Title: Pieces of Eight
Series: Kismet Unchained, fourth in the series -- whoohoo!
Coupling/Genre: Alex/Isabel Courtney/Michael Kyle/Tess Liz/Max Maria/Other (in approximate alphabetical order.)
Rating: MATURE
Disclaimer: I didn't create 'Roswell', I didn't make it a TV series, I didn't originate these characters or plots -- I'm just adapting them.
Summary: Michael discovers some important alien thing is happening in Houston, Texas, and brings about half of the gang along to investigate. Meanwhile, others get involved in a mystery closer to home...
Author's note: Thanks for all the support from everyone as this series continues. This fic is my alternate for 'Meet the Dupes,' which will probably tell you a lot. It is also continuing my entry in NaNoWriMo 2005.
Kismet unchained so far: (Previous titles are links.)
- Not Written Yet. (corresponds to 'End of the World')
- Husk Funeral. (corresponds to 'Harvest')
- The Big One. (corresponds to 'Wipeout', kinda.)
- Pieces of Eight. (corresponds to 'Meet the Dupes')
"It's definitely Houston," Michael announced as he climbed through the window of Max Evans' bedroom.
"Houston?" Max repeated, looking up from his computer desk and frowning a bit. "As in... 'Houston, we have a problem'??"
Max didn't want to have a problem. It hadn't even quite been a week since the Harvest Ball at their school. Given that said school happened to be on the west side of Roswell, New Mexico, the UFO capital of the country, it might not seem that big a deal that evil aliens had stormed the dance, held most of the students and chaperones hostage in their formal duds, and chased Max and his friends around the school grounds for about an hour, trying to kill them. But still, it definitely hadn't met Max's usual definition of a fun time, and he'd been hoping that a little more time would pass without hairy alien danger.
"Um, no, not really," Michael told him. "Houston as in actually Houston, the city. In Texas."
"Umm, okay then..." Max frowned slightly. "What about Houston, then?"
Michael opened his mouth quickly as if to reply, then seemed to be having trouble exactly what it was that he would say. (Anyone suggesting that it would make more sense to figure such things out BEFORE opening one's mouth was missing the point, and had never met Michael. Thinking first had never really been a habit that he'd developed.) Finally, he seemed to get something put together.
"You remember that alien tracking gizmo that Liz got from Whittaker's office, right?" Max remembered, and nodded. "Okay, well, when Nicholas ran away, the 'mysterious interference' that was keeping us from getting a decent reading on the thing disappeared, and I managed to figure out a way to get it to work at long ranges - like interstate distances. For a long while I wasn't quite sure of what I was seeing, because it doesn't also display landmarks or borders or anything else really, just alien energy signatures, and it's a tiny little readout space anyway."
Max smiled slightly - at least now he had some notion what Michael was talking about. "But you've worked it out, and there's something in Houston?"
"Alex helped," Michael mentioned, with that slightly teasing grin that Max recognized - now that Michael knew he was interested, he was stalling on getting to the good stuff. "Rigged up a computerized camera to record the tritium display and analyze it in more detail than humanly possible. After figuring out the north-south orientation was exactly the same as whatever way the pentagon was facing, it was just a question of playing around with scales until we found one that would fit... that would put a cluster of alien beings back in Copper Summit, Arizona, for instance."
Max just sighed slightly at this point, knowing that it would irritate Michael a bit.
"Okay, okay, Houston," he continued. "It's not just a question of something *being* in Houston, as much as something HAPPENING. There's been a bunch of activity, different alien signatures coming into town from different directions and at different speeds, and others leaving. Not as many leaving as arriving."
Max thought about that. "Some kind of conference? The number of aliens there more or less increasing over time?"
Michael shook his head. "No, the number of signatures is NOT clearly increasing over time. Some are fading out there in Houston."
Max's breath caught. "So aliens are dying there. Maybe it's some kind of battle still going on."
"Yeah," Michael agreed. "And the question is... what do we do about it?? Do we want to find out what they're fighting over, or not?"
"Hwooo." Max pondered that for a moment, but couldn't think of an answer. "I think we need to widen the discussion on this. I'll round up the usual suspects."
"I can help make phone calls," Michael said.
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"Okay, my turn to start," Isabel said, and let out a breath while she considered. "Green."
"Giant," Alex replied quickly.
Isabel giggled. "Okay. Giant... panda."
"Virus," Alex replied, brushing a bit of Isabel's golden hair aside. Isabel shot him a look. "It's a computer thing," he explained.
"Alright... flu."
"Eagle."
Isabel took a moment to see the link there, and laughed again. They were on the couch in the rec room of Isabel's house, both contentedly laying back, Isabel resting against Alex's chest. "Double."
"Triple," Alex answered after a moment.
"Trouble." At just that moment her cell phone rang, and Isabel shifted position to get it out of her pocket. "Ooops, I think maybe I jinxed us," she muttered to Alex before pressing the talk button.
Alex had a notion what she meant. Since discovering that aliens were real,Roswell had become a place where you had to be very careful to avoid danger and strangeness, and that situation seemed to lend itself naturally to superstition. Saying the word trouble and then having the concept materialize in your life a few seconds was exactly the kind of coincidence that could get anybody believing that jinxes were real.
"Umm, okay," Isabel was saying into the phone meanwhile, and Alex realized that he had zoned out into his thoughts for a moment. "We, um, we'll be there."
"Be where?" Alex asked, running through the possible answers. The crashdown cafe, or Whittaker's office maybe? No, they'd finally changed the locks there and Max had decided it wouldn't be a good idea to sneak in.
"Michael's apartment." Isabel sighed. "Apparently... it's Houston."
----------
"Come on... you have to know something." Tess sighed, and Liz and Maria shared a helpless look. They still weren't too comfortable hanging around with Tess, but she had asked for their help while they were hanging around in the Crashdown dining room waiting for their shifts to start and grabbing some snacks. "You've known Kyle for years... Liz, you dated him for, what... umm, err--"
"Four and a half months," Liz supplied the correct figure with a sigh. "Most of which was just a summer fling, and not really the kind of thing you should be shooting for, and, umm... well, Kyle's a very different person now."
"Yeah," Maria chimed in supportively. "I mean, I can hardly even understand him anymore when he goes off on his Buddhism kick, and..."
"You don't understand," Tess accused with a sigh. "Everything is completely different now, and I'm freaked. You got me into this, Liz, with your suggestion to 'make a big gesture' and show Kyle that I wasn't ashamed of liking him. So I did. The thing is, now he wants to actually *date*, instead of, well... you-know. In public... well, semi-public. Neither of us are quite ready for any of this to get back to his dad."
"Out of curiosity," Maria asked, "did you ever date before you came to Roswell?? We know that you were in a few different high schools, but..."
"A little, yeah," she admitted. "Never really meant anything to me, just kind of -- well, protective camoflage I guess. A pretty girl who doesn't go out on dates attracts attention, specualtion, rumors. Eh... Nasedo always insisted that we fly under the radar." She sighed. "The first time I ever really liked a guy at school, Nasedo told me that I had to keep my heart pure for Max. Boy, didn't *that* work out well."
Liz smiled slightly. She still felt uneasy around Tess, no matter how clear she was about having given up on trying to win Max away from Liz, but they'd all have to find better ways of getting along and working together... and learning more about each other's backgrounds seemed like a good place to start. "That's something that's, well, that's always puzzled me a bit, Tess. Did... well, the guy that *we* refer to as Nasedo, did you actually call him that when you were growing up?? It seems a little unlikely that he'd pick an Mesaliko word that some kid out on a reservation used to call him and use that with you. We just started using it because we first really found out about him from RIver Dog."
Tess smiled, and answered quietly. "I called him that a bit around the end... he asked me to. He'd found out that you guys knew about that name, I guess, and he wanted me to be like you that way. But no, until he was almost ready to take me to Roswell, I called him, umm... Ed mostly. He didn't like me calling him Daddy or Father or anything except when someone else was around, because he wasn't my real father and didn't want me to start thinking that he was. We talked about it a little when I was little, I seem to remember, and kind of decided that anything else would get too confusing."
"Okay, ummm, so... date ideas." Liz sighed. "Well, maybe you could... Courtney!! What's..."
"It's Houston," Courtney said as she stepped up to the table. "Liz, can you blow off your shift today, maybe? Michael said this is kind of important."
"WHAT'S Houston??" Tess asked.
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"Okay," Kyle repeated after Michael and Max had gone over the basic details. "So, something alien is going on in Houston, possibly dangerous, and you just want to charge right in??"
"Well... we'll be as careful as we can, obviously," Max said with a small, tired breath. "But it's not like there's somebody we can just call up to find out what's going on from here. We kinduv need to get into the area at least."
"There's something else," Michael said. "Now, this is a long lead, I admit, but I've been thinking about the story that Hal Carver told me about his memories of the '47 crash. He said that he helped aliens rescue TWO sets of pods, four in each. If one of those pods was, well, was the four of us, then what happened to the other four? Who were they, and where did they go? What if they're in Houston, and... and maybe they need our help now?"
"Why would you want to help them?" Kyle asked. "You don't know anything about them."
"We know that they're... like us," Tess said. "Not necessarily that they act like us or are nice people by our standards, but... they came from where we came from, and that's the basis for some kind of sympathy. I don't think any of us will be blinded by that kind of sentiment into doing something stupid, but I think it counts as an extra reason to go and investigate."
Liz was watching Courtney careful for her reaction as soon as Michael started talking about Carver's story. She'd known it for a while - Max had told her the tale secondhand as they drove back from Gomez - but she didn't think Courtney or Kyle or Alex had heard it before. And Courtney... well, she had joined up with Michael, Max, and the others because she thought that they were 'the Royal Four.' If there was another foursome, what did that mean to her plans?? Who, in the alien political saga, were they, after all??
"Well, if we're going, we'd probably better go soon," Michael suggested. "Because whatever is going on - it's going on now, and has been for at least a day already. Don't want to just show up in Houston to find out that whatever's happened, it just finished."
"But we'll need some time to cover our tracks," Liz countered. "We just kind of took off for Arizona, there's no way that those of us with parents, err, parents who don't know about this deal, will be able to pull that off again. We'll need some kind of cover story."
"And Houston's a long way to drive," Isabel put in. "Over seven hundred miles, even further than Arizona was. Even though there'll be interstates all the way, it'd take nearly twelve hours straight." She smiled slightly. "Maybe Alex and I should put something we've been trying to work."
"Okay, I've heard what the two of you have been trying lately," Kyle remarked. "And sorry, but I don't see how it's going to get any of us to Houston quickly."
Isabel shot him a nasty look. "Not whatever you're thinking of," she replied. "It's, umm... he's been teaching me some computer stuff, and I've been practicing using my powers to manipulate them. I'm thinking that the two of us could probably hack into an airline computer system and get plane tickets. Roswell feeder airport to Albuquerque, Albb to Houston probably."
"Heck, we could change dollar bills into hundreds and just buy the tickets."
"I think Isabel's way is probably safer," Tess put in. "A bunch of high school tickets buying last-minute plane tickets with cash would trigger some suspicion. No matter how good the money's been taken care of, somebody might start digging into our files to see if we might be involved in drugs or a sex ring or god knows what... and there's just too many hints of our REAL secret. We can't ask for that kind of scrutiny."
"Well, maybe..." Max sighed. "If the two of you are sure that you can work the computer angle without ANY chance of tripping some alarm or doublecheck that could lead back to our tickets."
Alex gulped. "I... nothing is ever a hundred percent sure, Max. But I wouldn't go along if I thought it had any real likelihood of putting Isabel or any of the rest of us in danger. You know that."
"Okay, so, how many tickets do we need??" Isabel asked. "Alex and I are definitely going, and I assume that Max, Michael, neither of you will be left behind. Tess, Courtney, Liz??"
"I, umm, I'm going to have to stay out of this one," Courtney replied. "Got some business to take care of here in town."
"I'm in," Liz suggested.
"Umm..." Tess weighed that, and looked over at Kyle. "Maybe it'd be better if I stuck around too. Not sure..."
"What's this business, anyway babe?" Michael asked Courtney.
"Oh, erm, I got a message from another Skin, one of the others who was part of my faction," Courtney said, sighing. Max and Liz turned to look at her.
"Umm... how is she, err..." Max mumbled. Aside from Courtney, all of the 'Skin' alien mission to Copper Summit were doomed to die - Courtney had saved the replacement husk for herself from the Harvest Chamber and then killed all the others.
"He's not doing so good," Courtney replied in a very toneless voice. "If I'd known that Ranley was still free to move, I'd probably have grabbed his Husk too, even though it might have slowed me down enough to get caught. But... well, he said that he sent a friend to Roswell, a courier, to send me a message, right around the time that you guys first got in touch with me. I never got the message. I want to see if I can find out what happened to the courier."
"This courier," Liz asked. "Another alien, or..."
"The courier was human," she replied. "Someone who knew a little bit about the 'aliens on earth' stuff, and owed Ranley a favor. But not a life." Courtney sighed. "He was afraid to come himself, because Whittaker could have spotted him on her monitor. Humans don't trigger those scanners."
"Wait a second," Kyle put in. "Right before... the weekend before we went to Arizona, right? That's when this courier went missing?" Courtney turned to look at him, and nodded. "My dad discovered a body. As far as I know, they never identified him. Tess, I mentioned that to you, right??"
"Umm... yeah, it sounds a little familiar, yes," Tess replied uneasily. "I didn't think it was important to tell the rest of the guys, I guess..."
"And I didn't think of asking about anything like that at the time," Courtney said. "Umm, Kyle, can you, err, find out what happened to that body? Maybe even get me in to see it, if it's been kept on ice all this time??"
"Yeah, I'll... err, I'll see what I can do," he replied. "Which means that I probably won't be heading off to Texas this time."
"I'll hang around too," Tess replied, seeming relieved that the decision was over. "Feels kinda weird, the two of us staying behind when we can skip town more easily than the rest of you -- but we'll catch the next time, if there is a next time."
"Okay, I've got the beginnings of an idea," Max said. "Liz, you're with me. Alex and Isabel, tackle the airline thing, and Michael... see if there's anything you can work out with that pentagon thing."
"Kay," he replied. "One good thing about flying is, if anybody else is monitoring Houston with one of these things, we won't give quite so much warning. Instead of our signals crawling along the highway through traffic, we'll be dropping out of nowhere at high speeds towards the airport. And they probably won't be sure at first if we're actually coming to Houston or just on our way somewhere else."
"Yeah," Liz agreed. "Hope that's enough of an advantage for us."
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"Umm... you think you might know our John Doe??" Jim Valenti asked Courtney. "Sheez, I was supposed to get him out of the cold storage and buried in the town cemetary yesterday, but it managed to slip my mind to sign the right authorization slip. Maybe that was a good thing."
"I, erm, I actually never met the guy, Mister Valenti," Courtney replied. "But my, umm, my friend gave me a pretty good description. If he's the same guy, I think I'll be able to tell."
"Okay, I'll get it sorted, though we'll probably need to cook up some sort of story to tell the examiner, and Hanson if he starts asking questions." Jim sighed. "I don't think we've ever spoken before, though Tess has mentioned you, Courtney." He laughed hollowly. "Guess that makes you the second actual alien born on an alien planet that I've ever met. Still can't quite get over exactly what I got myself into."
"Yeah, think about what it's like for me," she told him with a sigh. "All of this stuff that I've been doing here on Earth for so long... it's important, I know that, but there are times when I just wonder if I'll ever see home again."
"I wonder if I'd have the guts to do that sort of thing, if there was need," Jim agreed, loosening up a bit in response to Courtney's candor. "Go off to a completely strange place, leaving... leaving my family behind maybe, and pretending to be somebody completely different." He sighed. "I'm glad that nobody's asked it of me, I guess."
"That's... that's something that Tess and the rest might have to do, isn't it?" Kyle asked, inserting himself into the conversation. "I mean, from what I've picked up, they're supposed to be kings and princesses and what-have-you back there, and maybe they'll be asked to come back to Antar. They'll have to leave behind... leave practically everyone that they know, and... well, they won't -- actually, I guess they kind of will be pretending to be someone that they're not, because they're not entirely the Royal Four anymore. And at the same time, they wouldn't look quite like 'normal' people, and..." he trailed off unhappily.
Courtney put her hand on Kyle's arm, wanting to reassure him but not sure exactly what she should say in front of Kyle's father. "Yeah, I know Kyle," Jim replied softly. "I guess when the time comes, that'll be Tess' choice to make. I'm trying to do the best I can for her, but I'm not her real family."
Kyle wasn't quite sure what to say to that, so he just shrugged a little awkwardly. "Okay, so, the best cover story is as close to the truth as possible, right?" Courtney said, and after a moment Jim nodded. "So, I got a call from my high school friend Randy, and he asked if I'd heard from a colleague of his who was coming through town. Randy said that he should look me up on his way through town."
Jim considered that. "Possible. They might want to get Randy's phone number, find out where he worked with this friend." He sounded slightly concerned about that point.
"I can give out some of his standard cover information, though I'd better call Ranly and give him a heads up first." After a second she added, "Ranly with an l is closer to his name back home... with a d is his cover name. I usually use the more traditional format when I'm talking to him."
"Okay," Jim said after a few seconds. "Well, you can use our phone to make the call if you want - that wouldn't seem too suspicous even if anybody finds out about it." He sighed. "Sometimes this conspiracy stuff really gives me a headache." Courtney nodded in agreement, or sympathy or something.
"So, what was your name 'back home' anyway??" Kyle asked. "I'm curious. Does Michael know it?"
"Actually I don't think he does, though I'd tell him if he asked." A short pause. "Little less clear on why I should indulge your curiosity, though."
"Umm, hows about because I just kinduv did you a favor, coming here with you and helping explain the situation - unless you'd rather have faced my Dad alone. And because I'll keep buggin' you about it until you say."
"Well, it'll take more than that," Courtney quipped, and headed off to use the telephone.
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"Umm... some sort of University campus visit?"
Liz smiled back at Max, and considered the idea. "Has potential. My parents have been bugging me to start thinking about college stuff. But it seems a little early for a straight-out campus visit, considering that we're not half finished junior year."
"Yeah, maybe a little," Max agreed.
"How about... select members of the science club going to visit the bio lab at University of New Mexico."
"Maybe," Max allowed. "We can let the idea bounce around in our heads for a little while."
"Alright, yeah," Liz agreed. "Ooooh, it seems like the alien craziness just doesn't let go lately, huh??"
"Well, we're in the middle of a war," Max allowed. "Doesn't exactly lend itself to happiness and security. If we get a chance, I'd like to have a chance to do something fun and carefree with you. Especially since we don't exactly have to worry about hiding it from everybody."
"Yeah," Liz agreed, and then -- "Oop, that reminds me. I told you that I'd finish the story, about... well, about your future self, and I kinda never really got the chance."
"Hmm. Do you think this is the right time?"
Liz sighed. "I'm not sure. I feel like I should have told you already, and yet... not sure how to start, and I want to just enjoy spending a little more time with you before getting into it."
Max had to think about that for a moment. "Are you worried... about it changing things between us once you come clean?"
"Well... maybe a little. There's kinduv a surprise ending that might be hard to understand if you don't come at it from the right perspective."
"Maybe you'd better tell it to me and get it off your chest," Max said. "I don't think you really have anything to worry about... I know that you love me, I trust you, and that whatever you felt you had to do, it was for the best. So, umm... start from the beginning?"
Liz told him. She told him a little about her first visit to the fortune teller in Hondo, since that had gotten tied up in the storyline to her, and it seemed a good way of setting the mood. She told him how Future Max had appeared, full of terrible stories about disaster nearly fourteen years away, and how he had come back to convince Liz to break Max's heart and send him towards Tess, so that she wouldn't leave Roswell. She told Max how they had hatched a plan to have Tess bump into Max outside the crashdown, and then Liz had backed out of the agreement, losing her nerve, unable to throw what she might have with Max away.
"That was when I found the black pentagon in Whittaker's office, and went over to talk to you about it... you remember that day?"
"Yeah," Max nodded. "That was when I asked you to the Gomez concert."
"I know," Liz agreed. "It... it seemed like a sign, that I was right to find my own way through this and not necessarily accept what future-you told me. After you gave me a ride back into town, I met him again, in Whittaker's office, and told him that I hadn't brought Tess to meet you. He told me then that in his timeline we didn't go to Gomez -- but you came to my balcony, and we made love. Yeah... kinda crazy, I know."
"Actually... it makes more sense to me than you know," Max muttered. Liz shot him a half-scandalized, and entirely intrigued look. "I mean, not that it was something that ever really entered my mind, because I didn't specifically make plans for what happened if you said no. But it... well, coming there sounds like something that I might have done, and, well, I won't say that I would really expect us to have sex in a situation like that -- but I wouldn't have said no."
Liz laughed. "Okay, fair enough - I guess. But, erm... well, future-you kinda freaked out, and I started to wonder if he was, umm... entirely stable. Not that, ehh, not that I generally think of you as anything but stable, but he'd been through all this stuff, lost the people that he loved most, and felt like he was down to the last resort. People who've been through that aren't always thinking clearly. So, I started to wonder, if I knew some of what he knew, maybe I could do better. Maybe I could figure out a way to save the future without giving you up. I started pumping him for information, saying that if I couldn't figure out another solution to the immediate problem, I'd still go along with what he wanted." She looked into Max's face. "Say something."
"Umm... I'm surprised at all this, of course," Max admitted. "But... well, I wasn't there, at least I didn't meet Future-Me."
"He said that you couldn't," Liz explained. "Or you'd both explode, something like that."
"Oh-kay. So, yeah, I actually think it sounds like what you did was pretty clever and romantic."
"Wait 'til I'm done," she murmured. "Okay, so that's why I knew about a lot of the stuff with Courtney and Copper Summit, as I told you last week. But future-you wouldn't really tell that much - I think he was a little suspicious of me too, and he said that after we were together and Tess left, umm, in his timeline none of you tried to find out much about your alien heritage, which I kinduv told him was a mistake." Liz smiled in an off-center way, feeling her skin light up with blush. "I actually quoted Sun-Tzu to him: 'Know your enemy, know yourself, and you will prevail in all your battles.' I still think that's good advice." She looked into Max's eyes. "Are you going to ask me how long I've been reading Sun-Tzu too?"
"Umm... yeah, I was just about to," he admitted. "Future-me said the same thing?" Liz nodded.
"For a few months now. And then he got this big idea of me pretending that I'd slept with Alex, or Kyle -- we had been talking about the Maria/Michael/Courtney situation, and he decided that if he had caught me, with another guy back then, it would have been the only thing to make him back off. The only thing that could make you back off. I told him that I didn't want to, and that's when he started to... well, I do think that some of the meaner things that he said were just bluffing. But I couldn't see any way of controlling future-you, or satisfying him without totally caving in on the things that I had decided to stick to, short of..." She trailed off at that point.
"Short of what?" Max asked, and Liz didn't reply, which prompted Max to think just what it could possibly be that she wouldn't even have the strength to say. When it occured to him... "Oh, my gawww-- are you trying not to say that you killed him?"
"Ummm... err, pretty much, yeah. I just couldn't see any other way. Met him out in the park, early early friday morning, trying to make him think that I was going to go along with his plan - just to get him off guard. Then I used the pentagon to weaken his powers for a minute, and took a gun that I'd swiped from Mister Valenti's collection." Liz was breathing hard at this point and it was taking a lot of her self-control not to just start bawling uncontrollably. "I... I never thought that I could use a gun, as in an actual firearm, until then, Max. Not after... whuh, not after I almost died from getting shot myself. I... I--" Now she couldn't keep the crying away, and Max hurried over to hold the girl he loved and comfort her during this strange ordeal of confession.
"It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, emotionally, to pick up that thing and pull the trigger," Liz said after a little while, her voice curiously faraway. "Physically, it's so simple... too simple. Should be harder than that to kill someone, even someone from the future who didn't belong here." She looked up at Max, and wondered if he saw her eyes shining from the tears. "Do you... do you understand, Max? Understand why?? Understand how I could do such a thing??"
"I think... I think I'm starting to," he said in a low voice. "It's... it's a kind of a contradiction. To save me, you had to kill a future image of me that was going to ruin everything. By killing him, by living through that trauma, and by telling ME about it, you've pretty much made sure that I'll never go back into the past in exactly that same way again. Therefore, you didn't really kill *me*. If my life doesn't bridge over into that shadow life, then it can't end on that particular morning in the park." He sighed. "Trying to understand time travel gets weird, but I think I understand that much."
"Yeah... I guess I was worried that you wouldn't get it so easily," Liz replied, taking a long, slow breath, realizing that her world was not actually going to spin off of its tracks and crash messily. "I... I said something to future-you, before I killed him. The words are etched into my memory, and I think maybe it's good if you hear them, if you don't mind. I'd like to tell you, anyway." Max waved for her to go ahead, and Liz tried to figure out at which point she should start.
"'You came back here to fix your past, to set it from one course, charted in stone, to another. But your past is still my future, and my future has *NOT* been written yet, no matter how it might seem from your perspective!! I refuse to let ANYONE else, even you, take those choices away from me - I *will* make my own destiny, yet.'" Liz wiped away a stray tear and breathed softly. "Maybe now I should change that end to 'We will make our own destinies, together' now that I've told you about all of this." She sighed.
"After it was done, his body disappeared into dust, kinduv like the skins do when they die, and I found the bullet and was looking for something to hide it in. I found a little bag from the fortune teller's in Hondo, Madame Vivian's, and that was when I remembered that she had sold me a charm to help protect the bonds that connected me to my soulmate. Here, I'm still wearing it." Liz fished out a simple gold chain from underneath her shirt, and showed him the charm on the end of it - two hands clasping each other. "The chain is a different one - Vivian sold it to me on a really bad fake chain, so I got a better one in Santa Fe. But I really believe that it worked, that it kept me from losing you that week. I'm not sure if the charm has any more virtue left in it, but I've been wearing it ever since, just in case." Max smiled.
"And so you came and found me that morning and said that you wanted to come with me to the Gomez concert, if it wasn't too late," he finished with a smile. "And invited me to go out to Madame Vivian's again, which I only really did because I thought it might be funny, and because it would be with you... just what did she tell you, anyway??"
"Umm... the details are a little complicated, and all of her interpretations were at best vaguely related to what was going on, but she said that it looked like I had protected my happy future from the Hermit of Time, much as it hurt me to go through the nine of swords, or whatever. Teamwork in my future would bring success... I'll check my diary later, I know I wrote more about that reading in there."
"Okay, umm..." Max thought about it. "So Future Max didn't say anything about what might be going on in Houston?? Or anything that, in retrospect, seems to relate to those four other pods from Hal Carver's story?"
"Umm... no, not really. There's a little stuff that just *might* be relevant, but the connection is extremely tenuous, and I'd rather think about it a bit more before I share, okay??"
"Of course," he said immediately. "Come on - let's get out of here. You deserve a night out on the town - whatever your big thu-bumping heart desires." Liz giggled.
"Okay, french food and french subtitled movie it is," she teased him.
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"Okay, what's it gonna be?"
"A sigourney weaver combo and a moment of your time?" Maria blinked at Tess' request. The other girl was sitting in the booth nearest to the kitchen, and couldn't seem to make eye contact even as she talked.
"Um, alright... well, it's kinda busy right now, but I should be able to grab a few minutes around when your burger is ready." And with that, Maria hurried off to pick up an order that was ready for another customer. A little while later, she was back, putting a cherry coke with lime and a plate with a sprout-burger and some spiced french fries. (She knew well enough by now what Tess wanted when she asked for a 'combo.') Then Maria slid into the seat opposite her. "You've got a hundred and eighty seconds. Talk."
"Okay, umm... let's see. Michael and a bunch of the others - Max and Liz, Isabel and Alex are tearing off for some new alien adventure in Houston. They're trying to travel light and small, so I volunteered to stay behind... can I assume that you're not insisting on being included?"
"Well... I don't know the details... but yeah, I don't think I'm in the mood to try and tag along," Maria allowed.
"Okay, then, this part is awkward. Courtney has a little mystery to solve, she's gone and talked to Kyle and his dad about it. I reckon I'll probably be helping out with that before it's done, since I'm here." She took a deep breath. "And, as weird as it sounds, I'd like to ask for your help too."
"Uh, why me?"
"Well, because you're possibly the best detective we've got in the whole circle," Tess told her.
"Wow, I can't even believe you said that with a straight face."
"Of course I did - I'm serious. Isabel told her that you helped find out where I was when Whittaker had kidnapped me."
"That didn't take any detective skills - I just happened to know about a sign."
"...And I've heard other stories, from back before I joined the group. Heck, you did a pretty good job investigating ME when I first turned up in town. Well, we don't really have time to keep arguing about it...."
"We''ve actually got some time," Maria said, checking her watch, "unless there's something else you wanted to ask me. But... okay, I guess I'm willing to help out. What kind of mystery is it, anyway?"
"Well, at this point, it's looking like a murder."
"Oooh." Maria jumped a little. "Not sure I've ever tried to solve one of THOSE before." She sighed. "I assume you and the-unnamed-bitch will be available for bodyguard duty, just in case I get a little too close to the murdered before I find out who he or she is?" Tess nodded. "Who got whacked, anyway??"
"Ummm..." Tess looked around. "We'll talk later."
And Maria got up and went over to ask a family who had just sat down if they'd like any drinks.
TO BE CONTINUED...
