The farmer blinked with heavy lids, tightening his grip on the wheel of his truck. It was late, much later than he preferred to be out on the road, but he had needed to run a last-minute errand at the not-so-local grocer.

The moonlight flickered through the dense trees that lined the rough road, hitting the pavement intermittently through the canopy. The farmer reached forward on the dash for the radio to help wake him up, glancing down for just a second to hit the right switch.

He looked up and swore.

A figure had appeared in the road, crouched and frozen with eyes staring wide into the headlights. He caught just a blur of pink before his hands slammed back to the wheel and his foot rammed down onto the brake pedal.

The truck skidded, the unweighted back fishtailing as the farmer struggled for control.

He managed to guide the vehicle to a stop, his knuckles white on the wheel and his heart beating itself a new path in his chest. He hesitated only briefly before he remembered the humanoid figure and hopped out of the driver's seat faster than his bones preferred. His old boots crunched down on the loose asphalt as he searched in front, behind, and under the truck, checking for whomever--or whatever--he had just seen.

The farmer lifted his cap and scratched his greying hair as he considered, the cool night breeze calming the fearful sweat from his brow.

Looked like whomever it was had gone, and not by way of his tires.

He glanced around the woods, the misty night air heavy with anticipation. He felt like a balloon that had been rubbed against carpet--full of static electricity, and the eerie sense that he was under surveillance.

After a few steadying breaths, the farmer climbed back into his truck, ever more eager to get himself home. The engine needed some light persuasion as he turned the key, and he almost cussed it out again as his fear spiked at the delay. He made a mental note to check the battery in the morning once it finally rumbled to life and he eased back onto the road.

The woods soon gave way to his farmlands, and not ten minutes later the farmer pulled up the gravel driveway to his two-story home, the only house for miles in either direction. He sighed in relief as he saw that the lights were still out. He hated to leave Charlotte unattended, but had figured she'd be okay with the dogs while he ran a quick errand.

After all, it was Charlotte's birthday tomorrow, and he had realized that he was all out of pancake mix.

The farmer twisted in his seat to grab the few plastic grocery bags that he had placed on the back seat when, through the back window, he noticed an unfamiliar lump beneath the blue plastic tarp in his truck bed.

The hair on his neck prickled as he stared at the lump, unsure if it was the bad light or if there truly was something underneath his truck's rain coat, as he liked to call it.

He considered only briefly before he reached for the small revolver that lived in his glove compartment. Something had him spooked tonight, and he didn't mess with spooks.

He left the truck headlights on as he eased himself out of the cabin, letting the lights reflect off of the painted white garage door to illuminate the night. He cautiously came around the side of his vehicle to the truck bed itself.

Slowly, he lowered the tailgate.

With a direct view he could tell that it wasn't just his imagination--there really was a lump under the tarp.

"You there, come on out, nice and slow," he said, his voice steadier than his hands.

The lump still didn't move, and he began to wonder if he was making a fool of himself. He went through his mind for the last time he had used the truck, trying to remember if he had left anything back there.

Just to be sure, he switched to a single-handed grip on the gun, the other hand reaching forward for the edge of the tarp. It took all of his tired willpower to grab the plastic sheet, and even more for him to whip it up and out of the way.

Curled up in his truck bed slept a girl with pink hair.

At first, all he could see were the backs of her legs and tops of her feet as they peeked out from under what looked like a white dress, but when he walked around the side he realized that it was a young woman wrapped in a too-large coat.

He also made note of the grey gas mask that covered the lower half of her face. Or at least, he thought it was a gas mask.

He really didn't know what to think.

Shaun would know what to do, he figured, but then again Shaun wasn't here.

He reset the safety on his gun and tucked it into his belt before scratching under his hat again. Considering that they were so far out from most help, he supposed there was nothing left to do but take her inside for now.

She didn't wake when he gently eased her off of the truck bed.

His back protested loudly as he walked the few short steps to his front door and managed the lock with one hand. He shook his head as he considered--either he was getting old fast, or she was much heavier than her slim build made her look.

Her hair tickled him where her head rested against his shoulder and he suppressed a shiver. More than a tickle, it felt like something was crawling along his neck, pressing itself against his skin.

He was all too happy to lower her down as he lay her on the couch, but was perturbed yet again when he was reminded of that mask. He didn't know what to do – should he take it off? Would she suffocate if she slept with it on? Why did she have it in the first place?

With only the porch light filtering in through the side window, it looked like her pink hair was worming itself across the pillow.

The farmer figured it was a trick of the light and the air current of the A/C unit, which blasted against the summer heat. He grabbed the folded blanket they kept by the couch for late night TV and draped it over the young woman. He stared down at her, entirely uncomfortable.

It felt like his brain was itching.

He took off his cap and considered. Something about this night, this whole situation, had him on edge, but he didn't know what to do. He had Charlotte to think of, but this young woman too appeared to be in trouble and was deeply asleep. It wasn't as if he could just leave her in the truck bed.

He'd camp out in Charlotte's room, he decided. He triple-checked that the safety was on his gun as he made his way to the staircase. He hated having the gun in the house with his daughter around, knew Shaun would throw a fit if she ever heard of it, but he wanted it nearby for the night.

He grabbed a bundle of blankets and a pillow, glancing one more time at his unexpected guest before climbing the stairs to the bedrooms. Ruff and Tuff, their two collies, greeted him at the top of the stairs, noses flaring as they sniffed the air wafting up from downstairs.

They whined quietly, and he shushed them.

He entered the first bedroom on the right, the dogs trotting closely behind him with ears low.

He brushed his daughter's kinky curly hair out of her forehead to give her a quick kiss. He didn't think he'd get much sleep that night, but he lay out his blankets at the threshold of the door. He lifted one edge for Ruff, the snuggle bug, to climb in, but realized that both dogs had planted themselves just outside the doorway, standing and staring with large, unblinking eyes down the stairs.

--------------------

The Facility had entered lockdown.

No shipments in. No movement out. All security systems reinforced and made redundant where possible.

Even the Corpse Doctor hadn't been called in despite the two fresh new corpses they had on hand.

The bodies in question were stretched out naked on flat medal slabs in the onsite morgue, which was otherwise known as the Cold Room. There they had rested almost untouched since Subject 1101 had slain them just over a week prior.

Farheen hunched over the male corpse, her face mere inches from one of the small perforations that covered the entire body in clusters.

The body had been completely exsanguinated, and expertly so.

Each hole was about the diameter of a dime, drilled in through the skin by the subject's scalp feeders. The attacks had targeted all the major arteries, the feeders concentrating on the most efficient way to drain a body.

Farheen and Rose had reviewed the security tape countless times since that day, had needed to ask the tech team to reduce the images almost  frame by frame to catch every movement that the subject made.

Six seconds. It had taken her six seconds to break the tube, feed from the two medics on staff, and break down the door that separated her from Victor.

The subject had, somehow, shattered the thick containment glass of her tank without a single movement that they could trace. Farheen hypothesized that the subject had thus shown retention of the psychokinetic skill that had produced the original blast in the operation room, but couldn't rule out the possibility that the camera simply couldn't catch the speed of her movement.

The subject, after emerging from the tank, had struck each medic almost simultaneously--where the "almost" marked a distinction of seconds.

The man had been taken down first, the feeders from the subject's scalp lengthening and sharpening themselves to pierce into his flesh and drain him in a single breath. However, the attack pattern on the second medic showed a completely different approach.

Despite the tiny timeframe between the attacks, the subject appeared to have learned and readjusted her movement, striking the female medic only in one spot, right above the heart.

The feeder had pierced through the chest to the heart, expanding within the medic's body, branching through the cardiovascular system within the woman's torso. When, moments later, Subject 1101 had withdrawn from the body, the branches had broken off and remained behind, leaving a substantial amount of symbiont within the body.

But the leftover symbiont was dead, dead with its host.

"This may have just been intended as an auxiliary growth, expendable from the start," Rose muttered to herself as she studied the body. The medic's flesh had been meticulously carved away to reveal the symbiont within her. "It didn't try to infiltrate the entire body like it did in 1101, and the branching may have been intended to compensate for the singular point of entry into the body as opposed to the multiple, clustered approach in the male."

"So you think she was testing different methods?" Farheen asked, looking up from her examination of the puckered holes along the male's thigh.

"Perhaps. It's possible she staggered the attacks intentionally to learn from the first before initiating the second, but it may be that she was striking at random to see what worked best."

"Both options are worth considering, but what if there is a more obvious answer?" Farheen said, her tone indicating that she was thinking aloud rather than challenging Rose's observations.

"Are you suggesting that she was trying to reproduce?" Rose asked, picking up on her colleague's line of thinking.

"While it is true that Pearl has shown no reproductive drive that we understand, it would not be unimaginable that when mixed with the human subject the symbiont began to prioritize differently," Farheen confirmed.

"Then is this an egg? A bud? The other symbionts bred by two merging and redividing as four new individuals, but Pearl never showed interest, even when paired with other P-strain partners." Rose bit her lip as she stared down at the woman's body and the pink root system exposed within. Then her eyebrows lifted. "Oh, that reminds me," she said as she turned to the intercom on the wall. She pressed the button. "Send Gabriel to the Cold Room," she said without preamble and without response to the hasty, static-filled reply.

Gabriel entered the room minutes later, his half-smile twisted to the side. He glanced briefly at the grotesque display on the slabs, but made no comment as the women continued to study and prod.

"You called?" he drawled, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

"Call a team," Rose said, not even bothering to look up as she continued her work. "And not those idiots you've been using."

He raised both eyebrows at her tone.

"Even supposing that I do, I very much doubt that we could catch her," Gabriel said, crossing his arms and leaning back against the door. "We have six teams already trying to track her but she's as good as gone."

Rose waved a hand in the air, as if dispersing his bad ideas. "I don't want to catch her, for now. I think we would lose a valuable opportunity to study her if we removed her from the outside environment too soon." She shook her hair to the side, out of her way. "And I also have no doubt that she will make herself known within due time. No," she continued, "I have a different mission for this team."

Gabriel slid his eyes over to Farheen, who was watching Rose. No help there, he acknowledged dryly.

"For what?" he asked, straight to the point.

"Subject 1101 was special. Pearl picked her for a reason," Rose said, not returning the favor with her indirect response. She leaned back from the table, staring up at the portable television that she had ordered to be set up in the room.

Gabriel waited.

"As unfortunate as the news coverage of our missing body has been, I did learn one invaluable piece of information," Rose continued as she re-caught her train of thought.

She cocked her head with a smile.

"Subject 1101," she said slowly, "has a sister."