Increasingly, Scully felt that she should return to the X-Files—but leaving Genomica meant leaving her best chance of discovering more about her pregnancy and its origins.
Or did it? Only one way to find out.
She walked through the vast, hushed, Architectural Digest–worthy atrium of Genomica into the warrens of corridors through which its employees traveled to get the actual work done. Through the glass doors of a lab, she saw technicians bent over their instruments, heard the whirr of centrifuges, all glimpses of the effort necessary to peer into the double helix of DNA itself.
Scully was still debating how best to break the news of her departure to Dr. Karen Jones when she arrived in Jones’s lab. However, as soon as she walked in to find Jones standing at one of the lab tables, reading some report or other, Jones’s eyes widened. “Dana!” she whispered, gesturing Scully forward as she quickly rose. “We have got to talk!”
There was nothing to do but follow Jones into the small room in the back of the lab that she used as a private office. The minute the door closed, Scully said, “What have you found?”
“Not what I was looking for,” Jones replied as she sat at her desk, inputting a series of passwords to bring up Scully’s file. “Which was evidence of gametogenesis techniques being used on you, i.e., evidence of the single most phenomenal leap forward in reproductive technology humanity has ever seen. Which is what I did not find. Never in a thousand years did I think I’d find something bigger.”
Scully gripped the back of Jones’s chair as she leaned forward to peer at the screen. Both their faces were bathed in bluish light. “What do you mean?”
“Okay, so, I was checking your samples for higher ambient PM two-point-five levels—” Jones caught herself. “No need for the deep dive, because I didn’t find anything weird about your pregnancy. Your telomeres, though? That’s another story.”
This made no sense to Scully. “Telomeres—the ends of our DNA strands?”
“Exactly. The younger we are, the longer our telomeres are. I mean, there are other factors at work too, but the relationship between aging and shortening telomeres is clear. As our cells continue to divide throughout our lives, the information coded at the ends of the telomeres is lost, bit by bit, and the years take their toll. Genomica has an entire lab devoted to telomere research—how to preserve length, how to regain it—”
“Why? Telomere length doesn’t strongly relate to the kind of work we do here.”
Jones gave her a look. “Why? Two words: Troy Alexiares. He’s convinced he can hack his own genome to live forever. This charity isn’t just about improving his image. His funding also goes toward research on how to preserve and lengthen telomeres. He’s got the doctors here searching for eternal life.”
Clyde Bruckman appeared in Scully’s mind again, as she had last seen him—wrapped in plastic, leaving the world as he had always known he would. She pushed that from her brain. “Did you find something about my telomeres?”
“Get this.” Jones brought up a startlingly clear image of a DNA double helix. Scully fleetingly wished Rosalind Franklin could’ve lived to see it too. “This is an image of Alexiares’s DNA. His telomeres are long for his age, because at least some of what he’s doing is paying off. Sure, he’s out partying with models all the time, but he’s drinking green smoothies, not Cristal. He’s proud of his telomeres; hell, maybe he should be. But he’d kill for his DNA to look like this.”
Jones clicked, and another DNA image appeared beside the first one. The difference in length was immediately apparent. Scully said, “This one is mine?”
“Nope! This one is a sample from a healthy human newborn. This one is yours.”
Another click, and a third DNA picture appeared, this one with telomeres longer even than the baby’s. Although Scully did not possess particular expertise in DNA analysis, she knew enough to understand that this length would only be found in utero, if even then.
She knew one other thing as well. “I’ve had my DNA analyzed before, Karen. It didn’t look like this.”
“Well, it does now. Whatever you’re eating, I want a slice of.” Jones turned around to face Scully. “Maybe whoever did whatever to you wasn’t trying to get you knocked up. Maybe they were trying to extend your life.”
That sounded poisonously like the work of Carl Busch. Scully could almost taste cigarette smoke in the air. She refused to think of him for very long. “That level of lengthening—reproducing conditions in utero—”
“You see it too,” Jones said. “It’s possible that your body could be accomplishing the impossible and producing new ova. Normally women are born with all they’ll ever have, but for you, that might not be the case.”
Could Busch have been trying to make her immortal, and only accidentally made her fertile? Scully wished she could believe that. But given her history with William—
—with Jackson Van De Kamp—
No.
“Hey.” Jones’s tone had gentled. Scully realized she’d shut her eyes. “You okay?”
“I think so.” Important as all this was, Scully felt the overwhelming urge to change the subject. “You should know I’m leaving Genomica to return to the FBI. To the X-Files.”
“You can’t leave,” said Jones, gesturing too elaborately at their surroundings in a way that seemed to take in the whole building at once. “Where else will you get crap-ass coffee from plastic pods?”
Scully laughed despite herself. She didn’t mind the pods so much, but she knew her bar had been set very low via local-police-station percolators through the decades. “I’ll have to endure the deprivation.”
Jones folded her arms across her chest. “I mean, obviously we’re going to keep researching your situation no matter what—”
That was the question Scully had needed an answer to. “Obviously. Yes. Thank you.”
But Jones wasn’t done. “Seriously, you want to leave a job with regular hours and good benefits and great coworkers—most particularly myself—to go chase werewolves with your kinda sorta life partner?”
It’s not only werewolves, Scully nearly said, before reverting to the “normal” conversation filter she generally had to use when discussing the X-Files with anyone but Mulder. “It may sound outlandish, but my job at the FBI is important, and it can’t be entrusted to just anyone.”
“You’re that indispensable?” Jones’s cocked eyebrow made it clear she was joking, but the question was fair. “Literally nobody else can do this but you?”
Scully sighed. “It’s complicated.”
Jones rose from her chair, and the jokes were over. “Listen, if I’m out of my lane here, shut me down, but…are you doing this for you? For the work? Or are you doing it for Muldoon?” This was how Jones had misheard Mulder’s name early on, and it was now a shared joke between them. “Your career isn’t any less important than his. Your life isn’t less important than his. But when you tell me about your history, it sounds like his work has always come first. Again, I may be on the outside looking in, but sometimes the view is better from there.”
“You’re…not wrong,” Scully admitted, “but that’s an incomplete truth. Our story is more complex than you know. More complex than I could ever tell you.”
“Is that because it’s all FBI classified, or because it’s so crazy I’d never believe it?”
Scully sighed. “That’s not actually an either/or question.”
Jones held up her hands in mock surrender. “Sorry. I’m out of line, and I know it.”
“You’re looking out for a friend. I can respect that. There’s more to it than the FBI. Working with dying children—I’ve done it before, for years. Some physicians become inured to it. Develop a ‘thick skin.’ It’s not like that for me. The losses hit me harder.”
William, in his crib. In her arms. William, her miracle. A practical joke by the universe, allowing the Cigarette Smoking Man to perform an experiment on her by violating both her body and spirit, given to her in the image of what she had wanted and loved most in this world…
Jackson. His name was Jackson. He was an experiment. He wasn’t ours. He was barely even mine.
But how could she set all that aside while the evidence of those experiments was potentially still inside her?
“I don’t know how much longer I can continue to work with children battling potentially terminal illness,” Scully said, cutting off that dangerous line of thought—though not before realizing it proved exactly why she needed to get out of Genomica. “If I stay longer, become more involved in more patients’ care—the work won’t become any less painful, but I won’t want to abandon them. It leads down a dark road, Karen. That’s not a road I can travel any longer. I know what I need to do.”
“I get it. Me, I spend my time in the lab. Even that requires some serious retail therapy to deal with, some days.” Jones made a gesture that highlighted her designer silk blouse, the pearl ring on one finger. “Actually working with the kids is a hell of a lot harder, I know. Just stay in touch, okay? We have to keep digging into this.” Genuine vulnerability hid behind Jones’s smile. “And I’d hate to lose you completely to Muldoon and the werewolves.”
It had been too long since Scully had made a new friend. “You won’t.”
On the way home from Genomica just after sunset, Scully found herself thinking back to the coffee, which she had drunk by sheer force of habit. Caffeine could increase the risk of miscarriage. Scully felt guilty about drinking even that one cup, then felt a stab of resentment: Her diet, her exercise, everything about her habits was no longer entirely unrestrained. By her own choice, Scully’s body did not solely belong to her. But one cup wasn’t excessive. The widespread cultural monitoring of pregnant women would not make her question her own medical knowledge.
And yet—accepting this pregnancy meant accepting all the change that came with it.
As she stopped at a red light, she glanced down at her belly, which came a bit closer to the steering wheel than it once had. Regardless of whether she returned to the Bureau or remained at Genomica, she’d need maternity wear soon. Really she had needed it about a week ago.
She’d seen a billboard for a maternity store near the hospital on her last visit. It was one Scully had shopped at during her first pregnancy, hardly more than ten blocks out of her way. She still remembered selecting an enormous white shirt, convinced she’d never really fill it—then barely being able to fasten the buttons those last few weeks—
Don’t look back. Don’t remember it. That was just one more stage of the experiment.
And the store was just a store. Scully resolved to go with no nostalgia, no pain. This was practical, nothing more.
Ten blocks later, Scully was relieved to see that the store had helped her by adopting a new logo and redecorating. It had expanded, too, taking over the space next door that had once belonged to another shop (a frame shop? an art supply place?—something like that) to become a self-proclaimed “superstore.” The broad parking lot was illuminated not only by the streetlights, but also by an enormous electronic billboard that hadn’t been there before. Today it broadcast the gimmicky slogan of a certain highly affordable lawyer for those involved in car accidents. Scully wondered idly whether the garish red and yellow lights of the billboard distracted enough drivers to drum up new business for the attorney in question.
Scully remembered the store as refreshingly straightforward—well stocked with business wear, not overburdened with the enormous baglike, candy-colored dresses many maternity shops still offered back then. Her heart sank as she realized it had adapted itself to the era of Instagram and TikTok, with cutesy props and overpainted murals ideal for selfie or dance backdrops. Still, a business-wear area remained in the back.
As she went, she walked past a young woman—mid-twenties at most—with a blond ponytail worn high on her head and a blue T-shirt that proclaimed BOY MOM IN TRAINING! She was positioning herself against one of the murals for her next post-able image, no doubt, but as Scully walked by, the woman’s photo pout softened into a genuine smile. Scully smiled back, embarrassed to have been judging someone who, in return, had seen only a fellow expectant mother.
What was so bad about selfies, anyway? Scully thought as she glanced back. Yes, there could be a narcissistic edge to endless self-portraits, but was it really any worse than the self-loathing embedded in so many women of her generation by the media of their own time? Scully remembered her freshman year of college, all those moments in front of the mirror, disapproving of her healthy young body’s slightest deviations from the women pictured in Victoria’s Secret catalogs. She’d grown out of that quickly enough, of course, but how ridiculous to have wasted even a minute on such thoughts. By all means, let Boy Mom enjoy herself.
Scully began leafing through various maternity dresses that would pair well with a blazer—wear the blazer open, and that might see her all the way through. She amused herself with the thought of instead walking into the Bureau wearing one of the T-shirts on the mannequins nearby that showed a little bun in a cartoon oven. AD Morrison would probably swallow her tongue. The thought made her glance back up at Boy Mom, who seemed a likely customer for such a thing, but the woman had already gone to the counter. A man stood slightly to the side, nearer the doors, watching. Probably her husband.
But hadn’t Boy Mom been shopping alone before?
Maybe. Maybe not. A husband, brother, or friend might have been distracted by his own phone several feet away. That was plausible. But then wouldn’t the man have been in the checkout line with her? Scully tried to get a better look at him, but from that angle his face was somewhat concealed.
As Boy Mom looked up to tap her card against the register, the man hurriedly glanced down…almost as if he didn’t want the woman to know he’d been watching her.
Scully preferred empirical evidence to gut instinct, but that wasn’t the same as distrusting her gut. She drew in a sharp breath as she shoved the dresses back onto the rack and started toward the front. Her mind filled with flashes of the crime scene photographs depicting Lizette Heflin’s murder, its gory aftermath, and she felt a surge of adrenaline.
What were the odds it was the same guy? Low, probably. Scully felt certain the man was up to no good, but he could be just a garden-variety mugger.
But any chance whatsoever of his hurting someone was too high.
Call for backup, Scully thought as she quickened her steps to the door. Boy Mom had just accepted her shopping bag and would be going past the man any second. Just in case it’s him, you need backup—
She pushed her hand into her purse and then gasped with pain.
“Ahh—” Scully pulled out her hand, which was flushed red from the terrible heat. Light shone from the depths of her purse, and Damn it all, it is him, it’s the killer.
Sure enough, the guy followed Boy Mom out the door.
Scully broke into a run, shoving her way through the aisles, past the cashiers to the exit. Jingle bells didn’t dampen the sound of a woman—of Boy Mom—saying, “Hey, what is this? What are you—”
“Stop it right there!” Scully yelled in her best law-enforcement voice. The guy had his hands clamped around Boy Mom’s upper arms, but he jerked around at the sound of Scully’s shout. “You heard me! FBI! Let her go and drop to the ground, now!”
He started backing away, but he was trying to drag Boy Mom with him. He still thinks he can get away with her—that means his vehicle is close. Boy Mom was fighting him, clawing at his arms, but he had her off-balance, and she was small and slight. Scully went for her service weapon, which might intimidate the guy into giving up. Although she was a good shot, even a trained sniper would hesitate before trying to fire around a struggling captive—but this guy probably wouldn’t know that.
“Freeze!” Scully shouted as she brought up her gun. “Hold it right there!”
The guy stared at her, obviously uncertain, but still staggering backward with the struggling Boy Mom in a headlock. Scully wanted to get a good look at his face, but the bright billboard behind them glowed so much that he was backlit, more shadow than shape.
That billboard was so bright—too bright—
Scully gasped as the billboard’s glow intensified to blinding radiance, a split second of incandescent light before the screen shorted out with plumes of sparks and a loud pop. The guy was either startled or knew a good distraction when he saw one, because he flung Boy Mom to the ground and took off running into the dark. Scully started to run after him, but another spray of hot bright sparks cut her off—only for a moment, but long enough for the dark surroundings and the busy traffic to conceal him completely.
She dashed forward anyway, searching for any signs of movement. Nothing. Scully grabbed her phone (still warm, but now usable) and hit the flashlight; its cool narrow beam scoured the long arc in front of her, revealing an alleyway and a couple of dumpsters. A feral cat froze in the light, its eyes reflecting back flat and orange. In the distance Scully heard a car peeling out of the alley at top speed. She jogged forward in hopes of at least glimpsing a make and model, but he was already gone, lost in the labyrinthine DC traffic.
“Damn,” she swore before turning back to Boy Mom, who lay on the ground with a bloody face. Scully began dialing to call for an APB while hurrying toward the woman lying nearby—at the moment, the only person she could help.
Mulder got there only minutes after the DCPD did. The maternity store was surrounded by red and blue flashing lights, mostly police cars, though one ambulance had pulled up near the door. He was relieved to see Scully standing by the woman who had been assaulted, talking with both her and the EMTs; the woman held a bloody towel to her nose but otherwise appeared unharmed.
“Check it out,” Mulder said, gesturing to the array of police cars around them as he walked toward Scully. “We have maximum police presence in the single location we know our suspect isn’t.”
Scully gave this the reception it deserved, i.e., almost none. “They’ve double-checked all the cars in the lot, every one of which belongs to a staffer or a customer. He must have planned far enough ahead to park around the block.”
“Maybe some security footage in the neighborhood will turn something up,” he said. “At least you got a good look at him.”
She sighed. “I wish I could provide a decent description, but—he was an average height, average build, white male with short brown hair wearing jeans and a dark jacket. No distinguishing features. I think I’d know him if I came face-to-face with him again, but I’m not confident that even working with a composite artist would provide anything definite enough for us to work with. Damn it.”
Her anger did not entirely conceal the faint tremble of her voice. Mulder gently touched Scully’s chin. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said. Her gaze drifted to some vague point over his left shoulder.
Sometimes, when she pulled away, Mulder let her go. Not tonight. “Humor me,” he said, drawing Scully into his arms. After a long moment, she relaxed slightly, letting her head rest against his shoulder. If the beat cops wanted to stare, let them.