Alex sat down on the bed and stacked the pillows behind his back. He had just put his feet up on the bed when everyone came in. Michael was saying, "So it's some kind of weapon that can kill anyone that comes looking for us."

Max answered as he shut and locked the door, "It's not that simple, Michael. We can't just go around using it."

"Why not?" It seemed like a good plan to him.

"It's too dangerous."

"What do you mean?"

"You saw what it did to us. We can't take the chance of that happening again. What if Valenti hadn't been there to get me and Liz out of there? What if the other aliens had come back? It takes too much out of us."

"So next time the four of us will use it together. With all of us, it shouldn't take as much energy."

Max laid the Shield still in the windbreaker that Kyle had wrapped it in on the bed next to Alex, who quickly moved his feet away from it. Anticipating the explosion that was to follow, he hesitated before saying, "You can't use it."

"What do you mean? You used it."

"It only responds to me... and Liz."

"What? That bites. We finally get something that can help us, and... This is stupid." Michael was feeling justifiably angry at this insult. He pointed to Liz, and said, "She can use it, but I can't?!"

Isabel spoke up, "How can that be, Max?"

"I don't know." He was reluctant to repeat what Nasedo had said about it responding to his mate. He still didn't know what it all meant, and until he did, he didn't intend to discuss it. Thinking there must be a mistake, Michael strode to the bed, and flung off the covering and grabbed the smooth edge of the circular object. They all heard the pop of electricity as it repelled the other alien. "Damn it!" He let it drop to the bed.

Liz who hadn't heard about how the Shield had zapped the others as they collected it from its hiding place, rushed over and asked, "What happened?" She reached to pick it up, and Maria tried to stop her, "Liz, don't." Liz ignored her and once again picked it up.

Michael, Isabel, Maria and Alex stared in amazement as she handled the thing. It hummed softly at her touch, and she could again feel the energy pulsing through it. Max reached over and laid his hand along side hers, and the humming, though still soft, increased. She released it into his grasp, and it quieted back to a whisper of sound. Having made his point, he set it back onto the bed. He said, "Nasedo said that it was specially designed for me. It won't respond to anyone else, including you and Isabel."

"Except Liz." Michael sounded disgusted.

"That's right. I don't know why, and I'm telling you now that you are not to say anything to Nasedo about it." He looked straight at Michael, and added, "I mean it, not a word."

"Why not? If he's supposed to be here to protect us, maybe he needs to know something like this. Didn't you ever think that by keeping things from him, we're making things harder on ourselves? I mean he could tell us everything we ever wanted to know."

"He won't tell us anything we haven't already figured out ourselves. It's not his job, remember?" Max hugged Liz lightly to him and continued, "I still don't trust him. After what he did to Hank, Liz, and the handprint pictures Valenti had... Hubble's wife... and who knows how many others... I don't trust him period... and neither should you. As soon as this is over, he's going back to Virginia for good this time. No one in town is safe as long as he's here, and that goes double for Maria and Alex." He stroked Liz's hair as he added, "And Liz. Because they know who we are and who he is, he sees them as potential threats. If he ever thinks that they are hurting us, or could be used against us, he'll take them out just like that. Do you want them to become just another set of silver handprint pictures in the FBI files?" He paused. "The less he knows about Liz and the others, the safer they will be."

Maria asked, "Do you really think he will hurt us? I mean he's supposed to be on our side, right?"

Liz looked at her friend and said, "You didn't see what he was like the day he took me from the CrashDown. When Max called me, he was taking the body of some guy he had killed out of his trunk, you know, and he just... he just tossed it on the side of the road like it was..." She couldn't even come up with a good descriptive word for the callousness with which he'd treated the corpse. "Then he smiled at me like he couldn't wait until it was my turn." She looked from Alex to Maria as she finished, "If Max hadn't come to get me, he would have killed me, too."

Alex asked, "Ok, so we should avoid him, but how? We never know who he is. That's how he got Liz the last time, remember. He could be any one of us, or our parents, or Sheriff Valenti. How do we know who to trust?"

Maria said, "Yeah, Alex is right. Maybe we need like a secret hand shake or something."

"Get real," from Isabel who would refuse to participate in anything so stupid and dorky.

"It's not a bad idea," said Alex, who never thought twice about making a spectacle of himself in public.

"Oh yeah, what's to keep him from figuring it out, then we're right back where we started." Michael was also skeptical.

Liz looked to Max for a suggestion. It was easy for Michael and Isabel to scoff: they weren't the ones in danger from Nasedo. Liz could use her ability to connect with a person, and in that way verify their identity, but Alex and Maria were completely helpless against him should he decide to go after them. Short of handcuffing the couples together or putting the shape-shifter under constant surveillance, neither of which was feasible, she was out of ideas.

Max was also at a loss. His current plan was not to let Liz out of his sight until this was over and both Nasedo and the other aliens were out of Roswell for good. "For now, let's all stick together. We'll worry about what to do later."

The two remaining aliens did not return to their motel until close to midnight. The sudden sound of talking coming from the monitor woke up the gang who crowded around the screen. Bubba was saying as they closed and locked their door, "Are you sure? I mean how could Tess have been mistaken? She said that she had already killed the wife before she came out of the pod."

"Well, apparently not." Mr. Skinny's voice was heavy in sarcasm. "It must have been the other female that died, the sister. You're lucky you weren't there, or you could be as fried as the others. When I went back, there were two big piles of cinders on the floor, and that was all that was left of them. We've got to get that Shield. Our people are nowhere near coming up with anything like it. If we could just get our hands on it, we could work on trying to duplicate the technology."

"Too bad the Sword is lost."

"The Sword, yeah. It's been so long, I'd almost forgotten the other half of the Shield. If it was anything like what I saw from the Shield today, I'm just glad they don't have it, too." He sat down heavily. "Stupid human."

"Hey he outsmarted you." The larger alien said.

"That's only because he died before I could get to him." Their tones made it apparent that this was an old argument. "How was I to know Atherton's mysterious friend was none other than the protector, Nasedo. Or that Nasedo would kill the little bastard before I got him to tell us where he'd stashed the Sword."

"Look on the bright side, he didn't have time to get the location from Atherton before he killed him, so Nasedo doesn't have it either."

The leader banged the table with his fist. "I don't want a bright side, I want the Sword."

Bubba walked over to the end table between the twin beds and retrieved the scroll. As he unrolled it, the watching teenagers realized that there were actually two papers rolled together not just one as Alex had originally thought. They laid them both on the table, but from the angle of the camera, they couldn't really make out the on either one. The aliens fell silent as they studied the documents.

Michael looked over at Max. "Did you hear what they said? There's another weapon out there somewhere. One that goes with your Shield. And James Atherton had it last."

"Wait a sec... Who is James Atherton?" asked Alex. The name was familiar to him somehow.

"He's the guy who wrote the alien book, 'Among Us'," Isabel explained.

"Hey, isn't he the guy from the dome house, the one in Texas?" Maria asked.

"Yeah."

"He's the one whose key you found in Valenti's office, and when you touched it, you got a flash of the dome house and the secret room under the floor," Liz summed up.

"Yeah. Hey! Do you know what that means?" Michael asked Max. "It means that this Sword thing was meant to be mine. That's why I was connected with it, and dreamed of the dome and had those visions. It was calling to me, like the orbs called to you."

"We don't know that, Michael. And besides, I wasn't the one who was connected to the orb, Liz was. Just because you had the visions doesn't mean that whatever this sword thing is it was meant to be yours." Max tried to interject a reality check, though he knew it would be too late.

He could practically hear the wheels spinning in Michael's head and wasn't surprised to hear, "We gotta go back to Marathon, Texas. We gotta check out that secret room in the dome. That's probably where he stashed it."

"Michael, that room has already been picked clean by the FBI by now. It's too late."

Liz knew that Max was right. Because they were so incautious when they went out there the last time, the word stealth not any part of their vocabulary, they were followed and had almost been trapped in the house when whoever was after them arrived. Michael had grabbed what papers and pictures he could, Isabel took the necklace with the alien symbol on it and they had all left in a hurry. Unfortunately, the next day while the teenagers were at school, 'somebody' (Read: The FBI) broke into the Evans' house and took the box of stuff, and they were right back to where they started from, with questions and no answers. The only thing that they retained from the whole experience was Isabel's necklace because she had been wearing it at the time, and the foundations of Michael and Maria's relationship.

Liz remembered remarking about how the main floor of Atherton's dome house looked pretty thoroughly searched before they'd gotten there last fall. "Well, now we know who was there before us: all of these guys and Nasedo. At least we know that none of them had found the secret room."

"Well, if these guys didn't find it then, it still had to be there when we were there. Whoever had followed us out there wasn't looking for this Sword thing. If it was hidden, it could still be there. I'm telling you, we gotta go check it out." Michael was nothing if not persistent.

Max was already shaking his head. There were too many things going on right now in Roswell to take a ten hour road trip to Texas. Before he could say anything, Maria walked over and laid her hand on Michael's arm. "We'll go. As soon as these guys are taken care of, we'll go back, just the two of us, if no one else wants to."

Max put his hand on Michael's shoulder and said, "We'll all go. But not right now."

Michael agreed. He thought again of all the weeks he'd been haunted by the image of the dome that he'd gotten from that flash. He'd done nothing but eat, sleep and talk about that dome for days. Max had been annoyed at his obsession with 'semi-circles', he'd said. Michael had even painted the thing in art class, and it was so good the teacher had put it on display. Isabel had been aghast to see his 'thing' out there for everyone to see. Looking down at Maria's hand on his arm, he remembered something that he hadn't given a second thought to since the day it had happened. When they were looking for the lock that went with his key, Isabel had suggested that he try touching the key to see if he would get another flash. He'd tried and nothing had happened. Then Maria had walked over and stood next to him. She was close enough that he could smell the flowery scent of her shampoo, and she implored him to try again. With her presence filling his senses, he did finally get the flash that led them to finding the secret room. What did it mean? Why had it worked when she was near and not before? Somehow by being with him had she made him stronger? Was it possible that he was bound to Maria in some way? Like the same way Max was to Liz? Michael had rationalized that Max's attraction to Liz had stemmed from the fact that his true mate had died. Michael wondered if the tables had been turned, and Isabel wasn't alive today to pull at him with her presence, would he have been drawn to Maria with the same force that Liz called to Max? Struck by the thought, he reached out and lightly ran his fingers across Maria's beautiful face.

"What?" she asked, puzzled by the change in mood she sensed in him.

"Nothing. Just thanks... for understanding."

The gang was silent, watching the monitor, absorbed in their thoughts. All of them but Alex were reflecting on their last, fateful trip to Texas. Alex wondered what he had missed. He had still been in the dark over the alien's true identities at the time, and hadn't been invited to come along. And why was the name James Atherton familiar to him? He couldn't come up with an answer.

On the monitor, one of the men sighed loudly. "This is getting us nowhere."

The leader answered as he rolled up the scrolls and prepared for bed, "At least today wasn't a total waste."

"Tell that to the others. You know, we started off with a six man team, now here we are fifty years later, and we are down to just you and me. We've lost half the team in just a couple of days. Our superiors aren't going to like that. Not that we're any closer to going home." Bubba sighed in frustration.

"That's where you're wrong. This time tomorrow, if things go as I anticipate we'll be on our way out of this town and heading to the rendezvous point."

"Feeling a little optimistic, aren't we?"

"Not at all. Until now, we didn't know who we were looking for. Now we have them. There are only two people on this whole friggin' planet that can work the Shield: the leader and his wife. Those kids, Max and Liz they called each other, we know who they are now. Finding them will be easy."

Hearing this, Max reached for Liz's hand. He caught Michael's eye, and they silently agreed to protect Liz at any cost. "And don't forget, the other girl, the sister, is dead."

"That still leaves the last boy. We don't know which kid he is in this town."

"Sure we do." Mr. Skinny gave a self-satisfied chuckle. The teenagers now all looked to Michael, secretly asking how he had given himself away. "He was with Nasedo today attempting to rescue the other two. In fact we had him and didn't even know it." His voice was heavy with disgust. "Of all the kids in this city, we just happen to net the three we were looking for. Next time, instead of assuming all by-standers are humans, we'll assume that everyone is an alien right from the get go, and save ourselves the headache."

"You saw Nasedo?" Bubba was perplexed. "How do you know?"

The leader gave a malicious laugh and said, "Get this: When I was escaping from the building today before they could fry me with the Shield, I was almost caught by the local sheriff. The sheriff," he emphasized. "Right there in front of the Shield, with blue lights and energy swirling around like a hurricane and he didn't blink an eye. Like he knew what was going on in that room. Are you going to tell me that not only does the law here in Roswell know that there are real aliens living here, but they go out of their way to protect them?" He scoffed at the idea. The six people watching held their breaths, afraid of where this was going. "If that's the case, then maybe we should go introduce ourselves, we might be given the key to the city, or maybe they'll have a parade in our honor." The sarcasm was unmistakable. "No, if the sheriff here is protecting them, there's only one answer to that: Nasedo has infiltrated the Sheriff's Station."

The other alien looked as stunned as the six kids listening in, before he said, "Wow. That's... that's ingenious. Protecting them from the inside."

"And if the Sheriff is actually Nasedo," the leader continued, "then who do you think is the sheriff's kid?"