Max gave the girl's hand a squeeze and let it go. "Be good, Shania. Do all the things you planned to do." He paused for a moment, then decided to warn her. "You'll want to be sure they don't examine your palm until it stops glowing. Otherwise, they might put you under the same scrutiny they've put me. “
Shania lifted her hand and saw that its palm was glowing a faint silver. She looked beyond it as Max stepped toward the door. "Thank you," she said simply.
Max stepped out into the corridor, and a moment later Lisa followed him. "I suppose I should thank you too, but this isn't over for us, you know?" she said. "Even if they don't find out whatever this glowing-hand thing is, we're still in trouble. “
"What do you mean? “
"We don't have very good insurance," she said. "We lost the car today, and these hospital bills are going to cripple us. So while you're off running from the cops, think about the problems you've caused for my family. “
"I'm truly sorry," Max said. As he walked away from her, he could feel her gaze burning into his back.
Isabel felt intense relief once she and Kyle finally got out of the building and away from the blather of the cable news channel that had just broadcast their faces all over the country.
Perhaps twenty minutes after having entered the hospital, she and Kyle joined Maria, Liz, and Max in the hospital parking lot.
"Sorry about the delay," Kyle said. "They didn't want to let me out of there without taking all my insurance information first. I told them it was an Antarian policy. “
Isabel snorted. "He did not." Turning to Maria quickly, she said, "Don't tell Michael he said that, even as a joke." She knew how little humor Michael found in all matters alien.
Maria raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
"Wasn't this supposed to be a busy time in there due to drunk-driver wrecks?" Kyle asked.
"Guess we picked the wrong night," Liz said, frustration in her voice.
"So, how did everything go in there, Max?" Isabel asked.
"Fine. Both of them are healed," Max said gruffly. "I got caught by the younger one's sister, but she got distracted from calling security when Shania woke up from her coma. “
"That's great," Liz said, squeezing his arm.
Isabel could tell that something else was eating at Max. "What's wrong?" she asked quietly.
"Nothing," he said, too quickly. "I'm just exhausted. You know how much healing people drains me. “
"Liz could use her electrical powers to give you a jump-start," Maria said, a smile on her face.
Liz gave her a shocked look, and Kyle snickered.
Maria blushed. "I did not mean that in any kind of a sleazy way. “
"Uh-huh, sure," Kyle said, teasing. "But you just might have given new meaning to the term 'sparking.' “
As they walked back toward the Microbus, Isabel caught her brother's eyes for a moment. What she saw in them wasn't just exhaustion, though that was clearly there, in spades.
He's haunted, she thought. And from the look of things, this is one ghost that even our little Scooby Gang might have trouble getting rid of.
Very slowly and painfully, Ava swam back to consciousness. Her limbs and head felt heavy, as though encased in something viscous, like honey. When she opened her eyes, bright lights dazzled them.
Where am I? she thought, squinting against the glare.
Ava opened and closed her eyes repeatedly until they adjusted to the brilliance. Feeling marginally stronger, she began moving her limbs experimentally.
She discovered she was sitting in a narrow, padded seat, both of her arms secured by stainless-steel handcuffs to the chairs arms. Identical seats were arranged in rows before her, behind her, and on either side in the otherwise empty cabin. The carpeted floor beneath her feet vibrated, and she could both hear and feel the resonant subwoofer hum of large jet engines.
An airplane. They've loaded us onto an airplane. Ava had never been aboard a plane before. Even when she, Rath and Lonnie had left New York for Roswell immediately after Zan's murder, they had traveled by car. And she had continued traveling exclusively by car… in a series of other people's vehicles, actually… for many months following her lovers death. She had wandered the country then, trying to sort out her ambivalent feelings toward Rath and Lonnie, the two members of the Royal Four who had conspired to throw Zan into the path of a truck back on that horrible day, when her life had spun utterly out of her control…
And I'm every bit as guilty as they are, Ava thought. I didn't even lift a finger to save Zan. I just froze when they killed him, the way I always do whenever things go south. She considered the cuffs that bound her to her seat. I'm probably getting what I deserve. Those government guys will cut me open to see what makes me tick. Maybe after it's all over, I'll see Zan again. And the other Ava, the one from Roswell.
Hot tears stung her eyes as memories of the past two years continued spooling past her. She remembered how she'd survived being alone on the road by discreetly obtaining transportation, meals, and lodging from people she encountered along the way, courtesy of her mindwarp abilities. She'd never influenced anyone to give her any more than they could afford, and therefore had managed not to rouse much unwanted attention before moving on to obtain aid from her next "sponsor. “
Ava had been sitting in a dingy little roadside diner somewhere in Ohio, grieving Zan, when she'd felt the fiery death of her other self… Tess, as her alter ego had called herself. When Rath and Lonnie had taken Ava to Roswell just before the big alien summit meeting that had followed Zan's death, she and Tess had evidently forged a subtle psychic connection.
The psychic flash Ava had endured at the precise moment of Tess's demise… a vicarious empathic experience that had seemed more real to her than even her most vivid dreams of Zan and Antar… had convinced her that she could no longer survive entirely on her own, a destitute half-alien waif with no one to lean on except for those whom she coerced into giving her aid and comfort. She realized that the surviving members of Antar's Royal Four needed one another, regardless of which set of them, if any, were the "real deal," as Rath liked to say. Just as Tess's preordained place had been with her own podmates, Max, Isabel, and Michael… Roswell 's version of the Royal Four… so, too, did Ava belong among her own kind.
This understanding had come to her as she'd walked alongside the median strip of a lonely stretch of highway, considering the aftermath of Tess's demise while watching the cars that flew past her in either direction. Ava knew it would be a simple matter to mindwarp any one of the drivers into stopping for her, and taking her in whatever direction she wanted to go.
The only question that remained then was, Which way? She knew that her heart still belonged to Zan, and that it always would. But Zan was dead, and the closest facsimile was a New Mexico teenager named Max Evans. Like her, this other Zan was now facing life without his predestined soulmate; Tess, the Roswell Zan's Ava, was gone, just as her own Zan was.
I could go to Roswell and have my Zan again, and he can have his Tess, she told herself as the traffic continued to whiz past, every car an opportunity, each direction a gateway to a unique life that would exclude the possibility of any other. One of those directions led eastward, back toward New York. The other would eventually wind southwestward to Roswell. And Zan.
But even as these thoughts swirled through her mind, she'd known that trying to hold on to Zan this way was wrong. She had seen the way the other Zan… or rather Max… had looked at the slight, dark-haired girl he'd called Liz.