The Pretender lay on Miss Parker’s bed, looking at the ceiling. Sydney took a few steps forward and sat down on the bed next to him.

“Jarod, you nearly scared me to death, why didn’t you show yourself when I came into the house?”

“I didn’t want to disturb you.” He answered simply and turned his head in Sydney’s direction.

“I was cleaning up, I wasn’t performing brain surgery.” Sydney answered and smiled lightly at Jarod, who smiled back, put looked up at the ceiling again.

“I can’t believe she is gone, I had to come here to see for myself. I have to find her, but I have nothing yet, she covered her tracks very well.”

“She is, but you have to remember, that she is traveling with a baby. She needs supplies and daycare and food and whatever else a baby needs. Don’t give up hope.” Jarod sat up and looked at Sydney intensely.

“You are right Sydney. I can’t give up. I will find her and make sure she and Baby Parker are safe. Do you really remember nothing of where she wanted to go?”

“No, only that she had friends abroad who she wanted to contact. I would try to find old acquaintances of hers from when she was abroad during school and college.”

“I will - thank you Syd.”

“No problem Jarod, it’s really good to see you, I was so worried.”

Jarod felt bad about that. He had never intended for anyone to get hurt by him leaving. “I’m sorry, I needed some space and the best way to do that was to cut all strings. I’ll tell you something you might not know. Shortly before I escaped the last time, Miss Parker and I had a talk. I asked her to flee with me and turn her back on the Centre. I thought she was ready after everything that we learned on the island about her family and her father disappearing, but she turned me down.”

Sydney sighed and put his hand on Jarod’s. “She needed a wakeup call and that came when she was given sole custody of Elias – that’s what she named him. I watched her closely the whole time and she really changed. Everything she did from that point on was to get ready to give him a better life. There is one thing I didn’t tell you over the phone. She asked me to train her. She is a Red File, because she has the Inner Sense and the Pretender gene, just like you do. I trained her to be more adaptable. I taught her a lot of the things I taught you in your teens. She is very good and you might have a hard time locating her, but I have faith in you and I’m sure if anyone can find her it’s you.”

“You are right. Take care Syd, I have a Pretender to catch!” Jarod said with new energy and hope, even joking a bit.

“Oh god, please not another one of her kind!” Syd joked back, rolling his eyes.

Then, as always, Jarod simply disappeared.

-

Miss Parker grabbed a third package of sugar and poured it into her black coffee. She was sitting in a coffee shop above a clothing store, which overlooked a nice part of Hamburg. Once again she was looking through job announcements. The jobs spanned from telecommunication specialists to veterinarians and clowns. She had been on the run for only a few short weeks and she was already feeling bored. She had only taught at the studio twice more and that was really not what she had in mind.

Though she liked dancing again. It felt like being free of everything, forgetting everything around her and it brought her back to a time when the Centre had been the furthest thing from her mind.

A young girl and her mother came into the narrow coffee shop together and sat down next to her table after ordering a Latte Macchiato and a Hot Chocolate. She glanced over to the girl who excitedly told her mother about a boy she had met or seen on TV or something like that and her mother looked at her with that typical mother smile, that was a mixture of joy, pride and pure horror, that her little girl was talking about boys already. Her mother had always said that she had all the time in the world to find a nice boy and that she was too young to start looking. As it turned out, she had no time left. Her innocence was ripped away by her mother’s death in mere seconds. Even though Miss Parker knew that her mother had to protect her unborn and had no other choice to fake her own death, it still bugged her how it had all happened. She could have pretended to have taken an overdose, but no, she had to pretend to shoot herself in an elevator with everybody including herself there to see it. For a few years after that, she had remained in the Centre, being homeschooled and had no contact to other kids except for the usual suspects.

Miss Parker sighed and put aside her paper. This was getting her nowhere.

-

Broots and Sydney were being called up to the tower. Sydney had meetings there occasionally, but Broots never. He was really afraid, he was shaking visibly and no amount of good words from Sydney could calm him down.

“Broots, calm down. You know nothing, but the way you are acting they might think you do and that would be much worse.” Sydney told him again as they rode up the elevator.

“I’m trying, but my body responses automatically. It’s as if I have no control whatsoever.” Broots shot back and leaned against an elevator wall.

As they came to a halt and the door opened for them, Broots only exited reluctantly. They walked down to short corridors, until they arrived where they had been summoned.

As they entered, they saw Lyle in his new throne in front of the window and a man they had never seen before, leaned against his desk in a leisure way.

“Mr. Broots, Sydney, nice of you to join us. Let’s come to the point right away. You two worked very closely with Miss Parker for the last couple of years on catching Jarod.” He obviously waited for a reaction, so the two nodded. “That was not very successful, so I am splitting you up. Sydney will work with me in finding Jarod and Mr. Broots; you will work with our new employee, Mr. Hunt to bring back Miss Parker and the child. Mr. Hunt was briefed about the situation. Now – even though we are working in teams, we still need to work together closely. There is a good chance that the lab rat and my sister will be meeting up at some point, when they’re not already together.”

Broots looked over at Sydney horrified. Until now he at least had Sydney to turn to, now he was all alone day in and day out. “Any questions?” Lyle asked.

“No.” they said. There was no way to change anything about their situation and really they both knew that they were lucky to be alive and not strapped to some torture machine to get every last information out of them.