Trust 3: Earth by Parrotfish

Title: Trust 3: Earth
Author: Parrotfish
Series: Trust
Written: January 1997
Rating: PG (violence, disturbing imagery, language)
Classification: T (Mythology story) A (Angst)

Summary: It's Mulder's nightmare come true. Scully's gone, and he'll have to use every resource at his disposal - stolen files, secret contacts, his own intelligence and intuition - to find her before it's too late. But in the search for her, will he lose himself?

Author's Note: This is the third story in a series called "Trust." It resolves the cliffhanger at the end of "Trust 2: Water," which is available at the archives. But, having become addicted to the art of the tease, I'm releasing this latest story in installments. Never fear: It is completely written, and there will be a new part posted every day for seven days. Please let me know if you like the long tease, or if you'd have preferred it all at once.

Series Note: The first story in this series, "Trust: Fire," is a straight X-File. It introduces the character of Rachel Sachs, who appears throughout this series. "Trust 2: Water" is a cliffhanger that puts our heroes on the road to learning some truth about the conspiracy, about their past, about themselves, and about their feelings for each other. "Trust 3: Earth," the story before you, resolves the cliffhanger, trading heavily along the way in angst and UST (Unresolved Sexual Tension). Is this all heading toward MSR (Mulder-Scully Romance), you ask? Well, yes ... but with a twist . Time, and future installments, will tell. Thank yous: To Chris Carter for creating The X-Files; to David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson and the entire cast and crew for bringing this marvelous series to life; and to Fox for putting it on the air.

I couldn't move. I couldn't see. I couldn't hear. The nothingness pressed down on me, pressed up on me, pressed into me, surrounded me, held me.

Dirt filled my nose and mouth, cold, wet dirt that held soft, moving, squirming things. There was no air. There had never been air, or light, or warmth. Only cold dirt stretching endlessly in every direction for eternity. At its center, me. Not moving, not seeing, not hearing, not breathing. Dying. Never dead but forever dying. Buried alive.

My eyes snapped open at the sound of my own whimper. My face was pressed against hard wood, my body nearly doubled over to sleep in an uncomfortable position. I could still taste the horrid, cold, moving dirt in my mouth.

Coming upright, I saw I'd fallen asleep at my desk. It couldn't have been for more than ten minutes; not enough to rest, just enough to sink deeply into the inner horror.

I licked my lips, trying to convince myself that the dirt wasn't there. The taste of salty sweat and the feel of cracked, chapped skin and rough bristle were reassuring. I tried to force myself to think.

I didn't know if I was numb from exhaustion or exhausted by numbness. The events of the previous 24 hours had raced by with the unreality of a faded silent film. I had seen people moving about, I had been transported from place to place, but I couldn't seem to get what anyone was saying, except every once in a while when someone had thrust his face into mine and forced my attention - like the flashcards in old movies that give you just one key line of dialogue.

"Agent Mulder, when was the last time you spoke with Agent Scully?"

"Agent Mulder, do you know of any threats made against your partner recently?"

"Mulder, could this tie in with any of your recent cases?"

"Agent Mulder, who do you believe is responsible?"

I don't think I said anything but "No" and "I don't know."

As I sat in my office, the numbness beginning to wear off, I tried to piece together as many recent events as I could.

Rachel had shown up at my apartment, bloody and beaten, telling me that Scully had been taken by men in black who had burst into her apartment, gagged and hooded Scully, then hit Rachel when she had tried to resist. I'd called Skinner and told him to get a team to meet me at Scully's place. I think the adrenaline had been pumping at that point because I had still been pretty with it.

Rachel and I had headed back to Scully's apartment. I guess I couldn't have been too alert, because I'd never stopped to think that Rachel was bleeding all over the place and probably needed medical attention. Remembering it now in my office, I felt badly about that - especially since she'd just gotten out of the hospital as a result of our last outing. Fortunately, the agents who were waiting for us at Scully's building had called the medics and had gotten her taken care of. The damage hadn't been too serious.

The FBI team had started tearing Scully's place apart with their usual graceless thoroughness. I'd mindlessly opened and closed a few cabinets myself in an attempt to help. I remembered Skinner leading me back into the living room and sitting me down.

Rachel, who by then wore a bloody bandage on her head, had given her statement. The agent taking it had been cold and unbelieving, issuing little grunts of doubt at key points in the story. She'd given descriptions of the men who'd taken Scully - descriptions that were not likely to be of any use. They never were. How many times had I taken similar descriptions from MIB abduction witnesses? White men dressed in black all look the same.

Rachel never told them about the file she had helped us retrieve just five days earlier, even though she knew it had something to do with Scully's previous abduction. Had I been thinking, I would have been grateful to her.

And then there had been Skinner talking to me so seriously, assuring me he wouldn't rest until she was found. Looking back, I realized with some amusement that he'd been speaking to me as one speaks to the grief-stricken relative of a crime victim. I must have been really out of it to inspire that kind of treatment.

I remembered something else, too: Skinner telling me I couldn't work on the case. Too personally involved, he'd said.

It didn't take a crack investigator to figure that out. Too personally involved. Too personally immersed. Too personally drowning in a flood of foul, stinking, unreal horror. The last 24 hours had been like being caught in a whirlpool of raw sewage, being sucked into the center of some central excremental repository of pure evil, and at the bottom, sucking it all in and stinking worse than the rest of it, was me.

Me.

They'd taken her, and it had been easy. I had been sitting home, blissfully unaware that my partner, my friend, my soul were in the process of being bagged and hauled away for delivery to the devil. If I had gone to her apartment the minute the document had been placed in my hand, I would have been there. I might have stopped them. They might have taken me instead, or at least in addition.

But I had been too busy proudly jerking off the useless organ in my skull, trying to figure it out on my own instead of going straight to her, and now she was gone. I'd sworn they'd never take her again, and my oath had amounted to nothing, like spitting into the wind. I sat in my office, imagining the warm saliva dripping off the end of my big, ugly fucking nose.

Her mind hovered gently at the edge of awareness, enveloped softly in womb-like warmth and stillness. No movement, no noise, no light disturbed the peace of the place that was No Place. She seemed to be aware, but there was nothing of which to be aware except her own awareness, and that thought spiraled in on itself endlessly through the void.

It seemed to her there should have been other things of which she should have been cognizant, but she didn't know what those things were, or what made her believe they existed at all. Something before this? Something outside this? Something....

Had there been awareness a moment before this moment? She couldn't remember, nor did she have any idea how long this moment had already lasted. Would there be awareness a moment from now? Is that something one can ever know? Does it matter?

Does it matter? Does anything matter? Something matters, she felt sure. She thought something mattered, but she had no idea what. The thought disturbed her. Why did her thoughts float so freely, as she herself seemed to do? Shouldn't there be some place for her thoughts to go? But there was No Place.

She was No Place, and there was nothing for her here. No one for her. She was alone.

Alone with nothing. Awareness was gentle no longer. It became relentlessly suffocating, pressing down on her, pressing up on her, pressing into her, surrounding her, holding her, crushing her, dark nothingness squeezing the life out of her. There was nothing, there was no one, she was alone alone alone alone in this now and in the next now and in the now after that and every now she would be alone and there would be nothing and no one. Oh let it not be, please let it not be, please let there be something and someone, if not now then soon, but there isn't and there won't it will be nothing and no one for all the nows. No thoughts would come, no prayers, no memories, no plans, no faith, no hope. Just terror and terror and terror, alone, nothing, No Place. Now. And now. And now. And now. And now. And now. And now.....

It had been five days since Scully's abduction. There were no leads, no witnesses, no evidence, no suspects. Nothing. She was gone. I was completely powerless to help her. So was the entire fucking Federal Bureau of Investigation.

So I sat on a Central Park bench and waited, watching the softball-and-beer game on the Great Lawn, the homeless men and women who picked through trash cans looking for anything worth a nickel deposit, the young man practicing tai chi on the grass, the dog-walkers, the parents wheeling and walking and carrying young children, the endless stream of runners and bikers and roller bladers - the seething life at the heart of a teeming city.

There may have been eight million stories in the naked city, but I didn't give a shit about a single one of them.

"You wanted to see me?"

Marita Covarrubias sat on the bench beside me.

"Yes. Where is she?"

"Where is who?"

"Don't you dare!" I snarled. "You leaked me the information that got us the file. Now where is she?"

"What makes you think I know?"

"Don't play games with me." I looked at her with thinly disguised fury. Marita was a delicate, Aryan beauty - funny, with a name like hers - whose tongue was glib, but whose eyes conveyed an ever-present danger of treachery.

"You overestimate me, Agent Mulder. I am not in a position to know the location of Agent Scully. Very few are."

"Well then why don't you give me the names and numbers of some of those 'very few.' I'd be happy to look them up and send your regards."

"I can't do that."

"I don't give a shit what you can't do!" My temper flared. "If you don't know where she is, find someone who does!"

"I know you don't believe this, Agent Mulder, but it's not in my power to do so. I would help you if I could, if you asked me for answers I could provide. But you're going to have to do this some other way. Work on what you already know."

"What I already know? If it were as simple as that, I'd have already done it."

"Agent Mulder, what you already know is far from simple. Look for the connections. You have so many pieces of it: microchips, genetic testing, record-keeping, the Japanese, World War II, the Visitors. Your answer lies with those things."

She rose to leave, and I grabbed her wrist hard. I must have been hurting her, but she didn't flinch, as though she were accustomed to rough treatment.

"You've got to help me," I pleaded.

"If I can, I will. Right now, I can't. Let me go."

Dazed, I released my hold on her. She walked away.

"And the Lord said to Cain, 'Where is Abel thy brother?' And he said, 'I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?' And He said, 'What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood cries to me from the ground. And now cursed art thou from the earth, which has opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand; when thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield to thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be on the earth.'"

I read the words again, and yet again. Each time, they changed and appeared to me in different form.

"Am I my brother's keeper?"

"Am I my sister's keeper?"

"Am I my father's keeper?"

"Am I my partner's keeper?"

But always, the end was the same: "And now cursed art thou from the earth..."

A knock startled me. I put the book down and answered the door.

" Mrs. Scully...."

"Fox. I thought you would call."

I didn't answer.

"May I come in?"

Reluctantly, I admitted her and shut the door.

She stood and stared at me a long time in that way she has, as though she's seeing me not as I am but....I don't know, some other way.

"Do you have any news, Fox?" At other times, her use of my hated first name had given no offense. Now, it made me cringe.

"No. I'm sorry." I could see she had been crying a lot lately. Her eyes were swollen and red, and her nose was raw from blowing.

"I heard from Mr. Skinner how it happened, and then Rachel Sachs came to see me. The poor girl was beside herself, as though it were her fault."

She looked at me pointedly, but I wouldn't meet her eyes.

"Fox, what do you think has happened to her? Is it the same as last time? Last time they gave her back."

"It's probably the same." My voice was cold and distant in my own ears.

"Then maybe they'll give her back again."

"Maybe. I don't know."

She took two steps forward and raised her hand to my face, cupping my cheek in her palm. "Please find her, Fox. Please bring her home to me."

Her touch on my stubbled skin burned like dry ice. I recoiled.

"Look, Mrs. Scully, I'll call you if I learn anything. Now go home!"

It was her turn to flinch from my harsh words and sharp tone. "Fox, please, don't do this. It will be all right...." She walked toward me, hand outstretched.

"NO!" I slapped her hand away. "I'm not some child in need of reassurance. I don't have any fond, youthful memories of your warm, maternal embrace. I'm not your son!"

Tears sprang to her eyes. Some calm, detached part of my mind took note of the fact that I had just made Mrs. Scully cry, and it was like hearing the clang of a prison door slamming.

"I'm...I'm sorry, Fox," she stammered. "I thought.... I didn't mean...." She paused. "I'll go now. Call me if you hear anything."

"Yes."

After she left, I ran for the bathroom and retched for what seemed like hours. The acid taste of my own digestive juices burned my throat satisfyingly.

Some time later - I don't know how long - my cell phone rang.

"Mulder," I answered hoarsely.

"Agent Mulder, this is Skinner. I have been asked to communicate a message to you."

"Yes?" I rasped.

"I have been asked to tell you that it would be better for Agent Scully if you were to back off and let others handle the situation."

I was silent.

"Agent Mulder? Mulder, are you still there?"

"Yes. Who sent this message?"

"You know who sent it."

"Do you believe it?"

It was Skinner's turn to pause.

"I don't know," he said.

That evening, I sat with the document, the printout of that cursed file with its reams of medical data about numbered test subjects. I had read it, stared at it, pawed it, leafed through it, thrown it, retrieved it, and started over again dozens of times in the days since Scully had been taken. I'd forced myself to read carefully every word, every number, every abbreviation, racking my brains for a clue. I had surrounded myself with medical textbooks, dictionaries, articles, research papers - hell, I'd even tried numerology. The damn thing refused to give up the one secret I needed to know - how to find Scully.

And then there were those words at the end of the entry for Subject 846895 - the subject whose description matched Scully exactly. "Next scheduled testing period: 8/1/97-10/30/97."

Scully had been taken on July 23rd. Was it usual for them to abduct a subject a week in advance of starting the tests? Were the dates only approximate?

Or had they moved up the schedule because they knew I had the file?

The words and numbers began to swim on the page before me as a thick cloud settled over my mind. I had insisted on going after that damn Japanese Defense Department file despite the fact that I didn't know why its existence was leaked to me. Scully had been hesitant, and I had forced the issue. She'd tried to stop me....

"And He said, 'What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood cries to me from the ground...."

The inarticulate roar in my ears was my own voice as I sent the coffee table and all the papers on it flying with a vicious kick. The noise left my throat and took up residence in my head, pounding and howling and demanding that all conscious thought surrender to it.

>From somewhere behind it, I heard my name and a pounding that came from some outside source. I struggled to follow the voice, focus on it, locate it.

The door. Someone was calling my name from the other side of the door. I stumbled over and opened it.

Rachel gaped at me. I thought she might turn around and run from my wild-eyed gaze. If I could have torn her limb from limb with my eyes, I think I would have, and only because she had had the misfortune of showing up. But the connection between my brain and my body seemed to be faulty, and my eyes could do no damage but to communicate the rage within.

She glanced past me and took in the destruction I had wreaked on my living room. Cautiously, she entered, closed the door and turned to me.

"Is that the printout of the file?" she asked, pointing at the papers strewn across the floor.

"Get out," I said quietly.

"Is it?"

"GET OUT!"

"NO!" She faced me squarely. "I want to know what's going on. I want to help."

"Listen, little girl," I hissed, grabbing her roughly by the arm. "This is way out of your league. You don't have any idea what's involved. This is a game for grown-ups, and if you try to play, you'll get very hurt." I tried to yank her toward the door. The strength with which she resisted surprised me.

"Stop it, Mulder," she said, pulling her arm free. "Jesus, you're such a fucking hypocrite. Your little game wasn't too dangerous when you needed me, when there was no one else to do your dirty work. In case you'd forgotten, I've already gotten hurt playing this game. You're a little late. So why not face up to the real reason you're trying to throw me out."

"Shut up, Rachel."

"You just don't want to be seen this way. What's the matter, Mulder? Are you embarrassed to be caught with your Armani pants down? Or are you just enjoying your little guilt trip too much to share?"

"SHUT The FUCK UP!"

"You are such a selfish bastard!" She was on a roll. "This isn't about Dana, it's all about you. How you feel. What you did, or didn't do, or should have done. Christ, look at yourself, Mulder! You're no good to anyone like this, and especially not to Dana. But you're too fucking self-indulgent to try to control yourself for ten minutes together. I ought to just leave and let you wallow in your own shit - except that you're the only one who can find her."

A ball of hot rage was growing in my gut as she spoke, and it broke free with her last words. Before I could stop it, my hand was curled into a fist and raised to strike. I wanted to kill her with my bare hands. Rachel backed away, trying to get out of reach. The backs of her legs met the overturned coffee table, and she went down in a heap, bringing her arms up to cover her head.

The realization of what I had been about to do cut through the red fury that had clouded my brain. I collapsed, horrified, feeling hot tears run from my eyes.

She sat up slowly.

"I'm sorry." I couldn't find any other words to say.

"Shut up, Mulder. Don't be sorry. It's sickening."

I held out a hand to help her up. She looked at it suspiciously, then took it.

"What's in the file, Mulder?" she asked as she rose.

"I'll show you."

I entered my office the next morning more purposefully than I had in days. Rachel and I had pored over the data for hours the previous evening. Neither of us had said a word about what had happened earlier. I hoped neither of us ever would. Instead, we'd shared information and tossed around some ideas. The opportunity to articulate my thoughts had given me some focus - - a focus I'd completely lost in the grief and rage that had engulfed me from the moment I'd learned Scully was gone.

Make no mistake - the grief and rage were still there, threatening to overwhelm me at any moment. But for the time being, they were held at bay by the knowledge that Rachel was right. I was the only person who could find Scully, and I couldn't afford to lose myself in my roiling emotions.

Not only that, but I was buoyed by a new strategy, a new tack to the investigation. In looking over the file, Rachel had suggested that I let her try to figure out what the data meant. She'd pointed out that, as a marine biologist, she had a background in biological experimentation and methodology. Even though she had little knowledge of tests on human subjects, she might be able at least to find a pattern, to deduce what the goal of the testing might have been. She'd suggested there were other clues in the file that I could pursue.

That's when it had hit me. The tests being run on these experimental subjects were the most sophisticated in modern medicine, and they required elaborate, expensive technology - fast MRI's, medical cyclotrons, CT scanners and the like. Such devices were manufactured in limited numbers and by a very few companies.

It wasn't a lead, but it was a promising idea. Track the technology from its source to its destination, and you just might stumble onto the place where the data was being generated.

And so, in my office the next morning, I took my jacket off, rolled up my sleeves and set to work, grabbing an armful of X- files from the drawer marked "Unsolved."

Five hours and many hundreds of files later, I found what I was after. The case was four years old, a medical mystery in which patients who had all served together in Vietnam demonstrated similar neurophysiological abnormalities. Just the cover I needed.

Leaving the mess I'd made of my office, I headed upstairs to Research and cornered the first person I found. He was a pimply faced kid who looked scared to death the minute he laid eyes on me. That didn't bother me much. I was used to it. My reputation as a kook preceded me everywhere in the Bureau.

"I need you to run a search for me," I blurted without preamble.

"Ummm...sure, Agent Mulder. If you'll just fill out the J-140..."

"Look," I interrupted impatiently. "I haven't got time for any damn paperwork. I need this NOW!"

The kid looked like he wanted to crawl under the desk.

"Yes, but I can't do it without a J-140 and a case number," he managed.

"Why not? Your fingers broken?"

"No, sir. It's...it's the procedure."

I took a couple of deep breaths and glanced at the ID hanging from the kid's shirt pocket. "Okay, Slatsky. How about this? You start the search, and I'll get you the J-140 by the end of the day. I have the case right here with all the information," I said, waving the four-year-old file at him.

The kid hesitated only for a moment, then clearly decided not to risk sending me over the edge. "I guess that'll be okay. What do you need?"

"I need a list of every medical cyclotron in existence and their manufacturers, as well as all the manufacturers of magnetic resonance imaging equipment. And I need all available information about all the companies you turn up."

The kid's shoulders slumped. I knew I'd just dropped a massive task in his lap, but I didn't care in the least. Let him work for his living.

"What's the priority level?"

"One," I said, praying he wouldn't notice that there had not been a single thing added to the case file since his sophomore year of college.

The next day, I came into the office filled with hope. Within an hour, it was gone. The search results were on my desk. There wasn't a single lead. Nothing to connect a cyclotron or an MRI machine with any institution or company that seemed on the face of it in any way suspicious. Dead end.

I knew I'd been clutching at straws, anyway. I mean, what were the chances of making a connection that way? These people were smart - they didn't leave loose ends lying around for anyone to find. I felt so desperate that I decided to see whether the "official" investigation had turned up anything. I headed upstairs to find Ralph Gorman, the agent who'd been put in charge.

As soon as I walked into the room that had been set up as the team's headquarters, the place went dead silent. My presence made every agent uncomfortable. They looked like they expected me to pull out an AK-47 and start shooting up the place. That wasn't such a bad idea.

Gorman was sitting at one end of the long table at the center of the room, a blueprint of Scully's apartment laid out before him - like that was going to help somehow.

"What have you got?" I stood before him. All eyes were on me.

"Mulder, you're not supposed to be..."

"Fuck that, Gorman. Tell me what you've got!"

"All right, all right, Mulder. Keep your shirt on." He slid a couple of Xeroxed pages across the table toward me. "Here's the latest report."

I sat down to read it. Everyone seemed relieved and went back to what they had been doing.

It took me about a minute and a half.

"What is this, Gorman?" I said threateningly.

"What do you mean, what is it?"

"You're investigating disappearances in Baltimore and Philadelphia?"

"Yeah. We've got a series of disappearances in those cities - all women about Agent Scully's age. There are other similarities, too."

That was it. That piece of mind-boggling stupidity snapped whatever semblance of control I'd been managing to maintain.

"What kind of fucking idiot are you?" I barked, standing so suddenly that my chair fell over. "Scully's been abducted before. She was taken by professionals - you heard the eyewitness report! There's no body, Gorman. In each of these other cases, the body has turned up within days. You're wasting everybody's time!"

"Agent Mulder," the windbag replied. "May I remind you that you are not a part of this investigation?"

"Agent Gorman," I spat back. "May I remind you that you're an incompetent asshole?" By now, I was yelling. "You'll never find her this way! Jesus Christ, you'll never find her at all, and you know why? Because you couldn't find your own dick with your right hand! You fucking....."

A strong hand clamped down on my shoulder.

"That's enough, Agent Mulder."

I recognized Skinner's voice without turning around.

"Sir, this investigation is being completely mishandled."

Skinner spun me around to face him. "I said, that's enough!"

I just glared at him.

"Come with me, Mulder."

I threw one last, disdainful look over my shoulder at Gorman before following the AD out.

Once in his office with the door closed, he pointed me at a chair and I sat down.

"Don't you dare do that again, Mulder. I should suspend you for that little display. As it is, you can consider yourself on warning."

"Sir, you know Gorman's line of investigation is a crock. How can you let it continue?"

"That 'crock,' Agent Mulder, is based on solid investigative procedure."

"Oh, come on!" I was yelling again. "That kind of by-the-book approach never solves a case! He's just going through the fucking motions, covering his ass!"

"He's covering the Bureau's ass, Mulder, not just his own. In this case, that's damn important. Don't you think I'm concerned about Agent Scully? Do you think I'm not personally on top of every aspect of this investigation? I can assure you, Gorman is not the only one working on this case. Now, I'm warning you, Mulder - you'd better give Gorman a wide berth. Don't get in his way. Because if you do, I'm going to have to get in your way. And you don't want that."

I got the message.

"Yes, sir," I managed through gritted teeth and rose to go. Skinner stopped me.

"I need to know something, Mulder."

"Yeah?"

"The search you requested yesterday - was it related to this matter?"

I stared at him evenly. "You know I'm not assigned to the Scully investigation, sir."

"Answer me, Mulder."

I hesitated. "No, sir. I was looking for background on an X-file. The case number is in the paperwork."

It was Skinner's turn to stare evenly. "Just remember, Mulder - I need you working on cases other than Agent Scully's. Is that clear?"

His exact choice of words was not lost on me. He had not said I was forbidden to work on Scully's case. He was just telling me to keep up the pretense of working on something else. It was a warning. Someone was watching me closely.

"Yes, sir. I understand."

Once I'd gotten clear of Slatsky and Gorman and Skinner and all the rest of them, clear of their bullshit bureaucratic procedures and political maneuvering, my brain kicked in again. As I sat on the bench at the reflecting pool, it became clear to me that the line of investigation was sound - follow the technology. The trouble was that the tracks were well-covered.

Time to try unofficial sources.

That realization put me on the road, headed north toward New York. It was difficult to concentrate on driving. I was used to getting by on little sleep - I'd been doing that most of my life. But in the eight days since Scully had been taken, I'd been lucky to get two or three hours in a night, and I probably hadn't had more than ten hours total. I knew I was exhausted, that I was a menace behind the wheel, but I didn't much care.

I allowed myself the torment of conjuring her image in the windshield before me. With all the vividness of my eidetic memory, her face hung there with its usual, serious expression, its elegant, framing sweep of red hair, its impossibly blue eyes.

I sighed foolishly at a memory that sprang to mind. It had been between terms at Oxford. I'd traveled alone to Florence, where I'd found an image of beauty that had immediately become a favorite - Titian's Venus of Urbino. My wandering mind imposed Scully's lovely face on that reclining, nude form, and I smiled as her piercing eyes became those of the lovely, sensuous creature hanging on a wall of the Uffizi Gallery. I found myself wishing avidly to become the contented lap dog curled sleepily at the foot of Venus' bed.

Eight days since Scully had been taken. Eight days. The thought ran round and round my brain relentlessly. So much could happen in eight days. So many things could have been done to her....

And then I watched in horrified fascination as another memory arose unbidden to replace the beautiful one that had made me smile. On that same trip to Florence, I'd stood for half an hour in the Loggia dei Lanzi before Giovanni da Bologna's Rape of the Sabine Women. In the face of the terrified woman held aloft by a brutally muscled man, I'd seen the face of my lost sister, an innocent violated by the foul machinations of powerful, cruel men. In the windshield before me, Scully's lovely face now became that anguished visage. It was Scully's face turned up, Scully's eyes wide with fear, Scully's mouth open and calling for help, Scully's arm pushing desperately at the powerful shoulder of her captor, Scully's nude form about to be thrown down and ravished with an unspeakable violence. My mouth went dry, my heart raced, my hands clutched the wheel with painful force. I closed my eyes to blot out the picture before me, heedlessly driving blind for a long, long moment.

Mercifully, when I opened them, I saw nothing but the New Jersey Turnpike rolling by. I swiped a shirtsleeve at the sweat that had dripped into my eyes and drove on.

An hour and a half later, I was on the same piece of road, traveling in the opposite direction. I'd done what I'd come to do. Marita had not offered an immediate answer when I'd asked if any of her "friends" were associated with a company involved with advanced medical technology. But at least she hadn't turned me down cold as she had previously. This time, she'd said my request was not impossible. She would do some checking.

And that meant more waiting.

Awareness returned like a light slowly being raised in an empty white room, so that the distinction from darkness was immaterial, the emptiness equally complete. Her mind awoke, but her thoughts were blank. And, like a light that grows brighter and brighter but illuminates nothing, her awareness grew and intensified in the vacant space of her mind. At first, she thought the intensity of this experience, pristine in its utter formlessness, was interesting - even enjoyable. Her body thrummed with it, though it was oddly unable to react.

And still, awareness expanded and heightened, until a threshold was passed and her consciousness sent up a noiseless, agonized call.

It was then that some vestigial trace of reason allowed her to realize that the awareness engulfing her was a pain so exquisitely pure that no act of will could defy it. And still it grew, never slowing enough to allow at least the cold comfort of acclimation. With irresistible power, the formless pain forced itself into the passages of her consciousness, unrelenting, cruel, demanding.

Pain filled every corner of her awareness, flowed achingly slowly over and around her. All-encompassing pain became the only identity on which to hang her tortured awareness, until finally, in the ultimate violation, it undermined everything else she was. She became pain.

All the while, her consciousness wailed in inarticulate despair, seeking ease, begging release, summoning salvation.

Salvation. Her savior had a name, but the name was lost in the pain - in her pain and in his own.

For a man who has spent my entire life waiting for one thing or another - for my sister to return, for a secret informant to show up, for morning to end a long string of nightmares - I've always been pretty bad at it. So this time, when Rachel Sachs showed up at my door, I greeted her with some relief. At least her presence would give me something to do other than pace.

She sat on my couch in shorts and a T-shirt, legs crossed Indian- style.

"You still look like hell," she said.

"Yeah, well, I'll make an appointment for a manicure and a body wax tomorrow."

She smiled slightly. "Time to clean up the bikini area, Mulder?"

I smiled back. "Well, I wouldn't want to offend."

She changed the subject.

"I've spent a lot of time with the file, analyzed a lot of the data, and I've come to a couple of conclusions."

I sat in a chair across from her. "Tell me."

"First of all, judging from the patterns in the data, it's clear that all the subjects are being tested exactly the same way."

"Is that important?"

"Only insofar as it confirms that this is, in fact, experimental data. As I'm sure you know, valid data can only result from a carefully controlled test on multiple subjects. It's safe to assume that that's what we're dealing with."

"Okay. What else?"

Rachel paused. Her hesitation annoyed me.

"Well?"

"Remember, I'm no neurologist. But from what I do know, and what I looked up in medical texts, I'd say there seems to have been a lengthy period during which each subject's normal brain activity was monitored in a kind of twilight sleep state. The resulting brain function data is remarkable in its regularity. Then, it would seem that various stressors were introduced at intervals, between which the twilight sleep returned."

"Stressors? What kinds of stressors?" My voice became sharp.

"I don't know. I told you, I'm no neurologist. I can't begin to guess based on the test results what kinds of stimuli were applied. That would take an expert."

"Damn!" I slammed my hand down on the table between us.

"I'm sorry, Mulder. I wish I did know."

I barely heard her. My mind was already miles away, trying to figure out how to get this data analyzed by someone with expertise in the field without compromising its secrecy. I knew it was hopeless. From what Rachel had told me, anyone who knew anything at all about human brain function would instantly recognize that this data had resulted from some terribly unethical experimentation and would likely start asking too many questions.

"Mulder?"

I had tuned Rachel out and seemed to have missed a question.

"Hmm?"

"I said, what are you going to do next?"

"I'm not sure."

She hesitated again. I could tell she was unwilling to tread in areas I felt she didn't belong. Given how I'd been treating her lately, I probably didn't deserve that much consideration.

"Mulder, Dana told me she's met others who've been abducted in a similar manner. Maybe you can learn something about these tests from them."

"They all claim to remember few or no details."

"Yes, but even their vague impressions might help. After all, you now know something about their experiences that they don't know. You might be able to put some of the pieces together."

It wasn't a bad idea. But the thought of meeting those women...the ones who'd told Scully about the cancer that has taken the lives of so many abductees... I shuddered.

"More information about the cancer might be useful, too," Rachel said. It was as though she'd read my mind.

"How do you know about that?" I asked. It was an absurd question, asked in anger. So Scully had told Rachel about the fast-spreading disease that had killed some of the women she'd met in Pennsylvania. That fact irritated me, raising again the odd jealousy I felt toward this woman who had won such intimacy with Scully so easily. My reaction was especially inexcusable considering my own decidedly underwhelming response when Scully had first told me about the cancer. It had just been so horrible, so awful to contemplate, that I had brushed it aside, had barely acknowledged it. The fact that she'd probably at least gotten a little sympathy from Rachel when she'd told her only annoyed me more.

"She was scared, Mulder."

"So was I." My confession surprised me. We sat in silence for a while.

"Mulder, there's one more thing. I don't know if it's important."

"What is it?"

"In order to be valid, an experiment like this one must contain at least two groups of subjects - a study group and a control group. Now, I can't really interpret this data very well, but I can tell that they're getting pretty uniform results across all the subjects mentioned in this file. That would tend to indicate that what you've got here is just one group."

"Which one?"

"I have no idea. I would expect the study group to share some unusual characteristic, like a disease, or a physiological anomaly, or an injury, or something. Is there anything about Scully that makes her unusual?"

I chuckled bitterly. "Only everything."

Rachel looked at me strangely before replying. "I mean, anything in her medical history."

"Other than the coma that followed her previous abduction - nothing I know of."

"Then maybe she's in the control group. Of course, I'm just guessing on all of this. Maybe talking to some of the other subjects will tell you more."

"I'll go to Scranton on Saturday," I said.

"Why not tomorrow?"

"Can't. I have to keep up this pretense that I'm not working on this case."

"How can they possibly expect that of you?" There was genuine sympathy in her words, and it softened me. I pictured that warm tone of voice easing Scully's fears just a little, and my resentment faded.

"They don't. It's just a little game of theirs. I pretend to play by their rules, they look the other way."

She smiled. "Who would've guessed they put a blind eye in FBI?"

Betsy Hagopian was dead. So was Jennifer Levitz. And Adelaide Murphy. And Naomi Davidowicz. And Talisha Jones.

Those were the clearest-cut cases, Lenore Babinsky told me. Those were the Pennsylvania women who knew they'd been abducted, who had had implants removed from their bodies, who had been active MUFON members. There were probably many, many more, she said. Women who'd been through it but never told a soul, who kept up the pretense of having gone away on trips or having been bedridden with illness, who couldn't face the scorn and ridicule of telling loved ones they believed they'd been abducted by aliens. And who, despite the secret they'd kept so tightly, had died anyway of the horrible, undefeatable cancer.

She told me something else about those "confirmed" cases. Each of the women who'd died had been abducted more than once. So far, no one who'd been taken only once had contracted the disease.

Ten days earlier, that information would have produced in me a tiny sigh of relief, one I probably wouldn't even have consciously noticed. Ten days earlier, the thought would have flashed through my mind that Scully wasn't at risk. She'd only been taken once.

But not now. Now her name hovered in the air, unspoken, threatening to join the list of the dead. Dana Scully.

If she ever came back at all.

I could see that Lenore Babinsky's name would be on the list sometime soon. We sat at her kitchen table in her modest, tidy Scranton home, sipping tea. Beneath the jeans and polo shirt she wore, she was just skin and bones. Her face had the hue of fireplace ashes, and her skin was as dry and brittle as century-old newsprint. Her hair hung thin, limp and colorless. She was a living ghost. All that remained for her to do was breathe her last and be laid to rest six feet under.

"Mr. Mulder?"

Would a day come when I would sit at a kitchen table looking at Scully and thinking these same thoughts?

"Mr. Mulder?"

"Hmm? I'm sorry. I was distracted."

"Yes. I could see that. I seem to have that effect on people more and more these days."

My eyes fell guiltily to stare at the tabletop. "I'm sorry," I mumbled.

"That's all right. I'm getting used to it."

There was an awkward silence before she went on.

"You said you wanted to interview several of the abductees. Normally, we refuse such requests from strangers. The results of such 'interviews' have a way of winding up in the supermarket tabloids bearing headlines like, 'Woman Says Baby Was Fathered by Space Alien.' But we know of you and your work, and we've met your partner. How is she, by the way?"

The concern behind her question was unmistakably genuine, but I couldn't bring myself to tell her the truth.

"She's fine. She's working on a different case right now."

Ms. Babinsky said nothing. The doorbell rang, and she rose to admit the women she'd invited to meet me. She offered me the use of her kitchen so I could speak to each woman one by one while the rest sat together in the living room.

I taped each interview. I've replayed each one dozens of times since. Most of the women were surprised that I asked little about the circumstances of the abductions themselves, focusing instead on whatever they could remember from their time away.

The descriptions were eerily similar.

Donna Fagliacci: "I guess I don't really remember a lot of it, considering how long I was away and how weird, I mean, how vague the memories are. But I remember feeling things."

Me: "What kinds of things?"

Ms. Fagliacci: "Just...feelings. You know. Like I remember being terrified. I remember being hurt, and sad, and angry...."

Me: "Go on."

Ms. Fagliacci: "I know it sounds silly, but I even remember being incredibly...pleased. You know - turned on, even. But the weird thing is that there's nothing that goes along with those feelings."

Me: "What do you mean?"

Ms. Fagliacci: "Well, let's say you remember being really terrified when you were a kid - I mean, really scared out of your mind. You know?"

Me: "Yeah."

Ms. Fagliacci: "So when you remember something like that, there's always something that goes along with it. Like, even if it wasn't something real. Like let's say you were terrified because you thought there was a monster hiding in your closet. Even though there wasn't really any monster, the memory of the fear is, like, linked to the idea of the monster. But this isn't like that."

Me: "It isn't?"

Ms. Fagliacci: "No. It's like remembering being completely terrified, all by itself. No reason. I don't know if that makes any sense. It's not even really like a memory, I guess. I don't know."

And so it went. Each woman described a sense that she'd experienced intense emotion during her abduction, but not one could connect any specific event, image, or idea to a feeling. It was as though the feeling was a thing all by itself, with its own independent existence, defying everything human beings come to learn about the causal nature of experience.

Pure sensation. How many people have tried to achieve such a state through meditation, drugs, sex, faith - any number of spiritual stimuli? I know I did in my youth, experimenting with everything from hallucinogens to long periods of fasting. But after hearing these women talk about experiencing feelings in a void, I knew my curiosity on that subject was gone for good.

I ended each interview with the same two questions.

Me: "Ms. Fagliacci, where do you think you were while you were away?"

Ms. Fagliacci: "I don't know. Someplace...someplace deep."

Other women used similar descriptors: "below," "closed," "hidden."

Me: "Who do you think took you?"

Ms. Fagliacci: "Aliens."

Aliens. That's what every one of them said. But the file in my possession seemed to controvert that theory. The data appeared to have been produced by tests that were well within the grasp of contemporary medical science. On this planet.

Those were my thoughts as I thanked the women for speaking with me and walked away from Lenore Babinsky's sad little home, her wasted body haunting me as I went. Jesus Christ, who would knowingly do that to an innocent human being? She looked like a concentration camp survivor. I smiled grimly, remembering that Scully believed that's exactly what Lenore Babinsky was, in a way - the victim of monstrous doctors who'd begun their hideous experiments in Germany and Japan during the Second World War, and who were continuing them secretly, protected by powerful international forces.

Tests that left their subjects to face sure, slow deaths. Tests to discover what? And to benefit whom?

Another thought hit me. I still had no idea of the experiment's ultimate goal, but I had a sudden burst of insight into its immediate effect. A quick trip to the library only strengthened the hypothesis.

Radiation. All those CT scans. These women had been subjected to testing with unthinkable frequency, dosed with levels of radiation aimed directly at their central nervous systems that caused their bodies to change and turn against them with deadly force. Each woman had been abducted, imprisoned, and subjected to her own personal Hiroshima.

And always, always the cancer came after the second or third round of tests. Were the later tests somehow different, or was it just a cumulative process that reached a critical point of no return somewhere during the second test period? How long did it take?

How long did Scully have?

I had no idea.

"And He said, 'What hast thou done?"

I stared out the window of my darkened apartment at the street lamp that burned outside wondering what I had done. A brilliant woman ... a brave woman ... a loyal woman ... an innocent woman ... a beautiful woman had been delivered into my hands for safekeeping, and what had I done?

I had wrapped her in danger. I had introduced her to the ugliest, most horrifying experiences imaginable. I had used her shamelessly, relying on her when it suited me, abandoning her when it did not. I had caused the circumstances that led to her sister's murder. I had added my own burdens to hers.

And I had let her be taken. Twice.

"The voice of thy brother's blood cries to me from the ground."

My god, what if her blood had already been spilled? What if, this time, their goal had been simple - to end her glorious, radiant life? I didn't know if she were alive or dead, but of one thing I was sure: She was magnificent, and I had squandered countless opportunities to tell her I thought so.

As though what I thought mattered. Next to what she was, my thoughts were vile desecrations, impure and profane.

I knew there was an absurdity to the image of Scully that now invaded my every thought - the image of a saint, an image I knew would have displeased her, or perhaps made her laugh dismissively. But with her gone, she was suddenly revealed to me. Her strength, her clarity of purpose were nothing short of divine. For my entire adult life, I had had no inkling of a divinity that manifested itself in anything familiar until Dana Scully had come along and so effortlessly gained my admiration, my trust - my love. It was nothing short of a miracle. And now They were crucifying her for my sins. My lack of faith. My cowardice. My fear. My lust. My selfishness.

"And now cursed art thou from the earth, which has opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand."

<Oh, Scully. Forgive me. I'm just not strong enough. I can't do this. It's too much.>

I found myself sitting on the couch, lovingly stroking the cold metal of my gun. If I had had the courage to do this before, last time, then Scully would be home safe now, and the ground would be silent.

The strength of my beliefs. That's what she'd told me she had last time.

The trouble was, my beliefs were brittle, useless things, propped up by a network of lies, self-deceit, arrogance and obsession. How could someone as smart as Scully have been taken in so easily? I couldn't allow that to continue.

<Oh, please, please, please let this end. Let her come back. End this.>

Come back? Come back to what? Come back to an inevitable diagnosis of fatal disease? To the ravenous cancer that would consume her body and steal her soul? To the pain I saw in Lenore Babinsky's eyes? Oh, god, no, anything but that. I couldn't face that.

The safety came off with a sharp, satisfying click. This would be easy.

If only the knocking would stop. I knew I should wait for it to stop. At last, it did, much to my relief.

But the next sound surprised me. The sound of a door opening.

"Mulder?"

I hoped she'd go away. Instead, blinding light filled the room.

"Mulder? What the fuck are you doing?"

"Go away."

"I think not. Put the fucking gun down."

"No."

"It wasn't a request."

"Who the fuck are you to tell me what to do?"

"Me? I'm just some passer-by who happens to be a lot saner than you are. So put the gun down now, before ..."

"Before what? Get the fuck out Rachel, before you have to see something that'll haunt your fucking dreams for quite some time to come."

"No." She surprised me, not by what she said, but by how she said it. Suddenly, unexpectedly, her voice was gentle. The sharp tone of disapproval, of anger, was gone.

"Mulder, she made her own choices. You didn't make them for her."

I looked at her, and suddenly there were tears running down my face.

"I closed off so many options for her. There were no good choices left."

"That's not true."

"Everything that's happened to her has been because of me."

"Yes."

I was surprised again. I'd expected her to argue.

"Well, then, I'll just step aside."

"You can't do that."

"I was about to do that before you barged in."

"No, Mulder. What you were about to do would have deprived her of choice, not given it back to her. I do believe that what's happened to her has been because of you. Because she - chose - you. Freely and willingly. If you remove yourself from the picture, you take away the choice. That's why what you were about to do would be the ultimate selfish act. And somehow, I feel sure you know that's exactly what it would be. Don't you?"

I put the gun down on the coffee table, sighed and rubbed my tired eyes.

She surprised me again by sitting down next to me on the couch and changing the subject.

"How did it go in Scranton?"

"Terrible."

"Did you learn anything?"

"Yes. But I'm not sure it's anything useful."

"What happened?"

There was a long pause as I decided whether to answer, and then, having decided, gathered my strength. When I began speaking, the words didn't want to come, as though my mind were still trapped in a murky netherworld where my gun made more sense than any explanation my mouth could offer. But as I spoke, it got easier, and the shadows began to disperse.

"I met with several abductees," I began slowly, "all of whom had found implants similar to Scully's. They described memories of a variety of intense emotions during the periods they were missing - but no experiences that could explain the emotions."

"You mean, they didn't remember what made them feel whatever they were feeling?"

"More like they believed there were no experiences connected to the feelings. Just the feelings themselves."

Rachel stopped to think about that. "Maybe those emotional events were caused by the stressors. They're part of the testing."

"My thoughts exactly," I said, impressed that she'd put it together on her own.

"What else?"

"Well, I believe that, wherever they were taken, the place was claustrophobic."

She smiled. "A spaceship would probably be pretty claustrophobic."

I surprised myself by failing to bristle at her teasing. It merely drew me farther away from the dark place where she had found me.

"It would, but I think this is more like some underground facility. That's the sense I got from their descriptions."

"I see. That doesn't exactly help us pinpoint it on a map, but I suppose it's something."

"I suppose."

There was a silence before she spoke again.

"There's something else, isn't there?"

"Yes."

"What is it?"

I swallowed, trying to find the courage to tell her the rest.

"They told me about ... about the cancer."

"What about it?"

"It seems to appear in every woman who has been abducted more than once."

"Every one?"

"Every one. I believe it may be an effect of the intense levels of radiation to which they're exposed during the course of the tests."

"No wonder you feel like shit."

Another surprise. This woman was full of them. Her simple, matter-of-fact way of referring to the fact that she had just barely stopped me from blowing my own head off was - well, disarming. So to speak. I found myself making an unexpected confession.

"I keep thinking, even if I find Scully, it'll be too late to save her. She'll die anyway. I've done that to her."

Rachel sighed. "Jesus, Mulder, you are a piece of work. First of all, finding her would clearly be preferable to not finding her. And second of all, you're beating yourself up over something that hasn't happened yet, and may never happen."

"It's happened in every other case we know about."

"Okay, so maybe it has. But that's all the more reason to keep trying to find her. Maybe we can cut the second round of testing short. Who knows what exactly causes the cancer? Maybe it's not the radiation. Or, if it is, maybe her exposure is still not that great, and if you find her soon she'll still be okay."

"That seems absurdly optimistic."

"Aren't you the guy who's supposed to be willing to consider extreme possibilities?"

"Funny, usually the extreme possibilities I believe in are pretty nasty. I never thought about considering the positive ones."

"Yeah, well, next thing you know, you'll be visualizing world peace."

I laughed. "Okay, but if you catch me in tie-dye, promise you'll put me out of my misery."

"It's a deal." Her tone grew serious. "Y'know, you must realize by now that your highly developed sense of guilt is your Achilles heel."

Suddenly, I was angry again. "I don't know what you mean."

"Of course you do. It makes you so incredibly easy to manipulate. It's like a big, red button in the middle of your forehead that says, 'Push me.'"

"You're a lousy psychoanalyst, Rachel. Don't give up your day job."

"Am I? What about that message you got from Skinner about letting other people handle this?"

"What about it?"

"It just seems to me to be such an obvious ploy. That message plants the idea in your head that you're responsible for what happened, and that if the outcome is bad, it'll be because of your continued involvement. That kind of thing makes you crazy because you're so willing to believe it."

Jesus, was I really that easy? I'd always fancied myself a complicated man, and this woman made me sound like a wind- up toy, capable only of repeating the same pre-ordained action again and again and again for the amusement of others.

Well, when I thought I about it, I realized I'd known all along that that's what I was. I'd just hoped I hid it better.

But apparently I didn't. At least, not from Rachel Sachs.

My eyes locked with hers.

"Do you have any other advice before we end our session, Dr. Sachs?"

Surprised again. Her eyes filled with tears.

"No. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound that way."

I regretted my sarcasm immediately. "No, it's okay. I just hate it when people catch on to me."

"I don't really believe I have, Mulder. I've barely scratched the surface."

Her eyes had become a fascinating mixture of sadness, confusion and relief. The sadness and confusion I understood. I wasn't sure what she'd been relieved of.

"You shouldn't be anywhere near this mess, Rachel. You should turn around and run like hell."

"I don't think so."

"Then you're a fool."

"That's a distinct possibility."

I admired her ability to crack wise while treading on such dangerous ground. And her eyes ... those dark brown eyes gazing unwaveringly from beneath long, elegantly curved lashes, looking at me like my face was telling tales my mind didn't yet know.

"I suppose I should thank you for showing up tonight," I said.

"I just wanted to know what happened in Scranton," she replied.

"Is that all?"

"Yes."

"Nothing else?"

"I want to help."

Her words tugged at my soul. I wanted desperately to be helped, to find a way out of the painful morass I was trapped in. My face drifted closer to hers and I drank in her scent. She smelled of cinnamon and cloves and just a little of sweat, and her full, wide mouth drew me closer until my lips were on hers and my tongue was thrusting and probing her soft inside.

Her eyes closed, but mine did not, and I watched her face as she responded to my desperate, hungry kiss. Her forehead was lined with concentration and her cheeks flushed hot and red. I felt her hands grasp the back of my head and pull me closer as her tongue stroked eagerly against mine, and my erection grew painfully hard with wanting her.

My arms came around her and my weight pressed against her until she was lying prone beneath me, my hard-on throbbing urgently against her leg. I found skin beneath the hem of her shirt. She wasn't wearing a bra, and my hand found her small, firm breast. I could feel the toned muscle behind it flex in response as her nipple surged into the palm of my hand, and that alone milked precome from my raging cock. I was rapidly losing control.

So when she pushed against my chest, I fought her for several seconds before I realized what was happening.

"Mulder. Stop!" she managed, speaking almost directly into my mouth.

I froze, my body still stretched the length of hers.

"Don't do this." Her eyes were locked on mine.

I leaped to my feet and crossed the room.

"Get out!" I was yelling.

"Mulder...."

"Just get out!"

"NO!" She came up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder. "No. Mulder, the timing is really bad here. Can't you see that? You're half crazy about Dana. You're not thinking clearly."

"Don't patronize me."

"I'm not patronizing you. I just think your judgment is clouded."

"What a kind way to put it."

"You think this is a rejection, Mulder? Think again."

I turned my head to look at her.

"What does that mean?"

"It means I'm not sure you're seeing me clearly. Your thoughts are with her. And this wouldn't be fair to her."

I felt the tears starting to flow again. Dana. Had I really just gone from nearly killing myself over her to jumping her best friend in less than ten minutes flat?

<Yes, you did, you piece of shit.>

Just like last time. Just like with that psycho vampire woman. The gaping hole left by Scully's departure was like a cold vacuum, sucking in anything warm and alive to fill the space.

But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn't true. I knew this time was different. I was still an asshole, but I'd changed a little since the first time.

"You're right," I whispered. "It wouldn't be fair. But it wouldn't just have been anyone who came along."

"No?"

"No."

"I'd like to believe you. But I don't."

"You think I'm betraying her."

She sighed. "I don't know."

"Maybe I am. But I don't think so."

"You love her, don't you, Mulder?"

The last surprise of the evening: "Yes."

"I believe you," she said. "Now you have to believe she's coming back."

She moaned. Writhed. Screamed. Trembled. All without movement, without sound. All in that surreal, empty space, balanced on the razors edge between the physical and the mental.

The nowhere nothingness was once again flooded with undeniable, overwhelming sensation, jumbled and irrational and intense. Like the light-headed rush of sweet, rich chocolate on the sensitive upper palate. Like the sensuous kiss of soft silk draped over the tips of hardened nipples. Like the ephemeral transcendence of a Chopin etude. Like the warmth of a bedfellow chasing the chill of a cold room in winter. Like slow, oiled fingertip strokes easing aching, knotted muscles. Like heady, spiced, mulled-cider-and-pine December air. Like a hot tongue lapping the bright red point of sensitive flesh. Like falling falling falling falling falling falling falling into a mind-shattering orgasm that will not end.

Like all of those things, but like none of them. Feeling it without seeing it or tasting it or smelling it or hearing it. Without the taste or smell or sound or touch of a lover whose hazel eyes weave wild and beautiful tales.

Empty ecstasy.

She had been gone twenty-three days, and I seemed no closer to discovering where she'd been taken. Like everything else in the foul, murky conspiracy in which Scully and I had become embroiled, this too had no clear direction, no sign of resolution. Just bits and pieces of information and theory that floated on the surface of a deep, putrid swamp.

It had been five days since Rachel had walked in on my little personal drama. We had spoken only once on the telephone since then, when she'd called to ask if there was any news. I thought she knew that, after the strange peace we'd made with one another, I would have called her if there'd been something significant. But then I was slammed by the realization that she was calling not for herself, but for Margaret Scully. Scully's mother had not called me once since the day I'd practically thrown her out of my apartment, and of course I'd been too self- involved to call her. But Rachel had. In fact, it seemed Rachel was holding together a lot of my loose ends.

In the meantime, I'd checked up on Gorman's investigation. I knew the cretin wouldn't have turned up anything useful. It's just that I wanted to see if his incompetence was due entirely to his own lack of gray matter, or if there were signs he was purposely chasing his own tail - following orders to fail. But his work was so spectacularly ineffective, so monumentally unimaginative, that it was impossible to tell. Oh, he'd given up on the serial murder angle - in fact, the Philly P.D. had already caught the guy. Now he was trying to determine whether Scully had had any connection to the KGB. I guess that little incident involving the Senate hearing and my trip to Siberia had led him to this brilliant insight.

Skinner had come to me once, asking off the record whether I was pursuing any unofficial channels of information, saying he might be able to help if I'd tell him what I was looking for. I was sorely tempted to try him. After all, basically, I trusted Skinner. At that point, I didn't doubt he would have gone out of his way to cover our asses - mine and Scully's. It was just that I couldn't be sure of the channels he might have used. Hell, I couldn't be sure of the channels I had used, but at least they were mine. So I just stared him right in the eyes and told him I was working on other cases as ordered.

Which, in fact, I was. Every day, I'd gone into that goddamn office and plodded through some mind-numbing exercise in law enforcement that involved neither truth nor justice, though it might very well have embodied the American way. I opened cases and made phone calls and collected evidence and wrote reports. I managed to keep it all local - Skinner must have been helping me out on that front - so that I could go home to my own apartment at night and wait.

Which is really what I was doing all along, every minute, day and night. Waiting. It was torture, but in a sick way I welcomed it because it seemed to serve me right somehow.

It was Friday night, and as I drove home I felt ambivalent. At least I wouldn't have to go into the office for the next couple of days and see Gorman's imbecilic face or feed the ravenous monster of FBI bureaucracy with some damn form in triplicate. On the other hand, I was at a dead end, frustrated and agonizingly helpless, and the last thing I needed was a couple of days to think about that.

I slammed my apartment door as though violence against inanimate objects might make a difference. I was hot and tired and sweaty. I tried to think of something distracting to do, but could think of nothing better than a shower. The hot water proved somewhat soothing, and I got out feeling better than when I'd gone in.

On my way to the bedroom, I noticed the light flashing on my answering machine. I hit play as I continued toweling my hair, enjoying the cool air conditioning on my overheated skin.

A woman's voice. Three words.

"NeuMed Technology. Wilmington."

Darkness and luck, I thought. They'll be enough.

They had better be. They were all I had.

Knock knock.

<Shit. That woman is getting to be quite the nuisance.>

Ignoring it wasn't going to work, I realized after some more knocking. She'd seen the lights. She wasn't going away.

I opened it and blocked the doorway with my body.

"Go away."

"And a pleasant evening to you, too, Agent Mulder," Rachel said.

"Go away."

"That's a tired old refrain, Mulder. Let me in."

"Which part of 'Go away' are you having trouble with? I can arrange for classes in remedial colloquial American English, if that's what you need. But it'll have to wait until Monday."

"Very funny. Let me in, Mulder."

"No."

"Why not? What are you hiding?"

"Well, now, if I came right out and told you, I wouldn't be very good at it, would I?"

"Cut the crap. What's going on?"

She didn't look like she was going anywhere. I toyed for a moment with the idea of slamming the door in her face, but I didn't relish the idea of hearing her knock for the next hour.

I stepped aside and let her in.

She looked around suspiciously.

"What are you up to?"

"Nothing."

"Bullshit. You're dressed in black from head to toe, and I doubt you're heading out to a Nine Inch Nails concert. There's a backpack on the couch with a great big honker of a flashlight peeking out. And you have this stubbornly determined look on your face, like you're about to toss me out the window to get rid of me. So - what gives?"

"Stop it, Rachel. Game over. No match. You lose. Go home."

"Your pinball metaphors are way hip, Mulder, but I'm not going anywhere. You're up to something. You've learned something new, and you're holding out on me. I told you, I'm not walking away from this. So just tell me what's going on."

I sighed.

If only I'd thought it through a little better than that.

"Okay. I've got a lead, and I'm heading out to follow it up. It's going to take a little undercover work, so just go home and leave me to it. Okay?"

"What kind of lead?" Her voice was surprisingly intense.

"A name. A company that does cutting-edge R&D in the field of neurological research."

"A name. And you're going to do what with this name?"

"I'm going to check it out."

"I see. Well, judging from your get-up and all the James Bond movies I've seen, you look like you're about to do something stupid."

"Excuse me? And you're qualified to make this call because ...?"

"Because I have the common sense I was born with. Something I can't say for you. What the hell are you going to do?"

"Leave this to me, Rachel. Go home."

"Let's see - from the looks of it, you're going to break into the place. Now, we're talking about a major research facility, which is likely to be a big place with lots of high-tech security. So obviously you know exactly what you're looking for, where to find it and how to access it?"

I didn't answer.

"And you've gotten some inside help, along with a guarantee of safe passage?"

I still didn't answer.

"Christ, Mulder! You're not going to just waltz in there and poke around, are you?"

I glared at her.

"Mulder, there's got to be a better way! Tell me what you know about this place."

I was furious - and not just because this cocky amateur was telling me my business. Because she was right. Because what I was about to attempt was insane.

"NeuMed Technology in Wilmington," I said. "They work with sophisticated technology, including the machinery used to conduct the tests that yielded the data in the file."

"How do you know this?"

"I just do."

She paused, assessing my answer. Her next words indicated that she'd decided not to press the point.

"So they adapt stuff like MRI equipment for new applications?"

"Yeah."

She paused again, chewing on her lower lip in thought. I watched in fascination as her deep, brown eyes turned inward. With a blink, her decision was made.

"Mulder, I may be of some use to you here."

"Forget it, Rachel."

"No, listen to me. I may be able to get through the front door without arousing any suspicion."

Much as I wanted to be rid of her and her meddling, the prospect she'd offered was intriguing.

"How?"

"Some areas of research in my field utilize the most sophisticated technologies - cutting-edge technologies that were designed for use in humans. Especially research involving the higher marine mammals. If I could whip up a convincing grant proposal for such a project, I could go over there for a meet-and-greet. You know, tell them I've got reason to believe I'm going to be funded, and I want to have my equipment lined up ahead of time. Maybe ask some leading questions, see if I can learn something."

"No."

"What do you mean, 'No?' What's the alternative? You break in with a flashlight and search an entire research facility? Do you have any idea what you're looking for?"

I didn't answer.

"You don't, do you? Jesus, Mulder, at least maybe I could narrow the field for you."

"No. It's too dangerous."

"Oh, poppycock. If anything, my idea is much safer. I'd be dealing with a middle-level research geek, someone who might not even know if the company is into anything funny. He'd have no reason to suspect me, and he'd have no reason to guard his tongue."

"I said no!" "Why not?"

"I told you. It's too dangerous."

"That's a chance I'm willing to take. And it's a better chance for Dana. And you know it."

I swallowed a bitter retort. "How long do you need?"

"A couple of days. If I start right now, I can have something filed in 48 hours."

There was a long silence.

"Do it," I said through gritted teeth.

Three days later, the drive to Wilmington was tense. Neither of us spoke much. I was wound so tight that I could have strummed Hendrix' version of "The Star Spangled Banner" on the tendons in my neck. I don't know about Rachel. I couldn't read her at all. If it had been Scully seated next to me, on our way to someplace strange to do something dangerous, I would have known what she was thinking, how she was feeling. She would have known the same about me. As it was, I felt more alone than if I'd been alone.

Oddly enough, though, the fact that Rachel was there didn't irritate me. It was odd because, when you got right down to it, I hadn't even decided that I trusted her. Yet somehow, going to Wilmington with her seemed like the right thing to do. Maybe it had something to do with Scully. She had trusted Rachel, so maybe it didn't matter whether I did or not. As Rachel had pointed out so damn correctly, this whole thing was about Scully, not about me.

By the time we arrived at the motel, it was dark. We checked into adjoining rooms some sixteen hours before Rachel's appointment at NeuMed.

I knocked on her door and went in. She was sitting on the bed.

"Headache?" I asked.

"Yeah. How did you know?"

"I could tell. Why don't you take something?"

"I already did."

I sat down on an armchair by the window and looked her over.

"You sure you want to go through with this?"

"Yes."

"Then remember what I told you. The most valuable thing you can do is get information without arousing suspicion, because once you've tipped them off, the information is likely to be useless. Don't forget that we're fishing for a place, a facility where these tests could be conducted. Be very alert and try to remember everything - you never know what's going to matter in the end. And if he gets suspicious, just get the hell out. All right?"

"We've gone over this a million times," she snapped.

"Doing it for real will be very different. You need to be prepared."

She sighed. "I know. I'm sorry. I guess I'm nervous."

I nodded. We sat in silence for some minutes before I decided to ask what was really on my mind.

"Why are you doing this?"

"I told you. I like Dana. I admire her."

"Very few people ever risk their lives for someone they like and admire. Why?"

Her eyes fell and her hands twisted in her lap. Eventually, she spoke again.

"For my grandmother."

"Excuse me?"

"My grandmother. I know that sounds hokey. She was a concentration camp survivor. Bergen-Belsen. When I was young, she always used to tell me stories about how it was when they took her and her family away, and what it was like in the camp. One day I asked her, 'Grandma, you sound so bitter about the way your neighbors watched as the SS came for you. But what could they have done? What did you expect them to do?' She shook her head and clicked her tongue in this way she had. 'Rachel,' she said, 'when pure evil comes along, there are only two choices. If you're not fighting for good, you're fighting for evil. There's nothing in between.' Ever since then, I've wondered what I would do if pure evil came along. When I saw those men take Dana away, I knew the time had come. And I knew exactly what Grandma would have wanted me to do."

I tried to make her look at me, but she wouldn't. "You're right. That's a pretty hokey story," I said. I'd meant to be glib, but I could tell my humor had fallen flat.

"Yeah, well. We can't all have such interesting family histories," she replied. The comment cut deeply.

"I'm sorry, Rachel. I didn't mean to trivialize it."

"I know." Her eyes finally met mine.

"You should get some rest," I said.

"I don't think I could sleep."

"Me neither. TV?"

"Sure."

A low-budget B-movie droned late into the night, giving us an excuse to keep each other company.

The thought tormented me as I paced that cage of a motel room. Rachel had gone to NeuMed. She was out of my reach, out of my control. She was waltzing away with my one lead, my one line to Scully, and she could blow it with a single wrong word. Hell, all it would take is an attack of nerves - a shaky hand, a vocal tremor, a facial twitch - and a suspicious observer would be onto us. And there wasn't a damn thing I could do about it.

I had no choice but to trust her.

The sense of helplessness was overwhelming. If only I could - do - something. Listen to the conversation. Tell her what to say. Maybe I shouldn't have let her talk me out of the wire. If I could only hear what was going on .. But I knew she was right. A place like that would have some pretty sophisticated security equipment. Even if the company were 100 percent legit, they'd probably be paranoid as hell about industrial espionage and take precautions. And if NeuMed was what I thought it was, Rachel would definitely never have gotten two steps inside with a wire.

I stopped pacing and threw myself into a chair.

That would have been something, at least. I wouldn't have felt so utterly helpless. But I had denied myself the simple luxury of prayer a long time ago, disdainful of the self-delusion, the deep denial it implied.

"God would never let me baby die if I just pray hard enough."

"This pain will cease if I just believe in Him."

"My sister will be returned to me if I have faith."

No, I had given up on all that stuff long ago, despite my occasional foray into a church or a synagogue to see if it wasn't too late. But I knew it was. There would be no such relief for me ever again.

Scully managed to believe, somehow. With all her professed faith in science, all the undeserved grief that had befallen her, she still thought there was a god in heaven and he was good. I envied her that. Somehow, what seemed like a pathetic weakness in others was a noble strength in her.

I wondered if Rachel prayed. Last night, when she had finally slipped off to sleep, still dressed and lying atop the ugly motel bedspread, did she dream of a god who was merciful and would help her in her cause?

Interesting question.

Did Rachel's grandmother pray all those years ago, in the days of the great evil that was Nazi genocide?

Even more interesting question.

As the clock ticked off every painful second, I felt a knot of anxiety take shape and grow in my belly like some perverse homunculus. I'd made a mistake. This was wrong. How could I have been so stupid? Rachel had no idea what she was doing. This would end badly.

Images flooded my mind with the certainty of premonition. Rachel's broken body heaped in an alleyway, a dark figure hazed in cigarette smoke standing meditatively above her. Scully lying pale and motionless in a hospital bed, machines doing the work of her own useless organs. Her mother sitting stony silent, eyes watery and face drawn into an archetypal mask of grief.

Me, with my brains splattered across the back of a dirty old leather couch.

At that moment, I knew with inarguable certainty that, if Rachel were devoured in the lion's den, then my own fate was sealed. I imagined I could hear growling beasts feeding hungrily on a young woman's body.

That morning was an excruciating torment I felt sure would never end, my own personal, godless, existential hell. I wondered if the folks at Motel 6 knew that life's great dramas were played out inside those tacky little rooms.

Finally, I was reduced to standing by the window, peeking out from behind drawn blackout curtains, watching for the car. There were a couple of moments of truly exquisite torture, when, not once but twice, silver Tauruses pulled into the motel parking lot. Each time, I felt a rush of relief and eagerness. The first time, an elderly man with a hat got out. The second time, it was a pudgy, middle-aged matron with puffy, platinum hair.

And then, at last, the third silver Taurus pulled up, and a slim, dark-haired woman emerged.

At that point, had Scully herself gotten out of the car, I don't think I would have been more relieved.

"What happened?" I asked before she'd even closed the room door behind her.

"I think it went okay."

"Okay? What does that mean?"

"Well, I met with a guy named Howard Zinzer - mousy little man with a nervous blink and bad breath. He's a bioengineer. Not a front-office kind of guy, but he seemed to know a lot about what was going on. Probably real hands-on with the research, so he comes into contact with a lot of people. Anyway, most of our conversation was exactly what I would expect in this kind of meeting - he gave me a tour of the facility, we chatted a little about my research, then got down to tech talk. But there was one thing that stood out - an inconsistency. I don't know if it's much to go on...."

I was impatient with her rambling account. "What is it?"

"Well, near the beginning of our meeting, I asked him how many facilities NMT has. He said six, and he listed them. A couple of hours later, he was naming locations where various components are manufactured or tested. He mentioned five - there was one location he'd mentioned earlier missing. Maine. I tried to probe a little, ask him if there were any secondary locations, anything on the East Coast. He said no."

"Where in Maine?"

"I don't know. I couldn't think of a way to ask without indicating that I'd noticed the discrepancy."

"Damn!" I slammed my hand against the wall in frustration.

"Mulder? I'm sorry."

I didn't hear her next words as my brain sorted through all she'd told me. She must have repeated herself. I looked at her, but my attention was focused elsewhere.

"I know I should have done more," she went on. "I just couldn't think of anything. I didn't want to say too much ... I was trying to remember what you told me ..."

For the first time since she'd walked into the room, I looked at her - I mean really saw her. Her mouth was pulled into a tight line, her lips pressed together so that only a hint of their normal redness remained. Her forehead was creased with worry. There were brownish-purple circles under her eyes. Neither of us had slept much the night before. I suddenly wondered if she'd slept much since witnessing Scully's abduction. I remembered how she had appeared at my apartment, bloody and agitated.

"How did you get there?" I found myself asking.

"What? I ... I drove your car ... I mean ... What do you mean?"

I shook my head to clear it. "No. I meant, how did you get to my apartment the night they took Scully?"

"I drove. Why? Is it important?"

"You were bleeding. They'd hit you on the head. You had blood all over your face."

"Yes. I remember it was hard to see. I had blood in my eyes. Why? Does it matter?"

I smiled tiredly. "Yes. It matters."

She shook her head, confused. "I'm sorry I couldn't find out where in Maine."

I put a hand on her shoulder. "It's all right. We know a lot more than we did before. You did well."

"What do we do now?"

My arm dropped back to my side. "-We - don't do anything. I'll take it from here."

"But what are you going to do?"

"Find out where in Maine."

"How?"

"There must be something in that place that would tell us. I'll take a look around tonight."

"What? I thought we settled this already. That place is way too big."

"Not any more."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"You've given me two very valuable pieces of information. One is that whatever we're looking for may be in Maine. And the other is that Dr. Howard Zinzer knows where in Maine. I don't have to search the whole place now - just Zinzer's office."

She sighed and crossed the room to pick up her purse from the dresser where she'd left it when she came in. She opened it and removed something, holding it out to me.

"Here."

I saw a plastic swipe card in her hand. "What is it?"

"It's an access card for NMT."

"What? How'd you get it?"

"Ladies' room. Someone left it by the sink, so I slipped it in my purse. I thought it might come in handy. Of course, I don't know if it'll open all the doors, but at least it's something."

I took the card, flipping it over and over to examine it. "Is there a keypad on the door? Do I need an access code?"

"Not on the regular doors. There were some with keypads, but not the hallway and stairwell doors. The offices were all on regular, old-fashioned locks."

"I can handle those."

"Mulder, this is crazy. Can't you go to your boss - get a search warrant, or whatever the hell you do?"

I flopped onto the bed and rubbed my eyes tiredly. "No. We can't give away the game until we know for sure, and even then, we'll have to move quickly. Look, I don't have the strength for this, Rachel. I have to get in there tonight. Period. End of discussion."

Somewhat to my surprise, it was.

My calves ached dully as I crouched motionless in the woods. The rest of the world was sleeping peacefully in soft beds, under sheltering roofs, on quiet streets, while I huddled, watched, waited, strained to spot a gap through which I could furtively slip to conduct my midnight thievery.

"A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be on the earth..."

The massive, impersonal building that housed the Wilmington division of NeuMed Technology loomed darker than the darkness that surrounded it, and I squatted below, hoping against hope there was a weakness here somewhere.

There was.

I suppose I should thank R.J. Reynolds for my good fortune - along with the Wilmington city fathers, who unwittingly conspired to force a security guard out of doors to smoke a butt.

And the door was not locked behind him.

I forced my cramped muscles awake and crept forward, relying on the camouflage of spy-movie-black clothes to secret me from watchful eyes. My good luck held. The guard was feeling contemplative and wandered a hundred feet from the door, strolling across the parking lot and admiring the clear night sky.

I'd slipped in behind him and closed the door before he'd finished making his wish on a star.

The card worked flawlessly, unlocking every door I encountered as I passed through the hallways. There were video cameras hanging from the ceiling at intervals, but the lights were dim, and I was careful to slide along walls and stay in the shadows as I followed Rachel's directions to the office she'd visited not twelve hours earlier. Once or twice, I reached for my gun out of habit and was distraught to remember I didn't have it. Rachel had warned me of metal detectors scattered throughout the building. I had to do this unarmed if I hoped to pass undetected.

A plastic lockpick made quick work of Zinzer's door, and I was in. Penlight in hand, I took a look around. The office fairly groaned with the bland normalcy of its absent occupant. Framed family photos on the desk - wife and two kids, a boy in braces and a girl in owlish glasses. Einstein poster on the wall like a religious icon to watch over the true believer in science. Red light flashing on the phone - a message that had come in after Dr. Zinzer left for the day, no doubt. Bookcase laden with heavy tomes, the spines of which said things like, "Perception and Process," "Principles of Neurophysiology," and "Bioelectrical Systems." A black filing cabinet.

Nah. I figured nothing was too obvious when it came to the obviously unimaginative Dr. Zinzer.

I held the penlight in my mouth and tried "M" for "Maine." Okay, that would have been too easy - but I've seen stranger things. I tried "C" for "Covert." I even tried "S" for "Scully" and "E" for "Extraterrestrial." Then I gave up and started at "A" for "A logical place to begin."

After about 15 minutes, I got to "O." And after 16, I found it.

"Operation Pushpin."

I laughed quietly at the hokiness of it. The masterminds of this nightmare must be frustrated TV writers, I thought.

Flipping the folder open, I began leafing through the few pages of computer printout inside. I couldn't determine exactly what they were, but they seemed to describe some device. It was probably a spec, maybe something the Wilmington group had worked on for the secret project.

"Delivery: 2/22/96 to Frog Island, Maine."

Bingo.

The file was tucked inside my pants and the drawer closed in a wink. As I shut the office door quietly behind me and hurried down the hall, I was already deciding not to call Skinner with the information for fear his line - or my cell phone - might not be secure. I'd have to get to him personally, get him to order a thorough search of the island, look for...

"HEY YOU! STOP RIGHT THERE!"

All at once, the corridor was no longer silent and dim. An ear- splitting klaxon sounded, and bright lights flashed on to reveal an armed guard at the far end of the hallway, his weapon leveled at me.

Too late, I realized that I'd been tearing down the center of the corridor, oblivious to the security cameras. Even a half-asleep, high-school-dropout, ex-con rent-a-cop would have noticed. Which he obviously had.

I took off in the opposite direction at a dead run. What happened next only confirmed that I had to get to Frog Island, Maine.

The son of a bitch took a shot at me.

Even in high security facilities housing top secret Pentagon projects, they generally have a go at chasing an intruder down before they start shooting, unless of course the intruder opens fire first.

So this shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach was rather suspicious - and alarming.

I had no idea where I was going, whether I was heading deeper into the heart of the building or out toward the perimeter and a possible exit. The turns I was taking kept me more or less out of the direct line of fire of the guy chasing me, but I knew someone would head me off coming the other way any moment. So when an open stairwell came into view, I opted to head up. It wasn't like I had any clear notion of being better off on the second floor. It was just the path of least resistance.

Bad move.

I hit the upstairs corridor just as another guard was coming off a stairwell at the other end. He opened fire the second he saw me, confirming my theory that the first guard hadn't just been a little trigger-happy. These guys were under orders.

It took some bobbing and weaving, but I managed to get around another corner and put some wall between me and all that flying lead.

Another short-lived reprieve. I heard footsteps and yelling voices clamoring up another stairwell, the door of which was closed - but I knew as I ran by that it would burst open in a moment, spitting out more deadly hunters on my tail. I turned the next corner and saw - I'd hit a dead end. And I couldn't go back the way I'd come.

The end of the hallway before me was floor-to-ceiling glass. I barely had time to register that there was something visible right outside even though I was on the second floor, when instinct and adrenaline and fear and sheer speed carried me straight at that wall. In one motion, I grabbed a metal-framed armchair from beside a secretary's desk and held it before me as I went crashing into - and through - the smooth barrier.

As I came down on the other side, I let go of the chair and rolled into a ball, preparing myself to fall a story down.

I was shocked to hit the ground straight away.

The building was on a hill. What was the second story on the side I'd entered was the first story on the side I'd so indelicately exited.

I didn't have time to process that information consciously. I was back on my feet and running like hell, surrounded by yelling voices and sweeping search lights and barking dogs and - oh god, gunshots again - and finding it suddenly not so hard to pray after all.

I sensed rather than saw people closing in on me from the left and the right, and I knew the ones behind had to be awfully close.

Now, blinding headlights were coming straight toward me as I ran.

<It's over.>

I skidded to a halt. The car swerved at the last possible moment and the horn blared.

I thought I heard a familiar voice scream, "Get in!" as the passenger door flew open. I jumped without thinking.

We peeled out, tires screaming, shots ringing out around us.

"Close the fucking door!" Rachel screamed, her voice pitched high in terror.

I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to bring my pounding heart and rapid-fire breathing under control. Then I closed the door.

"You're fucking insane," I said as we sped away.

"What does that make you?" she asked.

"Grateful."

Dark-cloaked awareness, and again everything was nothing, absence all. She was as still as everything, as still as nothing, with no power but the conundrum of potential energy, a power that is not, but could be, and therefore is.

She felt the potential energy that was not motion or heat or light but could become motion or heat or light if ... if ... if what? She didn't know.

Buried deep within her, buried all around her, she knew it was there, though she did not know with which sense the perception came to her. Potential energy cannot be smelled or heard, tasted or seen. Touched?

She stretched for it without reaching, turned toward it without moving. The energy that she was in the dark silence snaked beyond her, seeking to achieve potential, to reach it and embrace it and consume it and become it. Seeking ... seeking ... seeking ... what? What? She didn't know.

And yet she stretched, groping without hands to gather without arms to seek without eyes to find ... to find ... something ... someone ... some energy that was potential but had become something else.

She sent out her shoots not knowing why, putting all her energy into hoping.

Skinner's secretary's eyes went wide when I burst through the door. I don't blame her. I must have been a sight. I don't know how I looked, but I know how I felt. Hot. Weak. Feverish with anticipation.

I ignored her and barreled right on through Skinner's door. He looked up, startled.

"Agent Mulder? What is this?"

"I know where she is."

Of course, I didn't really. I mean, I wasn't sure. I hoped I was right, hoped so hard that it was eating me up like a raging infection, forcing a response from my body, a response that would either save my life - and hers - or kill me. Kill us both. Because if I was wrong...

No.

I had to keep going. I was exhausted, wired on lack of sleep and caffeine and anxiety, but rest was not an option. I hadn't slept in the couple of hours it took to get back to D.C., even with Rachel driving. I was too busy obsessively nursing the flame of hope.

Funny how people seem to feel hope is always a good thing. It isn't, at least not always. It can be a choke collar yanking you painfully back when you try to move on. It takes superhuman strength. It's tiring and frustrating and painful. In most cases, letting go of hope would be a relief. But in this case, that was not an option.

So I embraced the raging disease of hope, nurtured it, gave it my full attention.

It left me little strength for the niceties.

Skinner was staring at me like he thought maybe I'd finally gone 'round the bend.

"You know where Agent Scully is?"

"Yes. We have to hurry, or they'll have time to clear out."

He looked at me expectantly. Finally he asked, "Where?"

"Frog Island, Maine."

"Frog Island, Maine?"

"Yes."

I'd said it. I'd delivered the message. I expected the world to burst into action, all hell to break lose. For the past several hours, the words "Frog Island, Maine," had been echoing in my brain like a magical incantation to be recited at the right time in the right place. Here was the time and place, and I expected the spell to take effect - to set into motion the wild chain of events that would call Scully back from ... from ...

>From wherever she was. From Frog Island, Maine.

But Skinner just sat there staring at me.

Next thing I knew, I was screaming at him.

"She's in Maine! They've got her there! It's an experiment, and we've got to stop it! It may be too late - the cancer! LET's GO!"

Skinner rose slowly, walked around his desk and put a hand on my shoulder. Looking back, I suppose his steady, sympathetic manner was soothing, though at the time it seemed nothing but frustratingly slow and stupid. Why couldn't he see?

"Agent Mulder, sit down and calm yourself. You'd better start at the beginning."

I couldn't oblige him by sitting down and being calm, but I did somehow manage a semi-coherent narrative involving secret Japanese files, covert brain-function experiments, abductions, cancer victims, NeuMed Technology, and, finally, Frog Island, Maine. I handed him the file I'd taken from Zinzer's office.

Skinner paced as I talked. I could see his jaw clench and unclench as he listened, that frighteningly intense, slow-burn anger of his starting to smolder. I half expected him to chew me out for operating on the sly, disobeying orders. He didn't. In hindsight, I figure he'd known all along what I'd be up to, and he was counting on it.

He took the file from my hand without glancing at it.

"Are you sure, Agent Mulder?"

I swallowed. Was I? Even if my information was accurate, they could have evacuated the Maine facility after the incident in Wilmington. Unless they didn't realize what piece of information I'd picked up in my late-night raid. Maybe they'd lost track of that bit of the paper trail...

"Yes." Was that hope talking? It didn't matter.

He picked up the phone.

"Get me Gorman." A pause. "Agent Gorman, I want you to drop whatever you're doing. I want your entire team in Portland, Maine, within three hours. I want you to arrange transportation from there to Frog Island ... You don't need to know what's there! Just do it! Agent Mulder and I will be joining you."

I could picture Gorman's face during that conversation. He'd be about ready to burst a blood vessel. It was his investigation, and he was being given orders he didn't understand, with no explanation offered.

I hoped it made him feel like the stupid, incompetent idiot he was.

On the map, Frog Island was an uninhabited wilderness. In the early-morning Summer sunshine, Frog Island was still an uninhabited wilderness.

On the boat across, I'd briefed the dozen-plus agents and officers on what little I knew: I told them we were looking for some kind of high-tech medical facility, probably underground, certainly well-hidden. They'd all looked at me like I was making about as much sense as Ronald Reagan on a bad day. After all, the nearest sign of civilization had to be at least fifty miles away. This hardly seemed like the kind of place one would find a high- tech medical facility. I think half of them would have happily thrown me overboard had not a very stern-looking AD Skinner been sitting behind me, his sober countenance clearly communicating that he'd eviscerate the first bastard who failed to take all this very seriously.

When we got there, my heart dropped to the pit of my stomach. The island was huge and thickly wooded. There was no sign that anyone had even been there lately, let alone that a sophisticated, operational research facility was in the vicinity.

And we had only twelve agents, plus the AD and a handful of state troopers.

I flashed on a nightmare scenario I hadn't previously considered - - that Scully might be somewhere on the island, but that I'd fail to find her. There were already so many things I could barely live with, but that...

I pushed the thought back into the mental U-Store-It where I keep my private collection of horrors and took up my position in the search pattern. We fanned out into an inverted V, each searcher about fifty feet from the person on either side. The point person penetrated the woods, and we were off.

I forced myself to concentrate despite my fatigue and the feverish feeling that still gripped me. I looked at every twig on the ground for signs of breaks caused by clumsy feet. I eyed every bramble for a telltale bit of cloth or paper that might have snagged. I sniffed the air for any odors that didn't seem to belong in the Maine woods on a bright August day.

After about twenty minutes, our discomfort was made extreme by the merciless torment of black flies. The horrid creatures seemed ravenous, like they hadn't had a meal since last Summer. Luckily, the state troopers had known what to expect. They called a halt and distributed repellent. I smiled at the irony. It was the nasty stuff with deet - the stuff that's supposed to cause cancer.

As if on cue, my cell phone rang.

"Mulder," I said into it, as I continued spraying the foul chemical on my FBI windbreaker and down the legs of my jeans.

"Go back."

I froze. I knew that voice well. It was one I heard nearly every night in my blackest nightmares.

"Fuck you," I murmured in reply.

"Go back, Agent Mulder. You don't want to do this."

"I don't? Gee, I see your point. Why would I want to put a stop to the most heinous, unethical human experiment of our day? I'd rather be bowling."

"This is not a joke, Agent Mulder. If you continue on your present course, you will jeopardize everything you care about. You will put your sister at risk."

"Samantha? What's she got to do with this?"

"Believe me when I tell you, quite a lot."

I resisted answering right away, forcing myself to stop and think. If Cancerman was bothering to warn me off, then maybe I was close. And there was something in his voice ... something I didn't think I'd ever heard there before. Something that sounded an awful lot like fear.

Every instinct I had screamed that this call was an act of panic. But I had no way of knowing whether that was what he wanted me to think, or whether he'd really been backed into a corner somehow. It would be just like the devious bastard to beg me to stop precisely because he knew doing so would have the opposite effect, urging me to move faster. Perhaps he needed the information I was about to uncover...

This line of thought was giving me a headache.

"Thanks for the tip," I answered, my voice surprisingly calm. "I hope you won't be offended if I choose to ignore your advice. Now, do me a favor and drop dead."

I turned off the phone and tucked it into my back pocket.

Skinner came up beside me. "Who was that?"

"Smoky the Bear. He called to tell me to put out my campfire."

Skinner knew exactly who and what I meant. He just gripped my shoulder for a moment, then went back to his position in the phalanx.

The march resumed.

We walked for hours through those woods. As the day wore on and the temperature rose, everyone involved grew hot, grimy and disgruntled. Had it not been for Skinner's presence, there would have been grumbling, possibly mutiny. But the A.D. pressed grimly on. It didn't occur to me until later the degree of faith he had placed in my word. I said she was here, and he acted with certainty that she was.

By then, I had a lot less faith in myself. There were three possibilities: they'd already evacuated, they'd never been here in the first place, or they were sitting tight in their hiding place, unable to get away now that we were so close.

The chance the last scenario would prove true seemed mighty thin when a cry came from someone on the opposite end of the search formation.

"I found something!"

We all broke and ran to see.

I don't know what I expected, but what I found was disappointingly prosaic. An old, weather-beaten shack stood in a clearing. It looked abandoned. Probably built and forsaken long ago by some hermit or hippie.

I came forward, gun drawn, and took up position on one side of the door. Skinner took the other side, and a number of others arranged themselves behind us.

At a nod from Skinner, I kicked in the door and leveled my gun.

It was like stepping through the looking glass.

Gone was the tumble-down hut I'd entered. I found myself standing inside a gleaming white room with another door on the far side. It was locked, and from the looks of it, this one wasn't going to be so easy to kick in.

My patience was gone. I fired three rounds into the lock. The door swung open, revealing stairs going down. Looking in, I saw the flight curved to the left, so I couldn't see what lay below. I headed down, leading with my gun. I could hear Skinner and the others stepping carefully behind me.

I turned the bend in the stairway and stopped in shock.

I saw a long, white corridor, consoles housing banks of instrumentation stretching down the middle. A few startled technicians in white lab coats looked up at us and froze in their seats, where they had obviously moments before been monitoring readouts. Along each wall on either side of the corridor were round openings, each some six feet in diameter, rimmed in glowing blue light.

"Nobody move! FBI!" somebody yelled. I was too stunned for the formalities.

I walked slowly to the opening nearest me and looked in. It led into a cylinder some eight feet deep. Inside, on a hard white table, lay a woman, nude, her body laced with wires, her head like a Medusa's, sprouting a tangle of snakelike tubes and leads.

I walked to the next one, and the next, and the next. The scene inside each was the same.

And then I was running, frantically skidding past each opening, slowing only long enough to glance inside and move on ... until I came to the one.

Among the tubes and wires and lights I saw a gleam of red hair. I stepped inside the tube and took a good look.

Garish lights in blue and red flashed across the pale skin of Scully's exposed torso, creating bands of weird and unnatural color. Her skin was dotted with small discs, each with a cluster of wires winding out and away into some electrical network that hung like a spider web above the table where she lay.

I was frozen, mesmerized by the sight of this technological violation.

But slowly, as if of their own volition, my eyes learned to see not the tubes and wires and lights, but the woman herself. And I realized that her breasts rose and fell in a quiet, even rhythm. A very human rhythm.

She was alive.

The bright point of light was so tiny, so distant, that she doubted its reality. She stared at it, not because it was especially interesting or beautiful, but because it was all there was. At first.

The light did not grow larger, but as she stared, she felt a connection form like a gossamer strand stretching the vast distance between wherever she was and wherever It was. The connection was fragile, tenuous, but she could feel the delicate link tremble with her own presence and Its.

She focused all her energy on It, sensing the presence at the other end. She willed It to see her soul, to sense her life, her intelligence, her need.

Need? What did she need from It?

Everything. Despite the delicacy of the connection, she knew that the strand between them was vital, was all that held her in place.

And him.

Him? Not It?

No, him. It had begun to take on an identity, a meaning. The point of light was not merely a thing, but a person; the gossamer thread not just a connection, but a relationship.

She began to sense that she was somewhere very deep, buried in the dark, and he had come to her as a beacon to light the way back. She feared that he would wink out and leave her alone in the dark. But she knew he would not do so willingly.

And what was she to him?

He was insubstantial, lighter than air, threatening at any moment to float away where the breeze would take him. She felt him. She knew he grasped his end of the thread as firmly, as desperately as she grasped hers. He sent her his life, his intelligence, his need. She was his tether, his anchor. Without him, he would fly up, up, up, until he was gone in a silent, final POP.

She wondered if she was a point of light, too.

Twenty-nine days after her abduction, Scully awoke in a hospital bed.

I had been reading for hours by the light of a small bedside lamp that glared harshly in the lenses of my reading glasses. I pushed the light aside when I saw her eyes were open, staring at me.

I smiled. "Hi."

"Mulder? Where am I?"

"Portland Memorial Hospital."

"Oregon?"

"No, Maine."

"How did I get here?"

"Long story. How do you feel?"

She paused, thinking about it, focusing for the first time since awakening on the signals coming from her own body.

"Tired. Incredibly tired. And I have a killer headache."

Unfortunate choice of language.

"You should rest."

"But how..."

"Rest, Scully. We'll talk later."

I think she would have argued if she could, but she didn't have the energy. She was already slipping back to sleep.

Her breathing had evened out when the door opened and two women entered. One stood quietly just inside the room. The other rushed to her daughter's bedside.

I rose and walked over to Rachel.

"How is she?" she whispered.

"Pretty well, considering. The doctor says there's no obvious damage. I had them check for implants, and there weren't any."

"You were in time, then."

"I don't know."

I stood silently for another moment, then left the room. Rachel followed. We stood at a hallway window, watching a dreary Summer rain drench the waterfront.

"This is a happy ending, Mulder. Why so glum?"

I sighed. "There are no endings, Rachel, happy or otherwise. There are only interludes and transitions between scenes of tragedy."

"They must love you at parties."

I laughed. "Sorry. I don't normally let myself wallow in pathos. Ruins my image."

"Don't worry. I'll never tell." She winked.

Just then, Margaret Scully walked out of her daughter's room.

I stood and stared, wordless, for a moment that stretched into a minute, then two.

"Please forgive me," I finally managed.

"Forgive you, Fox? For what? For bringing Dana back to me?"

"I treated you inexcusably. I don't think I'll ever forgive myself for that."

She took a step forward, then another and another in rapid succession, and then I was in her arms.

"Don't you dare, Fox," she whispered. "Don't you dare blame yourself for something you couldn't help. You did what you had to do. Thank you."

And then she was gone, disappeared back inside Scully's room to take up the vigil, sparing me the embarrassment of replying to gracious words I knew I didn't deserve.

She thought I'd done it selflessly, done it all for Scully and for her.

I didn't.

I did it all for me.

I sat again by her side. Mrs. Scully and Rachel had gone back to their hotel to rest after hours spent watching Scully sleep.

I had lost track of time sitting and staring at her, lost track of place and even circumstance. I indulged what seemed a sinful, wanton fantasy, that Scully was not recovering from a terrible ordeal but merely sleeping peacefully, and I was permitted to watch.

When she woke again, I felt ad if I'd been caught in a transgression.

But then she smiled, just a small, weak smile, and the guilty feeling evaporated.

"Hi again," I said quietly, taking her hand.

"Hi."

She looked down at our joined hands resting lightly on the bed, then back up at my face. Her eyes closed for a moment.

"They took me again, didn't they?"

I swallowed a lump that had suddenly risen to my throat. "Yes."

"How long ago?"

"Do you remember any of it?"

"Some. I remember men breaking into my apartment. They hit Rachel, didn't they? Is she all right?"

"She's fine."

"Thank god."

"Do you remember anything else?"

A screaming silence filled the room.

"No," she said at last. "How long?"

"Twenty-nine days."

"Oh my god." Her voice caught.

"There was no coma this time. We found you before they were through."

"You found me?"

"Yes."

Her hand tightened gently, weakly around mine.

Her next question was barely a whisper.

"Mulder, what did they do to me?"

I couldn't bring myself to answer, instead raising her hand gently to my lips.

"It doesn't matter," I lied smoothly. "It's over."

The End

Return to The Nursery Files home