Disclaimers, etc. w/ first part.

10/12

My mind didn't have the mercy to let me wake up dumb to the facts. The pain would've made that impossible anyway. The moment I stirred, it moved through me like an electrical current. I just laid there, wondering when my eyes were going to open and take it all in. Was I scared to open them? They *were* open. It was the room that was black. Or I was blind.

"Are you awake?"

Startled, I sat upright, wincing instantly. My groan of agony sounded exaggerated in the ringing silence. "Who's there?"

"Three guesses," answered the darkness. I smelled the match before it sprang to flame and his face was cast in orange, the rest of the room thrown into shadows. Black had morphed into hell, and I preferred not seeing. Krycek let the flame lick at his skin for a second before his sharp exhale made the darkness again. My eyes were beginning to adjust, and I didn't hurry the process.

"Welcome to decontamination," he said, and a soft echo rose up from the floor. My fingers stumbled across it. Some sort of soft vinyl material. The walls were the same. Not a padded room, but not far from it.

I was trying to listen. There was some sound, nagging at the edges. I couldn't place it. Then suddenly, the sound exploded in my ears, like a door had been opened and let it creep into the corridor just beyond the wall. It took on breathing, throbbing life of its own. The only voice that terror had, whipped up from the mouths of children. Like the match in his fingers, it was puffed out. The open door had closed.

"Great," Krycek muttered angrily. "We're right next to the children's ward. We're not going to get one minute of sleep. They're going to be in and out of there all fucking night."

"Children's ward?" Those words had never evoked actual distress in me. Whatever this room was, we were trapped in it together, or I think I would've already killed him -- if I could move. "Where are we?"

He sounded tired. Bored. As if he had explained this already. "NeuroMast, I'm sure. It's the only one I've been in where the decon quarters are this large. And one of the only two with an actual children's ward. So unless they drove us all the way to Maine, we're still in Nebraska. You wearing a watch?"

I cuffed one wrist with my fingers, ignoring the bone-on-bone rub in my shoulder. "I did. It's gone now."

"Sometimes they forget. It's a good sign when they take the things away." He struck another match. "When they put everything back on...that's when you should worry. That means they're going to dump you somewhere for the police or the crows to find you, whichever comes first. Got worried when I found the matches. Not that it matters." Dropping the burning stick on the floor, the bright orange of the fire extinguished quickly, leaving a nasty smell behind like melted plastic. "Flame-retardant."

"You've been here before."

"Years and years ago, over and over again." The matches rattled in the box as if he were tossing them from hand to hand. "I've tried to peg it down to a number of days. Actual time served." He laughed emptily. "I don't think it's possible." The light flared again, to show an expression totally disparate from the laugh that still hung in the air. "I hate it here."

My god. He was *scared*. I'd seen the expression before. But this wasn't Augustus Cole, holding a Bible for me that looked like a gun to Krycek. This was horror.

It felt like just five minutes ago, we were gassed into submission, right before someone drummed me in the skull with a steel toe. I tried to remember what kind of shoes McGrath had been wearing. "How many days has it been?"

"That's why I was asking if you had a watch...that kind now that has the date. Two to five days, but I can't narrow it down." The matches stopped rattling. "I don't even know how they sprayed that stuff without even being in the house. I think they finally made it where it'll find its own way into the house. Artificial life. I would've smelled the dust and I would've heard the spray. Who knows what these assholes can do now? The end result is still the same. Temporary braindeath. You'll never know what happened the past few days. It won't even come back to you in slivers. It's gone."

He babbled on like that, as if the silence itself would've forced him to insanity. So I said nothing for as long as I could. Anger was held in check by nausea. Days. Actual days had passed? Scully --

I sat up now, pain be damned. He was faintly visible from where I sat. Scully had to be going out of her mind with worry, not that this was anything new where I was concerned. Most of the times before, I'd been able to call her and didn't. Now I wasn't able, and all I could share was the fear. Three months of it precisely, drawn and compounded.

The door beyond the wall opened again. Screams and howls, sobbing and shrieking. It wrenched itself into me. With a sigh of hydraulics, it was again closed.

"Children," I said, fighting the stammer in my own voice. "What do they do with them?"

"You heard the door just now. Use your imagination."

That was the *last* thing I wanted to do. "Tests?"

He turned to me now, and I could make out a vague blur of his facial features. "Yeah. Different ones for the boys and the girls though. The boys get the power tests, the intelligence alterations, the chemicals. The girls get the worst part, from what I've heard. They're mostly just the test vessels. That's how I've heard them say it, that they couldn't make a tough girl, just break one. At least that's what I thought, till your fucking sister kicked my ass." He ran his thumb along a gash parallel to his hairline, red and black with scabbing. "They started teaching the girls how to fight."

"So she is my sister."

"I wouldn't be here right now if she wasn't." He picked up his other arm so that it sat stiffly across his knees. "And I probably wouldn't be here if it wasn't for you."

"You're welcome," I said, no stammer now to my rage. "Anytime. So what did you do with her?"

He snorted. "I now have no more idea of where she's at than you do, since they came in with their damn gas. I'm sure she's back safe, wherever they keep her."

They keep her in a nice suburban house, I thought to myself. No way were they keeping her there now that Krycek and I both had figured out who she really was.

I flattened my back to the wall, and it alleviated some of the pain. "You were abducted too? You've had the tests?"

"Yeah," he rasped, trying to reel himself back in. "Wasn't what you'd call a first-round draft pick, if you know what I mean, but better than most. The tests themselves weren't as bad as the gaunting -- that's, that's what we called it, because we'd seen other boys who'd survived it, and the were always just skin stretched over bone, like the Holocaust kids. They did our gaunting when I was six. All twenty-three of our group, and only me and one other kid made it through. They said I only made it because I was young enough, resilient enough. But I didn't really make it. I was sick for a whole year afterwards each time, so they never used me. The other kid, though -- Kurt. Flying colors. After that, it became common knowledge that only one or two were gonna make it. I made it through one more before I ran away. Of course, you can't really stay gone. They won't let you."

Kurt. My mind was racing. Kurt Crawford. "Where do they get the kids?"

"You know where they get us!" He snapped, and caught himself, running his fingers through his "Right out of our parents' arms. You can't have all those empty orphanages without someone blowing the whistle, but kids from happy families...they go missing every fucking day." He jerked another match across the flint angrily. "My dad was with the KGB. He was one of three Russian consorts to the Project, and I was the kid he didn't think was his. No DNA testing back then to prove otherwise, so off I went." The match burned down and he snapped another, flare of the heat not keeping up with the flare of his words. It was suddenly as if he spied the open book he was and slammed himself shut. "All the Project men...they have a kid in the pot. A couple of them have grandkids."

In the pot. As if the whole horrid mess could be raffled off to the winning ticket. "You were singing a different song not so long ago."

"What I do is only for myself."

"That's not how I recall it." I leaned forward fiercely. "If you're free now it's because an SUV exploded in an alley in D.C., or because the last smoke to come out of that motherfucker came through the hole I put in his head."

The match lit now burned calmly. "It really was you, then? You really did shoot the bastard?" He laughed. "Didn't think you had it in you. I heard rumors though. But I hadn't heeded an order of his for at least two years prior to that, even it looked like I did. I had them so jerked around they didn't even realize I was the one making work for them."

"So why Samantha? Why now? Some childish act of rebellion?"

"Because I *found* her." His eyes glittered, covered by some sort of milky film. "My ace in the hole. She would've opened every locked door to every government secret in this *land* for me. She's the only woman to have survived the gaunting. Survived her sixth one last month. Six gauntings. She's strong. But that's exactly why I thought she couldn't put up a fight. Even Kurt...he wasn't sick, but he was weak."

"The gaunting...it's the cloning. They clone every five years." Shit. No wonder. My mind drifted to the medicine cabinet again, to the article in the paper in 1993, which ran after the procedure, and then the one in December, exactly five years later.

"The cloning," he said, in agreement. "It makes no sense for us to call it that. Too hard to wrap our minds around it. But we're not in trouble yet." He'd run out of matches, and now just scrubbed his thumbnail against the side of the box. "The day they get the Samanthas and Kurts to have anything resembling reproductive sex, we're doomed. And if the colonists find out how to accomplish it first, we're dead. But that's the beauty of it. That's going to be their demise. They can't. The tests they have to run for the gaunting on the girls maim or destroy the reproductive organs. That's why they have all those kids in there right now. Trying to find the girl with the iron uterus who can withstand that shit."

My stomach turned. "Then why are they taking grown women who have nothing to do with the Project? Why are they experimenting on them?"

"Don't you get it?" He shook his head. "At first it was to see if they could transplant the sexual organs into the girls who've lost them. Samantha's belly is criss-crossed with scars from where they've yanked hers out and tried to put new ones in. Mengele could've told them how useful *that* was. After that, I don't know. After that, it just became some sort of research free-for-all. They need the ovum for the gauntings. If a new test killed the grown women, they wouldn't use it on the kids." He shrugged. "These medical labs fight over grant money like they're Ivy League professors trying to exhume dead presidents. The ethic's the same."

"You could be just as full of bullshit as they are." I sat up straight, new strength bounding through me. "More lies. Why are you telling me this?"

"It's what you wanted to know, isn't it?" He was bleeding now, from somewhere. It dripped on the prosthetic's thumb. "I thought you deserved at least what little I know of the truth before you died."

"No one's going to die," I insisted. "Scully's going to find out soon what happened. All she has to do is go to Pam Wyeth's house, untrap a few frames of camera footage and she'll rain hell on this place if she has to."

"Can't even save yourself." He laughed under his breath. "Scully's not coming. No one's coming."

The words meant nothing to me. It was the silence that followed that left me cold. He was waiting for the question. I didn't ask it. It screamed through me.

"You know, Mulder, you should *really* learn to talk to people." He rubbed at his eyes. "I talk to Jonson, for what? Twenty minutes. I'll bet you don't know that his wife is screwing around on him with a guy who has more money, right under his nose too, but he really loves her. Or that his little girl -- she's seven, by the way. Her name is Kimberly -- has spinobifida, and has to get a very expensive pair of leg braces every few months because she's growing so fast and they want her to walk again. I'll bet you didn't know a word of that. And here he is, in Nebraska, working way under scale for you because it was one of the Senator's dying wishes...wondering how he can afford that next set of leg braces on what you pay him without having to quit and lose the job altogether." Krycek smiled, tossing the empty matchbox towards me. "He was very easily bought."

I sat back, stunned.

"Scully's the only one who survived the cancer. All of the other subjects died. They want to know what's so special about her and isolate it. She had a $50,000 bounty on her head. Of course, the one on Samantha's would've been much higher and I wouldn't have to give Jonson a cut, but I'll take what I can get."

It was as if I thought I could talk him out of it. "She survived because we put the chip back in!"

"A chip?" He scoffed. "In her neck? Microchips don't cure cancer, Mulder. It's just a homing device in case they misplace her. Resilience is the reason she survived. They admire resilience in their test vessels."

I don't know where I found the energy, or the ability, but I lunged for him. He had more strength. He'd done this before. He pinned my throat with the prosthetic.

"We're all evil, Mulder. There are no good guys. In the end, whoever has the gun wins. Just remember that you got yourself into this. You're supposed to be out in North Dakota by now, laying where they left you when they took her."

I fought to breathe, but only wheezing came.

He moved the arm, testing me.

"I don't need a fucking gun." My own voice scared me, coming through the bruises, and the two ribs that I thought might be broken to resonate with a will I didn't know I had.

The first punch knocked him out completely. But I kept hitting him, harder and harder, thinking of her face. Thinking of how she'd just laid there, all that apparatus taped to her, bag inflating and deflating with the manufactured rise and fall of her chest. She was broken like glass. Snuffed like a match.

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