The Wrong Woman

They found her sitting on a park bench, staring up at the sky. Her expression had been whimsical, something that didn't change even when the sirens approached and her eyes turned downwards to look upon the approaching officers, with their guns raised towards her as if she were holding a bomb instead of a small, whimpering child.

"This what you were looking for?" Carolina chuckled as she shifted Margo onto her hip so she could stand. "Relax, kids," she remarked on their sudden apprehension on her movement. "I'm not going to eat you."

Things seemed, for a moment, to suddenly fall into place. Margo was brought back into Alesha's arms, and the cuffs Jebidiah watched going onto Carolina's wrists felt very, very satisfying... but something just seemed wrong. There was something very fishy, about all of this; the only thing that would've made Carolina easier to catch was if she'd walked herself straight into the police department with a red target on her chest.

Her lack of struggle made it very clear to Jebidiah that there was something more nefarious at foot--but for the life of him, he couldn't figure out what.

"So this is your grand plan, Carolina?" Jeb spat as Officer Curious lead her towards him. "Escape from prison, break into people's houses, steal, kidnap, and murder a few innocent people, just to hand yourself back in? Not sure that's quite the revenge you had in mind."

"Oh no, my dear Mr. Kane, it certainly is not," Carolina responded with a smirk, her eyes barely visible to him under the rim of her hat. "In fact, I honestly haven't the faintest clue what you're talking about."

"Don't play games with me, Carolina."

"Oh but I'm not, Jeb, I'm not. In fact, I'm insulted. You, accusing me of murder? Why would I ever do such a thing as that?"

"Don't be coy. Shark Racket, Harris de Wynter? Think they just fell over on their own accord?"

"Dear me, of course not," Carolina purred, smiling. "I actually admit I wish I'd thought of it first, you do seem to have your panties in a right bunch over it--and it all turned out to be incredibly convenient, for me. But I'm sorry, love--you must be entirely blind, because besides your lovely granddaughter, I haven't touched a soul."

Jebidiah could feel the anger pulsing through his veins; his face was beginning to grow hot, something that was becoming increasingly harder to control. "And why, Carolina? Why kidnap her and leave both her, and yourself out in plain sight to see?"

"Come now Jeb, do you honestly think I want to deal with a brat like that for more than a couple of hours? Besides, I'm getting bored with this cat and mouse game we're playing. I did what I came to do, and now I'm ready to relax in a cozy little cell for the rest of my time while I watch the intricate little tapestry you've woven start to unravel."

"Which is supposed to mean what, exactly?" Jeb hissed back, his lips still curled angrily.

"I am going to watch, Mr. Kane, as with every step you take, you will lose everything that you hold dear. I will watch as one by one, you drive your children away, watch as you try to justify your actions but find nothing but the cold, hard truth you've hidden behind the lies. You took my children away from me, Jebidiah--and now I have done the same to you."

"I don't--"

"All I had to do was use their own faults to my advantage, my dear. Put the dominoes in a line and wait until the first piece falls--so I can watch as everything you love is stripped from you. That is all I wanted, Jebidiah--and that is what I will get."

---

"This... This place is amazing, Brad! I can't believe you never brought me over here, before!"

"Just please don't touch anything, alright? We're not supposed to have anyone that doesn't have clearance inside this level of the facility--I'd get in some serious trouble if you broke anything."

Amelia nodded silently, though she was still overcome with amazement at the gadgets and gizmos that littered the invention floor of Brad's workplace. She'd never really taken an interest in science before, but some of this stuff almost changed her mind; she wasn't sure what half the stuff was supposed to even do, but that was part of the fun!

"Are you coming? We don't have a lot of time--the security guard makes a pass of the facility every hour, and I'd really prefer to keep my job."

"Fine, fine--ooohh, wait, isn't that your Time Machine thingamadoobob?" Amelia lifted a finger to point into the corner of the large room.

"Yes--and as you can see, it's off-limits. Please, Amelia, you said that you were serious about this."

"Sooorrry sorry... I'm just--" She took a deep breath and turned her gaze away from Brad, ashamed. "I'm just kinda nervous, is all."

Truth be told, Amelia had a lot to be nervous about. Things for her had reached an all-time low; not only had she neglected those anti-depressant horsepills, and started seeing weird visions of glowy eye'd monsters, her last lifeline to sanity was dead; it was as if the world was trying to send her some sort of ironic signal that she was at the end of the road, too. She was desperate.

Desperate enough for this.

"Are you going sit down?" Bradley asked, impatient.

Amelia carefully set herself down on the seat; her nerves seemed to even cool, slightly, when she turned her eyes up towards the pulsing monitor on the light above her.

"So, explain to me what exactly this does, again?"

"It's a new type of a medical scanner we've been working on from a contract with a government. Basically, it sends out a specialized mixture of electromagnetic micro-pulses that allows us to see into the body on a much smaller scale--it's already been developed to work on less complex chemical compounds, but we've been working on this, which works... a bit like a very precise, high-powered MRI. But it tells us a lot more."

As the chair spun around, Amelia felt herself getting a little bit more anxious again. All this funny talk of 'electromagnetic micro-pulses' sounded a little frightening. "It's... It's safe, isn't it?"

"Not 100% safe, no--but it's not dangerous. It's about like having a series of X-Rays--carries a little bit of risk, but unless you're having one of these once a day, it's nothing to worry about. All our test subjects were unaffected." Bradley looked up from his screen at Amelia's quivering lip with a little bit of concern on his face. "You want to know what's wrong with you, don't you?"

"Yeah. I do." Deep breath. "Let's do this."

The large metal frame of the scanner erupted from the base and shielded her within moments; if Amelia weren't so paralyzed with surprise, she probably would've let out some pretty colorful phrases at how Bradley had neglected to warn her.

By the time she got the courage to even do that, the hum of the machine had gotten so loud that he wouldn'tve even been able to hear her if she said anything. 'I can't believe I'm doing this, I can't believe I'm doing this,' she thought to herself, her eyes still wide with fear.

It really didn't help, seeing how distracted Bradley was from her current condition. His eyes were glued to the screen, and his expression so intense that Amelia couldn't tell if he was just concentrating, or if he was confused.

"What do you see?!" Amelia tried to yell, but he obviously didn't hear her.

Instead, he continued to turn the dials frantically, moving the scan over various parts of her body. Unfortunately, everything that came up on the screen just...

"Isn't right," he muttered. "This doesn't make... sense."

The machine came to a halt loudly, the noise slowly puttering lower and lower as the metal casing surrounding Amelia's body slowly pulled away in order to let her free.

"That was... quick," she mumbled as she tuckled in her feet, preparing for the chair to swivel around. "But not quick enough," she added quietly as she began to feel her head spinning, the buzzing noise still making her own voice sound fuzzy to herself.

"Mhm."

Brad was still distracted. Amelia even had to wave her hand a little bit to catch his attention, for him to remember to flip the switch for her to be swung around again.

"Sorry," he mumbled, still not lifting his gaze from the monitor.

"Finally," Amelia murmured once she was let free; but as soon as she began to put some distance between herself at that strange, electromagnabbit machine-y thing, that light-headedness she'd attributed to the scanner's overwhelming noise caused a much unexpected weakness in her legs.

"Whoooooooooops!" she gasped, when her legs' weakness caused her to stumble right into her brother's arms. "That was weird!"

"You alright?"

"Yeah, yeah... I'm good--I think. Am now, at least," she lied.

"So... Did you see anything? A problem? Anything that you can use to help me?" she asked as she righted herself, trying not to show that anything was wrong. "You don't... you don't have to lie to me, Brad--I can handle the truth."

"It's not even that, Mia, it's that--" Brad paused, his face falling when he say the desperate, saddened look in her eyes. "I'm not a doctor. I can't tell you exactly what's wrong. But we've done scans on dozens and dozens of employees here--including myself--and... what I saw... It wasn't like any of us."

"What does that mean?" Amelia stuttered, her eyes widening.

"I don't know, Mia. But it can't mean anything good."

---

"Jeb, Jeb, I'm so glad you came this fast--Jeb... This isn't good. "

Jebidiah hadn't even made it out of the parking lot when Tana rushed out of the police station and up to him on the sidewalk, a look of sheer apprehension making her age lines look even deeper and more worrisome than usual. Just looking at her made him feel old--they really were getting on too far in years to deal with this sort of thing, anymore.

"Calm down, Tana--what's the problem?"
"You... might want to come inside and sit down, Jeb."
"I don't have time. Just spit it out, woman."
"Remember how you told me to check everything? Even the hairs?"

"Yes, of course I did," Jebidiah groaned, impatient. "What about it?"

"Well, we did some analysis on some hairs we found on glass from the window in Dr. de Wynter's window--and Jeb... they weren't Carolina's."

"Whoa, whoa, slow down. That's impossible. I know she won't confess, but it had to be her, Tana, she's--"

"Jeb, listen to me," Tana groaned, trying to get him to pay attention. "We triple checked the DNA on both hairs, and there wasn't even a shred of similarity... so..."

"So...?"

"Jeb... If I knew what I was going to find, I wouldn'tve done it. But I didn't think--I had absolutely no idea--"

"Just say it already!"

"The hair... It's. Jeb, it's a familial genetic match to someone we have on file."

"Who?"

"... You."

One word: that's all it took for the wool over Jebidiah's eyes to come clean off. Finally, what Carolina had said made a shred of sense, though the fact of the matter was something darker than Jeb could have possibly imagined.

Tana had to say nothing else for him to understand; in that moment, he knew exactly who was behind those deaths: the monster he had created.

---

Amelia was beginning to grow impatient. Brad was the one who'd been so overly cautious about this security guard patrolling the building, and yet he was willing to sit here at his drawing bench, scribbling mathematical equations over a piece of scrap paper, as if she didn't even exist.

It was getting into late evening, now, and she was tired--and still feeling quite ill from that machine.

"Man, what is taking you so long?" Amelia groaned at her brother as he scribbled more and more furiously. "I thought you said that you were just going to compare some notes?"

"It's a bit more complicated than that," was his answer, which came across a little too grumpily for Amelia's liking. "You wouldn't understand. Just go sit down or something, okay? I'll try and explain, when I'm done."

"Fine, fine," Amelia said with an eyeroll as she walked away, deciding to further investigate the fish swimming in the tank on the other side of the room. As she walked, though, the light-headedness came back--this time, with a level of nausea that left her stomach feeling as if it were turning in on itself.

"You alright?" Brad mumbled, though there didn't appear to be much actual concern in his voice.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine," Amelia lied yet again, her hands fiercely clutching at her stomach.

No--she definitely wasn't fine. The next moment, her stomach did another sommersault; she was  becoming more and more convinced that her dinner was going to come crashing out onto the floor.

And yet, it was more than that--more than just her stomach. Or her head. Or her weak knees...

... It was every cell in her body. They weren't hot, but it felt as if she was on fire; turmoil seemed to bubble inside her from her feet to the crown of her head. The longer she crouched on her knees, preparing to retch all over the pristine white floor, the more even her fingernails seemed to rebel against any sensation that was normal.

'Your okay, Amelia, you're okay,' she tried to tell herself, the pounding sound of her heart in her chest overriding any other noises that may have been going on around her. 'Just focus on being okay.'

But she wasn't. It was is if the harder she fought, the worse it became. Even the very world she saw around her began to change--it was not unlike what she saw that night at the Bottega, except much more real. Real because it wasn't her surroundings that were changing: it was the way she saw them.

Amelia wheezed, her breath becoming more and more difficult the weaker she became. "What's... happening... to me..."

But, quicker than it began, it was over. The nausea stopped. The weakness stopped. The pounding of her heart... stopped.

Slowly, she began to arise.

"Amelia? Are you sure you're alright?" Brad paused in his writing, suddenly uneasy about the sudden noise, then silence, that had come from his sister. "We can leave, if you want--"

"No, Bradley. I'm quite alright."

"Are you almost finished?" she asked, now turning to face him. "There's something I wanted to ask you..."

"Yeah--oonnneeee sec," he mumbled, his tongue teasing the corner of his lip as he continued writing with increasing speed. "It's amazing, Amelia--amazing. I've never seen anything like this. These compounds that the scanner picked up in your bloodstream... They're remarkable. They have the same structure as a virus, and yet properties I've never seen before... But from my calculations, the effect they were having was regenerative, as if they were altering the very chemistry in your body--just... just remarkable!"

"That's... very interesting," Amelia said, slowly.

"Alright alright, sorry, I don't mean to bore you, I've just fascinated--this has to have something to do with these symptoms you've been having. I'll have to have a doctor come in and take a look. In the meantime--" Bradley gathered his notes up into a stack, and set them to the side of the workspace. "What is it that you wanted to ask me?"

"Oh my--oh my gawd, Amelia--what's... what's..." Bradley began to stumble backwards, sending his notes scattering to the floor. "You're... you're..." The words sputtered from his mouth irratically, as fear and uncertainty completely overtook him.

This... this couldn't be!

"I was just wondering..." Amelia hissed, now licking her lips. "... got anything to eat?!"