gold choker around her neck, shook out the
ponytail and balanced a pair of cat's-eye spectacles on her nose, and she
became a front-page photo in a recent issue of *The Washington Post,* standing
behind the Attorney General.
 "We went to college together. Let me talk to her," Scully was explaining.
 The officer looked over Scully's head at Mulder.
 *Big mistake, chief,* Mulder thought.
 Scully reached up and pulled the officer's chin back toward her. "I was
speaking to you, Officer. You don't have a problem with that, do you?"
 He looked into her eyes.
 "No...ma'am," he said.
 Scully pushed past him and took two steps out into the circle.
 Mulder followed her, a step behind.
 
*What's the boy's name?* Scully couldn't remember. The last time she'd seen
 Anne had been at a party she'd attended right after she joined the Bureau,
back when she attended parties. Then, the boy had been a photo in a Anne's
wallet, four or five instead of the current twelve or thirteen. *Jason?  I
think it was Jason.*
 She took another hesitant step toward Anne, slowly lifting up her hands,
facing her palms out. "Anne?"
 The woman kept looking from one officer to another, frantically swiveling her
body and her boy, as if she were trying to find a wall to back up against. She
looked so much different than even her recent newspaper shots, Scully noted.
Her skin was drawn tight against her face, every muscle tense. Rivulets of
sweat flowed from her scalp, plastering her hair to her forehead. She shivered
like a just-struck tuning fork, and her eyelids were fully drawn back--like a
wild animal's.
 "Anne?" She had to shout to be heard above the crowd's din. "Anne? It's me,
Dana Scully. Remember me?"
 She looked at Scully, but didn't otherwise acknowledge her.
 "Anne, this is a friend of mine, Mulder." She could sense Mulder behind her,
to her right, letting her lead the way. Trusting her.
 Anne kept looking at Scully.
 "We're not going to hurt you, Anne. We just want--"
 Anne began screaming in a foreign language, machine-gunning Scully with
glottoral consonants. Saliva spewed from her mouth, pink with blood.
 She glanced over at Mulder.
 *Hebrew,* he mouthed, shaking his head a little from side to side: *Maybe.*
 She raised her eyebrows.
 He shook his head.
 The boy started to cry. "Mom, you're hurting me," he said.
 Scully took another step, now standing about three feet from Anne. "Jason?"
she asked. The boy looked over at her. "Jason, I'm Dana. I went to college
with your mom."
 "Make her stop," he said, sniffling.
 Anne spouted another hysterical tirade. Scully pursed her lips as she watched
the woman's gun hand begin to shake, rubbing the barrel back and forth against
her son's skull.
 Scully could feel her legs begin to shake. *Oh God, what do I do now?* She
quickly estimated the distance between her raised hands and Anne, knowing that
she had no chance of grabbing the gun before it went off.
 And in this crowded arena, no one dared to shoot Anne, not until they
evacuated the stands behind her-something they were trying to do right now..
 "Jason, do you know why your mom's doing this?" Scully asked.
 He shook his head. "She a-asked me if I wanted a pretzel and then the next
thing I know she's pulled out this gun and she's b-b-babbling at me-"
 "Do you understand what she's saying?"
 "I don't understand *anything* here," he yelled, crying again. His sobs
punched Scully in the stomach.
 From a dark corner of her soul came a shout: *Another child's going to die
because of you.*
 Scully clenched her open palms into fists.
 With another burst of foreign words, Anne thumbed the hammer back on the
revolver.
 "There's still too many people behind her, Scully," Mulder warned quietly.
 *Dammit, Mulder, I know that.*
 "Anne, remember when you and I met last, at Tim Foster's party, about seven-
eight years ago? You showed me pictures of Jason. Do you remember?"
 Anne was breathing heavier, faster. Jason was sobbing.
 "Anne, listen to me. Remember telling me about how you read Jason bedtime
stories? About his favorite story? What was his favorite story, Anne?"
 Anne blinked twice. Her brow furrowed.
 "What was Jason's favorite bedtime story?" Scully repeated.
 Anne's lips quivered. Her blinking became more rapid.
 "*Anne,*" Scully screamed, "*tell me Jason's favorite story!*"
 "*Winnie the Pooh,*" she croaked.
 Scully took another step forward. "Thank you. I knew you were in there, Anne.
You were so happy because *Pooh* was your favorite, too, right?"
 Anne nodded once, twice.
 Scully slid her right foot across the floor, walking as if she were treading
paper-thin ice. "Anne, don't you want Jason to read *Pooh* to his child?"
 She was so close. She could see the goosebumps on Jason's flesh, smell the
salt of his tears.
 Tears streamed from Anne's eyes.
 "Dana?" she asked. She sounded like a little girl.
 Scully smiled. "Anne. Give me the gun."
 She nodded. "OK."
 And then the noise exploded in Scully's ears.
 *Who's shooting?*
 She instinctively dove for Jason, grabbing his hips, pulling him down to the
floor, draping herself over him.
 Then she felt someone fall on top of her. Soap, musk, the faintest whiff of a
smell like peanut butter. Sunflower-seed breath. *Mulder.*
 Then she heard a scream and a gunshot.
 The boy was bawling.
 "Are you hurt?" Scully asked him.
 "Keep him down," Mulder whispered into her ear.
 His voice was tight, tense. She knew without looking. *She's dead.*
 She rose to a kneel, lifting Jason's head carefully, quickly assessing him
for injuries. She wrapped a hand around the back of his head and gently pushed
his face into her shoulder.
 He kept crying, slowly reaching his arms around Scully.
 *Oh God. He knows.*
 "Shhhhhh," she said, placing her cheek against his. She looked to her left.
In her peripheral vision, she could see a crimson streak shine against the
polished wooden floor. The copper smell assaulted her nose.
 *Anne.* She closed her eyes, and felt her heart sink as tears refused to
come.
 *You've just seen too many people die, Dana. You're used to it.*
 She turned her head as far as she could. "Mulder," she called.
 
 An EMT, on call in case one of the millionaire basketball players twisted his
ankle, rushed over right after the gunshot, but it only took him ten seconds.
He checked his watch, looked up at Mulder, shook his head. He shrugged off his
jacket and laid it over what remained of Anne Doyle's skull.
 Two of the cops began to run toward Scully. "Leave her alone," Mulder said,
holding up a hand.
 "What do we do now?" one of the officers asked Mulder.
 "Fuck if I know," he muttered, clumsily pirouetting on his feet. The stadium
was still half-full of spectators; some were screaming hysterically, but most
were standing still, shocked motionless.
 A flashbulb went off somewhere.
 "Get the press out of here now," Mulder said.
 The cops, now armed with marching orders, swung into action. Mulder beckoned
for the EMT. "Let's check out the boy."
 He turned back toward Scully, who knelt on the floor, cradling the boy in her
arms. His heart stopped.
 *She's holding him like she held Emily.* Tight against her shoulder, like
she'd never let him go. Rocking him just a little.
 He had to look away for a moment, up into the rafters of the MCI Center,
anywhere but Scully's eyes.
 *If I hadn't met her, she could still have children.*
 *If I hadn't met her, Emily might still be alive.*
 *If, if, if...*
 "Ma'am?" the EMT was asking Scully.
 Mulder turned back. She pursed her lips, curtly nodded and whispered
something to Jason.
 "No," he sobbed into her shoulder.
 "Yes," she said, softly but forcefully. "He needs to make sure you're OK."
 Jason pulled away a little to look into Scully's face. She nodded. Still
focused on Scully, he gingerly stood up.
 "C'mon, big fella," the EMT said. He led Jason away, gingerly placing a hand
on the back of the boy's head, keeping it turned away from his mother's body.
 Mulder fell to his knees next to Scully. Without touching her, he could feel
her shaking. Sweat glistened on her forehead and the back of her neck. The
blue fire had reignited her eyes.
 "Who shot her?" she asked through half-gritted teeth.
 "She did," Mulder said quietly.
 He suppressed a shiver, replaying the scene in his mind's eye. Anne had taken
a step back from Jason. A manic grin had split her face. And then, in one
fluid, almost practiced motion, she brought the gun up to her temple, angled
downward, and fired. Four cops were now clustered around the bullet, lodged in
the MCI Center parquet.
 "But the noise I heard," Scully began.
 "It was the clock," he explained. "No one had shut off the clock. Buzzer
sounded for halftime."
 "Jesus, Joseph and Mary," Scully muttered, running a hand through her hair,
staring at the floor.
 He wanted to hold her like she held Jason, let her cry, *make* her cry
instead of letting her repress her rage. He'd learned to read her: every bit
lip, every "I'm fine," every tongue in the cheek marked another emotion that
Scully bottled up and laid in some weird wine cellar of pent-up feelings, deep
within her soul.
 He wondered how many of those bottles had his name on them.
 But he knew she wouldn't let him comfort her in front of others, and forced
himself to settle for placing his hand on her shoulder. He felt knots in every
quivering muscle under his fingertips.
 "You're shaking all over," he said.
 "Mulder, I'm fine," she said.
 He sighed.
 "I need you to do something." She looked back up, at him, *into* him. "I want
to know why she was about to kill her child."
 He nodded once, squeezed her shoulder. She reached up and brushed her fingers
across his knuckles.
 Mulder stood and pulled his cell phone out of his pocket. He pointed at one
of the senior Washington Metro officers. "She's ours," he said.
 "On what grounds?" the cop asked.
 *Good question,* Mulder thought. "She's a Justice Department official," he
blurted. "That's automatically our jurisdiction."
 *Isn't it?*
 Mulder felt his poker face start to slide.
 But the cop just shrugged. "Fine by me, Fed. She's all yours."
 Mulder began to dial.
 
<2>
Beirut
4:44 a.m. local time
December 2
 
 Akhmed al-Hadithi was already awake when the phone rang in the other room. He
was lying in bed, smoking a Turkish cigarette, his ears still ringing from the
nightmare. In the dream, he replayed the worst 20 minutes of his
life--watching American fighters turn his armored column into a line of
blackened metal and charred bone, a graveyard that stretched for miles along
the road to Basra. While 100,000 of his brothers-in-arms had died, he had
survived, and his curse was this dream, one where fire perpetually rained from
the sky and his friends screamed in agony as they watched their life pour from
them in messy geysers of blood. The explosions were the worst; earsplitting
thunderclaps, packing a concussion that punched through his eardrum to smash
against his brain.
 The phone rang twice again.
 *He's late,* al-Hadithi thought as he slid on his pants and looked at his
watch. He had expected the warning calls around two or so. But the Silver-
Haired Man was a special contact, one for whom all rules had been abandoned.
Whatever he wanted, he got.
 Akhmed walked into the other room of his apartment and unlocked the front
door. He opened the sliding door to the balcony. The night was placid; he
could hear the Mediterranean surf lazily lap against the beach fourteen
stories below.
 He then smelled the smoke--a flat monotone of an odor compared to the sharp,
acrid notes of his cigarette, which he stubbed out in an ashtray as he turned.
 "Perhaps you were a cat in an earlier life," he said. "With silent paws.."
 "You wanted to see me," the Silver-Haired Man replied. Without invitation, he
sat in one of the room's two armchairs.
 Akhmed took the other. "My superiors want to know if you found the
photographs adequate." He clipped his vowels, one of the few remaining
vestiges of his Oxford education.
 The Silver-Haired Man drew deeply on his cigarette, fixing Akhmed's eyes with
a glare cold enough to seep into the Arab's bones. During his seven years with
Iraqi Intelligence--four of them spent as a "cultural attaché" here at the
Beirut Embassy--Akhmed had handled all sorts of contacts, from mild-mannered
university professors to knife-wielding borderline psychotic transvestite
hookers.
 But the Silver-Haired Man was the only one who had scared him. His eyes, a
colorless shade of gray, seemed to judge the world and find everyone and
everything in it guilty.
 *An executioner's eyes.*
 "The samples were adequate," the man said in a tone that added *just barely
so.* "I would like to send my team to the site."
 "That isn't a problem. We will bring them through Jordan, as previously
arranged."
 The Silver-Haired Man drew deeply on his cigarette.
 "My government has asked me to give you this," Akhmed continued. He leaned
over to push a small box and an envelope across the low table between their
chairs.
 Leaving the cigarette in his mouth, the Silver-Haired Man opened the
envelope. "I don't read Arabic," he said, replacing the small note.
 "It's a note from *El Rais,* our leader, thanking you for what you've done
for our country," Akhmed said.
 The man then opened the box, a long, flat black jewelry case. A polished-
silver medal winked in the apartment's dull lamplight.
 "Our country's highest honor. Secret, of course," Akhmed explained.
 The Silver-Haired Man closed the box and stubbed out his cigarette in the
ashtray on the table. "I'd like to begin tomorrow."
 "That's fine."
 "Is that all?"
 Akhmed felt his jaw go slack. "I've just presented you with a letter from my
President--a *personal* letter--and a decoration which only nine of my
countrymen have worn, most of them posthumously. In seven days you have done
what my country has labored to do for 20 years. And yet you sit here as if
this is all in a day's work."
 "In a way, it is," the Silver-Haired Man said.
 "So you are like me, an intelligence officer."
 "I didn't say that."
 "But you are American."
 "I didn't say that. Are we done?"
 Akhmed sighed. A maxim of his mother's came to mind: *When God smiles, don't
try to make him laugh.* This man had approached him unsolicited to make an
offer that, within a few days, should change history-and Akhmed's stature
within the Mukhabarat. As a lowly Fourth Directorate rank-and-file agent, the
most Baghdad had expected of him was being able to verify the rumor of the
month, something he hadn't been able to do that often anyway. And now, he was
doing something that even the al-Tikriti--the President's kinsmen, and Iraq's
de facto ruling class--had never been able to do.
 An American friend of his at university had used an expression she said was
similar: *Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.* Whatever *that* meant.
 "For now," Akhmed said. "By the way, my government has asked me to tell you
that we plan on testing one of your gifts." He checked his watch.
"Momentarily, actually."
 A flicker of interest sparked in the man's eyes. "So soon?"
 Akhmed nodded. "Isn't that what you wanted?"
 "It is what I expected." The man withdrew another cigarette from a crumpled
red-and-white pack, which he replaced in the inside pocket of his crumpled
brown suit. He'd lit a match before Akhmed could offer one. The flame bounced
lightly, up and down.
 The Silver-Haired Man's hand was shaking, Akhmed noticed.
 He lit the cigarette and stood. "I'll be in touch."
 Akhmed watched him leave, realizing too late that the medal case and the note
still sat on the table.
 He checked his watch. 5 a.m.
 He wished he could feel a little tremor shake the building.
 Even though this explosion would be meters and meters underground, he
imagined it as loud enough to drown out the sounds of Basra in his head.
 
<3>
FBI Headquarters
9:58 p.m.
 
 Her voice derailed his train of thought.
 "Hmmm?"
 "I said, what are you thinking?" Scully asked.
 *About you.* About her shoes, actually. She was wearing a new pair today:
black, with the heel a little higher than normal. Mulder didn't know an Armani
from an Adidas, but he knew they were new on Scully. Today's outfit was a
stand-by--charcoal gray over a button-up white blouse--but the shoes redefined
it, turning it from a Fed-at-work uniform to something far more dangerous.
Part of Mulder's mind enjoyed cataloging Scully's clothes, especially over the
past year, as she'd turned on the siren in her wardrobe: foreign fabrics that
hugged curves rather than hid them, new four-alarm shades of lipstick.
 *Ever since the cancer.*
 And the psychologist within him knew that he didn't buy back--above face
value, no less--those Knicks tickets from Langly because he wanted to see a
basketball game. He'd wanted to see Scully somewhere other than a pathology
lab, where she wasn't holding a corpse's large intestine or that little saw
that he couldn't stand to watch, the one that made the horrible screech when
it cut into a bone.
 He'd wanted to see her in new shoes.
 And it was a date, no matter how much he tried not to admit it to himself and
certainly wouldn't admit it to her. And he knew that when he'd turned her
question inside out and handed it back to her, he'd been asking something
entirely different.
 *Are you wearing those for me?*
 Whenever he phrased the question like that in his head, it always triggered a
rapid-fire series of possible endings, playing like fast-forwarded movies. But
the scenario he feared the most was always last, always played at normal speed
and always prone to create this sick, sloshy feeling in the pit of his
stomach. Lines of disgust would crease Scully's face. *No,* she'd say, with a
caustic laugh. *My world doesn't revolve around you, Mulder.*
 She had taught him that, harshly, a couple of years ago with a trip to
Philadelphia. That was a lesson he'd since kept close to his heart.
 *Never again will I take her for granted.*
 But he'd already done so much damage, as her brother reminded him every time
they met. Mulder could pinpoint the second worst moment in his life: when Bill
Scully Jr. had walked up to him in a hospital corridor, his dying sister one
room away, and fixed him with a glare that said *This is all your fault.* The
worst moment had occurred a second later, when Mulder thought: *You're right.*
 "Mulder?" Scully asked again.
 "I was thinking about what Anne was saying," he said.
 The elevator doors opened with a *ping.* They walked toward Skinner's office.
 "You think it was Hebrew?."
 "Sounded like it, but I'm not sure." Mulder was thankful to shift his brain
into a different gear. "I remember a little from the few times I went to
temple, and some of the words sounded very similar."
 "When was the last time you were in temple?" Scully's voice carried an
incredulous note.
 "Nine years ago," he said.
 He had few memories of that day, but the ones he had were vivid: the crunch
of the glass under his heel, softer and quieter than he thought it would be; a
kiss that tasted like vanilla and spice.
 "For a wedding," he added.
 Skinner's secretary Abby had left long ago, leaving her boss to burn the
midnight oil alone with his office door wide open. The big ex-Marine sat on
the edge of his desk chair, eyes riveted to the television set across the
room, which was bathing the room in an ashen light. Scully knocked softly on
the doorjamb.
 Without looking up, he waved them in.
 "Sir, we-" Scully began.
 Skinner held up a finger.
 Both agents turned toward the TV, now filled with CNN anchor Bernard Shaw's
serious face and baritone voice, superimposed over a BREAKING NEWS graphic..
"For those just joining us," he said, "in a few minutes the Pentagon is
expected to confirm reports of an underground nuclear weapons test conducted
hours ago in the Iraqi desert."
 "Oh my God," Scully softly muttered. A worry line erupted on her forehead as
she pivoted on her foot and walked into Abby's office, picking up the phone on
the secretary's desk.
 A map appeared on the TV, showing the likely location of the blast, deep in a
part of western Iraq unblemished by place names or landmarks.
 "Government geologists," Shaw droned on, "have recorded tremors in the region
that are indicative of a ten-kiloton blast, somewhat smaller than the bombs
recently exploded by India and Pakistan."
 "Backpack nukes," muttered Skinner.
 Mulder turned to look at Skinner, who returned his gaze for only a fraction
of a second. Then the dark eyes skittered away, returning to the television.
 "An official with the Iraqi Embassy in Cairo refuses to confirm or deny
reports of a nuclear test," Shaw continued, "but did say Saddam Hussein will
go on television to address his nation at 7 a.m. local time, about an hour
from now."
 "You know," Skinner said quietly, "I remember the night Kennedy gave the
speech about the Cuban missile crisis. I was 15 and making out with Sylvia
Hennessey in the bomb shelter we'd built in the back yard. No one ever went
out there. We were alone in the dark, feeling our way around each other."
 Mulder conjured a mental picture of a teenage Skinner copping a feel--and
felt his skin crawl a little, as if he'd imagined his parents having sex. "Did
you love how she ran her fingers through your thick, dark hair?" he asked.
 "I'm trying to make a point, Agent Mulder," he said in his Marine-cultivated,
FBI-honed I'm-the-boss-dogface voice.
 "Sorry, sir."
 "Suddenly," Skinner continued, "the door burst open and my father turned on
the light and I thought I was done for. But he just nodded at us and began
counting the cans on the shelf."
 "Cans?"
 "Yeah. Soup, creamed corn, all the bomb-shelter food. He was sweating and he
kept dropping cans as he counted. He didn't say a word, but I knew, just by
watching him, how scared he was."
 "That must've scared you."
 "Not as much," Skinner said, lifting his chin and pointing it toward the
television, "as this does tonight."
 Mulder turned back toward the TV, now showing a Pentagon press conference
where a group of hastily dressed generals were pointing at maps but looking at
each other with wide-eyed faces that said *We didn't see this coming at all.*
 Then an odd memory surfaced: lying on the couch, his father seated in the
armchair, the two of them watching *The Day After.* He couldn't have been a
day younger than 23, but he still wanted to hide his head under the throw
pillow when the flashwave melted everyone.
 His dad must've sensed his fear, reaching across to touch him on the arm.
 "There are worse ways to die, son," he had said quietly, clinking the ice
cubes in his scotch glass.
 For years, he had cherished that sentence as one of the rare times his father
had tried to make it all better, to console his son and protect him from bad
things. But today, Mulder knew his father better--and realized that he was
simply telling the truth, that he had seen people die deaths more horrible
than the instant double-whammy of sound and fire that preceded the mushroom
cloud.
 *Dammit, Dad, what did you do to Samantha? To me? Why?*
 Now an admiral was speaking on the television. "The aircraft carrier *George
Washington* and its battle group are already stationed in the Persian Gulf..
We've taken them up to the highest level of readiness."
 *The* George Washington. *Isn't that-*
 He swiveled toward Scully, who was still on Abby's phone, one hand shielding
her eyes and massaging her temples.
 *Charlie's on the* Washington, Mulder remembered.
 He walked into Skinner's anteroom. "It'll be really late, Mom," she was
saying, "but I can come over... do you want me to?...are you sure?"
 With a whir, the fax near Abby's desk awakened.
 "Call if you need me. I love you, Mom."
 "Please don't tell me you're fine," Mulder said as she hung up.
 She looked up with a half-smile. "She's really worried. Her only consolation
is that Bill's still in the Pacific and unlikely to--"
 She dropped the sentence, staring at the paper which the fax machine was
spitting out.
 "Scully?"
 Mulder saw mushroom clouds in her eyes.
 She snatched the paper from the fax machine's tray and roughly brushed by
Mulder to return to Skinner's office.
 "What the *fuck* is this?" she shouted, tossing the paper onto his desk..
 Skinner's head snapped around so fast Mulder heard vertebrae click. "What did
you-"
 Mulder, too, had felt his mouth fall slightly open at Scully's expletive. He
knew Scully could curse. He had listened to her once through a bathroom door,
when she had the cancer, muttering a blue streak as blood gushed from her
nose.
 But she'd never spoken like this to Skinner.
 *I don't even think she's spoken like this to me. And I drive her nuts
sometimes.*
 "You heard me. Explain this. *Sir.*" The sarcastic venom dripped from
Scully's lips.
 Skinner glared at Scully for a moment, letting his eyes harden into ebony
opals before he looked down at the page.
 And then his forehead crinkled with confusion.
 "I don't--that's not my signature--"
 Mulder looked over Scully's shoulder to read the form. It bore Department of
the Army, Judge Advocate General letterhead and requested surrender of
evidence from the FBI--namely one corpse, that of Anne Doyle--as part of a
pre-existing and ongoing investigation of a classified nature. And the bottom-
most signature--that of Walter Skinner, Assistant Director--looked just like
every other Skinner signature Mulder'd seen at the end of endless
requisitions, commendations, reprimands and countermands that coursed through
the veins of the J. Edgar Hoover building.
 Anger seeped through Mulder's torso--not hot fury, but the tired, all-too-
familiar here-we-go-again feeling, more a sigh than a scream. Another piece of
evidence stolen from them, another so-called ally apparently turning turncoat.
Skinner's face held some hope--with the peaked eyebrows and the shaking head,
he seemed genuinely surprised.
 "It's not my signature," he repeated.
 Scully took a blank piece of letterhead from the top of his desk. "Sign your
name," she commanded.
 Skinner complied. Scully laid the result over the fax and held it up to the
light of the television.
 A perfect match.
 "They must--" Skinner began.
 "They? *They?* Who's *they?*" she shouted.
 "Our chain-smoking friend, for one--"
 "What exactly is your relationship with that man?" Scully folded her arms
akimbo, planting her feet solidly spaced, fully in interrogation pose. The
television's light cast her in an eerie silhouette, the edges of which seemed
to spark with white light.
 "We don't *have* a relationship, as you--"
 "Do you work for him?"
 "No," Skinner growled.
 "You were going to let me die," Scully said in a softer tone.
 *That's what this is about,*  Mulder thought. Last year, after he'd faked his
death, Scully had told him about the deep doubts she'd harbored about Skinner
while she had her cancer, especially after they'd discovered seventeen phone
calls from an assassin to the FBI PBX node that included, among others,
Skinner's extension. Of course, it also carried Section Chief Blevins'
extension--a man later revealed, posthumously, as a mole within the Bureau..
 *Trust no one,* of course, was Mulder's credo, but he *wanted* to trust
Walter Skinner. Even as he watched the video of Skinner talking with Ray
Thomas, seemingly incontrovertible proof that he had been involved in the
detective's murder--and therefore a cover-up, one that involved bees and
viruses and cigarette-smoking men in some bizarre equation he still couldn't
balance--Mulder knew in his gut, in his *heart,* that Skinner was telling the
truth when he said, *I was framed.*
 He had the same feeling now, watching Skinner's face crumple at Scully's
accusation. "Agent Scully--Dana--" the assistant director began.
 "Don't call me that," she hissed.
 Mulder inched himself out on the limb. "Scully, he's telling the truth."
 She turned toward him, inscrutable in the darkness.
 "Agent Mulder," Skinner warned.
 "He tried cutting a deal with our tobacco-state friend to save you from the
cancer. But Joe Morley reneged."
 Mulder felt the temperature in the room plummet, and silence settled for a
long moment, only punctuated by the generals' voices from the television.
 "Why didn't you tell me?" she finally asked.
 Mulder turned toward Skinner.
 "No, *goddammit,* Mulder, I'm asking *you.*" Her voice quivered with anger.
 He felt the ice begin to crack under him.
 *The truth, Mulder. Never lie to her.*
 "He did it because I asked him to," he said.
 "You asked him to aid and abet a criminal? To break the law?"
 "Yes."
 "That's *conspiracy,* Mulder." And then a chuckle, somewhat caustic. He saw
her at the basketball game, wearing new shoes. *My world doesn't revolve
around you, Mulder.*
 *But dammit, maybe mine does around you.*
 "I did it because I wanted to save your life," he said, surprised at the
volume of his voice, the spit that flicked from his tongue.
 "And why was that worth more than everything we've been trying to uncover?"
she shot right back, taking a step toward him.
 And he felt the words begin to slide off his tongue: *Because I love--*
 But the key of her voice had unlocked another memory, an unpleasant one: the
day seven years ago where another woman had asked the same question when he
had announced, somewhat proudly, that he was reopening the decades-old X-
Files.
 *Why?* Laura had asked.
 And when he told her, she'd thrown the wedding ring at him.
 *Truth is sometimes overrated,* Mulder thought.
 The words screeched to a halt. Backed up. Regrouped.
 "Because together we can beat them," he said.
 "And *them* is who it's all about, isn't it, Mulder?"
 The question felt like an icicle, cold and sharp, pointed at his heart.
 "*Sir.*" Scully let the form of address slouch lazily as she said it. "If you
want to prove where you stand, perhaps you'd be kind enough to secure Anne's
office. If someone hasn't been there already."
 "I can do--" Mulder began.
 "No, we need to go out to--" Scully picked up the fax. "Fort Detrick. I have
a feeling that body's not going to be there for long, and I may need some help
with the autopsy."
 Mulder didn't like the sound of that, but decided not to argue.
 Scully brushed past him, out the door. Mulder began to follow, but the
television caught his eye as he turned. One general, visibly sweating, was
holding up a picture of an odd-looking device.
 "The characteristics and yield of the explosion seem to indicate Saddam may
have used one of these backpack nukes," he was saying.
 Mulder swiveled to glare at Skinner, who had his back to him, retrieving his
coat from the rack.
 "Get a move on, Agent Mulder," he said without turning around.

<4>
En route to Fort Detrick, Maryland
11:18 p.m.
 
 The silence between them had grown humid, noticeable, like the feeling you
got standing in the bottom of a deep well, anticipating the booming echo your
voice would make if you used it.
 Scully leaned her forehead against the passenger side window, watching the
street lights fly by, thinking about Mulder's voice as he drove, at high
speed, toward Frederick. The first few times they'd met, she'd found his voice
horrible--a droning monotone made for delivering monologues that meandered in
vain for a point. But over the past six years she'd discovered that what
seemed to be the only color in Mulder's voice--she usually thought of it as
blue, a reaction that saddened her--was actually thousands of shades, each
with its own distinct meaning. She now could tell simply by listening whether
Mulder was happy or frustrated or panicked or aroused. She loved the aroused
voice--fluid, soothing, punctuated with a gulp or two.
 Sometimes she wanted to drown in that one.
 Now she'd settle for anything, even one of those meandering monologues that
made her gnash her teeth.
 *And that bothers me,* she said, watching the streetlamps become sodium-vapor
comets as Mulder sped up. With six sentences and a hangdog look--the one she
hated, the one that made him look like a kicked puppy--Mulder had confused her
more than any flukeman or shapeshifter she'd been at a loss to explain
scientifically.
 He'd once again confirmed the double standard in their relationship. Whenever
she withheld information--like the apparitions she'd seen of murder victims
shortly before their deaths and, almost, hers--he'd berated her. *Why didn't
you tell me,* he'd complained.
 But vice versa, keeping things sub rosa from her was OK. He chalked it up to
*protecting her.* And that didn't make her as angry as realizing that part of
her *wanted* to dress Mulder in the shining armor of a knight, to *let* him
protect her. She remembered--with a frown of distaste--her conversation with
Ed Jerse in a Philadelphia bar, when she told him about her problem with
"father figures." And yet when she had discovered that she might have been
tattooed with poisoned ink, who was the first person she called?
 The lights become less frequent as Mulder approached the Army reservation.
 She looked to her left, watching him drive, his jaw set tight, hands gripping
the wheel in knuckles that might've been white in better light. If Mulder was
a knight, he was definitely more a Quixote than a Lancelot, she
thought--tilting at every windmill with this dogged perseverance, looking for
the people who stole Samantha, his parents, his life.
 And yet he always showed he'd drop that lance in a heartbeat for her. He'd
never say why--the chains around that part of Mulder were old, rusty and
clearly unbreakable, at least so far--but he'd proven what he was willing to
give up.
 On a bridge, trading his sister for her, he'd shown her his heart.
 And she didn't know if that enraged her or excited her.
 She had a headache.
 Now he was glancing at her.
 "You know," he blurted, "sometimes I'm a prick."
 It was the way he said it, as if he'd just had an epiphany, that made her
laugh, softly but uncontrollably.
 "Did you just open yourself up to that extreme possibility?" she asked.
 "Isn't your line, 'No, you're not?'" he asked with a half-smile.
 "No, it's not."
 "So I am a prick."
 "Sometimes."
 "On the prick-meter, where do I rate?"
 "Is there a prick-meter?"
 "Sure. I just invented it."
 "How does it work?"
 "It rates from zero to, let's say, four."
 "Only four? That's not much of a prick, Mulder."
 He chuckled. "Twelve then."
 "Is twelve good or bad?"
 "No one's complained."
 "*Mulder.*"
 "OK. Zero is a saint and twelve is, twelve is I'd-laugh-at-your-execution
prickdom."
 "Most of the time," she said quietly, "you're a negative number."
 "But--"
 "But you can be a six," she finished.
 He slowed down, approaching the gate to Detrick.
 "I'm sorry," he said.
 "I know," she answered. "I'm tired. Let's get this over with so we can go
home."
 He pursed his lips.
 *He thinks I'm still mad.*
 *Am I?*
 She reached over and touched his arm.
 "Tomorrow, you can help me build a prick-meter," she said.
 Mulder drove up to the guardhouse. Their badges worked fine at the front
gate.
 "A *corpse*?" said the corporal on duty, scrutinizing Mulder's ID.
 "Yeah."
 "Didn't see one."
 "Well, maybe you can--" Mulder began.
 "I did see a *body bag,* though, come in about an hour ago."
 "A full one?"
 "Seemed so."
 "Maybe that was it," Mulder said flatly.
 "Think they took it to Building 20."
 "Where's that?"
 "You sam rid," the corporal replied.
 "What?"
 "USAMRIID." Scully spelled out the acronym. "The Army's Medical Research
Institute for Infectious Diseases."
 "Infectious diseases?" Mulder muttered as they drove away.
 "If Anne had one, we've already got it, Mulder. Her gunshot scattered enough
blood droplets to infect everyone on that basketball court." Scully frowned.
"But I don't think she's infectious. If she were, they would've taken here to
someplace with a higher MOPP level than Building 20. I think they're just
hoping to hide her in the medical trash."
 "Among kidneys and stomachs and spleens?"
 "Oh, my," she said without a smile. "Only people like us root through the
body-part trash for things like Leonard Betts' head." She shivered. "Do you
have a plan?"
 "Of course I have a plan."
 Mulder began thinking of a plan.
 He parked down the street from Building 20.
 As the two agents walked up the sidewalk, Scully muttered, "You don't have a
plan, do you?"
 "Just look like you know what you're doing," he replied.
 She snorted.
 He burst through the swinging doors that opened on a guard desk.
 "We're here for the body," Mulder said.
 The desk sergeant stood, and leaned his hands on the desk in front of him.
They seemed as thick as tree trunks to Mulder.
 "ID?" the sergeant asked in a basso-profundo rumble that seemed to emanate
from somewhere deep within his sequoia of a chest.
 The agents tinned him. He rolled his eyes from one to the other.
 "You don't have clearance," he boomed.
 "I don't need clearance. I've got the vaccine," Mulder said.
 The sergeant's forehead wrinkled. "What vaccine?"
 "They didn't tell you about the vaccine?" Scully asked, a panicked note
creeping into her voice.
 The sergeant's eyes flicked back and forth between Mulder and Scully as a
faster pace now. "What vaccine?" His basso was creeping into baritone
territory.
 "What do you think, Doctor?" Mulder turned to Scully.
 "His pupils are dilating a little," Scully said, leaning close. "And his skin
appears clammy. I'd say he's got it."
 "Got *what?*" Sweat broke out on the sergeant's bald head.
 "*It,*" Mulder said. "Damn. You don't even know what *it* is?"
 "Two, maybe three hours," Scully said, folding her arms. "Unless he gets the
vaccine."
 "*Give me the vaccine.*" He grabbed Mulder by both arms.
 "Wish I could, big fella, but I don't have clearance," he said.
 "And, more to the point, we don't have enough vaccine to spare for you,"
Scully added.
 "Who does?" The sergeant's voice leapt across the alto border.
 As if on cue, the two agents looked at one another.
 "Fuck it. I'm gonna find out. I'll ask the CO." The sergeant stormed past the
agents and fled from the infirmary.
 Mulder watched him go. "We don't have much time."
 They found a door labeled MORGUE at the end of a long corridor. It was
locked.
 From his coat pocket, Mulder withdrew a plastic device that looked like a
caulking gun, except that a short thin wire, not a long paste tube, served as
the nozzle. He slid it into the door's keyhole and began to manipulate the
tumblers.
 Scully squatted next to him. "Where'd you learn to do this?" she whispered.
 *At the Academy, same as you. What kind of a question is that?*
 But her breath, warm and moist, tickled his ear and made him shiver. He tried
for a joke. "Boy Scouts," he sputtered.
 "What else did you learn in Boy Scouts, Mulder?"
 He could feel her lips barely brush his earlobe.
 *Was that a double entendre?*
 *Am I just imagining things?*
 The lock saved him by popping open.
 Scully passed him, fishing a penlight from her pocket and shining it around
the room. He closed the door behind him.
 "I haven't done an autopsy by flashlight before," she muttered, hanging her
coat on a peg near the door and walking to the far wall. She began
methodically opening body-bay doors, checking the occupants.
 "You can teach a class on it at the Academy." He put her coat over hers.
 "Mulder." Her voice had lost all levity. "I found her."
 He walked over. Scully had pulled out the body tray, which was fortunately at
waist height, and was pointing her flashlight at Doyle's naked torso, now
trifurcated by a sloppily stitched Y-incision.
 "Someone beat us," he said.
 "Looks like it. Hold this." She handed him the penlight, and snapped on some
rubber gloves from a box sitting on a nearby crash cart.
 Mulder looked at the corpse and felt the hot dog he'd wolfed down before the
basketball game do a nauseating somersault. Doyle's body was totally devoid of
color, the skin gray and pasty, almost like modeling clay. Her lips were the
exact same shade. Her hair, mottled with blood, dully reflected the
flashlight--no shine at all. Her breasts hung limp, the nipples barely
visible.
 Scully had found a scalpel and begun reopening the sutures.
 "What are you looking for?" he asked.
 "I don't know. Blood. A sample of brain tissue. That might be the best we'll
be able to do. I just want to see--*shit.* They've drained her blood."
 The body cavity cradled a group of flaccid gray organs, looking like a bunch
of deflated balloons. He burped and tasted vomit.
 Scully rummaged through tools on the nearby crash cart.
 *Not the saw. Not the saw,* Mulder thought.
 "Here." She handed him a dagger-sized needle.
 "And what am I supposed to do with this?"
 "Stick it in her heart. Sometimes the atria or ventricles hold some blood at
death."
 Mulder looked at the colorless lump of muscle that used to beat within Anne
Doyle's chest. It looked like a big piece of gristle.
 Scully had taken a scalpel and begun tentatively probing at Doyle's exposed
brain. "I wonder if there's a bone saw," she muttered to herself.
 Mulder froze.
 "Probably too loud," Scully continued.
 He turned back to the body. Doyle's lifeless eyes stared up at him.
 He lifted the syringe over his head, Norman Bates-slasher style.
 He closed his eyes and, on the count of three, brought down the needle.
 Opening his eyes, he found the needle protruding from Doyle's right lung.
 "Give me that." Scully pulled the syringe from the lung, and in one practiced
motion sank it into Doyle's heart. The tube began filling with viscous, nearly
black, blood.
 "Where'd you learn to do that?" Mulder asked around a dry tongue.
 "Brownies," Scully shot back. She was cutting out thin slices of brain,
placing them into small plastic containers.
 Both agents jumped a little when they heard a door slam.
 Mulder lay the penlight on Doyle's belly and walked over to the door,
carefully peering out through the window.
 The sergeant was back, apparently unamused with their ruse. He was kicking
open every door in the hall. He held an automatic pistol in the hand that
wasn't balled into a fist.
 Behind him walked two MPs with large automatic rifles.
 "Scully," he hissed.
 "I'm done," she said.
 "We can't get out."
 She quickly played her flashlight along the firm's walls.
 *There must be another exit,* Mulder thought.
 "Fire door," said Scully softly. "But it's alarmed."
 "That'd give them an excuse to start shooting, maybe," Mulder said.
 The sergeant was now only two doors away.
 He heard Scully rummage through the crash cart tools.
 Then he heard her start to open and shut body-drawer doors.
 *Oh, no.*
 He turned to find her squatting by one of the bottommost bays, apparently
built for extra-large corpses; its door was slightly bigger than the others.
 She turned to him, pointing the flashlight in his face. "You first," she
said.
 He smiled.
 "What's so funny?" Scully asked.
 "I always knew," he whispered, "you'd like it on top."
 She snapped off the penlight so he couldn't see her face.
 He quickly clambered into the hole, face down, feet first.
 He heard Scully rip something that sounded half like plastic, half like
paper.
 Then he felt her wriggling in on top of him.
 She took the length of tape she'd fixed to the inside of the door and yanked.
 It shut just as the outside door to the room opened and the sergeant snapped
on the overhead lights.
 
The inside of the body drawer was a claustrophobe's nightmare: pitch-black and
cramped. Scully's shoulder blades dragged against the roof of the bay as she
wriggled a little farther back, enough to let her heels hit the rear wall.
 She gently laid her head sideways on the back of a Mulder she couldn't see,
her cheek resting against a knob of bone that felt like the top of his spine.
 *Have I ever held him this close?* she wondered.
 They touched--even embraced--often, but not like this, not with her breasts
squeezed hard against his back, her pelvis squeezed against his, her hands--by
fortunate accident, she thought with a little thrill--in his hair.
 She couldn't help brushing her cheek a little against the skin at the nape of
his neck. Not too rough, but not too smooth.
 With her ear against his body, she could hear his blood pump through him,
listen to his heartbeat.
 A rapidly pulsing heartbeat. Coupled with ragged breathing.
 *Is it danger or is it me, Mulder?* she wondered.
 She wriggled backward--just a centimeter or two, all she could
manage--feeling her nipples harden as they roughly rubbed against the double-
silk of her bra and blouse.
 *He feels so sculpted.*
 *Trapezius.*
 *Rhomboid.*
 *Latissimus dorsi...*
 Imagining Mulder's bare back sent a hot, wet wave coursing through Scully.
 And his heart pounded, like a piston, harder in her ear.
 She felt an incomprehensible--and nearly uncontrollable--urge to gently bite
the hard muscle (*levator muscle of the scapula*) at the base of his neck.
 *All that's between us is some fabric--*
 Her body seized as she suddenly remembered the clothes they wore into the
room--two coats, now hanging on the opposite wall of the morgue room.
 
*This would be a lot easier,* Mulder thought, *if she didn't smell so damn
good.* Sea-breeze and soap mixed with rose-petal and a splash of Chanel.
*Essence de Scully.*
 It also hadn't helped that the first thing he felt as she snaked across his
back, pulling the door shut behind her, was her new-shoe heel digging right
into his solar plexus, sending sharp white pain rippling through his lower
back.
 But he forgot about that quickly as the rest of Scully slid across him--her
lithe legs, flat belly, the soft weight of her breasts, warm through the back
of his suit jacket, her doctor's fingers gently brushing through his hair.
 He felt her cheek, cool and smooth, come to rest at the back of his neck.
 The thick door to the body drawer was soundproof. All he could hear was her
breathing... quick, irregular, shaky.
 *Is it me or the danger, Dr. Scully?*
 He felt her exhale hot, wet air on his right ear.
 *Her lips must be so close.*
 *Are they wet too?*
 He felt himself begin to stiffen against the cold metal floor of the drawer.
 *Getting a hard-on in a body drawer. This could only happen to me.*
 Scully tensed a little. Then her cheek moved, slowly, as she turned her head.
 He felt her lips teasingly drag themselves over his earlobe. He began to
quiver.
 Then she whispered two words into his ear.
 "Our coats," she said.
 *Shit,* Mulder thought.
 Then, deep from his jacket pocket, his cell phone began to trill. He could
feel it vibrate against his chest.
 "Shit," Mulder hissed.
 *Can they hear that outside?*
 He decided he'd better not take any chances. He tried to move his hands back
behind his shoulders, to reach for his gun.
 "No," Scully whispered.
 He felt her hands slide down around him, then up his sides. Her nails lightly
raked across his shirt.
 She found his holster, unbuttoned the flap and withdrew his sidearm.
 He then felt her right hand slide up his shoulder, up his arm, finding his
right hand.
 Carefully, her left hand handed him the pistol.
 Mulder took a deep breath.
 With the automatic's muzzle, he pushed open the body-drawer door.
 "*Federal agent!*" he shouted, hoping for an element of surprise.
 But *he* was surprised; the room was empty.
 Scully slid up his body, gingerly poking her head past his.
 "All clear," Mulder muttered.
 "Then let's get out of here," Scully said, laying her palms against the
inside walls of the drawer. With one quick thrust, she pushed hard enough to
drive the drawer forward, out into the room--and her hips hard against
Mulder's.
 *Do that again,* a voice screamed in his head.
 They retrieved their coats and moved, carefully, into the corridor.
 Their sergeant and his two heavily armed colleagues were clustered around the
building's front desk, in an animated what-to-do-next discussion. Both agents
slipped past them in mid-argument, quietly moving through the door and out
onto the street.
 "That was close," Mulder muttered.
 "What about the front gate?" Scully asked.
 "We'll have to worry about that when we get there."
 But inexplicably, there were no worries; the same guard who admitted them
cheerfully waved them through without a second glance, and Mulder sped away,
back toward I-495 and the capital.
 "Do you think she was poisoned?" he asked after a few minutes.
 No answer.
 When he turned, he found she'd fallen asleep.
 
Scully knew it was a dream when she realized she was standing in the Johns
Hopkins medical school pathology lab, a room she hadn't set foot in for at
least a decade. And it was the Hopkins lab of ten years ago; Richard Marx
quietly dribbled from an overhead speaker.
 *So this is a nightmare,* she thought.
 Yet she was having trouble finding that mental off-switch, the dreamscape
exit-sign that showed the path back to the waking world.
 And it seemed so real. She could feel the scratchy, olive-green disposable
scrubs against her skin; smell the acrid, sinus-clearing formaldehyde.
 Anne Doyle lay on the table in front of her. Scully found herself holding a
long, evil-looking suture needle, attached to industrial-strength catgut. She
must have been sewing Anne back up.
 *I forgot to do that,* a voice whispered deep inside her.
 The double-swing doors into the lab crashed open. In came a gurney wheeled by
Mulder. It carried a gunshot victim.
 "What's going on, Mulder?" she asked.
 "Got you another customer," he said with a nonchalant shrug.
 "Is he dead?" Scully said. Blood still gushed from several holes.
 "Good as. No rest for the wicked," he said over his shoulder as he left.
 Scully moved toward the cart, only to hear the doors open again.
 Now Skinner wheeled in another body.
 "Appears to be strangulation," he said, flicking a finger toward the bruises
around the neck. "But you'll tell me for sure."
 "I-" Scully began.
 Skinner went out. In came Bill Jr. and another gurney.
 "Grenade," her brother said, without looking at her.
 Scully looked over at the first victim Mulder had brought in. Blood now
gushed from the body like a fountain, cascading onto the floor.
 Bill Jr. left. Margaret Scully came in.
 "Mom?" Scully asked plaintively.
 "Male prostitute, anally raped before bludgeoned to death," her mother
replied flatly, departing.
 Scully felt liquid lap around her calves, and looked down to see the floor
covered in about six inches of blood.
 *Is it blood?*
 It wasn't red... it was ebony.
 And it felt *alive.*
 The doors crashed open again. Another gurney, seemingly moving under its own
power.
 Then Scully saw two tiny hands wrapped around the rear handle.
 "Please, God, no..." she wailed.
 Emily walked from behind the stretcher. The black liquid on the floor came up
to her knees.
 "Last one, Mommy," Emily said.
 With a trembling hand, Scully reached out and pulled the sheet back from the
corpse.
 Mulder stared back at her, a bullet-carved tunnel now connecting his temples.
 His eyes blinked.
 "Scully?" he asked.
 Scully backed away, chest heaving.
 "Scully?"
 The air in the room felt colder. Something gentle brushed against her cheek.
 "Scully, wake up."
 She snapped bolt awake in the car seat.
 "You're shaking," Mulder said.
 She realized she was, like a storm-blown leaf.
 "Bad dream," she said.
 Mulder pursed his lips and nodded. "I know what those are like."
 Scully looked out the window and saw her apartment building. She checked her
watch. Nearly 1:30 a.m.
 "Do you want me to take the samples into SciCrime and-" he began.
 "I don't trust the FBI lab. I'll do the analyses myself first thing tomorrow.
Mulder, go home."
 "I will."
 "No, you won't," she said with a sigh. "You're headed back to the office.
You've got insomnia written all over your eyes."
 "That was Skinner who called while we were checking out the body drawer," he
said. "His voicemail indicates that he secured most of Doyle's office and home
effects. But he believes someone was there before him. Things seem too clean.
He's brought several boxes of evidence back to headquarters. I might take a
look through them."
 Scully sighed. "Do you want me to--"
 "No." He reached across Scully and opened her car door. As he sat back up, he
squeezed her shoulder. "Get some sleep, in your own place, your own bed.
You'll be OK. I only have one nightmare a night."
 She reached up and touched his hand.
 "You shouldn't have any," she said quietly. "G'night, Mulder."
 Scully made it as far as the couch before she felt her body begin turning off
its lights, conserving power after sheer exhaustion.
 She kicked off her shoes and turned on the television.
 The Israeli Prime Minister was making a furiously animated speech on CNN,
talking about the Iraqi bomb.
 Scully felt her eyes grow heavy as Netanyahu talked about vague
"countermeasures."
 *The television as a lullaby.*
 *Do you do this every night, Mulder?*
 And then sleep took her.
 
<5>
Claridge's
London
8:32 a.m. local time
3:32 a.m. Washington time
December 2
 
 "You're lucky this isn't an American hotel," said the Well-Manicured Man.
"They'd have no ashtrays."
 "You called me," his breakfast companion replied, a Morley hanging from his
lower lip.
 "A status report," the Englishman demanded, leaning back into the armchair.
 The room-service waiter politely coughed; the Briton fished a five-pound note
from his wallet and shooed him away.
 His colleague waited for the door to close. "As you instructed, we have
secured the site in Iraq."
 "And at a terrible price, I'm afraid." The Well-Manicured Man began to tear
into his eggs florentine. "Will satellites be able to tell?"
 "I doubt it."
 "Make sure."
 "I worry more about United Nations inspection teams that are sure to demand
access to Iraq."
 "The U.N. is another person's problem. And I'm sure President Hussein is
currently showing the door to any remaining blue helmets within the country."
 The Cigarette-Smoking Man nodded.
 "Bronschweig?"
 "He's already there."
 "Good. How much time do you think they'll need?"
 "It's unclear at this point."
 "Very well." The Londoner reached for his tomato juice.
 "I remain uncertain that this will work," the American said.
 The Well-Manicured Man stopped in mid-sip, dabbed his lips with a napkin. "Is
your... skepticism... in the plan, or in me?"
 His only response was a puff of smoke.
 The Englishman sighed loudly. "Must I resort to the time-honored and timeworn
art of blackmail to ensure you cooperate?"
 "I know everything you know."
 "Of course." He leaned across the table. "But you see, I know everything
*you* know. And therein lies my advantage."
 The American's smoking hand was steady, but his eyes widened.
 "Yes," the Well-Manicured Man said with a smile, leaning back. "I know about
*him* and *her.*"
 "They are to be left out of this."
 "Then you are to do what I say."
 "The Elder will find out."
 "The Elder thinks you are dead, remember? You were shot." The Well-Manicured
Man chuckled. "Besides, my colleague's too busy accelerating the timetable.
I'm sure you saw this morning's *Financial Times.*" He placed a folded copy of
the salmon-colored newspaper on the American's unfilled breakfast plate.
 Through his own smoke, the man read the only visible part of the headline:
*Merger to un-*
 He left it unfolded on the table. "I've seen it," he said.
 "The formal announcement was made in Frankfurt an hour ago. That should keep
the Elder busy for a while. Of course, I'm more concerned about *this*."
 He made sure to unfold the late edition of the *International Herald-Tribune*
and open it to page three before putting that in front of the smoking man.
 *U.S. justice official kills self on nationwide TV,* blared the main
headline.
 *Mother releases hostage son before suicide,* added the subhead.
 The picture showed Anne and Jason Doyle, locked in their deadly embrace, as
what the newspaper described as "two unidentified FBI agents" approached them.
 Mulder and Scully.
 The American stubbed out his cigarette and quickly lit another.
 "So much for handling things discreetly," muttered the Well-Manicured Man.
 "Admittedly, an error."
 "A *serious* one. Not only did the woman die in a way that will clearly
provoke investigation, but she had to do so in front of *these two.* You are
to ensure that *these two* do not become involved any further."
 "They won't. I promise." The American rose. "Is that all?"
 The Well-Manicured Man frowned. His eyes narrowed. "Do not betray me," he
said, slowly rising from his chair. "I know you Americans have no sense of
history. But on this continent, history resides everywhere. And in the last
war, there were people like you who had no beliefs, no ideology, just a
burning desire to ally themselves with the victors, no matter who died in the
process."
 The Cigarette-Smoking Man inhaled deeply, listening.
 "We called them quislings, after one of their more spineless examples."
 The American reached for his coat. The Well-Manicured Man put a hand on his
arm.
 "And after the war," he said in a light tone, "we shot them."
 
<6>
FBI Headquarters
December 2
7:17 a.m.
 
 The moan was loud enough for Scully to hear through the locked office door.
 Her first reaction was panic. *Don't hurt him--*
 But then she realized it was a woman's voice-husky and throaty, but also
tinny, as if she were speaking through a telephone. Or a television speaker.
 And that this woman seemed to be enjoying whatever was happening in her
world.
 Enjoying it *very* much.
 She stood outside the door, listening to the various gasps and groans,
clearly the end result of poor acting.
 *Is this what you call 'going through other evidence,' Mulder?*
 *Have you been doing this* all night?
 She wasn't shocked by his habit, but she was surprised that he was being
rather blatant about it this morning. His... hobby, she guessed... embarrassed
him. *Whatever tape you found in that VCR isn't mine.* Downcast eyes, stammer
in the voice. He moved the hiding place for the videos after that, but she
still occasionally found a catalog.
 *Sleazy Rider,* an epic tale of the motorcycling life, was the title of the
tape she had discovered three years ago. She had watched one scene, laughing
her way through the whole thing.
 *What does he get out of it?*
 *I want to find out.*
 Scully slid off her shoes and coat.
 She waited for an especially loud groan to slide her key into the lock and
open the door.
 The office was dark except for one lamp, augmented by the dirty-white glow of
the television. Both sat behind a large corkboard on wheels that blocked
Scully's view. Pinned to the board was a huge National Geographic Survey map
of the U.S., speckled with pins of several different colors, each representing
a different alleged alien sighting or, in some cases, alleged abduction.
 Lightly, she touched the black pin Mulder had placed in Skyland Mountain.
 She missed the Mulder who would spend hours arguing the use of "alleged,"
whom she'd leave most nights standing in front of this map, staring at it,
trying to find patterns in the colored dots. What Mulder lacked in empirical
evidence for his beliefs, he had made up with passion--intense and infectious,
sparking from him like electricity. When she saw his eyes flick over the map,
back and forth, wide and curious and on fire, she, too, wanted to believe.
 But now...
 Darts and pencils had been randomly flung at the map, which now hung limp
from an unrepaired rip. He'd torn down the old title card: ENCOUNTERS, written
in Mulder's very precise drafting-class block print.
 Ever since finding out his discovery of an frozen alien body in the Arctic
was nothing more than a Barnumesque hoax, Mulder had wanted to forget more
than believe. And at one point, he even admitted to Scully that he sometimes
doubted if aliens took Samantha--a confession that would have formerly been
blasphemy in the church of Mulder.
 A gasp from the television reminded her why she wasn't wearing shoes. She
quietly walked up to the map, then slowly moved toward its side.
 *What if he's crying while he's watching it?*
 *What if he's taking notes about it?*
 *What if he's touching himself?*
 Scully felt a delicious little shiver pass through her.
 She took a deep breath, and stepped out from behind the corkboard.
 Technicolor pornography was belching from the television.
 But the man sitting in front of it was fully clothed, from his academy-gray
sweatshirt to his sneakers.
 And his knitted brows, semi-ajar mouth and focused squint proved he was more
confused than aroused by this selection from the Mulder Film Library.
 "May I help you?" Scully asked quietly.
 "Oh!" The man's head snapped up in shock. He fumbled for the *stop* button on
the remote, but instead hit the *volume up* button just as the two female co-
stars began a chorus of... Scully wasn't exactly sure how to describe the
sound. The man finally managed to stab the *off* button with a shaky hand.
 He blushed, straight past red to crimson. "I thought this was something
else," he said, plastering a nervous smile onto his face.
 "That's what my partner often says."
 "You must be Scully." He rose, and Scully took a better look at him; about
Mulder's age, but looking older, with salt-and-pepper already sprinkled in the
dark hair around his temples. "Fox said you might come in early."
 *Fox? He doesn't let* anyone *call him Fox.*
 The hairs on the back of her neck began to come to attention.
 "You're not wearing a visitor's pass," she said, carefully rolling her eyes
across his clothing. He didn't appear to be carrying a weapon.
 His smile frayed at the edges as he began quickly patting down his pockets.
"I think maybe Fox--"
 *That name again.*
 "--held onto it when we came in early this morning. You see, I was jogging--"
 "I'm sorry, who are you?" Scully interrupted.
 "Oh, I'm sorry, David, David Tremblay." He extended a hand.
 Scully let it hang. "And what are you doing here? *Without* a visitor's
badge?"
 *What's missing from the office?*
 And then her heart leapt into her throat: *Mulder was going to bring back
evidence from Doyle's office last night. Where is it?*
 "Fox wanted me to see something, although I'm not sure exactly what it is."
 "You're a law enforcement officer?" Scully asked.
 "Well, no. Actually, I'm a rabbi."
 "My partner's never mentioned you," said Scully, carefully pivoting on her
feet, placing herself between Tremblay and the basement office exit.
 "Well, actually, we haven't seen each other in a long time. About eight,
almost nine years now. Since I married him."
 *Gotcha,* Scully thought.
 She grabbed her SigSauer from its beltline holster at the small of her back
and assumed a firing stance.
 "Keep your hands where I can see them, please," she said quietly.
 "Wait, whoa! Is that thing *loaded?*" Tremblay reached for the sky. Sweat
began rolling downstream from the widow's peak on his forehead.
 "The next time you try impersonating a colleague of my partner's, I'd learn a
thing or two about him first, like if he was ever married previously."
 "But I was *there,*" he said.
 "What are you really doing here?" Scully asked.
 Behind her, keys rattled in the lock, and she heard the door open.
 "Hey, Scully, your shoes are outside here. Listen, I like to play Twister as
much as the next guy, but I don't think we have the room--"
 Mulder emerged from behind the corkboard.
 Scully glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. He held steaming
styrofoam cups in each hand, and a donut box was under his arm.
 He looked past Scully to Tremblay.
 "I see you've met my partner, Dirty Harry," he said, nodding his chin toward
Scully. "She must like you. She normally waits for the second date to show
people her toys."
 Scully left the pistol where it was but turned her head toward Mulder. "This
man, who lacks a visitor's pass, claims to have officiated your wedding."
 Mulder's eyes widened and flicked toward Scully for only a second, but it was
enough for her to read. She felt her arms slacken and drop slowly to their
sides.
 *Mulder?*
 *Married?*
 A cacophony of questions, like an overcrowded press conference, exploded in
her mind.
 But Mulder looked away, back toward Tremblay. Storm clouds rose in his eyes,
turning the hazel to something darker.
 Tremblay shrugged. "What did I do?" he asked.
 "He's telling the truth," Mulder said softly.
 Scully *felt* her eyebrow arch toward the stratosphere. Mulder tried to hold
her gaze, but couldn't; his eyes skittered across the room, from filing
cabinet to ceiling light to floor tile.
 "Married, Mulder?" she asked. "In this life? Not a past one?"
 He nodded.
 "I don't mean to be rude, Agent Scully," Tremblay said quietly, "but could
you put that away?" He stared at the pistol.
 *Mulder?*
 *Married?*
 She shook her head lightly, trying to free herself from the surprise. "Sure,"
she said, reholstering her sidearm. She extended her hand. "I'm terribly
sorry. But you don't have a visitor's--"
 "Damn. Sorry. Catch, Dave." Mulder fished in his pants pocket and tossed the
laminated plastic card to the rabbi, who deftly caught it in his left hand
while using his right to return Scully's handshake.
 "No harm, no foul, Agent Scully," Tremblay said. "Now I've had more
excitement in the past hour and a half than I've had in the past five years."
He attached the pass to the collar of his sweatshirt. Right up front.
Prominently.
 "Scully, Dave is an old friend of mine whom I've asked to review some of the
press tapes from last night. When he was younger, he spent a lot of time in
Israel studying languages, like ancient and modern Hebrew." But Mulder didn't
look up as he spoke; instead, he closely inspected the donut box, opening it
as if he were counting, preparing to arrest someone if there weren't exactly a
dozen.
 Scully pulled a chair closer to her and sat down, still watching Mulder.
 *What was she like, Mulder?*
 *Why haven't you told me?*
 *And no pictures?*
 Something fiery erupted in the pit of her stomach.
 "I was there during the Gulf War, too. That was pretty intense," Tremblay
said in a trying-to-alleviate-an-awkward-situation voice, punctuated with a
fake, nervous laugh. "But Fox--"
 Like an arrow, Scully shot a *what-gives* glance toward Mulder, who didn't
see it.
 "--I couldn't find the tape. All I could find was this one." He ejected
*Sleazy Rider* and handed it to Mulder, who made an annoyed sound as he
recognized it.
 "Evidence from a different case, sorry about that," he said, a slight stammer
creating a mid-sentence hiccup. "Remember this case, Scully?"
 *You're not getting any help from me.* "No," she said.
 "Yeah. Well. It's closed now." Mulder tossed the video into a nearby half-
bent garbage can. He rummaged through a pile of tapes on the VCR cart,
withdrawing a different one. "Here."
 Tremblay placed it into the machine and turned everything back on. An image
of the MCI Center came into focus.
 "OK, then." Tremblay sat back in his chair, rubbing his hands together,
smiling as if his favorite feature film was about to start.
 "Um, Scully. Could I speak with you for a moment?" Mulder said, jerking his
head toward the front of the office, toward the other side of the corkboard.
 "Sure. Whatever."
 The two agents walked around the bulletin board. Mulder thrust his hands into
his pockets and analyzed the floor for a moment.
 Scully stood, back against the corkboard, following Mulder's gaze to the
floor. She realized her body language: arms folded tightly across her chest,
lips pursed hard against her teeth.
 *I'm pouting.*
 *How childish,* said a voice in her frontal lobe.
 But from deeper within her howled another question: *Do you compare me to
her, Mulder?*
 She let her brain win and looked up. "Mulder, I'm sorry about the gun, I
didn't know--"
 "I didn't expect you to find out like this," he interrupted, finally matching
her gaze.
 *Did you expect me to find out at all?* But all she said was:"It's fine."
 "You don't seem *fine* about it." He injected some venom into the fourth
word.
 "Your personal life is your business. It just was a shock."
 As soon as the last word fell out of her mouth, something changed in his
face. His jaw set tightly, and his eyes grew even darker.
 "A shock that someone would marry me rather than commit me?" he asked
hoarsely.
 *Oh, shit, what bruise did I just poke?*
 "No, no," Scully said. "Of course not. It's just that... I thought..."
 *I thought I knew everything about you, Mulder, but I don't.*
 "People usually talk about their exes, is all," she finished lamely. "I told
you about Jack."
 "Only because he was the principal in a case. Look, it was a short,
unpleasant mistake that I don't like to relive any more than I have to. That's
all," he said.
 "I'll never bring it up again," she said, with a sharper tone than she'd
intended. It cut him somewhere; he winced.
 Their eye contact collapsed; both stood for a moment, looking at the floor.
 "I need you to do a favor," he said. "I'd do it, but I had a hard enough time
convincing Dave to show up. I kind of ambushed him while he was jogging... I
went through some of the things Skinner and his team pulled from Doyle's
office and home last night. One was a hard drive that I dropped off with the
boys around three this morning. Langly said it should be easy to crack, he
might have it done. Could you go get it, see what they have to say?"
 "Sure. Whatever," she said.
 "Fine," said Mulder, and left her standing there as he returned to the other
side of the corkboard.
 
Mulder winced again as the door slammed shut behind Scully.
 "I'm really sorry about that," Tremblay said. He was using the VCR's frame-
rewind function to find a specific segment of the tape. "I didn't know that
your marriage, short as it was, is a state secret."
 "I don't have secrets," Mulder said, collapsing into a chair.
 "Oh, yeah, right." Tremblay laughed and reached for a donut. The powdered
sugar on his fingers betrayed the fact that it would be at least his second.
"Your partner's one."
 "Who? Scully? Scully's no secret."
 "In a way, she is. One that you're keeping from yourself."
 "What?"
 "Forget-- Damn. I mean, oops," Tremblay said, letting his finger slip from
frame-rewind to rewind and moving way past his target spot. "Forget it, Fox."
 Mulder chuckled.
 "What?"
 "That's why Scully pulled the gun," he explained. "No one calls me that
anymore."
 "It's a name that didn't leave the Vineyard, huh?"
 "Exactly."
 "Gosh, everyone we knew growing up, though, did leave. There's no one left on
the island. You, me, Pete, Laura. Chilmark's Four Horsemen, that's what your
dad called us. Creepy."
 "His idea of a joke," Mulder replied in a tone that said *yes, creepy.*
 "We were only *eight.* We didn't need jokes based on the end of the world."
 "I think *he* might have needed them," Mulder said.
 "But anyway, who would've thought Pete would become a *mutual-fund manager,*
of all things? Who would've thought you would join the *FBI?* Who would've
thought I would become a *rabbi?* And live in *Washington?* And have two
*kids?* Certainly not *me.*"
 Mulder smiled, remembering the beach, *their* beach, up until he was
twelve--and Samantha was taken, and things got very bad, very quickly, and his
dad came home one day and said they were moving to Washington. They'd race
back and forth across it during the day, playing a plethora of games for which
they'd make up thousands of rules. In the evenings, when the crowds died down,
they'd swim. And at night, they'd lie back on the sand and look up at the
stars, thousands of them, worlds waiting to be conquered by their
imaginations.
 He still remembered the first day he stopped looking at Laura as yet another
of the four horsemen. They were ten and running to get home to supper. She
stopped him, however, and handed him a seashell--one like he'd never seen
before, a mottled purple and blue with dozens of curlicues. He found something
new in it every time he looked.
 *For me?* he'd asked. *But why?*
 *Because you'd like it,* she'd replied, squeezing his hand.
 "How is Laura?" he asked.
 "Last I knew, fine. Remarried. But you knew that," he replied, glancing over.
 Mulder nodded.
 "I knew it was a mistake the day I married you two," Tremblay said.
 "Then why'd you do it?"
 "If I remember correctly, you asked me."
 "Why'd you let me, then?"
 Tremblay shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe the idealistic part of me thought if
*I* loved the two of you enough, if *God* loved the two of you enough, it'd be
OK. But it wasn't. Here. This is the part I wanted to show you."
 The rabbi activated the tape, and Doyle exploded in a storm of diphthongs.
 "That doesn't sound like any verb I conjugated in Hebrew school," Mulder
said.
 "That's because it's Arabic," Tremblay replied, hitting the pause button.
 "You're kidding."
 "Nope. An old, old dialect, however. Ancient and nothing really like the
modern-day language. It's almost closer to Coptic than Arabic, but Coptic's
got a Greek influence; this has the signature sounds and structure of the
latter. It's like a patois, a kind of hybridization of the two."
 "Only I could confuse languages that represent two nations who have fought
each other for two thousand years," Mulder said.
 "Actually, they sound very similar. When they put on the new Israeli-
Palestinian *Sesame Street,* they have to be careful because Hebrew words
sometimes sound like different Arabic words."
 "Those consonants must be hell for Oscar the grouch. Can you tell what she's
saying?"
 "Most of it sounds like variations on the same command: 'Leave me alone.'
Except this." Tremblay hit the pause button again. On the TV, Doyle thumbed
the hammer back and burst forth with another torrent of words.
 "'They come forth with plague to smite the innocent and bring a thousand
years of darkness upon the world,'" the rabbi translated.
 "Not exactly light conversation," Mulder said.
 "Downright spooky if you ask me."
 Mulder clenched his fist, then let it go. "Is that all?"
 "Pretty much. Except these two also seem to be amateur Egyptologists."
 "What do you mean?"
 "Well, check this out." Tremblay fast-forwarded to a close up of Anne's head-
and-shoulders. "See this?" He pointed to a shiny piece of jewelry, pinned to
her sweatshirt.
 Mulder stood, walked over toward the television and peered at the brooch.
"Looks like hieroglyphics."
 "Hiero*glyphs,*" Tremblay automatically corrected. "That's called a
cartouche. It's a piece of jewelry that spells out a short prayer. Looks like
it's pewter or silver. You can get them from any of those crap catalogs they
carpet-bomb your mailbox with nowadays."
 "What's this one say?"
 "Now leaving what Dave Tremblay knows about ancient Egypt, visit again soon,"
deadpanned the rabbi. "You'll need to hijack another jogging expert for that
one. Do you have the cartouche in evidence?"
 Mulder shook his head. "Her clothes have gone missing."
 "That's odd."
 "In the whole scheme of the last six years," Mulder said, "not really."
 "Well, you've got another sample." Using the frame advance, Tremblay
following the panning camera, in slow motion, down Anne Doyle's neck to her
son's head and then freezing the picture on a close-up of Jason. "Check out
around his neck."
 Another cartouche, hanging on what looked to be a rawhide leather--
 *Wait a second.*
 The memory returned with enough force to knock Mulder back a step.
 *Give it back, Fox, it's my necklace.*
 Sam's voice.
 *Say you're sorry for calling me a boogerbutt,* he said.
 *I'm sorry.*
 He had almost given her back the necklace when she recanted.
 *You're not a boogerbutt, you're a turdhead.*
 *That does it. You'll be sorry, Sam.*
 *Fox. No!*
 He had pulled the scissors out from his desk drawer.
 *Don't cut it! No! It's mine! Mom! Mom!*
 The leather was difficult to cut with school-issue scissors--he was fraying
it apart, rather than making a clean *snip,* right near the silver-looking
pendant.
 He should've just untied the knot that held the two ends of the rawhide loop
together, but that simply wasn't destructive enough for an 11-year-old.
 *I'm telling! I'm telling!*
 He'd finally cut it, holding the open necklace up for inspection.
 *Stupid hieroglyphics,* he remembered thinking.
 Of course, his mother made him repair it, retying the two ends of the broken
rawhide in a sloppy second knot that always hung closer to the cartouche.
 The same sloppy second knot stared back at him from the television screen.
 He knew it, both in his eyes and in his heart.
 *That's Sam's necklace.*
 
<7>
8:32 a.m.
The Lone Gunmen headquarters
An undisclosed location in Virginia
 
"Great timing," said Byers as he finally opened the door, after spending
nearly three minutes unlocking all the deadbolts. "We're just finishing the
printout. Did Mulder come with you?"
 "No, I guess I'm just the little errand girl this morning," Scully said,
surprised at the taste of her words. *Pretty bitter.*
 Byers led Scully back into the largest of the rabbit-warren of offices that
constituted the Gunmen's publishing headquarters. Langly, dressed in a
threadbare robe, Anthrax T-shirt and dingy white boxers, sat at the largest of
several monitor-and-keyboard terminals, eating what appeared to be a bowl of
Froot Loops swimming in chocolate milk. Scully's teeth felt fuzzy just looking
at the meal. She didn't want to look too closely at Langly.
 "Hey-hey, Agent Scully," he said. "Had breakfast? Want some cereal?"
 "No thanks, Toucan Sam," she replied. "Nice outfit."
 "It's my Gulf War homage." He pointed to the Anthrax logo. "Poor man's nuke.
Saddam could've saved himself a lot of money. He already has enough of *this*
to poison most of New York or Los Angeles. So why'd he need the bomb? In our
next issue, we'll have excerpts from a secret CIA report detailing--"
 Byers cleared his throat.
 "Anyway, we're finished with the hard disk." Langly ripped open four sugar
packets and dumped their contents into a tall styrofoam cup of coffee. "Very
simple to crack. Not very worthy an opponent."
 "What did you find?" she asked.
 "Only one document." Frohike emerged, troll-like, from behind a carrel full
of racks of computer equipment. He carried a thick sheaf of freshly laser-
printed papers. "But it's a doozy."
 Even from a yard away, the cologne hit Scully like a tidal wave. "Did you
swim through a pool of Old Spice this morning?" she asked.
 "I just freshened up when I heard the lovely Agent Scully was at the door,"
he said.
 *I knew geeks like this in high school.*
 *We called them the audio-visual club.*
 Frohike handed Scully the document. She began paging through it. "Looks like
a preliminary draft of some kind of antitrust lawsuit."
 "Lovely and lawyerly," sighed Frohike. "You're right."
 "The encryption on it was very, very kindergarten. Frohike's *mom* could've
hacked this," Langly interjected from around a mouthful of cereal.
 "Your mom can do a lot of things too. I can tell you some--" Frohike began.
 "Shut up. Scully, someone *did* try to erase the drive."
 "But you never really delete computer files," Scully said. "You just
overwrite them eventually. So there's often stuff still on the disk."
 Langly nodded as he slurped his coffee.
 "In any event, it looks like Doyle was either very well connected with Wall
Street or has a crystal ball somewhere in her desk," Byers said.
 Scully looked over at him, puzzled.
 "You haven't seen today's papers?" he asked.
 "Of course I have."
 "The business section?"
 "You mean to follow the investments I've made after earning millions with the
Federal Government?"
 Byers offered a half-smile and pulled up a Web browser on a nearby computer.
 The front page of the *Financial Times* materialized.
 Scully leaned over a little and read:
 
 *MERGERS TO UNITE THREE FIRMS INTO BIOTECH GIANT*
 
 *LONDON--GSK AG, the German chemical manufacturing conglomerate, is expected
 to announce as early as tomorrow its intent to purchase a large American drug
 company and a smaller US biotechnology firm, reliable sources have confirmed.
 GSK will announce a $10 billion stock swap to purchase Pinck Pharmaceutical,
 an Indiana-based phamaceutical concern--*
 
 "Oh my God," Scully muttered. She remembered a horrible night in a Virginia
prison, sitting in a makeshift lab, looking into a microscope she was
adjusting with a trembling hand and wondering if she would see her own death
once she focused the instrument--if the test would show she had been exposed
to a toxin that was violently killing some of the prison inmates.
 *By that point, I'd already been poisoned with the cancer and didn't even
know it.*
 She turned to Byers. "Pinck is the company which Mulder and I believe
poisoned a number of inmates in a Virginia prison a couple years ago."
 "Read on," said Byers. "It gets better."
 
 *-- which has recently seen earnings surge thanks to the sale of its new
 anti-impotence drug, Eureka.*
 *GSK will also purchase Rausch Technologies, a privately held biotechnology
firm headquartered in Arizona, for an undisclosed amount of cash that is
expected to be immaterial to earnings.*
 *Rausch is heavily involved in genetic research, founded by American veterans
of the Human Genome Project, the worldwide scientific initiative to map DNA.*
 
 "Section Chief Blevins was taking kickbacks from Rausch," Scully said. "We
discovered that after he was shot."
 
 *GSK officials declined comment last night about the acquisition rumors, but
sources close to the company said firm officials hope to leverage the acquired
technologies in creating a new strain of genetically engineered drugs designed
to cure cancer.*
 
 In a reflex, Scully reached up and laid her fingers beside her nose, probing
and feeling for the mutinous brigade of tumor cells that she knew--she
*hoped*--had since disbanded.
 *Sometimes, late at night, I can still feel it.*
 *Like something growing under my skin.*
 *Devouring me... eating me alive...*
 
 *If European Union officials approve the merger, it will catapault GSK from
seventh to fourth place among the world's largest pharmaceutical companies.*
 
 The story used comments from talking heads to blather on to an abrupt
conclusion.
 "Wonder if Doyle bought the stock," Byers said quietly, looking at yet
another monitor. "The Germans confirmed the merger early this morning in
Frankfurt. GSK's stock's up eight percent on the DAX so far today. Pinck's
should skyrocket when Wall Street opens."
 Scully had returned to the document, rapidly paging through it. "It looks
like Doyle was trying to stop the merger."
 "Interesting that she was trying to stop it before it started," Byers said.
 "There's big holes missing in her argument," Scully said. "There are whole
sections missing. Have they been extracted?"
 "Not that we can tell," Langly said.
 "We think she never finished writing this," Frohike added.
 "It looks like she was designing this as some sort of friend-of-the-court
brief, trying to prove to EU officials that the merger was anticompetitive.
But that would be a hard case to prove," Byers said. "GSK and Pinck have
highly complementary product lines. Merging them wouldn't increase their
market share significantly in any business segment."
 "Did you see page 242?" Frohike asked.
 Scully turned to the page in question.
 It was a list of items Doyle wanted to subpoena.
 Halfway down the list she saw the two notations:
 
 *Affidavit of Special Agent Fox W. Mulder, Federal Bureau of Investigation,
in re case X4012*
 *Affidavit of Special Agent Dana K. Scully, Federal Bureau of Investigation,
in re case X4012*
 
 *Our statements about the prison.*
 "Mulder always told us X-Files couldn't be subpoenaed," Byers said.
 "Technically, they can," explained Scully, "but it's very difficult; Mulder's
resisted any efforts to add the files to the Bureau's evidence database. But
the reports we make to Skinner, which are affidavits, *are* in the Bureau's
database, and can easily be subpoenaed."
 "So this means GSK's behind Doyle's death?" Langly asked.
 "It creates a possible motive," she replied, "but there's no proof any of the
companies staged a hit. It could've been any of their shareholders, or
environmental terrorists upset about another big drug company, or simple
psychosis on Anne's part. I'm running some toxicology screens on her blood
later this morning. That may prove something." She paused, chewing her lower
lip. "I've heard of GSK, but what do they make, specifically?"
 "Poison gas," said Byers.
 "What?"
 "Well, no, not really. The rumor is that GSK was founded by some of the
German scientists that helped invent Zyklon-B, the gas used to kill Jews in
Nazi concentration camps. But the connection's never been proven. They're
famous for antibiotics, actually; medicines designed to weaken viral
infections, stuff like that."
 "We can find out more for you," Frohike said. "Smells like a good article
from our end. Conspiracy among the pharmaceutical-industrial complex. We've
been tracking that for years now."
 "That'd be great," Scully said, relieved that the trio could provide some
backup. "And I have another question for you."
 "Shoot," said Langly, pouring some sugar packets over what remained of his
cereal.
 "What can you tell me about Mulder's ex-wife?"
 Langly looked at Byers.
 Byers looked at Frohike.
 Frohike looked at Langly.
 Silence descended.
 "Did he tell you about her?" Byers finally asked.
 "I found out by accident," Scully admitted.
 He began to fiddle with the end of his tie. "We're not... we promised..."
 "What, you guys signed a blood oath out behind the gym after school?"
 All three of the Gunmen looked away.
 *This is unfair of me,* Scully said.
 *But I* want *to know. So badly.*
 "OK," Scully said, holding up both hands. "OK."
 She picked up her briefcase and turned to leave.
 "Her name was--well, is--Laura," Frohike said.
 Scully turned toward him. He sat at a terminal, absently pushing a mouse back
and forth with his finger, refusing to look at her.
 Byers and Langly coldly stared at their partner.
 "We met Mulder in the summer of 1989," he continued. "He was engaged at the
time. He knew her from growing up, they were neighbors or something. They were
married at the end of the year. Nice ceremony. We weren't invited, but we...
well, you know... made arrangements to tape it."
 "He didn't invite you three?" Scully asked. *You are his closest friends.*
 "She didn't care for us," Byers said, almost apologetically.
 "She thought we were freaks." Langly slurped the chocolate milk from his
bowl.
 Scully moved closer to Frohike. "What happened?"
 Frohike shrugged. "One night, two years later--this is actually the night
after he opened the X-Files--he showed up in the middle of the night. Drunk.
Crying. We put him on the couch. Byers noticed his ring was gone. The next day
he said they'd fought over having kids, and it was over. And we were never to
mention it again."
 Scully put down her briefcase and sat next to Frohike. "I don't believe that,
and neither do you," she whispered.
 Frohike looked up and nodded. "She dumped him because he began chasing
aliens."
 *Oh, God, Mulder, I'd never leave you. Do you think that? Is that your
nightmare?*
 She looked into Frohike's rheumy eyes. "Me?" she asked.
 He shook his head sadly. "I don't know. Maybe. You scare him sometimes."
 Scully reached over and turned Frohike's chin toward her. She bent over and
planted a feather-soft kiss right above his right eyebrow.
 She leaned back and smothered a giggle. He looked as if he'd just been
electrocuted.
 "Thanks, boys," she said.
 As Byers walked her to the door, she heard Langly say, "What are you doing?"
 "Checking the mirror," Frohike replied. "Maybe I turned into a prince."
 "You did. Of *Transylvania.*"
 "We'll call when we get more info on the merger," Byers promised Scully.
 "That's OK. Your *mom* says I'm her Prince Charming," she heard Frohike
respond.
 "That's funny, because *your* mom's mouth's always full when I--"
 Fortunately, Byers closed the door on the end of Langly's sentence.

<8>
FBI Headquarters
8:20 a.m.
 
 Mulder seethed during the whole elevator ride.
 *Skinner.*
 He had just returned from seeing Tremblay to the front gate. He'd kept his
thoughts of Sam to himself; he couldn't remember what lie he had told Dave
about him and Laura, but he was sure it didn't involve his missing sister.
 *Maybe not so missing anymore, huh?*
 *Hope hides in Pandora's box,* he mused, and tried to splash cold water on
his crackling nerves, which kept humming: *You're closer, you're closer,
you're closer...*
 "Are you all right?" Tremblay had asked at the metal detectors.
 "Yeah, yeah. Thanks, Dave." Mulder had shaken his hand.
 Tremblay had held onto Mulder's. "Fox. Come have dinner with me and Rachel.
Please. I don't want the next time we meet to be in two-thousand-twenty, when
you jump out of the bushes and surprise me during some geriatric jog."
 Mulder offered an honest smile, one so unused that his facial muscles creaked
a little in protest. "Will you try to get me to return to temple?"
 "No," said Dave, cocking his head. "But I will try to get you to return to
the Fox I once knew. Bring your redheaded friend. And call Simon. If anyone
knows those hieroglyphs, he will."
 Mulder waved, turned around, pulled his cell phone from his pocket and fished
in his shirt pocket for the Egyptologist's phone number, seven digits Tremblay
had scrawled on a piece of donut-box paper.
 The cell phone rang.
 Mulder punched the talk button. "Scully, you won't believe what just--"
 "Agent Mulder," Skinner growled.
 "Sir?"
 "I'd like to see you in my office."
 "Sir, right, I'd just like to--"
 "Now, Mulder." An abrupt *click.*
 Mulder boarded the elevator with his face screwed up into a snarl of disgust.
 *He can't take this away from me.*
 *I won't let him.*
 *Maybe Scully was right about him.*
 *Hope hides...*
 Abby was absent when Mulder arrived. He paused outside Skinner's half-open
door, about to rap on the jamb, when he heard the assistant director speak.
 "I received your message and I'm about to take care of it."
 Skinner was holding a phone conversation; he sat in his desk chair, swiveled
away from the door.
 Mulder's knocking fist stopped in mid-air.
 "This is the last time, and I'm not sure I can stop him."
 A long pause. Mulder found himself holding his breath.
 "I'm not your servant. I've repaid my debt to you. In full. With interest."
 A shorter pause. Mulder felt his body wind up with anger, every muscle
drawing taut.
 "Fuck you," Skinner said, slamming the phone receiver back onto the cradle.
 "That's how I always end my conversations with old friends," Mulder said.
"Especially ones who smoke."
 He saw Skinner's chin drop to his chest for a moment in resignation. Then the
Marine backbone returned, head and neck stood at attention on shoulders and
back, and the assistant director twisted his chair toward Mulder.
 "Who's *your* friend?" Skinner began.
 "My friend?"
 "The one I saw you enter this building with at 6:42 a.m."
 "Old childhood friend of mine. We went jogging and I decided to show him his
tax dollars at work. He was jealous of my office."
 "You went jogging? Dressed like that?"
 "Sure."
 "Difficult to run in dress shoes."
 "Scully does it in heels."
 "Where is Agent Scully? She's not answering her cell phone."
 *Smart girl,* Mulder thought, until he realized that she might be screening
her calls to avoid him.
 He cringed as her remembered her face crumpling, her gun arm collapsing, in a
rare, unguarded and certainly unScullylike moment of pure surprise and
confusion that only he knew enough to catch before she became all G-girl
again.
 *I was going to tell you, Scully. I want to tell you everything.*
 *Someday I'll be able to do something without hurting you.*
 "Agent Mulder?" prompted Skinner.
 "Beats me. Sir, did you call me up here to discuss footwear because, if you
did, I'd be surprised you were into that sort of thing."
 "I called you up here to tell you that the D.C. police are contesting
jurisdiction, and want to take control of the Doyle murder."
 "The D.C. police, among the most underfunded in this country, are asking for
more work?"
 "So I understand."
 Mulder longingly looked at Skinner's metal wastebasket, wanting--needing--to
kick it until it was a crushed aluminum ball. "OK. Just let me see the
paperwork, and I'll turn over the evidence. That is, all the evidence that
hasn't already been stolen."
 "You don't need to see the paperwork."
 "I think regulations say otherwise."
 Skinner sighed. "Are we done with the playground games? You're off this
case."
 Mulder stood silent, examining his fingernails.
 "What, Mulder?"
 "I was waiting for the 'or else,'" he said.
 "I don't know what the 'or else' is, Mulder, OK?" Skinner exploded, standing
up, leaning across the desk at his subordinate. "I don't know if the 'or else'
is an order from the Attorney General shutting down the X-Files or a car bomb
outside this building or a bullet in the back of your head."
 *Blah blah blah,* Mulder thought. *I've heard this before.*
 "Or Scully's," Skinner finished.
 Mulder *felt* his blood pressure skyrocket in his wrists, in his carotid
artery, in his head. His teeth ground together. His nostrils flared.
 He leapt across the desk at Skinner, reaching for his throat.
 The ex-Marine neatly feinted to the left, using his left hand to grab
Mulder's right wrist and twist it. Quickly, he then grabbed Mulder's right
arm, directly below the elbow, with his other hand. He twisted in the opposite
direction.
 White-hot pain flooded Mulder's arm. He was sure the next sound he'd hear
would be the *crack-pop* of the bone snapping.
 Skinner leaned over the desk to look into Mulder's eyes.
 "I'm on your side," he said.
 "With friends like you," Mulder grunted, jerking his head toward his
restrained arm.
 Skinner let go, but held Mulder's gaze. "You're so goddamned paranoid, and
maybe that's helped keep you alive so far, but you have to believe me when I
tell you this. They're *frightened* of you and Scully. Push the right button
and they'll hurt you, and you're fucking *stomping* on that button right now.
You can't take them on yet, not until you're ready."
 "So when do I become a Jedi Master?" Mulder sneered.
 "Goddamnit, Mulder," Skinner roared. "For your sake--for *Scully's* sake--"
 Mulder began to pace, clenching and unclenching his fists.
 "--lose this battle. Win the war," Skinner finished.
 "Is this a war?"
 Skinner looked down at the desk, brows knitted, considering the question. "I
think so," he finally said.
 Mulder took a deep breath and watched his boss sit back down in his chair,
carefully, as if it were made of twigs. Skinner seemed a little smaller, a
little shaky, with sagging posture and a couple beads of sweat shining on his
forehead.
 *And you're a casualty,* Mulder thought.
 "What do they have on you?" he asked.
 Skinner looked at the desk, snorted softly, with a half-smile creeping across
his face.
 "Enough," he said in a tone that sagged with defeat. "Enough." Then, as if
waking up, he injected steel back into his spine. "You'll hand over all your
evidence to me, then?"
 Mulder looked up at the wall clock.
 *I must be so close,* he thought. *So close to Sam. So close to the truth.*
 *Can I buy the truth with a lie?*
 *Should I?*
 "It'll take me a couple hours to assemble it," he finally said. "Some of it's
in the lab, Scully's got some of it with her."
 Skinner frowned.
 "You want me to trust you?" Mulder said. "Then you have to trust me."
 "By the end of the day," Skinner said.
 Mulder moved for the door.
 "And Agent Mulder?"
 Mulder stopped but didn't turn back.
 "Thank you," Skinner said.
 *Why'd you have to say that?* Mulder thought.
 *You just made lying so much harder.*
 
<9>
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Forensic Laboratory
Rockville, Maryland
10:42 a.m.
 
 
 "You have," the overly perky tape-recorded voicemail maiden said, "seven new
messages. Would you like to hear them?"
 *Mulder,* Scully thought with a sigh.
 She had turned her cell phone off shortly after leaving headquarters, after
making her only call so far this morning: to Sean Marsden, an old friend and
colleague from Quantico and now one of the senior forensic scientists for ATF,
to borrow some blood testing equipment. She trusted Marsden about as much as
she trusted anybody since beginning work with Mulder: not much, but more than
anyone in FBI's expansive SciCrime laboratory, a place where X-files evidence
tended to evaporate.
 She had felt a little guilty switching off her new Ericsson and tossing it
into her briefcase, but she tried to explain it away by telling herself it
wasn't so much to protect her from Mulder, but vice versa. She wanted him to
focus on the case, not on her. As much as Mulder chastised her for being
overly clinical in investigations, he tended to be overly clinical when it
came to her psychology: any emotional response she made he turned over and
over in his hands, overanalyzing and overcompensating.
 *Like seven voice-mail messages' worth of overcompensating.*
 *Sometimes, Mulder, I think I'm your greatest vulnerability.*
 She didn't think she liked that.
 Still, his left-handed revelation this morning had poked and prodded at all
the chinks in her G-girl armor, making her wonder what woman could unlock
parts of Mulder's heart that still, after six years, remained off-limits to
her.
 And again, Mulder transmitted a cacophony of conflicting signals. He seemed
nonchalant about opening part of his past to Scully, as if he were remembering
an old college roommate. Yet he seemed angry, almost livid for a moment, when
Scully returned the insouciance.
 *As if he wanted me to be jealous.*
 *Now who's overanalyzing?*
 "You have..." The recorded voice began to loop back on itself.
 Scully stabbed '1' for 'yes,' and tucked the phone between her ear and
shoulder. She had taken some drops of Doyle's blood and conducted a complete
blood count, to check for base abnormalities. The CBC machine could count
millions of microscopic blood cells. Its screen indicated it was almost
finished.
 "First message. Received at 8:47 a.m.," said the computer voice.
 "Scully," Mulder nearly shouted into the phone.
 *Just what I need after this morning,* Scully thought. *HyperMulder.*
 "You'll *never* believe this," her partner continued. "Looking back over the
videotape I saw that the kid's wearing Sam's necklace."
 *Oh, no.*
 Scully stretched one hand across her forehead, rubbing both temples with
outsplayed fingers.
 Mulder always thought zebras when he heard hoofbeats, but whenever his
missing sister was involved zebras of all stripes emerged from his
imagination, and Scully found herself vainly trying to round them all back up
and drive them back into the corral.
 Or wherever zebras went.
 But she also felt her heart began to race a little faster, because Samantha
had become almost as much her quest as Mulder's. Sometimes, when he wasn't in
the office, she'd pick up the tiny picture he kept on her desk and try to spot
the similarities between the eight-year-old frozen in a Kodak moment with the
young adult she'd walked past on that bridge, almost four years ago.
 And then she had disappeared, yet again.
 *If she was really Samantha.*
 Because Mulder told her he had discovered dozens of Samantha-clones as well.
 Mulder's voice came back to her from the phone. He had been describing the
Egyptian amulet, more to himself, she figured, than to her. "So I'm going up
to Photo to blow up an image--"
 *Beep.* The machine cut him off.
 A higher-pitched, longer *beep* sounded from the CBC machine. Scully looked
at the numbers on the screen. All normal. The hematocrit was slightly
off--Doyle apparently had thicker blood than normal--but otherwise everything
seemed normal, just like Scully's first round of tests: no alcohol, no drugs,
no apparent diseases. Not taking any chances, however, Scully had slid on a
pair of extra-thick prophylactic gloves and wore a face mask.
 "Next message," said the voicemail girl, "received at 9:11 a.m."
 Scully took the vial of Doyle's blood and slid a syringe through the rubber
cap, sucking just a milliliter or two from the sample.
 *It still looks really, really dark,* Scully said. *Almost over-oxygenated.
That's odd.*
 The background of Mulder's second message was awash with traffic noises.
"Hey, it's me. I'm walking over to the Smithsonian to talk with this guy Simon
DeForest, an old school buddy of Dave's. I'm hoping he can tell me what these
amulets say, if anything."
 Scully lined up a number of glass slides, holding the syringe over the first,
preparing to carefully place one drop on each. She slid her thumb up over the
plunger.
 "By the way, I got cut off last time before I could tell you about Skinner.
He's shutting us down, wants all the evidence turned over to D.C. uniforms by
the end of the day."
 Anger flared through Scully's body.
 "Dammit," she said.
 Her thumb, apparently just as angry as the rest of her body, fully depressed
the plunger. Two milliliters of black blood sprayed across the lab table, onto
her white lab coat.
 "*Shit. Goddammit,*" Scully swore, reaching for a sponge and disinfectant,
going through a biohazard cleanup procedure that medical school had thankfully
drilled into her subconscious.
 There were only a few drops on the lab coat, and it hadn't soaked through to
her blouse.
 *No sense in changing. I'm running out of time.*
 "Next message," droned the automaton, "received at 9:53 a.m."
 "Mulder," she muttered into the cell phone, "these better be important."
 "Where the hell are you?" Mulder's outburst echoed, as if he were in a nearly
empty corridor, or maybe an elevator. "Anyway, I just spoke with DeForest.
Took *forever.* Very precise, wanted to know exactly what I needed, had to
doublecheck all his theories with textbooks. Your kinda guy, Scully. He says
Sam's amulet just spells her name out in a tourist-level hieroglyphic
alphabet, but it's the other cartouche, the one Doyle wore, that's really
interesting. Call me back, I'll tell you about it." *Beep.*
 Scully disposed of the sponge in a waste contained labeled BIOHAZARD NO
SHARPS and washed her glove-clad hands with disinfectant.
 "Next message." Scully now thought she could detect a bored note in the
recorded voice. "Received today at 10:06 a.m."
 "Look," he said, his voice taut and uncomfortable, "if you're pissed off
about what happened this morning, why don't you call me back to tell me that
instead of pouting like this?" *Beep.*
 She felt one side of her face twist upward into a furious sneer.
 *Oh, fuck you, Mulder.*
 *If you talked to your wife like that, no wonder--*
 *Out with the knives, Agent Scully?*
 "Next message, received today at 10:08 a.m." Scully wondered why all
answering-system voices had to be female.
 "I'm sorry about the last message," he said in a Mulder-mumble that sounded
almost contrite. *Beep.*
 *Mulder?*
 *Apologizing?*
 *To me?*
 She felt a hot flush pass across her face.
 *God, how can he* do *this to me?* She felt her heart bungee-jump from cold
anger to something far warmer, an adoration she'd describe as adolescent if
she wasn't the one feeling it surge through every synapse in her nervous
system. She wondered if Mulder's apparently numerous previous lives (*if you
believe that sort of thing*, her brain hastened to add) included any
musicians.
 *He's certainly playing my feelings like a violin.*
 *And you're letting him, Dana.*
 Her face fell at that realization. She wasn't sure how she felt about *that.*
 "Next message," began the recorded voice. Scully sighed and didn't hear the
time.
 "Hey," he said. "I ran Jason Doyle's name through the Internet, and...
well... I know you've come to expect 31 flavors of insanity from me by now--"
 "But," she guessed, talking to the voicemail machine, "his name came up as an
alien abductee."
 "--but his name came up on a MUFON abductee page. So there's another Sam
connection," Mulder's recorded voice confirmed. "So I'd like to go over and
talk with him, but I can't until his dad's present, which should be around
two, he's flying back from Africa. Anyway, if you can make it, I could use
some backup there." He paused for a moment. "Uh... your fan club, the one led
by a troll? They said you left a while ago..." Another long pause, as if he
were talking to her answering machine, waiting for her to pick up. *Beep.*
 "Next message." The voicemail maiden's voice seemed washed out from overuse.
"Received today at 10:20 a.m."
 Scully hit the '3' button to pause the messages, and quickly assembled four
slides using a new syringe and what remained of Doyle's blood. She then
recradled the cell phone and hit '2' to resume.
 "I'm worried, Scully," Mulder said. "Please call me."
 She hit speed-dial for the office number.
 It didn't even ring. "Mulder," he growled.
 "It's me," she said.
 "Oh." But it sounded like a chest-collapsing exhalation, pregnant with
relief. "Hi."
 "You've been busy."
 "Well, I've done what I could, working alone," he said, rather heavy-
handedly.
 *JealousMulder. That's a voice I don't hear often.*
 Scully rubbed a hand across her face. That hot flush was still there, and it
felt a little damp with sweat.
 *They sure keep this place warm for a lab.*
 "For your information, Mulder," she said, using a voice she hoped would cool
both him and her down, "I've been running some bloodwork out here in
Rockville."
 "Found anything interesting?"
 "Not yet, but maybe in a minute. I'm going to take a look through the big
microscope." Scully picked up one of the slides she'd made and walked across
the room to a big lab table that boasted only one, mighty microscope. The ATF
techies called it Godzilla.
 "I'll keep you company," said Mulder. "The boys told me about what they
found."
 "Your opinion?"
 "Indiana's beautiful this time of year. Like Siberia without the rustic
charm."
 "When do we leave?" Scully slid the slide onto the microscope stage.
 "Still working on travel."
 A styrofoam cup of coffee suddenly appeared at Scully's elbow. She looked up
into a face that had a blonde goatee with very-early preliminary streaks of
silver, eyes that crinkled behind Oliver Peoples spectacles and a warm smile.
 "Hold on a sec, Mulder," she said, returning Sean Marsden's smile.
 "Thought you could use some of this," Marsden said.
 "Who's *that?*" Mulder asked in her ear.
 "I said, hold on," she replied to Mulder, then turned back to Marsden. "You
didn't have to buy me coffee."
 "It's ATF rules. Unlike the Bureau, where they make visitors buy them
coffee."
 Scully chuckled, but knew Marsden's jokes hid his deep-seated dislike for the
Bureau. He had resigned from SciCrime after four years, and the fact that the
ATF recruited him in a heartbeat revealed how good he truly was. But office
politics were hard-wired into the Hoover Building. She and Mulder--given their
literal and figurative standing in the FBI's basement--often found themselves
excluded from little turf wars, primarily because no one wanted to fight over
them (except Skinner, and, she still believed, he only did so to promote
someone else's agenda).
 But Marsden had been a close friend in her Academy days. He'd been her
section's practical joker--she still smiled, years later, whenever she
recalled how he rigged the stomach of a colleague's cadaver to explode on
cue--but he'd also been a good listener, helping her thrash out several key
decisions in her early career.
 Including, ultimately, her decision to take the X-Files assignment.
 And since then, Marsden had possibly been the only one of her Academy-era
friends and colleagues that hadn't frozen her out. Others avoided her gaze in
corridors, several hadn't returned her phone calls in years, and a few were
outright nasty.
 She knew what they called her behind her back.
 *Mrs. Spooky.*
 *The Ice Queen.*
 *Roswell's Poster Girl.*
 But Marsden never did that--sure, the occasional alien joke, but nothing
worse than she and Mulder would banter back and forth--and whenever she needed
a lab, he gave her the run of his at ATF.
 He'd always ask her to dinner as she left. She'd always decline, blaming her
busy schedule.
 She didn't know why he hadn't found anybody yet. He was very attractive;
chiseled chin, full head of hair, and nice eyes, also hazel, although much
more of a kelly green, rather than Mulder's, which only got--
 *Why do I compare every man to Mulder?*
 But her next thought scared her more: *Mulder's eyes are still better.*
 "Dana?" Marsden asked.
 "*Dana?*" Mulder repeated through the phone, in an incredulous tone.
 "You OK?"
 "Spaced out," Scully said, shaking her head. "Sorry."
 "You look as if you've seen a little green man," he said, smiling.
 "Oh, *please,*" Mulder said in her ear. "Scully, I've used that line on you
for six years and it hasn't worked yet."
 "No, just woolgathering," she said to Marsden.
 "Besides, they're *gray,*" Mulder continued.
 "Thank you for the coffee," Scully said. "I'm wondering, could you turn down
the temperature? It's kind of warm in here."
 Mulder snorted.
 "Sure," Marsden said, his face cracking a little with concern. "But I keep it
really cool in here anyway... you sure you're feeling OK? You look a little
feverish."
 "Wait," said Mulder, the sarcasm gushing into Scully's ear from the phone.
"Let me get a pen so I can write these lines down."
 "It might be me," Scully admitted, dragging a hand across her head. It did
feel warm. Hot, almost.
 "Lemme check," Marsden said, walking off.
 "Get his phone number?" Mulder asked.
 "Have you found any old pictures with Samantha wearing the necklace?" Scully
asked, taking one of the napkins that Marsden had left with the coffee and
dabbing her forehead, the back of her neck.
 "Not yet," he admitted freely, apparently prepared for that question. "But I
have a photo album at my apartment that has several pictures of Sam. I'm sure
there's one in there. Besides, Scully, I *remember* it. I remember cutting the
leather, and my mother making me tie it back together."
 Scully examined the soaked-through napkin. "Why'd you cut her necklace?"
 "Because she was being such a *brat.*"
 "I think you just did it just because you could. I have brothers, remember?"
 "And you have sisters. You *never* broke anything of Melissa's?"
 "Never, although, like all older siblings, she tortured me. The point is,
last year, after I lost time again, at Ruskin Dam? Remember what you told me?"
 "That you should thank your lucky stars--"
 *Goddamn photographic memory.* "*After* that, Mulder."
 Long pause. "No," he said in a guilty tone that screamed *Yes.*
 "You said you weren't even sure if you could believe those memories you had
of Samantha anymore," Scully said softly.
 "I remember," Mulder said, and Scully could see him, phone in one hand, head
in the other, fingers gently touching the scar from where he had let some man,
some *butcher,* take a drill to his skull in an attempt to determine, for once
and for all, which of his memories were the truth.
 Scully still fantasized about shooting Dr. Goldstein. In the kneecaps first.
Breaking the Hippocratic oath was one thing; breaking it over Mulder's skull
was quite another.
 Her temples pounded like twin jackhammers. And she was thirsty. Incredibly
so. She greedily slurped at her coffee, but it wasn't helping.
 "But as much as I believe anything," he continued, "I believe this. I can
still feel the scissors in my hand, and how tough it was to cut through the
leather."
 Scully was silent, tongue against her upper teeth.
 "You have to believe me," he whispered. "I don't care about anyone else. Just
you."
 *You're my one in five billion.*
 When he, strapped to a hospital bed and presumed insane, had said that to
her, she'd almost melted.
 She felt like she was melting now, but in a much different way; she could
feel a bead of sweat ski down the slope of her nose.
 "I believe *in* you, Mulder," she said quietly. "Let's start there."
 She looked at her watch. *Have to hurry.*
 She began to focus the microscope lenses, placing her right eye into the
socket of the eyepiece.
 "So what about the bloodwork?" Mulder asked.
 "I've got it under the microscope right now." Despite being dead and fixed to
a piece of glass, the cells seemed to swim through Scully's vision.
 *Am I dizzy?*
 Her throat was so parched.
 "What do you see?" Mulder asked.
 Scully finally fine-tuned the focus knobs to provide a clear picture of
Doyle's blood. Hundreds of red blood cells filled her field of vision, double-
concave discs that looked somewhat like half-sucked hard-candies.
 *But these look... really different...*
 "Oh my God," she said, as she realized what she was looking at.
 "Scully?" Mulder asked, his voice tinged with worry.
 "They're different, Mulder. They're--" she began.
 The cells began to blur together.
 Something began to throb behind Scully's face.
 Slightly below and to the side of her nose.
 "Mulder," she said. She felt as if a boulder had been rolled onto her chest.
 It was difficult to breathe. She forced herself to listen to her respiration.
 "Scully?" Mulder shouted. "What's going on?"
 "Hyperventilating..." She heard herself wheeze. She reached up to touch the
ache. She felt something slick under her nose.
 The room was spinning.
 She pulled away her gloved hand. The fingertips shone under the fluorescent
light.
 They were covered with blood.
 Bright red blood.
 Hers.
 "Oh, God," she moaned. "No, no, not again."
 "*Scully!*" Mulder screamed.
 But a curtain of blackness had begun to fall, and Scully let it.
 She realized she was sliding off the lab stool, but blacked out before she
hit the floor.
 
Mulder requisitioned a fleet vehicle with a siren to drive to Rockville.
 Her voice haunted him.
 *No, no, not again.*
 Nearly a sob. Nearly a scream.
 Scully didn't scare easily, and *never* in front of Mulder, at least that
he'd noticed.
 *I'm the one who has the girly scream.*
 She'd even handled the cancer so much better than he had.
 He remembered walking into the hospital, holding the stupid bouquet of
flowers, an apology for his admittedly callous behavior when she had ended up
landing in the X-Files yet again (*a record,* he had sniped) for her
Philadelphia excursion.
 *Is it operable?* he'd asked.
 *No,* she'd said.
 The word was a bullet through his heart. He watched the flowers wilt.
 *But it's treatable,* he prompted.
 *The truth is that the type and placement of the tumor make it difficult,*
she said, *to the extreme.*
 *I refuse to believe that.*
 *For all the times that I have said that to you I am as certain about this as
you have ever been,* she'd replied.
 Her voice had been so level, so controlled.
 He had felt like screaming, sobbing.
 *They keep trying to take her away from me.*
 He'd tried over the past six years to inject some distance between himself
and her, to anticipate the apparently eventual day when he'd lose her and have
to continue alone.
 But he couldn't.
 Everyday he found himself addicted to and in awe of her.
 Relying on her. Depending on her. Trusting her.
 *Needing* her.
 *And yet I always do something to fuck up her life,* he chastised himself.
 Had he never met her, she would have never run into Duane Barry.
 *No Duane Barry, no Skyland Mountain.*
 *No Skyland Mountain, no cancer.*
 *And no Skyland Mountain, no infertility.*
 *Dammit, dammit, dammit, can't I keep my terrors to myself?*
 His cell phone rang. He snatched it up, snapped it open. "Scully?"
 "Agent Mulder?" a man replied. "This is Montgomery County Emergency Response
on an unsecured channel."
 "Is my partner all right?"
 "She needs a little oxygen, Agent Mulder, but she's OK. She... hold on..."
 Mulder's entire body sagged with relief.
 "She says, she's fine, drive slow," the EMT said.
 Mulder stood on the gas pedal, speeding toward the ATF crime labs.
 Upon arriving, he got directions from the front desk and burst into the
central laboratory, circling around the waist-high lab tables, moving toward
the knot of people in the room's far corner.
 But he only saw the woman sitting on the floor.
 *I wish I could see her hair,* he thought absently. Through his red-green
color blindness, Scully's hair appeared silver flecked with gold, beautiful
but not the fiery red he knew it was, the shade he unsuccessfully tried to
paint with his imagination.
 An oxygen mask she was holding obscured most of her face.
 But her eyes seemed to shine when she saw him approaching.
 *Thank God I can see blue,* Mulder thought.
 He sank to his knees next to her, oblivious to the EMT he elbowed out of the
way to do it. He picked up her hand. She returned his squeeze.
 "I'm the one that's supposed to do the heavy breathing on the phone," he
said.
 She pulled away the mask to reveal a half-grin. "What can I say, Mulder? You
take my breath away."
 "You should keep the mask on, Dana," said a lab coat-clad man kneeling to
Scully's left.
 "I'm fine," Scully said.
 *Dana?* Mulder's head snapped up.
 The blond, bearded, bespectacled man offered him a sort-of-smile. "You must
be Fox Mulder. I'm Sean Marsden, an old classmate of Dana's. She's told me a
lot about you."
 He offered a hand. Mulder eyed it warily until he saw sparks flash in
Scully's eyes. *Behave, Mulder,* they commanded.
 He shook the hand, but looked back at Scully. "What happened?"
 "I'd like to know as well," Marsden said.
 Mulder almost snapped, *Take a number, I know her better, she's mine,* but
the cold realization that maybe he didn't, maybe she *wasn't*, after all,
stopped the words behind his teeth.
 Her next sentence warmed his heart. "Mulder, you *have* to see this," she
said.
 Mulder couldn't keep himself from shooting a proprietary smile across at
Marsden.
 "You too, Sean," she said.
 Mulder felt the smile disappear from his face, and watched it reappear on
Marsden's.
 "Look in the microscope, Mulder."
 Mulder stood and placed his right eye over the socket.
 "Looks like a whole bunch of Life Savers," he said.
 "Red blood cells," said Marsden.
 "But they're not *all* red," said Scully. "Mulder, even with your red-and-
green blindness, you should be able to tell that, right?"
 *Do you ever wonder if I can see your hair, Scully?*
 "Yes," he answered. "Lots look clear. More than half."
 "But the blood sample's very red. Almost black," said Marsden.
 "That's correct," Scully said, and Mulder suppressed a smile. *Doctor Scully
is in.* When Scully went clinical, she went all the way, talking to you as if
she were addressing a med school lecture--very crisp, very organized, very
*precise,* wielding her words like a scalpel.
 He had initially found it annoying. *Last thing I need is for someone to
lecture me in a monotone,* he'd thought.
 Then he found it interesting.
 Recently he'd found it endearing.
 And, occasionally, very sexy.
 *I wonder if she'd describe what she would do in bed that way--*
 He shook away the fantasy. *Get a grip, Mulder.*
 "Every red blood cell has 300 million hemoglobin molecules," said Scully.
 "You've counted," Mulder interrupted.
 "And each molecule," she continued, "contains four iron atoms, each of which
can bond with two oxygen atoms. That's how oxygen from the lungs is
transported around the body. And when RBCs carrying oxygen are exposed to the
air, they turn red. These didn't."
 "So half her RBCs weren't carrying oxygen?" Marsden asked.
 "It appears so."
 "Then why did her blood look so dark?" the ATF scientist asked.
 "Well, there is a lot of dark stuff in this sample," Mulder interjected.
 "I think those dark blotches are platelets. Or were," Scully said. "Osmosis
pumped oxygen molecules into Doyle's bloodstream. But the hemoglobin molecules
apparently wouldn't take the oxygen. So it--somehow--bonded to whatever it
could. For some reason, the platelets took the oxygen."
 "That doesn't make any sense," Marsden said. "Platelets can't bond with--"
 "*Normal* platelets can't," Scully agreed. "*Normal* RBCs can. So obviously
Doyle had abnormal blood cells."
 Mulder's mind raced to keep up, and almost with an audible *click*, he felt
it slip into a higher gear. "Scully, if the RBCs weren't carrying the oxygen,
then she wasn't getting enough air, right?"
 "Right."
 "So it would've been like she was suffering from high-altitude sickness, or
oxygen deprivation."
 "Exactly. As if she had been climbing Everest, and moving to thinner and
thinner air with every step up the mountain."
 "And one of the signs of oxygen deprivation is psychosis."
 "Straight A's, Mulder," Scully said.
 He looked down. She was looking up, giving him a little proud-of-you grin.
 He then saw the flakes of dried blood under her nostrils.
 Panic clenched his torso with a cold, steely grip.
 *No, no, not again.*
 She must have seen it on his face. Her grin collapsed and her fingers
fluttered up to touch the skin above her lips.
 "I think I can explain this, too," she said softly.
 Mulder chewed on his lip, tried to breathe deeply.
 "Sean, do you have a Geiger counter in the lab?" she asked.
 "A *what?*"
 "Geiger counter."
 "We do, boss," said a lab assistant, who had been standing nearby, pretending
that he wasn't eavesdropping.
 "Get it," Marsden snapped. "Is radiation involved, Dana?"
 "I think so." Scully kept her eyes fixed on Mulder's. "Something must've
forced the body to create RBCs that wouldn't bond to oxygen, and platelets
that would. My vote would be a mutation, and radiation appears to be a likely
agent."
 The assistant brought the Geiger counter over, a steel wand attached to a
beige box with a grab-handle. Scully took the device and flipped it on, waving
the wand across the black spot on her lab coat.
 The Geiger device softly clicked once, twice, thrice.
 "Shit," both men exclaimed at once.
 Mulder reached for the buttons on Scully's lab coat. *I've got to get this
off her.*
 His hands collided with Marsden's, who apparently had the same idea.
 "Gentlemen," Scully said with a warning tone. They withdrew. She began
unbuttoning the lab smock herself.
 "I think," she continued, "that exposure to the radiation may have caused
several of my existing RBCs to dump their existing oxygen, creating a short-
term asphyxiation risk. But I don't think my biochemistry's been permanently
altered."
 *Scully, they've already permanently altered you enough,* Mulder thought. He
bit his lower lip.
 *I'll kill whoever tried to hurt you.*
 "What makes you believe that?" Marsden asked.
 "For one thing." Scully pointed at her nose. "It wasn't black. And secondly,
no matter how powerful that radiation was, it takes prolonged exposure to
create the degree of mutation we're seeing in Doyle's blood. The body tends to
flush RBCs that don't work, so it wouldn't have taken a large degree of
mutation to prevent a rejection response. Dammit, I should've taken a sample
from her spleen," she said, eyes distant. Mulder knew she was remembering her
hurried autopsy last night.
 Mulder remembered something different: the streaks of blood on the MCI Center
parquet. "So why didn't anyone get sick last night?"
 Scully frowned a little. "I'm still trying to figure that out. Proximity, I
guess. Anne was at least a couple feet away from everyone when she--" She
trailed off.
 "I'm not taking any chances. I want that blood placed in protective
containers. Lead-lined," Marsden said.
 "That's probably a good idea," Scully agreed. "But I doubt that small amount
would be enough to create lasting damage. Besides," she added, looking at
Mulder, "radiation and I are old friends."
 "Which is why I'm worried," said Mulder. "I would've thought you'd have a
high tolerance, yet this hit you hard."
 Marsden's eyes bounced back and forth between the two agents, confused.
 "I was diagnosed with cancer a couple years back," Scully explained, "but
it's since gone into remission. Although frequent nosebleeds were among the
symptoms I displayed."
 "I think we should get you to a hospital," said Marsden.
 "No way. I have work to do," Scully said. "But Sean, I'd like you to do a
full blood work-up, just in case, if you don't mind. And I will call my
oncologist as a precaution. But I'm confident we have nothing to worry about."
Concern flooded her eyes. "It's Jason Doyle that I'm worried about."
 "Might he have the same condition?" Mulder asked.
 "I don't know. But we need to find out. You said he had a father--"
 "Divorced," Mulder explained. "He's with the State Department, stationed at
the South African Embassy. Was on safari when this happened, they just tracked
him down. He should be at Dulles by now, and I'd agreed to stop by around
two."
 "We'll be there," said Scully, beginning to stand.
 "I don't think that's--" he began.
 Scully shot him a glare. *Don't.*
 "OK," said Mulder. "OK."
 "What can I do to help?" Marsden asked.
 Jealousy flashed through Mulder once again. *Maybe you've already done
enough.*
 He recalled the conversation he'd heard while on the other end of the phone.
 *Thought you could use some of this.*
 *You didn't have to buy me coffee.*
 Mulder cast a suspicious eye toward the coffee cup.
 "The blood work-up," Scully replied. "And a PCR, so we can see if Jason and
his mom share a genetic disorder that might trigger this."
 "Done," Marsden said, taking a notepad from his pocket, writing down a list
of tests to run.
 Mulder took the opportunity to nonchalantly pick up the half-finished coffee.
 Scully was patting down her pockets, looking for something. "Sean, I can't
thank you enough... here they are." She pulled out one of her business cards.
"Mulder, can I borrow a pen?"
 *You've got to be kidding me.*
 "Sure," he said lamely, handing her one.
 She wrote her home number on the back. "I'll call later today. And maybe I
can take you out to dinner sometime next week, to repay you for all this?"
 "Sure," Marsden said, smiling at Mulder.
 "Let's go, Mulder," Scully said.
 "Nice to meet you, Agent Mulder," Marsden said sweetly.
 "Likewise," Mulder replied through gritted teeth.
 
<10>
 
Somewhere in western Iraq
8:08 p.m. local time
12:08 p.m. EST
 
 Sound travels fast in the featureless desert. The sergeant heard the Humvees
a good five minutes before he saw the four tiny pinpricks of light dot the
twilight horizon to the west. Despite the wide expanse of the Iraqi interior,
there were very few places one could hide.
 Except for the place sixteen kilometers to the north, but that was a place
that he knew not to mention.
 *Or even think about,* his duty officer had instructed him.
 *Under penalty of death.*
 That was fine with the sergeant. Several nomads from the north who had passed
through recently retold stories they'd passed from generation to generation,
some of which the sergeant had already heard as they passed from soldier to
soldier.
 The nomads talked about the Bloody Crescent, the *wadi*--a small valley
created by a long-dead river--that supposedly gushed with dark, deep blood
once every generation.
 They spoke of ancient relatives who watched their friends and families try to
flee the crimson-colored flash flood, only to fail and suffer a slow, painful
death as the blood infected their bodies with poisoned worms.
 They talked about the stench that arose from the river of blood, a colorless
gas that choked children to death.
 They talked about the heavy swords that were traditionally used to amputate
the infected limbs of the unlucky who didn't drown in the blood and die
instantly.
 And every nomad told the exact same stories, even though the sergeant knew
they came from different families, some of which had historically feuded. For
centuries.
 Old wives' tales? Maybe, the sergeant thought. But he wasn't going to risk
anything to find out whether they were true or not. Especially after the army
told its soldiers to stay away as well. A few of the nomads--who often sneaked
through the perimeter, thanks to laid-back defenders like the sergeant--told
of seeing Republican Army tanks. One old man drank three cups of the
sergeant's best wine while describing the men he'd seen from afar one day:
dressed in white suits, covered from head to toe even under the pitiless
midday sun.
 The sergeant had a wife and a child back in Baghdad. He'd much rather see
them than whatever atrocity nature or man had hidden sixteen kilometers to the
north.
 The headlights grew larger, to the size of coins, as the Humvee came closer.
 He prodded his colleagues, both of whom were asleep.
 "Come," the sergeant said. "Visitors."
 The three soldiers groggily got to their feet, slinging their Kalashnikov
automatic rifles over their shoulders. They'd spent most of the early morning
celebrating their nation's successful nuclear test, an event they'd actually
felt under their feet and heard over the radio. In fact, the sergeant had shot
off so many bullets in celebration of their army's success, he feared the clip
in his rifle might be empty.
 But the Humvees had arrived, slowing as the sergeant's colleagues lowered the
red-and-white guard bar across the two-lane highway.
 A man dismounted from the lead Humvee and approached the soldiers. He looked
American, the sergeant noted with a frown: aviator sunglasses, clean-shaven,
close-cut brown hair, khakis and thick-soled, black desert boots.
 *All he needs is the leather jacket.*
 He knew the man was an American for sure when he spoke. "Are you in charge?"
he asked in Arabic. His grammar was passable, but his accent was horrible,
open-voweled.
 From the corner of his eye, the sergeant saw his two subordinates unshoulder
their weapons and place tense fingers on their triggers.
 The man slowly but smoothly raised his hands with relaxed muscles that didn't
betray an iota of concern for the two rifles. "I'm unarmed," he said in a
bored voice. He looked back toward the guard leader, reading his insignia.
"Sergeant, I have travel authorization documents granting me and my party
permission to pass through unaccosted."
 The sergeant raised his eyebrows quizzically. "North?" he asked. "To the
Bloody Crescent?"
 The man laughed easily. "That's what I believe you call it, although it's my
understanding that it's neither bloody, nor a crescent. More like a *wadi.*"
 "That is a prohibited zone."
 "Not for us. May I?"
 The sergeant shrugged and nodded.
 The brown-haired man reached into his back pocket and withdrew a sheaf of
papers. The sergeant read through them.
 They had been cut by the Mukhabarat, the secret security service.
 They carried the names of three very senior generals in the Republican Guard.
 And they echoed the man's claims: this party was to continue on.
 In fact, they had free reign to travel wherever they wished in Iraq.
 The sergeant tossed the papers to the corporal closest to him. "Radio command
and confirm these documents," he said. "I'll need to inspect your vehicles, of
course, Mr.... Do you have an identity card?"
 "You can call me Alex," the man replied.
 "Alex." The sergeant's tongue tripped over the unfamiliar consonants.
 His corporal shouted to him from the radio unit. The sergeant turned.
 "The documents are genuine," the corporal said in a quivering voice.
 *But he's an* American, the sergeant thought. *The President spoke this
morning about how we will bury them, and now we have one driving carefree
through our country?*
 *Carrying God knows what in those jeeps?*
 "Nevertheless," the sergeant began, "it is standard procedure to submit to a
search."
 He slid the bolt back on his rifle, and smothered a sound of relief as he
heard a bullet slip into the breach.
 "Please," he added for emphasis.
 Alex shrugged and nodded. "You'll need this key for the rear storage
compartments."
 The sergeant just nodded as the American fished slowly into his pocket.
 When he withdrew the stiletto blade with a flash, the sergeant knew he
should've been more careful.
 But it was too late.
 In one fluid motion, Alex buried the stiletto near the base of the sergeant's
neck.
 He felt something cool and wet pool around the wound.
 The sergeant turned to his two guards. "Shoot him!" he yelled.
 But both corporals stared at him with wide, panicked eyes.
 One's hands went slack and his rifle clattered to the ground.
 "Shoot--"
 Then he heard the hissing sound.
 And felt the pain--like millions of white-hot needles suddenly sticking into
his shoulder.
 He looked down at the knife, still embedded in his body.
 The wound was bleeding an odd, greenish foam that was... eating away... his
flesh.
 His collar bone already protruded, bare and clean enough to shine ominously
in the Humvee headlights.
 The sergeant began screaming--a high-pitched, wounded-animal howl--as he
collapsed.
 The second corporal, who hadn't dropped his weapon, now brought it to his
shoulder, aiming at Alex. The sergeant heard the metallic sound of a Humvee
door opening and the explosion of a pistol shot. The trooper's head exploded
in a mess of maroon and gray.
 The first corporal fled into the night.
 Someone else with an American accent shouted. A harsh word, maybe a name.
Began with a *kh* sound.
 The sergeant suddenly stopped screaming, as the foam ate through his larynx.
 The last thing he saw was the man named Alex lean over his body and retrieve
his authorization papers.
 "Sorry," Alex muttered in Arabic.
 Then green blotches began interrupting the sergeant's field of vision.
 *Oh God it's in my--*
 He heard his eyeball pop as it dissolved, and then it was over.
 
<11>
 
Fox Mulder's apartment
1:10 p.m.
 
 Scully rapped three times on the door.
 "Scully, just use your key," she heard him yell.
 She pulled out her key ring, smiling at the bald eagle preparing to touch
down on the moon. The Apollo 11 charm was the first birthday present Mulder
had ever given her, despite the fact that she had celebrated each of the past
five October 13ths by presenting him with a tie, each more garish than the
last, daring him to wear them.
 He had worn the last one--a horrible purple, yellow and black monument to bad
taste--while delivering a lecture on poltergeists to visiting professors from
the University of Heidelberg. *The tie kept them awake,* he told her
afterward.
 That had been a more cheerful occasion than the previous year's tie--one
she'd asked her mother to buy from a hospital gift shop, when the cancer was
raging pell-mell through her body. Mulder only wore that tie once; she had
never seen it again. It might have been because it was pink and polyester; she
suspected, however, he linked it with her sickness, and therefore hid it away.
 *But the purple one,* she thought as she found the appropriate key. She liked
that one best of all because he let her tie it before the Heidelberg lecture.
She still remembered standing so close to him, looping one silk end over
another, unable to keep herself from lightly brushing her fingers across his
crisp white shirt as she did so.
 Her pulse had quickened as her nails lightly traced his chest muscles.
 *Greater pectoral.*
 *External oblique.*
 *Rectus abdominis.*
 Then the sandpaper skin around his neck that she grazed as she straightened
his knot.
 *I want to feel that against my cheek.*
 *I want to feel that against my--*
 She sighed as she slid the key into the lock.
 Mulder had seemed as nonchalant about the whole episode as she was trying to
act during the whole episode.
 Didn't move a muscle. Didn't bat an eyelash.
 *You can tie me up anytime, Scully,* he'd said with a wink before walking
off.
 *What was that supposed to mean?* she'd wondered.
 *The enigmatic Agent Mulder.*
 "Scully, what are you waiting for?" he called from inside.
 Only one deadbolt, and she drew it back to enter.
 *Ironic,* she thought. *More locks on his heart than on his door.*
 She found him in the kitchen, where he looked out of place standing over the
sink, shaking something vigorously.
 "If you're making lunch," she said, "I'll pass. I've seen your refrigerator,
and the eighteen species that call it home."
 "Any results from the oncologist?" he blurted.
 She had, after a rather animated argument in the Rockville parking lot,
convinced him to let her go alone, but she knew he wasn't happy about it.
 "Results from the blood work and X-rays come back tonight, but I feel fine."
 "OK," he said, unconvinced. "They took care of you fast."
 "This helped," she said, waving her badge. "I hated doing it, but..."
 "Skinner called," he said.
 Scully drew a deep breath. "And?"
 "Apparently there's really a D.C. detective already waiting in his anteroom
with an evidence transfer receipt, wondering where we are. Plus, our boss has
been extra helpful. He told the cop we had some forensic evidence from the
corpse. So now they want it."
 "Mulder, we *stole* that. It's inadmissible in court."
 He shrugged.
 "And besides," Scully continued, "doesn't the Army have the body?"
 "They've already turned it over to D.C. police, minus the blood."
 "And how have they explained that?"
 "They said most of it sprayed across the MCI Center floor last night."
 Mulder made an interested noise and began rapidly moving his wrist up and
down, shaking whatever he held in his closed fist over the sink.
 "Mulder, what *are* you doing?" she asked.
 Mulder opened his fist to reveal a vial filled with a very crimson, almost
black, liquid.
 Scully felt herself take a step away. "Where'd you get that?"
 "Burger King," Mulder said. "And Chef Chiang's."
 *It's made him* even more *insane,* Scully thought for one panicked moment.
 "Three packets ketchup to two packets soy sauce," he said with a smile.
 She groaned. "We shouldn't fabricate evidence."
 "This is the D.C. police, Scully. They'll probably put this on a hamburger.
Besides, you know and I know where this case file is going."
 "Into a garbage can."
 He nodded. "They'll do a couple dog-and-pony shows for the press, then chalk
it up to psychosis of some sort."
 "What did you tell Skinner?"
 "That your nose had started bleeding again. That took some wind out of his
sails."
 A pang of guilt broke through the several layers of anger and distrust Scully
had built over her feelings about Skinner. Nearly three years ago, the man's
face had simply collapsed as she related what the oncologists had told her.
Every Marine-hardened muscle softened as she explained her limited treatment
options, none of which were expected to work. Finally, he had turned away and
looked out the window, as if he didn't want to hear any more, and *that* was
what tore into Scully's soul.
 Ahab also turned away when he cried.
 It was just one moment--then Skinner turned back and continued as if Scully
were reading him expense reports--but if it had been honest, then she knew
what side Skinner was on.
 *If* it had been honest.
 Not thinking, Scully laid her arm down on Mulder's kitchen counter.
 "So now we have until five to turn everything over," said Mulder. "Wanna see
this quality evidence--"
 A sticky film tried to wrap itself around her palm and fingers. She felt her
nose wrinkle. "*Gross,*" she said, looking down to examine the dried brown
syrupy remains of something that looked like it had been a longtime resident
on Mulder's counter.
 "Come on, Scully. You're all cool and collected when a man who should've been
a tapeworm shows up, but you get all girly when you put your hand in--"
 He looked down at the stain.
 "--when you put your hand in--"  His face crinkled into a puzzled expression.
 Scully raised an eyebrow, pleased that Mulder couldn't identify the compound
either.
 "Fuck it," said Mulder. "Check out this quality evidence." He walked into the
living room.
 She washed her hands thoroughly in the sink before following him.
 Four white cartons sat on Mulder's couch.
 The ATF Geiger counter sat on his coffee table, next to a styrofoam coffee
cup.
 "Everything's clean, then?" she asked.
 "Of radiation, at least," he said with a snarl.
 "Do you have any latex?"
 "Only one in my wallet." Mulder sat in his desk chair.
 "In case you get lucky while chasing werewolves or vampires or something?"
 A pained expression floated across Mulder's face.
 "You won't need gloves," he said dully.
 *Another bruise that I didn't see?* Scully wondered.
 "Why not?" she asked.
 "Because no one else used them either."
 Confused, Scully lifted the lid off the first box.
 She wanted to explode over what she saw, but the only feeling was a dull
been-there-done-that ache in the pit of her stomach.
 "Nothing's bagged," she said. "It's all loose."
 "And every print, at least on the few items I tried to dust while waiting for
you, seems smeared," Mulder said.
 "Shit." Scully tossed the carton lid back onto the box.
 "Maybe the D.C. police can do something with it," Mulder said sarcastically
as he opened a bottom desk drawer.
 Scully put her forehead in her hands, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her
palms.
 *If there is a patron saint of evidence, what can I do for penance?*
 She looked up to see Mulder flipping through a thick red book.
 "Is that a photo album?" she asked.
 He nodded, turning another page.
 She stood behind him, carefully placing her hands on the back of his chair.
He momentarily stiffened--an almost imperceptible tightening on the neck
muscles, a soft but sharp intake of breath--and then he relaxed. He'd done
that ever since she'd met him. Even when she hugged him--the few times she'd
let herself do that--his first physiological reaction was defensive, as if she
were raising a hand to strike him.
 *Let me in, Mulder.*
 He had opened to two pages that held several pictures of Samantha, some of
which Scully had never seen before. Most of the pictures were the standard
school shots: frilly dress, missing tooth, brunette braids framing a round
face and an honest, unforced smile. But Sam's eyes were like her brother's,
razor-sharp and piercing, inquisitive and alive.
 "She looks so much like you," she said softly.
 "A curse," Mulder muttered, opening his top desk drawer and rummaging through
it.
 *She looks like an explorer, Mulder.*
 She knew that every time Mulder said *Why didn't they take me?*, it was a
question laden with pain and fear about what had happened to Samantha. But on
some days, Scully could pick out a soft tone of envy, the confused cry of a
12-year-old who mapped the cosmos from his back yard every night... yet was
left behind when visitors finally arrived.
 Of course, now even Mulder doubted that aliens had taken Samantha. Or her.
*Why does that scare me?*
 *Some days I* don't *want to believe. And yet I find myself...*
 Her thoughts faded as Mulder withdrew a huge magnifying glass from the
drawer.
 Scully noticed it had been resting on top of a thin, magazine-shaped parcel
wrapped in brown paper.
 She bit her tongue.
 He held it over the pictures of Samantha. She watched his lips grow thinner
and thinner as he passed from one photo to another, making his way from left
to right.
 Even from her vantage point, Scully could see none of the photographs had
captured a necklace-wearing Samantha.
 Mulder began turning the pages at a nearly manic speed. "I know I'm right,"
he muttered.
 Scully wanted to touch him but didn't dare.
 He stopped at a large photo of a group of children, clustered around a
boulder on a wind-swept, early-winter beach.
 The face second from the left leapt out at Scully right away. The hair was
more unkempt, the face rounder, the body softer. But the eyes were almost the
same:
 a little wider and a little more brown than green.
 *He hadn't seen so much yet.*
 Samantha was the leftmost subject, dressed in a too-big jacket that must have
been a hand-me-down from her brother.
 "There," Mulder said, his voice heavy with told-you-so triumph. He held the
glass over his sister's torso.
 Scully leaned over to look. The print looked windswept and blurry under the
thick magnifying lens. What *looked* like a fleck of silver hung from what
*looked* like a brown-colored string, which *seemed* to have two bumps along
its length, nearest the pendant.
 She rolled her tongue inside her mouth for a minute, thinking.
 "Mulder..." she began.
 "I know you can't tell," he said in quiet, measured tones. He was attempting
to meet her halfway. "I know. But it's there. I have memories--"
 "Memories you yourself have confessed you no longer trust."
 "I *know* this one." Frustration frayed his voice. "I can have Photo blow it
up--"
 "There's no way you can blow this up to anything discernible. This pendant
could be a...a butterfly, a locket. You can't definitely say that it's the
same cartouche that Jason wore last night."
 "You can't definitely say that it isn't." But he wouldn't look up at her.
 She gently shook her head. Of course, both of them had just told the truth;
and of course, neither of them were correct. *Story of our lives,* she
thought. *We seek the truth when what we need are answers. To so many
questions.*
 *About them. About us.*
 Scully looked back at the beach photo. To the right of Mulder stood another
girl, this one about his age, blonde hair cut in a fussless bob, freckles
punctuating her face.
 She then noticed that this girl was holding Mulder's hand.
 *Laura.*
 Lost in thought, she gently touched the photograph with a manicured nail.
 Mulder's neck muscles snapped to attention with a quiver. He quickly slid the
book away from her hand and slammed it shut.
 "They told you?" he asked brusquely.
 "Told me what?"
 He looked up at her. Every muscle in his face had turned to stone, but his
eyes swam in a morose-looking green.
 "That's Laura."
 "Who's Laura?" Scully played along.
 "My..." Mulder closely examined the desktop. "My ex-wife," he finally
croaked.
 Scully took a deep breath. "Mulder, you don't have to tell me anything--"
 "You don't mean that," he said.
 "So now you're telepathic." She tried to hide her annoyance and failed.
*Don't tell me what I feel.*
 "I've never mentioned her before because she's irrelevant to what I do every
day," he said. "She hasn't been a part of my life for more than eight years."
 *Bullshit,* Scully thought. *She's standing in this room right now. Between
us.*
 "And who is relevant to what you do every day?" she asked. "Anyone?"
 Now Mulder looked at her. The green and gold swirled in his eyes, apparently
in a confused battle for dominance. "Am I being interrogated?" he asked in his
best who's-in-charge-here voice.
 Scully looked down at the floor. *In search of the line I think I just
crossed,* she thought.
 It was then that she saw the coffee cup on the table.
 *He took the cup Sean gave me?*
 "What's that?" she asked, pointing at it.
 "What?" Mulder spun toward the table.
 And then *blushed.* Crimson.
 "Possible evidence," he mumbled after a long moment.
 "You thought Sean *poisoned* me? How would you have checked? Do you even
*know* how to run a toxicology screen?" Scully began to pace, her mind
spinning. She felt a column of molten anger explode inside her.
 But at its core was a slim thread of joy: *I made him jealous.*
 She hadn't meant to; the dinner invitation was a purely-business, no-nonsense
one, although a welcome opportunity to eat somewhere where the food didn't
come wrapped in paper or plastic, and converse with someone other than Mulder.
 *But I* love *talking with Mulder.*
 *Except when he drives me crazy.*
 *Which is most of the time anymore.*
 *Dammit!*
 She lost that slender thread of glee in a sea of fury.
 "You thought he *poisoned* me?" she repeated. "He's one of my closest
friends."
 "I could see that," he said, frost covering his consonants.
 "Mulder," she said softly. "There are other people in my--"
 She heard the trap *snick* closed.
 His eyes--a flat, dull metallic brass now--coughed up a humorless chuckle.
 "And there are other people in mine, people I'm trying to forget, people who
came *before* you," he said.
 His last five words shot through her ear and hummed through her body.
 But she pressed on. *In search of the truth.* "Mulder, why won't you talk--"
 "Because--" he roared.
 His cell phone trilled.
 *Let it go,* she thought.
 And for a moment, she thought he would, his eyes refusing to let go of hers.
 But then he did look away, sheepishly digging into the inside pocket of his
jacket. "Mulder."
 She felt drained, exhausted. All this verbal chess, when all she wanted to do
was sweep the pieces from the board.
 Then lie down on it. And pull him on top of her.
 *Is that what I want?*
 *I don't know, I don't know...*
 "Yeah... yeah... hold on." He handed her the phone. "It's your boyfriend."
 She crinkled her forehead.
 "Oh, he told me about the kiss. God knows why you gave *him* one." Mulder
waggled his eyebrows, but it didn't seem funny. "Made me jealous. Didn't think
short, bald and--"
 Scully snatched the phone from his hand. "What?" she shouted into it. *I'm
gonna lean over, smile bewitchingly, and rip you a new asshole, Frohike.*
 "I didn't want to bother you at the doctor," Frohike replied. "That's why I
called Mulder."
 Scully let some of her ire melt away. "Do you have something?"
 "I'm going to E-mail you a whole bunch of documents. Found a man who might be
able to help you with Pinck. He's kind of a freak."
 "Define freak," she said.
 "That's right," said Mulder, shrugging on his coat. "Call us, the freak
squad."
 "I'll let you decide for yourself," Frohike continued. "But he's been a local
activist trying to get Pinck investigated for a variety of offenses. Ever
since they fired him."
 "So he's credible," Scully said flatly, rolling her eyes.
 "Hey, I have to work with what I got. Pinck seems to run a pretty tight ship,
not too many malcontents. But this guy's got dirt, bucket-loaders full of it.
So he tells any two-bit reporter who stops by. Maybe he'd be worth a call or a
visit."
 "OK. Anything else?"
 "I didn't realize Pinck owned so much. Actually, *controlled* so much is a
better way to describe it. They have this supposedly tax-exempt foundation for
medical grants? It's only got the bare minimum of non-affiliated board
directors. This foundation's joined to the company like a French-kissing
Siamese twin. Sorry."
 "Anyway," Scully said.
 "It's a billion-dollar foundation. They've funded tons of research projects
at pharmaceutical companies nationwide. Hinke Chemical, Danapra Industries,
Transgen Pharmaceuticals--"
 Scully felt her spine turn to ice. "What?" she asked, louder than she meant
to.
 "Transgen. They're in San Diego. *Were.* Looks like they've closed up shop.
Do you know them?"
 She thought Frohike's voice had started to warble until she realized her hand
was shaking.
 *Do I know them.*
 *Mommy said no more tests,* she heard Emily say, as clearly as if she were
holding her.
 *That was the only full sentence I think I heard her say.*
 *The only full sentence I heard* my daughter...
 Her insides coiled into a knot, her blood throbbed incessantly behind her
eyes, and she wanted to let loose a primal scream that would collapse
buildings with a single shout.
 Instead, she bit her lip.
 "Thank you, Frohike," she said quietly, and hung up.
 Mulder was suddenly hovering near her, ripples of confusion knitting his
brow, his eyes smoky, a hand suspend in mid-air, halfway toward touching her.
 *If you can lock me out, Mulder,* she thought, *I can do the same.*
 "It's fine," she said, twisting her body slightly to avoid his touch and his
gaze, taking her coat from the rack. "Frohike's sending us some information."

<12>
 
Doyle Residence
Washington, D.C.
2:22 p.m.
 
 Mulder circled the block again, looking for parking.
 During a silent car ride that felt as if it had lasted for decades, he kept
sheepishly trying to surreptitiously glance at Scully, hoping to find a
foothold and climb back into her good graces.
 But she didn't look up at all, instead concentrating intently on her laptop
computer.
 *She's turned to ice and it's all my fault,* he thought as he stopped for a
red light.
 She had plugged the PowerBook's modem into her cell phone, her hands clacking
away at the keyboard with the fluid, nearly melodic Scully typing style, not
the start-stop, hunt-peck-and-curse one-finger method that was his signature.
 He watched her long, lithe fingers dance across the keys.
 *Doctor's hands.*
 That occurred to him every time she slid her hand into his, every time she
squeezed his shoulder, every time she touched him.
 So precise yet so delicate. So strong yet so soft.
 He wanted to feel them dig furrows in his hair.
 He wanted to feel them flutter gently against his cheek.
 He *needed* to feel them rake red lines across his back--
 The B-flat *blatt* of a car horn broke his reverie.
 "It's green," she said in a dull voice, not even looking up.
 Mulder made the turn. He was rewarded with a parking spot halfway down the
side street.
 As he wiggled the car into the spot through a pretty half-assed job of
parallel parking, he watched Scully in his peripheral vision as she shut down
her computer and packed it into her briefcase.
 Her lips remained set in a thin red line, albeit a four-alarm candy-apple
beg-to-be-nibbled shade of red.
 *You never smile anymore, Scully,* he thought. A crushing sadness began to
coalesce in his upper chest. *Did Emily take it with her?*
 He remembered Alaska. The long, heavy sleep, longer than his insomniac body
had even been able to deal with. He dreamt he was encased in black ice.
 The first thing he saw when he woke was her.
 The second was a million-watt smile that set every nerve in his body on fire.
 Some nights, he imagined that smile before he fell into the semiconscious
stupor he called sleep.
 *She gave that to me. She's given me so much. And what have I done?*
 *Taken her sister, her health, her daughter...*
 One blue eye had rolled toward him. A question mark sat in its iris.
 "Let's go," he said.
 
*He looks so tired,* Scully thought as they got out of the car. His face
scrunched in all the wrong places, his shoulders sagged, his spine wobbled as
it stood. She knew his determination was still there; she could feel it
rolling off him in waves. But his body still wheezed behind his mind, calling
for a timeout.
 *He didn't sleep at all last night.*
 *When* was *the last time you slept, Mulder?*
 She had a bad feeling about this. Exhaustion quickly rusted Mulder's steel-
trap mind, and for him to conduct an interrogation in such a state...
 But they had already reached the townhouse door. Mulder rang the bell.
 The man who opened up looked like an ex-boxer--thick chest, weight balanced
on the balls of his feet, even the pug-shaped nose. Black bags hung from his
lower eyelids.
 "Roger Doyle?" Mulder flipped open his badge. "My name's Mulder. We spoke on
the phone?"
 "Yes, Agent Mulder," he said, offering his hand.
 Mulder pumped it once. "This is my partner, Agent Scully."
 He held out his hand--and then his eyes lit in recognition. He swung his hand
to the right and wrapped it behind Scully's back, drawing her to him.
 "Thank you for giving me back my son," he said into her shoulder, his voice
cracking on the final word. His thick hands gripped her like a life preserver.
"I saw you on the videotape. You saved him."
 Scully managed to wrestle one of her hands around to awkwardly pat Doyle on
the back. "It's my job, Mr. Doyle. I'm sorry I couldn't save Anne. She was a
college friend of mine."
 "She probably mentioned you, but I have to confess I don't remember." He
pulled away from her, wiping one errant tear from below his left eye.
 "She talked about you all the time in her letters," Scully said, turning to
Mulder to explain. "Anne spent her senior year in Germany. That's where she
met Roger and got married."
 "But you were divorced three years ago," Mulder said awkwardly.
 Doyle's face fell as he nodded. "We were young when we got hitched, and Jason
came along right away. In fact, before he was supposed to. She was... she was
two months pregnant when we went to the altar. You probably know that
already."
 She saw Mulder's lips begin to form a *yes.*
 "No, we didn't," she said softly. "I'm just glad Jason's all right."
 Clouds passed across his eyes. "Well, he's not, not really, I'm afraid. He's
been up in his room all day. Won't talk, won't eat. Doesn't seem angry,
just... I don't know... almost catatonic, I'd say. Just lies on his bed,
looking up at the ceiling."
 "He's been through an incredibly traumatic experience," Scully said. "I think
it's probably just shock. But I'm a medical doctor. I could take a quick look
at him."
 "That'll give us a chance to ask a few quick questions," Mulder added,
"without disturbing him too much." He was using his G-man voice, kind of raspy
with its infrequent use, but definitely all Dragnet: monotone and iron-edged.
 *He thinks he's close to Samantha. God help us if he's wrong.*
 "Come in," said Doyle, fully opening the door.
 Mulder bolted in and immediately had one foot on the first step of the
townhouse staircase. Doyle laid a hand on his shoulder. "If you don't mind,
Agent Mulder, I'd like to be present when you speak with Jason. I need to
clean up something in the kitchen and then we'll head right up."
 "Very well," Mulder said.
 The two agents followed Doyle toward the rear of the house, into the kitchen.
 The tile floor was a minefield full of coffee-mug shards, jagged little
chunks of ceramic.
 Doyle opened a small closet and withdrew a broom. "I'm really pissed at
myself," he said to the floor as he swept. "I broke his cocoa mug while
washing dishes. Ever since he was six, he could work the coffeepot all by
himself. He's so smart, Agent Scully--"
 "Dana," she prompted.
 "Dana, he's so smart, figuring out how things work. Always has been. Anyway,
one night he came running into the living room around eight, wanting to show
off, make Anne a pot of coffee. And she let him. She made him some cocoa. They
sat here and talked until bedtime. And it became a habit, although she had to
switch to instant coffee--couldn't keep wasting the whole pot. She *hated*
instant coffee. But she loved Jason."
 Scully looked at the table, imagining Anne and Jason sitting in the windsor-
backed chairs, hands cradled around steaming mugs.
 *Emily would look so small in those chairs,* she thought.
 *And I don't know if she liked cocoa. Did she?*
 She imagined herself and her daughter sitting at her kitchen table in
Annapolis, and felt a hot, sticky sob begin to swell in her throat.
 *No,* she commanded herself.
 *That's right, Starbuck,* she heard Ahab's voice say. *Don't cry, act. Don't
wish, do.*
 Doyle sighed deeply, bending over to brush up the little pile of glass with a
handbrush and dustpan. "After he... came back... when we brought him back from
the hospital, the first thing he did was go to the cupboard, pull out her mug
and the jar, and make her coffee. She always made his cocoa and he always
made..." His voice broke, and his quivering voice betrayed his tears.
 Scully squatted beside Doyle, pulling some tissues from her coat pocket,
offering them, placing her hand on his shoulder. He wiped, sniffled, blew his
nose.
 "Sorry," he said, looking up.
 Mulder squatted beside Doyle, taking the dustpan from him. "I'm terribly
sorry, Mr. Doyle. But can you tell me about the time Jason went missing?"
 *Goddammit, Mulder,* Scully almost said.
 But she pursed her lips hard against her teeth instead.
 Doyle stood, and the two agents followed suit. "On his eighth birthday, we
snuck into his room to surprise him with gifts before school. He was gone. His
window was wide open. We were hysterical. Anne and I... we had lost ourselves
already. He was all we had."
 "Were the police cooperative?" Mulder asked.
 "They searched everywhere. *Everywhere.* Then, three weeks later, he just
showed up in a hospital. Incredibly dehydrated. Some cuts and bruises."
 Scully felt terribly, terribly cold.
 *Four months. Four months between the bright light on top of Skyland Mountain
and Mom and Mulder peering over my bed.*
 *I lost all that time.*
 *What happened to me?*
 She then felt Mulder's fingers, very fleetingly, against the small of her
back.
 She wanted to lean back into them, but they were gone after only an instant.
 "Jason said aliens took him," Doyle confessed in an embarrassed voice.
 Scully closed her eyes and waited.
 "Did the police offer any explanation for his disappearance?" Mulder asked.
 Amazed at her partner's self-control, Scully looked over at him.
 But Mulder was looking directly at Doyle.
 "The cops said, 'He was lost,'" the father said with a shrug. "'Now he's
found. Don't ask questions.'"
 
 Jason's room sat immediately to the right of the top of the stairs. Doyle
gently knocked on his son's door. "Hey, buddy. Can I come in?"
 No answer for a minute. Then a very distant: "I guess."
 Mulder followed Doyle and Scully into the room. Jason lay on his bed, dressed
in a Bulls T-shirt and sweatpants. His eyes appeared black and lifeless in the
room's poor light. They sparked a little when he saw Scully, who offered him a
small yet radiant smile. The room felt warmer in a second.
 "Dana," the boy said. "Your name's Dana, right? You told me. Last night."
 "That's right." Scully sat on the edge of the bed, lightly patting Jason's
ankle.
 *She looks so natural doing this,* Mulder thought. *I'll find whoever took
Emily away from her.*
 "Your dad says you've been quiet today," she said nonchalantly, reaching up
to feel Jason's forehead for fever, his neck for swollen glands.
 "Just thinking," he said.
 "Anything hurt or ache?"
 "My neck, a little. In the back."
 "That's normal. Some Advil should take care of that. Jason, this is my
partner, Agent Mulder," she said, looking up at Mulder and narrowing her eyes
slightly as she spoke. "He'd like to ask you a few questions, if you feel up
to it."
 "Alone?" he asked.
 "Of course not," Scully replied.
 "OK," Jason said, turning to Mulder.
 Mulder took a look around the boy's room, looking for what he called his
"front-door key," something to use as an easy, friendly segue into the
important questions. He quickly found it on Jason's wall.
 "Which one?" he said, pointing to the three vintage-looking *Star Wars*
posters on the opposite wall.
 "The first one."
 "Why?"
 "The Death Star scene? *Awesome,*" he said with a grin.
 Deep in the recesses of Mulder's mind, a klaxon began to wail.
 *Why would a boy,* the psychoanalyst within him asked, *who heard the gunshot
that killed his mother gleefully describe an explosion, cinematic or not, less
than 24 hours later?*
 *Something's wrong here.*
 Then he felt the prickle--a tingle that began at the base of his neck, a
liquid feeling that dribbled down his spine, squeezed his buttocks together
and launched a hurricane of nausea into his stomach.
 He and the prickle had become well acquainted in VICAP, where he had profiled
serial killers.
 It was, several agents had told him, a gift.
 He found it was a curse.
 And perhaps a malfunctioning one at that: *He's only twelve, for Chrissakes.*
 *Still...*
 "Me too," he said. "I like the scene where they tell Leia they're going to
blow up Aldebaran anyway. Gives me the creeps."
 He could feel Scully's eyes bore into his back. *She knows* Empire *is my
favorite.*
 "Yeah, me too," said Jason.
 *Snick.* Mulder closed the trap. Leia's planet, of course, was *Alderaan,*
not Aldebaran, *as any half-paranoid alien chaser like myself would know as
well as his zip code.*
 *Same as any kid who loved these movies when he first saw them. He'd remember
every single thing, word for word. And he'd be quick to correct others.*
 The prickle began to creep through his body.
 Mulder's stomach sank. *This can't be right.*
 The boy's eyes were so flat. Black, obsidian discs.
 *Let's start again.*
 "Tell me about yesterday, Jason. You went to school?"
 "Yes." He looked directly at Mulder.
 "When was the first time you saw your mom?"
 "After basketball practice," he said.
 "Five o'clock?"
 "Guess so. Maybe five-thirty."
 "She pick you up?"
 "No, I got a ride home."
 "With a friend?"
 "Yes," he said, but Mulder detected a little shiver in the voice, and the
eyes flickered away from his.
 "Can you give me your friend's name?"
 "Why?" Jason's jaw muscles set, but his brow didn't furrow.
 "We just want to make sure your friend's all right as well," Scully said in a
soothing voice, like ointment on a wound.
 "Tim Webb," Jason said.
 His pupils were dilating.
 Mulder turned toward Scully. *Are you seeing any of this?* he tried to ask
her with an eyebrow. She didn't look away from Jason.
 "Dana, can I have a glass of water?" he asked, widening his eyes a little,
softening his voice.
 *Is he trying to split us up?* Mulder wondered.
 *Paranoid,* he imagined Scully's skeptical voice responding.
 "Sure," Scully said. "Sure. I'll go get one."
 "Bathroom's next door down," Doyle said.
 "So your mom was here when you got home?" Mulder hardened his voice, folded
his arms.
 "Yeah." And a genuine-sounding note of surprise emerged from Jason's voice.
"She was early."
 "That was unusual?"
 "I normally beat her home."
 "Did Tom come in?" Mulder asked.
 "No, he didn't."
 "I thought his name was Tim."
 Jason's lower lip trembled, just once, but it was enough.
 *What the fuck's going on here?*
 "Didn't you say Tim?" Jason asked.
 Mulder cut his eyes toward Doyle. Annoyed wrinkles had begun to rise on the
father's face, and his eyes seemed to size Mulder up as a sparring partner.
But he kept silent.
 "Whose idea was the basketball game?" Mulder continued.
 "Mom's. She got the tickets from work."
 "She appear different at all?"
 "Yes," Jason said. "She was sweating a little. Smelled funny. Like onions,
sort of."
 Mulder pulled out his notepad, pretending to write things down.
 "She moved with these jerky movements, like something kept surprising her,
creeping up from behind her. And her lips kept twitching."
 "Um-hmm," Mulder said. "What was she wearing?"
 "What?"
 "What was your mom wearing?" Mulder asked, keeping his tone light. *Just a
couple boys talking.*
 "I don't know," Jason said in a pitch approaching plaintive.
 "That's odd. You seem to remember lots of other stuff very clearly."
 "So I don't remember what my mom was wearing. I really don't notice what my
mom wears."
 "And this odd behavior you described continued during the basketball game?"
 "Yeah. And then she pulled the gun."
 "Had you seen the gun before?"
 "No," he said, and then--a fraction of a second too late--shook his head.
 Mulder glanced toward Doyle.
 "Anne didn't have a gun that I *knew* of," he said. "Agent Mulder, are you
going somewhere with this? I'm unsure about the tone of your questions."
 Scully entered the room, holding a water glass, just in time to hear Doyle's
comment. She shot Mulder a puzzled look.
 "Thanks, Dana," the boy said, giving her a crooked smile, reaching up for the
water.
 "You're welcome," Scully said, retaking her seat on the edge of the bed.
 "Did you love your mom?" Mulder blurted.
 "What kind of a question is that?" Doyle thundered.
 "Mulder..." Scully's voice was half confusion, half command.
 But the boy's face remained blank for a second, and then Mulder *knew.*
 *Goddammit, you 12-year-old son-of-a-bitch.*
 *You did it.*
 Mulder looked down at the pendant, dull silver gleaming against the red T-
shirt. The awkward double-knot appeared grizzled with age, but seeing it
triggered a flood of memories.
 *Fox, give it back! It's mine!*
 He could remember feeling the rough leather against his fingertips as he
began to cut it, the cold metal lying in his palm.
 *You know something about Samantha as well.*
 Jason had turned toward Scully, tears exploding from his eyes. "Why is he
doing this?"
 
 *Why* are *you doing this?* Scully wondered.
 Mulder's whole body appeared to thrum like a high-tension wire. His eyes had
turned to mica, almost flint, shiny yet hard, drilling into the crying child
on the bed.
 Scully kept her hand on Jason's ankle, squeezing a little. She wanted to pick
him up and hug him, let him cry into her shoulder again. She squeezed just a
little harder. *It's OK.*
 And then a dark realization spread through her mind: *Is Mulder using me as
the good cop?  If you're playing on my maternal instincts to elicit some form
of... of... fucking* confession, *Mulder, I swear to God I'll--*
 "Where'd you get the pendant?" Mulder asked, cutting off her thoughts. Scully
raced to shift gears and keep up. Normally, conducting an interrogation with
Mulder was productive, sometimes exhilarating, because they perfectly
complemented one another. She was the Listener, sitting and smoldering in the
corner while Mulder played the Questioner, machine-gunning suspects with a
quickly-shifting variety of questions. Sometimes she played good cop to
Mulder's bad. But she secretly enjoyed the reverse; making sure the perp saw
her pistol, as Mulder ratched up the anxiety by looking over his shoulder at
her and implying that *buddy, if you don't cooperate, she'll shoot us both
between the eyes.*
 She often could guess Mulder's next question. Under her shoes, she could feel
 the trail he was blazing.
 *We dance well together,* she often thought.
 But not today. Today, he was stepping all over her feet.
 A confused look passed over Jason's face, and he glanced over at Scully.
 *Help,* his eyes seemed to beg.
 "Look at me, Jason," Mulder commanded.
 The boy obeyed. "I don't know. I think I've always had it."
 Mulder looked over at Doyle.
 "I don't know, Agent Mulder. What does it matter?" the father shot back. His
hands were bunched into shaking fists.
 "Why do you wear it?" Mulder returned to his inquisition.
 "Because I *like* it." Jason's voice grew shrill.
 "Do you know what it means?"
 "It means, 'protected by God,' I think. That's what Mom told me."
 "Your mom wore a cartouche. Do you know what that one means?"
 "No. Neither did she. She just liked it."
 "Where'd she get it?"
 "I *don't know,*" Jason screamed.
 "Agent Mulder--" Doyle roared.
 "Mulder," Scully warned. *This is going too far.*
 "What do you remember about being taken away?" Mulder leaned over the bed,
placing each of his hands on either side of the body, thrusting his face
within inches of Jason's.
 And blocking Scully's view.
 *Goddammit, what's going on?*
 "I don't remember anything. I remember falling asleep in my bed one night and
waking up in the hospital."
 "I don't believe you," Mulder said quietly.
 "That's it. I want you out of here," Doyle said.
 Scully stood and put a hand on her partner's shoulder. "Mulder," she said,
quietly but with steel.
 Mulder leaned closer. "I know who you work for," he said, almost in a
whisper.
 *That does it.*
 "Agent Mulder," she shouted, clamping both hands around his shoulders and
bodily lifting him up. "May I speak with you outside?"
 Mulder kept staring at the boy, breathing a little heavily.
 "*Now,*" Scully ordered.
 "Sure," he mumbled, refusing to break eye contact with the boy until she had
led him into the hallway and closed the bedroom door.
 
When he felt the hands come down on his shoulders, his first thought was that
Doyle--who looked every inch a fighter instead of the diplomat he was--had
decided to dislocate both his shoulders for him, free of charge.
 But when he felt the fingernails, and realized who it was, he knew he was in
deeper shit.
 *She can kick my ass if she wanted to,* he thought as she closed the door.
And when she looked up at him, he knew she wanted to.
 Her eyes were ablaze like arc lamps.
 "What the fuck is going on in there?" she asked quietly.
 "I think he did it," Mulder said.
 "Did what?"
 "Killed his mom. Or let someone kill his mom."
 Scully's jaw went slack. "You're accusing a 12-year-old of matricide."
 Mulder took a deep breath. "Yes."
 "On what evidence? On the fact that he didn't know his *Star Wars?* If that's
the case, we'd better start driving around elementary schools and rounding up
all these murderers."
 Mulder was impressed Scully knew the difference between Alderaan and
Aldebaran, but wisely voted against expressing his thoughts about the subject.
"He's lying. Didn't you see his face?"
 "Hard to, through all the tears," she shot back.
 Mulder felt himself wince. "I didn't enjoy that, if that's what you think."
 "Then why didn't you stop?"
 "Because I want to get to the truth."
 She looked up at the ceiling, shaking her head, swallowing her lower lips.
She drilled her balled fists into her hips. "At whatever cost? The end
justifies the means?"
 "Maybe. I don't know. I know this goes beyond the bounds of common sense--"
 "Mulder, we're on a whole different fucking continent than common sense," she
interrupted.
 "But I *know.* As a Fed, as a cop, I--"
 "Wait a minute. As a *cop?* Cops deal with evidence, with *proof.* Cops don't
go around using their badges as permission to carry out personal agendas or
vendettas."
 Red spots begin to rise in Mulder's vision. "What the fuck is that supposed
to mean?"
 Scully looked Mulder right in the eyes. "What I'm saying, Mulder, is you're
beating up on a little boy because you think he's the key to finding Samantha,
but everything doesn't have something to do with your missing sister."
 Mulder's stomach contracted as if she'd hit him.
 And a reply instantly crystallized in his mind.
 *Don't say it.*
 But he did.
 "And everything doesn't have something to do with your dead daughter," he
said.
 
His words stabbed her. She even looked down at her chest, expecting to see
deep maroon blossoms rising through her blouse.
 *Take it back,* she wanted to scream.
 And he apparently wanted to, she could tell. His mouth hung slightly open and
his eyes were squinting in full Mulder-scrunch.
 "Scully, I--" he began, reaching out.
 She flinched backward. "Don't." It came out as a hoarse whisper.
 He withdrew his hand quickly--as if he'd touched a hotplate--and rubbed his
jaw, shaking his head, looking at the floor.
 Scully felt frost grow between them.
 "I didn't mean for it to come out like that," he mumbled.
 "How *did* you mean for it to come out?" She honed her voice to a razor-sharp
edge.
 He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again.
 "Paula Koklos," he finally sputtered.
 Scully sagged back against the corridor wall. *You're just finding all the
old wounds today, Mulder, aren't you?*
 "You told me that when you examined her, after her death, you had a vision of
Emily--"
 "I know," Scully spat, "who Paula Koklos is. I won't forget anytime soon who
Paula Koklos is. Or Roberta Dyer."
 "Or Roberta Dyer," said Mulder, letting the question mark hang in the air.
 *Or the church of St. Peter the Sinner, for that matter,* she thought,
shivering as she remembered the vision of Emily, reaching up to take her hand,
feeling her little fingers graze her palm.
 *It hurt so much to let her go. Again.*
 And her reward? A corpse. Roberta Dyer's corpse. With its eyes burnt out.
 "I told you what happened. You don't believe me," she said.
 "I *want* to believe you, Scully."
 "I *know* what I saw," she said, her voice quivering.
 "But you don't have *proof,*" he said.
 "Neither do you," she shouted.
 Their eyes locked.
 *We fell into that trap together,* Scully thought.
 But that realization did nothing to calm the whirlwind of fury that was
building inside her, tightening around her stomach, making it difficult to
breathe.
 *I'm so goddamn mad at* everything.
 *You get this way, too, Mulder. Whenever I point out the need for evidence,
whenever I ask you to pause and analyze, you race and hypothesize.*
 *You lash out at me when I hold you back.*
 *See how* you *like it.*
 "Neither do you," she repeated. "And if you don't find some in five minutes,
Mulder, I'm walking out of here and you're finishing this case on your own."
 She watched his Adam's apple bob as he gulped. "Scully--"
 "No. For God's sake, Mulder, when will you learn? You can't pay for the truth
with the lives of the innocent. You have no right to do so. There are no
shortcuts."
 He looked away, smacking a closed fist into an open palm, biting his lip.
"But you're being unreasonable," he finally said.
 She checked her watch.
 "God *damn* it, Scully," he swore. He lifted his fist again, preparing to
smash it into his other hand.
 He stopped, mid-swing, his eyes focused on a point in his mind.
 "Follow me," he said, without looking at her. He turned on his heel and
bolted down the staircase.
 Resigned, Scully followed, wearily descending the steps.
 *I'm so tired of this,* she thought. *So* fucking *tired.*
 The sound of cupboard doors banging open and close revealed Mulder's
position.
 "What are you doing?" she asked, entering the kitchen.
 Mulder didn't answer, intently continuing to rifle the shelves. He dropped a
box of cereal; it popped open and sprayed Golden Grahams across the tiled
floor.
 *There's a metaphor here somewhere,* Scully thought.
 Her partner threw open the final cupboard door, and grunted triumphantly. He
placed two jars on the counter with a *bang.*
 One was a squat, brown tin box. Clearly Hershey's Cocoa.
 The other was a taller glass jar with a thick red plastic lid. Taster's
Choice instant coffee.
 *Poisoning? His mother's coffee?*
 Mulder picked up the cocoa tin and moved it to the far edge of the
countertop, on the other side of the sink.
 Scully folded her arms and watched.
 Mulder stepped back and opened the instant coffee jar.
 Then he withdrew the Geiger counter from his overcoat pocket, like a magician
pulling a rabbit from a hat. He switched on the device and began waving the
wand across the coffee.
 Nothing happened.
 "I *know* I'm right," he muttered. "Come *on.*"
 The machine remained silent.
 Cold pity blended with hot anger inside Scully, creating a heavy cocktail of
defeat.
 "Mulder," she began.
 Then--loud as a rifle bolt hammering home--the Geiger counter clicked. Once.
 Scully felt her jaw fall open a little again.
 Another click.
 *Once again, he pulls belief from the jaws of incredulity,* Scully thought.
 *Pure alchemy.*
 Two clicks in rapid succession.
 "I don't know how to read this," he said, looking at the Geiger indicator.
 She tentatively stepped forward, angling herself to avoid his personal space,
reading the needle. "It's registering a very minimal amount of radiation.
 *Very,*" she stressed, "minimal."
 "But higher than background," he said in an unsure tone.
 "Yes," she agreed. "Higher than background."
 With rapid steps, he walked over, pried off the cocoa-tin lid and jammed the
wand inside.
 The agents stood in silence for sixty seconds.
 Nothing happened.
 She looked up, bracing for the arrogant told-you-so look that, curiously,
wasn't there on Mulder's face.
 "This doesn't prove anything," she said, although her voice sounded hollow,
even to her.
 "But it does prove *something,*" Mulder protested. "We're just not sure what.
At least it's means." He referred to the murder investigator's holy trinity:
means, opportunity, motive.
 Scully looked up into gold-flecked eyes that seemed to be asking forgiveness.
 "Maybe," was all she felt like offering at the moment.
 "*No,*" Roger Doyle's voice screamed from upstairs.
 A bloodcurdling, wordless shout from Jason Doyle followed a split second
later.
 Without thinking, Scully reached behind her and drew her SigSauer.
 Pistol already in hand, Mulder was racing for the staircase.
 Scully clamped her left wrist around her right, securing her pistol grip as
she moved into the corridor.
 Mulder was taking the stairs two at a time.
 She began to follow him up the steps, noticing too late that Mulder's running
 feet had dislodged the staircase's runner rug.
 Her feet shot backward as she tripped, and her knee collided with a *crack*
against the third step. Purple spots swam in front of her vision as the pain,
steely and sharp, rose from her knee through her skeleton, into her teeth.
 She heard a loud *snap,* like a tree branch breaking, except tougher, more
plastic-sounding. *A bone?* Then a wet, heavy *thud* from outside the house.
 *Mulder.*
 She regained her footing and sprinted forward.
 She finally reached the top and burst into the bedroom. A blast of winter
air, metallic and laden with ice crystals, greeted her.
 Jason's window was wide open.
 Mulder stood in front of it, looking down, outside. Both his hands firmly
gripped his pistol, holding it out to his side.
 *Where's Jason?*
 Scully swept her pistol in an arc to the right as she entered the room, in
case Mulder has missed someone in the corner.
 *Or something.*
 Nothing there.
 "Found Roger. But Jason's not outside," Mulder said, turning.
 Scully's eyes cased the perimeter of the room, settling on the closed closet
door. She glanced back over at Mulder.
 He nodded.
 On cat's feet, Scully moved to the right of the door. Mulder stood in front
of it, the backs of his calves pressed against the footboard of Jason's bed.
He adjusted his shooting stance slightly, set his jaw.
 Scully softly slid her hand around the doorknob.
 Mulder took a deep breath, looked over at her and nodded, once.
 Smoothly, quickly, Scully twisted the knob and yanked open the door.
 "Free--" Mulder began.
 The business end of a hockey stick came flying up between his legs, smack
into his crotch.
 Mulder howled, and fell backward, awkwardly, onto the bed.
 His pistol flew out of his right hand, clattering against Jason's bookcase by
the far wall.
 A blur flew out of the closet, jumping onto Mulder.
 Scully kicked the door back closed.
 Adrenaline and training flooded her veins.
 She could hear her carotid artery pumping in her neck.
 Reflexively, she took a step to the right, getting her target in profile.
 She lifted her right hand. The SigSauer felt heavy, lethal in her fingers.
 The blur wore a Bulls T-shirt and sweatpants.
 Jason screamed like an animal. She could see his incisors gleam in the pale
light from the outside.
 He raised something sharp and shiny above his head.
 *Don't let him hurt Mulder,* was the only thought that telegraphed through
her mind.
 And the rest was all Quantico, happening within the space of a second:
 Her left hand found her right.
 Her feet braced for the recoil.
 Her ice-blue eye lined itself with the P230's sights.
 She aimed at Jason's shoulder and firmly squeezed the trigger.
 At the last instant, the boy twisted his body slightly.
 Then the weapon exploded in her hands.
 
The FBI mandates that its agents use "clean" bullets, unlike so-called "cop-
killer" bullets that slice through Kevlar or explode into a meteor shower of
shrapnel upon hitting their target.
 But Scully saw nothing clean about the wound she inflicted on Jason Doyle.
 His last-minute swivel toward her moved his right shoulder out of her line of
fire.
 And placed his chest directly into it.
 The .38-caliber slug smashed into Jason's rib cage, splintering two of them
as if they were matchsticks.
 There was a slight *pop* as the bullet tore through Jason's lung.
 It then struck his heart, dead-on and in mid-pump, passing through a geyser
of thick arterial blood that seemed to spray everywhere as Jason toppled
backward from the impact of the bullet.
 The bullet continued, breaking two more ribs before it tore through Jason
Doyle's back and buried itself into the opposite wall.
 Jason fell to the floor, behind the bed.
 Scully leapt onto the bed, aiming the SigSauer down for a second shot, if
Jason was still able to wield whatever weapon he'd held above Mulder.
 The gray carpet had already turned black with spilt blood.
 A second shot wouldn't be necessary.
 She turned to Mulder, who lay half on the bed, half sprawled across the
footboard, both hands clutching his testicles. Blood speckled his white shirt,
and she felt panic scream up her windpipe, strangling her throat.
 *Please God no please God no*
 His eyes fluttered open, and softened a little upon seeing her. "Not mine,"
he wheezed, referring to the blood. "I'm... fine. Sorta."
 She sighed with relief, curtly nodded and moved off the bed, kneeling over
Jason Doyle.
 The carpet squished with blood as her knees fell onto it. The crimson liquid
was everywhere, spurts gushing from the open wound to the beat of a small
heart whose tempo was quickly winding down.
 Scully shrugged off her overcoat. She tore off her navy-blue suit jacket,
folded it and applied it to the dime-sized hole in Jason's chest, pressing
down hard, as if she could hold in his life.
 His eyes were wide as half-dollars. They flicked toward Scully.
 "Dana," he whispered.
 "Hold on," she said softly.
 "I'm sorry," he said. Tears mixed with blood and ran down his cheek.
 Scully pressed harder on her jacket. Blood seeped through, across her
fingers.
 "They made..." His breath hitched. "They made me do it."
 "Who, Jason, who?"
 "Aliens..." he said in a faraway voice. His pupils dilated, and his eyes
locked on a distant point.
 "Jason? *Jason,*" she shouted. "Stay with me."
 He blinked, swallowed, turned toward her. "Dana?"
 "Yes?"
 "What comes next?"
 Tears blurred Scully's vision. "I don't know, Jason. But something does."
 *Something must. Mustn't it?*
 "Are you sure?"
 All Scully could do was nod.
 His eyes returned to infinity. He smiled. "The light feels warm," he mumbled.
 "Jason?" she asked.
 The eyes didn't blink this time.
 For a long moment, Scully sat silent, biting her lip, seemingly oblivious to
the puddle of blood in which she knelt.
 Mulder struggled to a sitting position, still clutching his crotch. He
turned, and met her eyes. His turned light brown with large flecks of green,
the muscles around them melting, looking as if he'd cry too.
 "Scully, I'm sorry," he said, placing two fingers on her shoulder.
 Very gently, she reached up to his hand.
 Very gently, she moved the two fingers away.
 "I need to clean up," she heard herself say hoarsely.
 She stood on shaky legs.
 The next thing she knew, she was leaning over the bathroom sink.
 She couldn't remember how she got there.
 
 Mulder watched Scully leave the room, moving very slowly, as if she were
sleepwalking.
 *My fault,* he thought.
 And this time she appeared to be blaming him. With one small swipe of her
hand, she'd crumpled his heart.
 He sat on the edge of the bed for several minutes, head in hands.
 Tears began to prick his eyes.
 *When does this end?* he wondered. *When can I be normal again?*
 *When can I be normal* period?
 *The Mulder touch. Everything I grasp turns to blood. And every one I touch
cries out in pain.*
 *Father,* he thought, feeling his face contort into something ugly. *Your
curse?*
 From somewhere, he found the strength to stand.
 His... wound, for lack of a better word... didn't seem as serious as he first
thought. The hockey stick had hit his undefended groin muscle, but had only
delivered a glancing blow to his testicles.
 *No soprano singing, fortunately.*
 He took a deep breath, and felt his professional training take hold of his
body's controls.
 *Let's examine the scene.*
 Jason Doyle lifelessly stared up at him, covered with Scully's jacket. The
cartouche winked back at him, its pewter color reflecting the dull winter
light creeping in through the window.
 The humming through his nerves he'd felt when he first saw the cartouche on
the video screen that morning evaporated.
 *Back where I started.*
 *I'm sorry, Sam.*
 He leaned over and tried to untie either of the two knots next to the
pendant, but both were too gnarled and toughened by age.
 Placing his handkerchief around his hand, he rummaged around Jason's desk,
finding a pair of dull kid's scissors.
 He applied the blades to the leather, trying to gnaw through the rawhide. It
took him about five minutes to do so. He slid the pendant into his pocket.
 Gently, he pulled Scully's jacket up over Jason's face.
 He then leaned over and picked up Scully's P230, placing it on the bed.
 The tip of the silver-colored weapon Jason had brandished peeked from under
the bed. Carefully Mulder nudged it out, wrapped his handkerchief around it,
and lifted it for closer inspection.
 It looked like a sadist's syringe--a thick and sharp needle poked from a
gunmetal-colored cylinder, with a plunger at the top. Mulder thought about how
close he came to feeling that needle--that *blade*--slicing into his neck, and
shuddered as he placed the weapon next to Scully's gun.
 He turned toward the open window.
 Lying on the floor near it was a baseball bat, slick with blood.
 *Jason must've clubbed his father with the bat somehow.*
 *Then, while his dad was reeling, he threw up the sash, pushing Doyle out.*
 Mulder leaned out the window.
 Roger Doyle had only fallen ten feet.
 Unfortunately, he'd landed on the top of some wooden trelliswork apparently
erected around some rose bushes next to the house. The five-foot wooden
screens were topped by sharp, triangular points that now jutted through
Roger's barrel-shaped torso. His head hung limply, and oddly, from a broken
neck.
 Mulder looked left and right. *Neighbors?* No screams as yet.
 He hung his head and took a deep breath.
 *There's really only one call I can make at this point.*
 He fished his cell phone from his inside jacket pocket.
 
Scully closed and locked the bathroom door. She stared at herself in the
mirror, surprised at how she looked. Sunken eyes, ashen face, worry lines
breaking out like an epidemic.
 She turned on the sink taps and began to wash Jason's blood from her hands.
 *How many times have I done this in my life? Literally, figuratively...*
 When they had called her up from Quantico six years ago for her assignment,
she believed in her badge. A sworn officer of the Bureau and an agent of the
United States Government, she felt she wore the white hat and sheriff's star.
*I've taken it as my code and my purpose,* she had told a priest earlier in
the year, *to uphold the law. To save lives.*
 *To save lives.* The Hippocratic Oath. *First do no harm.*
 She remembered telling her father that during the middle of their worst
argument, the one during which she'd announced her plans to join the Bureau.
*You think you're going to* save *lives?* he'd thundered in what her mother
called his aircraft-carrier voice. *They're going to give you a gun, Dana.
You're going to* end *them.*
 *This is all because I'm a girl,* she had shouted back. This made her the
atypical Scully child; the other three remained quiet during Ahab's lectures,
but she let her mouth run. She wasn't afraid of him, although she was afraid
of what he thought of her.
 *This is all because you're a doctor,* he'd replied. *We spent all this money
to put you through medical school only so you can cut open dead drug dealers?*
 *I'll catch criminals,* she'd said.
 *If they don't catch you.*
 *I'll be serving my country,* she had continued, her voice rising. *You
taught me about being an American, about the cost of the rights we have.*
 Ahab had glowered, upset that his daughter had outflanked him.
 She had leaned over to kiss him on the cheek. *Ahab,* she'd said, *when my
forensic evidence clinches the case against a child molester or a terrorist
cell, I'll save just as many lives as if I'd been prescribing amoxicillin from
my corner office in some medical complex. If not more.*
 Ahab had looked at her with sad eyes.
 *It's not so easy, Starbuck,* he'd said softly.
 *Oh, Ahab,* thought an older Scully, *how right you were.*
 She looked down at her hands, which she'd scrubbed red and raw with the bar
of soap. But blood still stained her cuticles, her fingernails. She couldn't
get it all off.
 *So much children's blood. Jason's. Roberta Dyer's.*
 *Emily's.*
 *My skills, my badge, my gun, and I couldn't save my own daughter's life.*
 *First do no harm?*
 *All I've done is harm, and I have nothing to show for it.*
 And with that, a dam burst behind Scully's eyes. Tears, blistering hot and
thick with salt, silently gushed from her eyes, running down her cheeks in
turgid rivers.
 Her chest quietly heaved and hitched with sobs.
 Scully felt herself slowly sink to the floor. She wrapped her arms around her
knees, laid her cheek against the cold tile.
 "Oh, Daddy, Daddy, you were right," she whispered. "I'm so sorry."
 
When Mulder heard the doorbell, he jogged forward from the kitchen, peeking
through the peephole.
 Skinner's deep brown eyes, wide with ire, stared back at him.
 With a grimace, Mulder opened the door.
 The assistant director moved inside quickly and slammed the door behind him.
 He simply stared at Mulder for a moment. The cords of his thick neck stood
out in clear relief.
 Mulder opened his mouth to attempt an explanation, only to give up before
uttering a word.
 "I remember telling you to get off this case," Skinner said. "That sounded
like an order to me. Did that sound like an order to you?"
 Mulder felt a snarl erupt on his face.
 Skinner stabbed an index finger into Mulder's chest. "For the next fifteen
minutes, Mulder, you're going to do *exactly* what I say or I'm fitting you
for iron bracelets and shipping you off to D.C. central holding, where I'll be
sure you share a cell with a 230-pound man who lifts weights and wears
eyeliner. Do you understand what I'm saying?"
 "Yes," Mulder croaked.
 "What the *fuck* am I supposed to tell this D.C. detective at five o'clock?"
Skinner said, exploding in Mulder's face, his mouth fully open as he yelled, a
vein rising on his forehead. "That now, all of a sudden, his single homicide
has become a triple-whammy? And when the press gets hold of this, what's going
to happen? I'm amazed there hasn't been a TV crew outside this house.
Fortunately Doyle kept to herself and kept her address unlisted. How would you
have liked to have your little show upstairs air on the six o'clock news?"
 "I don't know," Mulder mumbled.
 "*Goddammit,*" Skinner said, venting. He stared at the ceiling for a minute,
taking a couple cleansing breaths, trying to get himself back under control.
"Where's Agent Scully?"
 "In the bathroom."
 "Is she all right?"
 "No, she just shot a 12-year-old kid."
 "I mean, is she wounded?"
 "Not physically, sir, not that I can tell."
 He sighed, rubbing a hand across his baldpate. "Where are the bodies?"
 "The father's out back, draped across a trellis, so to speak," Mulder said.
He quickly recapitulated the gun battle and his conclusions about Jason's
apparent murder of his father. "I covered him with a tarp. Best I could do.
The boy's still upstairs."
 "You remove anything from the scene?"
 Mulder's fingers closed around the cartouche in his pocket. "No."
 "You said the boy attacked you. Did he use a weapon?"
 Mulder wanted to say *no.*
 *But then they may assume Scully used excessive force.*
 "Yes," he said. "Some form of stiletto or syringe. I found some Ziplocs in
the kitchen, so I bagged it. It's upstairs on the bed."
 "Agent Scully's weapon?"
 "Ditto. Pistol, slug and casing."
 "And yours, Agent Mulder?"
 "What?"
 "Regulations," Skinner explained.
 With a grimace, Mulder unholstered his pistol, ejecting the clip. He handed
both to Skinner, who placed them in his coat pocket.
 "What's going on?" asked a voice from the top of the stairs.
 Both men looked up to watch Scully descend. She'd washed her face, but her
face still looked puffy and red, and her voice sounded wet and raspy. Her
eyes, however, blazed like diamonds, and appeared just as hard.
 "Are you all right?" Skinner asked.
 She ignored the question, stopping halfway down the stairs. "What are you
doing with Mulder's weapon?"
 Skinner's face softened, but his voice didn't. "You know this is standard
procedure for a shooting."
 "It was a clean shoot," she replied.
 "I'm sure it was. But there are two bodies in this house, one of whom's an
American diplomat. And both are connected to yesterday's very public suicide.
There will be a lot of questions."
 "And we'll answer them," Scully said.
 "Some people won't want you to. They'll stop you," the assistant director
replied.
 "Like you?" Mulder shot back.
 Skinner stepped toward Mulder, very close. Their noses almost touched in a
bizarre Eskimo kiss. Mulder could smell lunch on Skinner's breath-- some form
of tuna.
 "I want you to take your note pad," Skinner growled, "and write down every
single thing you think you touched in this house. You and Scully."
 Mulder stepped back in surprise. "Why?"
 "Why do you think, you dumbass? So I can wipe the prints off them."
 Mulder glanced up at his partner, who had arched both eyebrows at her boss.
 "Our guns won't ever make it to SciCrime, will they?" she asked quietly.
 Skinner looked from Mulder to Scully and back again. "Look, I can't do much
more to convince you whose side I'm on. You were never here. You were both
somewhere else. *Anywhere* else. And take the kid's weapon with you. It'll
probably be safer anywhere else than the SciCrime lab evidence lockers."
 "What are you going to say?" Scully asked.
 "I have no *fucking* idea," Skinner replied, looking up. "But that's no
longer your problem. I want the two of you to disappear for 24 hours. Don't
show up at headquarters tomorrow. I want to build as much distance as I can
between you and this case."
 "That's obstruction of justice," Scully pointed out.
 "Would you rather spend the night in a jail cell, Agent Scully?"
 She looked away.
 Mulder stared at his boss, trying to fathom what lurked behind his dark eyes.
 "Jesus, Mulder, start writing," Skinner shouted. "It won't be long until some
neighbor decides to play Sherlock Holmes, come over and poke Doyle's body with
a stick. Let's move."
 "I'll check the bedroom, see if I can remember what we touched," Scully said,
heading back upstairs.
 Mulder began looking around the ground floor, trying to retrace his steps.
But he had one more question. As Skinner passed him to enter the kitchen,
Mulder grabbed his arm.
 The assistant director looked down at the hand on his arm, then slowly raised
his eyes.
 "If they--and by 'they' I assume we mean our cancer-causing friend--aren't
going to come after us, they'll certainly come after you," Mulder said.
 Not one muscle on Skinner's face changed.
 "You're wasting this time I've bought you, Agent Mulder," Skinner said
quietly. "Pray that I've bought you enough."
 
<13>
En route to Blue Bluffs, Indiana
6:50 p.m.
 
Scully hefted her overnight bag and her briefcase from the trunk of the fleet
vehicle.
 *Traveling light this time,* she mused.
 *That is, if you don't count emotional baggage.*
 *Wonder how you check that,* she thought with a slight smile.
 Skinner, in full damage-control mode, had ordered her to change out of her
blood-soaked pantsuit and into one of Anne Doyle's before leaving. He was
right--she couldn't walk anywhere as she was dressed without raising someone's
attention--so she did so. But she felt like a grave-robber, her skin crawling
as she slid into an expensive, cream-colored Anne Klein outfit.
 The assistant director had wordlessly taken her bunched-up navy suit and
tossed it into a fire he'd started in the Doyles' fireplace.
 *This job makes me go through a whole wardrobe every year,* she'd thought
idly.
 From the Doyle house, she'd walked four blocks to hail a cab to headquarters,
where she requisitioned a fleet vehicle, drove home and changed into her own
clothes. She'd then driven to ATF in Rockville. Marsden was out--an arson case
in Pennsylvania had erupted over the last hour, and he was on his way
there--but he'd left instructions that she had carte blanche access to the
labs, of which she'd taken advantage.
 After that, the drive from Rockville to National Airport, in the city's
southwest environs, presented her with two new surprises.
 The first happened in the parking lot at ATF, where she dialed Mulder's cell
phone as she cranked the engine.
 "Mulder." From the background noise, she could tell he was also in a car.
 "It's me. I'm afraid I'm going to be late, if traffic's bad--"
 "You won't be late," he interrupted. "There's been a slight change of plans."
 "We're not going?" She gripped the phone tighter. *I'll go without you. I
have to know about Transgen.*
 "No, we're going. Just not on a commercial flight."
 "What are you talking about?"
 "Just go to the charter-flight terminal. We're Hoosier Air 311. Or 312. Or
sometrhing. It doesn't matter; it'll be the only Hoosier Air flight."
 "All right, I'll be there shortly." She hung up, puzzled. *Charter* flight?
 The next surprise came when she turned on the radio, tuning in a Washington
all-news station, checking to see if the Doyle double-fatal had become the
lead story yet. She braced for an announcer's breathless voice, using a
sinister voice to report that mysterious "sources" had alleged that FBI agents
conspired to contaminate evidence at the crime scene.
 The announcer was breathless, but wasn't talking about Doyle or his son.
 "For those just tuning in, the Associated Press and Reuters are both
reporting that Israel has exploded three nuclear bombs in the Negev Desert."
 *New World Order my ass,* Scully thought.
 "These detonations have been expected by intelligence officers for the past
24 hours, of course, following Saddam Hussein's nuclear test, conducted last
night in the western desert of Iraq."
 *Has it only been 24 hours?* she marveled. *It feels like it's been a month.*
 "Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, informed the United States and
the United Nations early this morning that his nation would not stand by idly
as surrounding Arab states built nuclear capabilities. The Jewish state's
believed to have possessed nuclear bombs for nearly three decades now."
 "From the White House, the President has issued a statement urging the
Israeli government to exercise restraint in order to prevent a nuclear war in
the Middle East. At the same time, the Pentagon, which has already placed U.S.
forces in the Mideast on high alert--"
 Scully withdrew her cell phone and began dialing.
 "--says it's contemplating a variety of action plans. Military sources have
told the AP that the Army and Air Force are laying contingency plans for a
massive deployment of U.S. troops and material to the region, if the Saudi
royal family agrees to cooperate."
 "Scully residence," Margaret Scully answered.
 "Mom."
 "Dana." Her mother's voice sagged with relief. "I called Admiral Hanson's
wife, but she doesn't know--"
 "The Pentagon might not know yet, Mom, this is moving too fast."
 "I know," she said, her voice distant, her thoughts with a son half a world
away.
 "Are you all right?"
 "Yes," she said, forcing a false note of brightness into her voice. "You
know, Charlie's probably safer than all of us. Surrounded by steel and jets
and Tomahawks."
 *Navy wife to the end,* Scully thought. "Yes," she said, feigning agreement.
 "Is Lisa all right?" Lisa was Charlie's wife.
 "I think so. So far."
 "Mom, I have to go to Indiana tonight, but if you need me, call on the cell
phone, OK?"
 "I'll be fine."
 Scully sighed. *You won't be* fine--
 *Is this how Mulder feels when I say it?*
 "Your father always told me this would happen," Margaret said. "It used to
infuriate Melissa, remember? All those talks about nuclear disarmament--"
 "I've thought a lot about Ahab today," Scully said suddenly.
 Her mom was quiet for a moment. "Anything in particular?"
 *How I've let him down.*
 "No," she lied. "Just how I miss him, that's all."
 
 Hoosier Air 439--fortunately Mulder had correctly identified the carrier, and
it was the only flight they were running that evening--was actually a small
Gulfstream jet, painted a horrible melange of orange and brown that reminded
Scully of the tie she gave Mulder for his birthday three years ago.
 She boarded to find Mulder already strapped in, files strewn across one of
two small tables that interrupted the 20 or so seats stretching the short
distance from nose to tail.
 He looked up and she bit back a gasp.
 *I haven't seen those in a while.*
 She suppressed a little shiver. She *liked* him in eyeglasses.
 *Smart is sexy.*
 She took two fingers and pointed at her own eyes.
 "Traveling in disguise," he joked lamely. But as he took off the silver-
rimmed spectacles, he pinched and rubbed the bridge of her nose.
 *Headache from eye strain.*
 Concern floated to the top of the maelstrom of feelings about Mulder twisting
inside her--anger, frustration, desire and confusion having been the four
front-runners so far this afternoon. "Tylenol?" she asked.
 He shook his head.
 *He revels in pain sometimes,* Scully thought. *He lets it define him.*
 "Well, I wish you'd take something for it. Are there assigned seats?" she
asked.
 "Nope. Just you and me tonight," he said, jerking his chain forward. Scully
turned to see the pilot seal the aircraft door closed.
 "We'll be aloft in a few minutes, Agent Mulder. We're cleared to taxi," the
pilot said.
 "Thanks, Gary," Mulder replied.
 "What's going on?" Scully asked.
 "Skinner said hide, right? So that means commercial flights are out. And I
figured you might not want to spend eight hours alone in a car with me." He
said it matter-of-factly, without drenching the words in either pain or anger.
 She looked down at the table top in front of her. The aircraft began to roll.
 "So I called Senator Matheson," Mulder continued, in full-tilt storytelling
mode--only the monotone was missing. "Because I remember he knows this
congressman from Indiana very well. They serve together on one of the joint
committees, maybe Tax, I forget which one. The congressman's family is the
majority shareholder in Hoosier Air. He made a phone call, and we get first-
class seats."
 He was nearly rambling now, the words tumbling over each other pell-mell.
 *Why is he so nervous?*
 "Scully," he continued without a breath, "I'm so, so sorry about today." He
looked over at her, eyes light-tan with flecks of gold.
 *A new look for Mulder,* she thought. *Apology eyes.*
 "Two apologies from you in one day," she said. "That's almost an X-File."
 She meant it as a joke, but her voice seemed to freeze in the air. He winced.
 *I didn't mean for it to come out that way...*
 She felt the aircraft tear itself away from gravity and rise from the runway,
an ethereal, almost sexual, feeling that made her stomach flutter and her body
buzz.
 *Mulder makes me feel like this sometimes.*
 *Sometimes...*
 She took a deep breath. She'd rehearsed this sentence in her mind during her
entire time at the lab in Rockville, but the words still felt foreign as they
crossed her lips.
 "I'm sorry, too," she said, barely audible over the jet engines. "But I think
we need some time away from one another."
 He turned away and looked out the window.
 "Mulder."
 He ignored her.
 "Mulder, look at me. *Please.*"
 "I understand," he mumbled.
 "I don't want you to understand *your* way. I want you to understand *my*
way."
 Now he faced her. His eyes swam with clouds that eclipsed his traditional
piercing look. She reached across the aisle, grasping his hand, letting her
fingers trace the lifelines in his palm.
 "Do you remember..." She broke off, chuckling. "Our lives are full of do-you-
remembers. As if we forget. Do you remember Chattanooga?"
 He nodded. "The field where I died."
 "Allegedly."
 "Probably."
 "Anyway," she continued. "You asked me if I would change anything about the
four years we'd been together."
 "You said you wouldn't change a day." He smirked. "Except for the Flukeman."
 "I meant it," she said, looking at their clasped hands. "Not a minute, not a
second. If you believe anything, Mulder--in this world or any other--you must
believe that. And that's why today scared me."
 He squeezed her hand gently.
 "We've been through so much together that we know the location of every
wound, every scar on each other's bodies," Scully continued. "And today we
struck at them. With one sentence, you neatly sliced through all my emotional
armor. And I did the same to you. And we both spoke the truth, didn't we? I
know Emily clouds my objectivity every day, although I don't want to admit it.
And you know Samantha does the same to you."
 He nodded.
 "And when we can't lash out at these... people..." she spat, "who have done
this to Emily and Samantha, who are doing this to *us,* then we lash out at
whoever's available. Skinner most often. Sometimes each other."
 She felt his arm muscles grow rigid. She found his eyes.
 "We need some time to heal. To classify and categorize our feelings," she
said, trying to get a smile. It failed. "To protect ourselves against
ourselves."
 "What if we discover we're more intact apart rather than together?" he asked.
 The question felt like a medicine ball on Scully's soul.
 "I guess," she said, "that's a risk we'll have to take."
 He dropped her hand clumsily and sat back in his seat, closing his eyes.
 *He doesn't like this at all.*
 "Mulder..." she began.
 "What did Doyle's blood work reveal?" he asked quietly.
 Scully felt the door slam between them.
 *Don't, please, Mulder. Don't leave me on this roller coaster.*
 "Whatever," she mumbled. She bit her lip and opened her briefcase,
withdrawing a file. "Neither Roger Doyle's nor Jason Doyle's blood contained
mutated red blood cells or displayed oxygen deprivation symptoms."
 "So it was normal."
 "The *blood* was normal. Jason's *DNA* isn't." Scully handed Mulder two
pieces of film, both clear except for a number of lines across each,
resembling bar codes from grocery products.
 "What am I looking at?" he said.
 "The top film is a very quick-and-dirty PCR on a sample of Jason's blood that
I took before we left. ATF ran this double-time in the lab, so several
mistakes could've been made," she warned. "The second film is a PCR ran on
Jason's blood four years ago."
 Mulder looked over, confused. "Why would anyone need to run a DNA test on an
eight-year-old?"
 "To confirm paternity," she said.
 "Who ordered it?"
 "Roger Doyle."
 "Why a PCR?"
 "I agree, a little extreme for a paternity test. Unfortunately, the three
people in the best position to answer that question have died."
 "So Roger Doyle is or isn't Jason's father?"
 "He is," Scully said, feeling a headache begin to kick at the back of her
eyes. *Maybe I'll have that Tylenol I offered him.* "According to the *first*
PCR. The newest one, however, indicates significant changes in Jason's DNA."
 Mulder juxtaposed one film over another and held them both up to the aircraft
light. "They're different here... here... and here."
 "Again, it could be an error at ATF."
 "If it's not an error, can you explain it?"
 "No," Scully said flatly.
 "Maybe a mutation?"
 "Mutations occur generationally. You can't simply alter someone's existing
DNA codes."
 "Or at least we don't know how," Mulder persisted.
 "Mulder, nature has laws, and some of them are pretty stringent. This isn't
like running a red light. Breaking this one could turn genetics as we know it
upside down."
 "But one could argue that while Jason Doyle was missing, something happened
to him that caused a mutation in his DNA."
 "Or this boy isn't Jason Doyle," Scully countered.
 "Possible. And if this second DNA isn't in error--"
 "There's no way Roger Doyle could be Jason's father," she said with a nod.
 "Wow." Mulder shook his head in amazement. "How about the instant coffee?"
 "That's even stranger," Scully began. "Analysis of the coffee found
microscopic metal filings, approximately one part per ten million, throughout
the grounds."
 "What kind of metal?"
 Scully handed Mulder a sheet of paper littered with numbers.
 "I can't read this," he protested.
 "Neither could ATF," she said. "Apparently it's an unknown metal. And it has
some slight radioactive decay."
 "Higher than background?"
 "Higher than background."
 "And the weapon?" Mulder was apparently ticking items off a list in his mind.
 "The syringe was empty," Scully said. "But it did contain trace elements of
some acidic compound. And when I say trace, I mean very, very small amounts.
Total retained was about a microliter."
 "What kind of acidic compound?"
 "Nothing I or ATF could quickly identify. It is greenish in color. I've
placed it in a sealed evidence locker." She paused for breath. "Your turn."
 "Hmmm?"
 "Did you go through the information Frohike sent on this informant at Pinck?"
 Frohike's E-mail had been waiting for her at work; before she left for home
and Rockville, she'd forwarded it to Mulder's queue.
 "Oh. Yeah. Here are the highlights." He rummaged through his papers and
presented her a laser-printed sheet.
 Her heart sank faster than her eyes could descend the page.
 "This guy now runs a carousel at the county fairgrounds?" she asked.
 "And the Ferris wheel. Don't forget the Ferris wheel," Mulder said.
 "For God's sake, Mulder, he was a *janitor.*"
 "Scully, executive vice presidents often don't leave to become paranoid
conspiracy theorists. That's not a good career move."
 She kept reading. "Fired for drinking on the job?"
 "If he offers you a free ride on the merry-go-round," Mulder said, "say no."
 She looked at the long list of crimes of which Frohike's so-called informant,
Miles Seligman, had accused Pinck: price-fixing, environmental-law violations,
illegal export of strategic materials and assets, income tax fraud.
 "This looks hopeless," she mumbled.
 "Do you want to go into Pinck and confront people there?"
 She thought he was being sarcastic, but when she looked up his face was
placid.
 "No," she said, closing her eyes and rubbing her temples. "We don't have
enough for that yet. We'll have to start with Miles." She began packing her
briefcase back up. "Anything else?"
 Mulder thought for a moment. "Do you want to see the cartouche?"
 Scully was surprised to discover she did. "Yes."
 He dug into his pants pocket, retrieving it and handing it to her. It was a
two-and-a-half inch tall silver oval, with a slightly longer bar along the
bottom. Three hieroglyphs were suspended in the oval's center, attached to the
edge with exquisite metalworking--no sloppy soldering or melt marks.
 "If it's Sam's, who gave it to her?" Scully asked.
 "Don't know. I left a message for my mom. Maybe she can tell me."
 *Ask her no questions, she'll tell you no lies, Mulder.* But she kept silent.
 "It's pretty," Scully said. "It's not authentic, though?"
 Mulder shook his head, reaching over to point to the top two glyphs--a hook-
shaped curve and a bird that looked like a vulture. "These are the two symbols
for 's' and 'a'," he explained. "But DeForest says the Egyptians used a duck
to represent the combined sound. So this is likely a tourist knock-off.
Airport gift."
 "And the owl at the bottom is..."
 "M," Mulder said.
 "But the cartouche that Anne wore..."
 "That might be the real thing." Mulder withdrew a photograph of Anne's
cartouche, blown up by the FBI photo lab.
 Scully closely examined the picture. This cartouche was a solid oval, with
the glyphs engraved into it. There were twelve rows of symbols, each holding
eight glyphs. The odd-numbered rows used varying combinations of only two
symbols: vultures and owls. The even-numbered rows restricted themselves to
different permutations of dogs and snakes.
 "DeForest isn't sure what this is, because it doesn't have syntax--or
spelling even. Just gibberish." Mulder said. "He's seen this type of cartouche
before, though, in temples to the Ogdoad."
 "The Ogdoad?" Scully tried to keep her eyebrow in check and failed.
 "Egyptians from the city of Hermopolis worshipped the Ogdoad, the 'Group of
Eight' gods, whom they believed created the world," Mulder said.
 "But there are only four symbols."
 "An irony that's perplexed Egyptologists for centuries, apparently."
 Scully felt a smile rise on her face, watching Mulder's eyes crackle with
energy as they scanned through his memory and imagination, trying to turn
evidence into argument into proof.
 *Alchemy.*
 *We dance well together. We're intact* together.
 *I don't want to be alone, Mulder.*
 She began to reach across to Mulder, but he was unbuckling his seat beat and
standing. He offered an embarrassed smile and jerked his head toward the
lavatory at the back. "Too much coffee," he muttered.
 She nodded.
 When he was halfway back, he called for her. "Scully?" She twisted around in
her seat. He was standing in the aisle, looking at the floor. "When we get
back, I'll put in for two weeks' vacation around the holidays. I have it
coming, and... maybe I'll go find myself."
 *No, don't,* her mind and body screamed.
 "OK," she heard herself whisper.
 He looked up for an instant, gave her a wry smile and continued toward the
bathroom.
 *The last time you went on vacation things ended badly,* she thought as she
turned back to her files.

<14>
FBI Headquarters
8:23 p.m.
 
 Skinner smelled the smoke before he heard the knock. He hung up the phone.
 "You know," he said without looking up from his paperwork, "I *thought* it
was really cold outside. So can you tell me the exact temperature at which
hell freezes over?"
 The gray-haired man sauntered in and casually sat in the chair Mulder usually
occupied. "An ashtray?"
 "The rules haven't changed since you died," Skinner said.
 "Indeed." The man reached across to Skinner's desk and picked up his coffee
mug. He tapped a long ash into it. "You don't seem too surprised to see me,
Walter--may I call you Walter?"
 "No."
 "Anyway, *Walter,* it's not every day a dead man walks into your office."
 "You know what they say about bad pennies," Skinner said. "They just keep
turning up. Besides, after you've read enough of these--" he held up a candy-
striped X-file-- "there's really not too much that can surprise you."
 "Pulp fiction, those," said his guest, waving the cigarette toward them.
 "But you're the star of so many."
 "A reluctant one. Although I see you've become quite talented at fiction
yourself." The man reached into his jacket pocket and tossed a couple sheets
of paper at Skinner.
 They were laser-printed copies of *The Washington Post's* web site.
 *Suicide mom's husband, son found dead in G'town,* read the headline.
 "Oh, but this is your handiwork," said Skinner, tossing it back. "See?
'Suicide mom.' Your lie. The D.C. police may yet conclude she was murdered."
 "Walter, come on. Listen to this: 'Police sources say detectives have
assembled evidence that points toward Doyle and his son interrupting a
burglary.'"
 A broken window, some rifled desks, and a favor owed by a D.C. chief of
detectives. Skinner hoped that would add up.
 "So Doyle tries to stop the robbery by leaping out a second-story window onto
a picket fence? Please," said his guest. "It sounds like a bad television
movie you'd see on Fox."
 "Did you rise from the dead just to critique newspaper stories--true
newspaper stories, by the way?" Skinner asked.
 The man stubbed out his cigarette in Skinner's cold coffee and lit another.
"Where are Agents Mulder and Scully? I know they were in that house at some
point today."
 "No clue as to either point."
 "None?"
 "Whatsoever."
 "A shame," said the man, drawing deeply on his Morley.
 "Why are you looking for them?"
 "I wasn't, but I'm afraid they're looking for me. Rather indirectly. And I
can't have that, Walter, not right now."
 "Wish I could help."
 "You could," the man said, an edge emerging to his voice.
 "No, here you're on your own. Find a new errand boy," Skinner said tightly.
 "You don't understand. There's a power struggle going on, Walter."
 "Big surprise. Politics is universal, isn't it?"
 "Eventually, there may be new leadership among the people who employ me."
 "Yeah, in two years. We'll have an election."
 His guest snorted. "As if that man will control anything important. Look back
through history, Walter. You can argue for centuries over who was right and
who was wrong. But it only takes a few minutes to determine who *won* and who
*lost.*"
 "And you're going to let me join the World Series team?"
 "Let's put it this way," said the smoking man. "I won't let the losing team
pick you first on the playground."
 "I'm already on the winning team," Skinner said through gritted teeth.
 His guest chuckled. "How melodramatic. Go ahead and wrap yourself in the flag
as tight as you want, Walter. You were there at the beginning. Your hands are
just as dirty. You've got several codewords attached to your file. Tailwind?
Lucky Horse? Ring a bell?"
 Skinner smiled and shook his head. "Go ahead and destroy me. If you can."
 "Bravado. Good for a Marine. Bad for a survivor." The smoking man stood,
putting out his second cigarette and handing Skinner the butt-filled mug. "You
leave me no choice, Walter, but to take care of Mulder and Scully on my own."
 The assistant director replaced his smile with a sneer. "Touch either of them
and I'll hurt you," he hissed.
 The smoking man smiled, tapping out another cigarette and holding it up.
 "These will kill me before you will," he said. He walked into Skinner's
pitch-black anteroom.
 "Agent Spender, by the way, is doing fine. He's shaping up to be a class-A G-
man," Skinner taunted.
 There wasn't a word from the darkness in the anteroom.
 "I have to say, it's hard to see the resemblance. He's youthful, vigorous,
somewhat optimistic and doesn't smoke. Let's hear it for recessive genes."
 The smoking man struck a match. Every wrinkle on his face caught the light.
 "Should I give him your regards?" Skinner asked.
 His guest lit his cigarette, and became just a pale orange dot in the
darkness.
 "I'll be in touch," said the smoking man, and he disappeared.
 
<15>
Happy Pines Motor Lodge
Decatur Falls, Indiana
12:55 a.m.
December 3
 
He figured it was a dream--the deja vu gave it away, the feeling that he'd
seen this feature presentation most nights over the past few weeks--but the
oil still trapped him. He couldn't wake up.
 "Take my hand."
 Scully stood on the ledge above him. Tonight she was dressed in his Knicks
jersey and Quantico-issue jogging shorts, for some reason.
 The slimy oil had begun to swallow him. He could feel it seeping into his
skin, lapping at his chin.
 "*Mulder,*" she said, louder this time. "Let me help. Take my hand."
 He reached out, took it, yanked and pulled her in.
 She began to drown. He watched her swallow some of the oil, trying to spit it
out. She began to cough as it trickled into her lungs. As usual, he could only
watch, using every muscle he could find to keep his mouth above the surface of
the deadly pool.
 "Mulder," she coughed.
 He began breathing faster. This was different.
 "Mulder," she sputtered, finding his eyes with her blue ones, glazed over
with tears. "Mulder, you've killed me."
 He felt his chest began to heave with hyperventilation. He tried to thrash
about in the oil, do something to help, but the slime remained heavy as molten
lead, inexorably pushing him down.
 "*No,*" he screamed. "*No, Scully, no--*"
 He sat bolt upright in a sweat-sopped bed, his lungs clawing for air.
 His throat felt raw, scratchy.
 The hiss and crackle of the television's white noise comforted him.
 *OK, Mulder, let's put that psychology doctorate of yours to work,* he
thought. *Where in the fucking hell do you want to start with this one?*
 He let himself fall back against the pillow. His pulse pounded in his ears,
deep as a bass drum but fast as a snare.
 *This is the old dream.*
 "Nothing's as bad as the old dream," he muttered to himself.
 But he realized how false his voice sounded saying that, and knew it was
worse.
 He remembered the blue boxes Laura used to bring home, right before the end.
 "Nytol?" he remembered reading, stunned that he'd done something to make her
want to drug him.
 "To help you sleep," she'd said, exasperated.
 "I don't need any help sleeping," he said, angrily tossing the box into their
kitchen waste can.
 She began to cry.
 "You always go on about wanting the truth," she said. She wasn't hysterical
at all; her voice was level. And ice cold. "So here it is, Fox. I can't take
your nightmares anymore. So maybe they're to help *me* sleep."
 And after that, he was alone with his demons in the dark room at night. He
punched the remote button, turning up the volume on the television. He bathed
in the white noise.
 *Maybe you're not alone anymore.*
 "No," he said out loud. "I won't. I can't."
 But the Oxford-educated psychologist inside him made a disapproving noise.
 *You know why you're having this dream. Mulder the man can't deal with
something Mulder the student understands perfectly. So let logic prevail. Just
do it, Mulder.*
 He swung his feet out of bed. He thought about changing out of his black
sleeping-shorts and T-shirt into something more presentable.
 *Don't stop. If you do, you won't go.*
 He slammed his sockless feet into his jogging shoes, tying them up.
 He grabbed his overcoat.
 He walked out the door.
 Happy Pines sat on the edge of Decatur Falls, a middle-of-nowhere clump of
modular homes and disenfranchised farmhouses that hid from Blue Bluffs--the
state-of-the-art, sport-utility-vehicle-and-outdoor-Jacuzzi-laden planned
community that lay just over the hill. Ninety percent of Blue Bluffs residents
worked for Pinck. Not one Decatur Falls denizen did, which is why Mulder voted
to stay there: no water-cooler rumors could spring up.
 *But if hell has a motel, it looks like this,* he admitted to himself. Drafty
buildings, smelly beds, and every room had a beautiful view of the center-
court parking lot. *The works,* Scully had muttered before waving good-night
to Mulder. They couldn't even get adjoining rooms; they had to settle for
opposite sides.
 Mulder briskly strode across the parking lot.
  He pounded on her door, surprising himself with his frantic *rat-a-tat-a-
tat*.
 "Mulder?" he heard her call. Her voice sounded alert, as if she'd been
waiting for him.
 "Yeah," he said, looking at his shoes, suddenly embarrassed.
 *If I hurry, I could be halfway back to my room before she...*
 She threw back the bolt and opened the door.
 Caught out, he looked up and began to speak.
 Halfway up his throat, his words stopped cold.
 Her hair was a tempest of silver and gold in his color-blind eyes, tousled
and rumpled, errant bangs spilling pell-mell in front of her eyes.
 Soft, rose-petal lips, punctuated by a beauty mark that she often tried to
hide with foundation.
 Navy-blue silk pajamas that appeared one size too big for her petite frame,
as the open men's-style collar lay bare a wide expanse of creamy skin
stretching from neck to right shoulder.
 The gentle curve of her collarbone gleamed porcelain in the moonlight. He
resisted the deep-seated--the *primeval*--urge to lean over and trace the
flesh-covered ridge with the tip of his tongue.
 He carefully looked into her eyes, as if he were about to stare into the sun.
 Without flinching, she returned his gaze with sapphire eyes that sparkled.
 And, for a moment, Mulder saw a deeper fire ignite within them.
 Something feral that sent a fiery flash of arousal through his body.
 *An angel,* he thought idly. *And maybe that's exactly what I need.*
 
Scully had learned she didn't need to fall asleep anymore to have nightmares.
 The final weeks in the hospital--when the cancer fully occupied her body--she
fought sleep. When the shadows on the wall grew long, her stomach began to
tighten and burn.
 She believed God would send Ahab for her while she slept. He did once before,
when she was in coma.
 And, as much as she loved her father, she was not ready to see him.
 One night--following a bad bout of afternoon chemotherapy which had made her
dry-heave with nausea well into the evening--her mother had turned off the
overhead lights in her room.
 "Leave them on," she'd said.
 Margaret Scully had walked over to the bedside. "You should get some sleep,
Dana."
 Four notes of fury: "*I don't want to!*" she'd screamed.
 Then she'd begun bawling, uncontrollable sobs. She remembered her mother's
face--panicked, grieved, trying to hug her daughter everywhere at once, trying
to *somehow* stop the hurt.
 They'd sat up all night. She'd finally passed out, exhausted. When she awoke
four hours later, her mother was still sitting next to her, still stroking her
hair.
 Even now, victorious over the cancer, she looked toward bedtime with
trepidation.
 She'd begun sleeping on the couch, with the television on.
 Once or twice she'd begun to call Mulder in the middle of the night--seeking
comfort in the voice of another, more experienced, insomniac. But she'd always
hung up before he answered.
 The knock surprised her less than she thought it would. And even though it
sounded like a Gatling gun, she knew who it was.
 *Who else could it be?*
 She bounced out of bed, almost jogging to the door. One hand flew to her
hair, attempting to arrange locks without aid of mirror or light.
 *Mulder's seen me covered in mud,* she chided herself. *Hell, Mulder's seen
me covered in* shit.
 But her hand kept working.
 She reached the door. "Mulder?" she asked.
 "Yeah." He sounded sad. And cold.
 She hurriedly undid the deadbolt, throwing open the door.
 Her breath froze in her lungs.
 He stood half-lit, half-silhouetted by the parking lot lamp, which gave him a
soft halo. Wandering snowflakes danced through his unruly hair.
 His five o'clock shadow had moved well past eight, becoming a rough dark cape
hiding his chin. It was magnetic. She felt herself begin to reach up to stroke
her fingers across it.
 He wore a V-neck T-shirt under his open coat that showed her his entire neck,
from the tiny hollow at its base all the way up to the tiny line in his chin.
 She wanted to slide her tongue into that cleft.
 *Would you gasp if I did that, Mulder?*
 *Would you moan--*
 She shuddered as something warm and moist deliciously cascaded through her
torso, pooling in her belly.
 And his eyes: deftly cut emeralds holding gold-tinged flames.
 Looking at her. Looking *through* her.
 *Say something to stop me, Mulder,* she thought, feeling her leg tense, ready
to take a step toward him.
 And, as always, he obliged.
 "When you go to confessional, how does it feel?" he asked.
 Scully's entire body screeched to a halt.
 *I'm thinking carnal sin and he's thinking* church?
 "What? Mulder, it's a little late tonight for catechism," she said, sounding
a little more annoyed than she felt.
 He waggled his eyebrows once in agreement, looked at his shoes, began to
turn.
 "Wait," she said, reaching out, touching him on the arm. "I didn't mean--"
 She felt his whole body quiver like a bow string, overwound and ready to
shoot.
 *Maybe he's cold.*
 Somehow she doubted it. "Come in," she said.
 He gave her a smile--thin but honest, and she'd take it--and entered. She
closed the door behind them. She stepped over to the front window, wrapping
her hands around the thick plastic-feeling hotel drapes--wincing as she
wondered why they felt vaguely slimy--and throwing them open.
 "No lights," she explained. "The overhead bulb was out when I arrived and the
desk lamp blew shortly after that. I can turn on the bathroom--"
 "S'OK," Mulder said. "Do you have hot water?"
 "You don't?"
 "That's *all* I have. Scalding," he said. "Sorry. Guess this goes beyond
budget."
 "Are you here to confess your sin of always picking the *worst* possible
hotel, wherever we go?" She smiled, hoping he could see in the poor light.
 He chuckled. "What's my penance?"
 "Ten *billion* Hail Marys."
 "Where's your chair?" he said, pirouetting in search of a seat.
 "You have a *chair?*"
 He sat on the foot of her bed, clasping his hands, looking at the floor.
 Scully folded her arms, examining the moment. Midnight visits, nervous
banter, painful half-smiles--these were all signs of MulderAngst, something
she'd been swimming through for six years now.
 But something felt different tonight.
 *Like he's taking me on a trip,* she thought. *Somewhere he doesn't go
often.*
 "Confessional," she reminded him.
 "Right," he said too brightly. Clearly he hadn't forgotten where they had
left off. "What's it like? I mean, do you feel better? Cleansed?"
 "I haven't been in a while," she reminded him, walking over, propping up a
pillow against the headboard. She sat down on the bed Indian-style, leaning
back. "But cleansed is a good way to describe it. Sometimes. Sometimes I feel
lighter when I leave the booth. Some days I don't."
 "Do you think it still works if you don't believe in God? Or--more
accurately--you're not sure if you believe in God?"
 *In one sentence, the mystery of Mulder,* Scully thought with a slight smile.
 *A man who believes in extreme possibilities--except the most extreme of them
all. And who's wearing the cross? His skeptic partner.*
 She tried in vain to analyze his face in the window's poor light.
 "It may, if God believes in you," she said. "Mulder, what is it? You didn't
come here at one in the morning to discuss comparative theology."
 "I need to tell you... some things."
 Her blood ran cold. Her nerves caught fire.
 He looked toward the ceiling--*toward God?* she wondered--and inhaled deeply,
raggedly. "And some of these things may make you angry," he said. "Angrier,
maybe. At me."
 The parking-lot light began to flicker, bathing the room in lightning
flashes.
 Scully shivered, pulling her knees up to her chest.
 "And I'm worried about..." She saw him the pale illumination from outside
reflect for a moment off his gritted teeth, and then out went the parking-lot
light, this time apparently for good, and they were sitting alone in the
darkness.
 "...losing you," he finally whispered. "And I might."
 "Do you want me to say I won't leave, after hearing this?" she asked through
a dry mouth.
 "I can't ask you that," he said.
 "And I can't promise that," she said. "I won't promise that."
 She listened to him breathe for a moment, scared to reach across and touch
him.
 "Tell me," she whispered.
 The silence grew humid. Scully felt herself hold her breath.
 "Laura and I were neighbors," he began.
 She saw his silhouette writhe a little as he shrugged off his coat. He sat
back a little further on the bed.
 "She understood me. I mean, Dave and Pete--Pete was another friend of mine,
from the Vineyard--they *tolerated* me. When I wanted to map stars or spend
all afternoon examining a rock that looked like an Indian arrowhead, they'd
sigh and roll their eyes but they'd do it, bored the whole time."
 Scully imagined a Mulder-child, an ardent explorer at ten, overturning every
rock in his backyard, pushing hair out of his eyes to examine every mystery
nature could throw at him. *Even praying mantises in trees.* Her hand flew to
her mouth to cover her smile, even though she knew he couldn't see it.
 "But Laura... when I was ten, she gave me this seashell. Purple and blue, she
found it up by Vineyard Haven, I think. Beautiful seashell." He saw his hands
move in the barely lit room, turning an imaginary shell over and over in his
hands. "I had all these questions about it. Why was it purple? What kind of
animal lived in it? Where did it come from? What had it seen? Could it see?"
His voice rose, gathering momentum and ardor. *He's still asking those
questions,* she realized.
 "Anyway," he said. "Then Sam disappeared. Shortly after that, we moved. Back
to Washington for three years. Dad had a final stint with the State
Department, they called him out of retirement."
 "For what?" Scully asked.
 Mulder shrugged. "Just another blank page in the Mulder family album. We
returned to the Vineyard three years later, but that lasted only a month
before my parents split. In 1981, Mom fled to Greenwich and I fled to Oxford,
leaving Dad alone with his pension in Vineyard Haven."
 "When you returned to the Vineyard," Scully asked, "was she there?"
 In the dark, Mulder turned toward her. *I wish I could see his face.*
 "No," he said, sounding mildly surprised at her interest. "Her dad was a
Democratic consultant, and he moved the family to Washington before the 1976
elections. We probably lived in Washington at the same time, but didn't even
know it. Dad was swimming in Scotch by then, and he... well, by then we all
had problems."
 Scully thought of the way her parents held hands, even at the end, and wished
she could give that to Mulder.
 "When did you find her again?" she asked.
 "She found me," he replied. "Shortly before I graduated Oxford, I came back
to my flat--my *apartment*--to find a letter from her. She'd finished both her
bachelor's and master's in poli-sci at Georgetown and was working as a
legislative assistant in the House. For *Representative* Matheson. By the way,
Scully, you've been kind in pretending to believe my winning personality
helped me score the contacts I have on the Hill. They were all Laura's
friends--all her *bosses,* actually--whom I bumped into at one point or
another."
 Scully gently placed another piece into the jigsaw puzzle that was Mulder. It
made her feel a little sad. *Mulder's mystery is as sexy as it is
frustrating.*
 "She'd just gone to Hilton Head, and she said she'd found another shell and
it reminded her of me and she called Dave, who by now lived in Washington too,
and he gave her my address. And it felt like old times, Scully. No one really
understood me at Oxford--one professor told me he thought I'd make a poor
psychologist but a brilliant patient. I wore my neuroses on my sleeve on a
good day and like armor on a bad one. Phoebe had pretended to understand me,
only to dissect me like a lab frog."
 Scully felt her lip twitch upward in disgust.
 "The future after defending my thesis was this big white blank, and she began
to fill it for me with her letters. So when the FBI came calling, I didn't see
Quantico as much as I saw a ticket back to Virginia, close to her. She was
waiting for me at Dulles when I arrived in '86."
 "Were you happy to see her?" *You don't sound as if you were.*
 "Yes and no. It's a little complicated," he said with a sigh. "I was happy to
see *somebody.* By then, my parents and I... I blamed them and they blamed me.
So I was alone. And she was, too. Her parents and she'd never got along, and
she was an only child. Maybe in some weird way I was the only one who
understood her. By default."
 "Who proposed?" Scully asked. She rested her chin on her knees, hugged
herself tightly. She felt pins and needles all over.
 "Me."
 "Why'd you ask?"
 "I felt she wanted me to, and I loved her. I did, Scully. For all the wrong
reasons and some of the right ones."
 "What went wrong?" It was nearly a whisper.
 Mulder sighed deeply, bent over, put his face in his hands. Rubbed his
cheeks.
 "I did," he finally resumed, "as usual. Do you remember me telling you about
the time I first met the Gunmen?"
 *One of the more bizarre stories from the Mulder Collection,* she thought,
biting her tongue.
 "I had this hallucination about aliens," he reminded her. "And even today,
the boys still think that spurred me to drive to Boston in June 1989 to have
Werber regress me."
 "It wasn't?"
 "I'd made the appointment a week before Baltimore, actually."
 Scully leaned forward, confused. "Why?"
 "I'd been having nightmares about Samantha."
 "About someone taking her away?"
 "About me killing her."
 Scully softly, involuntarily, gasped.
 "Yeah," Mulder said, turning toward her. "I kept dreaming I'd strangled her
with my belt, then tossed her body down a nearby well, over on the Galbrands'
property."
 "Why?" she asked.
 "In the dream, I lose the Stratego game," he said. "Of course, at the time, I
was knee-deep in psycho killers at VICAP. And earlier that year, I had
profiled an Ohio schoolteacher who used a leather strap to strangle children
and drop them down wells."
 "So it was only--" Scully began.
 "No," he interrupted her. "Scully, you've seen me profile. Hell, they all
start the same. White male, aged 25 to 35... and they're never totally right.
They're close. But not exact. Except this one. I nailed Bernhardt Primakov's
balls to the wall. Facial tics, fears, sexual dysfunctions, every single thing
I got right. Patterson said it was like I was inside his mind, and that made
me scared that I was inside *mine.* And the suspicious looks I always seemed
to get from my father...."
 *Rot in hell, William Mulder,* Scully thought. "And you thought Werber..."
 "Could fix it once and for all," Mulder said with a slight nod. "I drove up
to Boston one afternoon. Packed my weapon. I'd planned... if I had..."
 "But you hadn't," Scully said, shuddering.
 "That's what I said during hypnosis," he said, running his hands through his
hair.
 "Mulder, you didn't kill your sister. How could you think that?"
 "How could I think she was abducted by aliens? Admit it, Scully, you've asked
that question."
 "You've *seen* her since. She's alive."
 "I know. And the psychologist in me knows the dream is a guilt manifestation.
It's just that when I remember the dream, it *feels* like something you can't
find in a textbook, something real, with vivid colors and odd smells and sharp
edges." He stood and walked over to the window.  "All I want to know," he said
angrily, "is what *really* happened."
 He touched his forehead, slightly above his temple.
 "We'll find out," she said.
 She watched Mulder's shadow for a moment, saw the shoulders shake a little,
his arm move to wipe his face. *Is he crying?*
 If he was, he hid it when he spoke. "You can probably figure out the rest of
the story from there. My dreams disturbed Laura; she begged me to quit
profiling, said it was ruining our lives. Which it kind of was. In a way, I
proposed to her to save us both. We got married in December 1989. Then, in
1990, I rediscovered the X-Files."
 "Arthur Dales." He'd told her the story.
 "It was more than trying to find out the answer to life on other planets or
explain the catalog of unexplained phenomena sitting in the basement." He
chuckled. "Actually, it was a lot less, Scully. All I wanted to know was why
this dead man croaked my father's name at the last minute. All I wanted--maybe
all I still *want*--is to know who corrupted my dad."
 "Laura didn't," she said.
 He leaned against the window sill for a long time, staring out at the snow.
The parking-lot light flickered on again.
 "In 1991, the day before Thanksgiving, I came home-- for some inexplicable
reason, she'd chosen to move in with me, instead of vice versa, so that
hellhole apartment was our home. She was packing. We were en route to spend
the long weekend with her parents, who now lived in South Carolina, on the
coast. That was the day I'd finally got every X-File 302 signed over to me.
The day I'd won.
 "I bubbled about it," he continued. "I think I even tried to dance with her
around the apartment. It took a while to see that her face... it'd just become
this ugly scowl... and then I knew, she didn't understand me at all, not
anymore. She asked why. And I told her. Samantha. Dad. Me. She threw the ring
at me and told me to leave. I went to see the Gunmen. I was too embarrassed to
tell them what happened. In the morning, I went back and she was gone. We
divorced by mail."
 Scully watched him in the dark for a while, trying to read the body language
of his silhouette.
 *Why tell me now, in the middle of the night--*
 She got it, and the realization stung her heart.
 "How long have you been dreaming about me?" she asked.
 She could see his whole body stiffen, as if he'd been struck.
 "Do you kill me in the dream, Mulder?" she said, standing.
 His head hung. He wouldn't speak.
 She approached him, sliding her arms around his belly, reaching up, splaying
her fingers across his chest. She could feel the muscles hitch, holding back
something. *Tears?*
 She laid her cheek against his back, between his shoulder blades.
 "Dreams don't always come true, Mulder," she said. "And just because they're
the answers to questions we're afraid to ask doesn't make them the right
ones."
 He rotated in her hands, turning around to face her.
 His face was a cipher in the dark room.
 He gently cupped a hand under her chin, tilting it slightly upward.
 She felt his breath, hot against her face.
 "I understand," she said through quivering lips.
 He nodded in the semidarkness. Sadly, she thought.
 "I know," he whispered. "But Scully, there's something else."
 
He felt himself falling into her azure eyes, gladly drowning in them.
 Her epidermis--he felt it only appropriate to use Scully words to describe
her--felt deliciously soft and smooth under his fingers as he gently lifted
her chin. Yet he could feel a high-voltage current of excitement running just
underneath, thrumming through her body, thrilling him to the core.
 He wanted to pull her tight, feel how her body fit against his, find the
spots that would make her squirm, make her scream, with pleasure.
 He stared at her lips, wondering what her kisses would taste like.
 *If you do one thing right in your life,* he chided himself, *make it this
one.*
 Mulder carefully moved his right hand, placing it on her shoulder. He very
gently pushed himself away. He felt her petite frame sag a little. Her eyes
flickered with confusion.
 "I did something wrong when you were gone, when you were... taken..." he
said.
 He felt her shoulder muscles grow taut under his fingers.
 She folded her arms across her breasts, but held his gaze.
 *I will not look away.*
 "There was a woman," he began.
 For one second, he saw her bottom lip swell and tremble.
 Then she bit it, and stepped away from his hand. She looked down.
 "The Bureau put me back to work, they *ordered* me to quit looking for you,
they sent me to Los Angeles, she was a material witness to a murder, I was
protecting her... I was alone again, Scully, I thought this time forever,
and..."
 He trailed off. She looked up. Tears clung to her eyelashes.
 He wished the earth would open up and swallow him whole.
 *Keep me from hurting her again.*
 "Did she understand you?" she rasped.
 He looked at Scully's cross, twinkling in the parking-lot light.
 *That's from someone I lost,* he had told Kristen.
 *Well, I hope you find her,* he'd heard her reply.
 *I did. But maybe I've lost her again.*
 "I think she understood... that she couldn't," he said. "She was rather lost
herself."
 "Did you... protect... her?"
 He winced as he listened to Scully try to keep a bitter edge from hardening
her voice.
 "No, I failed," he said. "She died."
 Her eyes widened. "Oh my God," she breathed, walking back, sitting on the
edge of the bed. "I'm sorry."
 Mulder stepped toward her, dropped down into a kneel, looked up into her
face.
 One errant tear plummeted from her eye, catching the light as it descended.
It detonated like a bomb in his heart.
 "I slept with Ed Jerse," she blurted.
 He rocked back on his heels. *I knew it,* he thought.
 He'd known it when he'd walked--well, run--into the hospital in Philadelphia.
He'd found her in a hospital bed, bruised like the last piece of fruit at the
produce store but otherwise intact, and he let his body shudder with relief.
 "We have to quit meeting in places like these," he'd said, trying to begin on
a light note.
 She had faced away from him, looking out the window. A faint shade of pink
had crept underneath the mottled yellow-and-blue smear on her cheekbone, and
then all he'd seen was his fist smashing into Jerse's face.
 "He do that?" he'd shouted. *I'll fucking fix his other arm.*
 "I took care of it," she'd mumbled. "I don't need your help, Mulder."
 *I don't need you,* was what he'd heard, and he'd felt panic leap from his
belly toward his throat.
 He'd decided to drown that fear in anger. "Bullshit, Scully, then why the
*fuck* am I here?"
 "I don't know," she'd said in almost a bored voice. "D'you want to tell me?"
  *Was he good, Scully?* he'd wanted to ask. *Worth a trip to the hospital?*
 He'd imagined what her face would look like in bed, the sounds she'd make as
she came. He'd kicked a metal hospital chair across her room--that, at least,
got him a look and a partly raised eyebrow--and stormed out of the ward.
 When she'd shown up in the office after recovering, he'd let her have it
until she finally stopped him with a soft sentence: *Not everything is about
you, Mulder. This is my life.*
 He'd found it difficult to argue with that.
 Days later, he'd been filing some case reports and seething about the entire
episode when he found Kristen Kilar's X-file.
 *What a fucking hypocrite I am,* he'd thought, self-loathing seeping from his
pores like a bad odor.
 Then his cell phone had rung. She'd asked him to come to the hospital.
 He'd bought flowers along the way. Made up some dumb story as a way to segue
into an apology.
 Then she'd spoken, and his world had collapsed.
 *Like it is now,* he thought.
 "I wanted--I *needed*--to feel something. Because I knew I was dying," she
continued, watching herself wring her hands in her lap.
 Now he tipped backwards, right on his ass, as if she'd pushed him.
 "How..." he began.
 "Betts told me." She sniffled, making a small frown, apparently angry at
herself for crying.
 "He *told* you?"
 She described the fight in the back of the ambulance, shivering as she
repeated Betts' words: "You have something I need."
 And now Mulder remembered with crystal clarity.
 She'd seemed so small that night, like she'd been trying to wrap the car seat
around herself. And when she spoke, it'd been with a hoarse whisper he'd never
heard her use before. A *terrified* whisper. *I want to go home*.
 *She didn't trust me enough to tell me. Just like I didn't trust Dad enough
to find Samantha.*
 *Have I become Dad?*
 The parking-lot light outside buzzed, flickered, died.
 They sat in the darkness for a while.
 "Where are we now?" she finally asked.
 "You know how I am with directions," he said.
 "Mulder."
 He thought for a moment. Then he clambered up onto the bed, sitting on its
edge, next to her.
 Through the dark, he reached for her hand, *knowing* where it was.
 "I'd like to say I'm sorry about what I did, but I'm not," he said. "Because
it made me realize...what was important."
 She squeezed his hand, once, but that was enough.
 He lay back on the bed.
 "So how'd it feel?" she asked.
 For one panicked moment, he thought she was asking about Kristen.
 "Confessing," she quickly added.
 The room seemed to grow even darker.
 "I feel a little lighter," he said. But actually, he felt heavier, as if he
were sinking into the bed. He felt his eyes flicker back open, surprised that
they'd closed to begin with.
 "Me too," Scully said, from somewhere far away.
 Mulder felt himself drown in something black.
 But it was warm and soft.
 "Mulder?" He could barely hear her now.
 He let sleep wash over him.
 
"Mulder?" she said, turning in the dark.
 A soft, raspy snore was her only reply.
 *He hasn't really slept for forty-eight hours,* she realized.
 With a tired grunt, she dropped to the floor and began to slide off his
shoes.
 *We are such emotional cripples,* she thought. *What other couple would
mutually admit infidelity to bring themselves closer together?*
 *Couples who can't admit they're couples.*
 *Defining ourselves by guilt. How Mulderesque.*
 She moved her hands up his legs, preparing to lift them into the bed.
 *Tibialis anterior.*
 *Quadriceps.*
 *Gracilis.*
 They felt so hard, so tight.
 She gently raked her fingernails up Mulder's thighs, very slowly.
 He made a slight, contented moan, deep in his throat. She gulped.
 She felt the tips of her fingers brush the hems of his jogging shorts.
 *Go no further, Dana.*
 *But I* want *to,* whined a voice in her head.
 She felt her face contort into... a *pout?*... as she lifted her hands.
 He now lay in almost a fetal position, mostly on the far side of the bed.
 She grabbed hold of the covers she'd thrashed off earlier in the night,
gently trying to slide one corner of them from under his inert body.
 He sleep-kicked a little in protest.
 She retrieved the final corner and pulled the thick hotel-issue bedspread
across Mulder.
 He mumbled something incomprehensible.
 She crawled into bed herself, lying on her left side, facing him, pulling her
side of the covers across her body.
 He smelled wonderful: soap and showered skin wrapped around a muskier, more
animal scent.
 *I've never watched you sleep,* she thought idly. *At least somewhere other
than a hospital bed.*
 She softly brushed her fingers against his cheek. The stubble triggered an
exhilarating shock that spread through her body.
 "I lied, Mulder," she whispered. "About what I said about Ed, needing to feel
something?"
 Another little snore. She smiled.
 "I needed to feel you," she said.
 She brushed hair from his eyes, letting it slide through her fingers.
 "I called out your name," she said. "I thought that only happened in bad
movies. But I did."
 She listened to his breathing--steady, rhythmic, soothing. She felt her body
begin to gently float away, toward unconsciousness.
 "I only called out your *last* name, of course," she heard herself mumble.
 Then she tumbled headlong into the blackness.
 
He was making love to someone in a pitch-black room.
 Silently, they were coupling, moving gently, without hurry. Her body
surrounded his, warm and protective, soft and wet. Fingers soft as butterflies
fluttered against his back.
 He felt a thick, hot droplet trickle down his cheek.
 *I cried with Kristen,* he remembered.
 Their sex had begun heatedly, after he'd let her shave him, but once he was
inside her, he'd felt empty. Useless. Alone.
 *Without Scully.* And he'd started to weep.
 This felt different.
 He felt his partner use her hand to turn his head a little, bringing her lips
to his ear.
 "It's OK, Mulder," he heard Scully whisper. "It's me."
 Her voice bathed him in rapturous fire.
 Then he awoke with a myoclonic jerk, as if he'd been dropped from an airplane
into the bed.
 *What... who...*
 "Mulder?" Scully mumbled.
 *Just a dream. Nothing happened. Only a dream.*
 He looked over and saw her, eyes closed, hair rumpled, reaching out to him in
her sleep. "Z'OK. Juzz'a dream." She patted him on the ear.
 He stifled a laugh. *You'd shoot me if I told you how cute you are.* "Go back
to sleep, Doctor Scully," he whispered.
 "Mmm-hmm. OK." She was already there.
 The clouds from earlier that night--*morning,* Mulder corrected himself--had
disappeared, and moonlight streamed in through the open window, cascading
across Scully's body.
 He marveled at her long eyelashes.
 He listened to her breath skate across slightly parted lips.
 He felt his pulse quicken as he slid his eyes across her figure.
 He lost his breath when he saw a tiny nub pushing up from behind the blue
silk cradling her right breast.
 Now Mulder knew he'd shoot himself for using *cute* instead of *exquisite.*
 *If there is a God,* he thought, *forgive me.*
 He blew gently across her body, watching her nipple harden under the fabric.
 She made a soft, pleasantly surprised noise, and for a bone-chilling moment
Mulder thought he'd awakened her. But her sleep-slowed breathing continued
uninterrupted.
 Reluctantly, he turned away, shivering.
 *That was definitely a good dream. It's been too long since I've had one of
those,* he thought, feeling himself fade back into slumber.
 One of his last thoughts was *it wasn't too good, was it?*
 He felt his hand move toward his crotch with trepidation, to check, but he
fell asleep before it arrived.

<16>
Rondalay Fairgrounds
Outside Decatur Falls, Indiana
8:53 a.m.
 
 "There it is," Mulder said, lifting one hand off the steering wheel to point
through the windshield.
 Scully let her eyes follow the line created by Mulder's index finger, finally
sighting the tall, spoke-filled circle that created a slight bump in the
otherwise level prairie horizon.
 "A Ferris wheel. In the middle of nowhere," she muttered. *Only we could find
that.*
 "Well, it didn't *use* to be the middle of nowhere," Mulder said in his tour-
guide voice, the one that hung just one note away from his lecturing monotone.
"This used to be one of the top corn-producing regions in the state. Fully
operational farms littered this county, producing bumper crops season after
season until 1930, when Elijah Cooper, a fourth-generation Hoosier farmer,
decided to level off a fifty-acre swath of his property that had lain fallow
for decades. He ended up flattening a Kickapoo funeral mound. Like several
Native American nations in Indiana, Illinois and Ohio--"
 "The Kickapoo buried their dead in huge earthen mounds that were considered
sacred ground," Scully finished for him. "Are you implying that Cooper's
decision to rotate crops into his back forty--"
 "Fifty," Mulder corrected.
 "--triggered an ancient Indian curse that poisoned the fields and their new
landlords?"
 "I didn't say *that,*" Mulder said. "Although it's curious that ever since,
no farmer who's plowed seeds into a field within 10 miles of Elijah Cooper's
old homestead has managed to grow a profitable crop of any type. Curious that
Elijah Cooper managed to fall into the blades of his combine--somehow tipping
forward through the glass windshield *and* the metallic safety guard--in 1932.
Curious that frustrated farmers were willing to settle for any price, and
shortly after World War II a company called Pinck Drug swept in and bought up
most of their acreage. That land is now the Pinck Pharmaceutical compound,
Blue Bluffs and this--" Mulder twirled his hand around to indicate their
surroundings-- "which they keep as a corporate investment. In fact, the only
piece of land in the vicinity that Pinck *doesn't* own is the Rondalay
Fairgrounds." He pointed back at the Ferris wheel, now larger in the distance.
 "Mulder," she said, "have you been gone anywhere in the world where you
didn't try to find something weird or strange in the landscape?"
 "Just call me Fodor's Guide to the Fucked-Up," he said with a smile. "This is
an old X-file. Back in the 1950s, they tried to put an interstate through
here, but workers kept losing their limbs in accidents. Called in the
Indianapolis field office to see if there'd been foul play, they got wind of
the local curses, labeled it unexplained, gave it an X-number and dumped it in
the headquarters basement for me to discover forty years later."
 "But we're not solving that one today," Scully warned.
 Mulder's smile disappeared. "No. We have more important things to do."
 *Welcome to Rondalay Fairgrounds!* exclaimed a large billboard weathered
nearly illegible by age, wind and rain. The only thing new about the decades-
old sign was a recently added two-foot-high warning in blood-red spray paint:
*Private Property Keep Out. This Means You Pinck.* The billboard's faded arrow
marked a turn-off onto a dirt road that wound through a small field--which
must have served as a parking lot during the park's heyday.
 *If it ever had a heyday,* Scully thought.
 "Well, someone's been here recently. Looks like a plow's been through
sometime in the past week," Mulder said, pointing at the road, which was
relatively clear despite the three-inch thick snow blanket that covered the
rest of the land.
 "Mm-hmm," Scully agreed.
 "Something wrong?" Mulder asked as he began slowly driving the rental car up
the path toward the fairground's front gates. "You seem preoccupied."
 "Something's... different." Scully felt the words escape before she could
halt them.
 And it was true: she had awakened at around six-thirty that morning,
deliciously warm under the covers, as if she'd bundled herself up in a tight
flannel sleeping bag.
 She'd felt *safe* for the first time in a long time.
 And then she'd felt the breath, a gentle breeze against the back of her neck.
 She'd felt the soft, heavy weight of an unconscious arm draped around her
waist.
 And she'd realized that somehow, during the night, she'd slid closer to
Mulder, back against his body, as if they were spoons.
 *I could stay like this forever,* she'd thought with a lazy smile.
 But her next thought--*No you can't*--had smashed that grin into several
pieces: worry lines in her brow, crinkles around her eyes and a frown that
felt forlorn.
 *If I lose myself in Mulder--or let him lose himself in me--we'll never
finish,* she'd thought, as she'd gingerly and reluctantly slid out from
beneath his arm. *He has to keep me sharp, and I have to keep him honest, and
if we're not totally objective with one another, that will never happen...*
 Still, all morning, whenever she'd looked at him, she'd felt his hand against
her belly.
 *Different already.*
 He stepped on the brake and turned toward her. "What?" he asked.
 *Dammit, not now, Mulder. I'm not ready to talk about this yet.*
 "Something's different about this dossier on Seligman," she ad-libbed,
pointing to the open notebook computer she was cradling in her lap.
 She watched Mulder relax, tension draining from his face. "What about it?" he
asked. He resumed driving.
 With calm-sounding keystrokes, Scully began frantically paging through
Frohike's electronic documents for something "different."
 "Well, OK. Take this, for example. I read through this one article the Fort
Wayne *Journal-Gazette* wrote about him three years ago. And it makes this guy
sound like a classic whistleblower, despite his problems with alcohol. He sees
something wrong, but he's afraid to talk about it because he might lose his
job. Then he finally sees something that makes him cross over that line, the
company tries to crucify him, and ever since he dedicates his life to finding
the truth..." She trailed off, as she realized how familiar *that* sounded.
 So did Mulder. "We all should be able to find something in common," he said.
 "But he didn't *need* this job. I took his name and ran it through various
search engines on the Internet. First of all, he owns these fairgrounds, free
and clear through inheritance. Why not just sell it? Or develop it? And he
graduated from the University of Indiana with a doctorate in computer science.
*Summa cum laude.* He could've got a job anywhere in the world. So why the
hell did he become a janitor for Pinck Pharmaceutical?"
 "Maybe Pinck offered free beer on Fridays," he said.
 "And not only that," she continued, "but why didn't he file formal complaints
about any of the things he saw? He's accused Pinck of price-fixing, yet he's
never contacted the Federal Trade Commission. He says Pinck's exported
strategic materials without license, yet he's never complained to the State
Department."
 "That could involve an expensive lawyer, which would put a dent in the booze
budget," he added with a snarl, slamming the transmission into park.
 *This is going to be difficult,* Scully thought. *Drunks remind him of his
father.*
 They both got out of the car and walked toward the park. Scully looked around
in vain for the vehicle that must have plowed the dirt road.
 Mulder walked up to the large gate that proved the only interruption in a
nine-foot-high chain-link fence. It was padlocked closed and bore a bumper
sticker as a warning: *Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be
prosecuted.*
 "Charming," Scully said dryly, approaching him. "Now what?"
 Mulder gave her a confused look. "What do you think?"
 *Oh, no, we don't.* "We don't have a search warrant," she said carefully, as
if explaining to a six-year-old why he couldn't touch a hot stove.
 Mulder had already twisted his fingers into the chain links, wedging one of
his toes into a diamond-shaped hole about two feet from the ground. He began
to climb up the fence.
 "We don't have probable cause," she protested.
 Mulder paused, cocking his head as if he heard something in the wind. "Did
you hear that?"
 She cupped her forehead in her right hand. She knew this game. "Hear what?"
 "I heard someone shout for help." He had managed to swing one leg over the
top of the fence. He reached a hand down for her.
 "I didn't," she said, looking up.
 "Then you're hearing *me* call for help. Please, Scully. I need you to come
with me."
 Green wrestled with gold in his eyes, winning out, creating a pleading look.
 She was about to say *absolutely not* when she remembered how he'd felt
against her body this morning, lean and hard and so warm.
 *What if someone hurts him in there?*
 *Or, more likely, what if he hurts himself?*
 *Different already. Dammit, Mulder, how far will you make me go?*
 "Will you let me call the local law for backup? You know that's the procedure
in situations like this," she said.
 "Sure. But I doubt anyone's going to come running to save Miles Seligman."
 With an exasperated sigh, Scully grabbed his hand and began to clamber up the
fence.
 
He pretended to case the carnival park as he trudged through the snow, but he
actually spent less time looking at the dilapidated Ferris wheel and carousel
than he did sneaking glances at Scully. She kept time with his pace, talking
on her cell phone with the Decatur County sheriff's office as an Arctic breeze
from the north blew her hair back, creating a sparkling meteor shower of
silver and gold in his color-blind eyes.
 *I woke up to that this morning,* he thought, his chest tightening at the
recollection.
 Somehow, during the night, they'd rolled over and together, and he had ended
up holding her. Her hair had softly splayed across his face, smelling better
than the trace whiff of Chanel his nose could still detect in the soft skin
across the back of her neck. She'd felt smooth and lithe pressed against his
body, as if they'd been sculpted from the same stone. His fingers had burned
against her abdomen.
 He'd felt her stir slightly, and then her body had tightened from head to
toe.
 *She thinks she's made a mistake,* he had thought. *About a lot of things.
And who could blame her? A man walks into her room last night, says he's had a
dream about killing her, and she ends up waking up next to him?*
 That's *an X-file in itself.*
 He'd feigned sleep as she wriggled out from under his arm.
 And while he'd walked back to his room to collect his belongings, he'd
promised himself to behave going forward. He needed Scully as his anchor, his
final tether to reality and logic, holding him within the bounds of proof. Of
*sanity.* Injecting sex into their already complicated bonds of friendship and
partnership would be like mixing nitroglycerin into a milkshake. *Possible,
but not a good idea and definitely resulting in something unstable.*
 Yet every time he'd looked over at her today, he'd had the same reaction.
 *She's beautiful.*
 But Mulder shook off his daydreams as he saw her eyes, still staring off into
the distance, widen with concern. Then they began to swivel around the
carnival park.
 Looking for something.
 "What?" he asked her.
 She slammed the cell phone closed and turned to him. "Mulder, the sheriff
says that we need to watch out for--"
 From the far corner of the compound, Mulder heard a strangled little yelp of
surprise. Then a bark that sounded something like a question. *Who goes
there?*
 Then a deep-throated growl that turned Mulder's intestines to water.
 He whirled back toward the fence, gauging the distance. Maybe fifty yards.
 "--the dog," Scully finished in a despondent tone.
 Mulder's eyes scanned from right to left, looking for shelter.
 Maybe sixty to seventy yards to his left was the closest building, with a
door that looked as if he could slam it shut behind them.
 "Follow me," he said, breaking into a sprint.
 *And don't argue,* he silently added.
 But she didn't, probably having reached the same conclusion he did: even if
they could reach the fence, they probably wouldn't be able to clear it before
Cujo clamped his jaws around one of their ankles.
 He ran faster, dragging air into his lungs with hard breaths.
 "Why... always... *dogs?*" he heard her ask from behind.
 An Alsatian-colored blur shot out from behind the carousel and began closing
in on them.
 Mulder now knew he was wrong about the distance to the door. It felt like
*six hundred* yards. His pulse throbbed in his throat.
 The dog's barks grew more high-pitched as he smelled fear rising off his
targets.
 The door finally seemed within reach. Mulder began taking Olympic-length
strides toward it.
 He glanced behind him. The Alsatian was *much* closer. He could see the dog's
dirty-white teeth snapping open and closed as the canine yapped.
 He reached forward, wrapping both his hands around the faded-brass doorknob
and yanking.
 The door didn't budge.
 He heard a sharp cry from behind him, and whirled.
 Scully had tripped.
 "*Scully!*" he shouted, starting back.
 She looked up at him. "*Go!*" she yelled.
 The dog leapt into the air, jaws open, trails of saliva streaking backward
from its gray tongue.
 It was clearly aiming for her throat.
 Mulder watched Scully shrug out of her coat and whirl it around, letting it
catch the breeze like a matador's cape.
 She then released it.
 The coat snagged the Alsatian in mid-air, trapping it in a navy-blue woolen
net.
 Scully was already up and running.
 The dog fell to earth, baying in confusion.
 Scully barreled into Mulder like an offensive tackle, shoulder-blocking him
into the door.
 Which opened--inward.
 Both of them landed in a heap on the hard wooden floor, Scully sprawled
across him.
 He heard Cujo's yapping grow louder as the dog bounded toward the door, now
free of the coat.
 Mulder thrashed out with his feet, his heels finding the door and kicking it
shut.
 With a heavy *thud* and a yelp of pain, the Alsatian slammed against the
building.
 For half a moment he just lay on the ground, struck semi-speechless by the
sound of Scully panting for breath in his ear.
 He was disappointed when she quickly stood, straightening her suit jacket,
trying to reimpose order on hair that'd run riot.
 "Are you all right?" she said, reaching down toward him.
 *Take my hand.*
 *Don't, Scully. I might pull you back on top of me and that'll sink us both.*
 He shook his head, trying to dissolve the dream's image.
 "You're not? What's wrong?" Her voice began to grow a little brittle.
 "Nothing. You should try out for the Redskins, Scully. They could use a good
linewoman." Mulder waved away Scully's hand, smiling to show he was fine and
could pull himself upright without assistance. One corner of her mouth sagged.
*In disappointment?* he wondered.
 Mulder stood and walked to the door, peering out through its window. He felt
Scully come up behind him, standing on tiptoes to peer over his shoulder. The
dog--only a bag of matted fur and undernourished bones when viewed up
close--squatted outside, barking furiously at its two former targets. *Looks
like you missed breakfast, Cujo,* Mulder thought, extending his middle finger
and holding it up to the window.
 Scully snorted. "That's real mature. Like it knows what that means."
 But the dog seemed to bark even louder for a few more seconds before bounding
back to Scully's jacket, which it proceeded to try and tear apart with its
teeth.
 He heard Scully sigh, felt her exhale against the side of his neck. "Dammit.
I just bought that," she said.
 "Did our sheriff friend indicate how long it'd take him to come find us?" he
asked, turning back toward her.
 "He said he'd just got a call regarding a traffic accident over on Route 13,
wherever that is. He'd come looking for us after that."
 "So we could be here a while." Mulder pulled a flashlight out of his coat
pocket and turned it on.
 Comets of light ricocheted around the room, and for one panicked moment
Mulder thought he faced an army of dark-coated men armed with flashlights.
 Until he saw that the soldiers returning his gaze looked just like him,
staring out of mirrors. Dozens of them, stretching from floor to ceiling,
tilted against each other at rakish angles.
 "A funhouse," he informed Scully.
 "How appropriate," she replied dryly.
 Mulder took a step forward, toward the foot-wide gap that split two of his
reflections.
 His toes and nose bumped hard against something that felt heavy, cold and
flat. *Plate glass.*
 With a shiver, the mirror fell backwards, out of its frame, shattering with
an earsplitting explosion as it struck the floor.
 He felt Scully's hand on his shoulder, trying to turn him around. "Are you
cut?" she asked.
 Mulder wiped a hand across his face and examined it for blood. "I'm OK."
 "Let me see."
 "Scully--"
 The hand on his shoulder became a claw. He turned and shined the light in his
face, unable to see her reaction.
 "OK, then," she offered as an almost timid reply.
 Mulder played the light across the floor. Powdered glass shrapnel lay strewn
across it, like new-fallen snow glittering in the flashlight.
 A duller gleam stopped Mulder's swinging beam. He stepped forward to identify
the different type of glass.
 A muddy brown color, with a red label. A forty-ounce Budweiser bottle. And it
clearly lay between two reflections, pointing the way ahead.
 "Looks like Miles has left us a trail of beer crumbs," he said, kicking aside
the bottle and cautiously stepping forward, without incident, into the maze.
 But Seligman's taste seemed to improve as Mulder followed the alcohol bottles
through the maze of mirrors. He soon came across some green-glass Heineken
containers, followed by a squarish, marbled-glass Rumpleminze bottle. Then a
Gallo wine carafe rolled against his feet. Finally, he found a Johnnie Walker
bottle--this one obviously special, as it remained standing up, carefully
placed in its disposal location.
 The whisky bottle seemed to sit dead in the center of a circle of Mulders and
Scullies, all of whom were looking around and looking confused.
 *I bet you that bottle's there for a reason,* he thought.
 "Dead end," she said.
 "Maybe not," Mulder muttered. "I think we just don't know how to read the
trail signs."
 He used his index finger to point to the mirror at his left. His mirror image
returned the gesture.
 Slowly, Mulder moved his finger toward the glass, watching his twin do the
same. But before they met, his finger bumped into the mirror--apparently just
millimeters away from his shadow's extended digit.
 "Mulder, phone home. I thought you hated that movie," Scully said.
 He shushed her, and tried the same approach with the mirror in front of him.
 He got the same result; the fingers failed to kiss.
 "Maybe it's behind door number three," he muttered.
 "What are you doing?" Scully asked in her are-you-even-*listening*-to-me
voice.
 Mulder touched the third mirror, to his right, and smiled as his finger
 touched his doppelganger's.
 "Two-way mirror," he muttered. "So someone can see out."
 He began feeling around the mirror's seams, pressing gently as he went.
 "A door?" she asked.
 He nodded, feeling a slight give in the mirror's upper-right corner. He
pushed harder.
 "Learn this in Boy Scouts too?" she asked.
 "I got a merit badge for finding secret passageways," he said, smiling as he
felt the soft *click* of the push-catch releasing. The mirror swung open on
inset hinges. A flat, wet cold-cellar smell rose up to meet the agents. Mulder
shone his light downward, revealing a set of stone steps descending into inky
blackness.
 "No warrant," Scully reminded him.
 "Hey, when Cujo came around the corner, did you see tags on him?"
 "What?"
 "I didn't either," he continued, knowing Scully knew he had no clue about the
dog's neckwear. "I bet you he hasn't had any shots. Not to mention a half-
decent meal, poor guy."
 "That poor guy almost made a sandwich of my neck," she said.
 For a flash, Mulder had an image of her screaming in pain, and felt his whole
body seize. He squeezed his eyes closed, suppressing the thought. "We got him
on failing to license the dog and cruelty to animals," he said with less
enthusiasm. "That's enough for starters."
 Scully was silent.
 "Well?" he asked.
 "Lead on," she replied with a resigned voice.
 He let the darkness hide his smile. *You know I'm right about that.*
 The two carefully descended the staircase.
 With the flashlight beam, Mulder began to cut away the darkness. The light
reflected off the far side of the cellar, a good thirty feet away. Wires and
fuse boxes populated the wall.
 He heard a click behind him, and fluorescent light poured from above. He
turned to find Scully's hand on a wall-mounted light switch.
 "Old Girl Scout trick," she said.
 He snapped off the flashlight and looked around.
 Everything--*everything*--smelled like piss.
 Two large minitower computers sat on rickety old card tables, in front of
which sat a rusted metal folding chair. One of the computers was slathered
with Greenpeace bumper stickers. A hodgepodge of peripherals--a printer, a
scanner, some modems and other odds and ends--took up most of the space on a
third table. A rat's nest of multicolored cables linked the computing devices,
tying them together and to a hole in the far wall.
 A mattress lay on the floor in one corner, covered with an old army blanket
and surrounded with cigarette butts and empty bottles. A magazine lay next to
it. Scully walked over and gingerly poked it with her toe, turning it to
reveal its cover: *Celebrity Skin.*
 She looked at Mulder, giving him a playful half-arch of her eyebrow.
 "March 1997," he read from the cover, digging into his coat pocket and
removing a couple pairs of latex gloves. "Can't remember who was in it."
 "Well, check if you want, but *I* wouldn't touch it," she replied, taking two
of the rubber gloves from Mulder.
 Given the rather crinkly state of its pages, Mulder decided that was wise
advice.
 The rest of the room, toward its rear, consisted of several large makeshift
tables, jury-rigged by placing old doors over sawhorses. They sagged with
papers and documents, books and shoeboxes, all jumbled in haphazard piles that
looked as if they'd all spilled over at least once each. Dozens of copier-
paper boxes, full of similar items, sat underneath the tables.
 Mulder's eyes rapidly skipped around the room, looking for someplace to
start. They finally settled on the sticker-wrapped computer.
 *A PC PC,* he thought, pleased with his own pun.
 He pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number from memory.
 "Lone Gunmen," Langly answered.
 "Turn the tape off," he replied.
 "It's off."
 "The other one too."
 "OK," Langly said after a second.
 "I'm looking at a pretty beat-up PC, looks like it runs on DOS, I guess.
Seems to have--" He looked at some of the devices jacked into the CPU's rear.
"Seems to have a live modem connection to something."
 "ATM or GSM?" Langly asked.
 "Yeah, right. You're lucky I've figured out it's on."
 "What do you want?"
 "If it's talking to someone, I want to eavesdrop," Mulder said.
 "No court order," Scully warned from the back of the room.
 "Can't you guys use that thing you used the last time we did something like
this?" Mulder asked.
 "Amazingly enough, I followed that," said Frohike, who'd apparently picked up
on an extension. "You mean the Timbuktu agent we used?"
 "Yeah, but we can't get in without breaking the connection," Langly said to
Frohike.
 "Maybe we can get into the other side of the transmission. That might have
multiple entry ports, like a PBX modem or something. Mulder, what's the number
there?"
 "Dunno," the agent replied.
 "Where are you?"
 "Rondalay Fairgrounds, off Route 171, in Decatur Falls, Indiana."
 "Great. Sounds like the capital of the Land Touch-Tone Forgot," Langly
quipped.
 "We'll hack Ameritech and see if we can figure it out," Frohike said. "That
should be pretty easy. Langly's mom could hack Ameritech with one arm tied
behind her back."
 "You know what your mom can do with one arm tied behind her back?" Langly
fired back.
 Mulder hung up and looked for Scully. She stood near the back of the room,
looking intently at the right-hand wall. For the first time, Mulder noticed
something was hanging on it.
 He walked over to discover a large *National Geographic* map of the world,
taped to the stone. Scrawled across it, in red grease pencil, was a string of
twelve numbers, finished with an exclamation point.
 "International telephone number?" he guessed.
 "Don't think so," she replied in a distant tone, staring at the map.
 Mulder drank in her face. She was wearing her doctor's eyes now, cobalt and
clear and calculating. He saw her jaw muscles quiver just once, and almost hit
himself in the forehead.
 *Her teeth are chattering.*
 He began to take off his coat.
 "What are you doing?" she said, still looking at the map.
 "Wear this."
 "I'm fine, Mulder."
 "I can see your teeth chattering."
 "They're not."
 "Whatever." He finished shaking off the coat and draped it across her
shoulders, letting his fingers trace their gentle slopes for just a second. He
resisted an urge to pull her backward against him, to feel her body meld
closer to his.
 "What if you catch cold?" she asked.
 "Then I hope your rates for house calls are reasonable."
 He had hoped for a witty retort, but she'd turned back to the map, taking a
notepad out of her suit jacket pocket, transcribing the long number.
 His cell phone chirped as he walked back to the computer.
 "Yeah?" he answered.
 "Whose computer?" Langly asked.
 "Miles Seligman's."
 "No shit." Langly said with a soft chuckle. "Looks like he's one class-A
hacker. He's built himself a sweet little pipeline right into Pinck's intranet
system. Cut through firewalls like they were so much toilet paper."
 "What?"
 "Yep," Frohike said from the extension. "We're taking notes here, Mulder,
that's how good your boy is."
 "What type of data?"
 "You can take a look for yourself, if you give us a minute or two," Frohike
said. Mulder listened to a downpour of keystrokes in stereo; both Gunmen were
apparently at work.  "We're going to take a gooey--"
 "A what?"
 "A G-U-I, a graphical user interface that Pinck uses inside, and splice it
across the Unix connection that Miles is using," Langly finished. "Then we'll
cycle it back to you. Give us a few minutes."
 "Mulder," Scully called, her voice excited. "You have to see this."
 "Gotta go," Mulder told the Gunmen, hanging up and walking back toward
Scully, who was paging through a four-inch-thick notebook with wide eyes and
trembling hands.
 Mulder looked over her shoulder. The binder was full of black-and-white maps
splattered with dots, curved lines and concentric circles of all shapes and
sizes. Most of the dots were labeled in both English and Cyrillic.
 "The Russian Olympic hockey team playbook?" he asked.
 Scully flipped the binder closed to display its cover. U.S. SIOP '65, it
blared in the same red grease-pencil used to decorate the map.
 She looked up at him, biting her lower lip. "Do you know what this is?"
 He shook his head.
 "It is a playbook, but it's the one the president keeps with him. SIOP is the
Single Integrated Operating Plan. It's the rules of engagement for a nuclear
war." She began flipping back through it. "See? Moscow. Leningrad. Yakutsk.
Novosibirsk."
 "Are there codewords?"
 "No," Scully said. "Just targets."
 Mulder rubbed his chin, feeling his brain grow dizzy from spinning in
confusion.
 "Where did he get this?" Scully asked. "You can't just find them in flea
markets."
 "Well, now you have your probable cause," he said absently. He began pawing
through the other binders on the table. *SIOP 1968. SIOP 1972. SIOP 1978.*
"Looks like he's got the box set."
 Scully moved to the next table. Mulder began replacing several of the binders
where he'd found them, stopping when he saw an inch-thick, black leather-bound
book, one that stood up and shouted first edition, lying near the edge of the
table.
 He picked it up. Even through the latex, the leather felt supple and well-
used. He carefully opened it, feeling the front cover creak on the spine as he
turned a couple of the pages: whisper-thin, yellowing onion-skin, already
brittle with age and crinkling under his fingers.
 He then slowly drew in his breath.
 Bold, black hieroglyphs stared back at him.
 Gently, he flipped through the hundreds of pages. The book was full of the
symbols, accompanied with the occasional red grease-pencil annotation.
 "Mulder, these are *Russian* war plans," Scully said in amazement from the
next table. "What the hell is going on here?"
 "Maybe you better look for Egyptian war plans too," he said, handing her the
book. His cell phone rang again. He began walking back toward the computer.
 "Yeah."
 "Check it out, dude. You're live," Frohike said.
 Mulder collapsed into the folding chair and examined the monitor screen.
 "What am I looking at?" he said.
 From the corner of his eye, he saw Scully lift her head in surprise. *I
thought that line was just for me,* her eyes quietly chided.
 He winked. She smiled, but just a little.
 "The business end of one of the biggest frickin' databases I've ever seen,"
says Langly. "We're talking terabyte central here, Mulder."
 "Thing must take up a couple of Crays," Frohike added.
 "It's both in German and English, looks like," Mulder said.
 "They must've been working on the GSK merger for months," Langly agreed.
 *Name?* the pixels asked.
 *OK,* Mulder thought. He typed *Anne Doyle.*
 *Anne Frances Doyle,* the computer responded. *Epsilon subject. DOD 12-1-98.
You are not authorized to read this file.*
 "Authorize me," Mulder said into the phone.
 "Not sure if I can," Frohike said. "This lock's got all the signs of Seligman
trying to pop it too. He didn't get very far."
 "You're saying a drunk Ferris wheel operator's a better code cracker than the
Lone Gunmen?" Mulder taunted.
 "Apparently," Frohike said without irony.
 Mulder tapped the *escape* key, following the instructions to return to the
search screen. *Jason Doyle,* he typed.
 *Jason David Doyle (1), Jason David Doyle (2). Please select.*
 "Well, shit," Mulder breathed. He pressed *1.*
 *Jason David Doyle (1). Alpha subject. You are not authorized...*
 Mulder went back, tried door number two.
 *Jason David Doyle (2). Gemini subject. Surveillance records at Issac Server.
You are not authorized...*
 "Guys, help me out here," Mulder said sharply, cycling back to the search
screen.
 The only response was torrential keyboard pounding.
 *Roger Doyle,* Mulder typed.
 *Subject not found,* came the response.
 Mulder grunted. Then a thought came to him.
 *Well, why not?*
 *Samantha Ann Mulder,* he typed.
 The pixels danced. *Samantha Ann Mulder. Alpha subject. You are not
authorized...*
 *Fox William Mulder,* he typed.
 *Subject not found.*
 Disappointment pounded Mulder in the chest. *I'm not part of all this?* a
little-boy voice inside him asked.
 *William Harrison Mulder,* he typed.
 *William Harrison Mulder. Epsilon subject. DOD 4-13-95. You are not
authorized...*
 Mulder brought his first down on the card table hard enough to make the
keyboard jump an inch into the air.
 "Mulder?" he heard Scully ask from somewhere.
 He took a deep breath.
 *Dana Katherine Scully.*
 *Dana Katherine Scully,* the computer heartlessly replied. *Gemini mother.*
The green pixels burnt into the back of Mulder's cornea.
 *Mother.*
 *Click here for detailed file,* the computer offered. Mulder obeyed.
 The two Gunmen's dueling keyboards had fallen silent. Mulder laid the still-
connected cell phone down on the table.
 *Loading...*
 A picture began to materialize.
 Numbers and letters spilled into the right hand side of the screen. Scully's
blood type and medical history. *No known allergies.*
 A trace of Chanel floated past his nose, and he knew she was now standing
behind him.
 The bottom-right quadrant of the screen filled with a long string of letters:
A's, T's, C's and G's.
 "DNA," he heard her whisper.
 The picture scrolled in, and began to swim into focus.
 It was an overhead shot of Scully, in a white hospital jersey, lying in an
autopsy bay.
 Mulder felt his fingernails dig deeply into the flesh in his palms as he
looked closer.
 She had been strapped down with thick, black belts.
 Her eyes were closed; she was apparently unconscious.
 *Harvested, 94.1%,* read a small box at the bottom of the screen. *Viable,
30.9%. Successful to date: 0.0%.*
 *What in the* fuck *could be successful about* this? Mulder wanted to scream.
 Her skin looked almost grey; her hair seemed slick with sweat, plastered to
her forehead. Mulder found himself reaching out and touching the screen.
 *My fault.*
 He looked back at Scully, who was staring at the screen, biting her lip. Only
her nostrils--flaring open and closed in a rapid rhythm--betrayed the fact she
was anything but calm.
 "How did you find this?" she asked flatly.
 Mulder responded by hitting the escape key twice, taking her back to the
search screen.
 She looked at it for only a minute before speaking. "Emily Sim," she croaked.
 *Oh, God, no.*
 "Scully--" he began.
 "Do it, Mulder," she said through gritted teeth.
 "I don't think--"
 "Or I will."
 Mulder looked up at her. Her blue eyes looked almost gray. But they were on
fire.
 *Emily Sim,* Mulder typed with loud, angry keystrokes.
 *Emily NMI Sim,* the computer spat back. *Gemini failure. Code 3TF. DOD
1-3-98. Click here for autopsy photos.*
 Mulder looked back. Scully's jaw looked solid as stone, yet it shivered just
a little.
 "Click," she whispered.
 He did.
 The picture loaded, a multicolored blur at first, but clearing as the pixels
fell into the proper ranks and files.
 Another overhead shot of an autopsy bay.
 But this was of Emily Sim.
 *Her hair looks like Scully's,* Mulder thought. *Silver and gold.*
 Emily's chest had been cracked open with a Y-incision.
 Some of her internal organs had been removed, leaving yawning, desolate
cavities.
 Long black fibers curled around her heart, her lungs. *So many of them,* he
thought. *Tentacles that choked the life out of her...* Mulder tasted acrid
bile at the back of his throat. He felt waves of acid break against the walls
of his stomach.
 He remembered the church, the gunmetal eyes Scully'd laid on him for only a
second before she'd turned back to the coffin.
 *There is evidence of what they did,* she had said.
 Of course, there hadn't been. They'd even stolen Emily's body, replacing it
with a coffin full of sand.
 But he couldn't watch then as she opened the coffin.
 He couldn't watch *now.*
 He turned back toward her. Her eyes glistened.
 "Scully," he breathed.
 "I'm f--" she began.
 He *felt* something snap inside him.
 "*Don't say it!*" he roared.
 Her eyes widened and her jaw went a little slack.
 "Can't you be honest in front of me?" he blurted.
 Now her eyes narrowed. "I'm nothing but honest in front of you."
 "You're nothing but *fine* in front of me." He let his tongue uncoil around
the fourth word, like a serpent striking.
 "If I hadn't walked over, would you have told me about any of this?" she
asked, leaning forward, burning Mulder with accusing eyes.
 "No, probably not."
 "To *protect* me," she said with a sneer. "I don't want to be protected. I
just want to know who did..." She gulped. "Who did that..." She pointed at the
screen. "To my daughter..."
 "And I don't?"
 "She's my daughter."
 "And you're--" Mulder began.
 He hung in mid-air, looking back at the cliff from which he'd leapt.
 Both Scully's eyebrows went airborne.
 "--her mother," he awkwardly finished, "but that doesn't mean you have to
suffer alone. Except you don't *trust* me enough to help."
 "I trust you with my life!" Scully shouted.
 "But you don't trust me with your heart," he shot back.
 She took a step backward. Her eyes fell with a crash to the floor.
 "Mulder," she said in a small voice, "that's undoubtedly the cruelest thing
you've ever said to me."
 *Whatever,* he thought. *I can't win.* He turned back to the computer,
pounding the *escape* key.
 "Mulder," she said quietly.
 "No," he rasped.
 *Walter Skinner,* he typed.
 *Walter Sergei Skinner,* replied the computer. *Epsilon subject. You are not
authorized...*
 He could hear Langly and Frohike chattering on the cell phone. He picked it
up.
 "*Fuck.* No, shut them *all* down," Langly yelled.
 "What?" Mulder said, rubbing his temples.
 "Mulder? *Mulder.* Where the *fuck* have you been?" Frohike asked. "Pinck's
shot a feedback-loop virus back through the connection, it's blowing out our
systems."
 "What?"
 "They're on to you. Get out of there," Frohike yelled before hanging up.
 Mulder closed the phone, head spinning.
 "Mulder," Scully insisted.
 He shook his head. *What was going on?*
 "Mulder," Scully said, more tightly this time. "We're not alone."
 His spine turned to ice.
 Slowly, he turned around in the chair.
 Scully looked back at him, head held high on a ramrod-straight neck.
 Her back was to the stairway.
 Her hands were in the air.
 At the foot of the steps stood a tall, black-beared man with thick glasses, a
deerstalker cap and a threadbare overcoat.
 He held an ancient shotgun in his hands. The tip of its long, heavy barrel
rested against the back of her skull.
 Mulder slowly raised his hands. "Mr. Seligman," he started.
 "You've ruined *everything,*" Seligman slurred loudly, with a sob in his
voice.
 Even from the distance, Mulder could smell the potato tones of cheap vodka
wafting from every one of the man's pores.
 "*Everything,*" Seligman repeated.
 He pumped the shotgun to load it. Scully closed her eyes.
 "*Everything!*" he shouted.

<17>
The gun barrel felt like a heavy and lethal circle drawn on the back of her
head.
 She tried to swallow but couldn't. Her throat was bone dry, painted with a
thick paste.
 The physicist inside her knew what would happen if Seligman pulled the
trigger. The force of the explosion itself, expelled through the barrel, would
be enough to shatter her skull as if it were a porcelain doll's head. The shot
from the shell would then shred her exposed brain, turning her thoughts and
ideas and dreams into lifeless gray liquid.
 She watched Mulder's Adam's apple dribble up and down like a basketball as he
swiveled in the chair, slowly raising his hands.
 "Don't hurt her," he said quietly.
 "Why'd you have to do this?" Seligman almost sobbed, his drink-addled vowels
tripping over one another. "Who are you?"
 "What did we do, Miles?" Mulder spoke calmly, distinctly, trying to knit his
words into some form of security blanket for the gunmen to grab.
 "You *blew* it," he said. "They check during the day. They don't check at
night. That's when I go in, around midnight. They'll find me. They'll *kill*
me."
 "Who's *they,* Miles?" Scully asked very softly. She struggled to keep her
voice level; part of her was still angry that she'd turned her back on the
stairway, letting Seligman sneak up on her, not realizing he was there until
she felt the cold steel rod prod her.
 "The Campfire Girls," he spat. "*Pinck.* Who do you think? They have a
corporate security force. They're better armed than the goddamn State Police.
They've left me alone 'cause they thought I was just a *drunk.* Now they know
what I've been doing. How *close* I've been getting."
 Mulder caught her gaze again. *Hold on,* his eyes said. "Close to what?" he
asked.
 Seligman began to snicker darkly. "Fat chance. Tell me who you are or I'll
make your girlfriend here even *shorter.*"
 Scully ground her teeth together. *I'll have your testicles for that.*
 Then Mulder laughed, a caustic cackle that dragged her nerves across
sandpaper.
 "Close? You're not even within spitting distance, Miles."
 She found Mulder's eyes. Gold sparks flicked inside them.
 *Trust me,* they said.
 She could feel the gun begin to shake in trembling hands, the heavy circle
now dancing in her hair.
 Mulder slowly began to stand.
 "C'mon, Miles. Do you really want to kill a Gemini mother?"
 "Wh-wh-what?" Now the barrel lifted off her head, but Scully could still feel
it behind her, its weight hovering like some deadly bird-of-prey behind her
neck.
 "Dana Katherine Scully," Mulder said, taking a baby step forward. "Don't you
know all the names?"
 "The Gemini mothers are all dead," he said, his voice beginning to widen with
a trace of surprise. "All but one..."
 Scully watched Mulder's eyes flick across his shoulder, checking something,
and she knew.
 "Now," he said in a very soft voice.
 But she'd already begun unleashing the move for which she'd been coiling
herself. In one practiced twist, she ducked her head, bent her knees, pivoted
on the ball of her right foot and swiveled around, her hips swinging her left
leg backward like a cleanup hitter aiming for the fences.
 Her ankle smashed into Seligman's left knee. *Home run,* she thought.
 He stumbled backward. She now saw how he'd managed to sneak up behind her;
his feet were clad only in ratty, Swiss-cheese socks.
 The gun exploded, a thunderclap just a foot from her heard. White noise
filled her ears--a tinny ringing arguing with a static-charged hiss. Her aural
canals felt swollen and plugged, as if she had taken her fingers and folded
over her pinnae to block out the world.
 Otherwise the world was silent, except for her heartbeat, pounding behind her
eardrums.
 She cocked her leg back and kicked again, higher this time, toes flying
toward the sky, a deadly ballerina's move. Her foot neatly connected with
Seligman's jaw, tipping him backward.
 *That's for the height crack, asshole.*
 Hot buckshot rained down upon her, white-hot hail that burnt tiny holes in
her suit.
 Then she saw Mulder lunge past her, like a screaming eagle, hands clawed into
talons, diving onto Seligman.
 The hiss in her ears grew louder. The blocked feeling was beginning to
dissolve.
 Mulder had wrapped his hands around Seligman's lapels, pulling him up, closer
to his face. Her partner's mouth was open wide enough to see his incisors.
 Without hearing a word, Scully knew Mulder was screaming.
 Baritone notes began to creep into her ears. *Mulder's voice.*
 He was shaking Seligman, whose eyes appeared to pop out of his skull with
fear.
 She began to realize Mulder was saying the same three words, over and over.
Except they weren't words.
 "Three-T-F," he yelled, now grasping Seligman's shoulders and shaking him
like a newly opened ketchup bottle. "Three-T-F! What is it? Three-T-F!"
 Scully felt her hand fly up to her mouth.
 *Code 3TF.* The alphanumeric remained as indelible in Scully's mind as the
picture of her autopsied daughter.
 *Of all the questions he could ask... his father, Samantha,* me...  *he wants
to know about Emily.*
 *This bungee cord you have my heart on, Mulder? I hope it's not fraying from
overuse.*
 "Stop," she said quietly, putting her hands on his shoulders.
 He ignored her. "Tell me," he roared.
 "I don't know!" Seligman screamed, his whole body shaking. "I don't know!"
 "*Stop it,*" she shouted.
 Mulder looked back over his shoulder at her, his face a portrait in pain.
 Irises of nearly solid gold strangled his pupils.
 Tension crackled between the two agents for a moment. Then Mulder curtly
nodded and let go of Seligman.
 "Mr. Seligman," Scully said, squatting. "If you know who I am, then you
probably know who my employer is."
 "The government," he said, nodding. "You helped create them, you know."
 "Create who?" she asked.
 "Pinck. When Eisenhower spoke in 1960? 'Beware of the military-industrial
complex?' He was referring to Pinck. And the Pentagon. They work together.
Eisenhower was trying to warn the people without enraging the generals. He was
afraid they'd kill his family."
 "Did you find all these war plans at Pinck?" Mulder asked, jerking a thumb
back toward the table.
 Seligman nodded. "I rewired some of the security systems, so I could snoop
around while I cleaned. I had a janitor's ID card with an executive vice
president's code. Got me into the documents library. Full of SIOPs. Nuclear
warhead design specifics, U.S. and Russian. Plans for the Seawolf three years
before anyone had even *heard* of the Seawolf."
 "So these documents were all classified," said Scully.
 "Every one."
 "What is this database?" Mulder asked, pointing at the computer.
 "The list," Seligman replied.
 "What list?" Scully asked.
 "Those who will survive."
 "Survive *what?*" Mulder said. Scully resisted a flinch as she felt the razor
edge to his voice.
 "The end," Seligman said softly.
 Scully watched a cloud quickly pass through Mulder's eyes, then it was gone.
 "A nuclear war?" Scully asked.
 Seligman nodded his head.
 *This is insane,* she thought. "You mean the U.S. government has determined
which Americans will live and which will die if--"
 "When," Seligman said.
 Scully wrapped Mulder's coat tighter around herself.
 "If," she repeated, "we have a nuclear war."
 "They know *every* person who will survive," Seligman said. "The Americans,
the Russians, the British, everyone. They held a secret meeting in Iceland in
1951, during the middle of the Korean War, to determine--"
 "This is bullshit," Scully said. "I wasn't born until 1964, and I'm in that
database."
 "--to determine the *criteria.*" Seligman continued in an if-you'd-let-
me-*finish* voice that, for a split second, sounded annoyingly like Mulder's.
"The criteria for who would survive and who didn't."
 "You in there?" Mulder asked.
 Seligman shook his head. "There's less than one hundred million people in
that database. And that's *worldwide.*"
 "When is this nuclear war going to take place? So I can mark my day-planner,
pack a bag," said Scully.
 Seligman drew a weary sigh. "I can show you something. May I?"
 Scully narrowed her eyes and looked at Mulder. *Don't indulge him, please.*
 He ignored her. "OK. No sudden moves." He reached for the shotgun on the
ground, moving it away from Miles.
 Seligman stood and slowly stumbled toward one of the tables.
 "I don't believe we're listening to this," Scully said.
 "Don't you want to know the truth?" he replied.
 "Whose truth?" she asked. "The truth of a drunk paranoiac?"
 "*In vino veritas.*"
 "Somehow I don't think *veritas* is on the list of ingredients for Four Roses
whisky."
 Both agents' heads snapped up as they heard a bottle smash against the
basement floor.
 "Oops. Where'd that come from?" said Seligman, holding a notebook in one
hand, scratching his head with the other, apparently genuinely confused.
 Scully began to walk over. "Mr. Seligman, can you touch your nose with your
right index finger?"
 He scowled. "I'm not drunk."
 "Of course not. Please?"
 He extended his arm, pointed his finger, and brought it toward his face. He
hit the top of his left cheekbone.
 She looked back at Mulder. His eyes were focused on Seligman, narrowing.
Green and gold wrestled in a confused clash.
 "Lemme try again," Seligman said.
 "This is not the World Series, Mr. Seligman," she replied archly. "It's not
the best four out of seven." Scully took the notebook from his hands and began
paging through it. It was full of green-and-white-striped computer printout
paper laden with names.
 *Millions* of names. Of all nationalities.
 *Peter Thomas Barrows.*
 *Lin See Tok.*
 *Jean-Luc Claude Dupree.*
 She felt Mulder at her side, looking over her shoulder.
 "The list," Seligman repeated.
 "No. Just one in a world full of them," Scully muttered, remembering a deep
cave in the hills of West Virginia, long tunnels full of file cabinets,
stretching forever into the darkness.
 Mulder gently lifted the cover to see its label. "*Firelake,*" he read.
"Scully, do you think that means what I think it means?"
 "It's the codeword for the database," Seligman explained.
 *It's more than that,* Scully thought, looking into Mulder's eyes. Ironic
that an unbeliever--or an agnostic, depending on his mood--knew The Book of
Revelations better than she. But Mulder had studied Revelations at Oxford, in
a classroom. She'd studied it in catechism, under the watchful eye and quick
tongue of Sister Bernadette. And when the old nun had read this line out loud
in a voice that dripped with both fear and warning, a young Dana Scully had
 smelled brimstone in the air, felt apocalypse in the sky.
 Consequently, she'd never forgotten it.
 "The sea gave up the dead which we in it," she recited, "and death and hell
delivered up the dead which were in them, and they were judged, every man
according to their works."
 "And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire," Mulder continued. "This
is the second death. And whosoever was not found written in the book of
life--"
 "--was cast into the lake of fire," Scully whispered.
 *Dancing again, Mulder.*
 "Mama read the Bible," Seligman quietly said.
 He had standing by the next table over, holding a photograph frame. Scully
stepped over, looking at the picture. A young woman with windswept brunette
hair stared back, half-smile on her face, sitting comfortably on the rickety
steps of what appeared to be a farmhouse.
 "Cynthia Janet Seligman," Miles said. "Gemini mother. The first one,
actually.
 DOD twelve-twenty-sixty-nine. About a year after she was taken."
 Scully's blood ran cold.
 "Taken?" Mulder asked. "By whom? By... aliens?"
 Seligman's eyebrows lurched upward. "What the *fuck* are you talking about?
Are *you* drunk? By *Pinck,* asshole."
 "Pinck?" Scully asked.
 Seligman nodded. "May fifth, 1968. I was eight. Mama woke me up early in the
morning. Still dark out. Wrapped me in a blanket. Carried me up the pull-down
stairs into the attic. That was my fort." He smiled a little. "There was a
small hole in the floor. A knot had fallen out of the pine plank or something.
I could look down into my room. I used to set up toy soldiers and pretend to
spy on them."
 Scully glanced at Mulder. The corners of his lips were twitching upward.
*Boys and their toys,* she thought.
 "Mama told me to be quiet as a mouse," Seligman continued. "So quiet. I
crawled over to the hole and looked down into my room. It was *pouring*
outside. We had this metal roof, and rain was just *thundering* against it. It
was lulling me to sleep again... and then I heard her scream."
 He began to shake; he reached toward a corner of the table for support.
 "I heard noises downstairs. Thumps and bumps. Then I saw her run into my
room. She was crying... she was crying..." One tear began to trickle down his
grizzled cheek. "She was trying to open my window. She wanted to jump. She was
trying to kill herself."
 Scully gnawed on her lips, sympathy flooding her body.
 "Two men in black raincoats ran in." Seligman had closed his eyes to replay
the memory. "I knew one of them. He had been to the house before, one evening,
to  talk to Mom and Dad. Came in a black truck with *Pinck Drug* lettered on
the side. I eavesdropped from the top of the stairs. They wanted to buy the
farm. Mama and Dad said no. They yelled a lot.
 "This... man... grabbed my mother's hair. He yanked backward. Hard. A tuft of
it came out..." Seligman choked back a sob. "It came out of her head. She
screamed. He grabbed her around the waist. He stuck a needle in her arm..."
 *Dear God,* Scully thought.
 "And the other man... he just watched... smoking..."
 Scully whirled toward Mulder. His eyes had narrowed to mere slits.
 "I hid forever," Seligman continued. "Until the rain stopped. Then I went
back downstairs and they were all gone." He sniffled. "Daddy never came back.
They found him drunk along one of the state roads. He drank a lot back then...
the farm was failing. All the farms had been failing for years... He'd hit
Mama once, she'd reported it. The sheriff figured Dad had killed her, hid the
body somewhere. They convicted him on it."
 Scully couldn't watch Seligman's face anymore.
 "He died in prison in 1980. After that, I decided to find out about Pinck. To
expose them. So I got the janitor job. And although I lost the farmhouse, I
inherited my uncle's fairgrounds. The last parcel of land around here those
bastards don't own. So I kept it." He sighed. "And being Feds, you probably
know the rest. But I finally found Mama. In the database, at least."
 "Miles," Scully said in a thick voice, "do you have the Gemini mother list?"
 He nodded, and turned toward the table.
 A loud, rusty creak came from upstairs.
 All three of their heads shot up.
 "Oh, Jesus, no," whimpered Seligman. "They're here."
 In four long strides, Mulder jumped toward the light switch and killed the
overhead lamps. The room went pitch black.
 Heavy footfalls pounded on the floorboards above them. *Boots,* Scully
thought. *Maybe two pair.*
 Some mumbles drifted down. A conversation was taking place.
 She jumped a little as she felt a hand on her arm. But then she felt a warm
breath on the back of her neck, a soap-and-aftershave smell she knew well.
 *Mulder. He found me in the dark.*
 The clash-and-tinkle of a breaking bottle. Then another.
 And then two sounds that circled around Scully's chest and squeezed the air
out of her.
 *Whoompf. Whoompf.*
 "What was that?" came Seligman's panicked whisper.
 As if in response, violet flames began licking through the floorboards above
them, kissing the wood like a jealous lover.
 
It had been Pete's house that burnt down.
 He and Pete and Dave had been playing Force Recon in the patch of woods
behind his house. It wasn't Mulder's favorite game--the only thing he'd liked
about it was that his friends called him *Mulder* instead of *Fox* while they
were playing--but it had been Pete's. Pete's older brother was due back from
Vietnam shortly, and Pete had kept going on and on about how he couldn't wait
for Bruce to get home, how he'd have so many stories to tell, so many
adventures to recount.
 There had been stories when Bruce returned, and Pete'd never wanted to play
Force Recon again.
 But they had been playing that night. Mulder had "died" early, tripping over
the rope-and-tin-can "Claymore" Petey'd set, forced to lay there and watch his
two friends skulk back and forth, deadly shadows amidst the black knot of
trees. Finally, Pete, who had been in the middle of creating a *punji* pit to
trap his enemy, accidentally stepped on a twig, and Dave--who often pretended
to be a crack sniper, despite his Coke-bottle bottom glasses--had "shot" him.
 The sky had seemed lighter, almost purple, as they emerged from the woods.
 "You're such a klutz, Fox," Mulder remembered Dave saying.
 "At least I'm not a buttmunch," he'd replied.
 "Shut up, assface." This from the future rabbi.
 Both of them hadn't been watching where they were going, and they ran right
into Pete, who'd come to a dead stop at the rim of the little depression that
held the wooded patch.
 Brilliant orange flames were devouring Pete's home.
 Mulder had been awestruck with the speed of the devastation. He saw the fire
blow out the bay window in the living room; he blinked, and re-opened his eyes
to see white flames shoot through the shingles on the roof; he blinked, and
the porch columns were now pillars of fire, rippling yellow blades cutting the
house to shreds.
 Hot, dry waves rolled from the house, crisping his hair, parching his skin.
 The conflagration had cast a crowd in silhouette. A couple of the shadows had
begun running toward them. "Oh, Peter! Peter! Oh God Peter," one of them had
screamed hysterically. His mother. She clutched at her youngest child. "We
thought... we didn't know... oh thank God, Peter."
 Pete's dad had been on her heels. And then Samantha. "Fox? Fox!"
 At that moment, the fireman had run off the porch, screaming.
 He'd caught fire.
 "*It hurts, it hurts, it hurts oh sweet Jesus IT HURTS*" the fireman had
screeched at the top of his lungs.
 A horrible, burnt-meat smell had cloyed Mulder's nostrils.
 And the fire had mercilessly blazed on, so loud, filling the sky with a roar.
 *Like this one will,* Mulder said, looking up at the ceiling, where the
flames had already turned orange.
 "*Mulder.*"
 Scully turned his jaw toward her, finding his eyes. Hers were hard jewels,
but they quivered a little.
 "We're going to be OK," she said carefully.
 *She remembers. Cecil L'Ively.*
 "I got the kids out," he mumbled. *On the second try. But I did.*
 "And we'll get out of here," she said, raising her voice to outshout the
fire.
 She turned away. "Miles! Miles, there must be another way out of here."
 Seligman stood, transfixed by the fire above him. He was almost growling, a
fear-soaked, brittle, wounded-animal sound.
 "Miles!" Scully stepped over and shook him.
 "Other staircase," he finally said, looking toward the left-hand wall. "Opens
outside. Cellar access."
 "Great," said Scully.
 "I bricked it up," he continued. "In case they came."
 "Oh, *fuck,*" she said. "Show me."
 Mulder's nerves chattered with terror. *I have to get out of here, out of
here, out of here...*
 "Mulder, come here," she called.
 He followed her to the wall, slick and solid stone, except for one, door-
sized section, apparently blocked with cinderblocks and quick-dry cement.
 *Lucky our mason here's a drunk,* thought Mulder's brain, examining the
uneven bricks, the hit-and-miss trowelwork betrayed with criss-crossing
streaks in the cement.
 His nerves weren't listening. *Get us out of here,* they screamed.
 "We're going to *die,*" Seligman bawled, sinking to the floor.
 Mulder's eyes sprinted around the room, looking for something, anything. They
tripped across a shovel, leaning against the corner.
 *Maybe Scully's right about God.*
 Two steps later, it was in his hands.
 *Now you have to get angry,* his mind shouted.
 But the nerves were now a Greek chorus: *You're going to die, going to die,
going to die...*
 He looked back for only a second. Glowing embers dropped from the ceiling
like deadly snow, falling on the tables. The whole room began to crackle.
 Scully brought over the folding chair from behind the computer table and
began to smash it into the wall, marking each blow with a dull grunt.
 *They've taken my sister,* he thought.
 With a roar, Mulder drove the shovel point against the wall. His only reward
was a dull *clang.*
 *They killed my father.*
 Another roar, another *clang.*
 *It's going to hurt, going to hurt, going to hurt,* sang his nerves.
 "I'm so dizzy," Seligman said. Mulder glanced back. Somewhere he'd found a
half-full liquor bottle. He cradled it like a baby.
 "The fire's eating up the oxygen," Scully shouted. But her voice held less
power than before, and she'd begun to cough. "Replacing it with carbon
monoxide."
 *Oh, so we won't burn to death,* Mulder thought, a manic chuckle escaping his
lips. *We'll just suffocate.*
 With a magician's *poof,* one of the tables erupted in flame.
 *My mother wasn't faithful.*
 *Clang.* This time Mulder saw a crack form in the cement. Scully struck with
the chair, widening the fissure.
 The air felt so heavy around him.
 His chest involuntarily began to spasm. The harsh coughs ripped up the inside
of his throat.
 *They call me 'Spooky' and laugh.*
 *Clang.*
 Had he moved a brick? He couldn't tell.
 *We're pawns in someone else's sick game.*
 *Clang.* Powdered cement cascaded down the wall, but he didn't seem to be
making any progress.
 Scully swung the chair around again, letting go of it this time. It clattered
against the wall and fell to the floor with a *bang. She fell too, sinking to
her knees, coughing up a lung, hands around her throat. Haze obscured his view
of her.
 "Scully, stand up!" he shouted.
 "Mulder..." she croaked. "Can't... sleepy..."
 "Dammit, Scully."
 She keeled over to the left, hacking, spitting up phlegm.
 *I won't let her die.*
 With a scream, Mulder drove the shovel back into the wall.
 *I won't let her die.*
 His throat cried out in pain. He couldn't tell if he was screaming or
coughing.
 The harsh, spark-filled smoke stuck hot pins into his eyeballs.
 *I won't let her die.*
 He drove, withdrew, drove, withdrew, moving faster and faster, like a piston.
 His nerves changed their tune. *She's going to die, going to die, going to
die...*
 And then a bolt of ice-cold air struck him like lightning.
 White light dribbled through a centimeter-wide crack.
 Mulder's veins throbbed with adrenaline. He wielded the shovel like an ax,
chopping into the wall.
 One cinderblock finally fell out the other side. Then two more. One more
blow, and a huge chunk of dried cement vaporized into a cloud of dust.
 He quickly assessed the hole. *Big enough for one.*
 The ceiling groaned ominously. He heard a series of *pop-pop-pops* detonate
above him, like firecrackers only ten times louder. *The mirrors are
shattering.*
 Scully's cough became louder. He turned to find her slowly rising back into a
standing position. She greedily gulped in air, chest heaving.
 "*Gemini!*" Seligman suddenly screamed.
 Mulder watched the man's body spasm, as if he was waking from a dream. He
dropped the liquor bottle and began to crawl toward the table nearest him. It
was already ablaze; what had been piles and piles of papers was now only a
black, charred mass, almost corpse-shaped.
 Except for one black loose-leaf notebook, half-hanging over the table's edge.
Seligman began crawling toward it.
 Mulder dropped the shovel, reached toward Scully, dragging her forward.
 He felt her try to turn around. "Miles," she sputtered. "First..."
 Mulder put his arms around her waist, lifting her toward his makeshift
window.
 "Mulder... no...." Coughs angrily punctuated her speech.
 He began to shove her through the hole in the wall.
 The inhuman howl made him look back.
 Seligman was now standing. His head was burning. Mulder saw the likely
ignition: a chunk of burning wood from the floor-cum-ceiling above, now lying
at the drunk's feet.
 Tufts of burning hair fell from what had once been Seligman's beard, what was
now a wreath of fire angrily circling his face.
 Mulder grimaced as the victim's skin melted, clinging to his facial muscles
before dripping down his neck. *Like cheese on a nacho,* he thought. A dry
heave of nausea passed through his stomach.
 Seligman flung his arms about, as if he could find life at the last minute
and grab hold. He let the notebook fly. Mulder watched it sail across the
room, landing fifteen feet away.
 In a puddle of water, with a soft splash.
 *That must be the only place in this whole room that's not on fire,* Mulder
thought.
 A thick, rotten, cloying smell filled the room, and Mulder remembered the
fireman, spinning in Peter's front yard, dying in front of his eyes.
 He looked at the now-sodden notebook, lying close to the far wall.
 *Scully's name is in that.*
 He took a step toward it.
 He felt ten sharp objects bite into his upper right arm.
 Mulder whirled to see Scully, leaning back through the hole, digging her
fingernails into him. "No," she shouted.
 "I can get it." He thrashed his arm about in a rough circle, shaking off her
grasp.
 "Goddammit, Mulder, no!" she screamed, managing to take hold of his wrist.
 Mulder extended his other arm, as if it could reach all the way across to the
black book.
 Above, the ceiling issued a death moan. Mulder heard a crack as loud as a
gunshot. He looked up for a second. A pregnant bulge had formed in the
funhouse floor, as if the pine one-by-sixes were holding back the next Great
Flood.
 He brought his eyes back to the notebook, still intact in its watery landing
spot.
 *I can get it.*
 He tensed his torso muscles to break free of Scully's hold, when he felt
dozens of little teeth clench around his wrist.
 He looked back to find a steel bracelet around his left wrist.
 Scully was clasping the other handcuff around her right hand.
 He reached into his pants pocket for the ring that held his house, car,
office and handcuff keys.
 And realized that he'd left the ring in his coat pocket.
 His coat. Now on Scully's back.
 "What the *fuck* are you doing?" he shouted at her.
 "Let it go, Mulder." Her eyes burnt brighter than the flames around them.
 "But--"
 "*Now,*" she said in a voice he'd never heard before, one she must have
inherited from Captain Ahab, clearly a voice to which the only acceptable
response was *yes, ma'am.*
 A loud creak began above his head, one that quickly rose in volume and pitch.
 Mulder looked one last time at the notebook.
 He then took two quick steps toward Scully, jumping into the hole in the
wall.
 She felt her hands grab him by the shirt, by his belt, yanking him through.
 For a moment her right hand flew backward, and Mulder braced for the ripping
sound that'd accompany the dislocation of his shoulder.
 But then he was through, falling on top of her. They collapsed at the bottom
of the stone staircase.
 He heard an explosive snap, and then a mighty groan as the floor finally
collapsed. He turned to see a long tongue of flame lick out of the gap in the
cinderblocks.
 Scully was dragging him up the stairs. He let her.
 At the top, they both took ten long paces away from the building, then
collapsed in the snow, face up.
 Puffy, white cumulus clouds floated through the blue ocean of sky.
 To Mulder, they all looked like loose-leaf notebooks.
 "That was the Gemini list," he said.
 "I don't give a fuck what it was," he heard her reply.
 "I coulda got it."
 "No, you couldn't have," she said. Her voice was a medley of anger,
exasperation--and, somewhere in there, a note of relief. "And I'm not
finishing this alone."
 Mulder heard the *crunch-crunch-crunch* of running footsteps approaching.
 A weatherbeaten face, topped with a baseball cap that said SHERIFF, filled
Mulder's vision.
 The gray eyes crinkled in confusion.
 He felt Scully sit up next to him, dragging his left arm along for the ride.
With an annoyed grunt, he grudgingly followed suit.
 He heard Cujo--now apparently a very angry Alsatian--barking from afar, but
didn't see any brown-colored blur bounding toward them. *Maybe Seligman tied
him up...*
 "Sheriff, I'm Special Agent Scully," his partner said.
 But the sheriff didn't look at her. Instead, he stared for a moment at the
two agents' manacled hands, then behind them at the cellar-access stairwell,
then at the blazing funhouse.
 "I think I saw something like this once on *Cops,*" he said, "but maybe you'd
better walk me through exactly what happened here."
 
<18>
Pinck Pharmaceutical headquarters
Blue Bluffs, Indiana
2:24 p.m.
 
 "Say something, Byers," Mulder hissed into the cell phone.
 But the Lone Gunman remained silent for another minute.
 Five rapid beeps interrupted the connection.
 "John?"
 "I'm here."
 "What the hell was that?"
 "Just the scrambler. Apparently your friends at Pinck are trying to tap the
call. Where are you calling from?"
 "A corridor right outside the corporate boardroom."
 "From *inside* their headquarters? Are you *nuts?*"
 "I haven't told you anything Scully and I aren't prepared to tell them in a
few minutes."
 "What, you're going to demand they fess up and show you the database and the
documents?"
 Now Mulder remained silent.
 "Oh, Christ, Mulder," said Byers.
 That actually *was* the plan. He'd proposed it to Scully as they sat
shivering on a bench in the Decatur County sheriff's office, wrapped in
mothball-smelling blankets, sipping lukewarm coffee that tasted as if it'd
been brewed three times already.
 "But we have no evidence," she'd initially protested. "No U.S. Attorney in
the entire country would listen to us."
 "That's not the point," he'd replied.
 That had earned him an eyebrow and a pinched look that said it all. *Say
what?*
 "The point is *they'll* know *we* know. And if we imply we know *more,* that
should trigger a response. They'll have to do something."
 "They may not have to do anything," she'd countered. "We're powerless without
proof."
 "Look how fast they came after Miles, once they caught him looking."
 "But they left him alone for *years* before that."
 He'd taken a deep breath. "I'm not saying it's a perfect plan, Scully."
 "None of ours ever are, are they?" she'd said with a wan smile.
 They'd sat silently for a minute, looking at each other.
 "So," she'd finally said, "we put ourselves on the hook as bait?"
 When she'd said it like that, the plan changed color in Mulder's head.
 "Maybe I'd better do this alone," he'd said.
 She'd withdrawn her cell phone from her jacket pocket and had already begun
to dial.
 "Fort Wayne, please," she'd said. "I need a number for the office of the
Assistant U.S. Attorney." She'd placed her hand over the mouthpiece. "Maybe we
can get a subpoena."
 "I'll get the laptop," he'd said, "and start on the paperwork."
 The Assistant U.S. Attorney's name was Ross Winston, and he'd agreed to meet
them in Fort Wayne on short notice, but only, he'd said, because he had a soft
spot in his heart for special agents, having served eight years in the Bureau
himself. But he'd simply laughed in their faces after Scully had outlined
their request.
 "Don't they teach law at Quantico anymore, missy?" he said.
 Scully had swallowed her lips and locked her jaw in vain attempts to stop the
crimson blush that'd blossomed across her face.
 "You don't even have what you *saw.* You have what you *think* you saw. And
you're accusing the largest employer in northeastern Indiana of... treason? Is
that it?"
 "Thanks," Mulder had said, standing, lightly placing his hand on Scully's
shoulder.
 "Jesus Christ, they're turning out agents like *you two* now? When *I* was at
Quantico--"
 "Dinosaurs ruled the earth," Mulder had finished. "Bye."
 So their subpoena had become a weakly worded (and, Scully kept insisting,
possibly illegal) "request for cooperation" which they'd faxed to Pinck's CEO
at around noon. A starched secretary had called Scully back to say no one was
available to speak with the FBI today; perhaps tomorrow?
 Mulder had responded to that by calling the Fort Wayne *Journal-Gazette* with
a "hot anonymous tip" about a "wide-ranging Federal investigation" underway at
Pinck Pharmaceutical.
 Thirty minutes--and probably one phone call from a pit-bull reporter--later,
the same secretary had called Scully to offer a two o'clock appointment.
They'd showed up fifteen minutes early only to be told to wait. And that gave
Mulder the breathing room he needed to call the Gunmen and let them know what
happened.
 But he hadn't expected a reaction like *this* to his story.
 "It's... kind of hard to believe," Byers said sheepishly.
 "You've known me how long?"
 "You know as well as I do, Mulder."
 "And I've told you pretty much everything I've seen? Serial killers who can
slide through walls? Television shows that make people insane? Inbred mutant
psychopaths?"
 "Think about this for a moment. Please," Byers begged. "What you've just
described is a scenario where the U.S. government has entered into a
conspiracy to destroy the world through nuclear war. Isn't this a little too
'Doctor No' for you? Aren't you expecting Q to come out and give you the keys
to the Aston Martin?"
 "If this is a James Bond movie, where are the girls?" Mulder asked.
 "You've already got one of the prettier ones," Byers replied.
 *Touche, John.*
 An awkward pause. "Look," Byers finally said. "There are theories about
conspiracy theories, believe it or not. All conspiracies are alliances
designed to accomplish a goal that somehow furthers the cause of the
conspirators. Like topple a government. Hide the truth. Fix a football game.
But here there's no cause. If the conspirators are successful, everybody dies.
The end."
 "Not everybody."
 "Hey, Mulder, those SIOPs you saw? We've seen a couple ourselves."
 Mulder opened his mouth.
 "Don't ask, don't tell, OK? Anyway, under those rules of engagement, even the
so-called 'limited' nuclear exchanges swap enough payload to render the world
inhabitable for thousands of years. You saw the ending of *Planet of the
Apes?* A *real* nuclear war would make *that* look like Disney World."
 "Maybe some new tenants want us to redecorate."
 "You mean extraterrestrials want us to nuke ourselves? I do believe we are
not alone. But there are some pretty incontrovertible laws of nature and one
of them is that almost any lifeform doesn't fare well in nuclear winter. If
our friends from the heavens wanted to annex us, I'm sure they'd rather take
over a world that wasn't a playground for radioactive isotopes that had a
half-life of twelve days short of forever."
 "I know what I saw," Mulder said.
 "Yeah, I know what you saw too. We saw some of it here," Byers said. "But I'm
still have trouble putting two and two together."
 "You're coming up with five?"
 "I'm coming up with turquoise, Mulder, it's that apples-and-oranges." Byers
sighed.
 "But it was definitely a Pinck database," he said, easing away from the
subject.
 "*That* we can say without a doubt."
 "In court?"
 "Well, through anonymous informer affidavits, if we had to. Remember that
what we were doing was illegal. Although Pinck really pissed us off with this
overkill defense of theirs. The feedback virus they shot at us might as well
have been a Tomahawk missile. Blew out two of our servers and almost crashed
our entire system. Pinck's cost us a lot."
 Mulder glanced back toward his partner. She sat in a chair outside the
boardroom, staring fixedly at a point on the floor. Her shoulders and eyelids
sagged. Every so often she held her hand to her forehead and closed her eyes.
Her entire posture seemed on the verge of collapsing.
 "Not as much as some have paid," he said softly. "I'll call you when we get
back."
 "Right."
 He turned around to face Scully. "Any word about our meeting?"
 "Not yet," she said.
 Mulder dialed his voicemail at the Bureau. "You look exhausted," he said to
her. "Do you want me to do the talking this time?"
 She looked up and slowly nodded, twice. "Thank you."
 "You have one message," the automaton told Mulder. He stabbed the appropriate
buttons. A recording of his mother's voice began. He clicked off without
waiting for it to finish and dialed her home in Greenwich.
 "Hello?" she answered.
 "Mom." He turned away from Scully.
 "Fox." The syllable floated on a torrent of emotions, and Mulder realized he
hadn't spoken with his mother in a very, very long time.
 "Please tell me you're coming home for holidays," Teena Mulder said.
 *I've missed you,* was what he'd heard.
 "Mom, I need you to remember something," he said quietly.
 Humid silence from the other end. *Most conversations I begin that way,* he
thought, *probably haven't ended well.*
 "I'll try," she said, a slight stammer of hesitation in her voice. "You know,
since the stroke.."
 "I know, Mom. Do you remember a necklace Samantha had?"
 "She had several."
 "This one was Egyptian, or looked Egyptian, at least. A *cartouche*-- an
oval, with some hieroglyphs on the inside. Silver or pewter. On a leather
string. Do you remember?"
 The pause was too long. He heard two liquid clicks, her mouth opening and
closing, trying to find some words, and he knew. *She's going to lie.*
 "I don't think she ever had one like that," she finally sputtered.
 "You don't think? Or you can't recall?" Mulder heard himself use his
interrogation voice. *This is my mother.* He closed his eyes.
 "I don't think she did."
 "Mom, *I* remember it. You gave me holy hell for cutting the leather thong. I
had to tie it back together and give it back to her."
 He felt Scully behind him, gently resting a hand between his shoulder blades.
He leaned back into it. Just a little. Enough to feel it a little more.
 "Well, maybe, I don't know, the stroke..."
 "Mom, who gave that necklace to her? Did you?"
 "I would *remember* that." But her voice asked, *Would I?*
 "If you didn't, who did? Dad?"
 One sob floated through the telephone ether, puncturing Mulder's heart.
 *No, no, no. Please no.* He felt his throat begin to swell shut. "*Him?*" he
managed to rasp.
 Two stifled sobs. "I... I can't remember a lot of things, Fox," she said.
 Scully's hand pushed a little harder. He returned the pressure.
 "Fox," Teena blurted.   "Please come home for Hanukkah. We can... we can
start over."
 He didn't answer. Instead, his photographic memory dialed up a recollection:
a hot summer night, unrelieved by the Vineyard's usual sea breezes, him and
Peter and Dave and Laura, all looking seven or so, bounding onto the front
porch in the twilight, sitting next to his mother on the steps. She poured
lemonade and listened intently, without condescension, to whatever they were
babbling about that night.
 When Laura had given him the shell, she'd taken it to Mom and told her what
happened, confused as to why she began smiling and crying at the same time.
 She'd been his confidant, until Samantha had been taken.
 "I might not have much time..." she began, trailing off, obviously
embarrassed to use such a ploy. *Or maybe not,* the more spiteful part of
Mulder's mind shouted. "Please, Fox."
 He squinted his eyes closed, so hard it hurt.
 With fumbling fingers, he stabbed the OFF button.
 "Mulder," Scully said softly. "They're ready for us."
 One quiet sniffle, and he was ready.
 "Let's go," he said.
 
The woman looked like a starched secretary: blue hair dyed gray, wardrobe by
Talbots, pinched nose and glasses hanging on a necklace. "Mr. Drosser is on
his way up to speak with you," she said primly, opening the doors to the
boardroom.
 "We asked to see Dr. von Brattsden," Scully replied, a point to her voice.
"We represent the people and government of the United States. The least your
chief executive could do is spare us five minutes."
 "Unfortunately, he is in Frankfurt, overseeing the first stages of our merger
with GSK," the secretary said. "Mr. Drosser is our corporate counsel. He would
be your contact in any event. Please make yourselves comfortable and he'll
join you shortly."
 The boardroom was immense and obviously designed to intimidate. A massive
panoramic window looked out to the west, across the Indiana plain. Mirrors on
the walls made the room feel twice its already considerable size. Huge, ornate
chandeliers, now dark, hung from the ceiling.
 Mulder glimpsed himself and Scully in the mirror and shuddered. *We look like
hell.* Attempts to clean themselves up at the sheriff's office earlier in the
day had only partly succeeded. A fine coat of soot added a pallor to both
their faces. A portion of Scully's hair continued to defy her brush; Mulder
found another piece of ash in his, and shook it out onto the boardroom carpet.
Tiny, ebony-ringed holes pockmarked both their suits.
 *And we must really stink,* Mulder thought.
 They took seats on either side of the table's head, but immediately stood
back up as a balding man lumbered into the room. Mulder sized him up; he was
packing a spare tire above his belt, but the expensive-cut charcoal suit he
wore had been tailored to hide it. Two gold rings flashed from a meaty hand
that clutched a stack of file folders, which he promptly dropped on the
boardroom table before collapsing into the chair between the two agents.
 "So you're the two that fucked up my day," he said.
 "How's that?" Mulder began.
 "I'm trying to prepare legal documents for the European Union mergers
commission, which needs to sign off on the deal we've announced. Instead I
need to deal with this... 'request for cooperation.' Whatever the *fuck* that
is. This isn't an official FBI document."
 "Maybe this isn't an official FBI investigation yet."
 "Yet? What do you mean by that, Agent--" He looked down at Scully's fax,
which sat on the top of his paperwork stack. "*Fox* Mulder? Is that your
*real* name?"
 "It means," Mulder said, struggling to keep a lid on his boiling-over anger,
"that we'd simply like to take a look around to nip some outstanding
allegations in the bud."
 "You mean some *extraordinary* allegations, don't you? You've accused us of,
let's see..." He read the fax. "'Hoarding classified military documents and
invading privacy'?"
 "We have--" Mulder began.
 "'Graverobbing?'" Drosser exploded. "Where the *fuck* do you get that from?"
 "You've been accused of stealing a corpse, transporting it across state lines
and conducting an autopsy without a medical examiner present."
 "Through your Transgen affiliate," Scully added. From the corner of his eye,
Mulder watched her lips become a thin, tight line.
 "Don't be fucking ridiculous," Drosser said.
 "As for the other charges, we have a statement from an individual who claims
he found documents, appearing to be the property of the U.S. government and
classified for national security purposes, on the premises here."
 "From *Miles?* Had to be Miles. You guys are going to build a case on a drunk
carnival-ride operator who's now dead? I called Sheriff Hammon before I came
up here. He says the state fire marshal's officers are ruling that Seligman's
old funhouse held enough liquor to burn down half of Fort Wayne. They're going
to rule the fire accidental."
 "Like someone accidentally mixed a Malatov cocktail."
 "Just calling 'em like I see them, Mulder. And what the fuck is this
graverobbing charge?"
 "We believe your Gemini project is accountable for that."
 "I'm not at liberty to tell you anything about our codeword projects, but off
the record, we don't have anything here codenamed fucking Gemini." Flecks of
saliva dribbled off Drosser's lips. He reached across to a silver tray on the
table, poured some mineral water into a thick crystal rocks glass, and took a
long sip. "The government already used that one, remember? On spacecraft?"
 "Sir, if you'd just let us look around, we can quell these accusations and be
on our way, without disrupting your merger."
 "Is that a threat?"
 Mulder rubbed his chin as if he hadn't considered it before. "It could be."
 Drosser leaned closer. "You listen here, boy."
 *My father called me that.*
 Mulder imagined his fist smashing through Drosser's nose and coming out the
back of the lawyer's fat head. It gave him a small, almost sexual, thrill.
 "I called a friend I have at the FBI," Drosser continued, "and he told me all
about you, *Spooky.*"
 Mulder dug his fingers into his thighs, anything to keep them from forming
fists.
 "How all you do is go around chasing UFOs and weird monsters and basically
waste a shitload of taxpayer money, protected by some fucking wishy-washy
liberals on Capitol Hill. And the line on you," he said, turning to Scully,
"is that they hired you to stop him but you just encourage him, maybe because
of some sick sexual thing you two have going. You *were* handcuffed together
when the sheriff found you."
 That almost was Mulder's final straw, until he saw Scully's eyes.
 They'd become gunmetal gray, and were boring through Drosser's head like
lasers.
 Mulder shivered. *This isn't going to be good. Maybe I'd better end it now.*
 He stood. Scully followed suit.
 "We'll have to come back with a subpoena, I guess," Mulder said.
 "Go ahead. We'll quash it on grounds of harassment," said Drosser. "Besides,
I also put a call into Winston, so I know you've already tried."
 "We'll go to his boss over in Hammond," Mulder said.
 "Get the fuck out of here," the lawyer replied.
 Mulder went to the door, opened it and turned slightly, holding it for
Scully.
 She began to walk around Drosser's chair to the exit.
 Then, in one sudden and swift motion, she reached around with her left hand,
picked up the crystal glass and smashed it against the table.
 With her right, she yanked backward on Drosser's ear. *Hard.*
 The lawyer yelped.
 She then began to propel Drosser's head forward toward the table.
 The sharp glass fragments twinkled in the sunlight from the window.
 "Oh God please *don't,*" Drosser screamed.
 At the last possible instant--when the attorney's face was only millimeters
from the crystal shrapnel--Scully jerked his head back an iota, stopping the
descent.
 She leaned over, placing her lips very close to Drosser's ear.
 Even in the quiet room, Mulder could barely hear her voice.
 "I will find out who killed my daughter," she breathed. "You *fucking*
bastard."
 With one final, almost careless, yank, she pulled him back to an upright
position in the chair.
 She wordlessly passed Mulder and walked out the door.
 *That,* thought her partner, *should get someone's attention.*

<19>
FBI Headquarters
7:09 p.m.
 
 Skinner wrinkled his nose before he looked up.
 *We must really reek,* Mulder thought.
 But he was following orders. Within 20 minutes of leaving Pinck, Skinner had
called him on the cell phone.
 "Return now," the assistant director had said without preamble.
 "We followed orders," Mulder had retorted.
 "Agent Mulder, I don't recall ordering you to burst into the headquarters of
what will be the world's fourth-largest drug company and demand to search the
premises."
 *You didn't order us* not *to,* Mulder'd thought.
 "Get back here now. And after you land, you report directly to my office. Do
not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Do not stop for a piss.
*Immediately.* Clear?"
 "Crystal," Mulder'd replied.
 "Close the door," Skinner directed Scully. She complied before collapsing
into a chair in front of her boss's desk. Mulder followed suit. His body was a
chorus of aches and pains; every muscle groaned, every bone creaked, every
organ complained.
 *Hot shower, hot food, sleep of some sort. I don't care in what order.*
 Skinner apparently planned to offer none of the above. His mandible muscles
twitched, sliding his jaw back and forth. Ebony eyes barreled into the two
agents like runaway freight trains.
 He leaned across his desk, turning toward Mulder. "You are a sworn officer of
the law," he began. "When you took your oath, you promised to protect the
citizens of this country. You did *not*--" Skinner bellowed that word, eyes
squinting as he shouted. "You did *not* agree to use your badge as an excuse
to bully and intimidate people."
 The assistant director stabbed his telephone receiver with a finger. "I have
two voicemails here. One's from the chief executive of Pinck Pharmaceutical,
advising me that his in-house legal counsel has recommended suing the Bureau
for harassment. Then I have a message from the in-house legal counsel, who
tells me that he may file criminal assault-and-battery charges in U.S.
District Court after he was struck today." The finger moved from the phone to
Mulder's face. "Goddammit, Mulder, I've had it. Every time you cross the line,
I cover your ass and move the line back a little. Well, now my back's against
the fucking wall, and you're going to be--"
 "I did it, sir," Scully interrupted.
 Skinner stopped in mid-sentence, mouth agape.
 "I struck Mr. Drosser," she clarified, crossing her legs, sitting up a little
straighter, taking a deep breath.
 *Getting ready to take a punch,* Mulder thought, and he resisted an urge to
reach out and touch her hand. That was his job--fucking up, having Skinner
yell at him, and then having Scully bail him out.
 "*You* struck Mr. Drosser?" Skinner obviously was still having trouble
getting his head around the concept.
 "I took the Quantico manual-arms combat--"
 "I know you're *capable* of doing it, Agent Scully. I'm just surprised that
you actually did." The ex-Marine visibly deflated. "Well."
 Scully's eyes flickered. Mulder almost cheered. *An emotion.*
 "*Well?* That's it?" she shouted.
 Skinner's brows knitted. "What?"
 "Had it been *Mulder,* you would've thrown every book on the shelf at him.
But because it's *me,* I get a *well?*"
 "Any lecture I could give you, Agent Scully," Skinner said softly, "I know
you've already given yourself."
 And Mulder knew that was true. He'd kept conversation to a minimum on the
flight back, hoping she'd fall asleep. Ever since leaving Pinck, her eyes had
been dull, her voice had been flat, her movements sluggish and weighted down.
But he'd spent the whole flight watching her look out the window, eyes wide
 open, replaying a scene in her mind over and over.
 He had been able to tell whenever she reached the part where she'd broken the
glass. She'd winced each time.
 *She's beating herself up.*
 Mulder didn't understand this part of her. Scully stood for rules. But she
*always* broke rules to save him, to protect him, to help him.
 She'd risked contempt of Congress--and went to jail--rather than betray his
location in front of people who would've swiftly killed him, had they known
where he was.
 *What I'm worried about is you, Mulder, and how far you'll go,* she'd told
him. *And how far I can follow you.*
 But she'd kept following him, even when he'd visited her in the hospital,
nearly dead of cancer. Even now, he dropped his head into his hands as he
remembered.
 She'd offered to take a murder rap for him.
 *Could she care for me that much?*
 *Could anyone?*
 *If I can save you, let me,* she'd said, fiery words delivered in a hoarse,
weak voice that couldn't hide the iron convictions that the cancer would never
have been able to eat away. Remembering those words still made it difficult
for him to breathe, even more than a year later.
 Yet Scully wouldn't break a rule to save herself. Today was the closest she'd
come to doing just that, but it was Emily she was saving, Emily who made her
break the glass and her composure into a thousand glittering pieces across the
Pinck boardroom table. Emily remained a deep and vast wound inside her soul,
one which even he wasn't able to fully map.
 Just like it was Samantha whom he was always rescuing, always searching for.
 *If I could give you one thing, Scully,* he thought, *it'd be yourself six
years ago.* The way she'd walked into his office, dropping her briefcase like
she owned the place, fixing him with a smart-aleck grin by the end of the
first day.
 A Scully who still had a sister.
 A Scully who could still bear children.
 "Agent Mulder?" Skinner asked, a foreign note--of concern--hanging in his
voice.
 "Huh?" Mulder looked up with a start.
 "Agent Scully's been telling me what happened in Indiana." The furrows in his
forehead grew deeper.
 *How long have I been woolgathering?*
 "Mulder," Scully said tenderly.
 He turned toward her.
 She reached out with a Kleenex and brushed his cheek.
 *Doctor's fingers. So soft.*
 He felt the teardrop pull away from his skin, soaking itself into the fibers
of the tissue.
 "The fire," Mulder said awkwardly. "Smoke--ashes--still in my eyes."
 She let her fingers linger for a moment, worry passing across her face. Then,
suddenly remembering where she was, she turned back toward Skinner, crumpling
the tissue. "We were unable to retrieve any of the data," Scully said,
apparently finishing her description of the day's events, "including either
the Firelake or Gemini lists."
 "And so you're telling me you illegally hacked a Pinck database?"
 "We discovered that Miles Seligman had accessed a data source, possibly
illegally, and during the course of that investigation we accidentally viewed
Pinck proprietary data," Scully said.
 Mulder smothered a smile, hearing the rules creak as Scully bent them.
 "You were in Firelake," he said, changing the subject. "It listed you as an
Epsilon subject. Same as Anne Doyle, same as my father. Does that mean
anything to you?"
 Skinner shook his head, his eyes paging through memory. "No. I'd met Doyle
once or twice in DOJ roles, but I didn't know her at all. And I'd never met
your father, Mulder."
 "You're all government employees," Scully said.
 "But none of us had anything to do with defense planning or nuclear war.
Unless your dad, Mulder--"
 "Not that I know of," Mulder answered.
 "And not that I'm giving this crackpot's idea of a U.S.-brokered nuclear war
any credence. But I am concerned that so many classified documents were found
in a funhouse basement. Christ, the world keeps getting more dangerous. Take
today."
 Scully and Mulder looked at each other, then at Skinner.
 The assistant director realized his agents probably hadn't seen a newscast.
"The Iraqis detonated another bomb in the desert around five o'clock."
 "Which means the Israelis will likely explode another as well," Scully said.
 Skinner nodded. "The President has called the Prime Minister again to plead
for restraint, but I doubt it'll work. The Iranians are now also starting to
rumble. U.S. intelligence reports that Tehran's issuing mobilization orders
and moving its poison-gas reserves closer to the Iraqi front."
 *Cry havoc,* Mulder thought wryly.
 "None of this adds up," Skinner muttered, almost as much to himself as to
Scully and Mulder. "Alphas, Epsilons and Geminis. Pictures of Agent Scully in
some medical facility somewhere that she can't remember. Blueprints for
Armageddon and all of our names on some list."
 "Not all of our names," Mulder said. "I'm not on the list."
 Skinner took off his glasses and pinched his nose.
 Mulder heard a nearly-silent sharp intake of breath to his left, but when he
turned, Scully had swiveled away, her body shifting uncomfortably in the
chair.
 "And we don't know who else is on that list," he continued. "Everything
burnt."
 Scully's body suddenly twitched. She whirled back around. "I forgot. Not
 everything. Check your coat pocket."
 Mulder took the coat, which he'd draped over the arm of his chair, and began
patting down its pockets. Scully, who always seemed to keep a spare something
everywhere, finally insisted he take it back when they arrived at
headquarters, where she knew she had another, albeit much older, coat hanging
on the rack in their basement office.
 He felt something flat and hard in one of the inside pockets.
 Pulling it out, he saw it was the black, leather-bound hieroglyphic book. He
handed it across the desk to Skinner, who leaned back in his chair and began
flipping through it.
 "And we do have Miles Seligman's body en route here, for what that's worth,"
she added. "Decatur County handed it over to us as soon as the ME declared him
dead."
 But Mulder noticed Skinner wasn't listening. He'd sat bolt upright again,
placing the book on his desk, close to the lamp. He was pointing at the
volume's inside back cover.
 Loopy, ornate Cyrillic script sat under his finger, written in black ink
faded nearly sepia with age and wear.
 Mulder and Scully leaned over to get a closer look.
 "I didn't know you could read Russian," Mulder said.
 "I can't, not well. But this is just a name." Skinner looked up, eyes wide
with surprise. "Krycek. Yevgeni Ilyich Krycek."
 
"His *father,*" Mulder said to Scully, shaking his head as he unlocked their
office door. "Truth is stranger than fiction. I always thought Krycek made up
anything he said about his parents. That he actually rose from the ooze
instead."
 But Skinner had quickly found the records in black-and-white--well, as black
and white as a computer monitor could get. Krycek's old FBI background
file--Mulder kept forgetting that the little prick, at one point, had been a
special agent--confirmed that Alexander Peter Krycek's father was in fact a
Yevgeni Ilyich Krycek. Krycek *pere* and his wife, Irina, emigrated from the
Soviet Union in 1963, apparently on a medical visa issued to Yevgeni's weak
heart. They became U.S. citizens in 1964, Alex was born that same year, and
then Yevgeni died of congenital heart failure in 1975, followed by Irina some
13 years later. And although Yevgeni Krycek had been a Russian history
professor upon arriving in the States, before he left Russia he held tenure at
Moscow University as an *archaeology* professor.
 Mulder and Scully had simply looked blankly at their boss as he read the
dossier.
 *We're drowning in questions,* Mulder'd thought. *We need someone to throw us
some answers.* Any *answers.*
 He opened the door, flipped on the overhead lights, let his paranoid eyes
scan through the room, checking for furniture moved out of place, items
present where before absent, anything that might have been disturbed.
 *Anything more disturbed than myself,* he thought.
 Scully wordlessly trudged over to pull her spare coat from the rack. Nothing
sparkled in her face. Pale thin lips expelled a forlorn little sigh.
 *She looks so miserable.*
 "Hey, Scully, how about I buy you something to eat at the Bellevue Diner?" he
said, hoping the words sounded nonchalant to her; to him, they felt like lead
on his tongue, falling to earth with attention-grabbing *thuds.*
 "*You* buy *me* dinner? Between this and two apologies yesterday, we'll have
to start a whole new drawer of X-Files." But her banter sounded wooden and
forced through her teeth; instead of graceful parries and thrusts delivered on
tiptoe, she was simply going through the steps on lifeless feet. "No, thanks.
I'm not hungry. Raincheck?"
 "Sure. You know if..."
 "Yeah, I know," she said, giving him a tight grin. "Good night."
 She opened the door, stood there for a moment with her hand on the knob, then
closed it again, remaining in the room.
 Mulder stood quietly, waiting.
 She turned. "I'm sorry," she said.
 "For what?"
 "For what I did at Pinck today."
 "You certainly don't have to apologize to *me.* I don't think you have to
apologize to anybody."
 "Yes, I do. I'm supposed to justify actions with facts, not emotions. Isn't
that what I always criticize you about?"
 *In spades,* thought Mulder, remembering yet another Virginia prison. His
fist connecting soundly with John Lee Roche's jaw. Striking a prisoner--an
actionable offense.
 *I didn't see it,* the guard had said.
 *I did,* Scully'd replied.
 That, Mulder knew then and now, had been a warning.
 "I feel like a hypocrite today, and it's not a good feeling," she continued.
 "I think there were extenuating circumstances in this case."
 "There are *never* extenuating circumstances for what I did." Her tone was
sharp. "We're supposed to use facts to--to justify our actions, and I didn't
do that today."
 "You can't live your life based on facts alone."
 "I have to do my job based on facts alone. That's what we do, Mulder.
Evidence is the cornerstone of prosecution. If I didn't believe that as a
cop--as a *scientist,* for God's sake--where would I be? *Who* would I be?
Facts are all I have."
 "Facts are nothing," Mulder retorted. "They're not the truth."
 She put her hands on her hips. Flint sparked in her eyes.
 "Well, they're not," he continued. "If they were, we'd be done. This whole
room is full of *facts.* It's the *causes* that string them together. The
emotions behind the reasons. The whys behind the whats. That's what we don't
have."
 "I didn't say otherwise."
 "But you'll never get that just looking at the facts." He walked around to
the front of his desk.
 "And why not?"
 "There are no emotions in facts, Scully."
 He could almost hear the *whoompf* as her eyes lit.
 "Really?" she said, rolling her tongue around her teeth.
 "Yes."
 But watching her face made him feel as if he'd begun to sink into soft, warm
quicksand.
 She began to walk toward him, very slowly. She balanced on the balls of her
feet, her legs moving with an almost feline grace.
 It was a very *predatory* walk.
 Her blazing eyes locked onto his, refusing to let go.
 In one liquid motion, she shrugged off her coat, letting it fall to the
floor.
 She came closer, gently extending her index finger to poke him lightly in the
chest.
 He almost collapsed backward over his desk.
 Then she got even *closer.* Only a charged whisper of air separated their
bodies.
 And even under the soot and the grime and the sweat he could smell Scully,
her skin and her hair, a better signature than even her DNA, a scent that he'd
know and follow anywhere.
 She lifted moist lips to his ear.
 "My medical school textbook described male sexual arousal as a two-stage
process," she whispered.
 He felt her breath tickle his earlobe.
 This, too, was a new Scully voice, more throat and less tongue. The
consonants had more curves, dangerous ones. And it wrapped itself around more
commands than questions.
 *I've got to be dreaming.*
  Her fingers ran across the knot in his tie, loosening it a little.
 "The first stage," she continued, refusing to raise her voice above a breath,
"begins when pheromones released by a female trigger a sexual response in the
male."
 She gently reached up, brushed her fingers against his cheek.
 His mouth became a desert. He tried to gulp and failed.
 "This response is often heightened following stimulation of the male
erogenous zones," she said.
 Mulder began to feel himself stiffen, and closed his eyes. *What if she feels
that?*
 *What if she* wants *to feel it?*
 *Didn't we just agree yesterday to take some time away from one another?*
 *Give me the Alphas and the Epsilons and the Geminis,* he concluded. *They're
far less confusing.*
 He tried to shrink away from her a little, but the desk trapped him, its hard
edge unyielding against the backs of his thighs.
 "While the number and location of erogenous zones differs according to the
individual, common ones include the earlobes."
 Her breath was a Santa Ana wind that set his ears on fire.
 "The neck," she continued, brushing the tip of her nose against it.
 *That was no accident.*
 "Sc-Scul--" he began.
 "Mulder," she said in an old-Scully annoyed tone, "I'm trying to make a point
here." She made an exasperated noise. "Where was I? Oh, right. Adam's apple."
She leaned in even closer.
 *How can we not be touching?* Mulder wondered.
 "Nipples and aureolae," she continued.
 She lifted her hand, holding it a millimeter from Mulder's right pectoral.
 "And others," she whispered.
 He could feel his whole body quivering, taut as a wire.
 "These erogenous zones include a higher-than-average concentration and number
of nerve endings supersensitive to touch and designed to respond to a variety
of interpersonal stimuli, including a caress... a lick..."
 She looked up, slightly crossing her azure eyes to examine his lips.
 "A kiss..." she breathed.
 His right hand began to writhe behind him, checking the contents of his
desktop. *Anything breakable? Can I sweep this off very quickly?*
 *Is that what she wants?*
 "Wh-what--" he tried again.
 "His heart rate will increase significantly," she droned on, looking back
into his eyes, commanding his attention. "His respiratory rate will also
increase, usually by at least 10 percent."
 *Try forty,* he thought. He felt as if he was hyperventilating.
 Her eyes dropped to his mouth again. "As arousal progresses, appropriate
nerve centers in the cerebral cortex will transmit neural messages that
restrict the flow of blood to the penis. The erectile tissue in the penis will
fill with blood and make the organ erect and..."
 She blended a half-moan into her sentence's final word. "...hard."
 Then she dropped her eyes demurely--almost shyly--downward, letting them
slowly roam down Mulder's body.
 When they came back up, they sparkled but gave no answers.
 He kept trying to dig his fingers into the desk behind him.
 "Is--is this--" he stammered.
 "A lesson," she whispered.
 *What?*
 She reached back up toward the knot in his tie.
 She straightened it, and retightened it.
 Then she stepped away, retrieving her coat from the floor.
 "Maybe you're right, Mulder," she said in her doctor's voice. "Those were
just facts, after all."
 Mulder felt the quicksand close over his head.
 "G'night," she called over her shoulder before shutting the office door
behind her.
 For a very long time, Mulder remained standing in front of his desk, stunned.
 *If that's the first stage, I think the second would've killed me.*
 His respiratory and pulse rates finally returned to normal.
 A black rectangle poking out of the nearby garbage can caught his attention.
He stepped over to retrieve it.
 *Sleazy Rider,* proclaimed the videocassette's title card.
 "Amateurs," he muttered derisively.
 He tossed the tape back into the garbage and looked back toward the closed
office door.
 
<20>
Western Iraq
The Bloody Crescent
4:55 a.m. local time
8:55 p.m. Eastern time
 
 Alex Krycek sat cross-legged on the desert floor, tending the campfire and
drinking thick black coffee, watching morning extend its purple and orange
grasp from the horizon into the eastern sky.
 He heard the short German doctor wheeze and puff his way toward him.
 "Krycek?" called a voice, English slathered with a thick layer of Bavarian.
"The American satellite will be overhead soon. You should get back
underground."
 "In a minute, Herr Doktor," Krycek replied. "We have some time. Help me
finish this coffee."
 With a weary grunt, Dr. Rudolf Bronschweig collapsed next to Krycek,
accepting a tin cup of coffee with a muttered word of thanks. For a few
moments, the two men silently watched the sunrise.
 "*Verdammt* weather," Bronschweig finally said. "Not even morning and it
already feels like an oven out here."
 "You're a long way from the Black Forest," Krycek agreed. "No skiing holidays
here."
 Bronschweig *harumphed* his opinion about Krycek's joke. "You don't seem
bothered by this much."
 "Genes, probably. My father loved the desert," Krycek said, looking east
again. "Before he died, he told me some fabulous stories about his
archaeological digs in Egypt. Real *Indiana Jones* shit."
 "Indiana Jones?" Bronschweig's voice registered confusion.
 "Never mind. You know what my father's favorite quote was? T.E. Lawrence.
About the desert being clean. Father thought Moscow was the dirtiest city on
earth, in more ways than one. He fled to Egypt whenever he could. As a
professor. As a military advisor. However he could get the visa. Did you meet
him?"
 "No," Bronschweig said.
 "Greatest storyteller in the world. Kept me up *all* night. My *mat*--my
mother--got so angry with him." Krycek sipped his coffee.
 "Those stories are why you're here," Bronschweig said.
 Krycek snorted. "Not quite. I have five million reasons to be here, and each
one bears the signature of the American Treasury Secretary."
 "Ah, Krycek," said Bronschweig. "Being a mercenary doesn't suit you well.
Mercenaries don't watch the sun rise. They wait anxiously for it to set."
 "I prefer to think of myself as a consultant rather than a mercenary."
 "Whatever," Bronschweig said.
 Krycek looked in the bottom of his coffee cup, as if reading tea leaves. "My
father hated these men," he said softly.
 "It's fair to say these men don't like each other. I'm not even sure I like
you," Bronschweig continued.
 Krycek chuckled at that.
 "You really believe the cartouche holds the key," said Bronschweig.
 "I believe that if it doesn't," Krycek said, "then hope is lost."
 "The Elder will not be pleased if he discovers our efforts."
 "If we're successful, the Elder won't be around to complain about it," Krycek
said, beginning to shovel sand onto the fire.
 "You know that Baghdad exploded another device," Bronschweig said, changing
the subject.
 Krycek stopped digging, looking up with wide eyes. "When?"
 "About one o'clock."
 Krycek slowly exhaled through pursed lips. "That's ahead of schedule on the
agenda."
 "Apparently Mr. Hussein has a different agenda."
 "What if everything happens too fast?"
 Bronschweig shrugged. "I don't know. Angel Four's out of the bottle. We can't
put it back inside."
 Krycek did some mental calculations. "When does the boy arrive?"
 "Tonight, unless something happens. But even then, the timetable remains
unclear. We still have several pieces of unfinished business. We need another
seventy-two hours. At least."
 Krycek began stomping on the now-smoking embers with his combat boot, making
sure he'd truly extinguished the fire. "Bronschweig, answer me one question.
Honestly. For once let's deal in the truth."
 Bronschweig gave a little shrug that said, *fair enough.*
 "Do you think this will work? In your heart of hearts?"
 The doctor looked east, his mind several worlds away.
 "God only knows," he finally said. "Come, come. The Keyhole satellite will
come over the horizon soon. Let's get out of sight."
 
<21>
Dana Scully's apartment
Annapolis, Maryland
9:49 p.m.
 
 "What a day," Scully muttered to herself as she twisted on the bathtub's
water faucets.
 *Just like any other,* she attempted to rationalize. *Get up, argue with
Mulder, find something you can't explain, argue with Mulder, place your life
in mortal jeopardy once or twice, argue with Mulder, deal with local law
enforcement officers who treat you as if you've just stepped off Mars, argue
with Mulder, then go to bed.*
 She upended the bottle of bubble bath, shooting a huge squirt of the pink
liquid into the water tumbling from the spout. Thick, frothy foam instantly
resulted.
 But today wasn't like any other day.
 For one thing, she'd never done anything like what she'd done to Drosser.
 And, for another, she'd never done anything like what she'd done to Mulder.
 *What was I doing?*
 As the tub filled, she stripped, placing each article of fire-destroyed
clothing into a thick green garbage bag. She'd learned to put a box of Hefty
bags in the bathroom just for occasions like these. They'd become more
frequent lately.
 "I should just start wearing scrubs to work," she muttered.
 She stood back and appraised her nude body in the full-length mirror--not
like a fashion model, but like the doctor she was. She'd been worried after
the cancer. Ribs had shown, her muscle tone had slackened, her skin felt and
looked like chalk. But she'd recovered a lot of ground in twelve months.
Tighter muscles rippled under healthier-looking skin, and her flat abdomen
gently sloped upward to meet her torso without showing any protruding ribs
through the skin.
 Scully brushed a finger across her right nipple as she examined her breasts.
The nub was still erect, and she gasped lightly as a powerful, tantalizing
shock passed from it through her entire body, making her skin tingle from head
to toe.
 *Mulder,* she thought, shutting off the faucets and climbing into the tub,
biting her lip as she slid into water that was at first nearly scalding, then
just hot, then simply wonderful.
 *What was I thinking?*
 Like a girl, she used two fingers to pinch her nose closed and plunged under
the surface. She came back up, lathered her hands with shampoo and sighed as
she washed Decatur County out of her hair.
 She'd only meant to stand next to him, delivering the same sentences but in a
dry clinical monotone, believing that Mulder, like any man, couldn't hold a
just-the-facts discussion about sex without tuning out or turning on. And
almost always the latter. She'd planned to simply wait until he appeared a
little uncomfortable and then give him her standard told-you-so eyebrow before
leaving.
 She sank below the surface again, rinsing her hair.
 But as she stood next to him, breathing in his musky, male aroma--seemingly,
and inexplicably, enhanced by the fire--and watching the muscles in his chest
tighten and relax, tighten and relax, as he breathed, she found herself
turning on.
 Rapidly.
 *So I can't have a just-the-facts discussion about sex either, not without
becoming aroused,* she thought, resting her head back against the edge of the
tub.
 *At least not with Mulder.*
 Every near-touch had just added to the crescendo of pleasure coursing through
her body.
 When she had seen one of his nipples harden through his shirt, she'd had to
take her left foot and step on her right to keep from touching him.
 His lips... she could go on forever about those.
 And when she'd looked down... well, she'd seen him naked before. But not in
an... extracurricular?... situation, and even through his suit pants, she'd
seen enough to be surprised.
 *Pleasantly* surprised. *I did that.*
 She dragged her hand back across her breast, and this time she moaned.
 *Mulder.*
 *What would sex with Mulder be like?*
 *Would he want to be on top or bottom?*
 *What kind of face would he make when he...*
 She suddenly felt hotter and wetter than the water around her.
 *No... no... this is dangerous.*
 She felt her hand lazily move down her belly, down below the water.
 *I can't think about Mulder this way... I can't lose him the way he is now.*
 Her hand kept moving.
 *How come this always happens... when I think of him this way? I can't, I
can't do this anymore.*
 But she couldn't stop it.
 *Oh, fuck it.*
 Just as her fingers were about to travel the final inch, however, she heard a
foreign noise.
 The front door clicking shut.
 Her first thought was a mixture of apprehension and ecstasy: *Mulder?*
 But no, that didn't make sense. Mulder called first. Mulder *knocked.*
 She heard soft footfalls slowly make their way toward the bathroom.
 *Not Mulder's.*
 She flailed her left arm out from the bathwater and reached toward the shelf
where she always placed her gun when she bathed, ever since Eugene Tooms had
tried to take her liver.
 But there was no gun there, of course; Skinner had probably already tossed
the weapon into the Potomac, or wherever bad guns went to die.
 The footsteps stopped right outside the bathroom.
 Scully shriveled into the bottom of the tub, only holding her head and neck
above water, as if the bubble bath suds were bulletproof.
 There were two sharp raps on the half-opened door, and then it swung open.
 She saw the puff of smoke before the gray hair and wrinkled face.
 *I should've known he doesn't die,* she thought.
 The Cigarette-Smoking Man held his cigarette in his left hand.
 Because his right held a Beretta nine-millimeter pistol.
 "Forgive the ungentlemanly intrusion, Agent Scully," he said softly, between
drags on his Morley. "But I'm afraid we have to talk."
 *I need a weapon* was Scully's first thought.
 *I need to stall* was her second.
 The bathwater now felt positively arctic.
 "I thought you were dead," she said.
 "Reports have been greatly exaggerated," the smoking man replied.
 "I don't allow smoking in my home."
 "A wise rule. But I'm afraid I'm a difficult house guest." He reached over
and tapped a long ash into her sink. "Conducting a conversation like this may
prove a little uncomfortable for both of us. Would you put something on?"
 "Not in front of you," she said. "Mind waiting outside? Say a couple hundred
miles away?"
 "Let's try on the other side of the door," he said, stepping away and closing
it behind him.
 In a flash, Scully launched herself out of the tub and into the thick white
terrycloth robe on the back of the door.
 *Weapon. Weapon. Weapon.*
 She opened the tub drain to create some noise, and then carefully opened the
medicine cabinet door.
  A plastic bottle of Tylenol fell out into the sink with a *clatter.*
 "Shit," she whispered.
 *Not much time.*
 Her eyes pored through the cabinet, looking for something, anything.
 *Goddamn safety razors.*
 *Could I use Drano?*
 *Sure. And hold it in what? Your hands?*
 Her eyes fell upon a pair of cuticle scissors. "They'll have to do," she
muttered, sliding them into her robe pocket.
 She opened the door to find the smoking man standing against the opposite
corridor wall, aiming his pistol right at her head.
 "Let's move into the kitchen," he said.
 "I'm afraid I have nothing in the house," she deadpanned.
 "Thanks, but I've already eaten. Keep your hands where I can see them,
please, Agent Scully."
 Scully lifted her arms away from her body. "Mulder's never indicated you're
this jumpy when you pay him a visit."
 "Agent Mulder doesn't scare me as much as you do," the man said.
 *That might be the ultimate left-handed compliment,* she thought.
 He marched her into her kitchen. "Sit," he commanded, jerking the gun toward
the table. "And keep your hands on the table. At all times."
 Scully complied. He leaned against the counter directly opposite her,
continuing to hold the gun but maintaining a loose firing stance, drawing a
lazy bead on her body.
 He looked exactly the same as he did nearly six years ago, when she first met
him: another rumpled suit and cloud of cigarette smoke in Section Chief Scott
Blevins' office, sitting in the corner silently as Blevins fed her some bright
and shining lie about her future with the FBI.
 Now she knew how they really saw her: as a red-haired stealth bomb they could
lob into Mulder's basement empire, using her scientific mind to debunk his
quixotic quests. That was a plan that backfired. *Showed them, huh?* Blevins
now lay dead, but this one still stood: hard yet wrinkled face, a civil
servant's stooped posture, and cold silver eyes that had seen the end of the
world.
 Scully shivered inside her robe.
 "I understand you and Agent Mulder visited Blue Bluffs this afternoon," he
began.
 "We did."
 "Did you enjoy Indiana?"
 "We found it more exciting than we'd been led to believe."
 "You caused a lot of excitement as well. I hear Pinck plans to sue the
Bureau. And now that they're owned by GSK--"
 "No merger commission has yet approved that transaction," she interrupted.
 "Now that they're owned by GSK," he continued, "they'll have plenty of
deutschemarks to spend on lawsuits. Trust me, Agent Scully, no merger
commission will raise a finger to stop this corporate marriage. I've seen to
that."
 "We learned a lot from Miles Seligman," she said.
 "Miles," said the smoking man, as if remembering a college roommate or a
distant cousin. "Miles was almost a threat. He had all the pieces, just not in
the right order. But he didn't worry me. You and Mulder, however, do. You tend
to stumble across the right things at the wrong time."
 "We've become very good at stumbling. We excel at it," Scully shot back. But
the iron in her voice wasn't present in her revolving stomach, her thundering
heart.
 *What does he want?*
 "This leaves me with a problem," the smoking man said, "because your
interference at this point would prove... inconvenient. So I must take action.
The simplest apparent solution, of course, would be to kill you."
 "You've tried that already," she said, letting her anger modulate her voice,
keep it steady. "Someone might have told you that I almost died from cancer
last year."
 "Really?" he said, overacting his feigned interest. "I'm sorry to hear that.
Had I known, I would've sent flowers."
 "You bastard," she hissed.
 "Agent Scully, *you* removed the chip, not I. Had you left well enough
alone..." He shrugged his shoulders. "You might have saved yourself a lot of
medical bills."
 The cuticle scissors burnt white-hot in her robe pocket.
 *I think I'll start with your eye,* she silently seethed.
 "In any event, your... experience... last year simply underscored a
conclusion I've been drawing for years now--that removing one of you from the
equation simply makes the other one stronger," he said. "One murder creates a
martyr. Two murders create an inquiry, likely led by Assistant Director
Skinner, quite an uncooperative fellow of late. And three murders represent a
scandal."
 "You'll have to forgive me and my math," she said. "How many murders make a
conspiracy? And how many comprise genocide?"
 "Do you play chess, Agent Scully?"
 She shook her head.
 "A shame. It was actually Bill Mulder who taught me how to play." The smoking
man used his left hand to fish another cigarette from the open pack of Morleys
next to him on the counter. He took a gold-plated lighter and expertly lit the
end, inhaling deeply. "Bill was very, very good, much better than I could ever
be. I have this propensity to avoid any direct confrontation. My style is to
circle the wagons, to keep my army intact. Bill would attack on several
fronts, sacrificing pawns for bishops, bishops for the queen. And he always
won. Because he knew which pieces to keep and which to lose."
 "Like his son," Scully said with a sneer, "and his daughter. Or is it *his*
daughter?"
 She remembered standing in Teena Mulder's house in Connecticut, watching
Mulder's face shatter as his mother began to dodge questions about Samantha's
paternity. She'd barely resisted an urge to slap his mother, take Mulder's
hand and lead him away.
 But all the smoking man did was raise his eyebrows. "Believe what you want.
This isn't some B movie where I stand here with the gun and explain the entire
plot because I'm going to shoot you anyway. First of all, I'm not going to
shoot you anyway. And secondly, I'm running out of time. Which is why I'm
forced to negotiate."
 He reached inside his overcoat and tossed a videocassette onto the kitchen
table.
 Scully cast a wary eye upon it. "Apparently you've confused me with my
partner," she quipped.
 "Look at it," said the smoking man. "It won't bite."
 Scully picked it up. It was a plain, Sony VHS videotape. She picked it up to
read the label on the spine.
 SCULLY DANA KATHERINE, it read in black, block penmanship. ADMITTED 8 AUGUST
1994.
 The videotape began to softly rattle as her hand started shaking violently.
 "You went missing on that date, didn't you, Agent Scully?"
 "You know I did," she replied, wrapping her right hand with her left in a
vain effort to stop the trembling.
 "That cassette should answer all your questions. It's what a football fan
would call a 'highlights' tape."
 Scully looked at the tape, hefted it in her hand as if trying to guess its
weight.
 *I'm holding time in my hands. Four months of time I thought I'd forever
lost.*
 *This is more than truth... this is an answer.*
 With a degree of effort, she placed the tape back on the table. "This is
obviously not a Christmas gift."
 "Quite correct." The smoking man reached back into his pocket and withdrew a
thin, unsealed white envelope.
 Scully opened it and unfolded the single sheet that sat inside. Her eyes
quickly scanned it.
 "This is a resignation letter," she said.
 "*Your* resignation letter. My offer is simple. Sign that letter. Leave the
country. Take the tape."
 Scully felt the bottom of her stomach fall to her feet.
 *Leave Mulder?*
 "If I leave," she said, "Mulder will just work harder."
 "No," said the smoking man. "If you are *taken,* Agent Mulder will work
harder, because he'll think doing so will return you to him. Or maybe he won't
work so hard. Do you think he was working really hard with that woman in Los
Angeles while you were missing?"
 The words cut her soul like rusty scalpels. She looked away, struggling to
keep her face composed.
 "But if you *leave* of your own accord, then you'll open up this Pandora's
box of doubts he has inside him. Because if you don't stand behind him, who
will?"
 *You're my one in five billion, Scully,* she heard Mulder say.
 Angry tears burnt her eyes like acid.
 "Nuclear weapons can destroy nations, but only guilt can truly destroy a
man," he added, drawing deeply on his cigarette.
 "What if I say no?" Scully said.
 "Then I have a Plan B. But it's far less clean," he said. "Do you know what
China White is?"
 "Number four heroin. High degree of purity, very expensive."
 "*Incredibly* expensive. I found out how much it would cost to buy an amount
large enough to earn whoever possessed it a life sentence in federal prison.
Then I bought twice that amount. I thought I'd dump it in your separate cars
and call the police."
 Ice crawled up Scully's spine.
 "You'd adapt well to incarceration. You like rules," the smoking man said in
an almost conversational tone. "You'd probably run the prison library or start
one of those jailhouse universities. Not Agent Mulder. I've watched him for
almost four decades now. I know him almost as if he were my own son. Cut off
from his work, his sister, you, the truth, and confined to a six-by-six cell?
You know what he'd do."
 Scully shuddered. She knew. In an abandoned Rhode Island cottage, a
delusional and armed Mulder had shown her the darkest corner of his heart, a
sight that scared her more than an army of flukemen, more than a battalion of
Donnie Pfasters.
 "Why not just frame us anyway?" she asked.
 Now his eyes looked away for a moment. He inhaled half the cigarette, blew
the smoke toward the ceiling.
 "It'd devastate Teena," he said quietly, then offered a wry half-smile.
"There, Agent Scully. You squeezed one secret out of me."
 "He'll find me," she said.
 The smoking man began to laugh, a horrible, condescending sound that made her
look down in embarrassment.
 "Oh, Agent Scully, I thought *he* was the naive one," he said. "Do you think
he loves you? He may think he does. He's certainly attracted to you. But
leaving the country to find you would mean he'd have to leave the Bureau and
the X-Files. Even Skinner wouldn't authorize Mulder to waste taxpayer money
playing some global game of hide-and-seek with his lover. His *supposed*
lover. Because you and I both know who his real lovers are. Those drawers of
candy-striped folders. You're just the mistress in this sad little triangle."
 *That's not true,* she thought. *Is it?*
 She felt two boiling-hot tears trace tracks down her cheeks.
 He leaned toward her, blowing smoke into her face. "Given your religious
heritage, I'm sure you see me as the devil right now. And if I could make this
deal any more Faustian, I would. If I could walk into this room holding
Emily--"
 "Don't you *ever* say her name again," Scully shouted.
 "If I could walk into this room holding Emily, and trade her for your
cooperation, I'd do it in a second. That's how dire my predicament is right
now. But there are some things even I can't fix."
 Scully lifted the cassette, turning it over in her hands.
 "Now I know how much time costs," she mumbled. "Thirty pieces of silver."
 "Enough melodrama," said the smoking man, tossing the remainder of his
cigarette into the kitchen sink. "I need a decision, Agent Scully."
 Scully looked at the videotape.
 *Mulder, what would you do? This is a dead end. We're damned if we do and
damned if we don't, and I've lost the game and I'm so sorry.*
 She remembered him in the funhouse cul-de-sac, feeling for secret latches.
 *Is there one here?*
 And then the idea came to her.
 She slid the videocassette back across the table.
 "Which federal prison would you prefer?" the smoking man said.
 "I want something other than this," she said calmly.
 "This is a fixed-price deal," he responded.
 "You said this was a negotiation. But if that's the way you feel, I hope
you're ready to tell Teena Mulder about her son's drug problem. Or his suicide
in prison."
 It took every atom of strength she could muster to keep from letting the last
five words break up in her mouth.
 *Oh, God forgive me. Mulder, please forgive me.*
 The smoking man stared at her for a moment, sizing her up.
 "I'd like a cigarette," she said, in the best commanding tone she could
achieve.
 His eyebrows shot up. But he placed the pack of Morleys and the lighter on
the table, sliding them over.
 With fumbling fingers, she fished out a cigarette, slid the filter into her
mouth and lit the business end. She inhaled deeply, feeling the nicotine hug
her nerves, soothing them with deadly kisses.
 She examined the lighter's inscription--TRUST NO ONE--before sliding it back
across the table.
 He handed her a coffee mug from the sink drainboard to use as an ashtray.
"Well?" he said. "What's your price?"
 She took another deep drag, hoping the smoke would burn away the chill that'd
seized her entire body, and rested the cigarette in the cup.
 She said one word.
 His eyes grew wide.
 "That's my price," she said.
 "Absolutely not," he scoffed.
 "Then take me to prison," she said. "Or better yet, shoot me. Right now." She
stood, reached across, grabbed his gun hand and pulled it toward her, placing
the barrel of the Beretta right against her forehead.
 The smoking man stood motionless, and for one moment, Scully was sure he'd
pull the trigger.
 Instead he reached for the cigarette in the coffee mug, putting it in his
mouth. He moved the pistol away from her forehead, but kept it aimed.
 "That price is too high," he finally said.
 "What you're asking of me is very expensive," she replied. "I'm assuming I
won't be allowed to tell Mulder anything? Or contact him once I leave?"
 He nodded.
 *Then that means,* Scully realized, *I can't tell Mom.*
 Near the end of the cancer, in the dark days before the remission, she
remembered awakening from a nap to hear her mother crying from her chair next
to the hospital bed. It hadn't been a hysterical sound; only a gentle weeping
punctuated with occasional sniffles and sobs. And yet it'd frightened Scully
to her marrow, scared her enough to feign sleep instead of face her.
 Mothers were supposed to wipe away tears, not make them.
 *And I keep making you cry. Melissa. The cancer. Now this.*
 "Then, in my eyes," she said, taking a deep breath, "this is the only fair
deal."
 He puffed on the Morley, eyes narrowing.
 "You should work for me," he said softly.
 "I'm only improving your chess game," she whispered. "Making you lose
pieces."
 "Resign tomorrow and leave the country by midnight," he said abruptly,
 beginning to move toward the door, leaving the pistol trained on her head.
 "Keep your hands on the table and don't turn around."
 "Then I assume we're in agreement?"
 She heard her front door open.
 "We are, Agent Scully," the smoking man said gruffly.
 As soon as she heard the latch click closed, she bolted up from the table and
ran into the hallway.
 Of course, only a cloud of cigarette smoke remained.
 She slammed the apartment door shut.
 She tore the cuticle scissors from her robe pocket and flung them across the
room.
 *Useless. I was so fucking useless.*
 She sank to the floor, back against the door, shoulders shaking with sobs.
 "Mulder," she mumbled. "I'm sorry. I did the best I could. I'm sorry."

<22>
December 4, 1998
Dear Mulder,
 
 I write to ask your forgiveness for my sins.
 When you came to my hotel room two nights ago, I watched you shiver in the
doorway, your body rippling like wind on seawater.
 I thought you were cold. I now know you were scared.
 My hand now trembles as it crosses the page.
 I lied to you three times today.
 It's not the first time we've hidden the truth from each other. You held back
your demons; I held back my sickness. We tell ourselves we do it to protect
the other; we actually do it to protect ourselves.
 But I've never twisted truth into a lie before your eyes, until today. I did
it with the best of intentions, those that form the bricks of the road to
hell.
 Does the end justify the means?
 Two days ago, outside Jason Doyle's bedroom, I told you no.
 Now I'm not so sure. It's hard to separate gray back into black and white.
 As I write this, I see your smile, that laconic leer that lazily stretches
halfway toward one ear and teases me with a now-you-see-it-now-you-don't
dimple.
 If I can keep one part of you with me until I die, it will be that smile.
 But I know that you will see my self-doubt as victory, proof that I have now
opened my mind to your extreme possibilities.
 Just as you will know that I can only see that as defeat.
 
 The first time I lied was when right after you gave me the gift-wrapped box,
when I returned from upstairs around lunchtime.
 I saw your eyes spark with worry for a moment as I took the package.
 My face must've betrayed me. I almost cried. Knowing what I was about to
do... and then you give me something...
 But of course, you hadn't bought me anything. Just taken my new service
pistol, issued by Skinner and the armory to replace the one that killed Jason
Doyle, and served it to me as a gag gift.
 I didn't lie when I said you were a brat. You have been and always will be,
one whom frustrates me to ecstasy.
 I didn't lie when I told you I'd been examining Miles Seligman's body and
then evidence from the Doyle residence.
 You raised one eyebrow before you asked why the D.C. police had turned
evidence back over to the FBI.
 I almost laughed. Do I look like that when I do it?
 Think horses, not zebras. If you keep part of me, I hope you keep that
eyebrow, that initial skepticism.
 I hope you keep some part of me.
 I didn't lie when I told you the evidence came back just as it always does
from the D.C. labs. Choked with drug murders and drive-bys, they have neither
the time nor patience for detailed forensic work and have come to rely on the
"professional courtesy" we offer all law enforcement agencies.
 Then you chuckled and said you thought I was avoiding you.
 A laugh in your voice, a question mark in your eyes.
 And here I lied: I said no.
 But I was. I had been all morning.
 You go through life thinking you remind me of everything I've lost.
 Untrue. Through yesterday, you've only reminded me of everything I've fought
to keep.
 And someday, maybe sooner than I think, your memory will remind me of why I
gave up what I did.
 But today, you only reminded me of you: the way you smell and the gentle
pressure of your fingers in the small of my back and your lousy sense of
direction and the weight of your hand in mine and how every time I leave you,
I wonder what your good-night kiss would taste like.
 And today, you only reminded me of how I'll never find out.
 And I wanted to avoid that feeling--the raw, empty ache that will now reside
where you used to sit in my heart--as long as I could.
 So I avoided you.
 
 The second time I lied was when you asked if I had found anything among the
evidence.
 I said no. But I did.
 They left me alone in one of the evidence rooms with the boxes, which
obviously have not received any priority. This poor family. We shuffle their
corpses and effects from agency to agency, passing responsibility for their
deaths from one bureaucrat to another, as if committing them forever to limbo,
never honoring their memories with an answer or their bodies with final rest.
 Three lives in sixteen boxes. Is that all we stand for at the end?
 You know what's in those boxes. Checkbooks and pocketbooks, passports and
driver's licenses, prescriptions and medical records, the detritus of a life
interrupted.
 I spent hours pretending to sift through them, in reality thinking about what
my boxes would hold. I could only fill one in my mind. Uninteresting
checkbook, uneventful passport, a relatively usual paper trail of bills and
diplomas.
 I grew despondent when I realized I held nothing of Emily's. Not even a
photo. I never took one. There was never time. There'd be my cross, which she
wore. Which I'll take with me to my grave. But no more.
 But it crushed me just as much to realize I have so little to prove *us.*
 A *Superstars of the Superbowl* tape. I still have it.
 My Apollo 11 keychain.
 One dried rose petal. Reminds me of what we could've lost, what we could've
had.
 Who knows?
 We never will now.
 I picked up a photo of Jason Doyle. Bat slung over his shoulder, cap low over
his eyes, wearing a blue-and-green jersey: G'TOWN TEE BALL.
 I ended his life with fire and steel two days ago, and I'm not sure why I had
to.
 My hand began to shake a little, and I ended up dropping the picture.
 The glass shattered, the frame exploded into four pieces of wood.
 Something fell out from behind the back of the photograph.
 It was a Swiss banker's business card. Some numbers had been written on the
back of it in pen.
 I pocketed the card before cleaning up the mess.
 So not only did I lie to you, I committed a felony.
 
 The third lie was the deepest.
 When I stood to leave, you said "see you tomorrow."
 And I nodded.
 You'll never see me again.
 And whatever you think about me for the rest of your life, please realize
that I did what I thought was best, given the few choices I had available.
 You would've never let me save you, even when I was dying.
 If what I've done eventually saves you, then it's saved us both.
 Because I love you, Mulder. So much it scares me, so much it hurts, so much
that I don't know who I'll become without you.
 Perhaps that's the only truth there is.
 It's certainly the only one that matters to me anymore.
 And if what I do today protects that truth from evil, then it's been worth
the cost.
 
 With all my love,
 ------
 She almost signed *Dana* but instead voted for *Scully.*
 She had folded the letter and placed it in the envelope, about to seal it
when she realized what she was doing.
 She saw the smoking man at Mulder's apartment, flipping through his mail,
finding her letter.
 She saw him reading it, a half-grin of prurient interest slowly rising to his
face.
 She saw him pocketing the letter with a wry chuckle.
 She saw him hiding the heroin under Mulder's couch.
 "I can't, I can't, I can't," she mumbled.
 She rose from her seat at her kitchen table, walked to the sink, opened a
drawer and dug out a box of matches, striking one against the counter.
 The letter curled at the edges, turned black in an instant and then was gone.
 She blinked back the tears as she looked at the clock.
 11:19 p.m.
 *Not much time.*
 She allowed herself one sniffle and walked into the bedroom.
 The covers on her bed were tangled and twisted, half on and half off the
mattress, a reminder of how she'd kicked and wailed herself into a uneasy,
dreamless stupor last night.
 She touched the pillows. She knew it was her imagination, but they still felt
damp.
 She took a long deep sigh and looked around the room. *It feels empty
already.*
 One of her overnight-size suitcases, still half-filled from the Indiana trip,
sat by the foot of the bed.
 Opening her closet, she looked down on her other tote bag, filled with
underwear and toiletries, a redundant backup for back-to-back adventures with
Mulder.
 *If there's one thing Mulder's taught me,* she thought, *it's how to pack.*

<23>
The Crab and Finch
C Street Southeast
Washington
2:07 a.m.
 
 *Jeremiah was a bullfrog...*
 The music barreled into Byers. His skeleton felt like an antenna, quivering
and twinging as the earsplitting notes struck it.
 *Was a good friend of mine...*
 As soon as he fully stepped inside the bar, he could feel the microscopic
capillaries in his eyes explode, victims of the pent-up cigarette smoke that
floated past him like some malevolent fog.
 *Never understood a single word he said...*
 Chewed-up, stained-pine pub tables littered the floor around the bar. Several
gleamed with spilled beer. With one finger, Byers reached over and carefully
returned a pilsner glass to an upright position.
 *But I helped him drink his wine...*
 *Carcinogens, clutter and Three Dog Night,* he thought, wrinkling his nose.
*No wonder I don't get out much anymore. This is more Frohike's kind of
place.*
 "We're closed," the bartender shouted at Byers, his basso-profundo easily
drowning out the music. He pointed at the clock on the wall. "You just missed
last call."
 *And he always had some mighty fine wine...*
 "I'm looking for someone," Byers said.
 "Aren't we all," the bartender replied, drying a glass.
 *Joy to the world..*
 This time a dull, low, alcohol-thick voice attempted to stumble through a
counterharmony.
 With an off-key, droning monotone.
 "I think I found him," Byers said.
 He followed the voice to the far end of the semicircular bar, where he found
Mulder sitting on the floor, back to the wall, his left ear flush against the
side of the blaring neon-ringed jukebox, as if he were trying to hear its
 heart. *Sitting that close, I wonder if he can hear at all,* Byers wondered.
 Mulder looked up with hooded eyes, and Byers took a half-step back in
surprise.
 His friend's hazel irises kept changing hue, as if the green and the gold
couldn't make up their minds as to which would be on top. The colors swirled
around two heartless pinpricks of black. He was holding a bottle of Jose
Cuervo tequila like a teddy bear. He lifted it a little in salute.
 "Oh, boy," Byers muttered.
 "All the boys 'n' girls," Mulder slurred.
 Byers watched Mulder's mouth struggling to work coherently. It was losing its
battle.
 "Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea," Mulder continued.
 But he let Three Dog Night finish the chorus solo: *Joy to you and me.*
 "Hey, you found my hiding spot," he said.
 "It wasn't hard," Byers replied.
 "'Cause I made it easy. Normally people who hide want to be found." He
grimaced a little.
 "What?"
 Mulder ignored him, trying to jump headlong into the middle of the second
verse.
 "Is he yours?" the bartender asked Byers.
 "Regrettably," the Gunman replied. "How much does he owe?"
 "Thirty-three fifty," the bartender replied. "But I'll let it go if you just
get him the fuck outta here. If I hear him play that song one more time I'll
go apeshit."
 "OK," Byers said.
 "John," Mulder said, grabbing Byers' pantleg. "Help me out. Gimme some
singles for the jukebox."
 "No way, Cinderella. It's past midnight and you turned into a pumpkin a long
time ago."
 Mulder took a long swig from the bottle, letting a trickle run down his chin.
"Just sing along with me then."
 "No. Let's go." He reached down to help Mulder up.
 Mulder ignored the hand. "You're self-conscious of your voice. It's OK.
Scully's got a bad singing voice. The worst fucking singing voice I've ever
heard."
 "When have you heard Scully sing?"
 "She sang me to sleep once."
 Byers felt his outstretched hand grow leaden with shock and plummet to his
side.
 "Not like that. Please. We're talking about Scully. We were in the woods and
I didn't wanna wrestle and she had to stay awake but she was holding me and I
fell asleep. And she sang 'Joy to the World,' all flat and shit, and it made
me want
 to cry."
 "Because someone finally sang it worse than Three Dog Night?"
 "No," said Mulder in a boy-like voice. "Because it was so beautiful."
 Byers snorted. "OK, time to cut these delusions off at the source." He held
out his hand again. "Give me the bottle."
 With his left hand, Mulder hugged the bottle closer to his chest. "No. Senor
Cuervo es mi amigo."
 "You are not your father's son," Byers said.
 Mulder's pupils grew darker and harder.
 But he placed the bottle on the floor and used Byers' hand to pull himself
up.
 "Can you walk?" Byers asked.
 "I can stumble." He looked back at the bartender. "G'night, Royce."
 "Get the *fuck* outta here," the bartender replied, with no sense of
camaraderie.
 Carefully, Byers maneuvered Mulder outside to the street. *Where are we
again?* he wondered, looking up for a street sign. *And will we ever find a
taxi? The other one  wouldn't even wait in this neighborhood.* "Whatever
possessed you to come out here to the Crack and Filth?"
 "Crab and Finch."
 "Whatever. Frohike said you normally go to Casey's Bar near Dupont."
 Mulder chuckled cynically. "Casey's is a bar where you go to get laid. The
Crab is a bar where you go to get drunk."
 Byers was glad any bar with *crab* in its name didn't fall into Mulder's
first category.
 "Scully and I went to Casey's," Mulder continued, the wistful tone back in
his voice.
 Byers felt confusion crawl across his skin. *What's going on here? Why isn't
she picking him up, dusting him off, taking him home?*
 "So anyway," and now Byers heard something dark and furious emerge in
Mulder's voice, "why are you here, Byers? This is more a Frohike place. This
is more a Frohike job. Hell, this isn't a Frohike thing at all because no one
knew where I was."
 "Scully did," Byers said, beginning to turn back toward the street.
 He felt Mulder's hands seize his coat lapels, whirling him around.
 "What did you say?" Mulder hissed.
 He pulled up hard on the woolen coat, forcing Byers to stand on his tiptoes.
 *This isn't Mulder,* was Byers' first thought, so paranoid that it ran back
into the corner of his mind from where it came.
 *His breath smells like tequila and bile and...*
 Byers looked around Mulder's eyes. The skin shone in the streetlight, a flat
and dull reflection. *Dried tears?*
 "An E-mail," he managed to stammer. "She sent me an E-mail."
 "What?"
 Quickly, Byers fished a folded piece of paper out of his inside coat pocket.
 Mulder dropped his friend, unfolding the note with trembling fingers.
 Byers reread the note from Mulder's side:
 
 *To: numbersix @ lonegunmen.com [scrambled]*
 *Fm: D_Scully @ fbi.gov*
 *Re: <no subject line>*
 *12/04/98 1435*
 
 *Byers:*
 
 *I want you to call Mulder at around one a.m. tomorrow morning to see if he's
all right. Try both his home and cell phones. If he doesn't answer either, go
get him from a bar called the Crab and Finch.*
 
 She'd written out the address, including the bar's phone number. *Such
attention to detail,* Byers marveled. He thought *that* was the sexiest thing
about Dana Scully.
 
 *If he's there, he'll need your help. I'd consider this an immense favor.
Scully.*
 
 He looked up at Mulder's face.
 One solitary tear trickled down his cheek.
 "Goddamn her," he suddenly exploded through clenched teeth.
 Byers felt his face contort into something that must've looked dumbstruck.
 Mulder crumpled the note in an angry fist and tossed it to the ground. "How
did she know I came here when she was missing? How did she know?" He turned to
Byers. "How did she know?"
 "I don't know," Byers said. "Why don't you ask her?"
 "Because she's fucking *gone,*" Mulder replied.
 Like collapsing dominoes, various realizations fell into place inside Byers'
mind. *I've got to get him back to our place,* he thought, stepping out into
the street and looking back and forth--in vain--for a taxicab.
 When he looked back, Mulder was gone.
 *Fuck.* "Mulder!" he shouted.
 He heard a garbage can clang in protest after being knocked over. The sound
came from an alley between the Crab and its nearest neighbor, a liquor store.
 Byers jogged into the alley. In the dim light, he could barely make out a
silhouette leaning against the wall at the alley's far end.
 He began to run.
 He felt his heart leap out of his body as he realized Mulder was holding
something.
 Something revolver-shaped.
 "No," he called.
 *Why does this alley seem so long?*
 Mulder pointed the gun into his mouth.
 "God Mulder *don't,*" Byers shouted.
 Mulder pulled the trigger.
 Byers closed his eyes as tight as he could.
 But there was no explosion.
 He carefully cracked open one eyelid. Mulder remained standing, the gun still
pointed into his mouth.
 He pulled the trigger again.
 This time, Byers heard a little hiss, the slight gurgling sound of a liquid
jet hitting the back of Mulder's throat.
 The rotting-wood odor of tequila hung heavy in the air.
 Now Byers grabbed his friend by the coat lapel.
 "Give me the gun," he shouted.
 Mulder handed him the squirt gun. A promotional label blaring *Jose Cuervo's
Tequila Shooters!* caught the light. *Just a stupid toy he got at the bar.*
 Byers flung it away roughly. "Not that gun." He roughly turned Mulder to the
side and yanked his SigSauer from its hip holster. He ejected the clip,
tossing it away as well before jamming the now-harmless pistol into his coat
pocket.
 Now Mulder hung his head, began to scuff his feet.
 "God, I'm sorry," he said, choking on alcohol and regret. "I wasn't-- I
didn't-- it was--"
 *Fuck the cab,* thought Byers.
 "Give me your cell," he snapped.
 Mulder didn't respond, simply continuing to stare  straight ahead. Byers
rummaged through the FBI agent's coat pockets, found the phone, turned it on,
dialed.
 "Gunmen," Frohike answered.
 "Me."
 "Hey, hurry up and get *back* here. The fucking Trojan horse virus that Pinck
left behind? It's spreading through our networks. Fast."
 "Need you to pick me up," Byers said.
 "Man, just take a--"
 "Mulder's in trouble."
 "Tell me where," Frohike instantly responded.
 
<24>
The Scully residence
Annapolis, Maryland
6:51 a.m.
 
 He hadn't meant to scare Margaret Scully.
 Last night, he'd lain awake on a couch in the lair of the Lone Gunmen,
feeling the alcohol seep out of his brain, back into his body. Alone with his
pain and without the tequila's anaesthetic, he'd thrashed about in his pitch-
black imagination for a clue, a sign, a hint.
 *Where did she go?*
 *What could I have done?*
 Then an idea erupted as a pinprick of white-hot light: *She would've told her
mother.*
 He'd tried to make himself wait until eight but couldn't, waking Frohike up
to borrow his van.
 And now he stood on the front steps of the Scully house, closely examining
the doorbell. He'd been running his fingers across it, but hadn't yet been
able to press.
 *Every time I come here I bring bad news,* he thought.
 He felt the urge to jog back to the van, drive away.
 But then he heard the *clickety-snick* of the deadbolt, and the door fell
open.
 Margaret Scully, who had begun to reach down toward the newspaper that lay
between Mulder's feet, recoiled with shock, lips parting in a prelude to a
gasp, hand starting to rise toward her throat.
 Then her lips set in a thin smile as she realized who it was.
 Mulder had to look down. He rubbed his jaw, feeling his fingers snag on
coarse stubble. *Sorry, Scully. I should've shaved.*
 "Fox," Margaret said warmly. "Where's Dana?"
 Mulder looked up, stunned. He felt hope trickle from his body.
 Her eyes softened, then hardened.
 "I was hoping you could tell me," he said hoarsely.
 "Fox?" The syllable was all Navy mom: panic rippling under a layer of steel.
 "I think..." He couldn't look at her. "I think I lost her, Mrs. Scully." He
felt her hand on his arm, but continued to examine his shoes. "She's quit the
Bureau and left town."
 "Fox."
 "And it's my fault. I--"
 "Fox." The pressure on his arm intensified. She gently pulled him toward her.
 He looked up, met her gaze. Her brown eyes brimmed with concern.
 "Come inside," she said. "It's cold."
 
 She led him into the kitchen. "Black, right?" she asked quietly, turning to
the cupboard, reaching up for coffee mugs.
 Mulder stopped short in the doorway. *I just told her that her daughter's
left without explanation and she's playing hostess?*
 "Don't look at me like that," she said without turning, shaking her hands,
exasperated that they held nothing. "This is what I do. You have to let me do
something."
 He remembered. During the cancer, Scully's tears made Hurricane Margaret spin
faster. She'd wheeled her daughter to chemo, filled out paperwork demanded by
the hospital, stayed up late at night reading medical texts she'd learned to
download from the Internet.
 "Black," he rasped, sitting at the table. A small television, wired for cable
and tuned to CNN, stared back at him from the other side. A military map of
the Middle East had replaced the tablecloth; an open laptop covered Iran and
Afghanistan. Other newspapers and documents cluttered the tabletop. The room
reminded Mulder of an FBI command post.
 "Charlie," Fox muttered.
 "Is fine," Margaret said, using an off-key voice into which she'd injected
too much relief. "I got an E-mail from him last night. The modern Navy and
their toys. When Dana's father went to Vietnam, sometimes it'd be weeks
between letters. The rose garden out back? That's what happened when I didn't
hear from him for sixteen days."
 She forced a laugh, but as she put a coffee mug in front of him, he saw the
worry lines around her face had multiplied.
 "Tell me what happened," she said.
 He recounted an abridged version of the previous night's events. After he
finished, Margaret sat for a long time, looking into the bottom of her coffee
mug, chewing her lower lip.
 *Like mother, like daughter,* Mulder thought. *And I'll never see Scully do
that again.*
 "There's something you're not telling me, isn't there?" she asked.
 Mulder looked up, burned himself on her gaze.
 *Yeah. I told your daughter I loved her.*
 He averted his eyes.
 "She told me you'd be like this," Margaret said.
 His eyes snapped up, almost making a clicking noise.
 "But you said she hasn't--"
 "Not recently. During the cancer. Near the end, before our miracle. Or
whatever you want to call it," she added quickly as Mulder felt his brows knit
in disbelief. "I used to stay up most of the night listening to her breathe. I
thought--" Her voice stumbled, but she quickly recovered. "I thought if I
heard her stop breathing, there'd be enough time to save her."
 She reached across, taking his hand. He let his fingers hang limp in her
palm.
 "One night," she continued, "right before you came back, I was sitting up
with her. I thought she was asleep. She startled me when she began speaking,
telling me you were alive, that your suicide had been a ruse."
 "You must've been surprised."
 "With you two, I've learned never to be surprised about anything anymore,"
she said with a wry smile. "She went on to explain that she was scared you'd
react badly to her death. Badly... to the extreme." He felt her hand shiver.
"She asked me to watch over you once she was gone. To make sure... to make
sure you knew it wasn't your fault. She told me to make you as much a part of
my family as you'd let me."
 *If I can save you, let me.*
 Mulder squeezed his eyes shut tight.
 "I guess she didn't trust your mother," Margaret said.
 *Makes two of us,* Mulder thought. He allowed himself a slight snort but said
nothing.
 "Which is why," Margaret said, her voice dropping in temperature, "I'm
worried. She would've never done this to you. She always worried about you.
She was ready to leave everyone but you. In fact, while you think you almost
ended her life, I think you probably saved it. Without you..."
 She let the sentence dangle, then fall to the floor.
 "Find her, Fox," she said, her voice commanding him to look up. Her eyes were
dark and turgid, swimming in worry.
 "She said not to. She said it was me," he said.
 "The only time I've known my daughter to lie," she replied, "was when she was
protecting you. Don't let her."
 Mulder felt the emotions swirling within him--fear and fury and regret--begin
to fuse into something with shape.
 "William always said, 'Don't wish,'" Margaret said. "'Do.'"
 He looked down at their clasped hands, and squeezed a little back.
 "I'll find your daughter for you," he said.
 "Find her for you, Fox," she said. "Go."
 And he went, racing back to Frohike's van, nerves jangling with ideas.
 *I'll pull all the airline passenger manifests.*
 *I'll crosscheck her driver's license with rental car agencies.*
 *Maybe her credit cards?*
 He sped back to his apartment, where he parked the van and jogged over to his
fleet car, preparing to drive the Ford back downtown to headquarters. *I'll
get a lot done on a Saturday. I'll find her.*
 *You didn't find her when she went missing before.*
 "I will this time," he muttered.
 His reflection in the closed car window brought him up short, one hand on the
door handle. His face was dark with beard growth. His hair, stiff and
unwashed, exploded in three different directions. The whites of his eyes were
pink.
 *You look like a maniac,* said a voice in his head. Sounding like Scully, of
course. *No one will cooperate with you if you smell bad. Five minutes. Clean
up.*
 He walked into his apartment building, pulling out his keys with his right
hand and reaching to the top of his door with his left, feeling for the hair
he always scotch-taped across the thin crack under the lintel.
 He felt his fingers brush two halves of the broken slender thread.
 His stomach seized and he reached for his gun. It felt too light sliding out
of his holster, and when he saw the gaping hole in the butt, he remembered
where the magazine was.
 In an alley half a city away.
 With a deep breath, he assumed a firing stance, wrapping his left hand around
the empty magazine slot.
 He stepped back, sizing up the door.
 *Can I kick this in?*
 *Fuck,* he answered himself. *It's never really kept anyone out, has it?*
 He cocked his leg back and let it fly.
 The deadbolt popped free of the jamb, splintering it like balsa wood, and the
door flew open, banging into the inside wall.
 "Federal agent!" Mulder shouted. "Stay where you are!"
 Someone was sitting on his couch.
 He carefully moved closer.
 The person turned. Rivulets of brunette hair fell across a shoulder. Eyes
like his, only younger, burned back at him, widening as they saw his gun.
 "Fox?" the woman asked.
 "Samantha?"
 His arms had actually begun to fall, to open, to embrace, until his brain
stepped in to countermand that order with a memory: one of dozens of Samanthas
in a Maryland clinic.
 Dozens of *cloned* Samanthas.
 He snapped his empty gun back up into a firing position.
 "When we were growing up, what sport did we play in the summer?" he asked.
 "Baseball," she said in a *well-duh* voice.
 "What position did I play?"
 "Right field."
 "What position did you play?"
 Her eyes narrowed and her mouth fell slightly open.
 "*Answer me,*" Mulder bellowed, waving the pistol.
 "Left field," she said coolly.
 Mulder kept the pistol up.
 "Although I *should've* played shortstop. But none of you older kids, not
even Dave, would let me. Even though I could outthrow any of you," she
continued.
 Mulder's heart melted.
 He reholstered his weapon and wrapped his arms tight around his sister.
 She hugged back. "I found you," she said softly.
 *But I lost Scully,* he thought with a grimace.
 "I haven't had much luck finding people, have I?" he asked.
 If she heard the question, she ignored it. "Fox, we have to talk. But
quickly."
 He pulled back to study her face. Angles outnumbered curves.
 "I don't have much time," she said.
 
<25>
Kreditanstalt Zurich
Switzerland
2:50 p.m. local time
8:50 a.m. Eastern time
 
 *Hey, Scully.*
 His voice whispered in her ear--actually, kind of purred, in that gravelly
voice he got when he was really sleepy, that three a.m. voice he'd use when
droning on and on during all-night stakeouts.It'd been driving her insane--in
a lot of different ways--since her plane had left Dulles almost seven hours
ago.
 "Oh, Mulder," she muttered, using the heels of her hands to briskly rub eyes
that hadn't seen sleep in more than 24 hours. "Shut up."
 "*Entschuldigen Sie?*"
 It was a kind question asked in an *achtung* tone of voice. Scully's head
snapped up to find the bank porter, seated behind a massive black walnut desk
that looked nearly bulletproof, watching her with a cocked eyebrow and half-
sneer, both of which said he expected her to come over and ask him for change
in a minute.
 "Noth--*nein*--nothing," Scully stammered, fatigue tangling her tongue.
 With a sniff, the porter returned to his newspaper.
 Scully shriveled in her chair, feeling small and alone in the mighty marble-
lined Taj Mahal of a front lobby. She'd felt that way ever since landing in
Zurich: dwarfed by the airport's cavernous entrance hall, finding that her
college-course German--already creaking with rust--sounded nothing like the
*Schweizerdeutsch* dialect used by the Swiss. She even got lost--normally
Mulder's job--on the way to the bank, located on Zurich's mighty Paradeplatz,
a street that had more banks than an interstate had gas stations.
 *I feel so foreign. So... alien.*
 She heard Mulder snort, and her lips had actually begun to curve upward
before she caught them, pulling them back down.
 *Go away, Mulder.*
 She looked down again at the two pieces of paper she'd been wringing in her
hands since she'd arrived at the bank twenty minutes before. She'd already
added several creases to the business card, rolling it over and over in her
fingers, underscoring the name Johann Strutknecht several times with a bitten-
ragged nail, re-examining the six-digit number scrawled in green ink on the
reverse. The other document was a pamphlet--*The New Kreditanstalt
Zurich*--which indicated she now sat in some sort of "people's bank" that held
Saturday hours--sacrilegious in Switzerland--and always appointed at least one
officer to deal with walk-in customers "unlike most of this country's private
banks."
 *If this is the "people's bank,"* she wondered, *then the private ones must
sprinkle diamonds on the floor.* She let her eyes roam around the lobby once
more. A stained-glass skylight depicting the seals of Switzerland's 23 cantons
drenched the marble floor with puddles of brilliant color. What wasn't stone
was either thick black walnut, rich with centuries never seen by the New
World, or brass polished to shine like gold.
 Scully exhaled through pursed lips, thinking of her now-empty checkbook and
her rapidly melting credit cards, one of which was howling in protest after
she'd maxxed it out buying her walk-on Swissair ticket.
 *Hope they don't insist on a credit check before talking to me,* she thought.
 *Hey, Scully, what kind of toaster do you think these guys give you when you
sign up for an account?* Mulder's voice whispered in her ear.
 She couldn't repress that smile, but it quickly flipped itself back into a
frown.
 *Quit haunting me, Mulder,* she thought. *I don't believe in ghosts.*
 But she couldn't exorcise him. When air turbulence had begun rocking her
Swissair flight, she remembered her first trip with Mulder, to Oregon. Rough
air had rocked the airliner, making her dig her fingernails into her armrests
while
 Mulder sprawled across three seats, as comfortable as he ever became while
grabbing one of the catnaps that he tried to pass off as sleep.
 *Will traveling with this guy always be so bumpy?* she'd thought at the time.
 It absolutely had, but she'd become used to it.
 Then she'd become fond of it.
 And now, she'd have to do without it.
 She checked her watch, and wondered if the smoking man had followed through
on his end of the bargain.
 *Is she there yet?*
 Every pay phone she'd passed since landing had hailed her like a siren,
inviting her to call Mulder and check.
 The dream hadn't helped. When the airliner's engines had finally lulled her
to sleep, they'd dropped her into the middle of a nightmare, one where she'd
entered Mulder's apartment, surrounded by police, just like she had over a
year ago to falsely identify a body as that of her partner. Except this time
it'd truly been Mulder, the back of his skull littering the bloodstained floor
like pieces of broken pottery.
 Her cry had been loud enough to alert a stewardess.
 Heels crisply *clacked* against marble and she looked up to see a door open
behind the porter's desk. A tall brunette woman emerged, striding toward the
exit in a storm of black leather and red silk, failing to look Scully's way as
she slid Sophia Loren sunglasses over her eyes.
 *Think she just renegotiated her car loan?* Mulder's voice asked.
 Scully looked down at her Jil Sander suit--all wrinkled and smelling like
plane--and sighed.
 "*Fraulein,*" barked the porter. In the vaulted room, his voice echoed like a
bullhorn.
 She slowly raised her head, glaring at the man. *In my country, you're called
a
 rent-a-cop.*
 But he didn't even flinch. "Herr Grubner will see you now."
 He led her through the doorway into a small, plush anteroom, dim but warm.
Instead of scampering for shelter, the low light from the green-shaded
banker's lamp lounged in the maroon chairs, stretched across the brown desk
and sideboard, making no effort to hide but also in no hurry to illuminate
anything well.
 A gnome-like man sat behind the desk, scribbling notes.
 The door slammed behind Scully.
 She began to move toward one of the wing-chairs until the banker's negative-
sounding grunt and upraised left index finger stopped her.
 With a flourish, he signed whatever document he'd been annotating, tucked it
into a tan-colored file folder and placed it to the right of two other file
folders that already stood upright in a rack on the outside left corner of his
desk. Only then did he look up at Scully. He rose from his chair. "American,"
he said, in English and with a dismissive tone that proved the caste system
was alive and well in this corner of the world.
 "Yes," she replied, taking his cue and continuing in her language. "Dana
Scully. Thank you for seeing me. I apologize for my appearance; I just got off
the plane."
 She extended her hand. He took it as if he were about to lean over and kiss
it; instead, he limply raised and lowered it once. "*Enchante,*" he said, in a
voice that indicated he was anything but. "Marcel Grubner. Please take a seat.
How can the Kreditanstalt help you this afternoon?"
 "I'm afraid it's an odd inquiry."
 "They always are," Grubner muttered, straightening some other papers on his
desk, stealing a glance at the ornate clock on the nearby bookcase.
 "I actually asked to speak with Herr Strutknecht, but I understand he's no
longer with the bank."
 The banker looked at Scully, his sleepy eyes sitting bolt upright in bed.
 "Herr Strutknecht's no longer with this *world,*" he said in a slow, guarded
voice, leaning over the desk a little. "He died two years ago."
 "I'm sorry, I didn't know."
 "If you say so," the banker said.
 Scully blinked twice in surprise. "Excuse me?"
 "Let me accelerate this charade to its miserable conclusion, if I may, Miss
Scully? You were about to tell me that while you realize my obligation to
maintain the privacy of the Kreditanstalt's customers--an obligation
proscribed by both this firm's charter and this country's federal banking
laws--you nevertheless had a friend whose recent, sudden and unexpected death
merited special consideration for waiving such requirements."
 Scully's tongue flapped around her mouth, awaiting instructions from a brain
that was still racing to catch up.
 *Telepathy,* said Mulder's voice, half playful, half awestruck.
 *Fuck off, Mulder.*
 "You probably even have an account number for the safe deposit box: nine-
three-one-zero-one-three," Grubner continued, standing.
 *Safe deposit box?* Scully flipped over the business card to read the number:
931013.
 "And I assume your request, a request I hope you would deliver with more
believable theatrics than your two colleagues--"
 "Colleagues?" Scully asked, feeling both her eyebrows crawl up her forehead.
 "Your two colleagues," Grubner continued, standing now. "The woman who was
just here and a man who visited earlier today, both of whom portrayed
themselves as close friends to the family of our client. Both said they were
authorized to retrieve the contents of the box."
 *Then they knew more than I do,* Scully thought.
 *The woman who was just here...*
 She flicked her eyes toward the file folder rack on Grubner's desk.
 "And I gave both of them the answer that I'll now give you: *Guten tag,* Miss
Scully."
 Scully rose, making herself sway a little as she did so.
 "Except I will add a coda to your answer: if you have any more friends who
wish to attempt to accomplish what you have failed to do, tell them to wait a
few days and use a different story."
 "I don't understand, Herr Grubner," she said, picturing her tongue coated in
gooey grade-school paste. Her voice came out thick and sickly. She pretended
her legs had become gelatin, quivering and wobbling, and reached out a hand
toward the desk to steady herself.
 The banker snorted, reaching toward a button on his phone.
 "But I don't..." she mumbled.
 Scully took one last furtive glance toward the file rack, noting its
location.
 She then rolled her eyes upward, trying to see the insides of her sockets.
 "Fraulein?" she heard Grubner ask in a confused voice.
 She fell to the right, pretending her arm was a dead appendage as it swept
across the desk, knocking the file rack over.
 *Just like a sack of potatoes or something,* she thought. *Fall without
grace.*
 She collapsed onto the floor, biting her lip as she landed atop the file
rack, its blunted metal edges poking her in the ribs, trying to expose her
ruse by making her wince.
 She cracked her eyelids open, just a sliver.
 The folders had jumped from the file rack before it landed and lay strewn
across the floor in front of her head, documents half-spilled out of some.
 Of course, they were all the same color.
 *Shit.*
 "*Verdammt Amerikanin,*" she heard Grubner mutter.
 *Was the folder on the right or the left?* Scully wondered.
 She heard glass clink against glass, the splash of liquid.
 *Right, I think. Means it must be the top folder.*
 She moaned and began to stand, holding her head with her left hand, thrashing
out across the file folders with her right, trying to look dizzy but actually
hoping to knock the top folder hard enough to spill its contents.
 She partly succeeded. Half the topmost document emerged from the folder.
 "Miss Scully?" Grubner had moved to the side of the desk, squatted down. He
held a glass of brandy in his right hand.
 Scully put her hand in front of her face. "I'm so embarrassed," she muttered.
 But she splayed her fingers enough to look through them at the top-most
document, some type of internal bank memorandum on paper with the patina of
parchment. There was a large box labeled *visitor name.* Next to it Grubner
had written *Marlene Fraznach.*
 *Could be an alias,* Scully thought. *I need an address.*
 "I made such a mess," she said, trying to sound like a little girl. *How does
one sound?* "Let me clean it up." She reached out, forcing herself to be
clumsy by pretending her fingers didn't work.
 "*Nein--* no, Miss Scully," Grubner began, reaching out with his other hand
toward her wrists.
 Scully felt his fingers trail along her arm as she grasped the folders and
dropped them again, feigning surprise at his touch.
 The topmost document slid out another two inches, enough for her to read the
address and commit it to memory.
 His left hand grasped her wrist, pulling it away from the documents. "Leave
them," he said. "Drink this."
 Scully took the snifter and sipped a little of the amber liquid. She found it
incredibly weak, but decided to finish her playacting, forcing a cough and
sputtering a little. "Thank you... I feel better..." she stammered. *Isn't
that what they say in the movies?*
 "Are you all right?" Grubner asked, concerned words backed by eyes that pled:
*please don't sue me.*
 "Just confused, Herr Grubner," Scully said, allowing the banker to help her
stand. "I mean, I still don't know what you're talking about. Finding out that
other people are after my friend's personal effects... and I haven't slept for
a couple days..."
 Grubner snatched back the glass, his eyes hardening.
 "Get out," he said quietly, "before my suspicions outweigh my sympathy and I
consider calling the police."
 Wordlessly, Scully turned for the door.
 The porter handed over her suitcase and briefcase with a scowl and pointed
toward the door, shadowing her two steps behind but making no offer to assist
with her luggage.
 With rapid, angry hand movements, he locked the bank's entrance behind her.
 *I hope their chocolate's better than their manners,* Mulder's voice
whispered in her ear.
 Her stomach rumbled at the thought of food, but she ignored it, striding down
the Kreditanstalt's front steps to the street, searching for a taxi.
 The Alpine air's razor edge sliced through her coat and into her bones. "Hot
bath, warm bed, sleep..." she mumbled to herself. "Maybe the hotel first..."
 Then she remembered the last night she'd spent in a hotel--a *motel*--waking
up halfway into Mulder's arms and halfway out of control.
 *So warm...so nice...*
 Scully wrapped the memory around her tighter to ward off the chill, and
raised her arm to flag a passing cab.
 She almost asked him to take her to a hotel, *any* hotel, but duty pulled on
her pantleg. She gave the driver the address she'd gleaned from Grubner's
folder, and he turned onto the *Universitatstrasse,* driving north toward the
city's university.
 Three side streets later, he stopped the cab and pointed at a small rowhouse.
"*Danke,*" Scully said, paying him and disembarking.
 She walked up the steps and pressed the doorbell.
 *M. Fraznach,* read the label above the plunger. There was no reply. Scully
tried again.
 *Maybe I beat her back,* she thought, wearily dropping her luggage and
sitting down on the topmost step, looking up into the sky, a celestial ceiling
flat and iron-colored and pregnant with snow.
 She turned up the collar of her coat.
 *Is Samantha there yet?*
 Scully put her briefcase on her lap, unlatching the brass clasp, flipping
open the heavy leather flap and withdrawing another folder. *PERSONAL,* its
tab read in her loopy Palmer-method script.
 With a deep breath, she flipped it open, examining the first photograph. In
the lower left corner--where an FBI evidence tag sticker should've been--was
simply a plain white label with her writing: *Samantha Mulder (?), Old
Memorial Bridge, Bethesda, 1/25/95.*
 She'd started this folder after she'd found Mulder's on Emily. For someone so
paranoid, he was lousy about security, she'd always thought. She'd never had a
problem guessing his passwords, getting into his apartment, finding things he
hid. Like his videotape collection. Once, a poem in his handwriting, a
tantalizingly incomplete fragment of sonnet that she'd never had the courage
to ask him about.
 And then, this April in the back of a drawer, she'd discovered this thick
folder on Emily. Unlike a usual X-File, which had photographs and evidence-bag
cross-reference tags and the other trappings of investigation, this file
contained pages and pages--at least a ream--of Mulder's handwritten notes, in
half-smooth, half-spiky handwriting that screamed eccentric.
 The only other item enclosed was a short, squarish key, similar to the ones
that opened luggage lockers in train stations, before they all became digital.
Its only tag read SPARE in Mulder's own writing; there was no evidence tag.
 Scully still wondered what that key opened.
 She'd spent a whole afternoon hiding in the back of their office once, poring
through Mulder's case notes. He'd quietly continued an investigation, albeit
one he had found harder to pursue as the number of X-Files began to mount.
 Nevertheless, she always found at least one entry a week.
 *Conducted SEC records search on Transgen.*
 *Useless meeting with source who claimed similar exp't to Em.*
 As Scully had finished reading the folder, she'd found herself blinking back
tears that flowed from a variety of places inside her. She was angry that
Mulder, always harping about trust, hadn't included her--Emily's own mother,
*dammit*--in his inquiries. She felt guilty that she, Emily's own mother,
still hadn't brought her daughter's killers to justice. But she couldn't put a
label on the strongest emotion flooding her body--one of tenderness, for lack
of a better word, toward Mulder.
 *Once again, playing the knight.*
 The least she could do, she'd thought at the time, was try to return the
favor. And so she'd built a duplicate version of Samantha's X-File, staying
late some nights to make copies of documents, new prints of photos, trying to
stitch some threads together into a plausible explanation for what happened.
Of course, she'd taken greater pains to secure her folder, keeping it in her
desk at home. It had been the first thing she'd taken when she'd rifled it
last night.
 She looked at the photograph, taken by FBI sharpshooters during that horrible
night when she'd seen Mulder's sister for the first time, brown hair running
riot in the nighttime breeze, eyes that burned with a secret. She'd watched a
ghost of a smile flicker across Samantha's face--almost of approval, as if
she'd been saying *Fox is lucky*--and then she was gone from sight. Then gone
for good in an ice-cold river.
 Or so she'd thought. Then Mulder'd told her about the clones. Then, earlier
this year, he'd told her about meeting Samantha in a restaurant, *another*
Samantha who hadn't remembered the meeting on the bridge, thought her brother
had been dead, thought the smoking man was her father.
 Like most Mulder stories, she only understood half of it, and guessed Mulder
didn't get much of it either.
 *Why did the meeting take place?*
 *Why was Mulder talking to the smoking man?* Of course, after Mulder's
revelation earlier in the week of his negotiations to save her life, that
began to make more sense.
 All she'd really known at the time, however, was his sister's rejection had
devastated Mulder, who'd actually let Scully hold his hand as he fought back
tears while he'd told her the story.
 Scully looked back at the photo, gently touching Samantha's image with her
finger.
 *Will you still look like this?*
 *Will you talk with your brother?*
 *Did you even show up at all?*
 *Maybe this was all for nothing,* she thought darkly, slapping closed the
folder and returning it to her briefcase.
 *Maybe he double-crossed me. It certainly wouldn't be the first time.*
 Then again, the smoking man had no reason to risk not complying, to risk her
returning and telling Mulder why she'd left. That would create two rabid FBI
agents, as opposed to one recoiling with shock from finding a long-lost
relative, and another who'd relieved herself of her badge and only posed a
threat if she could break into a Swiss bank.
 She closed her eyes, trying to imagine Mulder's face at the moment he saw her
sister, the full-fledged wide-open grin, the eyes that would finally, after so
long, dance a little in their sockets.
 Scully smiled.
 The machine-gun *clackety-clackety-clack* of high heels on cobblestones
disturbed her reverie.
 She looked up to see the woman from the bank standing at the foot of the
steps, holding a bag of groceries, still wearing the red dress that peeked
from under a black leather coat.
 She slid her Italian sunglasses down her nose, peering over them with wide
eyes.
 "Don't be alarmed," Scully began in German, rising to her feet. "I just need
to talk with you. My name's--"
 "Dana," the woman finished with a small but warm smile.
 Scully stopped still with shock.
 "Dana Scully," the woman continued in unaccented British English, her smile
faltering a little. "You don't remember, do you?"