He frowned.

"You're back," she said it with a bizarre mixture of relief, resentment, and fear. "What took you so long?"

Nasedo stood and crossed the room with that unmoving, uncaring look on his face. "There is something I need you to do," he told her.

"I don't think I can do this," she said breathlessly. "I don't want it."

He frowned, "I haven't told you what to do."

"I don't care. I want out. Of everything."

He circled her. "What is wrong with you?"

"I'm not ready to play fertility goddess, okay!" she cried. "I'm not ready to be Eve and populate a planet. I'm not the mother of a species type."

His odd, colorless eyes bored into her. "What has brought on this panic?"

"I never knew what all this stuff meant. That book, our 'destiny,' I knew what it was but I never really 'got it.' Not until tonight." She backed away from him and all that he represented. "I felt it," she cried. "The baby."

"What baby?" Nasedo questioned.

"The FBI Agent's baby! I felt it in. . . in her soul. I felt her love, her bond, her emotion. It was overwhelming. It was. . .it was everything." Tess's eyes were huge and frightened. "I can't handle that. I can't deal with that. I don't want that. To be that tied to another person. To need or to give that much. I don't want it--"

She was shocked when Nasedo grabbed and shook her.

"Where is she?" He demanded.

Tess was confused. "Who? The FBI agent? I left her at Eagle Rock."

Nasedo pushed Tess into the couch and walked away. Something in his face terrified Tess. It was awful.

Nasedo left the house and took the car. Time was running out. The woman and the child had to be destroyed. For the purity of his race, that child could not be allowed to live.

At first his people had thought they could win their war against the invaders. But their greatest enemy was not the invaders but their own physiology. Their leaders had determined that their hope for survival required a change in physiology. Hybridization with the humans--a repulsive thought. Reluctantly they had allowed a select few to take on the static, unchanging, overly emotional human form. Their blood, however, was still their own.

Those in power here on earth--the Syndicate--had adopted the same strategy for the survival of the human race. Hybridization. Since Roswell they had tried unsuccessfully to create hybrids just as his people had created Max, Isabel, Tess, and Michael. In general The Project had been a failure. Time and time again the humans had failed. Then only a few of years ago--success. Cassandra Spender, then Fox Mulder had been successful in the transformation. Hybridization. Their physiology immune to invasion.

Still, a few isolated hybrids could not be the salvation of any race--not his own or the humans. The expense and time involved in creating them was too great, and not fast enough to spare either of their races. Worse, the hybrid's immunities could not be passed by any artificial means. Time and again it had been tried. Smoking Man had been dying from just such an attempt before Krychek killed him.

But then the Smoking Man had the last triumph. The ultimate triumph. The answer. The key to all things. The way to save their race was not through hybridization but procreation. Human children immune from the danger. Human. A hybrid's child WITH a human. Dana Scully's child would be the first. The first of many.

Before him, Nasedo saw his own race's eventual adulteration then extinction. The hybrids-- Max, Isabel, and Michael already found themselves drawn to their inferior human allies. What would they do if they ever learned that their meticulously designed fates may have been a miscalculation? What would they do if they ever learned the possibility that to save their home world they must truly join this human one?

The possibility must never come to pass. Nasedo would see that the truth never saw the light of day. He would destroy the FBI agent and her unborn child.

* * * Scully's car came to a halt. Feeling under her jacket she checked her gun, then cautiously stepped out of the car.

A lone figure stood in the middle of the dark road. Scully's eyes narrowed as she tried to distinguish his features in the bluish glare of the headlights. There was dignity in his bearing, knowledge in his lined face, and compassion in his Native American gaze.

"Albert?" she whispered. Then spoke more forcefully if still disbelievingly, "Albert Hosteen?"

But it was impossible. Albert Hosteen had died eight months earlier.

"Again you search," the Indian said to her.

This can't be happening. . .but then the last time she had seen Albert had also been impossible. He had been comatose and dying when he had appeared to her just as she had lost all hope of finding Mulder, after Cancer Man had secreted him away to some experimental facility. When every lead she had followed reached a dead end she had returned home to find Albert Hosteen standing in her living room.

"You are looking in the wrong place," he had told her, then directed her to look in her heart to find Mulder. She had knelt in prayer for Mulder's safety, his life, and his sanity. The next morning she had found herself on her living room floor still clutching her car keys from when she had entered her apartment. But she had found Mulder alive and if not quite well--soon to be well. . . at least until he had been taken again.

But it was impossible. She had long ago concluded that Hosteen had been a figment of her desperate imagination. Her subconscious had spoken to her, not some ghostly apparition. She had spent hours, days, weeks trying to interpret the texts she had found in Africa. Surely it had been no great mental leap to connect that search to the time Hosteen had aided her and Mulder in decrypting the files regarding the Roswell incident. Surely seeing Hosteen now was only the result of her many sleepless nights and the growing realization that it might be impossible to find the man, the friend, the partner who had become the central figure of her life.

"You still search," Albert repeated.

Against her will she answered, "I can't find him."

Albert nodded. "Sometimes we don't find what we search for until we're ready to."

"I'm ready."

The Indian shook his head. "No, you are desperate. You feel alone, but you aren't. The FBI man is with you still. He is always with you--" He touched her forehead "--here--" he touched her heart "--and here."

Her devotion to truth made her say, "But how do I know he isn't dead? Mulder said it. Everything ends sometime, and these abductions were different. They weren't coming back."

"He isn't dead."

"But without proof how can I know that?"

The medicine man pointed. "See the moon, large in our sky, held in the earth's endless embrace. If the moon suddenly disappeared, the earth would fall from its axis. Gravity would altar. The seas would rise without reason, and the world would become chaos and die. But in day or when the moon is new we cannot witness our partner's path through our sky." He looked at Scully. "But we can see mother earth. If she exists, then so does the moon. You are all the proof you need."

But that's not enough, that deeply hidden part of herself cried even as she outwardly remained calm.

Albert told her. "You will find him again. But now there is danger," he stressed. "To you, to others, and most especially to your child."

She had feared as much. As soon as she had discovered the wonderful, impossible miracle she had feared it would be taken from her. She--who could not have children--was going to have a child, and some part of her knew that the danger that had surrounded her life for years would now follow more closely.

"Come with me," he directed and Scully, who trusted few, quietly followed him.

* * *

Michael pulled a small penlight out of his back pocket.

"I don't think that's going to do all that much in here," Maria said as they walked further into the dim interior of the cave. The sun had set earlier, but at least there had been a moon. Inside the cave was only darkness and. . .well to be honest, it was creepy. She shivered.

"It's alright," he murmured and squeezed her hand. She felt the gentle pressure of his fingertips against the back of her hand and the warmth of his palm pressed against her own.

Something inside Maria hurt. This was as close as she had been to Michael--mentally or physically--since the incident with Pierce, since Michael had said in an anguished voice, "Maybe I love you too much."

For the first time she almost believed him.

They emerged into the main 'room' of the cave. Michael's bluish tinted penlight slid a small beam of light across the wall, highlighting the symbols scrawled across it.

The corner of her mouth quirked as she remembered a scene in an old Monty Python movie where they too had found an inscription on a cavern wall and had then spent a great deal of time debating whether the "Arrrrrrgh!" was a message or a death groan. After all who would spend the time to scrawl a death groan on a wall?

She rolled her eyes. You're losing it, Maria, she warned herself, and she had no doubt that Michael would NOT appreciate her humor.

He approached the wall and touched the symbols. She could imagine the intense, searching expression in Michael's dark eyes. She didn't really need to see that expression to know it was there. She knew Michael by heart.

She looked around her to search for any differences since the last time she was here, but with the near uniform darkness it was difficult to tell. She remembered that the last time she had stood here there had been torches lighting the room as Michael lay on the floor still as death. Terror that he might die had nearly overwhelmed her.

River Dog, the Indian, had explained how Nasedo had once healed himself after a sickness. River Dog had produced stones from Michael's home world and handed them to each of their group instructing them to stand at the end of lines inscribed in a circle surrounding Michael. The pattern had vaguely reminded Maria of a picture she had once seen of a heart chakra.

Holding one of the extraterrestrial stones in her hand, River Dog had explained that they held energy, energy activated by the one who held it. He explained that the energy was called the balance and could change you physically, mentally, and even emotionally. But Michael faced death and, unlike Liz, for Maria there was no question. No second thought. She had taken the stone and stepped into her place beside Michael.

"Follow your own path," River Dog had said. And she had. She had held the stone and had watched it light in her hands. How surreal, how unreal. She could not believe when the stone began to glow with a pure blue-white light with a golden aura. Suddenly she had found herself. . .somewhere else.

She couldn't fully describe where she had been. It had been stark in it's beauty, like the desert at twilight. Red-gold sand and a blue violet sky. Michael had stood before her and without thought she had gone to him. Together they had stood silhouetted against an impossibly blue sky. She had reached for him and his mouth touched hers. . .and lingered.

Michael had healed. He had emerged from the chrysalis or whatever it was he had been encased within. He had risen and answered Max's questions, but he had only looked at her. Even as Isabel threw her arms around him and wept, Michael had only looked at her.

"I came back," he said as his gaze locked with hers. "No more running," he vowed. "No matter what."

"So where is he?" Michael asked, snapping Maria back to the present. "If River Dog was expecting us, where is he?"

A larger, stronger beam of light cut into the darkness. "River Dog?" Michael asked.

Special Agent Dana Scully emerged from the darkness. Michael glanced at Maria quickly as another figure followed Scully into the room.

"River Dog!" Michael announced.

Scully frowned and turned to see the silver haired Indian behind her was indeed River Dog. "But how. . .?" she whispered.

"River Dog, what's going on here?" Michael demanded.

"You came here for answers," the old Indian said.

"Yeah, but--"

The aged medicine man raised his hand and indicated the inscriptions on the wall. "You wanted an interpretation of these, did you not?"

"Yes, but why bring her here?"

Scully approached the wall. She touched the wall. Then knelt and examined it more closely. Her fingers traced the symbols with familiarity. "I recognize these," she announced.

Michael's gaze sharpened. "What does it say."

"These don't really say anything. They are a map." Then she stood and walked further down the room, "These say something."

"What?"

"Be fruitful and multiply."

Maria frowned. "Isn't that like something out of the Bible?" she asked.

"Yes," Scully answered softly. "And in one form or another it appears in most religions' creation myths almost as though it is a universal truth."

Michael pointed to the wall Scully had first examined. "You said this was a map. To where?"

She shook her head. "Not to where. To who. This group of symbols represent adenine. This group cytosine. And this and this are guanine and thymine."

Maria looked confused. "Why does that sound familiar?" Her frown cleared. "Wait a minute. We studied that in biology last year."

"It's DNA," Scully explained. "Human DNA. These symbols are a map of the human genome."

"Human like. . ."

"Human, like you, me, and everyone else in this room."

Maria glanced surreptitiously at Michael. His gaze didn't waver from the wall Scully had just interpreted. Was he happy or sad about hearing this? Was this the answer he wanted? Was it an answer at all or just something that once processed they would only question more?