In later years it would become obvious that someone had miscalculated when planning Dana Scully's illness and subsequent cure. But at the time this fact was not apparent, and the sequence of events threatened to destroy Fox Mulder.

He made no complaint, simply went where he was told. This time it was Arizona, because Scully was there.

Sedona was beautiful in the summer, Mulder thought as he squinted out over the red rocks at the setting sun. It was like a fucking painting in a cheap motel, it was so gorgeous. If he'd had the time, he would have joined the harmonic convergence folks chanting with their crystals, praying to Mother Earth to heal her poisoned self.

But he had other business, with a more personal poison.

Maybe it was strange for a world-reknowned oncologist to live in Sedona, dragging sick people out into the Arizona desert among the rocks for a chance to be cured. Maybe the heat helped dry up the cancers they brought to him; it was as good an explanation as any.

Skinner had never explained how he'd found Matt Rafferty's name, or how he'd gotten Scully into the good doctor's new study, which just fortuitously happened to concern brain tumors. The Lone Gunmen had traced Rafferty's grant to a foundation the CIA had previously used to fund the Contras. Mulder knew the price Skinner had paid, but at that point he hadn't cared, as long as Rafferty was a real doctor.

And Rafferty certainly was. He and Scully could chat away for hours, comparing horror stories. He'd apparently flirted with pathology before settling on oncology.

These days, flirting with pathologists was good enough for him.

Mulder kicked the red dirt, cursing himself for thinking about it. When he'd left Scully in Sedona, two months ago, he'd barely met Rafferty, just sniffed around him to see if he could be trusted. He'd thought that the man was just a means to an end, a tool.

This distraction from his plans was all the worse because he could tell that something big was brewing; he could feel it thrumming through the ground like a rhythm. Scully's cure had come because the silent men behind the conspiracies were settling up their debts in preparation for the final resolution -- or final solution. Never before had he needed Scully so much, but there was no way he could tell her about his certainty without risking her pity. And, yes, he'd go it alone rather than have her reject his intuitions, or, worse, come back out of loyalty to him rather than belief in his inferences.

He'd returned to Arizona to take her home, apparently cured, only it wasn't clear that she'd be coming home.

It was a very fine thing to see Scully happy. She sparkled when she was with Rafferty; it didn't take someone who knew her well to see that.

They'd gone out to dinner last night, a cozy threesome, and she'd shown off her happiness to Mulder like some shiny trinket she'd found. She wanted the two of them to like each other -- two important men in her life, partner and lover, and they should be friends -- but she must have known that it couldn't happen. Rafferty openly scoffed at the idea of the X Files. Any time Scully mentioned conspiracies or experimentation, he froze up, and she would frown and change the subject.

It was only Scully's pleading looks that had kept Mulder from needling Rafferty all through dinner. Well, maybe not. Somehow his ordinary witticisms didn't come very easy that night.

When Scully had gotten up to go to the bathroom, she'd been nervous, not sure what Mulder would do in her absence. As soon as her Mulder-behave-yourself expression disappeared from view, however, Rafferty had started to speak.

"I really love her, you know."

Mulder grunted and sloshed his ice tea around.

"Dana can be so...refreshingly naive at times."

Mulder's head came up; that sounded suspiciously like an insult. Rafferty put up a hand to forestall his outburst. "What I mean is...she talks about you all the time. She worries about you. Because she's your very -- good -- friend." Rafferty's measured cadence made the subtle emphasis on the last word stand out clearly.

Was this humiliation really required? He'd fucking bared his throat to Rafferty, deferred to him and his relationship with Scully, but apparently that wasn't enough.

"I understand," he said, and gulped the last dregs of his drink, wishing that it hailed from Long Island instead of Arizona.

"Good," Rafferty said, and nodded to Scully as she took her seat again.

Maybe the manly thing to do would have been to fight Rafferty for Scully's delicate little hand, but it wasn't going to happen. Everyone assumed that, just because he was six feet tall and crazy, he was also dangerous, when in fact the only person he could beat up was Krycek, and that when the man was handcuffed and he had Scully for backup. Some part of him craved violence, for sure -- he got beaten up himself often enough to prove it -- but he did a lot better receiving than giving. There's a certain moral high ground in being the loser in every battle.

Come to think of it, that might have been what happened at dinner last night.

Mulder sighed and poked at the ground with his toe, dirtying his shoe further. Scully had hardly mentioned Rafferty's name during the two months she'd been out here, even though they'd talked every night. Mulder had called because he needed to know that she was all right. Was she dreaming? Was she staring out at her furniture from the misleading safety of her bed, wondering when a demon would change back into a chair? The tumor that sat in her forehead like a demented parody of a psychic third eye haunted him day and night. When he was talking to her, before they were sure that the treatment worked, he sometimes thought that he could hear it growing, cell by cell, stealing the nourishment and oxygen that should be for her alone.

Mulder had said that he called because he had trouble sleeping without her around and Scully pretended to believe him, certain that he was just coddling her. But she had to know the truth, subconsciously at least, or she would have told him that she was falling in love.

It's not as if she couldn't have mentioned it, in between the gory details of the latest bout of diarrhea and vomiting. Dr. Scully had *regaled* him with detail about her physical condition, as if that would make up for the complete silence about her mental condition. When she was blurry with fever, she'd still managed to pick up the phone and describe the way that the skin was coming off of her arms and legs in sheets, telling him that nothing else of interest was happening. And, more fool he, he'd just assumed that meant she was worried but didn't want to expose her weakness to him.

He realized that he was mad. Nay, furious. This was not how one treated a friend. Hell, he'd known more about her one-night stand with Ed Jerse than about Rafferty, until he got off the plane and they were standing there, arms linked, a happy couple waiting to greet a family friend.

If she hadn't understood at some level how he'd feel, she would have told him over the phone. Instead, she'd let it hit him all at once, in public, where he could only try not to react. Scully was always confident that what they didn't talk about wouldn't exist. Dana Scully, mistress of denial. No, he reminded himself, Dana Scully, mistress of Dr. Matt Rafferty, M.D./Ph.D (Harvard).

So here he was, having stopped his car at a scenic overlook in the middle of nowhere, pulled off the road to look at red rocks. Red as Scully's hair, red as the blood that no longer dripped from her nose every once in a while. The rocks were strong and shaped into pillars by ages of wind; they rose and dipped in fantastic forms, punctuated every once in a while by a flash of green -- cactus, eking out a bare existence among all the dusty red.

The world was red below and clear blue above, not a cloud in the sky. The heat was furnace-like; the drops of sweat that fell from his body evaporated moments after they hit the ground. If it were not for the oxygen in the air, he could have imagined himself on Mars.

When he'd gotten in his car to drive back to Scully's rented condo, he'd found a note on his seat. The handwriting was unfamiliar, but the faint perfume lingering on the paper reminded him of Marita. "Africanized bees have been moving up from Brazil at the rate of 200 miles per year since the 1950s. They reached Texas several years ago, and should have gone further up. But, for some reason, they turned left into Arizona. No one has publicly offered an explanation for why these aggressive bees did not head toward the eastern seaboard."

He'd rested his head on his hands and his elbows on the steering wheel for several minutes. Distractions, always distractions. He could stay in Arizona and chase killer bees, but somehow it seemed inappropriate. He'd follow up on the hint like a good little paranoid, but if he had to stay in this godforsaken state one second longer than absolutely necessary he'd lose it entirely. He just wanted to collect Scully and go home.

So he tucked the note into a jacket pocket and started up the car. He'd explained his late arrival by saying he'd gotten lost on the way back; Scully bought the story with complete indulgence.

And when she'd said goodnight, Scully had told him that she might not be coming back. That Matt had asked her to marry him, and that she was thinking about saying yes. So could he give her the plane ticket, because she was at least staying out here a few days longer; if she said yes she'd use it to come back and pack up whatever she'd be bringing out to Arizona.

He'd congratulated her and handed over the ticket. He managed to make it to the parking lot of the condo she'd rented before spewing bitterness and expensive Southwestern cuisine into the gutter.

Remembering, with razor-sharp clarity, was enough to make him nauseous again. He wasn't going to beg. He was going to walk away and let her be happy.

Not because he loved her enough that her happiness came first. No, never that. Because she was Dana Scully and she didn't fuck around; if she wanted Rafferty that's who she'd have, no matter how sorry she was for Fox Mulder. And he still had his pride, as long as he didn't beg in vain.

He'd thought that nothing more could happen to his heart, that it had been squashed flat twenty-five years ago. But a bulldozer was rolling over it again, turning it into a thin grey smear spread across the universe, an atom thick.

Strangely, his hands throbbed in unison with his chest, creating a rhythm of pain that was not quite intense enough to shut off his mind.

He stared down at the sheer drop in front of him. The roads curved, so it was hard to get a sense of how far you'd driven into the hills until you stopped and looked down at a place like this.

If Scully could see him, she'd think that he was contemplating suicide. That was a laugh -- both the thought that Scully would see him, really see him, and the idea of suicide. Not enough penance done for that, no sirree. Maybe someday, when things got a little calmer, when he'd had some revenge. But still, he wondered what falling from such a height was like -- was it like flying, until the very last moment? Was the freedom from ground and all the impositions of the rest of the world worth it?

He'd survive. He always survived. He'd been left behind so many times, always wondering what had happened. This wouldn't be any different.

Mulder straightened his shoulders, took a deep breath of burning-hot Arizona air, and headed back to the car. He had a plane to catch.

* * *

Mulder told Personnel that Scully was having follow-up tests done; no sense getting her insurance cancelled on her, even if the bills were trickling to a halt. After so long, they barely bothered to ask about a pinch-hitter partner, and he didn't think that he even replied to the query.

They'd split up during so many of their investigations, especially near the end, that he wasn't sure he would even know what to do with a full-time partner. Scully didn't trust him, exactly, but she knew when to stay out of his way, and her talents were often wasted in the field when there were bodies whose silent words only she could hear waiting for her white-gloved touch.

Ah, thinking about her was counterproductive. He'd go visit the Gunmen, but their resolute silence about her was just as bad -- it was like having a ghost in the room, or an afterimage burned into his retinas.

There were still the bees. Since Skinner's life-saving betrayal, Mulder had felt that he was close to finding a major truth. Implicating Skinner had only been a small aspect of the plan. As he got closer to the heart of the conspiracy, he knew that his soul was getting a little more gray by the day; a big step had been filing off the serial number on Skinner's gun. He chuckled to himself, wondering what the observers watching him through hidden cameras might think of his crazed amusement. He remembered the look on the AD's face when the tech had pointed out that the numbers had been eradicated. Saying the gun was found in a sewer grate had been little more than an act of omission, but tampering with the gun itself was another level of commitment to obfuscation.

He was becoming a player, but he intended to play on his own terms. Skinner owed him, too, now.

The bees were the key, he was sure of it. Bees lived in colonies. They were haplodiploid insects. The males only had one set of genes; as a consequence, all the residents of a hive were much more closely related to each other than any human grouping, which accounted for much of bees' social behavior. He could sense some sort of clue there to the nature and purpose of the clones. But why Samantha? And who was the boy -- or, who had he been?

Without Scully -- there he went again -- no one paid much attention to his investigations, as if he'd just return to his original level of ineffectiveness without her. That meant that he could devote more time to conspiracy theory, and less to the random weirdness that turned up.

The prospect of work, as always, helped to define a place where the pain could be stored for later use.

So, bees. As it turned out, in one of God's more savage ironies, Dr. Bambi was expecting her first uber-child. She was supposed to stay away from actual bugs for the time being, and so (after inundating Mulder with information about genetic counseling and prenatal bonding and backaches -- what had he seen in this woman?) she was willing to chat about bees for a while.

The United States government subsidizes apiaries, to the tune of millions of dollars a year. It does this because the common bee is necessary for pollination of a variety of crops, cash and food both -- one-third of America's caloric consumption (though Mulder was probably at the low end of that distribution). When targeted for budget cuts, apiary owners have credibly argued that they are responsible for America's unparalleled ability to feed the world, and they can't stay in business on honey sales alone. No bees means no plants next year. The disappearance of bees and other pollinators could sunder the food chain at one of its weak links. Last year, they had investigated an X File based in large part on the disappearance of frogs -- an indicator species -- but this year it was bees -- a keystone species. One was a signal, the other the stuff of life itself.

Within that life-sustaining government subsidy, though, was room for a lot of concealment. Labs around the country received grants to advance apiculture. Bee research: Who would pay any attention to that, after all? What harm could come of it?

He'd seen the harm; now he had to find the honey trail.

* * *

"Bees are my favorite insect," Dr. Hylton said. He was a tall, balding African-American man. His booming voice, obviously a well-developed product of years of speaking in lecture halls full of students, carried well as they strode across the American University campus. "What is your favorite insect, Mr. Mulder?"

Mulder shuddered involuntarily. "I don't have one."

"Pity," the older man said, slowing to look back at his companion. "It's been said that the study of biology tells one nothing about God except that He has an inordinate fondness for beetles. But I like bees best. Bees are at the top of the heap, social- organization-wise. They're self-sacrificing, and within the group there's virtually an absence of social conflict, though of course there are exceptions. And what have we learned from them? To live in harmony, to support the natural cycle of life? No, we've learned that honey tastes good. All that claptrap about killer bees -- bees are nearly harmless, unless one has the misfortune to be allergic. A bee's stinger, you see, is attached to its internal organs; when it stings, its guts are literally pulled out with the stinger and it dies. Bees, unlike wasps, therefore do not sting lightly."

"But could a variety of bee be bred that *would* have a propensity to swarm and sting people repeatedly?"

"I take it you mean that the bees as a group would sting repeatedly," Dr. Hylton said with a scholar's pedanticism, "because of course each bee would only sting once. Even Africanized bees only sting when provoked, or when they're interfered with during the period when a breakaway colony swarms to find a new home. It's hard to see how -- not to mention why -- someone would breed bees more aggressive than that, because they'd wipe out their stock each time they checked for aggressiveness."

"But it's the workers who swarm and attack, correct?"

"Yes."

They'd reached the science building, a white marble edifice with an impressive dome, in good Washington style. Dr. Hylton took the steps two at a time, and held the door for Mulder.

"Then," Mulder said as his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light inside the building, "is it possible that specially aggressive bees could be bred by only selecting those queens whose drones were most aggressive for propagating the next generation? Could such a program have produced bees that behaved in the way I described in my message?"

Dr. Hylton paused and gave the question his full attention before pushing open the doors to the auditorium.

"Bees aren't like flies, Mr. Mulder. With flies, you can get a twenty-four hour generation. Bees live longer, and we understand their genotypes far less well. If such a program did exist -- and I think I would know if it did! -- it would have to have begun in the 1960s, to get the kind of extreme agression you described. It's an interesting theory, but much more science fiction than fact."

When he said "1960s," Mulder had a sudden intense memory of his father, returning from one of his mysterious trips. Fox had run to hug him, even though Dad hated that girly stuff from a boy, and his father had pushed him back with more force than usual, wincing. He'd said that it was insect bites, and he'd been stiff for the next few days.

The power of Mulder's flashback did nothing for the professor, who was walking away from his transfixed interrogator.

Mulder followed Dr. Hylton down the aisle as he headed for the lectern. Students were chatting and settling in all around them. "What about designing bees that could carry a modified smallpox virus -- is that possible?"

"As far as I know," Dr. Hylton said, opening his briefcase and removing his class notes, "no one has ever tried to use bees as a disease vector. It's just...well, it's just strange...Although, there have been some recent advances with modifying bacteria and viruses...The bacteria break down pesticides that would otherwise kill the bees; there have also been some successful experiments with genetically engineered viruses in caterpillars, though of course the research is directed to killing the insects with the viruses, not using them as vectors. So, yes, I suppose that it's theoretically possible that someone could modify disease-carrying bacteria or viral agents, to live in bees."

He pulled his glasses from his jacket pocket, looked down at his notes, and raised his head to address the class. Obviously, the interview was over.

"Today," he said, in a voice so loud that it hurt Mulder's ears, "asexual reproduction."

Mulder walked out as the lecture began. Some of the students looked at him funny, but that was hardly a shock.

* * *

"What do you know about bees?"

He'd finally gotten the strength to visit the Gunmen, and now he directed the question at Langley, who pushed off from the ground, sending his wheeled chair scurrying across the floor to stop in front of another computer console.

"The U.S. government funds bee research nationwide; many states do as well. Funding has increased dramatically in the last few years. Seen many honeybees in your backyard lately?"

"Can't say that I have," Mulder drawled.

"That's because they're *dead*," Frohike interjected. "There's no place in the country that hasn't experienced *at least* a ninety percent drop in the number of wild honeybees; most places the figure is nearer to one hundred percent. Even commercial apiaries have lost from fifty to eighty percent of their bees in the past few years, to flooding, cold, and two kinds of mites."

Byers chimed in. "There's research going on to breed mite- resistant bees, but so far the results haven't been encouraging. The best bet looks to be crossbreeding with bees imported from Russia."

"But no one knows about this," Frohike continued smoothly. "It's one of the great hidden biodiversity problems. Other kinds of bees -- birds and bats, too -- pollinate, but mostly they stick to particular species. Honeybees are generalists. And they're disappearing."

"It's almost like," Mulder said slowly, "someone's opening up a niche."

Three sets of glasses reflected the overhead lights as the Gunmen stared up at him, processing his suggestion.

He set them to compiling a list of researchers who'd received funding for bee research for at least two decades, preferably more. Long-term plans meant a long-term paper trail, and perhaps they could find a clue.

* * *

When he came into his office and Scully was sitting at the desk he'd ordered her as a welcome-home present, he just assumed that he'd graduated into full-blown hallucinations. It was not that different from seeing his sister out of the corner of his eye.

He sat down at his desk and opened the *Washington Post*. Until he got a new partner, he couldn't go out in the field, and that meant that he was getting to be a real fan of the Style section.

Her voice curled out of the dimness of the basement room like an eddy of smoke. "Aren't you going to say 'Welcome back?'"

Mulder put the paper down slowly, so that Scully wouldn't see that his hands had started to shake.

"You're..."

"I'm back, Mulder."

"Why?" He was honestly curious, which probably helped keep his voice from cracking.

She smiled crookedly at him. "Matt...couldn't accept what I do. He doesn't believe in conspiracy or government betrayal and he doesn't think I need to look any further for the truth." Her voice was tired and wondering. "How can you love someone so much who doesn't believe in the things that are most important to you?"

He took a deep breath through his nose and closed his eyes. "It's not that hard," he said. "So, what do you know about Zuni fetishes, Scully?"

****

They emerged nearly unscathed from *that* adventure; Mulder's bruised and swollen ankle hardly even counted. When they returned, Mulder determined to get back to bee-hunting.

"The Gunmen called," Scully said as Mulder walked into the office. "They want to do a profile on us. They asked me to describe you. I said that words could not explain you, and that we were highly sensitive about publicity after the Jose Chung fiasco."

The call had apparently triggered something in her, though, and she plunged onwards. "Seriously, we need to think about appealing to a wider audience, making the X Files better known so that we can't just be shoved -- "

"Into the basement?"

She ignored him and continued without missing a beat. " -- aside when political forces deem it expedient to thwart our work. Frankly, *The Lone Gunman* is not the kind of reputable publication we should be thinking about. *Other* FBI divisions get good publicity; why not ask the PR people for some help?"

"Because they'd laugh at us, Scully. They'd schedule us an interview with Sally Jesse Raphael, right after the kids who fuck their mothers' lesbian lovers." He leaned against the doorframe, crossing his arms in front of himself and smirking at her. Now *this* was living -- Scully and a good rumble; there was hardly anything more to be wished for.

"At least there's a chance people will watch tabloid TV; the Gunmen, much as I respect their talents, do not survive because of their mass readership...How do they survive, Mulder? Is it legal?"

"Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies."

Scully shifted in her seat, smoothing a hair that had fallen out of place. "In any event, we should think about wider exposure as a long-term goal."

"I hear Playboy is doing a 'Women of the Federal Government' spread."

"Maybe Bambi would be interested."

"I wish..."

She spun away from him in mock disgust.

"Look, Scully, if you don't want to talk to the Gunmen, that's fine, but I owe them. They want a story, they'll get a story, and later on we can try it your way."

"So, how are you going to describe me?" Her voice had a rare teasing tone, and she looked up at him through a curtain of rust-red hair.

"Smart as a whip and twice as sexy?"

She stared at him for a moment. "I'm not even going to go near that," she said.

"A petite powerhouse of pontificating pulchritude?"

"Ok, now I'm really upset."

He gave her his best shit-eating grin and nearly skipped over to his chair to call the Gunmen.

In return for the "exclusive interview," Byers told him some disturbing facts about smallpox. No one vaccinates against smallpox anymore, because it's supposed to have been eradicated in the wild. The recent outbreak of monkeypox, a kissing cousin, in Zaire cast some doubt on the wisdom of the end of vaccination, but no one credible was seriously suggesting that smallpox could return to the developed world.

Which, in the Gunmen's estimation, was a fabulous reason to suspect that very plan, somewhere in the bowels of government.

The CDC maintains a repository of smallpox, scheduled to be destroyed in 1999 to mark the total elimination of the disease. Kept in well-guarded freezers, the virus is supposed to be completely under control.

But.

Smallpox is a hardy little killer; no one really knows how long it can survive in the open. Archaeologists investigating ancient centers of disease are beginning to demand vaccination for the young Ph.D. students on digs in order to protect them, just in case. In places, such as the steppes of Russia, where victims were buried in permafrost, the temperature of the ground approaches that of the CDC's freezers, where the virus is preserved under ideal conditions. Even in subtropical conditions, it can be cultured from the disintegrating scabs and boils of corpses dead for decades.

The upshot was that, if one wanted a stock of smallpox with which to experiment, one wouldn't have to break into any highly guarded facilities. The right graveyard (and smallpox killed lots and lots of people around the country) would do just fine.

Combine that with bee research, and you were getting a lot closer to a deadly biological weapon.

* * *

The elevator wasn't working when he got home that night, so he took the stairs. He'd usually take stairs two at a time when Scully wasn't around, but the ankle kept him hobbling and cursing the incompetence of the supervisor. (On the other hand, he supposed, he'd have been kicked out of any well-run building years ago, so he shouldn't complain when that same indifference worked to his disadvantage.)

As he rounded the corner of the stairwell and the door to his floor came in sight, someone grabbed him from behind. The first punch hit him in the kidneys to make him double over in pain. Instantly, his assailant had him on the ground. Heavy knees pressed into his back, and the attacker was throttling him by the neck. His gun was tossed down the stairwell; he heard it hit on the ground floor.

"I have a message for you," the voice said from behind and above him. Mulder managed to keep himself from being smashed into the dirty concrete of the stairwell, but could only lift his upper body a few inches off of the floor with the weight on his back. He wanted to get out a snappy remark, but the pressure on his windpipe made it unlikely that he'd succeed.

"We have been tolerant," the low, rough voice continued, "but our patience is diminishing. Leave off your inquiries into smallpox. Sometimes a cow has to be sacrificed for the good of the herd; don't try to stand in the way of evolution."

The pressure intensified, and fuzz began to overtake the edges of his vision. The world sloped, yawing crazily as his elbows gave out, and then vision disappeared.

He came back to consciousness when the little old lady in 45, who already thought that he was mad, bad, and dangerous to know, came up the stairs with her mesh bag of groceries and began twittering in horror and fear. Not the most pleasant of sounds to hear upon awakening, but at least he did wake up. He waved off her half-hearted suggestions that she summon assistance and staggered back to his apartment.

A good threat was always a spur to him; it was an indicator that he was on the right track.

* * *

Needless to say, the next morning's meeting with Skinner didn't proceed as planned. He went in early to deal with the inevitable confrontation with Scully; the office light was already on when he arrived.

Scully looked up as he came in, noted the absence of a tie, and opened her mouth to say something, then looked more closely.

"If you say word one about auto-erotic asphyxiation," he rasped, "we're through."

She rose from her seat and came up to him, pushing the collar of his shirt aside to get a better look at the damage. "Have you been to the hospital?"

"What are they going to do, put a cast on it?" His own voice was an unfamiliar buzz.

"Do you know who you pissed off this time, Mulder? Here, don't talk, just write it down."

She pulled a pad of paper from the chaos of his desk and handed it to him with a pen. "I bet you think whoever did this did you a favor," he scrawled.

She frowned up at him. "That's not funny."

"Smallpox," he added, underneath his first line.

"Is that why Skinner wants to see us?"

He nodded, then realized that the motion also made his bruises hurt. Scully smiled sympathetically at his pained expression, and went over to her new desk. She rummaged around in one of the bottom drawers and emerged, triumphant, with a bottle.

"Liquid painkiller, adult-strength," she said with satisfaction. "Do you need a straw?"

"Are you sure you weren't waiting for this to happen?" he wrote.

She carefully measured a dose into a stray plastic cup and gave it to him, including a straw despite his refusal to answer the question. Mulder knew he wasn't going to be allowed to go to the meeting without drinking it, so he gave in.

It tasted terrible, of course. He was still making faces when they got into the elevator to go meet Skinner. People gave him funny looks -- so what else was new? Scully, though, gave him a classic tolerant poor-injured-Mulder look, and that made things better.

Kimberly ushered them right in, and Skinner looked up from the papers on his desk and immediately asked, "Agent Mulder, what happened to you?"

"Agent Mulder was assaulted, sir, by an unknown assailant who warned him against pursuing one of our current investigations."

Skinner frowned. "I see. This wouldn't by any chance be your investigation into a disease that everyone in the scientific community agrees has been conquered, would it?"

Mulder looked outraged. It was such blatant hypocrisy for Skinner to talk about the problem like that, when he'd seen, *participated in*, the project that was testing the super-virulent smallpox.

"I must point out, sir," Scully said, taking up the gauntlet, "that only a few months ago, no one thought that monkeypox could be spread from human to human. Then it happened in Zaire, and people died. Diseases don't go away easily. They fight back. The same type of thing could happen here; in fact, I believe that the same thing *has* happened here, though the CDC is unwilling to make this information public."

Skinner looked down at his desk. Mulder knew that Skinner saw Scully as some sort of embodiment of truth, justice, and the American way -- "nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered," or something like that. If the smoking man could use Skinner's weakness against them, why not use it for them?

"The order that you terminate this investigation comes from the highest authority," he said, obviously uncomfortable. "The Bureau is no longer interested in your theory. Why don't you take some time to recover, Agent Mulder, and think about what you *do* have to investigate."

Mulder shrugged. Skinner hadn't exactly said that he had to stop looking, just that the Bureau didn't approve, and that was not a unique situation.

* * *

Scully insisted that he use the enforced idleness created by his near inability to talk to finish up the paperwork that had been piling up since her return.

They were working in companiable silence when her phone rang.

"Scully."

Her expression changed, and she swiveled away from Mulder so that he couldn't see her face.

"Hi," she said softly. "No, but I'm at work...I think about it too...No, it's not final, but it's not going to change any time soon, and I want to be fair to you...Look, I'll call you tonight, all right? Yes."

"The great doctor?" he croaked as she put the receiver back on the hook, and instantly regretted saying anything at all to cause the pain that flashed across her face.

"He's a nice guy, Mulder. I..."

She obviously had no idea what she was going to say next, so he took pity on her and scrawled a note on his pad, handing it across the gap between their desks.

"I'm glad you came back."

She looked at him, then back down at the paper. "I had to come back." Her voice was nearly inaudible. "But sometimes, I really want a happy ending."

"What do you see in him?" Oh, he couldn't believe he'd just said that, in his pathetic, lacerated voice.

"He doesn't *press* me all the time. He's willing to wait for me."

"Sounds more like a dog than a boyfriend, Scully." Was there any Superglue around to shut his goddamn mouth?

"Look, Mulder, I don't always want to share the way I'm feeling with the world. I didn't tell my therapist I had cancer for three months -- and you didn't know about her until now, I know, which proves my point. Matt doesn't need to know that everything I say to him is the absolute truth."

Suddenly there was no more pain in his throat; the words came smoothly. "I think that's the most awful thing you've ever said to me. I can't believe that you wouldn't respect yourself enough to wait for someone who'll demand the truth from you every time."

Her eyes shone so brightly that he knew she must be suppressing tears.

It only took her a few seconds to banish them and go on the attack. "Wait?" she asked, raising one well-shaped eyebrow. If the conversation had happened even a year ago, he wouldn't have caught the tremor in her voice.

"That's against the rules," he husked.

"Which rules?"

He just looked at her.

"You mean our unwritten rules? The ones about cryptic silences punctuated at random intervals with revelations so potent they're almost blinding, but never enough to forge a connection that can resist our various insecurities?" Mulder chuckled painfully and shrugged. He had very little to add to that description.

Scully smiled, just a little. "Fine. You keep me honest, and I can't say that I always like that. I'm not as brave as you are. If I started coloring outside the lines, I don't know where I'd stop. It just...amazes me that you can always fight your way back to rationality, at least when you decide that you want to."

He stared at her warmly until she blushed and looked down. She left soon after, with the excuse of giving his abused voice no opportunity to strain itself further.

* * *

When he came in the next morning, Scully had left him a note.

"Mulder," it said, and he could hear her voice reading it, "I got a call from Marita Covarrubias this morning." Damn, he never should have asked Scully to help him get Marita's address. He'd never involved her in his transactions with Deep Throat or X. "She said that she had a gift for you, but that I had to come get it. I'll call you when I get back to D.C."

Back to D.C.? From *where*, Scully?

He called the Bureau travel office and asked if Agent Scully had made any travel plans through them recently. He had difficulty making himself understood at first, because his voice was still a mess, but he finally got them to listen by using words of one syllable. When they demurred, he called Frohike and had him run a trace on Scully's credit cards. She'd taken the 8 a.m. Metroliner to New York on a round-trip ticket. She could have got off in Philadelphia or Metropark, or she could have gone all the way to New York. To see the SRSG?

Marita Covarrubias. The Gunmen were unable to find out anything useful about her. She had a French passport, an English car, and a Spanish name. If he could talk to Scully about it, he'd tell her that it sounded like the beginning of a bad ethnic joke.

Marita had given him hope, before, when he was at one of his lowest ebbs ever. She'd helped him get to Russia -- that had turned out badly, but it was his own damn fault for bringing Alex the Great with him. It had seemed like a good idea at the time.

Not for the first time, he wondered about the connection between Deep Throat, Mr. X, and Marita. How did they decide -- the one who gets the short straw has to tantalize, mislead and succor Mulder until he or she is killed? What wheels within wheels were turning at the UN, the Pentagon, the NSA? The clues they gave him were just enough to keep him from despair, but never enough to prove anything or expose more than the frayed edges of corruption. They sent the mechanical rabbit down the track, and he followed helplessly like the well-trained dog he was.

Mulder tried Marita's office, but the secretary wouldn't tell him where she was, and only grudgingly took his urgent message. There was no answer at Marita's home number, either.

So this is what it's like to be ditched.

* * *

At 2 p.m., Scully's credit card showed a second charge: a second ticket on the Metroliner, this one just one-way.

Half an hour later, his phone rang.

"Mulder." Was that an edge of desperation in his voice? How quickly the famous cool could be lost.

"Mulder, it's me."

"How's the Metroliner?"

She made a small noise -- disgust, amusement? He couldn't tell. "I have someone with me."

"Well, don't keep me in suspense."

"I'm not sure who she is, but -- she looks like your sister."

"Who does she say she is?"

"Samantha Mulder."

In the silence, he could tell that there was something else, something she wasn't saying. He heard a child's voice, questioning. Scully had her hand over the mouthpiece, and he heard her admonishing tone, but couldn't tell what she was saying. He was a little surprised; it wasn't like Scully to discipline someone else's children, no matter how disruptive they were being.

"Scully? Are you there?"

"Yes, sorry."

"So what aren't you telling me?"

She sighed. "This -- girl, she says that she's Samantha Mulder, age nine."

* * *

Most everyone had gone home by the time that they arrived, which probably made it easier for Scully to get a little girl through the halls of the FBI.

Mulder could tell when they reached the basement floor. It was a change in the air of some kind, from an empty mustiness to a living, human presence. That sense was the only thing that kept him from jumping out of his skin when the door opened and Scully walked through, guiding the little girl with her.

"Where's Fox?" Samantha demanded, looking around the crowded office.

She looked exactly the same. The clothes were different, and she had a ponytail instead of braids, but it was Samantha.

She could talk, obviously, unlike the bee girls. But some clones could talk, he'd seen.

"Mulder," Scully said gently, putting her hand on his shoulder, "I think you should talk to her."

"You said we were going to see Fox," the little girl whined, twisting her foot and dropping her shoulder exactly as Sam always had.

"Samantha?" he managed.

"Who are you?"

He stood, and just as in the dream Roche had sent him, he towered over her, all out of proportion. She looked up at him, upset but unafraid.

"I'm Fox Mulder," he whispered.

Her eyes widened. She stared at him.

"What happened to your nose?"

It was not the first question he'd expected from her, but it did make sense. He reached up and touched the offending organ, reflectively. "I fell...a couple of years after you were taken, when I was fourteen."

She nodded.

"Sam, what happened to you?"

"I don't know. We went to a bright place, and they hurt me. Then I went to sleep, and when I woke up the blonde lady said that Miss Scully would take me to Fox...If you're Fox, how'd you get so big?"

"Actually," he said, "you seem to have stayed little." He kept his voice low, to minimize the effects of his most recent injury. The girl didn't seem worried about it.

"Do you know what the date is?" Scully asked her.

"I thought it was November...but it looks more like April outside." She looked around for a window; finding none, she turned her gaze back to Mulder.

"What year?"

"Nineteen-seventy-three," she said, sounding a little surprised that Scully needed to ask.

He moved back and caught Scully's sleeve, leaning down to whisper in her ear. "Do you believe her, Scully?"

"I don't know. She's just a little girl...and she looks so much like the pictures."

"The resemblance is exact," he agreed grimly. "But what would they have to gain, giving her back like this?"

"Maybe they think you'll stop looking for the truth." Was that hurt in her voice? He dismissed it; he'd think about it later.

"Fox?" maybe-Samantha interrupted. "Where's Mom and Dad?"

When it became obvious that Mulder wasn't capable of answering, Scully moved forward and knelt beside the girl. "Honey, your mom got sick a while back. We can take you to her, but she's going to be very surprised that you're back. It's been a long time."

Sam looked at Scully trustingly. "But, Miss Scully, it's only been two days."

* * *

Scully came into the office with a thick file folder. Mulder was still sitting in the position he'd been in when she left, hunched over the desk and staring at the picture of Sam.

"The blood type's a match," she said, "not that that was a surprise. We should have DNA results within the week -- I called in some favors -- but I think we both know what the tests will show. X- rays show a healed fracture of the collarbone; the injury was sustained at the same point in development as Samantha Mulder's fracture. She tests at 175 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test -- probably smarter than you were at that age, since it's expected that children gain several points a year."

"Eidetic memory is associated with lower than average intelligence, actually," he said. "Rearrange whatever neurons are responsible for it, and I'd probably be a real genius." He touched the picture, then turned it face-down on his desk.

"She shows biopsy marks at several points on her arms and thighs; there's also evidence of a spinal tap in the recent past, whatever that means with respect to her. I also had her hooked up to a polygraph and asked her some questions I thought might shed some light on her background. She's never heard of *Star Wars*, but she really wants to know how *The Magician* turned out."

"So all of a sudden you're a believer?" He finally turned to look at her.

"Twenty years from now, the cryogenic technology that could make this possible could be available to anyone. If the government has been hiding advanced technology from the public for decades -- and we know it might exist already -- yes, this girl could be your sister. I called the Gunmen -- " *that* made him start; he didn't know that she had the number -- "and they can't find any record of a girl fitting this description who's gone missing. What would you rather believe, that she's a clone who's been briefed on your favorite Stratego tactics?"

He said nothing and looked down at the item in his hand. Scully followed his gaze to the cloth heart, still carefully wrapped in plastic, awaiting the day when it could be reunited with a little girl.

"You know I don't -- it's just that your theories are so hard to -- " She was getting upset with herself, and took a few deep breaths to reassume her mask of professionalism. What she said next, though, surprised him deeply. "Mulder, this is Samantha. I know it. She's sleeping on a bench in the lab and I can see it."

"Is this the famous Scully mysticism, coming to assuage our uncertainties? I'm sorry, you're switching gears a little too fast for me -- at least I'm consistent."

"That's right," she said, anger creeping into her voice, "if I say it, you consistently disagree. You want me to believe, only you won't accept it when I do."

His hand clenched on the plastic bag, crumpling it. "Let's not do this." He closed his eyes and tried to search his heart. When he looked at her again, she was waiting, biting her lower lip nervously.

"I think you're right," he said. "I just don't know why she's back."

"Ms. Covarrubias said that she'd traded a significant amount of her political capital for the girl. She said that she'd argued that your quest would be over, and that they'd have nothing more to fear from you if Samantha were returned." Scully didn't ask if it were true; she just reported.

"What do I do now?" he wondered aloud.

"You call your mother," she said. \ * * *

The conversation with his mother did not go well. Since the stroke, she'd gotten confused easily, and the situation would have confused a much better-grounded person.

Finally, Mulder arranged to have her come to D.C., to see the girl who called herself Samantha Mulder.

Scully took her home to her apartment to wait when Samantha balked at going away with yet another stranger.

Mulder remained detached. He'd play with Sam, and talk to her, asking her questions about what she remembered after the lights and the pain. His interrogations were relentless, and they always produced the same answers: I don't know. It hurt. I went to sleep.

Even Elizabeth Mulder's certainty that her lost daughter had been found didn't produce any change in him. It was a horrid scene. Sam, despite the precedent she'd experienced in Mulder's grown-up form, had been expecting a matron, not a curled-up old lady.

Mrs. Mulder had clutched at Sam, uttering little bird-like cries, until Mulder had finally intervened and lifted Sam out of his mother's arms. Sam was crying. She was obviously afraid, and she didn't want to be around this strange old woman who smelled of medicine and mints.

Unfortunately, Mrs. Mulder was just attuned enough to the world to comprehend Sam's terror, and it made her even more upset. She began babbling in what Scully thought was Yiddish, and Mulder had to take her to another room while Scully rocked Sam into silence.

After that, Sam wouldn't talk about her parents at all. She didn't even ask about her father, though she was bright enough to have figured out that something had happened to him while she was "away." She wouldn't reminisce about the past when Mulder tried to joke about something that had happened to her, subjectively, just weeks or months before.

Scully did most of the caretaking, since Mulder was still too shell-shocked to help much.

Sam didn't seem all that bothered by being catapulted twenty- five years into her future. Strange things happen to children every day, after all, and all-powerful adults make mysterious wonders occur. Her near lack of affect was a great relief to Scully, who'd always imagined having children but never quite gotten around to figuring out what to do when they cried or threw tantrums. Sam didn't go in for that sort of thing.

Television and newspapers, though, truly shocked and offended her. She thought that they were too loud and crude, and she'd only look at them for a few minutes before running to Scully and demanding a safer pastime. So Scully dug out her old C.S. Lewis and E.M. Nesbit books and they read them together; Sam also liked math, so Scully started to teach her permutations and combinations. If she ever developed a poker face, Sam would be a killer card shark.

Scully found it easy to think of the girl as Samantha Mulder, because there was no other good explanation for who she was. Even if she'd been brainwashed, it was none of her own doing, and as far as Sam herself was concerned she was a Mulder. If it was good enough for Sam, it was good enough for Scully.

Part of her remained detached enough to understand that she bonded to the child so quickly in part because she couldn't have children herself. It was a consequence of the cancer treatment, and she'd traded the future for a chance at the present. She'd known what she was doing.

Matt had said that it was all right, that they could adopt, but she knew he saw it as a concession he'd made: He loved her, so it was worth it to him not to have children of his own. She wondered if any man she'd get involved with would see accepting her barrenness as an act of charity. But Sam was different -- she wasn't compensation for Scully's own deficiency, but she needed Scully's love anyway.

Scully kept hoping that Sam would be enough to make Mulder happy, that he'd stop whipping himself after being so long a sacrifice. But even if that didn't work, she wanted to be able to save one Mulder, since she'd done such a godawful job on the elder one.

Matt wanted to visit, to meet Sam, who of course he did not believe was an abductee or even a refugee from 1973, but if she was important to Scully she was important to Matt. Scully discouraged him -- the last thing Sam needed was another new person to fit into her life, someone who wouldn't always be around. Then, of course, Matt accused her of being in love with Mulder and using the child as a way to get to him.

Always, people would assume that it had to come to that.

"Why can't you believe that I'm doing this for a *reason*, not for a *person*?" she'd asked.

"That's not why people do things, Dana," he'd replied, and in that moment she'd almost hated the very self-assurance that had first drawn her to him.

"You mean, that's not why *women* do things."

"Why does it always have to be about that? I love you, Dana, and I just wish you'd stop fighting someone else's battles."

She'd sighed, and wished that he was either right next to her or gone entirely; the distance was the worst of both worlds. "It's my battle, too. You've seen the records; you know I was kidnapped -- " she used the term for his comfort, but she was beginning to want to start saying 'abducted,' just like Mulder -- "and I need to find out what happened to me. I need to find out why I got cancer -- and don't start with the randomness lecture, you're quite eloquent on the subject and I know that well, but I refuse to believe that all those women in Pennsylvania are dead by coincidence."

Matt had suggested that they end the conversation then, and talk again when she was feeling better. The whole thing left her feeling queasy, but at least he didn't insist on coming. God only knew what he'd say about the bee investigation.

When she talked to Matt, she somehow found herself defending Mulder's views, but when she talked to Mulder, she fought him too. She couldn't buy Mulder's crazier theories, but she couldn't exactly dismiss them either. She was stuck in the middle, trying to mediate the battle Mulder was waging against the rest of the world, and the tension of her liminality was getting intolerable.

Sam's presence was a Godsend in that way.

Sam counted as evidence, something Mulder had never really needed, not the way Scully did.

Sam had concrete needs and wants, and there were things that Scully could *do* for her.

Sam had survived, and that was the most wonderful thing of all.

* * *

Then came the fight with the Lone Gunmen. They'd visited the latest location, bringing Sam by to see if the Gunmen could offer any insights. Byers immediately started to teach her how to play Doom -- he treated her like an intellectual equal with a strong sense of fun, and she loved him -- while Frohike and Langley started jabbering about featuring her in the next issue of TLG and establishing "an Internet presence" for her.

"You can't do that," Scully said.

"What?" Langley gave her a dirty look; he still wasn't sure she wasn't a spy. "This is it, Dr. Scully, living proof of advanced, secret government technology, quite possibly of alien origin."

"No, this is a little girl you're proposing to put on display in front of the entire world."

"You can't hide the truth."

"Even assuming that making her your centerfold doesn't convince a court to make her a ward of the state -- an issue we still haven't settled, mind you -- you'd make her into a freak. If she's really thirty-three, can she vote? Can she drive? Most people won't believe it; they'll think it's just another hoax -- but she won't be able to go to school because reporters will be following her around, asking her how it feels to be the nation's oldest third-grader. And that's not to mention what the other kids will say and do. Can you really accept that cruelty?"

Langley folded his arms and looked up at her disapprovingly. "We all have to make sacrifices."

Scully shook her head. "No. No, we don't. Not unless we choose to. And she's too young to choose."

"Mulder?" Frohike appealed. "You know how important this is."

Mulder turned and paced down the narrow path between stacks of computer equipment. "Scully's right," he said, his voice muffled by distance. "She's not a spaceship. Why would anyone believe? Look how much a DNA match helped OJ's prosecution."

"You're saying that people are too stupid to be informed. That goes against everything we stand for, Mulder." Frohike had the look of a man betrayed.

"He's saying," Scully replied, "that people are hard to shake out of their fixed convictions. It's not just drama, though that's part of it. People need a story that they can understand. A man lost his sister, twenty-five years ago, and now she's mysteriously back? So what, unless we can explain why and how. It's not a story otherwise, it's just a fragment."

Mulder spun around and headed back to where the three of them were standing in a pool of light around Frohike's terminal. "She's my sister," he said, as if that were enough to justify his decision.

Langley nodded sympathetically, but Frohike just snorted and looked away. Nonetheless, the next issue of TLG came and went without Samantha.

* * *

"First things first," the family court judge said. "Can anyone explain to me how this girl could be who everyone appears to agree that she is?"

The family court's procedures were informal; so informal, in fact, that Mulder's lawyer was allowed in but not allowed to speak. The judge had told them that in an earlier conference, explaining that Samantha might be living with Mulder, not with his lawyer, so Mulder's responses were much more important to the decision.

Scully cleared her throat and stared at the middle-aged man in the black robes. "Your honor, I can speak to that. While we do not know how it was accomplished, we are fairly confident that Samantha Mulder was held in a sort of suspended animation for the past twenty-five years. The DNA match on hair samples preserved from the scene of her kidnapping is over 99%; both the FBI lab and an independent lab confirm this. No one disputes that Agent Mulder and Elizabeth Mulder are related to Samantha; the DNA and blood typing results are undeniable. I cannot tell you why, but I can tell you that we have seen evidence of technology advanced enough to make this possible in our previous investigations."

The judge harrumphed. "Regardless, it's clear that we have a little girl here who needs a family. Ms. Jones?" He turned toward the social worker.

The woman looked at Samantha, resolutely avoiding Mulder's gaze. "Your honor, it's my opinion that Mr. Mulder has too unpredictable a lifestyle to have custody of the child. He never knows when he's going to have to leave town, or how long he'll be gone."

"I'm willing to leave the field," he said hastily. "I can move to ISU, which doesn't require any travel; all the work is done from Quantico."

The social worker coughed. "In addition, his...attachment...to his sister is abnormally strong, obsessive even. I believe that supervised visitation is the most appropriate solution for him."

Mulder started to rise. "What are you implying?" he gritted out. He knew he couldn't afford to throw a fit, but when had that ever stopped him?

"If you'll examine the file, your honor," the social worker said, still not looking at him, "you'll find that Mr. Mulder only recently put the life of another little girl in danger from a convicted pedophile and child-killer because the man claimed to have information about his sister."

Scully laid a hand on his arm. He sat.

He was surprised when she spoke. "Your honor, let me have custody of Samantha. I'd...be willing to supervise visitation for Agent Mulder, if that's what you decide to require. I can leave the field and transfer to teach at Quantico as well."

The judge stared at Scully. "You two are partners, aren't you?"

Was he waiting for some sort of confession of passionate love? Perhaps he thought it would be romantic for them to be lovers. Scully paled, but lifted her chin and looked him in the eye. "Agent Mulder is my best friend. Samantha is more important to him than anything else. If I can help him, I will."

Elizabeth Mulder was rocking back and forth in her chair. "Mrs. Mulder?" the judge asked. "What do you think?"

She looked up. Mulder had helped her pick out a nice powder-blue suit for court when he'd gone up to bring her to D.C. She was impeccably dressed, but she still looked fragile and a bit confused. "Fox loves Samantha...my little girl. I can't take care of her. Fox always watched out for her. He'd never hurt her."

"Mr. Mulder? Would you accept Ms. Scully as Samantha's custodian, until a permanent placement can be arranged?"

He glanced over at his lawyer for some sign. She nodded imperceptibly -- if he said yes, he wasn't giving up his chance forever.

"Yes," he choked out.

"Does the state object?"

The social worker was frowning, but she shook her head. "No, your honor."

"Let's hear from the little girl herself."

The bailiff brought Sam in. She was wearing a floral Laura Ashley dress, the kind Scully would have fought like hell to stay out of when she was a little girl. Sam and Scully had spent a long time that morning braiding Sam's hair, in a pattern that looked to Mulder like a herringbone weave. He'd arrived at the apartment early enough to see the whole process. He also saw how Sam obeyed Scully unquestioningly; she idolized the older woman, and Scully obviously doted on Sam.

Sam went to Scully's side and waited; Scully pulled out a chair for her, and she sat.

"Samantha?" the judge asked.

"Yes, sir?"

"You've been living with Miss Scully, haven't you?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do you like that?"

"Yes, sir." Sam maintained her politeness without any apparent effort. Mulder hadn't been that well-behaved in years -- since the last time Samantha was nine, as it happened.

"And how do you like it when your brother comes to visit you?"

"He's real nice now that he's a grown-up. He used to boss me around, but now he does what I want."

"Do you want to keep seeing him?"

"Yes." She looked at Scully for reassurance, brown eyes wide and questioning. Scully kept her face still, but gripped Sam's hand tightly.

"Very well then. Custody to go to Ms. Scully, on condition that she transfer to a job that does not require travel, with supervised visitation for Mr. Mulder. We'll reconvene in three months to discuss a permanent placement; in the meantime, home inspections will be scheduled to assess Samantha's adjustment."

* * *

Skinner was most accomodating, arranging for Scully to start teaching the newest class of trainees the next week. That gave her just enough time to find a two-bedroom apartment out in Virginia.

The public schools of the wealthy Virginia suburbs were quite good, so they didn't have to worry about finding a school. Samantha started in the Gifted & Talented program straight off. Fortunately for her, no knowledge of popular culture was required. She told Scully that she just told the other kids that her parents didn't let her watch TV whenever she was asked about *Friends* or MTV. At home, they all pretended that Sam really belonged in the 'nineties, and when Sam's teacher asked if the adoption had been a big strain on Scully or Sam, Scully didn't try to explain. She understood why Sam would tell the story that way. We all have things that aren't anyone else's business; Sam was just starting a little young.

Scully got along quite well with Sam; she was an almost eerily well-behaved child, not given to tantrums or dawdling. Scully always had the most trouble with her brother's children when there was something that had to be done, but they didn't want to do it and got distracted by one thing and then another: the TV, a game, anything but what was planned. Sam didn't misbehave like that. She *liked* schedules and predictability, and she didn't run around knocking things over either.

Mulder bought Sam anything she wanted, spoiling her mercilessly, and soon she was as well-dressed and hip as the next suburban preteen.

He came over for dinner every day at first. Then, it was every few days, and finally every weekend. Scully never asked why he didn't make it, and Mulder never told. He didn't come see her at work, even though the morgue wasn't all that far from the bomb shelter where ISU was based. The only time he was ever with Scully he made sure that Samantha was there. If Sam went to the bathroom, he'd head to the kitchen to get another drink. Scully began to wonder just whose visitation was being supervised.

But no matter what, he made it to every soccer practice, and emailed Sam every day with a new joke or game he'd found for her.

* * *

It was the bees that scared Mulder away.

It was his day to pick Sam up from her after-school science enrichment program, and the building monitor told him the class was out in the soccer field. He'd walked up to the group of students clustered around their teacher, and Sam had turned to him joyfully and held out her hands to let him see what she was doing.

At first he thought that she was wearing some weird wooly gloves, splotched black and yellow. But then he saw them moving, writhing all over her vulnerable small hands, and he nearly screamed.

Loud noises could set them off.

"What is that?" he half-whispered to her, approaching slowly. Perhaps he could draw their attention if they got angry.

"This is our bee-keeping program, Mr. Mulder," the teacher said proudly. "The local government research station donated them to us, to teach the students about colony insects. Don't worry, they're harmless -- Sam's just got sugar water all over her hands; it makes them fat and happy."

Mulder just stared. This had to be a warning: We know about the bees. We know about your sister. And the twain could meet, if you don't behave.

He waited for Sam's perfect hands to emerge from their swaddling of bees, and took her home.

He was a very poor conversationalist during the ride, but Sam always did most of the talking anyway and he didn't think that she noticed.

If he was going to find out the whole truth, he couldn't let himself be tied down to her. She was just one element of a larger plan. Now, she was just a hostage, not even a reliable piece of evidence.

Smallpox is one of history's worst murderers, responsible for more deaths than bubonic plague. Even survivors were often crippled and disfigured. The death toll lasted for centuries, with periodic epidemics sweeping population centers every few years, until the scourge was finally eliminated. How could his quest for his sister matter at all, if she was thrown at him as a sop to distract him from the horrific plot that seemed to be coming to fruition? The bee attack on the South Carolina playground had the strong flavor of a test run. And the men behind the shadow government only showed their hand that openly when they were getting ready to move more aggressively.

He had a choice: the only thing he'd ever wanted, or the truth- -a truth that might be entwined with humanity's future.

When he thought of it that way, there wasn't much choice at all. He was used to never getting what he wanted.

Still, there was a little voice inside him that told him he was lying to himself: <You say you're pushing her away because you're the noblest fuck that ever lived, Mulder> it nattered, <but you know the truth. Wanting is a much better thing than having, isn't it?>

Yes. It had been easy to imagine that, when Sam came back, everything would be perfect and he'd be whole. The rotten foundations of that lie had been exposed by her return, and he hadn't quite managed to construct another myth to explain his existence.

* * *

Scully didn't think that Sam told Mulder about the nightmares, which only got bad after he stopped coming over so often.

They began soon after the move out to Virginia. Sam would wake up, screaming and thrashing around. She said that she remembered lights, and noise, and pain. Scully knew what she meant, knew how fuzzy and terrible the dreams could be.

One rainy night, Sam was sobbing in Scully's arms, and as Scully was 'shhing' and cuddling her, she pulled away.

"I didn't tell you the truth, Dana," she said, still crying.

"What do you mean?" Scully rearranged the disarrayed blankets around Sam, making them into a protective cocoon for her just the way she liked them. Lightning strobed the room, bleaching everything and making Sam shiver.

"I didn't dream about the white room. It was Dad. He was mad 'cause I killed him."

Scully looked up, into familiarly tormented brown eyes. "Honey, you didn't -- your father passed on while you were away."

"I *hated* him! I wanted him to die!"

Scully pulled the girl close and held her until Sam willingly put her arms around Scully's neck, relaxing. "Samantha," she said, breathing the warm clean scent of the girl's hair, "you may have been angry at your father, but that had nothing to do with his death. Wanting someone to die can't make it happen."

"It can when I do it," she said, sleepy but resolute.

"That's just not true," Scully said, feeling out of her depth. Mulder wouldn't let them go to a psychologist; he said that no one would believe or respect Sam's intelligence and she'd just end up worse off than before. It sounded as if he spoke from experience, so Scully had acquiesced. But she only knew how to love Sam, not how to heal her.

"But it worked when I did it to the rats."

Scully stiffened. "What do you mean, Samantha?" She looked down at the small head, hair flyaway and mussed from being unbraided.

"The first time I had all the tests -- they asked me to try to kill the rats -- just like holding your hand out and squeezing, only with your head." She demonstrated, letting go of Scully to show her a clenched fist, fingers still pudgy with traces of baby fat. "The doctor said, and I did it, and they died."

"Can you do other things?" Scully asked, dredging up a last reservoir of calm.

Samantha nodded, and the lights dimmed, then flashed. Lightning struck nearby, and the thunder was immediate. A bulb in the bedside lamp exploded, and shattered pieces of glass fell to the nightstand. Unthinkingly, Scully crushed Sam to her, squeezing her so hard that the child let out a muted protest.

Scully let her go, and the girl settled back into bed, clutching at her favorite stuffed toy, a grey dolphin that Mulder had bought her on their first big shopping trip.

"So I did it," Sam concluded, already falling back to sleep.

"No, baby, you didn't. You weren't around when it happened, you were sleeping, so no matter what, it wasn't your fault. Do you believe me?"

She nodded, eyes open only a fraction.

"Samantha?"

A sleepy nod.

"Did your father -- *know* -- about what you could do?"

Sam's eyes flipped open. The pupils were barely dots in the center of her liquid brown irises -- but Scully thought that something black swirled through the sclera, and then was as suddenly gone. She smiled, an adult and alien expression, both cynical and teasing. "And which father would that be?" she asked. Then her face blanked, and she was asleep.

Scully pulled the covers up around her, and bent to kiss her. She collected the broken glass from the bulb and unplugged the lamp from the wall so that Sam wouldn't hurt herself, and exited the room.

Only then did she let herself marvel at what she'd just seen.

The lamp -- it could have easily been a casualty of the storm. A power surge. That was the most logical thing. Standing in the hall, listening to the trees bash against the window from the force of the rain, a power surge seemed to be a perfectly reasonable explanation.

To be sure, something awful had happened to Sam; no doubt she'd been through strange and painful tests -- not unlike Scully herself. But to say that she could kill with a thought was insanity.

Perhaps, she thought, she would not tell Mulder about this latest development just yet.

 

* * *

Sam didn't pull any more tricks, and Scully was able to put the issue to the back of her mind for a while. One dead body being very much like another, especially compared to the infinite variety of the X Files, Scully barely noticed that the months were passing. Until the day she got the phone call from Mulder's lawyer, reminding her that the three months were nearly at an end and that they'd have to go back to court in a few weeks.

Mulder was once again the Golden Boy of the ISU. His solve rate was nearly equal to that of their best months on the X Files. Scully heard a lot about him in the cafeteria, when the other agents tried to pump her for information. Was she bitter? Why exactly were they back at Quantico? What was this about some child they were raising together? She brushed off the questions with the fewest words possible -- let Mulder explain it, if he wanted to.

She sent Mulder an email -- if he didn't want to talk to her about it directly, that was fine, but she wasn't going to be his supplicant -- suggesting that they discuss the issue of Sam's custody after Sunday dinner, when Sam went to do her homework.

She didn't get a reply.

* * *

Sam must have wondered why Scully was so tense when Mulder finally arrived that Sunday night, but like her brother she wasn't big on airing her feelings. She happily reported that she'd helped Scully make the quinoa casserole -- one of her favorite things about the 90s was the wide availability of new and unusual foods that had never made it to early-70s coastal Massachusetts. Scully made it a point to introduce her to as many new tastes as possible (Sam liked Thai but couldn't stand Burmese).

Dinner went well, as usual: Sam got the spotlight, and loved it. Mulder and Scully took turns asking her about her day.

Mulder wasn't looking forward to the oncoming conversation with Scully, but it had to be done. As usual, he and Scully barely exchanged two words, letting Samantha be the bridge between them.

The meal didn't last nearly long enough; as soon as he'd sat down, it seemed, Scully was carrying plates into the kitchen.

"Why do you look at each other like that?" Samantha asked him when Scully was putting away the leftovers.

"Like what?"

She shrugged and looked away, squirming on the chair. "I don't know. Like you want to hit each other, but not really."

Mulder laughed, immediately shocked at how bitter the noise sounded. "Tell you what, Sam. As soon as I figure it out, I'll let you know."

Scully came back into the room then, to pick up Sam's plate. The girl automatically tilted her face up for Scully's inspection, and Scully just as automatically took a napkin and wiped away a smudge. They wouldn't even have noted it as an interaction, Mulder thought; already, they were used to it. Scully looked over at him as she lifted the plate and they held a quick consultation with their eyes, agreeing to get Samantha out of there so that they could talk.

"Samantha, you have homework to do now," Scully said, smiling at the girl.

"Yes, Dana," she said, jumping off the chair and hurrying out of the room. Scully put the plate back down and looked after her.

"She's so polite," Scully said. "Not at all like children these days...even Charlie's kids just aren't...*respectful* that way, even though they're military brats."

Mulder nodded.

"We thought you weren't going to make it," she said reproachfully, beginning the real subject of the conversation. "Sam misses you."

"We need to talk about that."

Scully's hand went to her throat, tugging nervously at her cross. "What?"

"I'm going to tell the judge that I want you to have permanent custody. If...if you want me to have visitation rights, that's good, but you can't count on me using them."

"What are you saying?" Her voice was shrinking, getting higher as she got upset.

"I'm going back to the X Files. Skinner says he'll have a partner for me in a week."

Scully spun away from him. He could see her shoulders heaving as she attempted to maintain control.

"How can you do this to her?" she said after a few moments.

"What's the matter, Scully, did you think that it could really end like a fairy tale, with me and you and Sam all in a little house with a white picket fence? Sam was lucky to escape our family; she made it out and I didn't. I never will. It's time for me to accept that and go back to doing what I do best. What I need to do."

She whirled around and suddenly she was on him, hitting at him furiously. "Don't you dare! You -- "

She never finished what she was going to say, because he clamped his hand over her mouth. "Be quiet!" he hissed. "Samantha can hear you!"

Scully pulled her head back, away from his hand, and opened her mouth to say something else. Her face was bright red and tears were streaming from the corners of her eyes. She was still hitting at him -- a fresh set of bruises, for sure -- so he pushed her away and she went down, landing on the floor with a sound like a slap.

Mulder dropped to his knees, not sure whether she was hurt or not. Scully, dazed but still furious, grabbed at his tie with one hand and clawed at his face with the other.

"Please stop, Daddy," the teary child's voice came from the hallway. "It's my fault, I promise I'll be good from now on, don't be mad."

Scully let him go and fell back on her elbows. She watched Mulder's face change: It was rigid with pain, and then something snapped, and his face slackened. He stood, nearly stumbling over her, and staggered to the door.

He nearly fell through when he opened it, but he never looked back as he left.

Samantha ran to Scully, crying, apologizing. Scully rocked her, lying there on the floor, telling Samantha that it wasn't her fault, that she was a good girl and that everything would be all right. Eventually the girl fell asleep, and Scully carried her into her room. Scully undressed her and put on her nightgown, tucking her into bed with her stuffed dolphin. Tear tracks were still visible on Samantha's face, swollen from crying.

* * *

Mulder's cellphone buzzed insistently. He knew who it had to be. He was no hypocrite; he never shouted out "Don't go in there!" in horror movies when the fool on the screen went alone into a dark hallway where the monster lurked. *He* always went in. And he pressed the key, even though he knew it was Scully.

He couldn't say a word, though. He just breathed.

"Mulder, it's me."

"Scully," he managed to croak.

"Samantha didn't fall out of a tree, did she?" Her voice was terribly gentle.

Mulder leaned his head into the couch, where he'd been fighting sleep. <I tried to protect her, always. It wasn't just that one night I did such a bad job.>

"Samantha and I spent the morning with a therapist," Scully continued. "I made sure -- I talked to Frohike, who knew about him; he doesn't necessarily believe in alien abduction, but he's willing to accept that Samantha was nine in 1973 when she disappeared.

"But that's not what we talked about. We talked about your parents, and you. Dr. Washington would like to see you, if you're willing."

"How can I ever be in a room with her again?"

"You can see him alone at first, if you want," she said hesitantly. "She loves you."

"Did I tell you that she wants to be a doctor now? She told me while you were out of the room once."

"That's...Mulder, please come back."

The pain was too great. He took refuge in his standard, mocking tone. "Dana Scully, begging? I thought I'd never hear it."

"This is bullshit."

"If you're tired of hearing it, you know what to do."

"Dammit, Mulder, don't do this. It's not fair to Sam."

"Life's a bitch sometimes."

" It's not fair. I'm not a mindreader, and neither is Sam, and it's ok for me because I'm a big girl but you're the only one she has left. Do you think that it's good enough for me to be there when she wakes up screaming for you? Do you think that it will be that easy for her to transfer all her love and her needs to me, when she's still trying to adjust to the fact that it's twenty-five years later than it should be for her?"

If he was broken, which he surely must be, why couldn't he just fly apart so he couldn't hear her any more?

"What happens the next time I get mad?" he whispered.

"You deal with it. And you talk about it. You can't run away from this."

He had one refuge left. "The X Files -- "

"Will wait a few years. Your truth is here, in my apartment. She wants to know when you're coming back."

"Scully -- "

"*I* want to know when you're coming back."

"So I come back, and they win. I shut us down, of my own free will."

"Dammit, Mulder, all this time, it's all been about Samantha. Every minute of every day, you were looking for her. The conspiracy was only a means to an end. Now that you've got what you want, you don't want her anymore, but she won't go away. And this is one mess I can't clean up for you."

She sighed heavily. "Mulder, I didn't want to give up the X Files. I've...I've lost so much, all I have left is justice. It's never been about Sam for me. But I did give up the X Files, because that's what you needed me to do. If you want to go back to the field, so be it, but you will not walk out of her life like you walked out of mine. How could you think that she doesn't need you?"

"If I love her, she'll go away again," he said, broken.

"Will that make it any worse than it is now? Do you want her to remember you, angry, a six-foot man looming over a five-foot- two woman?"

He tried to burrow further into the couch, but it didn't help. He stared at the fishtank, bubbling away without any fish in it.

"Mulder? Are you there?"

"Tell me that it's going to be all right."

He could almost see her near-smile. "I don't have any guarantees, Mulder, you know that. But we can do the best we can."

"Scully?"

"Mmm?"

"Sam says you read her stories at night."

"I do."

"Do you think you could read me one?"

Now the smile had to be full-fledged. "I could...but it would be more efficient if you came over here, so I could read it to you together."

Silence. She was taking a big risk, and he wanted to answer, knowing that every second that ticked by would make her doubt herself more, but unable to speak until he'd figured out what was happening to his heart.

It was either imploding or expanding.

"It's...it's a long drive," he said huskily into the receiver. "Will Sam still be awake?"

Relief made her voice high and fast. "I'm sure of it."

"I'm on my way," he said, suiting actions to words as he swung his legs off of the couch and began hunting for his shoes.

"We'll be right here," she said, and hung up. He smiled at the dial tone issuing forth from the phone; Scully once used all the expected pleasantries, before she'd picked up the minimalist habit from him. Maybe they could both learn something from each other.

He'd struggled for so long just to survive, to eat the pain of living like nectar, that he'd forgotten the real point: to make things better.

He shook his head to clear the introspection away. Scully and Sam were waiting, and he didn't want to disappoint them.

* * *

It never went perfectly smoothly for them, and this time was no exception, but it wasn't a disaster, either.

They reached a compromise: Mulder would limit his non-ISU investigations to trying to find out more about Samantha and the bees. He'd talk to Sam's doctor (it was much easier to think of him as Sam's doctor) once a week.

He made very little progress at first. Marita Covarrubias wouldn't answer his phone calls. He supposed that she thought her job was over, now that he had Samantha back. But if she'd been given back to buy him off, why did Marita go along? He'd thought that she wanted to help him find the truth. He could only hope that her game was more subtle than he could as yet discern and that she'd return to assist him when necessary.

He'd been wrong before.

The therapy sessions went better than Mulder had hoped. Dr. Washington's first name was Fleet, and that alone gave Mulder a sense of connection with him.

Dr. Washington, of course, wanted Mulder to talk about before the abduction, but Mulder preferred to discuss what had happened after.

One day, the doctor looked up from his knitting and said, without preamble, "I think you need to talk to your mother again."

"Why?"

"Because every time we talk, you act as if there's no other witness to what went on in your house left alive. I think it's important to you to think that your mother wasn't aware of what your father did -- to you or for the government -- but it's unlikely that her lack of knowledge was as complete as you maintain."

Mulder opened his mouth, then shut it. "I suppose if I disagree I'll just be proving your point."

Dr. Washington smiled. "Ms. Scully *told* me you had a psychology degree. Mulder, your mother is the one person who might know more than you do about what connection your family had to the government or whoever it was that took your sister, and who might be willing to tell you."

"What if she tells me something I don't want to know?" he whispered.

"Then you'll have some choices: Deny it or work through it. But consider this -- you wouldn't be so afraid if you didn't think that she might know something."

* * *

The next warning to Mulder came the same day as the next clue, and, ironically, it was the combination of the two that told them the most.

Skinner sent them a case file -- the cover letter said that it was about a dead little girl, found on the street in downtown D.C. Nothing for the FBI to get involved in, Mulder knew, unless the smoking man was sending him another message.

He knew what it was when he opened the file and saw the picture of Samantha.

No, not Samantha. A quick call to Scully, who was in line at the Quantico gate to get her car checked in at the time, confirmed that Sam had gone to school that morning, and thus could not have been found dead at 8 pm last night.

A clone. A new warning: We can take her any time we want. This is how it will look. He told Scully to hurry down to his office, and flipped through the police report.

No tags on the clothes, no identification, no jewelry. No signs of molestation. Preliminary cause of death: suffocation, perhaps with a pillow.

The phone rang. He picked it up idly, not concentrating on it.

"Mulder?"

"Langly? I'm kind of busy..."

"Mulder, you've got to get down here. The, um, creatures we discussed? We've got some."

"I'll be there soon." He hung up and buried his face in his hands. Which way to turn? The lady or the tiger-striped insect?

Scully came in at that moment, and he could tell from her expression, seen through his interlaced fingers, that she was worried about him. "What's wrong?" she asked.

He handed her the picture and the police report underneath. She gasped, and then her face lit up with understanding. "You think it's a clone."

"Don't you?"

"I don't know. I should examine the body. It's down at the D.C. coroner's office, I can be there in an hour..." She looked at him expectantly.

"You go, Scully. I -- something else has come up."

"You're not planning on skipping town without me, are you?" she asked warily.

"No town-skipping, I promise. I just have to see the Gunmen, that's all."

"All right," she conceded. "Just call me, ok?"

He smiled at her and stood to escort her back to the parking lot.

* * *

There was a fourth Musketeer waiting for him at the Gunmen's latest location. He bore an eerie resemblance to Byers, but Mulder didn't ask about the relationship, if any. Frohike explained that "Mr. Smith" was a Canadian friend and sometime contributor to TLG, and that he'd come across a strange box in the freezer at his local morgue. Showing great restraint, Mulder managed also to refrain from asking about how *that* particular situation came about.

The box looked like a standard picnic cooler (which was how he'd gotten it across the border without any trouble). Inside he'd found icepacks, the best insulation money could buy, and almost fifty vials of larvae. Five were marked "Q," three "M," and the rest were "W." "Queens, males, and workers," Mulder said when he heard this part, and four heads bobbed in unison, agreeing.

Insect larvae do not make their species known to the non- expert on casual observation, so Mr. Smith was only going on comparison to some pictures he'd downloaded from the Web, but he thought that what he had was a mess of genuine bee larvae, stored in a very strange place. And, using the conspiracy theorists' equivalent of a waggle dance, the Gunmen had apparently put the word out that they were the ones to go to when strange bees appeared, so Mr. Smith obligingly packed up and headed over the border. It never ceased to amaze Mulder how such intense suspicion of any organized government could coincide with such apparently blind trust in whoever claimed to share similar suspicions. But every time he thought about that, he ended up wondering about his own decisions about who to trust, so he tried not to analyze the issue too deeply.

Mr. Smith was now incredibly nervous about the bees, and was perfectly happy to surrender them to Mulder.

He returned to Quantico, and traded a bunch of favors to Danny for the assistance of some techs who normally worked in evidence reconstruction. Insect management was a big part of dealing with bodies that had been out in the open for any length of time, and the techs were able to thaw and revive the larvae, though Mulder insisted on supervising so that they wouldn't ignore his warnings about the potential dangerousness of the tiny insects. He didn't tell them about the smallpox, because they'd never believe it, but he made noises about "super-venomous bees able to produce anaphylactic shock in almost everyone stung," and they seemed to buy it. In any event, he ended up with almost fifty superbees, almost ready to come out and join the world.

* * *

Scully, meanwhile, had arranged to have the dead girl's body brought back to Quantico, and she called him down to the morgue to discuss her findings. To spare his feelings, they discussed the issue just outside the morgue, but he could see the small white- draped body over her head.

"I don't think this girl *could* talk," Scully said. "Her voicebox is atrophied and partly blocked by a growth -- benign, but it would have obstructed speech nonetheless. She could have made some noises -- "

"Buzzing?" Mulder asked, but she ignored him.

" -- but not many. No scars or other identifying marks. Preliminary DNA tests suggest a near-match with Samantha Mulder's. In twenty years I might be able to tell you what the variations mean, but I can't today. She was suffocated, probably with a pillow -- there were a few fibers of the kind found in a standard cotton sheet or pillowcase. Beyond that, I don't know what to tell you."

"I think we're being warned not to pry too hard."

"You think they might take Sam again?"

"I'm not entirely convinced that whoever took her was part of the same group that brought her back. But, be that as it may, yes, I think Sam is at some risk. We're close to something."

End 4/8

Up the Ladder 5/8 RivkaT@aol.com

Now that they had the bees, it was time to pay a visit to the bee research lab maintained by the Department of Agriculture in Beltsville, Maryland. It was the only lab, according to the Gunmen, that had been doing bee research since the 1960s. All the other grantees were of more recent vintage.

All along, this had been happening nearly next door; a pretty funny joke on him, if you thought about it.

He stood at the bottom of a hill. The hill was covered with tiger lilies, orange and black so thick that the green of their stalks and leaves was buried beneath the petals. Bees, hundreds of them, leapt from flower to flower.

"It takes an average of 100 to 200 visits for a bee to successfully pollinate a flower," a woman's voice said from behind him.

"I've heard the 'bees are our friends' lecture, and I believe it," he said, turning to see a tall Asian woman. "Agent Mulder, FBI."

"Dr. Youn, Department of Agriculture," she replied with a hint of mocking. "We have an appointment?"

"Thank you for agreeing to see me on such short notice."

"I don't really know why you're here, actually. They said something about funding irregularities -- but I'm a scientist, I write grant proposals but I don't really know much more than that about the money."

"What I'm interested in is the history of research at this site, actually. It's the oldest bee research facility in the country, correct?"

She smiled. Her straight black hair brushed against her jacket as she looked down and retrieved the glasses that were hanging around her neck. When she put them on, she looked ten times more academic and imposing.

"Yes, it is. We're mostly interested in pollination, for obvious reasons, but lately we've been doing a lot of work on the tracheal and varroa mites that have caused such devastation in bee populations nationwide."

"Do you breed bees?"

"You mean, for particular traits? Well, we're involved in a program to breed 'well-groomed' bees; it turns out that bees that clean themselves often do better against mites, so we're trying to select for that trait."

"What about aggressiveness?"

"Like killer bees? Don't pay attention to the tabloids, Mr. -- Agent -- Mulder. Even Africanized bees aren't that aggressive."

"But has anyone bred bees for aggression?"

"Is the FBI interested in new methods of building security or something? Believe me, you should stick with Dobermans. Bees are the good guys. No one here has any interest in increasing the public's perception of bees as a threat. These days, every bee is a good bee."

"So you don't believe that the government has in any way encouraged the recent bee die-offs?"

Dr. Youn frowned severely. "It's true that we haven't always responded as quickly as we might, and bee research is desperately underfunded, but *encouraged*? Why would you ask something like that?"

"From what I understand," he said, trying not to be distracted by the low hum generated by the thousands of bees on the hillside, "mites kill very quickly. How could they have spread so far, so fast, when they kill their hosts within days, and they do most of their damage during the winters, when bees don't leave the hive? Usually parasites that virulent are self-containing."

Her mouth opened, then closed.

"You *are* a bee research facility," he said, pressing the advantage. "Do you mean to tell me that no one has asked why the mites are so successful?"

"I don't know what to tell you," she said faintly. "If you're implying..."

"I'm not implying anything. I'm asking. Is there any chance that human agency is involved in the spread of the mites?"

"That's ridiculous," she snapped. "Are you really paid to go around asking people insane questions? What would anyone want to kill off bees for? Bees produce billions of dollars of benefits for Americans every year."

"So I've been told," Mulder said, and left her. She stared after him, angry and puzzled.

He hurried back to meet Scully and find out what she'd discovered.

* * *

Scully was standing right by the door when he entered the lab, looking at a glass-encased honeycomb. Bees were, well, busy doing bee things inside.

It made Mulder nervous to see her surrounded by the bees -- there were glass cases scattered across the room, each apparently in use for various experiments -- but he knew she'd dismiss his concerns, so he didn't say anything about it. "What have you found out?" he asked.

"Something incredible, I think. These bees, except for the one with the green dot -- " she pointed to a bee almost obscured by the attentions of countless other bees swarming over it -- "are ordinary honeybees; I got them from the federal bee research lab out in Beltsville. I let one of our unfrozen worker bees in, and she immediately sought out and killed the queen. Then she started destroying all the larvae in their cells. Four hours ago, she began laying eggs of her own; I assume, though I did not see, that she mated with one of the males so that she'll be able to have male and female larvae. The honeybees are helping her replace the old queen's eggs with hers. In six weeks, there won't be a regular honeybee left in the hive."

"I thought worker bees weren't fertile."

Scully shook her head absent-mindedly. "That used to be the conventional wisdom, but it turns out that workers do lay eggs; it's just that other workers seek out and destroy eggs that aren't the queen's. It's the genetics of the situation, you see: The worker is more related to her own daughters than to the queen's eggs, but more related to the queen's eggs than to her sister's eggs, so she lays her own but destroys everyone else's..."

Mulder nodded as if that made perfect sense. Evidently Scully had once again become an expert on a subject in a few hours' time, whether by quick study or pure osmosis (her speed at assimilating data made the latter seem quite plausible to him).

"So what you're saying is that when these bees are released into the wild, they're just going to fly right into all the existing hives and take over."

"If you think that's disturbing," she said, "you're going to love what comes next."

Scully had concocted a grotesque apparatus that took up most of the length of the central table in the lab. It consisted of a large glass box, holding a section of honeycomb that was itself sandwiched in between two panes of glass, with circular exit holes near the bottom that allowed the bees to fly around inside the box. Petri dishes filled with clear liquid dotted the bottom of the box; the journeys the bees were making from the dishes to the comb suggested that the liquid was sugar water, or something like it.

Flanking the large central box were two smaller boxes. In each, a white mouse waited, looking nervous. Sliding trap doors, shut for the moment, connected the smaller boxes to the main bee box.

"This is Tyler," Scully said, pointing to the mouse with the red dot on the back of its head. "I've been working with Tyler all day. This," she said, walking over to the box containing the other, unmarked mouse, "is our other test subject."

"What, he doesn't get a name?"

"You'll see why in a minute. I've sprayed Tyler with a pheromone I've extracted from -- the clone's sweat, though it was also present in her saliva and mucous membranes. I think that I could synthesize it, given time, but for the moment I'm using the real thing."

"This is going to be gross, isn't it?"

"Got it in one. Come over to Tyler's door; on the count of three, we'll open the doors together. You see how to do it?"

Mulder nodded.

"Good. One, two, three!" They pulled up simultaneously. Tyler immediately flowed through the door and went over to a petri dish on his side. The bees paid him no attention whatsoever.

Mulder focused his attention on the poor fellow on the other side, who was edging his nose cautiously over the threshold. The first bee noticed him, and Mulder thought he heard the angry buzzing begin.

In seconds, the mouse had been stung once. Then twice, three times, accelerating every moment until he was covered with bees, writhing and bucking in a desperate attempt to get them off. He crushed a few against the glass wall of the box, but his struggles were weakening as soon as they began. Between the still-angry bees stuck to his fur, Mulder could see boils breaking out.

When the attack ended, there was nothing but a furry bag of bloody bones that used to be a mouse, studded with the corpses of bees.

Meanwhile, Tyler was still sucking up sugar water as if it was going out of style.

Mulder couldn't speak for a second. Scully looked at him expectantly. "Scully? For my birthday next year, why don't you skip the cologne and give me some of this stuff?"

"I'm afraid we're all going to need it, if these bees spread further. Mulder, I've sent a sample of the pheromone to the CDC, and I've also sent samples to a few friends of mine, and to some professors I've never met but who are supposed to be expert apiologists. I want you to give some of the pheromone to the Gunmen, and tell them to spread the samples far and wide, I don't want to know where. If this evidence disappears...we need to be able to reproduce it."

Scully's paranoia frightened him more deeply than the dead mouse. He nodded. "I'll do it right now, if you've got them ready."

She turned and went over to a counter on the far wall, returning with ten vials, each neatly labelled and tightly sealed. When he left, she was preparing to gas the bees. They still had some frozen larvae to examine if necessary, and the risks of keeping live bees around were just too great.

* * *

After dropping the pheromones off with the Gunmen, Mulder took a little side trip back to Beltsville. It was already dark when he arrived. According to the information he'd gotten from the Department of Agriculture, there wasn't even a security patrol around the building, only an alarm. They studied bees, for Pete's sake; who would want to break in or blow them up?

The alarm was standard government-issue; he nearly beat his best time disabling it and getting in, but he had a little trouble with the actual, physical lock on the door.

Dr. Youn's reactions had seemed reasonably sincere, so he bypassed her office and headed straight for the Director's.

His luck had saved his life numberless times, but it was not powerful enough to lead him to the right file cabinet on the first try. He spent several mind-numbing hours flipping through various and sundry reports on the most intimate details of bee life and death, grant proposals, building maintenance requests, and all the other things that end up in file cabinets in case someone, somewhere, demands an accounting.

In the bottom drawer of the fourth file cabinet, directly underneath the Director's Bill-and-Hillary picture, he found a section on varroa and tracheal mites. The general subject matter was unsurprising, but the contents of the fourth report, discreetly bound in dark crimson with only a grant number on the front, were shocking.

He knelt on the scratchy carpeted floor, using his pocket light to read until it dimmed, and then spent several minutes bumbling down the darkened halls until he found a copy room. The photocopy machine demanded a department code before it would agree to make copies for him, but some forgetful person had thoughtfully taped a list of codes to the wall above the machine. He chose "Research and Development."

As he copied, he kept alert for any noise. It wouldn't do to be surprised by a security guard who didn't show up on the official payroll. Though, if this report was accurate, none of the real research was done here; Beltsville was just a conduit for the money, and therefore its relative unguardedness was unsurprising.

What had caught his eye about the report was the glossy insert at the front. Beautifully colored photographs of bees -- dying and deformed bees, that was. Bees with tracheal mites that had gorged so heavily on the bees' blood that the bees' throats burst from within and the mites tumbled out. Bees who'd shared their larval cells with varroa mites and emerged with only three limbs, or one eye.

After the pictures, the maps of the United States. The first showed "implantation sites" as black dots. The maps were colored, the key showed, by number of honeybees per acre, with blood-red for the greatest concentration. The first map, dated 1992, showed a nearly scarlet country, punctuated with black dots.

In 1993, parts of the country -- the parts where the black dots had been thickest -- were already fading to pink.

By 1997, there was barely any true red left; the few patches he saw corresponded to major commercial apiaries and a few hardy university research centers.

There was a map projecting the state of the nation in 1998. It was bone-white.

He returned the report to its place among all the other reports about the mites, the ones in which researchers announced their despair, puzzlement, and slight hope for breeding and importation programs. It was a traitor, that report of calculated genocide in the midst of dedicated soldiers, but he needed to leave it where it was.

* * *

Despite the new information, Mulder went to Massachusetts again as planned the next day. He and Scully could hardly keep all their bee research secret, but the pace of events seemed to be accelerating, and as always in his life he was confident that the past and the present were intimately connected. Had it not been proven time and again that his family was the pivot around which so much of the conspiracy had turned?

He went to see his mother in the retirement community she'd moved into after Samantha's return, as if that event had finally made her acknowledge her growing infirmity.

He met her in one of the visiting rooms, a warm library-type room whose shelves were covered with books bought at estate auctions and never read since. She came in and they kissed, like long-lost strangers.

A few questions about the new place and how she liked her neighbors, and then he got down to business.

"Mom, did Dad ever talk to you about bees?"

"Bees?" she asked, confused. Whatever question she'd been expecting, bees weren't a part of it. "I don't remember...but your father had so many projects. After a while, I didn't listen very hard."

"But he never said anything about insects? What about smallpox?"

She sighed and twisted a thin Medicalert bracelet that circled her wrist. "I don't know, Fox. It's so hard to remember..."

Mulder gave up and turned to more personal matters.

"I never asked you, Mom. About me and Samantha. *When* did Dad ask you to make a choice?"

His mother sighed and looked out the window, rocking back and forth as she did incessantly these days. "Sam was just a baby, my beautiful baby girl. You were already reading, you always were a precocious child. He said...he said that it was all for the best, that it would give her an advantage. A leg up on the world, he called it. So they took her away, and the next day she was back. She was colicky, but Samantha was a fussy baby. Bill hated that so..."

"What happened later?" he said gently. It was like questioning any other witness -- get her to tell the story in her own words, prompt but don't demand.

"They took her -- checkups, Bill said. Always just afternoons, while you were in school. She didn't seem to mind...She said they played games with her, just games, nothing wrong. But when, when she was taken, that's when I knew. All along it had been a lie."

"Did Dad ever explain anything to you, about what was done to her?" The need in his voice frightened him; it made his mother cringe back towards the wall.

"He never said. I don't think he meant it to go so far...When I met him, you know, he was so dashing. He was fighting the Communists, proving that not all of us were traitors, that we were real Americans. He believed he was doing God's work...I believed it too."

And that was all she would say. Mulder caught the shuttle back to D.C.

* * *

Scully spent the day making bee puree. Take lots of dead bees, grind them up, and extract the virus from the goop. She needed a sufficient supply of virus so that she could get help working on a vaccine, perhaps even a cure. When *that* effort got boring, she'd go check on her clone cell cultures, which were doing a pretty good job of producing the necessary pheromone. Production was too slow to provide a large number of people with effective protection if, God forbid, the bees did start appearing around the country, but they could at least build up a limited supply.

Why bees as a delivery agent, anyway? Perhaps because they were not quite as indiscriminate as an airborne virus, especially if one had access to the protective pheromone. And if a bee could spread one virus, there was no reason that it couldn't spread others too. The bees were a flexible delivery system; the choice of super- smallpox was no doubt only for convenience's sake. Though she had a vague sense, like a small itch at the back of her brain, that somehow the genetic tags on the smallpox scars were somehow related to the bee program. When widespread smallpox vaccination had stopped, the tagging program had also ended -- but why record just one generation? What was supposed to happen to everyone else?

Idle speculation produced no vaccine, so she tried to concentrate on the immediate issues.

When Scully went to pick Sam up from the after-school program, she felt a real sense of accomplishment, even though she was almost too tired to make dinner and settled on macaroni and cheese from a box.

Samantha, bless her heart, did the dishes, and Scully just sat, typing occasional notes into her laptop about other avenues of research. Sam joined her at the table. They worked well together; both of them were able to focus to the point of tunnel vision, and they didn't need to talk to enjoy each other's company.

Scully's cell phone buzzed, and she reached for it. Sam was bent over her homework, chewing on the end of a pencil.

"Scully," she said. Was Mulder going to be late? He was due in any minute.

"Agent Scully," Marita Covarrubias said. "I've made a terrible mistake."

"What do you mean?" Scully asked, instantly wary.

Sam was staring at her -- her expression must have been worrisome.

Static began to take over the line. All Scully could hear was the SRSG's tone. The woman was frightened nearly out of her mind.

"Dana," Sam said gently, as something black swirled in her eyes, "I'm afraid that I'm going to have to ask you to hang up the phone."

****

Mulder slung his suit jacket over his shoulder and attempted to whistle the tune to "Don't Cry for Me Argentina." Despite the somewhat unsatisfactory conclusion to the interview with his mother, he was feeling good. He'd never quite realized how nice it was to have someone to be waiting for him when he got back from a trip. If he tried hard enough, he could even imagine --

No use being silly, even in his own head.

Wheezing more than whistling, he turned the key in Scully's door.

Normally, Sam would come running at this point, but he didn't see her. Maybe Scully had put her to bed early.

The lights were out.

Scully could be reading in her room. But this was quickly adding up to a bad scene.

"Sam?" he called out, drawing his gun. Safety still on, just in case Sam came running out, but it would give him a bit of a boost. "Scully?"

"Right here, Mulder." The voice came from the darkened kitchen, and he spun to look into the room.

Scully was sitting at the kitchen table. There was a glass of water in front of her, half-empty. He saw it gleam in the moonlight drifting in through the window over the sink. He could see the vague outlines of Sam's drawings from school, stuck on to the refrigerator by magnets.

"Are you all right, Scully?"

"I'm fine, Mulder. Isn't that the expected response?"

He stepped closer. In the darkness, he could barely see her face.

"Mind if I turn on the lights?" he asked, trying to sound flippant.

"I like the dark," she said. "It conceals a multitude of sins."

"That's what's wrong with it," he replied. "It's harder to find the truth in the dark."

"Not always," she said, low and husky, as she rose to stand right in front of him. "Mulder..." She took his forgotten gun from his hand and placed it on the counter.

"Where's Sam?"

"Asleep in my bedroom."

"Why...?"

"Shhh," she said, putting a finger to his lips. He opened his mouth to speak again, tilting his head back to break the contact.

"I -- ah -- I have to go to the bathroom," he said. His whisper sounded low and broken in his own ears.

She smirked. "Don't be long."

He retreated down the hall, passing past Sam's closed bedroom door, then Scully's. He flipped on the bathroom light, then stared at himself in the mirror for a minute. He'd have to pretend to do something, so he ran the water, splashed some on his face, then flushed the toilet.

Scully always told him what a slob he was. He thought she liked being able to nag. So, as always, he left the bathroom light on as he left.

In the yellow light that spilled onto the hallway floor, he saw a few drops of dried blood.

His first thought was that Scully had suffered a relapse. That could explain why she was acting so oddly.

"Scully?" He returned to the kitchen, determined to get a straight answer from her. She was sitting down again, and she looked up at him as he approached. "Tell me what's going on."

He turned the light on and looked in her eyes. They were black, swirling with moire patterns.

Fuck fuck fuck. How long would it take him to reach his ankle holster?

"Don't worry," Scully said. "I won't hurt her. I was waiting around to give you a message -- an explanation, really."

"You're one of those things from the submarine, aren't you?"

"I was never in a submarine, but I think you have the idea."

"Let her go."

"But I haven't told you my story. Don't you want to hear it?"

Mulder took an unwilling step forward. "Is Sam all right?"

"She's in Dana's bedroom, as I said. How come Dana's never around when you see all the things she won't believe? I think you leave her behind so that you can maintain the thin protection of her skepticism; if she believed, the two of you might go off and totally destroy your own credibility. Look at what happened at that Senate hearing, and that meeting where Dana tried to convince your superiors that people were being tagged with alien proteins through smallpox inoculations. Crazy, right?"

"Is there a point to all this? I get enough of this from Skinner. I can't believe you'd come from another star system to instruct me on career dos and don'ts."

"Very well, then. Lecture begins: What you think of as the 'greys' are our previous hosts. Unfortunately, after a few generations under our tutelage, most species seem to wear out. Our presence can cause DNA coding errors; also, so few survive the initial assimilation process that inbreeding becomes a problem. Your sister has been kind enough to be my host for the past few decades -- though I admit, that was much longer than I had intended."

"Why isn't Sam dead of radiation poisoning?"

"I see that you've encountered a youngster from my people. As we age, we learn to control the more immediately negative effects of our presence on our hosts. Only adults are allowed into high-quality hosts such as Samantha -- and you, I might add."

"Do they *know* what's happening to them? Is Scully still in there, with you?"

"Yes. It's quite an eductation for the little skeptic, don't you think? Samantha, on the other hand, was joined with me young enough that she's essentially split off a part of her personality to be me. She doesn't resist me like adults do, and she doesn't remember when I'm in charge. You should thank me, really; I protected her when Dad got a little rough and you failed to deflect him. As I was saying, we like our symbiotes -- "

"You mean slaves."

"You say potayto..." Smirking was damnably unattractive on Scully's rationalist face. "The clones are much better raw material than you one-off humans. The cloning means that there's no unique upbringing to defeat. Less innate intelligence and creativity to work with, but you take what you can get. When we take over entirely, we'll set up creches to raise children in so that we won't need to clone to get total control over the formative years."

It didn't even sit like Scully. It...lounged. Like a predatory cat, watching the mouse try to run away, enjoying the victim's momentary delusion that he might escape. He couldn't believe that he'd thought it was her at first."So where did Sam fit in?"

"Brilliant, young, and trainable. We use only genius-level templates to make the clones, so the intelligence degradation caused by the process doesn't make itself a burden. Unfortunately, your human friends in the Consortium began to suspect that our ultimate plan was not conducive to their continued power, and they set upon me unawares. I was frozen -- using our own technology -- do you think that's tragic irony, or poetic justice? No matter. When Ms. Covarrubias used her influence to have me thawed out, she was operating under the mistaken assumption that Samantha's only value was as a bargaining chip with the various Mulders. She replaced me with a clone, and told her superiors that she'd just had a clone programmed to act like the real Samantha. Her crush on you is rather charming, isn't it? It's a problem of secrecy: When even the covert operatives don't understand the skullduggery, they can make serious errors."

"But, if you were frozen, why were there clones running around?"

"Because your Consortium had adopted our technology, attempting to use it against us. They thought that a cloned army of compliant soldiers, backed by those horrid hybrid things, could defend against us.

"They should have just destroyed that poor little girl, and me with her, instead of keeping me around like leftovers in case of need. All I need to do now is find our communication devices -- a missile silo, I see? -- and call my relatives to our new home."

"What about the bees?"

"Bees?" it said, sounding confused for the first time.

"The Samantha clones -- they were taking care of plants for bees, a kind of bee that can carry a quick-killing virus."

"Well, how the hell should I know? I'm not the one who's been awake for the past quarter century. I'm here to thank you, not to do your job," it concluded, some of Scully's characteristic exasperation in its voice.

"There's just one thing I don't understand," he said.

"One thing? You have a high opinion of yourself."

He stared at her face -- smooth, skeptical -- that lush mouth, slightly higher on one side than the other. Not at the eyes. "Why are you telling me all this?"

It snorted. "The compound your friends used to freeze Samantha stilled her brain waves. They never thought to wonder what would happen to *me*. I was all alone in that icebox for twenty-five years. It's possible that I'm not quite the rational being I was when I went in. Believe me, there will be an accounting.

"I suppose I'm telling you all this because I think someone should know. Your betrayal was mine, too; we have the same enemies. And if it weren't for your handsome face and tragically romantic quest, I'd still be an ice cube. So I owe you and your animal charm."

"I wish I could say I was pleased to be of service," he said.

"I'm going to go now. I'd hate to have you or Dana get hurt, so don't try to stop me. Samantha will need to see a doctor -- there's some internal bleeding from the transfer."

He looked toward the bedroom door.

"Make the right choice this time, Mulder. It's what Dana wants."

It stood and took Scully's keys from the table. "Have a nice life," it said. "You probably have two or three years -- more if you get to the jungle, or somewhere else that's thinly populated. Enjoy it while you can."

And then it was gone.

Mulder called 911 from Scully's bedside. Sam was breathing shallowly, unevenly. Then he called Mrs. Scully, and asked her to meet Sam at the hospital, and to take care of the girl until he could return. He waited, thanking the FBI for making them move to Virginia where ambulances actually came within the decade.

Not soon enough, the ambulance arrived, and they loaded Sam on.

He was acutely aware that he was abandoning her again. But it was not as if he were a doctor, not as if he could take care of her like Scully.

He went out to his car. There was someone leaning against the driver's side door. Mulder drew his gun, keeping it down at the side so as not to scare any passers-by. The figure was watching him; no use trying for surprise.

Finally the figure's face became clear.

Why was he not surprised?

"Hello, Alex," Mulder said as he took aim.

"We don't have time for this fight, Mulder," Alex said, keeping his arms crossed over his chest.

"What are you doing here?"

"Well, gee, Mulder, do you think it has anything to do with the alien entity you've been harboring for the past few months?"

"What's your business with it?"

"I'm a good guy," Krycek said, grinning. "I'm going to make the world safe for humanity. Even for you Amerikanetz, more's the pity. How did it convince Scully to go drive off with it?"

"It didn't *convince* her of anything. It *took* her."

Krycek nodded. "Makes sense. It's easier for an adult to travel alone. Though if it wanted someone who could see over the steering wheel, it could have made a better choice."

Mulder growled and stepped forward.

"Oh, grow up. Short jokes should not be high on your list of priorities. Do you want to come with me, or not?"

"Come with you where?"

"I can track it," Krycek said, showing Mulder something that looked like a combination GPS link and radiation counter. "I'm going after it with or without you. Come with, and maybe you can figure out a way to keep Agent Scully in the land of the living, because I sure as hell don't care if she makes it out of this."

"Touch her and you're a dead man."

"Maybe you haven't been paying attention, Mulder, but there's no 'her' left. Just that *thing*. And it's not like I have any great affection for her, but the only human being who deserves to have that thing in him is your cigarette-smoking friend."

Krycek put the tracker away and opened the car door -- the door that Mulder had locked, he noted, but it seemed a relatively unimportant crime.

"Your choice, Mulder."

What kind of choice was that? Krycek might kill him on the way, or use him for bait if the oilien was at all affected by Scully's memories, but any chance was better than nothing.

He pulled the keys from his pocket and tossed them to Krycek. "I hope you've got a big bankroll," he said. "When I don't show for my presentation tomorrow, I'm going to be an ex-FBI agent just like you, except for the traitor part."

* * *

They caught the next plane out of National to Chicago, thence to Fargo, and rented a car. And once again they were driving, out in the middle of America, heading for the missile silo.

"Have you ever asked God for something, said 'this is it, God. Give me this and I'll never ask for anything again?'" Mulder asked Krycek.

Krycek looked over at Mulder, whose eyes were half-focused on the road. "Maybe."

"I did it a number of times. When Sam was taken, every night I asked God to bring her back. I told Him that's all I ever wanted, that whatever Dad wanted to do was ok, if He'd only bring her back. Then when Scully was taken, I tried it again. I think God gets tired of hearing people whine. I think He doesn't believe them when they say they'll never ask for anything again, and that's why He doesn't grant their prayers."

"That's...an interesting doctrinal innovation," Krycek said nastily, "but do I look like your rabbi?"

"No, you look like the traitor who killed my father and helped take Scully, but I thought we'd avoid those subjects. I guess we could talk about *your* life," Mulder said. "The people who love and trust you -- oh, sorry, I suppose we'd just be sitting in silence."

Krycek mumbled something that was almost certainly an anatomically impossible Russian suggestion.

There was, in fact, silence for about fifteen minutes. Krycek shifted restlessly in the passenger's seat. Mulder squirmed as his back began to ache -- long road trips always did that to him, no matter how carefully he adjusted the seat. Scully had gotten him one of those blue fluid-filled pillows about a year back, just a present for no reason, but it had gotten blown up (along with the rental car) during one of their misadventures a few months back. It would have been a great comfort.

"Our one advantage," Krycek said as Mulder drove, "is that it doesn't know the ship's been moved. Last time Scully knew about it, it was still in the hellhole where they left me."

According to Krycek, the ship had been moved to another storage site, an abandoned military research facility in Oklahoma, as soon as the Consortium had discovered Marita's deception.

"I've been wondering about that," Mulder said, checking the mileage sign whooshing by. "Everyone else that thing possessed is dead from radiation poisoning. Was it your charming personality that protected you? I thought that cockroaches were supposed to survive nuclear war, not rats."

"I'll ignore that in the interests of cooperation."

"That thing in Scully said that it was older and in better control of its bodily functions, which is why it didn't kill its hosts so quickly. But you were inhabited by the other one, the young one."

"I'm an operative, Mulder, not a scientist. All I know is that I was in the silo, and then I got sick and the oilien came out of me. It went into the ship, and then I was all alone. After a while, there was a funny smell and some pink froth. It was dead."

"How do you know?"

"I don't need to know what planet it came from to know when I smell decomposition, fuck you very much."

"But why would it die? If it needed a host to survive, why didn't it just come out and hitch a ride with you again?"

"Beats the hell out of me."

"There's got to be something...How much do you know about the deal the Consortium made with the oiliens, the trade of alien technology in return for some human assistance in the takeover plans?"

"I know we betrayed the oiliens -- big surprise there, right? And that the hybridization with the greys that created the shapeshifters was a big side project -- your father's, if I understand correctly."

"Scully -- the thing in her called them 'horrible.' The oiliens didn't approve?"

"The oiliens didn't know at first. Frankly, I agree with it. Those things are vicious. One nearly killed me once, before I met you. When I was in the midst of changing sides; don't really remember from which to which."

"Nearly killed you? How?" Something was clicking in his head, as the puzzle shifted and its outlines became clearer.

"Sprayed some blood in my face -- is it blood if it's green? Nearly blinded me. I was in the hospital for weeks. Had some plastic surgery done, actually; explains why I've got such a pretty face."

Mulder couldn't even think of an appropriately snide remark; all the active brain cells were otherwise occupied.

"So the other oilien made it to the ship," he mused, "but didn't manage to phone home. Otherwise, we'd already all be wearing a new set of eye colors. What stopped it?"

Krycek wisely didn't interrupt.

"What if you made it sick? Poisoned it somehow? What if the antibodies from your previous exposure to the shapeshifter's blood gave it an allergic reaction, one that it didn't recognize until it was too late?"

"What are you saying, Mulder? That we should call for shapeshifter backup and get one to bleed on Scully?"

"No. Too dangerous." He shook his head, staring at the passing mile markers. "But...if we could get it to transfer back into you -- "

"First," Krycek said furiously, "I would not have one of those things inside me again to save the *world*, much less to preserve the remote chance that you will *ever* get laid by Dana Scully. Second, we don't know that it would work on an older one -- remember, it told you that it was different, not as wasteful -- maybe it's hardier, too. Third -- I can't even believe I'm trying to rebut this rationally, Mulder, you're a fucking nutcase. I don't know what Ouija board you consulted to come up with this theory, but it's more insane than your usual productions, which is saying a lot."

Krycek rolled his head from side to side, easing the neck muscles. "Hold on -- the clones bleed green too, don't they? If the oiliens like the clones, why not the hybrids?"

Finally -- an objection he could answer. Scully would be so proud. "Blood and Kool-Aid are both red, Krycek, but that doesn't mean you're indifferent to what's in your IV." Mulder leaned back into the seat and stretched a little. "And what is your plan, Mr. Secret Agent?"

"I'm going to blow that fucking thing to bits."

"Then you made a serious mistake bringing me along."

Krycek made a strangled sound and turned on the radio, as loud as it could go.

* * *

They stopped for drive-through: KFC, a compromise between McDonald's and Wendy's. It was Krycek's turn to drive.

"So," Mulder said, making conversation as he crumpled up his napkin and threw it into the backseat, "how'd *you* get out of Russia?"

Krycek's hands clenched on the steering wheel. Which would have been unremarkable, had it not been for the huge dent left behind.

"What the hell is that?"

Krycek smirked, but Mulder thought his expression was hiding a more painful emotion. "No arm, no test. When I jumped out of that truck -- remind me to thank you for that, sometime -- I met up with some escapees from the camp. I told them I was just another poor sucker like them, and they repaid me by cutting off my arm.

"I'll spare you the next few pages of the story. It would only confuse you, anyway. Suffice it to say that, a few nights ago, our old smoking friend contacted me. He offered me a truce, if I brought this escaped alien in. As a sign of his good faith, he had one of his healers regrow my arm -- halfway."

The road was straight and deserted, so Mulder wasn't bothered when Krycek took one hand off the wheel to roll up the sleeve on the other, exposing a smooth, hairless forearm that seemed to turn into plastic at the elbow joint.

"Have you ever seen one of the healers work?" he asked rhetorically. "It's an amazing thing. It hurts like Hell, I must say, but it's incredible to watch. All I had was a shoulder, and then growing out of it like a fucking worm was my arm again. First the bone, then the nerves and tendons, then the muscle, and only at the end the skin. He had it stop halfway down, said I'd get the rest back when I came back successful. But they gave me this mechanical arm for the meantime -- developed for American soldiers; it links into the existing nerve network and responds just like a real arm, except for the part about being able to bend tungsten. I'm thinking of keeping it, though it does itch a bunch at the joint."

"Jesus," was all Mulder could manage. He stared at the arm as if it might suddenly get a mind of its own and lunge for him.

"You bet. When I was a kid, I never imagined I'd grow up to be a cyborg."

"Oh, but assassin was part of the career plan?"

"Sure," Krycek said, with such apparent sincerity that Mulder was taken aback.

A few minutes later, he gave conversation another try. "Since we're allies now, why don't you tell me what you know about the bees?"

"Bees? Like bzzz, bees?"

"Just like that, only louder and even nastier than you, plus they carry smallpox, whereas I believe rats tend to carry plague."

"Oh, stow it. I don't know jack about bees, Mulder. Even Sears has divisions, for Christ's sake, and my employers are a little more carefully organized than that."

They got about fifteen more silent minutes out of that exchange.

Then: "I've been thinking," Mulder said.

"That explains the burning smell."

Mulder glared at him. "All right, all right. What have you been thinking, Mulder?" Krycek's tone was patronizing.

"I accept that you won't try to get the oilien in you again. But I've been exposed to shapeshifter blood too; I nearly died. If we could get it to trade Scully for me..."

"Why would it do that?"

"Because we'll tell it that I know the new location of the ship."

"Why would *I* agree to that?"

"Because then you can follow it, and if it doesn't get sick, kill it -- kill me -- instead. You'll know where it's headed, which is more than you'll know once it finds out that the silo is empty."

They drove in silence for several minutes. Krycek kept frowning, glancing at Mulder, then looking back to the road.

"If I did agree to try this," he said, finally, "we'd need to keep it from accessing your memories. Otherwise it will know, and will just jump out of you at the first chance it gets -- which will probably be back to Scully."

"How are you as a hypnotist?" Mulder asked.

Krycek began to give him an are-you-serious look, then stopped, obviously realizing the futility of such a project. "Actually," he said, "I understand you're a good subject, and I have some...chemical aids that could help."

"Don't tell me. They look like ordinary pens -- they even write -- but they can inject powerful drugs. Q showed them to you just before you left for this assignment."

"No," the younger man said, "I only use those when there's a chance my luggage will be inspected. I'm carrying real syringes this time." Mulder was mildly afraid that this was a completely serious response.

They pulled over to do the hypnosis when the tracker said that they were within fifteen minutes of Scully's rented car.

Mulder sat on the hood of their car and unbuttoned his sleeve, patting his arm to help the vein pop up. They'd bandied the details of the story Krycek would implant back and forth for the past few hours, and Mulder thought that the alien would accept it as plausible Mulder suicidal/self-sacrificing behavior.

The sting of the needle was almost unnoticeable, but after a few minutes Mulder thought that he could feel the drugs curling through his system.

"Wait," Mulder said, as the drugs took hold. "What's the explanation for why you're helping me?"

"Don't you know?" Krycek asked silkily. "I've had a crush on you for the longest time." He ran a finger down Mulder's chest, stopping just above the button on his pants.

Mulder thought woozily that letting Krycek drug him senseless was not the smartest thing he'd done that week. And then there was just a fog.

****

They caught up with Scully just outside of the silo. It had stopped the car and pulled it over to the shoulder. It was looking off into the horizon, shading its alien eyes with her hand. Except for the road, everything was a sandy, gritty brown -- you could believe that the earth was flat, out here.

Mulder pulled up behind the other car and parked.

"All right," it said when they got close. "You're obviously here to talk, not fight, so let's have it."

"I want to trade," Mulder said.

"What do you have that I want?"

"The location of your ship," he said, staring at the thing residing in Scully's form. "It's been moved."

"Why should I believe you?"

"You'll know as soon as you make the switch -- if you're not satisfied, you can just grab Scully again. It's not like she'll be able to overpower this body."

It tilted its head up, the way Scully always had when she was considering his latest insane theory.

"All this for a partner, Agent Mulder?"

"I believe that's Mr. Mulder, after this weekend," he said with a flash of his old humor.

"Ah." It smiled. "Your loyalty is charming."

"Give Scully back," he said.

"You'd sacrifice the whole human race as you know it for one woman?"

"There is no one but Scully."

It turned its back on him. It hadn't been taking care of Scully's hair; he could see tangles, and the ends were flying in many directions.

A small eternity passed.

"Very well," it said, turning. "Come here."

He moved forward, but was shocked when it embraced him and tilted its head up, seeking his mouth.

"What are you doing?" he whispered.

Its mouth -- Scully's mouth -- was inches from his face. "Transfer has to be accomplished somehow," it said. "Isn't this appropriate?"

"Fuck you," he said, low and harsh.

"Do you want me to tell you that she wants you? That she wakes with your name on her lips and her hands between her legs?"

"Scully," he said, looking at her lovely mouth and not at her swirling eyes, "if you can hear me, I know this isn't you."

It chuckled and pulled his face down.

* * *

The first thing Scully realized when she got herself back was that she heard someone being violently ill a few yards away. Mulder was holding her -- she opened her eyes and his were mottled, staring back at her.

She wrenched herself away and staggered back, nearly stumbling over the sick man -- Alex Krycek? -- in her haste to get away from what her partner had become.

Krycek recovered quickly and grabbed her, enveloping her in his arms. She started to struggle, but he whispered into her hair, "Quiet! I'll explain in a minute. Let him think I'm your friend." His breath was nearly enough to make her gag.

Scully stilled and waited, wrapping her arms around him. She heard a car start, and the Mulder-thing took off.

"What do you remember?" Krycek asked when she wiggled out of his arms.

"Everything that happened," she replied. He nodded shortly.

"Look," he said, "I have to follow Mulder. I can't let it get into that ship. I'm sure someone will be by soon and you can hitchhike back into town."

"I'm coming with you," she said.

"Look, Scully -- " He cringed at her glare. "Dana, I work alone."

She shoved the gun she'd lifted from his back holster into his stomach. "Not right now, not when Mulder's involved."

He stood still. She could almost see the wheels spinning in his head -- could he take her? could her presence prove useful? Slowly, he raised his hands in surrender. "Have it your way," he conceded. "Just don't be upset when it doesn't end well."

Scully made Krycek drive, so that she could keep a better watch on him.

"Why are you with Mulder?"

"I had the tracking device he needed to find you, and he came up with the plan."

"What is the plan, exactly? I can't see you risking your life just to rescue me."

He laughed. "How little you know me, Dana. No, Mulder has a theory about why I survived my encounter with the other alien like this one -- he thinks my previous exposure to the blood of one of the shape-shifting hybrids made me toxic to the alien, instead of vice versa."

"You had one of them inside you," she stated. He nodded, and she shuddered involuntarily. "I hope that makes you wake up screaming every night."

"Looking forward to the future, Dana?"

She shifted in her seat and returned to the more pressing subject. "And since Mulder's also been exposed, he thought he could kill this one if he could convince it to transfer into him."

"You're good at this. Ever considered a career in investigation?" He was mocking her. There was nothing that she hated more; she could converse with him while he was being evil, but patronizing was another thing entirely.

She scowled at him. "But why didn't it figure that out as soon as it transferred in?"

"That's where I come in. I hypnotized Mulder, and he thinks he just made the trade to save the love of his life. He also thinks I have a thing for you too, which is why I agreed to help. He's going to the new storage site for the transmitter now, and when he gets there he'll find an electronic lock that will take even him a couple of days to crack; by that time, the poison should work if it's going to."

"What if it doesn't?"

"Then," Krycek said, slowing down to pull into a service station for a fill-up, "I kill him."

* * *

The new location meant another day's drive. They stayed well behind Mulder's car; they knew where he was going, so they stopped to eat while he barrelled on. Evidently the oilien didn't mind running Mulder's body into the ground; it must be looking forward to a world of new slaves.

Every minute the journey took gave Mulder's theory another chance to work. The other oilien had survived for days in Krycek before succumbing, if that was indeed what it had done.

As with much investigative work, there was much more waiting than action involved. When they arrived at the site Krycek had identified, they parked about a hundred yards from the abandoned building, just inside the razor-wired gates with the signs telling people to stay away from government property. The car Mulder had used was just a little closer to the building. Aside from the two cars, there were no signs that humans still inhabited the area. The building's windows were brown with dirt and some were spiderwebbed with cracks.

They got out of the car and sat, Scully on the curb and Krycek on the hood of the car. Krycek had bought gum at the last gas station, and he chewed it methodically, spitting out one wad as soon as it lost its flavor and stuffing another in his mouth. Mulder had been at the site for four hours by the time they arrived, and nothing more happened that day. The sunset was pretty, though. Even Krycek wasn't entirely unaesthetic, if she ignored what she knew about him and his terrible haircut.

Scully sat and contemplated her life. Who would have thought that it would come to this, waiting in the middle of nowhere with Alex Krycek to see if an undeniably alien being would die on its own or take her partner with it? She was tempted to kill Krycek, just on general principles, in case everything else turned out badly.

Maybe she should have demanded to stay with the X Files rather than surrendering them for Sam. She still knew so little about the grand plans behind all this activity. Mulder would be interested in the alien's inner life; he was probably analyzing what it was like to be put on like a Halloween costume at this very moment. She was more interested in finding the human beings who would dare to exploit the Earth entire for personal advantage, the ones who would sell their own kind into slavery and horrible death. The oilien had a very poor opinion of humanity, and she couldn't say that she blamed it, from the types it had encountered so far. The X Files offered a chance to confront that human evil.

Even so, if she hadn't rearranged her life to deal with Mulder and his newly reappeared sister, she probably wouldn't be any further along in the grand quest. Without Mulder's crazy intuitive leaps, without his disregard for normal procedure and rational caution, she'd be as lost as he was without her chiding, constraining presence. And Mulder probably would have ended up out here without her, saving the world and getting himself killed in the process. Well, that wasn't terribly fair. "Getting himself killed" was doublespeak, like "getting herself pregnant." She couldn't just go blaming him as if he were the bad guy.

She wished that they could have a fire. It was a little chilly, with the sun down. She didn't really feel like sleeping. Even ignoring the stress from the fact that Mulder was the prisoner of that *thing*, she'd only trust Alex Krycek if he were on her autopsy table. And even then, she might remove his heart just to make sure. Cutting off his head and stuffing the mouth with garlic, though, would be too extreme.

Scully had never believed in possession by demons. Sure, it was in the Bible, but she'd preferred to think of it as a metaphor for all the ills to which mortals were heir.

Now she had a much better idea of what it was like.

She'd always prided herself on maintaining control. Her worst moments -- breaking down over Pfaster, the whole awful episode with Ed Jerse -- were about losing control. To be a puppet for that alien thing had been worse than anything she could have imagined.

When the phone had gone dead and Samantha's eyes had whirled like black water rushing down a drain, Scully had frozen. What do you do when your beloved surrogate daughter starts manifesting signs of possession? It's not as if she could have pulled a gun on Sam.

The girl put her pencil down and walked over to Scully. "Dana," she'd said, and reached out her hands to cup Scully's face. Then...

Then came the part Scully preferred to forget about. It had been painful, intrusive, and humiliating. It was like a rape, but she couldn't even struggle.

When Samantha had released her, she was fully under the alien's control. Samantha collapsed, bleeding a little from the ears, and Scully had carried her into the main bedroom, storing her for later use.

All that time she'd been waiting for Mulder, she'd felt the alien rifling through her mind. Scenes replayed in her memory, sending waves of emotion through her -- pleasure, pain, anger, amazement, hilarity, everything overlaid with the oily touch of the alien as it learned her darkest secrets. It was like being ridden, and like being swept away by an undertow.

It was so good at reading her that she wasn't even sure how much of what it had said to Mulder about her was wrong.

Then, while it was driving out here, it had left her thoughts alone, mostly. She'd watched the gas gauge with hopeless dread, because every time it stopped for a fill-up it played with her some more. Now she was at Missy's hospital bed; now she was at Ahab's funeral; now she was being ditched by Mulder (tick tick, Scully). Stroking her pain, her loss, her frustration with Mulder until she would have cried, if she'd had control of her tear ducts; she would have thrown a tantrum, kicking and screaming, if she'd been able to move her limbs of her own volition. Knowing that it was manipulating her emotions didn't help.

When she was so consumed with rage that she couldn't think, it started to hit her with love. Mulder's arms around her, the fear in his eyes as he pleaded with her mother to let him in, that grin of triumph when they solved a case together and proved that, as a team, they were unbeatable. On and on until there was a black hole in her heart; she felt herself collapsing inward, being sucked into that place beyond the event horizon where Mulder was waiting and would wait forever.

Lacking volition gives one plenty of time to think. She had thought, when she joined the X Files, that the truth would always be available and understandable. That, even if it required hard work to find, in the end there would be one story to tell. It hadn't happened that way, of course, and looking back her expectation seemed hopelessly naive. These days, she'd settle for a modicum of closure: Bad guy dead, or inexplicable events halted at least.

She'd been having some doubts about her skepticism (if that made sense) for a while before this latest morass. Especially out in Arizona, when she was surrounded by people who believed that the world worked exactly the way that it was supposed to, and that taking bribes and dropping trousers was about as bad as government misconduct got. She'd look at them and wonder how they could be so trusting, so confident that bad things happened to people for no good reason.

Scully could sense the alien's amusement at her confusion and fear. Forget abduction, this was a hijacking, and it let her know that she was supposed to be learning something. Just what, it left for her to figure out as it took her on guided tours of her past. The last time they'd stopped for gas, it had replayed for her all her memories of making humiliating mistakes: Mispronouncing "orgasm" in conversation with teenaged-but-quite-experienced Melissa; completely forgetting the telltale signs of Kleinfeldter's Syndrome in front of everyone on rounds; nearly letting that strange man have his way with her; and a catalogue of other embarrassments she'd never managed to erase from her consciousness. When it was through with her, she felt like a totally incompetent fool, and knowing that she was being manipulated helped just about as much as telling herself that no one had really noticed the original mistakes.

Finally, the transfer (and hadn't *that* been a wonderful experience?). She was inexpressibly glad that the alien had controlled her throughout, so that she couldn't admit how much she wanted Mulder to take on the burden of the possession. If she'd been stronger, she would have willed that he be spared it. But all she'd wanted was for the pain to stop, so she'd been thrilled that he'd do this for her. After all this time, to discover herself a weakling, in need of having her battles fought for her -- it was humiliating. It was the alien's next-to-last victory over her.

Unless, of course, they somehow managed to pull Mulder's scheme off and make it out alive.

She sighed and pulled her knees up to her chest, hugging herself. Why did this have to be so complicated? Even with the therapy, Mulder was pretty thoroughly broken. He was like the snake she'd shot so long ago: She wanted to fix him, so desperately that she'd do anything, but it was going against the laws of nature to hope for success.

Then again, some of the things they'd seen went against the laws of nature as she knew them. Maybe insane hope was the proper response to an insane world.

Scully looked up at the stars. Here in the middle of nowhere, the light pollution was at a minimum, and the stars were as thick in the sky as flowers in a well-tended garden -- or as mines on a carefully-laid battlefield. Was the alien's star visible? How long had it traveled, to take her will and her words?

How could any human ally with that thing, knowing what it could do to a person? Knowing that it wanted to take over the world -- if it was even telling the truth; maybe the reality was even worse than the story of a planned colonization. If the truth of this ever came out, there would have to be trials whose revelations would rival those of Nuremberg. Scully was pulled from her reverie when Krycek's pocket began beeping rapidly. He pulled out another device and looked at a readout. "He's cracked the first set of codes," he said. "If he could get that far this fast, we don't have much time. We have to blow it up; we can't wait for Mulder's theory to work."

"I don't think so," Scully said, rising to her feet. He looked up, and stared down the barrel of the gun she'd taken from him.

"I wouldn't shoot if I were you," he said.

"You were always going to kill him," she said.

"Better safe than sorry. Dana, this is a fail-deadly detonator; I have to type a code in every fifteen minutes. If you shoot me, Mulder blows up anyway. Just a few minutes ahead of schedule, that's all. And we should really get further away, if you want to survive."

"What's in there?"

"Besides the oilien spacecraft and the oilien, you mean? Just a little backpack nuke; I borrowed it from the Pentagon, since they weren't using it to defend you against the Red Menace anymore. Good thing another enemy came along, isn't it, or these kinds of weapons might find their way into the wrong hands."

Scully cocked the gun.

"Dana," he said, edging toward desperation, "do you really think I'm lying? I don't want to die here, and I bet you don't either. Is one man's life worth a world's?"

"I don't make those trades," she said, and shot him in the arm.

Sparks flew everywhere as he screamed and dropped the detonator, sliding off the car in an ungraceful heap. Scully walked over to his writhing body and kicked him in the head, three times, until he was still. The prosthetic arm -- she couldn't wait to find out the story about that -- was still twitching and jerking, but she ignored it, picked up the detonator, and headed toward the research facility.

As she ran, she noted that the detonator gave her eight minutes. She aimed for the door that was swinging open, its lock snapped. The alien hadn't felt any need to hide its tracks.

There was enough dust on the floor to help her out. One path had been worn through it, showing the marks of many feet: the endless army of workers that the dark forces commanded, moving the ship, then Krycek, then Mulder and his passenger. She followed their trail to a darkened stairway -- there was the first electronic lock, flashing a pleasant green -- and down.

Two flights down, the stairway opened onto a large underground storage area. It was almost completely dark, except for the purplish glow from the alien spacecraft.

There wasn't any time to examine it, despite her burning desire to look into what had to be a miracle of physics. It was big, black, and incredibly frightening. For once, that was just enough information; maybe more than she wanted to know.

Mulder was never going to let her live this one down. It was hard to imagine what could possibly count as solid evidence of extraterrestrial life if this wouldn't cut it.

Mulder was lying on the cold concrete floor, discarded, twenty feet away. He had a nosebleed.

She hurried over to him, knelt, and tugged at his arm. "Mulder, wake up. I can't carry you. Come on, wake up."

He groaned and batted weakly at her arm with one bruised and bloody hand. The alien had been using his body fairly relentlessly, it seemed. He still wasn't conscious, but he was getting closer.

Five minutes.

She turned him over, picked up his feet, and began dragging him toward the exit. She had no idea how she could get him up the stairs, but she wouldn't leave him behind. He left thin trails of blood from his hands.

Dragging him was difficult, much harder than fifty minutes on the Stairmaster plus free weights. Her back immediately began to ache, and her arms soon joined it. She hoped that she didn't hit a bump; it would probably tear his head off.

Lights were flashing on the massive craft in the middle of the room: pink, green, yellow. They illuminated the odd indented swirls that might be decorative carving or might merely say "This End Up" in Oilien. The lights flickered, dimming, then getting stronger, then blinking off.

Scully saw a curl of pink foam ooze from one of the swirls. Just a few more feet...Mulder's head jolted, and then he woke up.

"Scully?" She dropped his feet as he put a shaky hand to his face. "I don't feel so good." Now he looked like he'd been kissed by a bunch of sloppy women: red blotches everywhere.

"That won't be a problem in a minute, unless you stand up and get the hell out of here," she said, and took his hand to help him up.

He stood, with some effort, and they hurried to the stairs.

Three minutes, the detonator showed as they leapt through the door and hit the hard-packed earth running.

They ran back to the car. Even with her shorter legs, Scully had no problem keeping up with Mulder. His body must have been just about done for.

Krycek was waiting for them, eyes locked on the detonator in Scully's hand.

"You've killed us, you bitch. How does it feel to be responsible for the death of the human race?"

"Shut up, Alex," she replied. "Are you going to put the code in, or do you want to die here and now?"

"I'd rather roast in nuclear fire than have that thing inside me again," he said. "Three lives, and maybe for nothing -- maybe it's already called all the relatives, thanks to you."

Thirty seconds.

Mulder was shaking, unable to stand. He collapsed, curling up into a ball on the ground between Scully and Krycek, holding his knees to his chest.

Fifteen.

Krycek looked down at Mulder with pity and contempt and something Scully couldn't quite identify.

She had a blinding flash of insight. Was this how Mulder's brain worked, filling in the details from small clues he couldn't explain to anyone else? She tapped at the keypad.

"What are you doing?" Krycek screamed. "Stop!" He lunged at her, but Mulder grabbed at his leg as the traitor went over her fallen partner. Krycek might have made it, but his still-twitching metal arm must have thrown off his balance, because it jerked to one side and he went over just as she pressed "Enter."

Scully waited. The world had narrowed to a grey LED screen. The display no longer showed the countdown; it was processing the code she'd entered.

There was a burning smell.

Krycek sagged to the ground.

They didn't blow up.

The counter reset to fifteen minutes again.

Scully tugged Mulder to his feet, then did the same for Krycek.

"Come on," she said. "We've got fifteen minutes."

"Wait," Mulder said. "In there -- the evidence -- " He was pale, shaky, but still on fire with truth-seeking, Scully could tell.

"No," Krycek said. "I sent a message a few hours ago -- if it doesn't blow up within the next half hour, they're going to hit this area with a tactical nuke and fuel-air bombs, for good measure. There's nothing we can save."

Mulder stood, looking back at the building.

Scully took his hand in the lightest of grips, trying to reassure him without damaging him further. "We'll find proof," she said. "I know it. But let's not get killed today, all right?"

They drove away from the research facility at a speed faster than the speedometer would measure. After fifteen minutes, there was a dull boom, and a tiny black cloud appeared on the horizon, blotting out the stars that were already beginning to fade into the dawn.

They stopped the car to look at it. Even Krycek, cradling his still-spasming arm, got out to gawk. They must have made a strange sight: two ragged men and a scruffy woman, standing by the side of the road, shoulders slumped in fatigue, looking back into the near-darkness.

"How is the government going to explain this, I wonder?" Mulder mused.

"Another chemical spill, maybe?"

"Yeah, what happens when all the kids born next year in the state have three heads?"

Krycek turned to them, grimacing. "Don't you know anything, Mulder? That kind of nuke's not much more than a big bag of TNT. Sure, there's more bang for the buck, but it's no Chernobyl. It does a localized job, and there are accepted cleanup tactics. They *were* designed for the European battlefield, you know, and the Army wasn't willing to apply the old 'destroy the village in order to save it' rationale when it was great-granddad's village they were talking about."

"If it's that small, why did you think it would be enough to kill the alien?" Scully asked. "Something that emits radiation apparently at will would probably not be highly vulnerable to nuclear assault."

Krycek shrugged. "Guess it's a good thing for everyone I let Mulder come along."

Mulder turned, and was stepping toward Krycek with mayhem in his eyes when his fatigue caught up with him and he stumbled. For once, he actually thought about his next move. He turned back to Scully instead, and held out his arms.

They hugged, crushing the breath out of each other. Mulder held Scully's head in his hand, pulling her cheek to lie against his chest. They listened to each other's heartbeats slow to normal.

All too soon, Scully pulled away.

He looked down at her, smiling fondly. "Did I ever tell you that you have great eyes? I like them much better white than black."

"Flattery will get you nowhere, Mulder." "So what was the code, Scully?" He leaned in, as if they were discussing a normal investigation.

She smiled sweetly at him. "Let's just say that you have an admirer among the rodent world."

He shot an incredulous glance at Krycek, who just raised his eyebrows.

"Sunflower seeds, Mulder," Krycek said, and Mulder stiffened.

"Ah..." he said sheepishly, releasing Scully, "I hope you don't mind the cover story."

"Considering the results," she said, "I think I'll forgive you. Don't move, Alex," she called out to the man who was not edging toward the car quite subtly enough.

"Look, our arrangement is over. Why don't you -- "

"What's that?" Scully asked, pointing off about forty-five degrees from the slowly-shredding cloud from the explosion. They all peered at the grey smear, barely visible against the predawn sky. It seemed to be getting closer.

"Bees," Mulder wheezed, making one of the intuitive leaps for which he was justly famous. "After us. Get in the car! Close all the windows and the vents and turn the air conditioning on!"

The grey cloud *was* getting closer. It looked as if it was heading for the car of its own volition.

Mulder tried to push Scully towards the car, but lacked the strength. She had to assist him in. Krycek seemed to think that there was no harm in going along with this latest bit of insanity, so he didn't cause trouble.

Sandwiched between the two men, Scully saved most of her attention for Mulder. He was going to need the usual mending and patching, but he'd probably be ok. She peered out of the window, over his slumping body.

"Are you carrying any of that pheromone?" he asked as she buckled him in.

"I didn't exactly get a chance to pack, Mulder," she said. "I'll put it in my utility belt from now on, all right?"

She thought that she could hear a faint buzzing through the glass as the cloud hit ground level, about ten yards from the car. She could see individual bees now at the edges of the swarm, black dots in the air. Krycek turned the key in the ignition, and the car started up.

The first bees hit the windshield, diving straight at the passengers' eyes. They hit the glass with such force that they smashed into it and stuck, oozing bee innards. Scully stared, wide- eyed.

"Air conditioning," Mulder insisted, and Scully turned the controls to maximum.

Now more bees were arriving, and they weren't all sacrificing themselves. They began to land on the windshield, coating it.

"That won't do much until the engine's been running a while," Krycek pointed out.

"Then drive," Scully suggested, trying to ensure that the vents were bee-proof. Krycek hit the gas, throwing her back into the seat, and he spun the car around in a tight, blind turn, then began speeding down the road back the way they'd come. Almost as an afterthought, he turned the windshield wipers on. They swept the window a few times, until they were too clogged with bee corpses to function.

Mulder watched over his shoulder as the bees that hadn't made it to the car yet gave chase. "How fast can bees fly, Scully?"

"I'm a doctor, not an entomologist. But -- " (never let it be said that she'd pass up a chance to give an opinion, however tenuously scientific) " -- they're too small to go very fast very long."

Nothing was crawling through the vents, as far as she could tell. Could bees really figure out how to get into a car? Most of the ones on the windshield had stopped moving entirely; others were blown off by the speed of their passage.

Sure enough, the car pulled away from the pursuing cloud quickly. When the swarm dropped from sight, Mulder chortled.

"What?" Krycek asked, annoyed.

"It's just that this is probably the first *not*-close escape I've had in my career. All the others have been near misses. This is kind of boring."

"Boring?" Scully and Krycek said simultaneously, and exchanged a hitherto unprecedented (perhaps unimaginable) look of complete understanding.

"Tell you what, Mulder," Krycek continued, "I'll let you off here, and you can walk back until you see them again, throw a rock at them, and try to outrun them. Will that make you happy?"

He just chortled again and rolled his head back against the seat. "Home, James," he said airily.

****

If it had been a movie, it would have ended when Mulder and Scully got off the plane and Sam jumped into Mulder's arms.

But it wasn't, and she didn't.

Instead, when they'd gotten a little further from the alien's corpse and attendant devastation, Mulder called Mrs. Scully on his cellphone. She answered on the third ring.

"Mrs. Scully?"

"Hello, Fox." She sounded cooler, more distant than usual. It was late in Maryland; he'd undoubtedly woken her.

"How is Sam doing? Can I speak to her?"

"I'm not sure how she is. You'd have to call the hospital to see if there's been any change since I left, a few hours ago."

"She's still there?"

"Fox, she hasn't been conscious since she arrived. The doctors say there's no reason for it, but she's catatonic."

It was perhaps not surprising that Mulder and Scully were not paying enough attention to prevent Krycek from slipping away at the airport.

* * *

They stopped in at Quantico just long enough to pick up a supply of the pheromone; Mulder insisted on it. He wouldn't go to the hospital without it, and Scully was very much afraid that he was right. She planned to stay in her office to write a report that might possibly enable them to keep their jobs and to give Mulder some time with Sam. Frankly, she wasn't sure that she was ready to face the little girl from whom had spewed that *thing*.

The pheromone was still in the refrigerator where she'd left it, and Scully gave Mulder a spritzer she'd made from an empty perfume bottle.

When she handed the bottle to him, he'd given her a look that let her know that he considered perfume a threat to his masculinity.

"It may smell a little like White Shoulders from the bottle, but the natural smell of the concentrate is a lot like Pine-Sol, so consider yourself lucky. It could be worse; bee sexual pheromones smell like Lemon Pledge."

Scully had checked their other evidence before she began her report. All of the bees, dead and simply frozen, were gone. Unsurprising, but grim nonetheless. If anything, the continued safety of the pheremone argued for the theory that they still had a friend in the secret government.

* * *

When Mulder arrived at the hospital, Skinner was with Sam. Mulder wasn't very surprised; he'd known that Skinner was looking for a reason to keep living. With his wife gone and his soul sold to the devil, Skinner seemed to think that victory in Mulder's quest might somehow justify what his life had become.

And children can make one so very hopeful.

"Agent Mulder, am I to understand that you left this child while she was sick, without letting anyone know where you were going and without reporting in until now? I suppose I should have expected it from you, but Agent Scully..."

"Agent Scully was indisposed, sir."

Skinner's eyes narrowed. "A relapse?"

"Well, no -- do you want me to tell you what happened, or would you like something that you could believe?"

"I'm going to ignore the incipient insubordination of that remark and just ask for the truth."

"All right, but don't say that I didn't warn you. Sam was, until a few days ago, inhabited by one of the alien creatures of the kind that was on the downed submarine we investigated a few years back -- the one connected with Alex Krycek's disappearance after we went to Hong Kong. When its safety was threatened, the alien transferred into Scully, intending to return to its ship and carry out its undoubtedly nefarious purposes. Krycek was dispatched to kill it; I persuaded him to try a tactic that might save Scully; it did; the alien is dead and the evidence is, of course, destroyed."

"*That's* the best you can do? Couldn't you think up some more plausible bullshit?"

"I'm not at my peak right now," Mulder said, indicating the still form on the bed. Sam hadn't moved or made any sign that she was aware of their presence. "I think that when the alien left her, it may have done more damage to her mind than it did to the adults it used, because it had been with her for so long and from such a young age."

"Do you think she'll recover?"

Mulder sighed, and finally crossed the room to take his sister's hand. "I wish I knew."

"You don't deserve her."

Mulder looked at the older man. "You'd know, of course. You've been in the smoking man's pocket so long there's lint instead of hair on your head."

"I believed that it was the wisest thing to do, under the circumstances. But it seems that even your good fortune gets the better of you, Agent Mulder. I wish you luck. You'll need it."

Skinner left.

Mulder pulled up a chair, and settled in to wait for a miracle.

* * *

Waiting in silence was never his strong suit. Eventually, he began to talk to her. He described the flowers blinding the window, cheerful and grotesque arrangements sent by the various Gunmen. He told her stories he'd once read -- lots of Isaac Asimov, the shaggy-dog stories with the groan-worthy punchlines, until the lack of giggles got to him and he switched to Tolkien.

After a while, he just talked.

"You know," he said to the still form on the bed, "it's like I keep climbing this ladder. Every time I reach another rung, I think 'This is it. Now I've found the truth, now I can stop looking.' But it's never the top, and I've climbed so high I can barely breathe and I still can't see Scully's heaven. Maybe the ladder never stops; maybe it just goes on and on until it comes to the place it started from, and I'll be climbing in circles forever."

Scully's voice, coming from the door behind him, cut through him like a sword. "You can't stop climbing." He heard her move across the floor, and she put her hand on his shoulder. "If you stop climbing, everything about you that makes you who you are would disappear. And we're so far up now -- it's too late to think about going back."

He reached up across his chest to clasp her hand. "Do you regret it?"

"I regret that the evil we've seen exists. I don't regret a single step I took with you."

"What if she doesn't wake up?" he whispered.

"We'll still love her. And we'll expose the truth for her. For everyone hurt along the way."

She came around the chair and let him hug her. He buried his face in her stomach, just for a moment, and then let her go. Relentless as a bulldozer, Scully was. She'd be with him, whatever happened next. And somehow, that made reaching the next rung easier.

"Scully?"

She pressed him to her more closely. "Shh, Mulder. Don't say anything you won't want to face later."

He chuckled ruefully, muffled by the fabric of her suit. "Sometimes I think you know me too well."

"Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever know you at all."

"As long as there's room on that ladder for both of us."

She ran a hand through his hair. "If not," she whispered, and he could feel her, alive and breathing and perfect, "we'll just get a wider ladder."

* * *

Scully pulled up a chair, and by the time an hour had passed she was dozing on Mulder's shoulder. She and Sam seemed to breathe in tandem, the slow, noisy breaths of the unconscious and sleeping.

After a while, a nurse came in and opened a cabinet on the far side of the room, next to the bathroom door, and removed a blanket which she laid carefully on Scully. The thin blue blanket covered Scully from her sneaker-clad feet, brushing against the floor, to her determined chin. Mulder smiled gratefully at the nurse, who winked at him and left, lowering the lights on her way out.

He was almost ready to doze off himself when a black spot at the edge of his vision caused him to come awake.

He thought it was a trick of the dim light at first, like chairs turning into monsters, but then he saw another. The bees were crawling from a ventilation duct above Sam's bed. Mulder reached into his pocket for the perfume bottle, moving his hand as slowly as possible. He wished that he'd asked Scully to lecture at greater length about bee abilities, since he had no idea whether they could see well in the dark, or whether they tracked other creatures by smell, motion, or something else. He was sweating profusely, terrified by the realization that the only people in the world who mattered to him were under attack, and completely vulnerable.

"Scully!" he hissed as he doused Sam and her bed in a mist of pheromone. He could barely work the small sprayer with his bruised and scratched hands, courtesy of the oilien; his finger kept slipping off the bottle. Scully stirred, and he grasped at her arm to still her.

Unfortunately, she was not good at waking silently and instantaneously, and she murmured and pushed at him.

The perfume bottle slipped from his blood- and sweat-slick hand and shattered on the tile floor, sending a spume of liquid up into his eyes and mouth, soaking him -- but providing no protection whatsoever to Scully.

The noise made her wake up fully, and she rose from the chair, grabbing at her gun.

Mulder saw no choice in the matter; he threw himself on top of her, knocking the chairs to one side and pushing her down to the floor. He tried to cover her completely with his pheromone- protected body. At first he thought that his clothes might transfer some of the liquid onto her, but then he realized that the damn blanket had insulated her from any leakage. He had no idea how many bees were in the room by now, but he thought that he could hear buzzing over Scully's protests.

"Scully, don't move," he ordered, trying to find her ear beneath the tangled cloud of hair at his chin. "There are bees in the room, and I dropped the bottle and broke it so there's nothing to protect you. I'm going to stay on top of you, ok?"

She stilled, and he could feel her thinking furiously, going from a sleepy haze to total concentration in seconds.

"They'll still be able to crawl under you," she whispered, muffled by his shirt. "Where are they?"

He twisted his head around and looked at the wall. From his angle on the floor, only a small section above Sam's bed was visible. He saw a mass of bees hanging on to the vent; a few were venturing downwards, toward the monitoring equipment, but none were flying around.

"Not doing much now," he said. "We might have a minute before there's enough of them to swarm and attack."

"Can you reach the cabinet next to the bathroom? I'll be safer inside, if there are no big holes."

Mulder stretched out his arm, trying not to crush Scully or expose her to the bees' attentions. His fingers brushed the bottom of the cabinet door. He tilted himself a little further over her, silently apologizing for getting her in this mess, and then he got three fingertips around the door and pulled. It was the kind that closed with a magnetic latch, so, after a few painful attempts, he was finally able to make it swing open.

"When I roll off you, you get in. On three, one, two, three!"

Mulder rolled toward the bed, vaguely hoping that the bees would see him coming nearer and attack him if they picked on anyone, and Scully scrambled for the cabinet.

Then she was in, and he slammed the cabinet door on her and he'd never been so incredibly grateful that she was tiny.

"Remember, Mulder," her voice came through the door, barely audible, "the pheromone isn't an antidote to the super- smallpox. Don't make them mad. Leave them alone and they'll do the same for you."

"We can't just let them live peacefully in the middle of the hospital," he said harshly, speaking to the edge of the cabinet door in hopes that she could hear him. "They'll kill indiscriminately."

He heard clunking and banging -- a muffled "ow!" -- and then, faintly, the familiar noise of a cell phone being dialed. Mulder smiled in the near-darkness, praising the inventor of glow-in-the- dark buttons.

Still leaning against the cabinet door, Mulder watched as the bees circled, looking for something to attack. He didn't move (he'd decided to try a new strategy: taking Scully's advice), and Sam wasn't going anywhere. The bees continued to flow into the room, but seemed nonplussed once there. They flew in small circles above the vent, occasionally venturing further into the room but then returning. The cluster on the wall grew into what must have been thousands. Scully had calmly given her badge number and called for an extermination team and an evacuation of the hospital floor, and from her increasingly detailed instructions it sounded as if she were actually being taken seriously.

"...Pink and white, because bees react better to those colors," Mulder heard as a bee finally decided to make a run at his head. He closed his eyes and thought that he felt the wind of its little wings as it swooped over him. After a few seconds, he opened them again, and it was gone, lost in the burgeoning mass over the bed.

A few of the bees began to investigate the flower arrangements on the windowsill. He thought that, all in all, a hospital wasn't a terrible place for bees to live, since they'd have constant access to fresh flower arrangements. They really seemed to like the daffodils, the most cheerful flower in creation, but they essentially ignored the lilies.

With an effort of will, he dragged his attention away from the flowers. Watching wonders of nature was not going to keep them all alive.

He could hear sounds from the hall now, drowning out Scully's continued orchestration of the situation from her tiny cell. People moving -- someone was reminding them to keep their voices down, even as other voices were raised in hysteria. Wheels rattling and squeaking had to be patients being moved -- God, this was a children's ward, he'd put that out of his mind entirely, and children were the most vulnerable of all to smallpox.

Just when he thought that things were going to be all right -- the noise from the hall was dying down, and Scully's conversation was sounding more and more encouraging -- the bees on the wall finally reached a critical mass, and a cluster of them fell, landing on Sam's bed with an audible splat.

Mulder was frozen in horror as they crawled over the bed, seemingly dazed by the fall. Some tried to fly back up but didn't get far; others simply began walking over the white sheets, exploring.

If he lunged for them and tried to sweep them off of her, she could get stung in the confusion. But the longer they stayed on her, the more likely it was that they'd just sting her on general principles.

A fat bee crawled over her right hand, limp and vulnerable outside of the covers. Over the thumb, then back on the sheet, then the index finger -- the sheet -- the middle finger -- the sheet -- it crawled *up* the ring finger, over the knuckle, into the webbing between ring and pinky -- then off.

Mulder would have welcomed a heart attack. Other bees were straying toward her hands, her neck and face.

What if the exterminators burst in and frightened the bees? They might attack the first available victim, protective pheromones or no.

Grimly, he stood and edged toward the bed, hoping that they wouldn't take it as a challenge. There were no bees on her hands at the moment, so he took the sheet by its top edge, his hands grazing her fragile shoulders, and slowly pulled it down, trying to roll the bees along with the sheet.

Carefully pulling the sheet, hands spread far enough apart to leave a place for them to collect in the middle, he peeled it slowly off of his sister's motionless body. The bees' activity level stayed the same, though now some of them were crawling toward his own hands -- not a concern, unless they went over and back onto Sam's now unprotected body.

Behind him, from the cabinet, Scully was making inquisitive noises; he put her out of his mind and concentrated on pulling evenly, nonthreateningly. Over her waist, now; the hospital gown ended and there were Sam's knobby knees, still scabbed from that big fall she'd taken at soccer practice only last week. Finally there were her perfect feet, and he gathered the sheet into a bag of bees, pulling out the bottom corners of the sheet to place the contents carefully on the floor.

Then he backed away and looked up for the first time in what had to have been hours.

Bees were no longer coming through the vent. They were milling about aimlessly, buzzing a little and then retreating into silence. Well, he was uncertain too.

Mulder took off his jacket and laid it over Sam, to give her some more protection.

The door burst open and the exterminators charged in, spewing their blessed poison.

The bees instantly swarmed, attacking the white-suited invaders ferociously even through the insecticidal haze, but they were no match for the quantity of gas thrown at them.

Mulder just sagged down on the bed and watched, unable to react beyond putting his arm around Sam and waving the fog away when it began to interfere with her breathing. Being in this room, practically bathing in insecticide, was probably not the healthiest thing for her, but that didn't seem like a central concern at the moment.

Mulder's shell-shock made it necessary for Skinner, who'd appeared as soon as the men in white confirmed that they couldn't find any more live bees in the vent, to open the cabinet and let Scully out. He barely noticed Skinner's solicitous behavior toward Scully -- giving her a hand, guiding her out of the room with a hand on her shoulder -- as the doctors began to check Samantha's condition. They wanted to give her oxygen because of the insecticide, and he moved off of the bed to let them work.

As a professional, he recognized several symptoms of shock in his behavior, especially his calm detachment, but he didn't really want to break down right now, so he decided to ride it out. He could break something (himself, maybe) when he got home.

He drifted out into the hall, where Scully was explaining what had happened to Skinner and several people in lab coats. CDC, maybe?

"Agent Mulder?" Skinner saw him emerge from Sam's room, and waved him over.

Scully took one look at him and moved to put her arm around his waist, breaking off in the middle of a multisyllabic monologue.

"It's all right, Mulder," she said, ignoring everyone else. "She's safe."

"Too close," he said, and then surprised himself by fainting.

* * *

The next thing he saw was Scully's face, filling his entire field of vision. She was sideways. <Why, Dr. Scully, what big eyes you have,> he thought, and giggled.

"Hey there, sleepyhead," Scully said. "Want to share the joke?" She pulled back and he turned his head to follow her, deciding as he looked beyond her that he must be in a hospital bed.

"Sam's all right," she said, before he could ask. "No worse, anyway. One of the nurses thought he heard her say some words while she was being moved, but there was a lot of activity going on at the time and you shouldn't necessarily put much stock in that."

Scully handed him a glass of water with a straw sticking out of it. He tried to bring a hand up to take it, but saw that his regular hands had been replaced with fluffy white paws -- bandages. She held the glass under his chin and carefully bent the straw until he could reach it.

He tried to drink quickly, so that she wouldn't have to hold the glass in such an awkward position, but then he nearly choked, and he decided that she'd prefer cramps to Mulder-recycled water.

When he was done, she put the glass on a tray to one side of the bed.

"How are you feeling?" she asked.

"Better. I'm sorry I dropped the bottle, Scully."

"I've had more pleasant accomodations," she said drily, "but it wasn't your fault, Mulder. The, uh, the alien treated you pretty badly. I'm just glad that cabinet was nearly empty."

"I hid in a cabinet once, too, you know." She looked at him inquisitively. "I was nine, Sam was six, and Dad was mad, not that the last describes a particular timeframe. I knew he would hit me if he caught me, so I determined not to get caught. I hid under the sink...I can still smell the banana skins and meatloaf scrapings from the trash can. I put my arm in my mouth and bit down hard so that I wouldn't throw up. He was calling for me and he came into the kitchen just as I'd shut the cabinet door. I was shaking so badly, I knocked over a can of oven cleaner, but he was stomping out and he didn't hear.

"He found Sam instead. I learned a big lesson that day. After that -- I didn't always keep her safe. But if she got hit, I was always there to get hit more, so that it would be as easy as possible for her. I taught her to hide when she could, and I'd come when he called. She'd hide in the dryer, because she was little enough to fit in; he never once looked in there."

Scully's left hand had come up, covering her mouth. She shook her head, and the tears in her eyes spilled onto her face at the motion.

"Hey," he said, trying to lighten the mood, "it was a long time ago. Now I have a whole new reason to be grateful to cabinets."

She still couldn't speak. She leant down to hug him, awkwardly, not putting any of her weight on the bed. He patted her back with his clumsy, gauze-covered hands, breathing in the unique spice-and-liniment smell he knew so well.

"We're going to beat them, I swear," she said into his neck. He rubbed his jaw against her cheek, feeling two days' beard rasp against her smooth skin.

Too soon, she straightened up. But there was a new gleam of determination, and even hope, in her eyes.

"Get some rest, Mulder," she said fondly. "Big day tomorrow. Skinner and I have some ideas about keeping Sam safe while we figure out what in hell's name is going on. We made the *Washington Post* with last night's attack. It's time to bring this out into the open."

END

Author's notes: This began as an exercise, essentially: write something that would be mostly Mulder. Nobody could have been more surprised than I when the oilien swam across Sam's eyes. Thanks to CiCi Lean and Jill Selby, who read parts as this got more convoluted.