PART III


******


TWO GREY HILLS, NEW MEXICO 
MARCH 18 
11:30 a.m.


On Ghost's gray back, Albert Hosteen rode in the relative silence of
the high desert, the sun warm and climbing high overhead and hanging
in the crags of the Chaco Mountains far off in the distance. The
horse's hooves kicked up a slight cloud of dust that settled around
him like tan smoke, a faint wind on his face that still held some of
the cool of the early morning on its breath. 

He wore a dark green shirt, the sleeves rolled up in the warm
sunlight, his jeans so faded they were almost white. He held a rope
in one hand, his other one on the worn reins. The aging saddle
creaked with each of the horse's steps, the saddle as old as the
horse, the leather beginning to crack at the joinings. The leather
was the deep brown of Hosteen's weathered skin. 

The reins slack, the horse lowered his head and sneezed, a ruffling
sound. Hosteen reached down and stroked the animal's soft neck, his
fingers trailing in the white mane. He spoke softly to the creature
in Navajo, and the horse's ears cocked back, as if to listen, which
made Hosteen smile.

It was a faint smile, though. Much was on his mind. 

Agent Scully, looking pale and tired at the breakfast table that
morning, was the current focus of his thoughts. She'd said the baby
had kept her up -- the child's movements and a touch of nausea -- and
she'd smiled wanly as she said it. 

Of course, she had lied. 

He'd worried over her, standing beside the window with his pipe in
the corner of his mouth. She'd picked at the breakfast Sara had made,
eggs and bacon and fry bread. She hadn't even protested when
Whistler had put the terrible smelling tea in front of her. 
Hosteen's brows had risen with that. 

He found his mind drifting to Eda, his wife, dead for more than 20
years now from cancer, her body growing thin and her skin turning to
paper between the worn sheets of the hospital in Farmington, then
later, how she'd seemed to vanish in their bed at home, like watching
her turn to sand and dust. 

He thought of how he'd felt after she'd gone, how he'd sat for hours
on the porch out front, his sons there, but how he'd felt alone in a
way he had not yet experienced, like an essential part of him had
gone missing along with Eda, the children almost like reminders of a
life he had once had and would never have again. 

Of course, he had learned to deal with the space inside him, open as
the desert beyond the house, a barren patch in him. He'd learned to
live a different life, filled with children and grandchildren, and
with his faith and his place in the community. 

Thinking of Agent Scully, the lost look on her face, the look of
someone with something missing, he remembered all of this. He
thought of how she was when she'd come to him with Mulder before, so
much broken between them, how she'd looked the same then, though it
had been well hidden then with shame and rage and pain. He
remembered Mulder on the concrete porch at his brother's house, the
time he'd found him shirtless in the chilly morning, Bo creeping at
the edge of the property like a ghost, how Mulder had seemed almost
like Hosteen himself in the weeks after Eda had died, his arms
crossed over his bare chest.

Hosteen sighed, the horse angling around a small scrubby brush, the
mountains closer now, great crags of sand and stone. 

Mulder and Scully had found their way back to one another in this
place, coming together as something stronger than what they'd been
before. And Scully would find a way to be apart from him here, as
well. She had it in her to do that now, even if on this first
morning alone she did not know it yet.

It was good, he decided, that she learn this lesson now. When the
road between her and Mulder was clear, though filled with distance. 
Better to learn this way than how he had learned it. When there was
no way back at all.

A soft stumbling behind him, a tug on the rope in his hand, and his
mind came back to the present. He turned slightly on the horse's
back and looked behind.

The pony was shuffling along behind him, its neck outstretched
slightly, a peeved look on its face. On its back, the boy sat, a
baseball cap on his head, his eyes down until he saw Hosteen looking
at him. They rose to meet his gaze, and then darted back down
again, as though afraid. His hands were gripping not the reins but
the horn of the small western saddle, his knuckles white.

Sean's first time on a horse, his aunt had said when Hosteen had
gone to gather him at his brother's house, the boy silent in the back
room when Hosteen had entered. Sean had been drawing on the floor,
stretched out with markers and crayons, and Hosteen had stood over
him, looking down into his thin, still frightened face. 

"A good picture," he'd pronounced, looking down at the drawing, a
very close likeness of the pony -- its charcoal back, the round white
spot on its rump dotted with black. Beneath the pony was a single
word:

Cloud.

"And a good name," Hosteen had continued, smiling kindly. "Looks
like a storm cloud, the colors on his back." 

Not surprisingly, Sean had not replied.

"Time to go out," Hosteen said, and, reaching his hand down toward
Sean, the boy had risen and followed him out of the house, past his
aunt's worried face, past the baby in her arms, whose hands had
brushed Hosteen's shirt as he'd passed. 

Hosteen lifted Sean onto the pony's back once Victor had saddled it,
Ghost standing patiently beside them, and then they'd headed out into
the desert, leaving everything else behind.

Miles from the house now, the sun coming almost exactly overhead,
Hosteen turned his attention to the foot of the mountains, the land
around it, barren but beautiful in that way that desert was, things
greener than usual with the coming spring.

They reached a large clearing at the foot of the mountains hemmed in
with boulders, and Hosteen urged Ghost to halt with a touch of the
reins. The pony likewise stopped, tossing its head against the rope
Hosteen held in his hand, still looking irritated at being led for so
long from the stable. As he dismounted, Hosteen smiled at the pony,
and touched its small nose with his free hand.

"Are you ready to learn how to ride?" Hosteen said, standing close,
and Sean looked at him, uncertain. He wouldn't take his hands off
the horn, the reins against the pony's mane. 

"I will hold the rope while you are learning," he added, showing
Sean the rope in his hand. "But you will do the steering and the
stopping. You will do all the work. Before we leave here today, you
will be able to ride him back walking beside me with him, not behind
me with me leading you along. What do you think of that?"

Sean stared back, and then shook his head. Hosteen merely smiled.

"You can do it. Your pony is very tame. The man I got him from
said he would not hurt anything, that he would mind very well." He
paused, meeting Sean's gaze. 

"Trust," he said softly. "In me and in yourself. You can learn and
will do very well. I can feel it. And I have feelings about such
things."  

Sean merely looked at him, and shook his head again. 

"Hm," Hosteen hummed softly, and stood back. "Come down off of him
and we will start at the beginning. Something easy. All right?" 

He helped Sean slide off the pony's back, holding him around the
waist. Then he handed the rope to him, and stepped back, walking a
few paces away from Ghost, who watched him go. 

"The first thing you must do is call a horse by its name," Hosteen
said. "Let it hear you, so it can learn to mind. Watch."

And as Sean shook his head, Hosteen reached his hand up toward Ghost
and spoke in Navajo to him. First his name, then the word "come." 
He did not move otherwise. 

Ghost pricked up his ears toward him at the sound of his voice, then
obediently came forward until his nose touched Hosteen's outstretched
hand. 

"Good," he said softly. "Good." Then he looked at Sean. "Now you.
Go over there and say the pony's name, and the word 'come.' See if
he will hear your voice."

But Sean was shaking his head again, looking down, and dropped the
rope. 

"An easy thing to do," Hosteen said, ignoring him. "Two words. It
is how you start with an animal like this. He will not mind you
unless he hears your voice."

He watched Sean look at the pony, the ground, and back again. 

"You are only speaking to the pony, Sean," Hosteen said quietly. 
"Not to me or to anyone else. Only to him. Go on. Try." 

He nearly held his breath in the waiting that followed, doing his
best to appear nonchalant, talking softly to Ghost as though he were
paying Sean no mind at all. 

Then he watched, from the corner of his eye, Sean walk a few paces
away from the pony, close to a boulder on one side. The boy raised
his hand and looked at the animal, who watched him, gnawing absently
on its bit. 

Sean's mouth opened, but nothing came out, closed it again, then
opened. Then...

"C..Cloud." A high voice, almost as faint as a whisper. A long
pause, the boy's eyes going down as he heard his own voice. 

The pony's ears came up, but it did nothing. 

"Call him louder," Hosteen said gently. "He will mind. Tell him to
come to you." 

Sean swallowed, his hand still outstretched. He opened his mouth
again, hesitated. 

"Cloud," he said, a bit louder, though his voice was hoarse, papery.
Hosteen smiled at the clipped accent in the word. 

Sean drew in a breath, swallowed again. When he spoke, it was
almost a normal tone.

"Come." 

The pony hesitated, but Hosteen knew Victor had spent the better
part of yesterday and the day before teaching the pony the word. 

Then it pricked its ears forward, and, dragging the rope after it,
it went to Sean until its nose touched his palm.

And Sean did something Hosteen had yet to see him do.

He smiled.


******


THE HANGED MAN 
BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND, U.K. 
1:22 p.m.



TO: RosesRedHotMama 
FROM: SpookyPapa 
DATE: 18 March 2003 
SUBJECT: Trying this out

S,

Well, one thing's for certain -- no one is ever going to find a way
to trace these names. You sound like a porn site advertiser and I
sound like a truck driver's CB handle or a racehorse. Never let the
Gunmen configure your email accounts, I guess. And I don't think we
have to guess which one of them made the names, given yours. The
worst part is I don't think they can be changed at this point, so
we're going to have to live with them.

I'm here -- remind me not to come the day after St. Patrick's Day
again, will you? I don't think it brings out the best in these
people. But that could be because of places we're staying right now
-- mostly pubs, looking for the elusive Mr. R. He hasn't shown up
where he was supposed to be and there's been no word on him from
anyone here. I've got a room, though, and the food is just like I
remember it -- heavy and good. Sk's so jetlagged he can't see
straight. I can't believe after all this time he hasn't learned to
sleep on planes. He's been pissed off all day about R. not being
here when we showed up. I figure he'll turn up, though. The
bartender says he's basically been living here for several days,
belly up to the bar the whole time. I can't wait to meet him. 

Just a note about G. -- he's really not looking good lately, though
he's trying to hide it as best he can. That gunshot wound really has
him tied up. I wonder if there's anything you can do for him, if
he'll let you. He's too young to be hurt that bad. I'm wondering if
there's something else wrong that he's not letting on about. Maybe
he'll talk to you about it. 

I'm thinking about you. Too much, probably. Wondering how you are,
what you're doing with yourself. Thinking about the baby, and what
you're feeling. I didn't think it would hit me this hard, this soon,
but knowing you're so far away...it's just hard. I'm glad we have
this, though. We've never really written letters before, and who
knows? It might be sort of enjoyable if we get into the habit of it.
I'd give anything to be sitting in front of you, though, reading your
eyes. I forget sometimes how much I can tell just by watching them,
how much you give away with them, if only to me. 

Hey S, should we start using emoticons? Abbreviations? I'd love to
have you ROTFLYAO. ;) :) ;)

Write me when you get a chance. I'll check here for you as often as
I can.

I love you.

M.


Mulder moved the cursor over to the "send" button on the tiny
machine, tapped it softly, and sat back in the chair at the worn desk
in his room, looking at the message that the email had been sent for
a long moment, feeling somehow hollow inside as he did it. He could
hear someone moving down the hallway toward the common bath, the
creak of the door. Below him, a murmuring of the people in the pub,
the faint sound of a television playing, a sporting event from the
sound of an announcer and a crowd. 

They hadn't been in Belfast long, and the place felt enormously
strange to him, despite his college years in the U.K Going from the
desert and the desolation of the reservation to this, a city teeming
with people and noise and traffic, was quite a shock to his system. 

As was being away from Scully so suddenly. He couldn't believe he'd
just left her the morning before, there beneath the covers in his
sweatshirt in Albert Hosteen's house. Already it felt like years,
made worse by the strangeness of the place and the distance. 

He sat up straighter, ran a hand through his hair, pushing it off
his forehead and scrubbing it back. 

He couldn't think that way. He had to concentrate. There was a lot
to be done here, and he had to be ready for what was to come. Not
distracted. Not aching the way he was now. 

More footsteps outside the door, and a knock this time. 

"Come in," he called, and Skinner entered the room, glancing at the
computer, still on, on the desk. 

"I'm not interrupting you, am I?" Skinner grumbled, his ill-
temperedness from the morning clearly still gripping him. He looked
tired, pissed off. 

"No," Mulder said quickly, and reached out to shut the internet
connection off, then he turned the computer off. "I'm all done. Any
word?"

"Yeah," Skinner said. He wore jeans, a long-sleeved white T-shirt
with a black jacket over it to hide his gun at his hip. "Renahan
just got back from wherever the hell he's been. The bartender just
pointed him out to me. He's downstairs in the pub."

Mulder stood, reached for his own leather jacket, also long enough
to hide his Sig, pulled it on over the black turtleneck he wore. 

"Let's go," he said, and Skinner nodded, led the way into the hall,
Mulder closing the door behind him. 

They wove their way down the narrow staircase that led from the
rooms upstairs to the pub below, a dark, cave-like place with a long
bar and some tables, a few booths lining the walls. There were dim
lamps in the booths, and ceiling fans kept the persistent smell of
cigarette and pipe smoke milling around the room. 

Skinner stopped just at the bottom of the stairs, nodded toward one
of the booths where a man sat, alone, his back to them. Mulder could
make out a long stretch of uncombed hair, a curl of smoke. 

"That's him," Skinner said, and led the way toward the table. 

The man that gazed up them as they stopped beside the table seemed
more weary than Mulder had ever seen anyone look in his life. Dark
circles beneath his eyes, set into a pasty white face. A wild beard
and piercing eyes, which met Mulder's, then looked him up and down,
doing the same to Skinner, though he appeared to recognize Skinner at
least.

"Mr. Skinner," he said, and it was not friendly. 

"Yeah, that's me," Skinner said. "This is Agent Fox Mulder."

Renahan's lip curled. "Not hurt as bad as you looked, eh?" he said,
staring at Mulder. "Not hurt at all, in fact." 

"No," Mulder said carefully. "I'm fine."

Renahan nodded. "I'd venture a guess that your wife is fine, as
well. Am I right?" 

Mulder looked at Skinner, unsure of what to say, and Skinner looked
down at Renahan. 

"We can't discuss that," Skinner said, keeping his voice low. "Not
here." 

Renahan smiled a bit more. "No need to discuss," he said. "You've
answered my question already." He gestured to the other side of the
booth. "Please. Sit. I don't bite, you know. Just look like I do
these days."

Mulder glanced at Skinner again, and then slid into the booth,
Skinner following him. 

"Begging your pardon, Mr. Renahan," Skinner began without prelude. 
"But where the hell have you been? You were supposed to be here to
meet us this morning." 

"Out," Renahan replied, unruffled. Mulder noticed he had a
cigarette in one hand, a pint in the other. The hand holding the
cigarette shook slightly. "Been talking to some old acquaintances of
mine from years back, those that are still around, that is. Finding
lots of people dead." 

Mulder nodded. "Are you finding what you need?" he asked, pitching
his voice carefully neutral. He was trying to get a read on the man,
and it was hard. The eyes gave nothing away at all. Blank as slate,
though intelligent.

Renahan looked back at him, appraising him again. "A bit of what I
need, yes," he said. "It's not IRA doing this. I know that for
certain now. The IRA's up to nothing much these days, and killing
two women -- including one of their own -- isn't something they're
doing. I've been trying to get a finger on Fagan with a few people,
but haven't found anything out I didn't already know." 

Renahan took a drink from his pint in the silence that followed,
Mulder chewing his lip. Skinner was looking around the pub as though
trying to figure out if they were being watched. 

"What about a man named Eamon?" Mulder asked. "A custom's officer
who was arrested once a long time ago." 

Renahan's eyes narrowed. "Eamon Neill?" he replied, sounding
incredulous. 

"I don't know his last name," Mulder said. "Mae didn't know his
last name. She just said he might be someone who could help us find
out something about Fagan."

"Well, that's the only custom's officer named Eamon I know," the
grizzled man replied, puffing on his smoke. "The only one we
arrested. He went to jail for a few years for conspiracy. Couldn't
pin any actual murders on him, though I know he's as dirty as they
come. Hiding people, stealing cars and weapons, scoping out targets.
He got a lot of people killed, that one, even if he didn't do it
himself." 

"Mae said he was good friends with Owen Curran, and that he knew
John Fagan," Mulder pressed. "Do you think we could find him?"

Renahan looked at Mulder and gave that same quirky smile, as though
he found Mulder terribly amusing. "You just want to walk right up to
his house and knock on the door, Agent Mulder?" He laughed. 
"Doesn't work that way around here." 

"Why not?" Mulder said, leaning forward slightly. "These people
aren't the ones under investigation. And if this Neill has already
been arrested, he knows that we'd know he had IRA connections. It's
not like we'd be exposing someone with no known ties. He might be
willing to talk to us."

Renahan's eyes narrowed again on Mulder. "What makes you so certain
of that, Agent Mulder? Eamon Neill is about as close to Path as
you're going to find. He might not want to risk further exposing
himself." 

"We won't know unless we try," Mulder replied, looking to Skinner
for backup. Skinner nodded. 

"It might be worth our time to talk to him," Skinner said. "IF you
know where to find him." 

Renahan leaned back, stubbed out his cigarette. "I don't know where
Neill is anymore," he said. "But I know some people who might know."
He moved to stand, Mulder and Skinner looking up at him. 

"Well, come on," Renahan said, chiding and gesturing toward the
door. "If you're going to do this, then do it. Time to meet a few
people. Get your faces out there. They'll bloody well like your
faces better than they'll like mine." 

"Where are we going?" Skinner asked, standing, and allowing Mulder
to do the same. 

"Derry," Renahan said softly. "Right into the middle of things. 
That seems to be where Agent Mulder wants to be." 

He looked at Mulder, who stared back.

"You're right," he said. "I do." 

Renahan smiled, and Mulder thought it was the first smile of any
real emotion he'd seen the man give him yet.. 

"Then let's get at it," he said, and led the way out of the pub. 


**********


TWO GREY HILLS, NEW MEXICO 
3:13 p.m.


TO: SpookyPapa 
FROM: RosesRedHotMama 
DATE: 18 March 2003 
SUBJECT: Re: Trying this out


M,

First, the next time I see F., pray I don't I have my gun with me. 

Second, the first time you "LOL", I K-Y-A. 

I miss you. There's no other way to say that. I remember a line of
poetry I read years ago, when I was in college, I think. I can't
remember who wrote it, but the line has always stayed with me. It
goes: "Your absence has gone through me like thread through a
needle. All that I do is stitched with its color." I know that
sounds trite and romantic -- blame the hormones. But it already feels
like a long time since I've seen you, and things are lonely here
without you. 

I took a long walk out to the trailer again today, and it was almost
as though I was looking for you, expected to find you there sitting
on the edge of the bed with Bo again. Thinking of that helps me, in
a way. You looked so lost when I found you there. I hope you've
found what you're looking for where you are now, or at least are in a
place where you feel you can begin searching for what you need to
come back again.

I'm interested to hear what this man R is like. M. told me a little
about his reputation with the IRA this morning after breakfast,
before I went walking out behind the house. The IRA were
simultaneously afraid of him and admired him greatly. He got people
to talk without using force. M. still doesn't know how he did it,
and there's a strange tone when she talks about him. It's the kind
of tone she uses when she talks about what she calls "The Old Guard"
of the IRA, this group of men who seemed to run the entire IRA
underground when she was a child. She's been talking more lately,
though it seems to make her sad to do it. She doesn't name a lot of
names, but I think her starting to open up a little bit is a good
sign. It's all so entrenched with who she is, even after everything
she's been through with O. It's like a limb she has. She can't just
cut it off without losing something essential about herself. It's
going to take some time.

Mr. H. is out with Sean. They've been gone for hours. 

Bo misses you, too. He's sulking around the house.

The baby is moving a lot again today. Sometimes I worry that she
moves too much, that something is wrong. I know that's not rational,
and that I'd worry more if she didn't move much at all, but it's
strange to feel this all the time, this fluttering inside me. Did
you know she's about a pound now, about ten inches long? Sometimes I
swear when I put my hand on my belly I can feel her there, but I
think it's just my own pulse in my palm.

I think I hear a car coming up the driveway. It must be G. coming
back from taking his things to V.'s. He came by when he got in,
dropped off the computer and then went out right away to get settled
in. And yes, I know he hasn't been doing well since the surgery --
and I know he's been trying to hide it, too. I was against the idea
of him coming here at first, but now I think he can probably use the
time away from the office, maybe get some extra rest and heal a
little better. I'll do what I can with him, though you know he'll
chafe if I hover too much. 

I've got to go. Write me when you can. 

I love you, too.

S.


Scully didn't read the email over -- she just touched the "send"
button and powered down the computer, hearing the slam of a car door
out front, Bo looking up from where he sat next to her on the floor
beside the bed. The dog's ears pricked forward, and he whined.

"It's okay," she said, out of habit. She'd been saying it to the
dog all day, all the time he'd followed her out into the desert
behind the house to the trailer, all through the time they'd spent in
the minivan down to where Mae was staying in Hosteen's brother's
trailer. He missed Mulder almost as much as she did. Perhaps more. 

Placing the computer on the bed beside her, its power cord trailing
off the side of the bed, she stood, stretched her aching back, and
went out into the hallway, Bo trailing along beside her, to the
living room. Someone was knocking on the front door, and Scully went
to the door, opened it. 

Granger stood there, a slight smile on his face. 

"Hi," he said, and Scully gave a small smile to him in return and
opened the screen door to let him in. 

"How are you feeling?" he asked. "I didn't pester you before." He
smiled wider. 

"I'm okay," she replied. She noticed the Ruger at his hip, the
holster threaded through the black belt he wore with his jeans, his
gray T-shirt tucked into the waist.

"What do you think of your quarters?" she asked. 

"They're fine," Granger said, and his brow creased down. "But I
don't like to think of you up here by yourself." 

She smiled the same wan smile. "I'm okay. I've got Mr. Hosteen
here with me most of the time, and a woman named Sara Whistler is
here usually when he's not."

"I meant without someone with a gun," he said, shaking his head.

She edged her hand down to the waist of her maternity jeans at her
back, drew out her Sig, which was tucked in its holster there. 

"There is someone with a gun," she replied, and he shook his head
and laughed. 

"Come on," she said, nodding toward the door. "Drive me down to
Mae's." 

"All right," Granger said, and followed her out of the house, back
out to his rental car, one of the small SUVs that were so popular at
the moment. It gleamed, brand new, in the sunlight.

"I got a four-wheel drive at the airport," he said.. "I didn't know
if we might need it." 

She climbed into the passenger side, moving carefully. "You never
know." 

And he took the driver's seat and they made their way down the dirt
road toward the stables and Victor's place. 


**

Scully left Granger and went toward the house a few hundred feet
behind it, Albert's brother's house where Mae was staying with
Katherine and Sean.

Every time she approached it, she remembered that night all that
time ago, coming in from days in the desert, the porchlight on, and
Mulder waiting there. It had felt like a tomb when she'd entered it
that night, a place of grief. 

But so much more had been made there, that night and the nights that
followed. What she and Mulder were now had been forged there, the
open wound of them closed over in that quiet place.

Now, as she approached it again, it had the same feel to it. The
same quietness. The same grief. Not even Katherine's laughter,
sounding out of place in the silence around the house, seemed to
alleviate it. 

Scully stopped before the door, rapped gently on the screen door,
and was told by Mae's tired voice to come in. She did. 

Agent Music sat with Mae at the table off the kitchen, Katherine in
a playpen Mulder and Victor had bought in Farmington, her blonde head
and bright smile peeking over the side. 

"Dana," Mae called from the table. She was sitting stiff in her
chair, Music across from her, a legal pad in front of him scribbled
with notes. 

"I'm not interrupting, am I?" she asked, and Music smiled up at
her, though it looked a bit strained.

"No," he said. "We're all done for today, I think." He pushed the
chair back, looking very much like one of Victor's ranch hands -- blue
T-shirt and stiff, new-looking jeans. Only his 9mm in a shoulder
holster gave away who and what he was. 

"I can come back," Scully tried again.

"No," Music said, more firmly. "We've gotten as far as we're going
to get. And besides..." He winked at Scully, not rogueish but
playful. "Victor said he's going to teach me how to ride." 

Scully chuckled softly. "Be afraid, Frank," she said. "Be very
afraid." 

Music laughed, touched her upper arm with the pad, and turned to
Mae. 

"Tomorrow?" he asked, and Mae looked up at him, pinched and deeply
sad. 

"Yes," she said softly. "Tomorrow." 

And Music left the house. 

Katherine made a loud cry from the playpen, and Mae rose as if given
her cue, went to the baby, lifting her up and out.

"She's hungry," Mae said, and she seemed unable to meet Scully's
eyes, which bothered Scully. "She's been good while Agent Music and
I were talking. I don't blame her for being a bit restless now." 

Mae sat at the table again, began undoing the buttons of her blouse,
and Scully sat across from her, in the chair that Music had vacated. 

Once Mae had gotten Katherine to calm, the baby nursing quietly, her
tiny hands on Mae's chest, Mae finally looked up at Scully. 

"I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I'm just..." She trailed off.

"You feel guilty," Scully finished for her, and Mae's face fell as
she nodded. 

"A bit like Confession," she said, and laughed nervously. "Rattling
the family bones."

"It's going to help us," Scully offered, fingering the corner of the
ratty placemat on the cheap wood table. "It's going to help us both
get home faster if you can talk about the things you know. You know
that." 

"'Home'?" Mae said, something bitter in her voice. "Where the hell
is that for me then? You've got a home. A life to go back to. What
have I got? This trailer is as close to a home as I'm going to get,
before this whole bloody mess is over and they cart me and the
children off to God-only-knows where."

Scully looked down, her face falling. "I'm sorry," she said. "I
shouldn't have said that."

Mae blew out a frustrated breath, looking down into Katherine's
serene face, her face evening out from its angry mask. 

"No, I'm sorry," she said quietly. "I shouldn't be angry with you. 
You're doing all you can to help me in this. I don't mean to take it
out on you. I've got no one to blame for the mess I'm in but myself."

"You're doing what you can," Scully offered, though she knew it
sounded hollow. 

Mae didn't seem to hear her, her eyes on Katherine. She began to
rock slowly from side to side, stroking the baby's wispy hair. 

"She looks more like Joe every day," Mae said. "The look in her
eyes. The set of her face." 

Scully swallowed, looking at the baby. She had not known Porter for
long, but looking at the baby, she could tell Mae was right. 

"I'm sorry," she said again. "I can't imagine...what that must be
like." 

"You don't want to imagine," Mae replied, and looked up into
Scully's face, the women's eyes meeting. "I know it's hard enough on
you not having Mulder here. You don't want to think about it." 

Scully looked away, down at the baby in her arms. Her brows crooked
as she thought. 

"Where would you go?" she asked after a moment. 

"What?" Mae asked, shaking her head in confusion. 

"If you could go anywhere," Scully continued. "With the children. 
Where would you go? Where would 'home' be for you?" 

Mae looked out the screen door, past Scully, onto a land Scully knew
she would never see. The look of longing on the other woman's face
told her that. 

"I'd go back to Ireland," Mae said softly. "Take Sean and Katherine
and go back to Belfast or Ballycastle. Start again."

Scully nodded. "Do you think that you might do that? After your
sentence is served, after all of it's over?" 

Mae laughed bitterly. "I think the last place I'd be welcomed would
be Northern Ireland. By the IRA or the Brits. And I wouldn't do
that to Sean. I don't want the legacy of being Owen's son to follow
him there. I don't want that life for him. Any part of it."

"Mulder and A.D. Skinner have said that the IRA isn't after you. 
That they don't want you touched. You might be safe there."

Mae's gaze hardened. "What they say and what they mean are
different things," she said dismissively. "Too much history there. 
Too much time spent working against the way things work. And I don't
know what I'd do in the Peace. I don't know any other kind of life
than the one I lived there. Than...this." She nodded toward the room
around her, a hiding place on the run. 

Scully looked at her, picking at the edge of the placemat. "You
could change, Mae," she said softly. "You *have* changed already. 
You could make a life there."

Mae stood suddenly, jostling the baby, who squealed at the movement.
"I don't want to talk about it anymore," Mae snapped. "This is the
life I've got now and I've got to live with it. I can't go dreaming
about things I can't have." Her eyes welled. "It's like dreaming
Joe will come back. It's not going to happen. Not ever." 

And she stalked off into the living room, leaving Scully behind at
the table, Scully's eyes down, frustration piquing her. 

Then, a tickling in her head. 

Her hand went to her forehead as if to smooth it away...


(Sunlight through windows. The bedroom, her and Mulder's house. 
Bars of light on the bed, on Mulder's back where she looks over his
shoulder, her teeth on his skin...

"Yes..." he whispers into her hair. "Scully...yes..."

More tickling, a sense of movement. 

"Mulder," she says on a breath. "She's awake. She's coming down
the hall." 

Mulder shaking in her arms, a stifled cry against her throat. Then
he rolls off her quickly, ends up spooned behind her, his face still
buried in her hair, his breathing heavy. 

The bedroom door creaks open. 

"Mommy?" Light, like a bell. 

She looks at the door and sees...

Rose. Three or four. A nightgown to her ankles covered with
strawberries, red on white.

"What is it, Rose?" She hears her own voice say it.

The little girl, dark hair trailing down her back, long...

"Are you hugging?" Rose asks, rubbing at her eyes. Morning. Early. 

"Yes, honey," Mulder says from behind her. "We're hugging."

The little girl touches the doorframe, a finger against her chin. 
"Can I come, too?"

Scully feels her naked skin, dewed with sweat beneath the covers,
Mulder's bare body against her. 

"Where's Casey?" she hears herself ask.

"In my room," Rose answers, pointing behind her. 

"Go dress Casey in her daytime clothes and come back with her and
you can get in bed with us," Mulder says softly, his voice patient. 
Gentle.

"Okay." And then Rose is gone.

Mulder's lips on her throat, her cheek. Heavy breath.

"Five minutes," he whispers. "Get dressed...")


"Dana?" 

Scully snapped herself back, drawing in a sharp breath as her hands
shot out onto the table in front of her, steadying her. She looked
up, her eyes wide, into Mae's face, who was standing just beside her,
Katherine still clutched to her chest. 

"What?" she asked. "What is it?"

Mae looked as wide-eyed as she felt, her mouth agape. "You were
talking just then. Talking to Mulder. To your baby. You called her
by her name. And you asked me where someone named 'Casey' was." Mae
shifted Katherine slightly. "Are you all right?"

Scully felt heat rising in her face, looked around the room, trying
to ground herself. 

"Yes," she said, and rose a little too quickly, unsteady on her
feet. Mae put a hand out to steady her, clutching the baby with the
other hand. 

"Easy," Mae said. "Easy now. What's wrong?"

Scully shook her off, taking a step back. "I'm fine," she said
quickly. "Fine. I just need...I need to go back to the house."

"Dana, what's happening?" Mae called as Scully went for the door. 
"This is like what happened when Katherine the other day, isn't it? 
Tell me what's wrong." 

"It's nothing," Scully said quickly, firmly, opening the screen
door. 

Mae still calling after her, her head swimming, sweat beading her
forehead, she went out of the house and back out into the light. 


******

OUTSIDE OMAGH 
NORTHERN IRELAND, U.K. 
MARCH 28 (10 DAYS LATER) 
11:35 p.m.


"Turn! Turn!" 

Skinner's voice hissed into the darkness, Mulder hearing it from his
left side as Skinner gripped the dashboard, half-turned toward the
back as he watched the headlights raking the rough road behind them.
The car behind them was moving fast, and Mulder pressed down on his
own car's accelerator, taking the turnoff to his right too fast and
sending Renahan nearly tumbling sideways in the small back seat. 

Not surprisingly, Renahan, stinking of Scotch, laughed. 

"Mr. Mulder, you're not going to lose them," he said in his thick
cockney, slightly slurring. "They've got you now and they're not
going to let you go." 

"What the hell are you laughing at?" Mulder spat, flooring it into a
straightaway, no lights anywhere but his own lights and the streaks
behind him, a quarter of a mile back and gaining. His hands gripped
the steering wheel, his eyes wide open and fixed on Renahan's ragged
face in the rear view mirror.

"Don't you think it's even a BIT amusing?" Renahan replied. "I mean,
you two poking around like the bloody F.B. fucking I. in the middle
of a pub in the heart of the IRA, and then being surprised when
someone comes after you for it?" He laughed again, and Mulder
seethed. 

"Oh, for Christ's sake, Renahan," Skinner bit out, turning to face
the other man. "If you could quit acting like you're enjoying this so
goddamn much it would help immensely." 

But Renahan only laughed again. 

Mulder bit his lip, shaking his head slowly, feeling the comfortable
weight of his Sig at his side beneath his jacket. He pushed the car
forward, as if willing it with his eyes onto the road ahead of him.
Faster. Faster.

The car behind them gained, the high-pitched whine of a small engine
pushed too hard. Around them, nothing but countryside, no houses,
nothing. He knew from the drive in that there were low mountains off
in the distance, mountains he was heading toward as he drove the car
west, further away from Omagh and into the vastness around it.

Ten days. Ten days in this car with these two, going from town to
town, sleeping in rooms over pubs or in the houses of strangers who
let rooms by the night, people who frowned at their accents, handed
them towels and sent them into dark rooms that smelled of old smoke
and dust. He was worn to the bone, his nerves frayed. Too much time
with Renahan, and too much time in the back rooms of pubs talking to
people who did not want to talk to him, and who gave up little, if
anything at all.

Whatever you say, he remembered the poet once saying, say nothing. 

"Renahan, tell me what to do," he said finally, his voice just loud
enough to be heard over the engine sounds, both of their own car and
the one now almost on their tail.

Renahan was still looking at him, the older man's eyes glinting,
wide and wet, from the back seat. 

The car behind them caught up, and with a lurch bumped against their
tail. Mulder swung into the right lane, but the car followed, its
highbeams flashing.

"Tell me what to do!" Mulder shouted, every muscle in his body taut. 

"Pull over." The smile was gone from Renahan's face now, though his
eyes were still amused.

"Pull over??" Skinner replied, incredulous. 

"You're going to bloody well end up on the side of the road one way
or the other," Renahan said, sounding almost bored. "Best to pull
over on your own."

The car behind them tapped again, a sound of metal on metal, a dull
thud, and Mulder swung the car back into the left lane, the pursuing
vehicle staying and trying to draw the drivers' windows even. 

"Do it, Mr. Mulder," Renahan said. "Before we've got a right mess
here."

Mulder glanced at the car gaining beside him, at Renahan, then at
Skinner. 

Finally, he nodded, and his foot stomped on the brake as he pulled
the car hard to the left and onto the side of the road, green coming
into the headlights, the long grass of early spring. A sheep darted
out of sight in the headlights.

The car that had been chasing them had likewise braked and was
backing up down the road with great speed. Mulder reached down and
took out his gun, Skinner doing the same.

"Put them away!" Renahan sputtered, leaning forward and pushing
Skinner's gun out of sight. "You're going to get us all killed that
way! We're not in bloody Tombstone! Goddamn Yanks--"

"I'm not going to just sit here and let these people--" Mulder
jumped in.

"They're here to scare you, not to kill you," Renahan interrupted.
"But they see those guns and they'll think differently. Now do as I
say!"

The car had stopped on the other side of the road, the door swinging
open, and four figures piled out into the dark, moving across the
road.

"NOW!" Renahan hissed, and Mulder, seeing the men coming toward him,
glanced at Skinner and put his gun away. Skinner, obviously
reluctant, did the same.

Hands on the window, a fist rapping on the thin glass.

"Out of the fucking car!" the man said, and when Mulder looked up,
he saw the a ski mask, only eyes, the dot of a nose and lips pushed
too big by the fabric pushing through. 

There was another man behind him, a crowbar in his hand, and the
other two had gone to Skinner's side of the car. Mulder looked over
and saw the blunt end of a very old looking pistol pointed at
Skinner's side. 

"Come on, OUT! OUT!" the man said to Mulder's right. "And get those
fucking hands where we can see them!"

The door was yanked open, and rough hands reached in, grabbing
Mulder around the collar and hauling him out onto the road. He
reached up and gripped the fists around his jacket, pulling hard. 

"Get your goddamn hands off me--" he began as he broke away,
knocking the first man down.

Then a sharp pain against the side of this head, and he toppled down
next to the car onto his side holding his head, his breath hissing
out against the gravel, his eyes on the shoes of the man with the
crowbar. 

Black boots. Military issue. Blurring in and out of vision...

"Mulder!" he heard Skinner call from the other side of the car. The
other man's voice seemed to echo slightly.

The first man -- the one who had spoken and who was clearly the
leader -- picked himself up off the ground, brushing himself off. He
stood next to Mulder, his feet, also clad in black boots, coming into
Mulder's view. 

"Don't touch me again, fucker," he snarled, and kicked out, knocking
Mulder's shoulder and forcing Mulder back onto his back. Mulder
stared up at him, feeling the wetness of blood seeping into his hair
above his ear. 

He blinked, his head swimming, and tried to force his eyes to focus. 

"Gun!" 

The alarmed call came from one of the men searching Skinner, and
Mulder stared up into the surprised faces of the two above him, their
eyes in their masked faces wide. The leader's face shot down to
Mulder.

"Search him," he ordered, and took the crowbar from the other man,
who bent and began rifling through Mulder's jacket, his shirt. It
didn't take him long to find the Sig, which he held up, and the
leader took it. 

"See if that stinking fuck in the back seat has got something on
him, as well," the leader said, and Mulder could hear Renahan chuckle
mirthlessly as he was hauled out of the car with much commotion. 

"Easy, boys, easy now..." Renahan was saying, and Mulder heard the
sudden sound of Renahan's body striking the trunk of the car as he
was searched. 

The leader was still looking down at Mulder, Mulder's own gun
trained on him now. 

"Get up," he ordered. "Now."

When Mulder didn't move immediately, the bigger man who'd held the
crowbar reached down and hauled Mulder up, setting him on his feet
and smashing his back against the car. Skinner and Renahan were
hustled around to flank him on either side, the four masked men
standing in front of them, three guns trained on their three forms. 

"What do you want?" Skinner snapped, all A.D., his hand going out to
Mulder's shoulder as Mulder swayed slightly. "Just who the hell do
you think you are, trying to run us off the road and--"

"Shut the fuck up," the leader said, holding his gun up level with
Skinner's face, and Skinner did. "What I want to know is who the
bloody hell YOU are, asking questions that shouldn't be asked all
over half the fucking countryside, eh?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Mulder said, his hand on
his head, which he pulled down as he stood up straighter, though his
hand was stained with blood. "And if I did, it wouldn't be your
business anyway."

The leader's eyes pinned him, the gun staying on Skinner's face, who
he clearly saw as more of a threat than Mulder on his rubber knees.
"Anyone asking questions about Eamon Neill is my business," the man
said, a dangerous rumble in his voice. 

That was when Mulder saw it -- a thin scar, thin as a knife blade,
down the man's distended lower lip. 

It was the same scar the red-haired man at the bar had worn, the one
behind the table where Mulder had sat with Renahan and Skinner and a
man named Joey Flannan, who smoked a pipe and let almost nothing but
smoke come from between his chapped lips. 

"No, no Eamon around here," Flannan had said, his face weathered as
though he'd spent his life on the sea. The words leaked from his
lips, his mouth barely moving, and his eyes set on Mulder's face.

"I know you knew him, Joey," Renahan had said, taking a sip from his
highball glass of Glenfiddich. "You. Seamus Hanson. A few of the
boys. Tipped off by Eamon Neill about that bloke who got tea every
morning at The Exchange in Derry."

Flannan's eyes had gone to Renahan, though the rest of his body
didn't move. Smoke gathered around his face.

Renahan smiled a smile that looked like it had been drawn on with
crayon. "Killed that little ginger-haired bastard postman by mistake,
didn't you?" he said. "Only knew 'ginger hair' and 'uniform' and
opened fire on a man with a wife and a baby just come, didn't you?" 

Flannan still didn't move. "I've got nothing to say to you, Mr.
Renahan," he said softly, and then his lip did curl a bit, as though
pinched. 

Mulder had leaned forward then, nearly knocking over the pint of
Guinness he hadn't touched. "Mr. Flannan, we don't care about your
involvement with anything," he said, glaring at Renahan. "And we
don't mean Eamon Neill any harm. We just want to talk to him. That's
all. Just talk." 

That's when the man at the bar had caught his eye. A young man. Red
hair. Eyes like arctic ice and freckles, and a scar down his lip,
trailing down his chin. When the man had seen Mulder looking at him,
he'd turned away, back to the bartender, who'd been watching, as well.

"Mr. Flannan, please," Mulder had said then, and he felt something
rising in him, something akin to desperation. So many days. Too much
time with Renahan and his gruffness and his taunting. Too many dead-
ends, and towns and men who would not speak. "Please. This is about
my wife. That's all. It's about my wife."

But Flannan hadn't swayed. He'd stood, pushing the chair back,
holding onto his pipe in the corner of his mouth. He nodded to
Renahan. "I've got nothing to say to any of you," he said, and,
picking up his pint, he'd wandered away. 

The man at the bar had turned and looked at Mulder once again, met
Mulder's eye, then turned away.

Now, his breath puffing out in front of his face in the cool of the
night, Mulder looked at the scar on the chin, recognized the strange
blue of the eye in the dim, obtuse light of the headlights. 

"Now the two of you," the man said, pointed to Renahan and Skinner,
"are going to get in that car over there." He nodded to the car he
and the others had come in. "And you..." He stared at Mulder. "You're
going to get back into this one and drive with me."

"We're federal agents with the American government," Skinner rushed
in. "You can't--"

"I don't give a fuck who you are," the man snapped, and he pressed
the gun closer to Skinner's face. "Now go. Get in the car." 

"Where are we going?" Mulder said, his voice rising. "Where are you
taking us?"

Now the man's face changed, even beneath the mask. Hardened. 

"Those two miserable fucks are going back to Omagh," he said,
jerking a nod toward Renahan and Skinner. 

"But you," he said, and now he turned the gun to Mulder, and the
man's mouth bore a predatory smile. 

"You're coming with me."


*********

END OF CHAPTER 11a. CONTINUED IN CHAPTER 11b. 



*****


TWO GREY HILLS, NEW MEXICO
MARCH 29
5:32 a.m.


The sun coming up over the ridge of mountains that wreathed the desert, the whole world a burnt amber, 
Paul Granger walked along the sandy road that split the wash out behind Victor Hosteen's property, a vast 
expanse of sagebrush and yucca and nothingness. He wore faded jeans dusted with sand like ash, a 
sweatshirt from Johns Hopkins, the waist of which was frayed, the lettering dotted away from 10 years' 
worth of washes. It was still cold from the night, the desert holding no heat, and the sun seemed almost wan 
in the way it was rising through a thin layer of cloud, the moon still a claw hooked in the deep blue of the 
night sky to west.

Granger looked up as he walked, one hand in his pocket, the other holding a long thin branch he was using 
both as a walking stick and also as a crook of sorts to tap the sheep in front of him into a jumble of woolen 
bodies that bleated plaintively as he touched their sides. Several wore bells, and the muffled sounds of their 
jangling rose into the brisk air.

They were coming up over a rise, one of the few on the property, a fairly sharp incline when compared to 
the flatness of the rest of the land. The sheep moved up it, zigging and zagging as Granger moved them 
back together with his stick, and he wished, as they rose, that he'd taken Victor's advice and ridden one of 
the horses from the stable to do this task of moving the sheep from the pens behind Victor's brother Keel's 
house back to their home base on Victor's ranch.

It hadn't seemed a long walk when Granger had gone the mile to get them, but now, coming back, it felt a 
great distance, a heavy burden of miles.

Robin was on his mind this morning, as she was most mornings since he'd arrived in New Mexico, the 
image of her lying in their bed beneath the heath-green sheets clear in his mind, a smile on his face. Then 
he was thinking of a night from last autumn, the weekend she'd cooked a recipe from the Gastronome 
Cookbook he'd given her for her birthday. The dish had a name he couldn't pronounce and in the end it 
didn't matter what it was, didn't matter a bit, because they'd stopped in the middle of her making it to make 
love instead on the broad cherry table off the kitchen.

He remembered the peals of her laughter as the room had filled with light grey smoke, the smoke detector 
screaming its shrill alarm as they kissed.

Granger was still thinking this as he reached the top of the incline, a nice view of light bleeding over the 
landscape, and that was when the pain struck him in the center of his chest, a squeezing inside him, a rush 
of burning that bloomed in him like a terrible flower, and it was only the staff that kept him from falling. 
Instead, he slid down it to one knee, then the other, his breath catching and a low moan coming up from his 
throat. He clenched his eyes closed against it, his teeth bearing down, his hand on his chest as though he 
meant to claw the pain out.

"Breathe..." he rasped. "Just breathe..."

His pulse roared in his ear, and his face felt full and hot, the pain coursing through him, a lightness in his 
head. His stomach roiled, bile rising in his throat, and he had to staunch the urge to vomit. He reached up 
and swiped at his forehead, knocking his glasses off in the process, and held his hand over his eyes, willing 
the pain away.

His pills were a mile away, hidden in his shaving bag at Victor's place. He kicked himself for not having 
them with him, at least one, tucked in the fifth pocket of his jeans.

Breathe, he told himself again, this time silently, and he concentrated on slowing his heart rate as best he 
could, as slowing it, being calm, would help the pain. That's what the doctor had said, at least. The doctor 
had said little about how to stave off his panic, though, the terror that gripped him when he wondered if this 
would be the last time he would feel this, if his world were going to fade to the sound of his heartbeat and a 
warm feeling in his chest that would spread until it blotted out the rest of his life.

The infection that had taken over his heart shortly after his surgery had come swiftly, his chest filled with 
blood from a severed artery and swelling as a fever had taken him over after the first couple of days in the 
ICU. Robin would never know how close he'd come to dying from the infection that had overrun him; he'd 
forbidden the doctors from telling her or his mother, the elder woman hanging onto the side of his bed like 
a tattered old bird, her dry hand on his cheek.

He'd forbidden the doctor from telling either woman of the prognosis afterwards, as well, the percentage of 
damage to the broad muscle of his heart, the lack of integrity in the vessels surrounding it from the tearing 
of the bullet through his chest. The time that he might have, and that he might not have, left.

He'd told them nothing. None of them. His doctor, a kindly, older man, had reluctantly cleared Granger for 
light duty, talked quietly about transplant options and possibilities and time, the things he knew and the 
things he didn't, and then he'd let Granger go when Granger had said he wanted nothing more than to get 
back to what was left of his life.

There on the road he thought of all this, the pain beginning to ebb slightly, sweat cold on his forehead. He 
thought of Robin, thousands of miles between them and her even further than that away in the land of the 
truths he would not speak. Everyone was there in that lost land -- his mother, his friends. Mulder and 
Scully. Rosen and Skinner. He felt like a man living on a ship that never saw a harbor, alone in a way he'd 
never felt before.

The sheep mingled around him, unsure, soft sounds coming from them, the hollow sounds of bells.

They were enough to pull him back to the present. Finally, he dropped his hand from in front of his face 
and looked at the animals, pulled in a less painful breath, leaned on the walking stick and managed to come 
up onto just one knee. Shaking his head to clear the pain away, to ground himself, he rubbed at his chest, 
sweat sticking his sweatshirt to his body, and then reached down and lifted his glasses carefully off the 
sand. He righted them on his face, mindful of the pain in his shoulder, as well, and stood slowly, brushed at 
his pants, and waited for the sudden fatigue to wan.

A couple of sheep were off to the right, meandering through the brush on the way to the desert to the side 
of the road. Willing his feet to move, Granger stumbled toward them, tapped them, called out, gathered 
them back with the others, and then moved back down the road, the sun full-on the sand now, bathing 
everything with warmth and light.


**********


11 SAMUEL STREET, #3
BELFAST, NORTHERN IRELAND, U.K.
6:35 a.m.


Rain pattering on the windows of the tiny rented flat, Christie Collin lay beneath the thin blankets of his 
bed, a woman whom he knew only as Bridget asleep beside him facing the wall. His eyes were on the thin 
line of a scar that traced down the back of her shoulder, each side of it dotted with stitch scars, though the 
scar itself was wide and fairly jagged.

A sloppy bit of work, he decided, and he inched a bit away from her, toward his own edge of the bed.

He didn't know why he'd picked her up at the pub the night before. There was something about her that had 
reminded him of someone, a face that seemed familiar but that he couldn't quite place. She'd been drunk 
when he'd met her, his friend John Finney introducing them. A few rounds of darts with her watching, a 
small predatory smile on her face as she swung back another pint, and he'd simply waited as the pub began 
to close, her against the bar on the far side. He'd gone to her and taken her by the arm and led her out and 
onto the dank streets, off to his place for the night.

The sex had been quick. Empty. Just after 2:00 a.m., she'd mumbled something about work and called him 
by the wrong name as she drifted off to sleep.

Now he only remembered her eyes -- blue. And the red of her hair, a plait of his drifting on the pillow 
toward him like tendrils. Looking at them, at the angry relief of the scar, he swung his legs over the side of 
the bed and rose, nude, into the light coming in from the street.

His military boxers were at the foot of the bed. Stepping into them, he walked into the adjoining room, a 
kitchen and a small den, the television still on and talking to no one. Going for it, he turned it off and the 
room fell into a silence broken only by the rain.

He stood in the midst of it, listening, still as stone.

He missed the life in Curragh Camp, his life with the Rangers, the Cciathan Fhiannoglaigh an Airm. He and 
Roy Killian would have been up hours ago, making tea on the hotplate in the barracks, waiting for Sergeant 
Malley to come in beating a metal trashcan to wake the others for the morning run. Or he'd be waking in a 
forest, his face painted tan and green and the world smelling of loam and the oil on his A196 rifle, his first 
sight the view of the valley from the ridge.

There in the rain, smelling the heavy scent of sausage cooking from the flat across the hall, he missed his 
life as it had been before with something tinged with anger that sunk into him and burned.

He'd learned not be easily startled, so when the phone began to ring he simply went for it, picking up the 
black handle from its cradle and placing it against his ear.

"Aye," he said, his voice low, graveled with fatigue.

"Christie?" The papery voice. The slight wheeze. His grandmother's voice. "Are you dressed?"

He looked down at himself, felt color rising in his face.

"Aye," he said again. "Just up and getting ready to make the tea. Is something wrong?"

A wispy breath, and his grandmother continued. "There are two men asking questions, I'm told. Two 
Americans. They've got Mr. Renahan with them and they're trying to find out who's responsible for the 
trouble."

She paused, out of breath, and he waited. He'd expected questions, but Renahan? The name was as old as 
he was. He didn't think the man could ever come back from the dead.

"What should I do?" he asked.

"I want you back in the south," came the reply. "Today. Take a car and go across the border. There's a man 
you're going to stay with. Outside Dublin. Riggs is his name. You'll meet him at the Cloniffe Bed & 
Breakfast and he'll tell you where to go from there."

"You're sure?" he said, the most vociferous a protest he could muster. He said it under his breath.

"Of course," his grandmother replied, her voice cracking, like a crow's. "I wouldn't send you away lightly, 
would I?"

"Aye, I reckon you wouldn't," he said, and forced a smile onto his face so it would touch his voice. "I'll be 
on my way then."

"And Christie?"

"Yes?"

A pause. "You shouldn't let strange women into your flat or into your bed."

He froze, looked behind at Bridget from the doorway, a chill running through him.

"Goodbye, Christie."

And then the line went dead.


**********


TWO GREY HILLS, NEW MEXICO
9:12 a.m.


The black dog wandered down the dirt road that connected Albert Hosteen's house to Victor's, his head 
down, his long black tail tucked tightly between his legs. He darted from one side of the road to the other, 
his nose busy on any scrap of anything he encountered, the road littered here and there with blowing scraps 
of paper and soda cans.

Scully watched Bo making his way down the road, her hand on the small of her back as she walked, the 
tails of the plaid shirt Albert Hosteen had purchased for her at the Target in town flapping in a wind that 
whipped sand into small clouds in front of her. She wore maternity jeans, a pair of boots, her hair pulled 
back into a loose ponytail at the base of her neck.

The baby jutted out in front of her, a perfect mound, making her feel a bit off balance. Rose was growing 
quickly, despite Scully's lack of appetite and fatigue. As Scully walked, she felt the baby roll over inside 
her, head-up to head-down, a lazy motion that made Scully smile. The tautness in her back as she leaned 
slightly stood in stark contrast to her daughter's ease inside her.

Bo made a beeline for lump of trash off to the right side, cluttering the base of a rough patch of sagebrush. 
He whined softly as he discovered nothing there of interest, looked back at her with his oil eyes. Scully 
might have wondered if he was hungry had she not just fed him. There was no consoling him the past few 
days. He'd been spending more and more time outside the house, disappearing for hours into the space 
Albert Hosteen's house, coming back looking tired and afraid. He was reminding Scully of the stories 
Mulder had told about how the dog was when Mulder had first found him -- a black ghost haunting the area 
around the ranch.

"Bo," she called, a bit singy, and patted her thigh. The dog stopped at the sound of his name and, still 
tucked in on himself, trotted up to her side, pressing the top of his head into the palm of her outstretched 
hand.

"It's okay," she murmured, rubbing his ears. If she could have comfortably knelt down she would have, just 
to get her face closer to the dog's. As it was, she simply bent and stroked his head, listening to his faint 
whining, until his tail came out and waved slightly in recognition, in something like ease.

She smiled down to him, though it made her sad to do it. The dog was like the part of herself that felt 
Mulder's absence so acutely. It was as if that part of her had crept out of her body during the night and 
drifted into the dog's dark body.

Pushing the thought aside, steeling herself, she straightened and began to walk again, Victor's house in 
sight now, the dingy buildings and the rising cloud of dust coming from the corral, the smell of the place 
drifting to her on the wind. She'd grown to like the heavy smell, to associate it with the cocoon of this 
place.

Albert Hosteen had left early in the morning, Sara cooking Scully's breakfast as she also did Hosteen's 
laundry in the battered Maytags off the back of the house. Sara had told her about a dream she'd had the 
night before, something about turning into a dove, and she'd finished the strange, unsolicited tale by turning 
to Scully, a knowing smile on her face, and saying:

"Tell me about your dreams, Agent Scully. Tell me."

Scully had looked at her, something in her rattled, that feeling one gets when another has somehow seen 
too much, and she'd withdrawn, mumbling something about a shower and a walk to Victor's place.

The walk had helped to ease her mind a bit, though her nagging worry about Mulder stayed with her as she 
and Bo entered the collection of structures that made up the ranch.

No e-mail from him in days, and the last only a brief note. Something about him and Skinner and this man 
Renahan staying at a Protestant man's house outside a town called Ballymena. He was on his way out to a 
meeting with someone, an informant of Renahan's, and couldn't write for long. She gathered he was getting 
little sleep, moving a lot, sometimes all night, criss-crossing and backtracking across the country. He'd told 
her he loved her, though even in the black on white of the computer screen the words had sounded sad. 
He'd promised to write as soon as he could.

But since then -- six days ago -- nothing.

She was trying to push the worry away, but it was pressing down on her. The what-ifs were beginning to 
circle her head like birds.

"Dana," came a voice from her right, Mae's voice, and the fussy sounds of Katherine in her mother's arms. 
Scully had been so deep in thought she hadn't seen Mae come around Victor's house.

Scully forced another smile onto her face, and Mae did the same. It was a common gesture they did for 
each other, this attempt to pretend that everything was all right. Scully thought that Mae was better at it 
than she was, and she didn't envy the woman her ability to wear such a mask.

"Just stretching your legs, or looking for someone?" Mae asked, bouncing Katherine slightly to try to hush 
her impending cries.

"Just walking," Scully replied, and Bo fell in right beside her, sitting up against her leg. "I thought I'd come 
down and see how you all were, what you were up to."

Mae nodded toward the stables. "Mr. Hosteen came early and go Sean. They're in the small corral with that 
pony and Mr. Hosteen's horse. I was watching them until Katherine needed a change."

Scully nodded, met Mae's eyes, her face growing serious. "Has he spoken to you?"

Mae's face fell, the mask slipping as though her expression were attached with string.
"No," she replied, her voice tinged with anger and her accent growing clipped. "And it's not right. I'm ready 
to put my foot down with him. It's been over a month. Enough is enough."

Scully put a hand out, brushing Mae's arm. "Mae, you heard what Granger said. Mr. Hosteen's methods 
may be unorthodox, but he's moving Sean in the right direction."

They'd eaten at Mae's house -- she and Granger -- while Albert Hosteen had had Sean out for the day, off 
somewhere in the desert. Mae had been fretting as the sun had started to fall low on the horizon, a simple 
dinner of beef stew and fry bread. Sara, who was staying with Victor at night now, had made the bread, and 
Mae had made the Irish stew. Granger, looking haggard, had tried to explain Sean's condition to Mae -- 
something he called Selective Mutism.

"Why the bloody hell does he feel it's all right to talk to a fucking pony and not to me?" Mae had burst out 
with after listening for a few minutes to Granger's psychospeak.

"Mae, he has to talk to who or what he trusts right now," Granger had soothed, Scully nearly dropping her 
spoon with the suddenness and volume of Mae's words.

"Why can't he trust me? I'm the only family he's got. Katherine and I are all he's got. Not Mr. Hosteen. And 
certainly not a horse."

Granger had put his spoon down then, touched the nosepiece of his glasses to push them up and cleared his 
throat. "Mae, I think he talks to the pony because he knows the pony won't talk back. I think that's what he 
needs right now. To just be *heard*. And by someone or something that isn't involved with any of the 
things in his life that he's finding to painful to speak about. He's lost so much. And everyone in his life is 
associated with that loss. Except Mr. Hosteen and the pony he gave him. You need to let this take its time."

"He blames me," Mae replied. "That's why he won't speak to me."

"Mae, after what he's been through, I think he blames everything," Scully offered softly. "Starting with 
Owen, and going right through us all."

Mae had stared at her, unconvinced and fighting back tears, and had finally risen and gone to the sink. They 
hadn't spoken of it again.

Now, bouncing Katherine on her hip, Mae relented again, though her expression was still pained. Every 
day that went by, Scully saw Mae's anger growing more and more intense. Her anger at the situation and at 
her own helplessness.

"How are *you*?" Mae asked, glancing down at her belly.

"I'm fine," Scully said automatically, rubbing the mound of the baby.

"You don't look like you've slept," Mae replied doubtfully.

"No, I'm fine," she said again. "She's keeping up some. Moving a lot. That's all."

"It's more than that," Mae said, her voice dropping. "You're having strange dreams."

Scully went still, searching Mae's eyes, feeling exposed.

Since that day ten days ago when she'd seen Rose as a child, her doll Casey in her arms outside she and 
Mulder's bedroom, she'd hadn't seen anything else of her daughter's life.

But there were other things she'd seen, asleep. She'd seen a man in her dreams. A young man in a white 
sweater on a phone in an airport. She'd seen another man. A man with a beard and shaggy hair. Wild eyes. 
Brown sweatshirt and brown pants.

And a gun. Pointed at her.

She'd heard the screaming. A child's. And her own.

Then the old man, sitting in his wheelchair, his hand outstretched.

(Come with me, Dana. Come with me....)

Scully composed herself, pushing all of that away, rubbing her belly like a charm.

"No, no dreams," she lied, and she could tell from the look on Mae's face that the other woman saw the lie 
for what it was, and was about to say so.

"Let's look in on Sean and Mr. Hosteen," Scully said, interrupting Mae before she could start.

The deflection worked. Mae's face hardened again, and she turned and started down the road toward the 
stables, Scully following, and Bo trailing behind them like the shadow of a child.


**********

CLEW BAY
OFF CLARE ISLAND
REPUBLIC OF IRELAND
10:03 a.m.


"Keep your fucking head down, I said!"

It was a hissed whisper, and was punctuated by the kick of a boot on the back of Mulder's neck. Mulder 
flattened himself onto the floor of the van he was riding in, his stomach swimming, the pressure of the foot 
on his neck growing stronger as a moan slipped up from his chest.

It wasn't the motion of the van moving over curving roads, the motion he'd had for most of the night, that 
was making him ill, but rather the current rocking of the vehicle. He'd felt the tell-tale bump of the van's 
tires as it has boarded a ferry, the blow of a boat whistle, and then nothing but the swell of waves.

Between the aching in his head and his tendency toward seasickness anyway, he didn't know how much 
more he could take without his stomach revolting, which he was sure wouldn't please his companions one 
bit.

Only one of his current "hosts" was familiar -- the man who'd led the group who had tried to run he and 
Skinner and that sonofabitch Renahan off the road outside Omagh. The others -- and the van -- were all 
new, picked up just before they'd crossed the border into Ireland, Mulder covered with a thick tarp and 
threatened into silence with a promise of a bullet as the border guards had questioned the driver.

Then hours on roads that felt like they'd been paved by the Roman Empire, struggling for breath and 
sweating beneath the tarp. Every time he'd spoken or tried to shift or rise, he'd paid for it. His body and face 
wore a collection of souvenirs from the attempts. His mouth tasted like blood.

So now, the van rocking and someone smoking a pipe that smelled like Christmas, the two men in the front 
laughing over some joke, Mulder put his head down all the way and tried to relax as much as he could. He 
was rewarded when the foot was removed from his neck.

"There's a good Yank," one of the men said softly, and one of the other men chuckled softly.

"Fucking git," came another voice, and Mulder had to hold his tongue or risk another hit.

The boat whistle blew again, and Mulder felt the ferry slow, bumping into the buoys that would guide it to 
the dock. The van's engine started, and after a moment the vehicle jostled off the ferry, revving up, and they 
were on their way again, onto another stretch of rough road.

After a few minutes, Mulder could tell by the noise of other cars, the starting and stopping, that they'd 
entered a town. It didn't take long to be through it, however, and then they were out again, bumping along, 
curving.

Then a turn. A gravel drive. Brakes squeaking as they stopped.

He heard the two doors open, then the side door slide open, sunlight flooding the darkened interior.

"Get him up," the leader said, and the canvas was pulled off Mulder's back, light hurting his eyes. The two 
men with him in the back grabbed him beneath the arms and dragged him up and out onto the drive.

Squinting, one of his eyes swelling, Mulder looked at his surroundings. A small house, perched on the edge 
of a cliffside, the ocean beyond. There were trees around the house, partially hiding it from view. Smoke 
curled up from it, grey.

"Move," the leader said, and Mulder turned to look at him, taking in his red hair, the set of his face. The 
thin scar over his full lower lip.

Seeing Mulder seeming to memorize his face, the man grabbed Mulder's shoulder and shoved him toward 
the house.

Three steps up, and the door opened without anyone knocking.

A man stood there -- fifty or sixty. It was hard to tell. His face still had a boyish look to it, despite the grey 
beard, the high forehead, and the creases around his eyes. He wore a black fisherman's sweater, wide 
corduroy pants and boots on his feet. He was looking at Mulder, taking in his face, the blood crusted 
around his nose and mouth.

"Bring him in," the man said softly, a gentle tone to his voice that surprised Mulder, given the treatment 
he'd received at the hands of the other men.

The red-haired man with the scar shoved Mulder again, pushing him down a narrow hallway into a living 
room warm with a fire. A window to the side showed the ocean view, and there was music playing. 
Something soothing. Low voice and a guitar.

"Let him be," the house's occupant said quietly as the others stuffed Mulder into a chair. Outnumbered and 
more than a little unnerved, Mulder held his tongue and held still.

Like dogs, the other men backed away from Mulder, retreating the room's sides.

The older man turned and retrieved a pipe from the mantle, stuffed it with tobacco and gave it a light with a 
thick wooden match. There was a grandfather clock against the far wall, and it ticked loudly, sounding 
tired. When the man had his pipe lit, he moved until he stood in front of Mulder, towering over him in the 
chair, the pipe in the corner of his mouth.

His eyes were bright, inquisitive, a small smile on his face.
"Why don't you tell me who I am," the man said, and he sound calm, almost amused.

Mulder looked at him. "You're Neill," he said. "Eamon Neill."

The man smiled wider, and Mulder swallowed, his hands clenching the arms of the chair. Though every 
inch of him hurt, he felt suddenly hopeful. Hopeful and still very much afraid.


**


The clock was still ticking, the same tired beat beneath the sound of
an Irish folk singer and a guitar, as the silence stretched between
Mulder and the man he had just fingered as Eamon Neill like a road.

The men who'd brought Mulder to this place – an island, he
guessed, from the ferry ride, the view out the large window facing
the cliff the cottage sat on nothing but sea – stood around,
still as
gargoyles and about as friendly, though the young man with the red
hair and the scar on his lip looked more nervous than Mulder had seen
him, gnawing on the scar as though the wound, long healed, still
pained him somehow. 

Neill, who'd been pacing slowly, his steps soft sounds on the
wood floor as he put one booted foot in front of the other before the
fireplace, had his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes down as if
thinking, considering what to do. He looked up at the red-haired
man, met his eyes, and then looked back down.

Mulder didn't move, didn't even shift in the chair
where'd they sunk him, though his body was sore from the long
ride,
face-down, in the van. It still seemed he could feel the boot on the
back of his neck, and his eye was swollen nearly closed, a puff that
his father had called a "mouse" forming on his lower lid. 

Instead, he listened to the clock. He watched the pendulum, old
brass, for a moment as it caught the light. He read the look on the
red-haired man's face.

(Whatever you say, say nothing…)

The song ended and Mulder could hear the strange whine of a CD
changing tracks. Neill seemed to find the sound his cue to stop and
turned to Mulder again, though he didn't uncross his arms or
change the curious expression on his face.

"Tell me what I want to know," he said, the same tone he used
when he'd asked Mulder to tell him who he himself was. Not
threatening. Curious as his face. Strange with something like
warmth.

Mulder met his gaze, licked a crack in his lip that was crusted with
blood. How much to tell, he wondered. How little.

"You want to know why I've been trying to find you,"
Mulder answered. "Why I've been asking about you."

Neill didn't move. The clock kept ticking. Another song began. 
Penny whistle. A woman's voice, talking about farming a tough
and beautiful land…

"Aye," Neill replied. It was little more than a whisper of
sound.

Mulder glanced at the red-haired man again, back. 

"Not in front of them," he said, a bit of his usual
confidence creeping back into his voice. 

He didn't know why he felt as though he had any power. Perhaps
it was the juxtaposition of the men around him and the quietness he
got off the man before him. Violence on the one hand and something
that seemed to move against it in the other, though everything he
knew of Neill told him this was not the case.

He did what he'd always done as he watched Neill consider. He
trusted his instincts. He told himself that 99% of the time, they
were right.

But that 1%…Jesus, could it be a bitch…

"How about you blokes go have a smoke?" Neill said at last,
and the red-haired man began to protest. He got out one bleat of
sound before Neill's hand came up and silenced him.

"Not now, Eagon," Neill said, firm but not unkind.
"You've done a good bit so far and I'm grateful. But
give me the
room."

The man, Eagon, looked at Mulder, at the others, who were watching
the exchange warily.

"Go on, boys," Neill said. "Go on." And, following
Eagon, they left. 

At least now it's a fair fight, Mulder thought gravely, watched
Neill reach for a pipe on the mantel, reach for tobacco in a worn
leather pouch. Neill filled the pipe, facing away from Mulder,
pressing the flakes down with his thumb.

"Tell me," Neill said as he put the pipe to his lips and
struck a white-tip on the brick. A puff of smoke came up that
smelled like sugar and wood.

Mulder swallowed. "I'm here about my wife," he said. It
wasn't what he'd intended to say. He'd meant to say
something else,
but he couldn't remember what it was. He only knew what he felt,
and
it was that that he spoke from.

"Your wife?" the other man repeated, still not turning,
looking into the fire.

"Yes," Mulder replied. "There was a bomb. In
Washington. My wife was…" He hesitated. 

Truth or lie? 

Lie.

"My wife was killed," he finished. 

"Whatever it is," Neill said quickly but with the same soft
tenor, "it's got nothing to do with me, I can tell you
that."

Mulder ran the tone through his mind, as though he were turning it
over for taste.

"You know," he said with conviction.

"Aye," Neill said, sounding tired. "I know. Scully.
The one who brought Curran and The Path down in the States." He
turned slowly. "That would make you Mulder. Fox Mulder." 

Mulder nodded. "Yes."

"F.B.I.," Neill added, looking hard at him.

"I'm not here as an agent," Mulder replied. "I'm
not after you. I don't care what you've done or why. I
don't care
about your politics or your past."

The last came out more bitterly than he'd intended – years of
living at the mercy of this thing, this intruder in his life
called "The Troubles" biting it out of him – and Neill
heard it,
chuffed.

He moved forward, pipe in hand, and stood directly over Mulder,
looking down, standing almost too close. Mulder was very much aware
that Neill was standing and he was not. He was aware of the men
outside the door.

"Your trouble is all about my politics, Mr. Mulder," he said.
"You'd better start caring about them. Now whether it's
about my
past…that I can't tell you. That I don't know."
Neill stepped
away, took a pull from the pipe. A log fell in the fire.

"This is about Owen Curran," Mulder pressed "Someone
associated with him. Are there any Path left?"

"No," Neill said, shaking his head. "Not here or up
north or in the States. Curran did quite a job on them himself in
that mess in Virginia. Quite a job. And to be frank, I can't
think
of anyone who would kill your wife for taking him out after that.
Lots of families here still wearing black over that. Lots of
families who think he deserved exactly what he got." 

He looked at Mulder. "The story here goes that your wife or you
were the one who did him in. I can't see how someone would come
after her – or you – because of that." 

"My wife didn't kill him," Mulder said grimly. "I
didn't kill him. Someone else did."

Neill raised an eyebrow. "Who?"

"I thought you would know," Mulder said quietly. "We
never found who it was. Curran was trying to kill my wife, his
sister Mae. Me."

Mulder reached down and raised the bottom of his shirt and sweater,
exposing his belly to Neill. The incision scar and the pucker of the
bullet hole stood out stark pink on his skin. 

"How did he die?" Neill said, his eyes flicking from the
scar to Mulder's face as Mulder dropped his shirt. 

"A single shot. From somewhere high."

"Clean hit?"

"Half his head was gone." 

Neill nodded, gnawing on the end of his pipe and paced toward the
fire slowly. "One of yours? Merc? Secret Agent Man?"

Mulder shook his head. "Neither. Another man was killed, too,
and an agent wouldn't do that."

"Nor a merc," Neill added, breathing smoke. "It's
one of ours, all right." He chuffed again mirthlessly.
"Glad about
that. Owen was a shame to his father and all the rest of us. 
Humiliating."

"Yeah, we were pretty…embarrassed by him, too," Mulder
quipped. 

A smile touched Neill's mouth, his eyes…apologetic? Mulder
couldn't quite tell. Neill took the pipe from his mouth and
pointed
it at Mulder's belly. "So I see." 

He went to the grate again, breathed deep from his pipe, billowed. 
The smoke hung around his face like a veil. He was silent for a long
moment. Then he spoke. 

"Your wife's not dead."

Mulder's eyes got wide and he started to protest, but again the
words he meant to say died in his throat. 

"No," he said simply.

"Quite a pony show on the tele, though. My hat's off."
He'd turned at this point and gave Mulder a slight smile that
crinkled the corners of his eyes. "Liked the white coffin. 
Innocence lost and all that." 

Mulder returned the smile and a laugh came up, though it pained his
side. "Thanks," he said. 

Why do I trust you? he wanted to ask. As his eyes hung with
Neill's, the other man's still hidden by the sheen of smoke
as he
continued that strange, warm smile, he thought of this. 

"I take it you've got her stowed away until you find
who's doing this," Neill said as the CD squeaked its way to
track
four. A fiddle and a man's voice in Gaelic. 

"Yes," Mulder said.

The clock struck an off-key note, then another, counting off the
hours. At the same time, from Neill's pocket, a chiming like an
infant music box. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a worn
but well-kept pocket watch attached to his belt with a small, gold-
linked chain. He snapped open and then closed again. The music
stopped, and Neill ran his hand over the surface.

"Was my father's," he said softly.

Mulder nodded. 

"Everything about me was my father's," Neill said, waving
a hand to take in everything. "The house. The land it's on.
Everything." He looked at Mulder meaningfully. "You
understand me,
Mr. Mulder?"

Mulder nodded. "Yes," he said. "I understand you." 

"Sometimes what you do…" Neill continued. "Sometimes
it's like your blood. Sometimes you can't stop it. It's
like your
heart in your chest."

Mulder had a sudden memory – Samantha, three or four, frightened
in a thunderstorm, crawling into bed beside him. Her small hands on
his chest, a face against his shoulder.

"You know about family," Neill said, and Mulder snapped back
to reality, surprised, as though fearing Neill had somehow read his
mind. 

"Your wife," Neill continued. "You know what you'll
do for family."

Mulder played the memory of Samantha over in his mind like a tape. 
He thought of Scully's face. Scully asleep in a car. The
stakeout on Modell. Then again, after making love, her hair –
longer
now – a wave on the white pillow. Their bedroom. Their house.

"Anything," Mulder said at last. 

Neill nodded, went to the fireplace and tapped out the pipe into the
embers there. They rained down and winked out. "Then you
understand more about my politics and my past than you think."

Mulder swallowed, treading lightly. "Some of it," he agreed.

Neill looked at him, placed the pipe on the mantel on its tiny
stand. "That's a start," he said. 

Again, silence between them, a man singing in a language Mulder
couldn't understand. He liked the music, though. He liked it a
lot.

"Will you help me?" Mulder said softly.

Neill looked down at the floor, toward the door where Eagon and the
others were waiting. Mulder held his breath.

"Aye," Neill said at last, and let out a long breath. "Aye." 


*******

THE SLAUGHTERED LAMB
OMAGH, NORTHERN IRELAND
UNITED KINGDOM
MARCH 31
9:36 P.M.


"Do you ever think about anything but drinking, Renahan?" 

Skinner looked across the worn wooden table that looked older than he was at Renahan's boozy half smile. 
The other man's lips wore a wet patina of saliva, the look one got when they were six or seven beers in and 
about two more away from the toilet.

"Fucking hell, man," Renahan said, too loud, though none of the men in the tavern even looked sideways at 
him. "You've met me – wouldn't you if you were me? Eh? Eh?" He broke into a fit of chuckles, each one 
snorty and swimming in dark beer.

Skinner scowled, stared down at the surface of his own beer, the liquid still touching the rim. He could see 
a vague reflection of his face in it, like a black mirror. He wanted to say that Renahan was right. He wanted 
to tell the man that if he didn't spend so much time acting like an asshole people might not keep mistaking 
him for one. But he decided to save his breath.

Breath was what you needed in the Slaughtered Lamb, a tavern so filled with pipe and cigarette smoke it 
looked like the deserted roads they'd driven back in from the roadway where they'd been forced off onto the 
shoulder, the entire drive robed in fog the headlights could barely break through. 

Skinner could still remember looking up at the sign over the tavern, blurred as he'd groped on the sidewalk 
for his glasses after being tossed out of the moving car with Renahan, the sign a wooden placard festooned 
with an old painting of a lamb with its throat slit. Its clarity as he righted his glasses and got to his feet 
wasn't much comfort as he'd listened to the Brit laughing on the ground next to him, laughing so hard he 
couldn't get up without Skinner's yank on his arm.

"In we go!" Renahan had said, brushing off his clothes as though the care mattered. He still looked like he'd 
just crawled out of a box underneath a highway overpass.

"Why here?" Skinner'd asked, pointing at the sign. It didn't seem a good omen.

Renahan smiled. "Because I'm thinking this being our stop-off isn't a coincidence, Mr. Skinner, for one," he 
said. "And two, we don't have a place to stay yet and they've got some rooms…and three…" He smiled the 
smile that seemed to challenge and apologize at the same time. "I've got a bit of a thirst." 

Skinner had no choice but to follow him in. 

The night before they'd been their captor's guests in a house outside of town, both of them locked in the 
back room of a house out away from town. No one had spoken to them, though they'd been giving a wedge 
of cheese and a loaf of bread at one point, and access to a toilet as needed off the back of the house. 

Renahan hadn't seemed bothered by the treatment, saying only once: "I've seen worse," and then quieting as 
the unmistakable sound of a gun butt on the door silenced them both until nightfall. Skinner's mind had 
turned the image of Mulder climbing into the other car with the young man with the slit lip over in his 
mind, and he'd gnawed a sore spot on his own lip at the thought.

"Fuck," he'd breathed at one point, forgetting Renahan was there, the other man dozing in the corner. 
Renahan had been awake enough to chuff at the word.

Then it was out into the car wearing blindfolds, a curving drive into town, and then the lights of the pub as 
they'd had their blindfolds removed, a shove and an obscenity for good measure and they rolled to a stop on 
the ground.

"I think this was a mistake," Skinner said over the din in the pub, clenching and unclenching his jaw like a 
fist as he spoke. 

"What part of it?" Renahan replied, taking another drink. Beer clung to his beard. 

"Sitting around here with our thumbs up our asses while Mulder's Christ knows where…"

Renahan smiled. "He's with Eamon Neill," he said. "You know that as well as I do. Neill's nephew, the 
ginger with the scar?" He made a swipe down his face. "Little Eagon knows exactly where we are. We'll sit 
tight. Wait it out." 

"We should be looking for both of them," Skinner spat, and now he did take a sip of his beer, frustrated. He 
wished he still smoked.

"No need," Renahan said. "They just walked in the fucking door." 

Skinner looked first at the other man's Guinness smile, then over his shoulder where Renahan's eyes were 
focused. Sure enough, there was Mulder and another man, shorter with reddish hair and a beard and tired, 
wise eyes. Mulder's hands were in his jacket pockets, and as he approached, Skinner saw the swollen eye, 
the split in his lip. He was looking at Skinner, a small smile on his face.

The man beside him was not smiling, and his eyes were not on Skinner but on the man across the table 
from him, who leaned back in the chair he was in, its back creaking like bones. Renahan reached for his 
pint and nearly missed.

Skinner stood, tucking in his shirt a bit more out of habit, straightening himself up to his full height. He felt 
his mouth curl into a wry half-smile as Mulder stood before him, his hair mussed, a couple of days growth 
of beard on his face making him look more worn.

Mulder's mouth quirked, the slit gaping a bit, that smartass smile that made Skinner want to belt him from 
across his desk. "Sorry," he quipped. "I got held up."

"We all did, as I recall," Skinner grumbled, and turned his attention to the other man, and Mulder did, as 
well. "I've been eating stinking cheese and pissing outdoors for a day and a half."

"It's good you can keep up your regular routine this far from home, sir," Mulder said dryly, and Skinner 
rolled his eyes, the relief at seeing each other in one piece released with the insults.

Mulder turned to the man beside him. 

"Mr. Neill," he said, nodding toward Skinner. "This is Assistant Director Walter Skinner with the F.B.I." 
Skinner and Neill shook hands, one short shake, and Neill angled his head in Skinner's direction.

"Mr. Skinner," he said, and his voice sounded like the man should sing bonnie Christmas carols, Skinner 
thought. Something warm in it, warm and quiet, almost as if the tone of his voice was pitched on purpose to 
keep people at ease. "I'm Eamon Neill. Glad to meet you," he added, and Skinner nodded, watching Neill 
turn his attention to Renahan.

"Mr. Renahan," Neill said softly. "Been a long time." His voice had lost some of its warmth now, his eyes 
looking tired and bit dim, as though a cloud of memory had passed before them.

Renahan chuckled. "Not fucking long enough," he said. "What was it? Eighty-four? Eighty-five? I can't 
recall."

"You know exactly when it was we last met," Neill said softly, though his voice seemed to carry. Skinner 
realized it was because the noise level in the room had dropped a touch. "I'd imagine you've still got the 
clipping up on your wall from the day you brought me into Derry. You still keep all those clippings, Mr. 
Renahan? Like you used to do?"

Renahan took a swig from the pint, the foam clinging to his moustache like a second moustache. "It was a 
memorable day, that one, aye," he said, ignoring the last part of the question.

"I know I'll never forget it," Neill said, and he reached to his right arm, pushed the sleeve of the thick 
sweater he wore up. There was a sunken-in place on the side of his forearm where muscle was missing, the 
area blotted with thick white scar. 

Mulder and Skinner looked at Renahan, who laughed. "I didn't do that to you now, Eamon," he said 
jovially. "That's not me."

Neill smiled mirthlessly. "You didn't have to do much of anything for yourself now did you?" he said 
softly. "Ran your own bloody Nutting Squad right there, didn't you?" His voice rose in volume, but not in 
ire. "Kept it looking clean for the Yanks on the outside, shiny and clean, while inside those walls you were 
doing worse than you blamed us for. Weren't you. Fucking Nutting Brits having their pictures taken for the 
papers and you in there chatting it up and then leaving the cell with your big smile while we were in there 
with those blokes and God only knows what."

The smile fell from Renahan's face, and other faces were turning all around from the tables surrounding 
them. A couple of men stood, pipes in their mouths. Skinner couldn't tell if they were rising to move 
forward or back, but their eyes showed they understood everything Neill had said, their eyes darting from 
Neill to Renahan and back again.

"I don't think this is the place for this discussion," Skinner ventured, putting his hands out, one toward each 
of the men. Renahan was still leaning back in the chair as though someone had poured him there, his hand 
tight on the glass. Neill still had his arm out, his left hand gripping his right elbow to hold up the sweater's 
thick sleeve. 

Mulder reached out, touched Neill's arm just above the scar's ruin, gently put his arm down as though he 
were lowering a hand that held a gun. 

"It's the past," Mulder said. "It's over now." 

Renahan's knowing smile returned, and even Neill's eyes creased with cynical amusement. 

"You're not that naïve, I know, Mr. Mulder," Neill said. 

"No," Mulder said. "I know there's no such thing as 'over' in the whole goddamn country." He couldn't keep 
the bitter from his voice. Skinner lowered his hands as Neill's lips curled in an almost sad smile.

Then he rolled his sleeve down, pulled out a wooden chair and sat himself. "Not naïve at all," he said, 
sounding tired but somehow pleased. He turned to a man at a table nearby, a younger man who wore a 
stocking cap that Skinner hadn't even noticed was there.

"Kevin, how about a pint?" he said to the young man, who nodded and stood, going to the bar. "We'll be 
needing two. And another for these two, as well."

Skinner looked at Mulder, and he could tell that Mulder was tamping down the urge to gape at the whole 
place, at every face, every set of eyes and every curl of smoke from every pipe.

"Have a sit, Mr. Mulder, Mr. Skinner," Renahan said, seeming pleased at the two Americans' discomfort, 
which Skinner would have labeled further as fear. Renahan's eyes didn't leave Neill's, the two of them 
looking like they were about to play a particularly intricate game of cards. Poker. With real clubs and 
spades. 

Mulder sat, Skinner following suit, both of them moving slowly, aware of all the eyes, the subtle lowering 
of the din of the room.

"Welcome to my Ireland," Renahan said to them both, his teeth showing in a bemused smile. Skinner 
looked at him, then at Mulder's dawning understanding as the younger man looked at Neill and nodded 
with some comprehension that Skinner couldn't yet reach himself.

"And to mine," Neill replied, his voice quiet and knowing again. He didn't even look up as the man he'd 
called Kevin returned with their black, warm pints and set them down in the center of the table for the men 
to take.


*****

CLONIFFE BED & BREAKFAST
DUBLIN, REPUBLIC OF IRELAND
APRIL 1
7:02 A.M.

Another bed, this one without the woman called Bridget, the woman he'd picked up and taken into his bed 
with her strange, scarred body. Without her and her smoky lips and her entreats for a couple of pounds, but 
also without the small amount of warmth she'd afforded. Christie Collin was dressing in the gray light 
coming through the overly fluffed curtains at the B&B and looking at the bed, thinking of the woman's red 
hair sprayed out on the pillow, how he'd looked down at her face as he'd fucked her – Bridget so drunk she 
was having a hard time keeping her blue eyes focused on his face – and how he'd tried to turn that face into 
another face.

Something more like desperation than desire. Regret rather than lust.

He wondered how long he'd be trying to bring the American woman back to life in his mind. How long it 
would be before he'd stop thinking of the baby inside her, both of them wearing suits of glittering glass and 
flame behind his eyes. 

As he dressed (simple jeans and the ubiquitous white fisherman's sweater he wore like his civilian 
uniform), he thought about two things his Sergeant had told him would happen to a soldier. 

"First," Finney'd said, cooking over a silver tin of Sterno in a mountain forest so green it had made Christie 
wonder if there were any other color on Earth, "you'll feel bad about some of the people you've killed. 
You'll think about them, turn their faces over in your mind like coins. Regret things. Wish you'd go back 
and do things different."

Christie – younger then, probably too young to think about such things but already in need of doing so – 
had stirred the tea in the metal teapot and nodded. 

"And second," Finney'd continued, "you'll have to learn to get over the first and move past it or you'll crack 
up doing this job. There's no going back. Dead is dead and there's nothing to be done about it." 

Deaths had bothered him then, but at least then, he thought grimly, they had been carried out for reasons he 
could justify or even name. 

As he thought this, he could almost feel his grandmother's dry hand on his arm, hear that papery voice that 
sounded like how an ancient crow would talk if it could form his name. 

A tap at the door, and Christie called for whoever it was to come in. 

The man he'd met the night before in a steady rain, the man haloed by the gas light outside the cottage and 
holding a black umbrella over Christie as he'd ushered him into the house, stood in the doorway, his face 
grim, though Christie suspected his face always looked that way. Riggs was Old Guard, the I.R.A. his life. 
The Troubles seemed to have lodged themselves in the creases of the old men's faces. At least every one 
he'd seen, and he'd seen quite a few.

"Mr. Collin," Riggs said, formal and steady. "Wife's got eggs on for you like you asked. Lady Collin said to 
call this morning. I've got a phone downstairs where you can be a bit private."

"Ta," Christie said, running his hand over his crewcut out of habit, as though he were actually straightening 
the razored hair. He followed Riggs out, closing the door to his simple room with his duffle on the neatly 
made bed behind him. 

The room Riggs led him to was a comfortable office with dark wood, the desk clearly nearly as old as the 
cottage itself. The phone on the corner was even corded, the old handle feeling ridiculously large against 
his ear as he turned the dial to put in the number and it rang. The signal was as clear as water.

"Christie?" That ghostly raven voice. Early for her, the voice not yet much used for the day.

"Aye, I'm all set where you said." He knew to keep the calls short, and he liked them that way besides.

"He's in Omagh," his grandmother continued without any nicety or prelude. "Omagh. With Eamon Neill 
and Ed Renahan and that man he works with." 

A good distance away. He was safe where he was. Then why…?

"You sound worried about that," he ventured. 

"Neill knows too much to be involved," she said, which he could have guessed.

"He doesn't know me." It was why he'd been chosen for this. Few knew him at all, and his life had frankly 
felt just like that.

"No, but he does know me. Or…people…who know me. People not far from where he is." 

He thought of Omagh, drew a line to the coast on the map in his mind, settling on the dot of a town whose 
name he knew all too well, that everyone with anything to do with the Cause knew and had managed to 
keep secret.

Not far at all.

"We need to find out what Mr. Mulder knows," she continued. "I've got someone whose going to go 
through his things and see what they can find. But in any case…I think it's time for Mr. Mulder to join his 
wife."

Christie felt heat come up in his face. "You said it would only be the two. The ones responsible. You said 
there'd be no more to be done to pay for this."

"It's not about John in this case." Her voice was a faint wheeze now. He could hear the whine of her chair 
and knew the call would end. "It's about protecting us. What's left of us."

(You, he thought. It's about protecting you.)

"Mr. Mulder's curiosity has been unexpected. There's too much too lose. When I have something for you, 
I'll call. But I want you moving. Cross the border. Go to St. Sebastian's. Wait for me there." 

And the line went dead.

He walked past the smell of butter and eggs and bread, past the sound of Riggs and his wife and someone 
speaking French, a foreigner rattling a newspaper at the B&B's kitchen table and speaking to his child. Up 
the stairs and back onto the corner of the bed.

The sun was coming through the drapes, flowers on their fabric staining the ivory blankets faintly red. He 
touched a spot of it, calloused fingers, hard on soft.

Bridget sleeping there. He held onto the name, held her face in his hands in his mind and she roused and 
looked at him.

"What is it?" she asked, her voice tinged as if she knew him or cared.

He hesitated, looking into her invisible eyes, worrying the cotton beneath his fingers as though it were her 
hair.

"She says…" he began, swallowed. "She says she doesn't understand this Mulder and what he's doing."

"But it's what she's doing, isn't it then?" she said softly. 

Christie nodded to nothing. "Don't know how she can't say she doesn't understand…a man with a dead 
wife. Dead baby…" He looked into the mirage of her eyes. "She has to understand that sort of revenge, you 
know? She must."

Bridget looked at him gravely, her face seeming to vanish into white. "She understands the Cause, 
Christie," she said, her voice lost on a gust of wind pressing against the window.

He spoke to her as she faded from view, her eyes showing she heard the final thing he said: 

"Then she understands revenge."
 

********


TWO GREY HILLS, NEW MEXICO
10:15 a.m.


"Watch," Albert Hosteen said, his long legs, clad in faded jeans, squeezing on Ghost's sides, a thin stick 
tapping on the dapple gray of the horse's long neck. Just a touch, barely enough for Ghost to feel through 
his sleek coat. As he did so, he said the Navajo word for "left." Dutifully, the horse moved to the left and 
walked toward a battered barrel in the center of the corral, close to where Sean was standing with Cloud, 
the pony looking bored. 

"Now watch again," Hosteen said, and Sean squinted up at him, his face already growing a touch red from 
the sun beating down on the corral. He said the word again, did nothing with the stick this time, and Ghost 
turned to the left again and walked to the second barrel, the one with the dent in the side from one too many 
rolls and kicks.

Sean looked at him, at Cloud, then back again, his face still screwed up against the sun. He chanced a 
glance to the side of the corral, too, where Mae and Scully and Sara were, Mae standing up on the slats so 
that her head looked over the top and Scully seated on the bleachers beside Sara, who was bouncing 
Katherine like a toy. 

Hosteen glanced over, as well, met Scully's eyes, the woman's face a bit pinched with concern. Sean had 
been ignoring Hosteen for twenty minutes, watching him but not doing as he said, leaning over 
occasionally to whisper something in the pony's cocked ear.

"Hmm," Hosteen said, speaking softly to Ghost, who walked slowly to the fence near Mae and Scully. 
Scully stood slowly as he approached, her hand on the small of her back.

"Not much progress today, I see," Mae said, and Hosteen noted that she didn't even try to hide the 
bitterness in her voice. He only smiled faintly as Ghost pushed his charcoal nose over the fence and against 
Mae's hand. Mae pulled her hand away a few inches, her eyes still on Sean talking to Cloud. 

"There is progress," he replied, nodding toward Sean. "He's telling the pony a story. Stories are important 
things to tell, don't you think?" He smiled at Mae again, mostly with his eyes, as she looked up at him 
almost accusingly. 

"I suppose," she said, and glanced away. 

"Does he like stories?" Hosteen asked, Ghost swishing his tail in a sound like a brush. Scully crossed her 
arms and watched the exchange, her eyes going between Hosteen and the side of Mae's face.

"What do you mean?" Mae said. "Of course he likes stories. More so when he was younger, but he's liked 
them, yes."

"What sort?" Hosteen pressed. 

Mae seemed to consider this for a moment, shielding her eyes as the sun swelled behind a thin cloud cover 
and beat down on them, turning everything almost white. 

"It's almost funny, but you know what his favorites were?" Mae said, looking up at him from slits for eyes. 
At Hosteen's cocked head, she said: "Cowboys and Indians." 

A laugh bubbled up through Hosteen's chest. "Bad stories about Indians I would guess," he said. "From the 
way he looked at me when we first met. Like I was going to put him on a spit and turn him over a fire." He 
chuckled again.

"Not bad stories, really…" Mae said carefully. "More…just…you know. The kind of stories about Indians 
scalping people. Braves and squaws and battles with people in bloody wagons and that sort. People turning 
themselves into animals and dancing around like monkeys for rain and painting their faces up. Rubbish like 
that." 

Hosteen watched Scully cringe and look down, stifling a laugh, and she glanced at Hosteen to make sure he 
wasn't taking offense. Behind her, Sara Whistler set off in a fit of laughter that startled a flock of birds on 
the barn's sagging roof into chittering flight, a few stray feathers falling down in front of the open doors.

"Hmm," Hosteen said. "I see." He winked at Scully, who said nothing. "Agent Scully, you should rest. Go 
find Mr. Granger first, though. He has something to tell you." 

"Me?" Scully said, and turned, looking toward Victor's house, the paddock behind where they'd all seen 
Granger fussing with the sheep with Victor and a few of his men. 

"Yes," Hosteen said, and then he turned Ghost with a word and headed back into the center of the corral 
toward Sean. 

Sean looked up, seeming almost guilty as Hosteen stopped in front of him. 

"Get on the pony, Sean, and come with me," he said, and Sean, who had not listened to a thing Hosteen had 
said for some time, relented, climbing on Cloud's back and taking the reins in his small hands. Hosteen 
urged Ghost forward, and one of Hosteen's men – dealing with the other horses in a connecting corral – 
opened the wide gate to let them out.

Hosteen smiled as they rode toward the entrance to the stable, something spinning out in his mind like a 
ribbon. The further it spun, the more he smiled. 

Finally, composing his face, he stopped Ghost in front of the entrance to the stable, reached in his back 
pocket and pulled out a red bandana. Sean had stopped Cloud behind him and sat, watching him warily. 

Bending to the ground, Hosteen picked up one of the plain feathers dropped by the cloud of doves that had 
risen off the roof. It was gray, the color of soot almost, and didn't even shine as he held it, its dull color 
seeming to absorb the light. The quill was hard and white and mottled with dirt. He put it in the pocket of 
his shirt.

He turned then to Sean, took the few steps that separated them. Sean looked at him strangely as Hosteen got 
very close, standing right beside him. He watched as the older man reached out, folding the bandana into a 
strip against the side of Sean's thigh. When he had a band, he reached up and, though Sean shied a bit, tied 
it around Sean's head, just above his eyebrows. After he'd made a firm knot, he reached into the pocket of 
his shirt and retrieved the feather, inserting it carefully between Sean's head and the knot. 

"Hm," Hosteen said, standing up almost comically straight. "Looks good."

Sean reached up, looking at him with a surprised and slightly distrustful expression. He touched the feather 
gently with his hand. 

"This is a dove's feather," Hosteen said. "The weakest of the feathers for a boy becoming a Brave. You 
have taken only the first step in your path to becoming a Brave." He said it lofty, just as he knew Sean 
would expect it all to be said. "If you wish it, you can continue on that path, but it is a hard path."

Sean continued to touch the feather, looking into Hosteen's face, searching.

"The next feather is a crow," Hosteen said. "To become a Crow, you will have to come with me into the 
desert and complete a trial. That is the way of my people. This is our way. Even though you are not one of 
us, I see you can do these things, and I am a Holy Man and know these things. Will you do them? Will you 
continue on this path?"

Sean stroked the feather again, his hand knotting the pony's mane in his hand. Cocking his head, he 
squinted at Hosteen against the light and finally nodded. 

"Hmm." Hosteen nodded. "Very good. We will begin tonight. Go and pack for a night of camping. I will 
bring you the things you will need for the trial." 

And with that, he turned, swung slowly but easily up onto Ghost's back and, with a word, walked away 
from Sean, leaving him there in his bandana and his feather as Hosteen headed back for the house.

*****

11:01 a.m.


Scully had walked the length of the ranch's compound to the area behind Victor's house, a dusty area that 
was swollen with sheep, all clotted together in the small space bumping against one another and mewing 
softly to one another. In the midst of them, Victor and Granger and two of the other men who worked on 
the ranch were pulling females out of the flock, females with wide strips of color on their rumps – yellows 
and reds and blues and greens. They were taking them out and putting them in a separate enclosure.

"Hello, Paul," she said softly as she neared his side of the fence. 

He looked up, his face a strangely ashen color for someone with such a dark complexion, his eyes wet and 
tired. He was sweating profusely, dark stains of it circling his armpits and the neck of his T-shirt. Her brow 
creased down immediately. It was hot, but it wasn't that hot…

"Are you okay?" she asked, and Granger seemed to balk a bit at the question, reached down instead for a 
ewe who was trying to run between his legs, her rump a brilliant shade of purple. 

"I'm fine, Dana," he said softly, wiped his brow on the arm of his short-sleeved shirt. "You okay?"

She nodded. "Yes," she said.

"The baby okay?"

She smiled faintly, bemused. "As far as I can tell, she seems to be. I think she'll be joining the circus, 
though, with the amount of turning she's doing." 

Granger smiled, though there was something pained in his face as he heaved a sheep over another and 
toward the small gap that separated the enclosures. 

"What are you doing?" she asked, though she kept her eyes on his face. 

"We're moving the ewes who've already mated," he said. Victor was across the pen, a ram dancing around 
the perimeter looking very put out.

"How can you tell that?"

"They were smoking cigarettes when we got down here," Granger quipped, and Scully chuckled. Granger 
grinned. "Actually, you can tell by the color on their rumps. See?" He gestured to the nearest one, a colored 
ewe in the midst of all the white. "You can tell from that one that she's mated with one of Keel's while she 
was up there, and only him. There's yellow but no other colors on her. The males have these wax sticks on 
their bellies so that they mark any ewes they've mated with and Victor can tell which lambs are from which 
males, so if there are any problems, he can castrate the males." 

"There's a few mental images I didn't need to have," Scully said, and noticed that the male prancing 
around Victor with its head down did indeed have a blue wax stick on its stomach, and there were many 
blue-stained sheep in the corral.

"Yeah," Granger said. "Sheep Sex. Who knew how exciting it could be?"

"Only the sheep," Scully said under her breath. 

"And," Granger added, "If the saying around Hopkins was true, some folks at Virginia Tech." He 
guffawed.

Scully groaned. A common joke at Maryland, too. 

Then, desperate for a change of subject and sorry she'd asked about the whole thing, she straightened a bit. 
"Mr. Hosteen said you had something you wanted to tell me?" 

Granger straightened, his hands on his hips, and wiped his brow again. "I what?" he asked.

"He said you had something to tell me," she repeated patiently. 

He shook his head. "Not that I'm aware of," he replied. 

One of Victor's dogs came galloping into the pen, its tail waving like a flag and peels of barking coming 
from it as it rounded up the sheep. 

"FANG!" Victor yelled. "Get out of here, you mangy—"

"I'll get him," Granger called, and took off at a lope between the sheep toward the dog, which was 
clustering the sheep into little knots and then nipping them so that they leapt over one another and fell. 

Granger made it about halfway across the paddock, Scully watching him and the sheep piling up around 
her, bleating, when something odd seemed to happen. Granger stopped in mid-stride, standing so still it was 
as if he were playing a child's game of Freeze. His fists balled, his face aimed down. The sheep bustled 
around him and the dog circled with even more frenzy, delighted at not being caught.

"Paul?" Scully called when he'd been motionless for what seemed like a long time.

He said nothing. He didn't move. It was as if he'd turned to stone right there in the dust and the sunlight, 
though even from where she was standing, there behind the low fence, she could see that he was trembling 
slightly and his chest was heaving. 

"Granger!" Victor called again. "Get that damn dog, will you?"

"Paul!" Scully called again, and now she did move, toward the rickety gate as fast as she could, moving 
through the sheep, the dog still rounding them up in gleeful chaos as Scully picked her way to Granger.

Victor had likewise moved, the other men going after Fang as Victor worked his way to Granger.

"Paul, what is it?" Scully said as she stood beside him, winded herself, panicking. Granger had gone even 
more ashen, his face looking almost waxy. He was biting his lower lip hard enough to make it bleed. 

"Nothing…" he choked out. "Nothing…"

She reached down and grabbed his wrist, her fingers finding the pulse there. The beats were irregular both 
in their rhythm and in their intensity, and she could tell from the way he held himself so stiff, his chest 
rising and falling with a strained cadence, that he was in terrible pain. 

"What going on?" Victor said, his hand going out to Granger's shoulder. Granger shook his head. 

"Paul, you're having some kind of cardiac event," Scully said, taking him by the elbow. "We've got to get 
you to a hospital—"

"NO!" The word burst from him. "No hospital no doctors nothing…" He trailed off from the stream of 
words. "Nothing…"

"Victor," Scully said. "Get in the truck and go up to your grandfather's house. I've got a bag there – you'll 
know it when you see it. It's beside the dresser in my room. Go get it for me, please." 

Victor looked stricken, but nodded and ran out of the corral. 

"Can you walk?" Scully asked gently, still holding his elbow. She could tell by the way his face was 
relaxing that he was not in as much pain. Beneath her fingers, his heart rate was slowing, becoming more 
normal. 

"Yeah," he breathed. "Yeah, I'm fine…" He tried to shake her off but she held on.

"You're not fine," she said, and she was angry now. She angled him toward the gate, a bench on the other 
side, which she sat him down on, pushing hard to get him to go down.

He wiped his forehead, still winded. 

"How long?" she said, and she could see something frightened pass over his face, which confirmed her 
worst suspicions as to his condition's seriousness. He'd reacted as if she'd asked him how long he had to 
live.

"It's nothing," he said softly. 

"Paul."

"It's nothing that anyone can do anything about," he amended, and his voice bristled. 

She settled onto the bench beside him. "The gunshot wound," she said. "Muscle damage from the bullet?"

"Some, but…" He shook his head.

She nodded, though she blanched. "Post-operative infection."

He hesitated, nodded. 

"Endocarditis?" She said it grimly. 

He nodded and she felt color rising her face as her temper flared.

"And what else?" she demanded. She felt her eyes flare. "What else?"

He didn't answer her, looked away.

"What in the HELL are you doing out here?" she snapped. "My God, Paul—"

"I'm out here doing what I want to do," he bit back, his eyes hardening. 

She swallowed. "Does Robin know?" Then she answered herself. "No, of course she doesn't know…" She 
ran a hand through her hair, smoothing it off her forehead where a few strands had fallen. 

"I don't want her to know," he said softly. 

"You don't think she has a right to?" Scully exclaimed. "Paul, if you don't get a transplant—"

"I'm on the list, but it's gone too far too fast," he said. "Getting some distance from me is probably the best 
thing that could happen for her."

Scully was standing before she even knew she had risen, glaring down at him. "How dare you make that 
decision for her," she said quietly, so quietly that Granger looked up as though she'd shouted.

"I'm protecting her, Dana," he said. "You'd do the same for Mulder." He looked up at her. "You ARE 
doing the same for Mulder." He stared. "Aren't you?"

The silence, broken only by the ewes, stretched between them as their gazes hung.

"Not like this," she said, low and dangerous. "Never like this."

And even as it left her mouth, she knew she was lying. She'd never told him when the cancer had spread. 
He'd found out the hard way. He'd found all of that out the hard way, more from what she didn't say than 
what she did, clues dropped like so much blood from her nostril, a morning in late…

And the dreams now. The man in her dreams with the brown pants, the brown shirt and ragged face. The 
man in the wheelchair beckoning her. Something just out of sight in every dream, and whatever it was 
drenched in a child's screaming and blood…

"I'll make a deal with you," she said, watching as Victor's truck came ambling back into sight from the 
road, kicking up a cloud of golden dust. 

He squinted up. "What deal?"

She pushed her hair back again, composing herself. "I'll tell him. If you tell her." 

Granger looked down, his hands closing on the edge of the bench. Victor's truck screeched to a halt and he 
came out, carrying a black doctor's bag as he jogged towards them.

"Deal?" Scully pressed.

Granger heaved in a deep sigh, looked at her, and nodded. 

"Deal." 


******

12:14 p.m.


Victor Hosteen's barn was older than his grandfather, the wood so parched by the desert sun that it had 
turned the color of ash. Inside was one of the few places on the ranch that actually stayed reasonably cool, 
even in the high months of July and August when the desert here baked at over 100 degrees. 

He didn't know if it was the quiet that came over the animals when they were inside it, the sweet smell of 
oats and hay, or the way the sunlight could only come in through the places in the roof where the wood had 
finally given way, one board at a time, bars of it falling to the floor like tiny spotlights for the lingering 
dust. 

He'd gotten the sheep into the pen to one side, the pen's low fence across from the stalls where some of the 
horses were sequestered. Two lazy mares, older than most of the herd, swaybacked. A black and white 
paint held the corner stall, coming to the bars with his eyes flashing at whomever walked through the 
doorway. 

As he'd come in with the sheep, the paint had tamped against the stall door, raising a high sound of 
warning. Victor only smiled. The horse had become too cantankerous to ride in the last six months or so, 
but Victor didn't have the heart to put him down. This one, the one he'd dubbed with a Navajo name that 
approximated "Killer," had been the first lesson in respect for the ranch that many of the men had learned. 

Many, including Mulder all that time ago. 

"Calm yourself down, old man," Victor said to the horse as he gave the last of the straggling sheep a touch 
with a long stick, urging them toward the pen and its shade and its dust. "We all know you're in charge in 
here, so let us be." A chicken scrabbled out of the way as he walked.

After he'd closed the pen with its rope lock, the sheep bumping against each other as they found their place, 
he leaned against one of the posts, his chin on his forearms, thinking.

"He's dying, you know," came a voice in Navajo from behind him. He was not surprised. He'd known she 
was there.

"Yeah," he replied in the same language, sounding tired. "I know." 

Sara Whistler came up beside him, carrying a chicken in her arms. It was black with white specks. Red 
comb and eye like beads. 

"What will you do, Victor?" she asked, bouncing the hen slightly as it began to make chucking sounds, as 
though it were a baby in need of a nap instead of the evening's meal. 

Victor chuffed softly, though he didn't smile as he did so. "What's there to do?" he said, and Whistler was 
silent. "It's about belief, isn't it? He doesn't have it."

"He has a lot," she replied, stroking the hen's neck. "More than even he knows."

"He's not one of us," Victor said, and this almost out of habit, though the words sounded hollow even to his 
ears.

"None of them are," she replied as he knew she would. "And your grandfather helps them. You can help 
them, too."

But Victor shook his head. "Not this way," he said. "Not with this."

Sara leaned against his arm gently. "You can't believe he came to us by chance," she said softly. "Any more 
than the others came to your grandfather to see the boxcar all those years ago."

"No, that was not chance," he agreed. "That was a secret that they were meant to find."

She nodded. "Meant to find for that truth and so that you and your grandfather would be here for them 
when they came again – Agent Scully and Agent Mulder. When they came again, so lost and so broken." 

"So you think it's come again?" he asked. "This time for Granger?"

"Not just for that," Whistler replied, "but yes."

He turned and looked into her eyes. The chicken was quiet, content in her arms. 

"Victor, if something is good," she said in a quiet voice, "should it not be for everyone's good?"

He met her eyes. "It's about belief," he said again. "And he will not believe. It's too far for him to walk. For 
any of them to walk." 

She shook her head. "Agent Mulder would believe," she said. "Agent Scully has had to learn to, as well." 
She paused, and he knew she was right on both those counts. 

"Try," she said, and held his eyes until he nodded. 

"The others won't like it," he tried one last time.

"They will do as you ask," she said. "As they've always done."

He looked at the sheep, heard Killer moving in his stall, a small wind coming in through the open door to 
the barn.

"All right," he said, relenting, and he let out a long breath. "I'll try."

She nodded, turned to walk away. Then, from behind:

"And Victor?"

He turned to face her again, his brow cocked in question. Her eyes were bottomless, her expression grave. 

"You must move quickly," she said. "There's not much time."

"For him?" he asked, confused by the gravity of what she said and how she'd said it.

Whistler shook her head. "For any of us." 

And she turned with the chicken and moved through the bars of light toward the house.


******

BALLYCASTLE
NORTHERN IRELAND, U.K.
APRIL 3
5:45 a.m.

If the man looked at the whirls in the grain on the bottom of the boat, they appeared to look up at him like 
eyes.

As the light shifted over the sea, climbing somewhere behind a shroud of clouds that burned the whole 
world crimson around him, he could see the dark eyes like holes in pale skin, the wood the color of a butter 
beneath his feet. The sea was so dark it appeared black, light caught on the waves around him as he pulled 
the long oars through it, sun on onyx and the whole thing shot with gold ribbons of light. 

He could still see the shoreline in the distance, the boat rocking on the waves, the water filled with chop. 
He dropped the anchor, a lard can filled with buckshot and its lid sealed down tight, the white rope running 
over the side for a dozen meters or more and then stopping, the boat drifting until it caught.

The man pulled the oars in, folded them out of the way like wings. 

Now the hard part. A hook in one hand, the head of a small fish in the other. He'd moved to larger bait 
since Christmas, not because he sought a larger catch but because his hands shook so badly now that he 
couldn't thread anything else on the barbed hooks. 

He rarely landed what he caught anymore. He'd lost so much line they'd started to rib him a bit in a town, at 
least until weight started dropping off of him too quickly to be anything else, when the shaking had become 
impossible to hide. 

The line and silver hooks and weights started showing up on his front step in a paper sack, a note saying 
"for your trouble." 

The man hooked the bait onto the three-pronged hook, the bait fish's eyes looking up at him like pearls. The 
pain was worse today, aggravated by the rowing, the night of little sleep soothed only by his wife's hands 
stroking his back.

"For your trouble," he said softly, his lip curling beneath his white moustache, and tossed the face over the 
side, where it disappeared into gold and black.


***** 

OUTSIDE MAGHERAFETT
NORTHERN IRELAND, U.K.
APRIL 3
6:03 a.m.


It was a story Scully had told him.

There was sunlight coming through the window of their house, washing the kitchen, glinting off a glass that 
stood beside the sink. In the story, he'd been leaning against the sink drinking a cup of coffee and Scully 
had been at the kitchen table, perched in a chair with her robe pulled off one shoulder, the baby's dark head 
turned toward her breast. 

As the baby had finished, Scully had put their daughter on her shoulder against a thick white cloth, and he'd 
turned at the sink, put the mug down, wet a soft cloth beneath a warm stream of water. Then he'd come 
forward with it, standing in front of her, pressed the cloth to the raw red of her nipple, his palm holding it in 
place. 

"It's how you kiss me just after that," she'd told him, her voice coming from beside him in the dark of their 
bedroom. It was the first night after they'd moved. "That's what stays with me from it." 

He'd reached down and cupped her breast, wanting to make it real right then, not wanting to wait. 

"Yes," he whispered. He knew just how he would do it. He'd done it then.

Awhile later, dawn giving way to a gray day that promised rain, it was a story he'd told himself.

The light that had come through the window, Samantha's body rising and going out the door that had shot 
open, wood on wood like the crack of gunfire. Game pieces rattling on a board, the house shaking itself 
apart. He remembered how small her body looked as the impossible brightness silhouetted it against the 
white of her nightgown, how her long hair hung down, her arms out in surprise and crucifixion. 

As vivid as it was, everything around that moment was fading. The face on the bridge – long, thick hair 
curled -- vanishing to Scully's bloodied face above the Bounty Hunter's forearm, her eyes aghast at his 
sacrifice. 

He concentrated, but it was going gauzy, a funeral shroud of Forget. Neill had started this when he'd talked 
about family at his house in the south, conjured Samantha out of the past's thin air.

But, he realized, he was forgetting his sister's face.

Awhile after that, it was a story Neill was telling him, Renahan snoring a bit too close to a dour looking 
Skinner in the backseat, his face framed in the rearview mirror. Neill was driving to Mulder's right. 

"I only saw him that once," Neill was saying. "And I know he was part of the Newry Squad. His name was 
a secret to nearly everyone except the most highly placed. I know James Curran knew him quite well. I'd 
wager Owen knew him, as well, though probably only when he was a boy."

"Why the secrecy still?" Mulder asked as the car took a particularly sharp curve slowly. Neill was a 
cautious man. "Did he retire?"

Neill smiled, his eyes crinkling at their edges in amusement. "No, I would doubt that he did," and Mulder 
immediately felt naïve. 

"I guess a retirement party isn't really part of anyone's plan around here," he said, acknowledging his 
mistake. 

"Not unless it involves a casket and four cases of whiskey," Neill replied, and Skinner chuffed from the 
back. 

"He's alive, I should think," Neill continued. "It's just a question of finding him."

"What did he look like?" Skinner asked. "That time you saw him?"

Neill was quiet for a few beats, the car chugging along. The sun lost itself further behind the cloud and a 
few drops of rain dotted the windshield.

"It was '84 or '85, so it's not much help. He had a moustache, dark but going gray. The sharpest eyes I've 
ever seen. He was talking to this man called Seamus, but we all knew that wasn't his real name. I was in the 
pub in Newry dropping off some… information…and he was there. I saw Seamus slip him a piece of paper 
under a glass, like the thing was a bloody pub coaster. I knew what it was, though. I knew it had someone's 
name on it, and a time and a place."

"What makes you so sure he'd know who was responsible for what's going on with Scully?" Mulder asked. 
The thought of the man Neill was speaking of made him vaguely ill. 

"Because if he'd passed away we'd all know who he was," Neill said, taking a left onto a different road. 
"And if he's still alive, he's one of the last, and most of the last none of us know. And it's one of the last 
who's doing this." 

"But you don't think it's actually him doing it?" Mulder said after he'd let Neill's words sink in.

Neill shook his head. "No," he said. "It wasn't ever personal for him. He did what he was told. Perfectly. 
But nothing more." He looked at Mulder. "This whole mess…well, this is a private little war." 

A town was dotting the green ahead of them far off in the distance, a sign signaling a few kilometers to 
Cookstown. 

"Let's stop and get something to eat," Neill said as they passed the sign, the car doing the speed limit. "I 
could use a pot of tea. And there might be someone in Cookstown I need to see." 

Mulder nodded, pulled his jacket closer to him. 

His hand on Scully's breast and the taste of her mouth in the darkness. 

A slip of paper beneath a glass filled with liquid a shade lighter than blood.

Samantha's face vanishing in a haze of blue light, and the Irish sky opening with rain. 


*****


TWO GREY HILLS, NEW MEXICO
6:06 a.m.

There was a thin wind the size of a wrist moving across the front porch of Hosteen's house, pushing itself 
against a series of rusted steel spoons Sarah Whistler had strung up in a makeshift chime just beneath the 
aluminum awning. As the wind touched the utensils they clinked against each other with low, tinny notes, 
and that and the distant barking of a dog and the thunder coming in from a storm Scully could see in the 
distance were enough to conjure a sort of loneliness she found unbearable.

She'd thought telling him would make her feel better somehow, freer or more honest or more…something. 
It had not.

"I see new things now," the email had said. "They're still of you and of Rose, but there's something hanging 
in what I see now, like shadow. There's a man somewhere, and there's screaming, and something like a 
gunshot. Something terrible is going to happen, and not only that but I feel it as though it's happening now, 
my body feels it now, and I'm afraid."

Gone was the teasing from their earlier emails, even the last one he still hadn't answered, the one where she 
talked like a gossip about Mae and Frank Music and how she thought Frank might be interested in Mae but 
would rather die than show it, and Sean and his pony, and the baby kicking. 

Nothing like that in this one. "There's something I haven't told you…" and then she'd told him. Once she'd 
typed "I want you to come home," and then deleted it and changed the "want" to "need," and then she'd 
deleted the sentence all together, replaced it with "love" and signed her name.

The wind picked up a bit in a gust, the spoons plinking. Bo lifted his head from beside the rickety rocker 
she sat in, one of her hands trailing just above the dog's head and one on the protrusion of her navel, a 
bump beneath her shirt she worried with her finger. 

"Rain," Hosteen said from behind the screen door, and she craned her head to look at him. Only his face, 
closest to the screen, was visible in the growing darkness. 

"Yes," she agreed simply, returning her gaze to the gathering of clouds in the distance. A thread of 
lightning shot through them, the whole gray mass – the color of dirty wool – illuminating for an instant.

"Hope it doesn't bother the airplane," Hosteen ventured, worrying something in a napkin as though it was 
too hot to touch. "I do not know much about where they fly to come to here, but I would be afraid in one 
with angry clouds around."

She looked up, confused. "Airplane? What airplane?"

Hosteen kept his eye on the horizon. "Granger's woman is coming. She has been flying all night from what 
I understand." 

Scully swallowed. She could only imagine Robin's anguish. She knew the other woman well enough, 
though, to know that the red-eye flight meant she would be frantic and furious when she arrived. She was 
glad Robin would be here for Paul, though, and said so.

"Yes," Hosteen said. "He has much ahead of him, Granger. He will need her very soon in a way he doesn't 
know." 

She couldn't think about it. There'd been so much death. She couldn't even imagine it taking on that shape, 
so she said nothing.

"Heard you on your computer," he said. He put the corner of a neatly cut grilled cheese sandwich in his 
mouth and took a bite. 

She nodded, said nothing. Rain started to patter the metal roof, a dot at a time.

"I hope he replies to you this time," Hosteen ventured. Scully had long ago stopped wondering how he 
knew the things he did. She stroked Bo's soft head.

"He will," she said, with a conviction she couldn't get close to feeling.

"Hmm." His usual sound of commitment or non-commitment.

They were quiet for awhile, watching the rain come in. Hosteen came out the screen door with a creak and 
stood beside her. His long fingers curled around the post at the top of one side of the chair. 

"I thought you were going out camping last night with Sean," she said softly. "Mae said you were going 
out."

"Hmm," Hosteen said again. "The place we were going…too far with rain coming in this early. I do not 
mind rain, but lightning in the desert can be very dangerous. And it makes the horses afraid."

She looked up into his face, though he did not return her gaze. 

"This will be gone by noon," Hosteen said. "We will go tonight instead. It will be clear and cooler tonight. 
A bit of wind. Stars out." He smiled a faint smile.

"You can tell all that from looking at this storm?" she said, gesturing to the angry sky, thunder rolling.

"Yes," he said, nodding sagely. "The wind tells me. The thunder tells me. Every drop of rain speaks the 
name of a star..."

She looked down, shaking her head, a laugh gathering in her chest. 

"And you were watching The Weather Channel while you were making your sandwich," she said, and she 
looked back up into his face, finding his warm eyes on her and his smile wider.

"You spend too much time with me," he said, feigning a stern voice. "We will have to make you an Indian 
soon if you keep uncovering my magic."

She chuckled, resisted the urge to touch his hand, knowing the touch would be tolerated but not 
appropriate. "Mr. Hosteen, you have magic I will *never* uncover or understand."

"So do you," he said, and the smile melted off her face as she looked up at him. He held her gaze steadily. 
"You told Mulder what you have been seeing?"

She swallowed. "Yes."

"Hmm," Hosteen said. "All of it?" 

She looked away, her hand worrying Bo's ear. The dog whined. 

"Most."

She didn't have to look up at him to see him nod.

"There will be more," he said into the sound of the sheeting rain. "Things you cannot hide. Things too hard 
to see." 

She kept her eyes ahead, her voice quiet. "I hope you're wrong," she said.

"I am not."

She nodded. "How do you know?" She hoped for one of his jokes, the Medicine Man rattling his bones.

Instead, she felt his hand touch her shoulder, just touching her there with its warm weight. 

"Magic," he said quietly, serious.

She said nothing, tears welling, and reached up to touch his hand. The spoons spun on their lines like fish in 
stronger wind, and she and Hosteen watched the rain.


******

TWO GREY HILLS, NEW MEXICO
APRIL 3
10:04 a.m.


Robin had thought that the desert would somehow look different in the Spring, since 
she'd heard even Paul say that it bloomed sometimes there. She'd expected to see sand 
somehow miraculously covered with flowers and grasses, impossibly bright as the cherry 
blossoms that festooned much of D.C. this time of year. 

But the truth was, Robin Brock - a black woman growing up in Philadelphia, most of her 
time spent in the hallways of one school or another, one lab or another, sterile 
environments where her dark skin stood out against white lab coats and white teachers - 
had never seen the desert. Paul had only seen it the last time he was here, and though 
he'd traveled a bit to see some of the things he'd always wanted to see (Grand Canyon, 
Canyon de Chelly, Petrified Forest), he came back regaling her with quiet stories of 
desolation and heat and something that felt completely lonely that he couldn't completely 
describe in the stretches between place to place. 

Dead Man's Wash. Bloody Wash. Broken Back. Tombstone. 

But he'd also talked about a little town called "Why?", complete with its question mark in 
the town's name, and another town called "Hope," both outposts on the edge of larger 
spans of desert, both run by retirees whose dream it had been to have a place in the 
middle of Nothing that was their own.

What was out here, streaming by the window of Victor Hosteen's pickup truck, was 
blooming, yes. There was no denying from looking at the ground line that in the heat of 
summer it would be a barren and unforgiving place. But there was some green on the 
scrubby brush, and here and there small patches of purple and yellow flowers moved out 
among the flat places like footprints.

There was a storm well out over the desert, the expanse so uninterrupted and vast that she 
could actually see where it began and ended, and through the beams of sunlight washing 
around it, she could see the areas where it was raining and where it wasn't. 

"Been storming all morning off and on," Victor said from beside her, both his calloused 
hands on the steering wheel, which trembled slightly as they rode over the cracked 
highway. She hadn't seen another vehicle of any kind since they'd entered the 
reservation. 

"But it looks so far away," she said, nodding to the storm clouds. 

"Oh, things move fast here," he said, smiling a crooked smile that showed straight white 
teeth. "Things blow in and blow out before you know it." 

She forced a smile. He was a happy man in some way she couldn't understand, and he 
was hoping to move some of it into her, she could tell. At least something like hope.

Robin stretched in the seat, feeling her back creaking like a chair back. It had seemed an 
interminable flight from Dulles, flying all night in that strange otherworldly glow of an 
airplane's insides, lights going on and off all night. She had slept little, and eaten less.

"How much further?" she asked. They were coming to a crossroad that had no signs.

"Oh, just to the right and up a bit and we'll be at my grandfather's house," Victor replied. 
"Do you want to stop and say hello to Agent Scully first?" He sounded almost as though 
he wished she'd say "yes." 

She shook her head, and that same pit of heat began to bloom in her belly again. 

"No," she said softly, and her gaze went out the window again. "Take me to Paul." 

"All right," Victor said. "We should have something for breakfast still. You must be 
hungry." 

She didn't answer. In fact, she did say anything further, nursing the feeling in her belly, 
then in her chest, as though something choking her. 

Victor downshifted the truck as they slowed for the turn. He took the right without using 
his blinker, the truck picking up speed as it headed up over the rise toward the ranch.


****


ST. SEBASTIAN'S PUB
TIEVEMORE
NEAR ST PATRICK'S PURGATORY AND LOUGH DERG
NORTHERN IRELAND
UNITED KINGDOM
10:32 a.m.


Bridget had stayed with him all the way back into the North. Christie'd stared at her 
staring mutely at him in the back of the white lorry his grandmother had arranged for 
him, a paper delivery truck that had a compartment in the back for checkpoints going 
from South to North. She'd been sitting on a stack of papers and every time the light had 
shifted as another car had passed on the narrow roads, peeking through the back windows 
with their small red taillights, he'd seen her face change and change again, her blue eyes 
mute and filled with either love or reproach. He couldn't tell. His grandmother had 
taught him they were fairly well close enough to be confused. 

At St. Sebastian's, the sign shot with arrows in someone's irreverent play on the Blessed 
Saint himself, he'd sat at the edge of the pub and watched the television sputter snooker. 
It bored him, but then it always had. He didn't know what he was waiting for, there with 
his pint at ten in the morning and a plate of eggs and sausage and a mound of potatoes the 
pub owner's wife had made him in the back, not knowing who he was by name but 
knowing he was someone she should feed.

He didn't know what he was waiting for - or who - but he'd know when it happened. 
Christie didn't know where Bridget had wandered off to when he'd come in, either, but he 
felt quite sure he'd find her again when he went on his way. 

"A bit early for it, isn't it?" came a voice next to him. He'd heard the man sidle up, of 
course, but he hadn't even given him a glance. The man's arm was close enough to his 
own bare forearm, his sweater pushed up, that the smoke from the man's cigarette felt 
warm on his skin.

"The pint, or something else?" he replied mildly, keeping his eyes on the television. The 
whole screen was faintly blue as the tube lost its light. 

The man chuckled, and now Christie did look at him, just a glance, that way of 
pretending to know someone that he was accustomed to. Drew less attention for being a 
stranger. Drew less attention for meetings.

He was about 60 probably, as everyone his grandmother sent him to these days seemed to 
be. He actually missed the States in some way because the people "involved" there were 
much younger. He felt like a ginger bird among old crows up here, though he'd never say 
that to anyone. One of the men he'd met in New York - Rutherford - had made him 
think he could have made friends with the man if they'd had the time. If things were 
different...

"Both," the man said, and put the fag down long enough to reach for Christie's hand. His 
knuckle had a nicotine spot the size of a pence. "Though I'm never one to frown on a pint 
any hour, to be sure."

Christie gave his hand a cursory shake, picked up his fork and took a bite of his meat, 
chewing. 

"What's going then?" he asked.

"Not much at the moment," the man said. He didn't offer his name and Christie didn't 
need to ask it. "Should have hopefully something of interest for you by evening, though."

"That's so," he said, still chewing. The sausage was particularly good. Home-grown and 
handmade. He could tell.

"Aye," the man said, pulling on the cigarette. "Don't know what yet, but we'll have 
something for you. If Renahan's involved this time with the Yanks, well...something 
good must be lying around to have a look at."

Christie didn't say anything to that for a long moment. "Thought it was just the husband 
here," he said, though he didn't know how he'd settled on that in his mind. Maybe it was 
because the man Mulder seemed the only one to matter to him. The only one to whom it 
would be personal. 

"No, no," the man said. "Another one. Assistant Director of the Fibbies. Guess they're 
bored over there." 

Christie nodded. "Skinner?" 

"Aye." The man took another drag. "Good man, I hear. Neither of them - him or the 
one Mulder - much to be trifled with, though we can handle them, of course."

"More worried about Renahan are you then?" Christie said. He spoke around a mouthful 
of eggs.

The man's face grew shadowed and his arm stilled, smoke rising from his hand. "More 
worried about Neill. Fucker."

Christie swallowed the food, washed it down with a mouthful of beer. "Aye," he said 
simply. "Should I stay here or meet you then?" he asked. 

"Get a room here at the Derg Inn," the man said. "I'll bring you what I've got by this 
evening. I've got a good man doing work for me on this and he'll come up with 
something." He stood.

"I go by Seamus," he said, and Christie looked at him full-on now. He knew exactly who 
he was now. The "go by" gave it away, those two words conjuring other words. 

Names. 

James Curran. That man he'd heard of only as "Shea." 

"Pleasure," Christie said, and the man reached out and touched Christie's shoulder in an 
almost fatherly gesture. 

"I knew your uncle," he said. "Well. I've known your family for as long as I can tell." 

Christie nodded. "I've known you that long, as well."

Seamus smiled. "You've done good work. Good things for your family. For your 
country. You should be proud, Christie. We're proud to be sure."

A faint smile. He wanted to feel proud. The child kicking the dark ball around in Antrim 
with his uncle, John's face not so hard then. Not the shell it became. The day he left for 
Basic, his uncle sheering his hair as he'd shorn so many sheep, Christie on his way to the 
Óglaigh na h-Eireann. Special Forces. Black Ops. John used to sing some song he 
didn't know when he talked to him. "Demolition Man." 

Bridget's face was in mind. The scar on her shoulder. Stifled cum-cry in Belfast and 
something about "strangers on your bed..."

"You all right, Christie?" Seamus's voice floated back to him on a heavy wave. The 
warm weight of his hand was there again. 

"Aye," he said quickly, and he literally did give his head a shake, as though he'd been 
cuffed on the back of his head and was throwing off the blow. "Just thinking about 
something." 

Seamus gave that same smile, gestured to the plate. "Finish up there and head to the 
Derg and get some rest. I'm thinking you'll be doing some traveling before too long to 
see what's what in Cookstown. We'll have everything you need for your journey when 
you go."

"Ta," Christie said, and Seamus drifted off like so much smoke through the pub and out 
into the street. 

He sat, still caught in memory as gossamer and inescapable as walking through a spider's 
web. He reached up and brushed at his face. He did what he was told. He ate.


*****

VICTOR HOSTEEN'S RANCH
TWO GREY HILLS, NEW MEXICO
10:48 a.m.


Mae Curran-Porter. 

She was trying the name on and trying to decide if it was something she could live with. 
Katherine sat in a high chair beside her at the end of a long wooden table constructed of 
an old door on sawhorses, the black knob up next to her. She worried it with her left 
hand as she wrote the name with the right, scribbling her signature like a 12-year-old girl 
with a crush on someone she barely knew in school. 

She turned the knob on the door, listened to the creak. She crossed out the "Curran." She 
put it back in. She'd dropped the name when she'd married Joe without a second thought 
because of the safety his name provided and the distance it granted from the past and its 
troubles. Troubles...

She looked at the baby's bright face, who was smiling and wearing a moustache of red 
stew. It was in her hair, and she seemed to know it and like the fact very much.

"Katherine Curran-Porter," she said to the baby, trying it on like her mother might have, a 
tone of reproach that sounded ridiculous to her own ears. The baby looked at her and 
smiled some more.

Behind her, she could see Frank Music coming up the path toward the house, a shy smile 
on his face as he raised a hand. He'd taken to wearing a cowboy hat, which she would 
have found funny except that for one thing, the sun was a bit unforgiving and she couldn't 
blame him, and for another, it looked sort of...attractive?... on him. 

Attractive...

She turned the word over, felt a flush on her face and pictured Joe's face and hated 
herself.

"Katherine Porter Whoever the Fuck We Both Are Now," she amended under her breath 
to the baby, and reached for a napkin to swipe roughly at the girl's face, taking the smile 
away with it. The baby's face screwed up like a fist.

"Hey," Music said as he indicated the bench seat on the other side of the table. Mae 
nodded, and he sat, taking off his hat and settling it down across from the knob. 

"Hello, Frank." She wadded the paper she'd been writing on up and tossed it in an oil 
drum that was being used as a trashcan outside the house she stayed in. 

"I'm not interrupting anything, I hope," Music said hesitantly, and she could sense his 
sensing her unease. 

"No, of course not," she said bitterly. "What the bloody hell would I be doing that you 
could interrupt?" 

She'd hoped to drive him off with her tone. She was good at that. She could be bitter as 
acid when she wanted. And she'd wanted to a lot lately, even to Dana, who'd been 
walking around like she'd been haunting the place since the Stone Age.

"You're just pissed at the world today, aren't you?" Music said, and he was smiling, 
which pissed her off at the world even more. 

"Aye, I am," she said, swiping at Katherine's hands, which made the baby even more 
perturbed. "What's it to you? You come needling me for something else? You need my 
father's fucking hat size now? Boxers or bloody briefs? My mum's recipe for potato and 
lamb stew?"

"I'll take that last one, yeah," Music said. "I bet that would be good." 

She stopped fussing with Katherine and looked at him, at that look in his eye. 

He liked her. He'd started to like her. Despite everything she'd try to do and everything 
she was. He liked her. 

Damn...

"I'm done interrogating you for Anti-Terrorism, Mae," he said softly. "I've given them 
everything you've given me, and if you have more you think will help as the case in 
Ireland continues to unfold, I'll pass that along. But you've told me a lot. You've 
probably told me a hell of a lot more than you wanted. So I'm done with that with you."

"Then be done with me," she said, but her voice couldn't even muster enough power 
behind the words to make it just above audible. 

"You don't mean that," he said softly, his finger worrying a whorl in the door's surface. 

Joe's face swam again before her eyes. Joe's kind face. Another man who had stepped 
onto the spinning disc of her world and gotten carried away into nothing. Swirl and 
vortex. That was her life. Heavy and uneven. 

Joe's face on fire behind the ruined windshield of the Jeep in Australia. It pushed tears 
from her eyes, her hand grasping the knob with a creak. 

"Hey," Music said gently. "I'm sorry." He reached out and touched her hand. Just a 
touch of his fingers on hers. "I didn't mean--"

"It's all right," she said quietly. She didn't move her hand. She didn't move at all. 

"I don't want anything," he added into the quiet. "I mean that. I don't want a thing. I just 
want...to be your friend. You know. I think you could use a friend. Somebody with no 
history with all this, you know? That's all." 

She looked at him, his eyes on the desert behind the house. "This place can be very 
lonely," he said.

"Every place is lonely," she said. She remained still. "Nothing changes that."

He nodded. "If that's what you want to believe, you can. But I really just want to try to 
be your friend."

Victor's pickup was coming up the dirt road toward his house, two small streams of dust 
going out behind it. Mae turned her attention to it.

"Men and women can never just be friends," she said quietly. "Too much gets involved."

He scoffed. "Oh come off it, Mae," he said, "You're being a little dramatic, don't you 
think? I mean, I'm talking about..." and he turned his attention to where she was looking 
as the sound of a loud slam reached them. 

The truck had stopped and a woman was getting out of the passenger side. She had 
lovely braids, a face darker than chocolate. Even from where she was sitting, Mae could 
see her eyes as she threw the truck door closed hard enough to break the old door's glass.

"Who's that?" Music asked, and he sounded vaguely worried.

"Granger's...friend," she replied, and watched the woman stalk inside.

 *

Granger had heard the door slam, as well, and heard the truck's tired engine moving down 
the road toward the house. More than that, though, something in him could feel it was 
her the minute the screen door squeaked open. There was no heavy sound of a suitcase 
being hustled in. The niceties at the door with Sarah Whistler were quiet and brief and 
the younger woman's voice wasn't feather-light amusement as it tended to be. 

She'd pointed that way, too, because there were footsteps coming down the hall to the 
room where he stayed in the back of the house. Double bed, dresser, black and red rug 
and a lamp with a shade made out of hide. 

He stood as the door opened, feeling suddenly cold in his Hopkins sweatshirt he'd put on 
like armor. He pushed his hands in his pockets and faced her where she'd stopped in the 
doorway. 

One braid was hanging between her eyes and she smoothed it behind her ear.

"Hey." It was all he could think to say. He fought the urge to tuck his lip between his 
teeth the way he'd done with his mother and grandmother. Time to sit in The Mercy Seat 
once again...

"'Hey'?" she parroted back. She had one hand on the doorway and one on her slim waist 
where a thick white T-shirt snugged against her, tucked into black jeans. "How about 
you try again, Paul." 

Now his lip did go in, his eyes down behind their glasses. His heart - the damned thing - 
was racing a bit, starting that familiar ache, swimming upstream against the meds. 

"Try again." Her voice was quiet, like thunder of a storm far off but moving in.

"I'm sorry." He nearly whispered it. 

"Not good enough." She matched his tone, but now with the thunder was coming rain.

"I won't keep things from you again." 

"You mean 'lie.'"

Someone turned on a television in the outer room and country music starting playing. 
Rodeo. Again.

"Yeah," he replied, nodded. 

"Then say what you mean," she snapped. The tears were on her face now as he glanced 
up in the morning light, a thin sheen of it forcing through the drapes that looked like 
tablecloths.

"I won't lie to you again."

She moved fast. Two steps and her hands on his cheeks were enough to bruise his face. 
Given the amount of blood thinners Scully had prescribed him, she probably had actually 
done it. 

"You're goddamned right you won't," she said. The tears looked like lamp oil on her 
face, her eyes bright enough to set her alight. "You're goddamned right..." 

"Jesus Christ..." She said it slow, prayer instead of curse. 

The storm moved in, broke. 

Her arms were around his neck, crushing him against her. He returned the embrace, 
feeling her ribs against his forearms, the great gales of air she pulled in and pushed out, 
the space above his sweatshirt wet. He laid his palms on her back, holding her against 
him and felt his jaw go tight. 

He had not cried before that moment about any of it. 

He turned his face into the nest of her hair, breathed deep as a first breath. A sound 
moved up his throat. In the house the television went off, making that strange, almost 
otherworldly sound coming from him seem louder, roaring in his ears. 

Over Robin's trembling shoulder he saw Whistler as she came in, took the knob in her 
hand, and pulled the door closed, her eyes down in a clear gesture of respect and her 
movements quiet as a ghost. 


*****

COOKSTOWN
NEAR LOUGH NEAGH
NORTHERN IRELAND, UNITED KINGDOM
2:13 p.m.


"I ain't telling you a fucking thing." 

Mulder slammed his hands flat down on the table, swore to the Savior, his palms slapping 
like pistol cracks, and he pushed himself up and stalked away towards the door, saying 
something about "you fucking people" as he kicked the door open, letting in a bar of 
sunlight sharp enough to cut through the pub's dark. Renahan found it funny that 
Mulder's wife had been Irish, too, and wondered what she'd say to the remark. 

He said so, bubbling a chuckle. Skinner told him to "shut the fuck up" in that stark and 
wonderful way that Yanks could say that word. It sounded so much more like a true 
insult when an American spit the "u" out.

Eamon Neill merely smiled. Manny Brennan was scowling across the table from him 
like he'd just eaten the Christmas goose, and all he'd done was said exactly what Neill 
knew he would. 

"Manny," he said in most even voice, the one he used for crazy men and small children. 
"How many times do I have to tell you--"

"Aye, I know what you said that this fucking Brit nutter isn't going to run anyone in don't 
care, you say, don't care nothing about the past and what people's done and all that shite!" 

It was a long fast run-on rant punctuated with spit. Brennan was a bit too old to drink 
that much before four, but then he'd always held it bad. Neill remembered that well.

"Mr. Skinner?" Neill said in the same quiet tone, giving Brennan time to catch his breath 
and take another drink. The more the better. "Could you go see to Mr. Mulder and 
make sure he stays close by?"

He could see Skinner's back straighten. "Why?" he asked, clearly getting Neill's 
insinuation of something amiss. Something *was* amiss. 

Brennan had known they were coming.

"You know how hotheaded he is," Neill said, looking at Skinner with an extra dollop of 
Afters on his sympathetic expression. "His pregnant wife just in the grave and all. No 
telling what a man in that sort of state could get into." 

Skinner's brow quirked. Message received and understood. "Yeah," he said. "Yeah, 
you're right." He pushed back from the table and stood. 

"Come on, Renahan," he said to the man beside him. "Come help me look for Mulder. 
You can apologize for being a dickhead about his dead wife."

Renahan put on a faux expression of regret. "Yea, bad that. Sorry for the trouble..." And 
Skinner helped him out.

Neill took the opportunity to look around the pub, filling as the day got later. Snooker 
was on the television and people were pretending to watch it as they watched Skinner and 
Renahan leave. 

Something wrong. Very wrong here in Cookstown, near the strand at Lough Beg...

"You leave that man ALONE," Brennan said under his breath on wheeze. He said it as 
though he didn't like people around him even referring to a gender. An individual. 
Anything at all.

"I don't want anything from him but to know who did this to this man's wife," Neill said. 
"That man's wife did us a service. We can do her husband one in return and then call it 
finished, can't we then. The whole thing done."

Brennan's face was blotched stone. "You with that man after what he did to us." The 
reproach fell, leaden, between them.

"I want it over." He said it slowly. "I want to be done with it. I want this man Mulder to 
be done with it. I want to whole damn thing over."

Brennan blew out a breath, his lips wet. "Jesus, we all do, Eamon. Jesus, we all do..." 
He took another drink. 

"Then tell me where to find him," Neill pressed. He was trying to work quickly as the 
pub door continued to open and close, new faces coming in, as Mulder and Skinner and 
Renahan were out in the town with people who knew who they were, why they were 
here...

Not too fast, he reminded himself. Brennan always gave a little squeal if you gave him 
enough time - and Guinness - to do it in. 

"I don't need a name. I met him myself. I'll know him from sight." 

Brennan looked down into his beer, studying it, looked up in Eamon's face. 

"You've never turned your back on us," he said, seeming to come to some conclusion 
despite the uncertainty in his voice. 

"And I'm not doing it now either," Neill said. And he wasn't. He knew that for a fact.

Brennan didn't nod or move anything but his wet, wet lips. 

"The boat shop in Ballycastle," he said. "He comes in and gets bait and line. You'll 
know him because they don't never let him pay." 

Neill nodded. "Bless you, Manny," he said quietly, so only Brennan could hear him. 
"Bless you." He stood, left enough money on the table to cover all the tabs and a bit 
more for Brennan's trouble.

Brennan picked up the pound coins and threw them hard on the ground, seeming to enjoy 
both their loud clatter and the looks they received. 

"Fuck you," he spat. It wasn't in his eyes, though, but Neill did not smile. He acted the 
part Brennan'd written for him and left, looking small, as if in shame.

****

The man saw the American moving through the streets, pushing his dark hair back in 
frustration, his strides long enough that the man would himself have to run to get to him 
if he so desired. 

Luckily, he did not. The car had been right where the note at the butcher's shop had said 
it would be, parked among some motorcycles down an alleyway. They'd tried to make it 
inconspicuous, and, in fact, if everyone in the town hadn't known it was coming and the 
number on the plate, they might have succeeded in keeping it safe.

The American, then the other, then the Brit. All down the main road in town, the 
younger Yank heading toward the Ardoe Cross as though he meant to hang himself on it. 

The right tool for the right job held in this case, as well, as the man jammed the pick into 
the lock and gave it a hard pull, coring it through. The boot lid popped open and the man 
was confronted with a stack of suitcases. He checked tags. Anything with "U.S.A." or a 
Union Jack he took, transferring into the back of his tiny pickup, a painters tarp heavy on 
top. 

He closed the lid - useless now - but it wouldn't pop until they hit a bump in the road. 
He'd have time to get back to Tievemore before they'd even figured out it was all gone.

As he hefted the bags he felt an unmistakable weight in one of the Americans' bags, a 
heavy rectangular and particularly electronic shape. 

Laptop, he thought, climbing into the driver's seat and starting the engine. 

Maybe when they were done cleaning it off, having a look, they'd let him have it. He 
might ask for that as part of his pay. 

The alley gave way to the main street, and he could see the Americans on the corner with 
the Brit, the young man with the dark hair - the one who's wife was dead, they said - 
raging in the Brit's red, amused face. 

Sorry for your trouble, he thought to himself, turning and heading out of town toward 
Omagh, traffic light and moving fast to the west. 


*******

CONTINUED IN PART IV.