Whom among us, part ten
Author: Chris Kenworthy
Email: Chris_Kenworthy@yahoo.com
Disclaimer: No, I don't own any of the Roswell characters. I don't plan to steal them and lock them up in white rooms either.
I just let them out to play from time to time and see what happens.Distribution: Distribute anywhere you like, now based at http://www.fanfiction.net/~chriskenworthy
Feedback: YES PLEASE!
Category: Roswell future-fic
Rating: PG
Summary: Liz's life changes when, as a university junior, she runs into Max again.
Spoilers: Up to 'end of the world,' kinda
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"Come on, admit it." The words drifted clearly into Max's mind as he woke up. He could tell, even before he opened his eyes, that Tess was lying next to him, snuggled into the crook of his arm the way she liked to do. The way *he* liked her to do, to be quite honest about it. As he looked vaguely around, he remembered that they were in the dome tent that Michael and Kenner had set up late the night before, and that he and his wife had crawled into a double-sized sleeping bag and fell quite soundly asleep.
Max got up carefully, not disturbing Tess as he gradually eased her out of his embrace, and looked down at himself. He had slept in his clothes, and aside from being a bit wrinkled they still seemed presentable enough. Michael and Isabel weren't in their sleeping bag - Kyle had taken it by squatter's rights, and Alex was snoring quietly nearby on a couple of blankets.
"Davin is right, Miss Parker." Bentor's voice reminded Max of the words he had heard as he awoke, and he silently pulled aside the tent opening and got out. Twilight filled the morning sky, which was now more blue than black, but Max could see from Liz's dark hair that she was still bent over the radio telescope, jotting out notes and adjusting the device every so often.
"He's *not* right," Liz declared, looking up to glare at Bentor and Davin, who it seemed were now acting as her two assistants. From this position, Liz obviously caught her first sight of Max, walking towards the telescopes' site, and at that moment her denial melted away. "Yes he is. **DAMNITT!!**"
"What's going on?" Isabel asked, walking up to the little group from another direction.
"Liz and Bentor's figures didn't check out," Michael announced from his vantage point on the old park bench. "The space capsule isn't any of the places where they thought it would be." Max looked at Michael with a definite 'warning glance,' anxious not to see a repeat of the dust-up last night. Michael shrugged apologetically, and forced a calm tone into his voice. "Well, it's not."
"Should've carried the two, huh guys?" Isabel wise-cracked, and her soft laugh choked away when she saw Max looking daggers at her. "Whoops, sorry."
"No, it's okay," Liz groaned, pulling herself to her feet and pacing away from the radio monitor. "I did make some educated guesses. Looks like they didn't pay off."
"*We* made educated guesses, Miss Parker," Bentor corrected smoothly.
"Yeah, thanks, Bentor." Liz smiled at him wryly. "That just means we BOTH look stupid right now."
Max spoke up, trying to get the subject away from placing blame. "Well, what's our next step now?"
"Back to the infamous drawing board, I guess." Liz walked over to stand face to face with Max, putting her thumbs into the pockets of her blue jeans. "Re-evaluate our assumptions and try to figure out if there's some way we can still track this thing."
"Not yet, Liz," Max heard himself saying. Liz stared at him, a trace of offense starting to gather in her face. "I mean, god, you're obviously wiped out and uber-stressed. You've been up most of the night, all day, and you were awake at the crack of dawn yesterday morning to help us steal the research on this thing."
"Eight o'clock is not exactly the crack of dawn, Max," Liz bit back angrily.
"And you were up in the middle of the night and wandering the campus the night before that," Max reminded her, not admitting that her correction was right because he didn't have to - and because that wasn't the point. "This isn't the right state of mind to be doing trajectory math, am I right??"
"I *have* to do it now, Max!!" Liz grabbed lightly onto his arm, and he could see the tears shining in her eyes even in the dim light. "This thing is getting close to earth and we still have no idea where to find it. I've already failed you once. To have a realistic shot, we'll have to locate it tomorrow night and there's still SO MUCH to be done..."
"Perhaps a compromise?" Bentor interposed himself into the conversation smoothly. "We work for an hour or two once we get back to the suite, lay the groundwork, and then take a break for sleep. That should strike an appropriate balance between the press of schedule and the need to think clearly."
Liz weighed that over. "I can do that. What do you think, your majesty??"
Max sighed. "It's okay by me."
"Then let's get going," Liz called out. He might be the king, but there was no question that she was in charge. "Wake up everybody else in the tent - they can fight for bunks in the RV if they're still sleepy. We need to get back to base camp now."
Max watched as Liz turned away. He was sure that at least two or three of those tears had slipped out of her eyes and were running down her face. But he didn't go after her, he went back to the tent. Now, where would Ardra and Kenner have gotten to??
* * * *
Alex wandered about the Arizona State campus forlornly, unable to shake his melancholy even in the bright sunday sun and surrounded by the beautiful university grounds. It was nothing like his dream, and that didn't just apply to the physical description of the college premises. Isabel hadn't acted anything like she did in his fantasies.
"Then again, when did she ever?" Alex muttered to himself. But the reality, if less thoroughly satisfying than his dream, had managed to be more interesting. Isabel Evans might not be head over heels in love with him, but at least he had finally won her respect - and she had won his all over again. That mental core-link that she had asked for...
Well, that was what it really came down to: no matter how much Isabel herself asked him to, Alex couldn't keep his feelings for Isabel out of the equation when he thought about whether to go through with it. And every part of Alex that loved her was telling him to do the link - for a couple of different reasons - to help her with this burden that was so obviously taking a lot out of her, to have a piece of her inside himself that he could keep forever, to be a small part of this mentalic journey that was such a huge part of her life now. Maybe even, in a very small and dark part of himself, the impulse to show Michael up by doing something that he obviously couldn't (or else Iz would have asked Michael to do it long ago.)
Sighing, Alex looked up, and noticed a familiar figure on a park-style bench in front of him. Kyle Valenti was sitting with his legs crossed lotus-style, his eyes closed, his hands resting casually on his thighs, motionless.
"Hey, Kyle!" Alex called out before he could think better of it. One of Kyle's eyes cracked open, and a clear look of frstration crossed his face. "Oh, I'm sorry - I didn't mean to disturb your meditation, or whatever. I can go if you want."
"No, it's okay," Kyle assured him, stretching his long legs back out and putting his feet down onto the ground. "What's up, Whitman?"
"Not much, just walking," Alex said, walking up and leaning his back against a tree a few feet from Kyle's bench. "A little too crowded with aliens up there - as I guess you realized yourself."
"A little too crowded, period," Kyle restated. "I have nothing against aliens, but yeah, Not much room to breathe in that suite, let alone meditate. So, what's on your mind??"
Alex considered. He and Kyle had never really become close, but with Liz so busy working on her star charts or whatever, he didn't exactly have a better choice for confidant here in Arizona. And he *did* want to talk to someone about it. "Okay, it's about... Isabel." He caught himself at the last second and almost mouthed her name at Kyle.
"Okay, 'Isabel.' Why are we whispering her name?" Kyle asked the last of that in a stage whisper.
"Because of the android bounty hunters wandering around campus?" Alex whispered back. "With super-hearing? Did anyone mention that to you??" Kyle shook his head. "As long as we're quiet about certain names and unusual words, we should be okay. I shouldn't have said the a-word, but I wasn't thinking."
"Okay," Kyle agreed, looking around them. No-one was nearby and sound wouldn't travel too well in an outdoor setting like this one. "So, what about *her*?"
"Umm..." Alex thought about how to answer that question without using 'unusual words.' "Did anyone mention that her talents have, um, blossomed over the past few years?"
Kyle considered a moment, then shook his head. "Nope, no-one mentions anything to me. Blossomed like how?"
"She... she can read minds, and affect them," Alex said, preferring that phrasing to a couple of different terms that might well be on an killer android's 'scan for' list. Telepathy, psionics, mentalics... (He had a wild notion of the alien bounty hunters breaking up a role players' club meeting in one of the dorms or harassing a few students talking about the latest sci-fi bestseller, but that wasn't really relevant right now.)
"Oh!" Kyle considered that for a moment. "Well, why is that fact brood-worthy for you??"
Alex sighed. "It's not, I was getting to that point. She mentioned, reluctantly, that she's having difficulty keeping her mental balance considering all of the stimulation of other people's thoughts..."
"Yeah, yeah, the 'Tam Elbron' effect," Kyle summarized. "And?"
"And, well... she said that she saw this big 'inner strength' deep inside my mind, and if she... well, basically mind-melded with me, she thought it could help her out."
"Like... well, never mind that," Kyle dismissed the analogy he had been about to make. "Well, do you want to do it?"
"Yeah... I think I do. But she says she's not going to go through with it until she's sure I'm ready. Tells me I'm not prepared for how intense it'll be. How much it'll affect my life once she leaves again. And you know... she could be right. I want to do this for her, but I'm scared too."
"Hmm..." Kyle considered all that for a second. "Are you *really* scared of it, Alex??"
"No," Alex blurted out suddenly, and then did a double-take. Kyle smiled enigmatically. "I mean, I know that I should be, but somehow I know deep down that if Isabel goes through with it, everything will be all right."
"Well there you go," Kyle suggested. "I always reccomend trusting your 'deep down.' Now all you need to do is find some way to convince 'her.'"
Alex thought about it a second, and decided he liked that plan. "Yeah. Well... thanks, and I think I'll let you get back to enlightenment now." He waved at the bench Kyle was still sitting on.
"Funny," Kyle said with a smile. "And good luck." He re-lotused his legs, closed his eyes, and started softly chanting something that Alex couldn't quite make out.
Alex smiled to himself, and started walking around the campus again, with a much lighter heart this time. Now, what line of persuasion would be effective against Isabel Evans??
* * * *
It was a week and a half after the spring dance. A number of people had told Liz that she wasn't talking much lately, and they were probably right.
Liz and Maria were serving shift at the Crashdown, and Alex was sitting on a stool on the counter, sucking down a strawberry shake as his own way of dealing with heartbreak. All three of them were all too aware of the fact that Max and Tess, Michael and Isabel were out on a 'double date' at Senor Chao's tonight. (The pod squad had apparently dropped the protocol of personally informing their human ex-sweeties of every social engagement, which Liz appreciated - she'd heard through the high school grapevine anyway, but by this point it was better not to learn about such things from Max's own lips.)
"I mean, he wasn't even any great shakes as a boyfriend," Maria was rambling, trying to make herself feel better about the whole situation by trashing Michael. "He gave me like *two* presents during the whole course of our relationship, a spice rack and a damn bottle of no-name shampoo and conditioner two-in-one. He'd pick his teeth at the table no matter how fancy a restaurant we were at. He put the Jetta through hell!! But, for some ungodly reason I was in love with him, so I rolled with the punches. And what do I get for all of my patience? *He* dumps ME to get with the girl who's been like a sister to him all of his life. I mean, what crime could I possibly have commited in a past life to deserve karma like this?"
"You should ask Buddha-boy that," Alex drawled, and took another long slurp through his straw.
The phone behind the counter rang, and Liz reflexively hurried over and picked it up. "Crashdown cafe."
"Hey Liz, it's Kyle."
"Wow!" Liz blinked in surprise. "Wow, that's freaky." She took the phone receiver half-way away from her mouth. "Maria, it's for you."
"No, Liz, don't hand me off to Maria, you don't have time." The earnestness in Kyle's voice tore through Liz's paper-thin veil of playfullness. "My dad just got called away on an emergency."
"Uh, okay..." Liz thought about that for a second. "Why are you telling *me* about it?"
"Because the emergency was a fight going down at Senor Chao's. I thought you'd want to know. I'm heading over there myself."
Liz felt as if her heart had been plunged into a pitcher of ice water. Senor Chao's. Kyle thought that Max and the gang were involved in whatever was going down there, and he probably had good reason. "You thought right, thanks." She fumbled the phone back to its cradle. None of the three of them (herself, Maria, Alex,) had quite figured out what the story was between Kyle Valenti and Tess, either before or after she had hooked up with Max, but Liz suspected that he cared very strongly for her, whatever you chose to label that caring. "C'mon guys," she told Maria and Alex quickly. "We gotta go. Alex, you came in the Rabbit, yeah?"
Alex nodded, a confused look on his face. "Wait a second, Liz," Maria spluttered. "We're on the clock here, we can't just..."
"Ryan!!" Liz called out to the cook in the back. "We're off. Emergency." She took off her apron and barette and strode towards the door, knowing that her friends would follow her.
By the time they got to Senor Chao's, the police had already arrived and crowds were milling at the scene. As Alex pulled over, Liz jumped out of the shotgun seat and ran over to an onlooker who seemed to be a year or two past high school. "Do you know what happened here?" she panted breathlessly.
"Well, a little - I was inside when it happened," he told her after a second's hesitation. "One minute everything's normal. then a couple of people in uniforms jumped this table of four kids - about your age, babe - and all hell broke loose."
"Uniforms?" Liz focused on that detail. "Like, what... army? Air force??"
The guy shook his head, as Maria and Alex drew carefully near. "No. Waitress, busboy, maitre d', that kind of uniform. But I don't think they actually worked for the restaurant, at least, I never saw any of them before they made their move, and I eat here about once a week, different days."
Maria put the next question. "And what do you mean by 'all hell broke loose'??"
The witness looked up at her, and immediately blushed a little when he realized he wasn't talking to just one cute girl. "I... I dunno if I should be talking about it. I mean, I haven't even given my statement to the police yet, and some of it sounds really weird. I'm not even sure if *I* believe it."
"Just tell us what you saw," Alex murmured, softly and encouragingly, and the guy nodded, somewhat buoyed.
"Okay. The first waitress pointed at some empty wine glasses on a vacant table - and they broke without without her touching them. Not just into a few pieces, but a lot of really nasty pointy glass shards. And then she looked at the four high school kids, and the shards started flying at them. Just before they were about to hit, this one kid waved, he had short hair, dark like yours," (he nodded at Liz here,) "and this wavy green wall thing appeared in mid-air, and all the glass bounced off of it. I guess that's when I realized that something really weird was going on."
"Okay?" Liz took her turn to prompt again. "What happened after that?"
"The guy in the busboy's uniform grabbed a carving knife and he, like, leapt at one of the girls. This guy could jump like he was a cougar... or a, I dunno, a demon or something. The girl - she had long straight golden hair," he put in that little explanation as Alex was opening his mouth to interrupt. Alex gasped silently. "She tried to fight him off, but he was too strong for her. This spikey-haired guy tried to help, but the Maitre D' just looked at him and he was slammed back against the wall -- well, you know, one of those dividers between tables that they have?"
"Yeah," Maria nodded. "What happened next?"
"Well... the last of the four kids from the table, this babe with light blonde curls, she points and there's this bright white light that knocks the busboy away from her friend, just in time. The four of them crowd together and the green curtain of light appeared in a circle around them again. The other people, they're pointing at it and like blasting away with yellow fireballs - god, it was like something out of a video game - but they couldn't phaze that shield. Finally one of them walks up to the curtain, and all of a sudden it's gone, and the four kids are nowhere to be seen. The other guys roar and start charging out of the restaurant. A few minutes after they'd gone, the police show up."
"Thanks for all your help," Kyle said, surprising Liz, who hadn't realized that Kyle had arrived and was listening too. The witness kinda nodded, a police person came up to him and the four human friends gratefully took the cue to fade into the background.
"Alien attack, obviously," Alex whispered softly. "Probably they made their escape using Tess' mindwarp trick."
"Yeah, but did those Skins catch up to them later?" Maria asked. "Where would they have gone?"
Liz thought a second. "Michael and Tess' place. Let's go."
Soon the four of them were at the apartment that Michael had been living in since he was emancipated, (over a year!) and that Tess had moved into at Christmas. The place was a mess - the front door had been blasted off of its hinges and was still burning slightly. Furniture was overturned all over the apartment, clear signs that the battle had come to them here as well. But no-one remained on the premises.
"Damn it," Liz muttered as Alex took the fire extinguisher from the hall and put Michael's door out. "We have to find out where they went next." Kyle turned to say something to her, and she cut him off. "I know that they don't want us 'involved' any more - quite frankly I don't care. I can't just go home not knowing if my friends are alive or dead."
"Umm..." Maria called from the window. "Liz, you might want to take a look at this." Liz hurried over to the window, just in time to see a black car rocketing down Maple street at what had to be better than sixty miles an hour. "I hate to say this, but... reinforcements?"
"Could be," Liz agreed. "Which means we follow that car."
But by the time they got down to the car, the Skin reinforcement vehicle was gone, and all that they could do was follow in the direction that they had seen it go. There was no mistaking the crowd of onlookers and gossippers that were still gathered at the West Roswell High parking lot though.
Alex parked again and they got the story from someone who had seen some of the action. It had been a horrific climax to the spread-out battle -- with Max and his friends killing several of their alien attackers (including one of the 'reinforcements,') whupping the butts of the rest, and taking off in the Jeep, heading for 285 north.
"I... I guess that's it," Maria said softly. "They're okay, at least for now, and I don't think we can chase them any more, Liz."
"Yeah." It felt like something inside Liz was dying. "Nothing left to do."
It was much later that night that Liz found the note, stuck between two loose bricks outside her balcony window. (How had he managed to get it there, amidst all the confusion of the alien attack?)
"I was hoping to be able to tell you this in person, that I'd have time to figure out how to say the words in front of you. But it looks like my time just ran out.
Our enemies have shown up. I couldn't bear to endanger any of the people I love... like mom and dad, you and the rest of the gang. But you'll be safe if they know that we've bailed on Roswell.
I wish it didn't have to end like this between us. But the road that my life is on has been leading me away from you, and I think you saw that before I did. May all the joy and happiness that a life can hold in this world come to you, Liz, and then a piece of me will be happy too. I'll miss you always, Liz my friend.
Max."
Liz cried for a while, and then she put the note in between the pages of her diary and went back to looking at college catalogues...
...And woke up in the spare room in Max's suite in the Congreve tower, shook off the weird dream and headed into the washroom to freshen up before heading back to work.
* * * *
Max walked into the living room area in the mid-afternoon and saw Liz working away on the huge whiteboard that they'd brought in, all alone. Some kind of sad music was playing on the stereo.
"Hey, where's... everybody?" he asked softly. Liz whirled around, looking almost embarrassed before realizing that she had no reason to be.
"Off on a grub run - you know how it is. And for your information, I ate earlier, so there's no need to nag me about taking care of myself."
"I didn't even ask why you didn't go with them, did I?" Max asked, and Liz shook her head silently.
"Sorry, getting a little defensive I guess. Just wanted to put a little more thought into the minimum-elapsed Mars slingshot." She tapped the board meaningfully, though it had nothing on it that seemed reminiscent of Mars or a slingshot to Max... just columns of odd numeric figures.
"Okay," Max assured her. He sat down in the black chair and waved generally towards the minisystem speakers. "That your disc playing?"
"Umm... yeah, I brought a whole bunch over when I went back to my room... you know, right after we first got the data--"
"It's cool," Max told her. "I was just wondering who the artist is."
"Oh, umm..." Liz hesitated, obviously having to change mental gears from apologizing about the music to realizing that Max was interested in it. "Beverley Mahood. 'Moving day.'" Sure enough, as the young woman's voice in the song finished emoting through a powerful chorus, that phrase echoed at the end.
"Are you... are you happy, here in Arizona??" Max said all of a sudden.
"What... are you asking because of the music??" Liz asked. "I... I would have said I was... when you showed up, it turned a lot of things upside down." Max wasn't quite sure how to take that. "Just a second..." She chewed slightly on her bottom lip and hurried over to the computer, working away on something complicated that Max oculdn't really work out.
I studied all our old photographs...
And then I tore every one in half.
You say you're sorry -- don't make me laugh,
Because it's moving day.
"Mmh." Liz sat back from the laptop and looked at it, a peculiar expression on her face that Max couldn't quite read.
"Is that good news or bad news??" He asked softly.
"I'm not sure," she admitted. "Maybe both. I think I've solved the minimum transit, and that's good. The answer isn't at all what I expected it to be, though, and that may be bad." She took out an old fashioned handheld calculator and started tapping some numbers into it.
"I wish I could do something like that," Max mentioned. "I mean... well, I don't really have a hidden talent, leaving aside the alien stuff."
"I think you do," Liz mentioned absently. "It's just not as obvious a hidden talent as mathematics or anything..."
She broke off, startled by the sound of the CD changer, even though from what Max could tell of the controls, it was set to a random shuffle that would take it to a new disc after almost every song. A piano and some sort of guitar could be heard, playing an extended instrumental before the lyrics started.
"So... where do we stand??" Max asked.
"Umm... I'm not quite sure," Liz had to admit. "It doesn't really look good -- there's far too many variables to be able to predict accurately. I wish there was some surer way of going about it."
"You'll find a way, somehow," Max said, trying to be encouraging, but the look that Liz flashed him suggested that perhaps all he was doing was increasing the pressure on her. All of a sudden, all he could focus on was the chorus of the new song, playing on the speakers.
This ain't Nineteen ninety-nine,
This is here and now - you are mine...
But you're cheatin' on me,cheatin' on us.
Cheatin' yourself right out of love,
You're slipping away from me unconsciously...
And I'm losing you, to some old memory.
As the next verse began, all that could fit in Max's head was that those words were an almost perfect description of how Tess might feel if she thought that he felt anything for Liz but friendship. Liz saw the connection too, obviously, and blushing, she fumbled for the remote and stabbed blindly at the buttons until one of them triggered another CD change.
They sat there for a long moment, not saying anything, caught in the awkward moment. And then Bentor, Davin, and Alex came back from their meal and Max beat a relieved retreat.
* * * *
"We're getting nowhere," Liz finally admitted about two hours later. "We're talking about looking for a needle in the mother of all haystacks here."
"I dunno about that Liz," Alex put in. "We can take about a dozen of the likeliest-looking possibilities..." he started ticking off points on the huge whiteboard that had been set up in the living room. "...and these three, and maybe this one. That wouldn't be too many to check tonight."
"And what if it isn't in any of them?" Liz flared. "We'd be screwed. We relied on guesses and what we thought was likely last time, and got nowhere with it. I will *not* depend on taking any more chances."
"Well, what else would you recommend?" Bentor asked mildly from the couch. The guys switch seemed to be permanently stuck in the 'mild' position, but Liz refused to let it bug her.
"I dunno... there's just got to be some better way to solve this than by trying to construct trajectories by guesstimate and verifying them with the radio telescope. Some way of scanning the whole sky for your stupid space capsule, like a radar pulse that it would bounce back to us, or..." Liz stopped and sighed. "I'm dreaming, I know. But still..."
"Man, we are all *idiots*!!" Davin burst out. Liz hadn't even realized that a second 'Other' was following their planning meeting, but as she turned to Davin what he said started to sink in, and a hopeful grin spread over her face.
"Does that mean what I really want it to mean, Davin??"
"Whatever kind of engine that space capsule has, it'll be quantum resonant," Davin explained, for whatever that was worth. "If we send out a pulse of microwave energy in the upper microwave band, it'll flood the crystal chambers enough to send a similar non-directed pulse out from the engine compartment. We'll be able to track it using that."
"And can we actually generate a microwave pulse strong enough??" Alex asked.
"With the granolith we can," Bentor filled in. "There's a good chance it'll show up on some of Earth's satellite, but I think that's an acceptable risk under the circumstances."
"So it's back to Roswell?" Alex filled in. Davin nodded.
"Okay," Liz said. "Round everybody up, as quickly as possible. By the time we've driven to Roswell, found this thing's signature, and measured its trajectory, things could be getting tight."
A lot of hurry and hubble filled the suite in the half hour that followed. Liz dived into the logistics energetically, aware that the sun was setting already and time was ticking away on them.
"Okay... what else?" Liz asked, looking over the living room.
"Ohh... the laptop!" Michael exclaimed, putting it into hibernation mode and unplugging the power source. "Don't want to forget that."
"No, of course not," Liz agreed out of reflex, and then thought about what she was saying. "Wait a second... this is Pete's laptop!"
"Uhh... so?"
"Well, he's gonna want to use it when he gets back from his parents' place," Liz explained. "I borrowed it for the weekend, but I can't just take off with it "
"Like hell you can't!" Michael exploded. "Liz, we need this thing..."
"Like hell I can!" Liz fired back at it. "Michael, I'm not gonna break a promise just so..."
Max stepped into the living room. "Michael, what's going on here?"
"Liz wants to leave the laptop here in Arizona," Isabel called out from the sidelines, which in this case was standing next to the whiteboard.
"Look, I realize that not having it would make things a little more difficult..." Liz started.
"Try impossible!" Michael flared back. "I've seen how much you guys use it... and the most difficult part is still ahead - calculating the capsule's precise course once we've located and determining where, and when, it'll touch down. You'll be at it for a month if you try to solve that with pencil and paper."
Liz turned to stare at Max. "I promised Pete that he'd have it back by the end of the weekend, Max. I can't break that promise." She couldn't help but think of the sweet email that he had sent her last night.
Max considered things for a moment. "Do what you have to do, Liz, but make sure you keep a copy of all your working notes. I'll buy another laptop once we hit Roswell." He glared at Michael and Isabel. "Is everyone satisfied??"
Isabel looked back unapologetically, expressionlessly, but Michael had the decency to hang his head a little. "I'm sorry, Liz, I wasn't thinking."
Liz nodded as she took the laptop from him. "It's okay, Michael." Then she turned around and left
TO BE CONTINUED...
