"You," Maria choked on her own voice. Her mind was contracted, unsure of what the right reaction might be. She had thought of her father as a dream man, a hero, an oil magnate with a toothy grin.

Not this handsome but humble man, looking so dogged she couldn't even bring herself to ask him why he had left, what she might have done wrong.

"How dare you." Amy's voice was laced with hurt, but Marcos knew his estranged wife well. She had rehearsed this speech in the event of his return. It was his duty to bear it. "How can you come back here after all this time? Do you want money, is that it? Well, you can have it. Take what you need. Just go away and stay away."

It had been foolish to think this was going to be simple, that somehow both Amy and Maria would understand without his telling it that he hadn't had a choice, that it had been for their protection. Even so, there was a part of him that agreed with Amy. How dare he? How dare he put her in this position, how dare he allow a hybrid child to be born, when he knew, yes he knew that such a thing was forbidden. But he had loved Amy and Maria beyond reason, beyond what the million voices of the All could allow. On Earth, he was a single mind, ripped away from the chorus of conciousness that had enveloped him. Cast adrift, he had found solace in Amy Denver, a peace that he thought he'd lost forever when the ship had gone down.

He had to tell them everything. He had to let them know about the Terran Project, what he was, and why the twin being that Maria embodied in her entirety was an unmentionable abomination in the eyes of the Fold, a crime for which no forgiveness or amnesty could be granted. Why they feared her. Why they would hunt her.

"There is something," he began, his eyes boring into his daughter's, so like his own, "that I couldn't tell you then. Something you may not be able to accept or even concieve of. But it is the truth, and I can prove it to you."

He shifted his gaze to the arrangement of plastic fruit in front of him. With little effort - it was like squeezing his thoughts into a fist - he made the ghastly centerpiece float, its waxy edges glowing pale silver. He made it turn around, as though on a rotating display shelf, as though to say 'look, no wires or pulleys'. Amy paled, gasping. She instinctively reached for her daughter, but Maria was wholly absorbed in the levitating apples and pears, her expression deep, hard to read. Not only shock, but something else. Something...clicking in her head, neural pathways ramming into one another, connections made and probabilities calculated. She had seen this before.

An image flared into his mind's eye: a young man, serious expression. Another young man, tall and suspicious, then smiling, inviting. A girl, beautiful, intimidating. The fruit toppled onto the tabletop, forgotten. Amy flinched, nearly screamed. Marcos was thunderstruck. She knew the Fold children, or at least the Roswell three. Briefly, his father-voice wondered which one was the smiling boy, Evans or Guerin? Then it hit him in totality. She knew. She knew. She knew.

"You recognize what I just did, don't you?" He tried to calm himself. His hands were shaking. He hid them under the table. "You know why I can do that, don't you Maria?"

Maria bit her lip, nodded.

Amy pulled away from her, suddenly feeling trapped. She always did resemble him.

Their laughs had exactly the same cadence. Amy had been very careful to never hate her daughter for that. "What's going on?" Louder, panicked. "What is going on here?"

"I'm not from Earth, Amy. I'm from another place, far away from here. Another galaxy. I was in the alien ship that crashed here in 1947. I'm an alien. Don't turn away from me Amy, you saw what I did. You have to listen to me."

Amy stood up and began fluttered her hands, hyterical. "Maybe you're just telekinetic, like Carrie. Or something." And now the fury. "Or maybe you're just a goddamned liar who can't even come up with a halfway decent story to explain why he left his wife and daughter all alone in this shithole town!" Tears came, Amy didn't try to wipe them away. "You know what I do for a living? Make little aliens for tourists and wonder where my self-respect went. Then I remember. It went out the fucking door with you the day you left, you bastard! And now you show up in the middle of the goddamned night saying you're an alien...Jesus, an alien? Do you really think so little of me? There's no such thing as a fucking alien, only deadbeat husbands who..."

"Mom." Maria's voice was clear, steady, sweet. She probably sings like an angel, Marcos mused.

"Sit down." She gestured to the chair Amy had vacated. Her mother stared at her, feeling betrayed, confused, furious. But she sat.

"I believe him." Maria took one of her mother's hands between her two delicate ones. "I believe him."

"You believe," Amy took a deep breath, "that your father is an alien?" Was she delusional? On drugs? Was this because of that Michael boy she had talked about? Did he put her up to this somehow? Marcos had always been too smart for Amy, too fast. Maybe he had gotten a hold of Maria earlier and brainwashed her into believing this patently impossible lie. The man she had known sixteen years ago would never have done such a thing. Then again, the man she had known sixteen years ago wouldn't have claimed to be from another planet, either.

"Yes, I do. Because...I know aliens do exist. They're here, in Roswell. I've seen them do things like what Fa...he did."

Amy's mouth opened in shock. "Who? Who is an alien? What the hell are you saying, Maria?"

"I can't tell you." Maria shook her head. "I promised." She turned to her long-awaited father with new eyes, eyes that pried inside of him for an explanation. "But even if you are what you say you are, that doesn't explain why you went away." Now she was eager, her youth obvious, hungry.

Marcos swallowed. "I left because of you, Maria."

His daughter froze, and he knew that she had misunderstood him. All her most buried fears, that his departure had been due to her, an unwanted baby, rose into her eyes, naked and begging for mercy.

He rushed to explain. "I knew that if the others found out about you, they'd try to take you away. So I left Roswell, hoping to divert their attention away from you. I made sure that I was enough of a problem to distract the Hunters for as long as possible, but now they're onto me again, and if they find you...I don't know what will happen. To any of us."

Amy was shaking her head. Maria's small smile of relief was replaced by one of perplexity. "But why would they want me? I'm just a high school kid, just regular, you know?"

Marcos suddenly wished he hadn't come here, that he didn't have to say this. But not coming had never really been an option, and saying it had always been inevitable. "Maria. You are not, by any definition, regular. Your father is an alien. Your mother is a human. That makes you a hybrid."

Maria's brows drew together. "So? I can't do any alien stuff, like lifting the fruit and heating up stuff with my hand."

"Can't you?" Marcos leaned forward and picked up one of the plastic pears, resting it in the palm of his outstretched hand. "Look at this pear, Maria. Do you see the wavy lines across it?"

"Wavy lines? What the hell are you talking about?" Amy had calmed down a bit, but just a bit. This concerned her daughter. She couldn't fly off the handle until she'd figured out what kind of game Marcos was playing.

"I see them." Maria shrugged, dismissive. "Dr. Dodd told me it was my astigmatism. The lines and stuff, I mean."

Marcos chuckled. She was so transparently earnest. It was like looking into a calm lake and seeing the bottom. "It's not your astigmatism. Those lines are force patterns, and every object that exists in space gives them off. Now, I want you to concentrate on the wavy lines."

She nodded, staring intently at the fake fruit. "Are the edges of the wavy lines bending?"

"Yes. What does that mean?"

"It means," he was having trouble hlding in his elation, "that you've got a hold of the force pattern."

His daughter was a Zenith, he could tell, not one of those strange, drooling hybrids the Terran Council rumor mill liked to advertise. "Now, make the wavy lines straighten."

For a moment, the pear lay on his palm, immobile. Then it shot jerkily in the air and hovered there, blazing a strange violet-silver.

"Holy shit!" Maria bolted out of her chair and the pear fell, rolling to the floor. "Holy...holy shit!"