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Fox said
while flashing a light in Nick's eyes. He didn't blink.
     "No." It had been three hours and still no
sign of Jane. By this point, he'd resigned himself to answer in a yes-or-no
fashion, and plain refused to answer anything remotely interesting about his
intentions.
    "Tired?"
    "Not anymore."
    Placing his hand on Nick's wrist, Fox continued to
take his pulse. Again. "Amazing," Fox whispered, his eyes glued to
the heart monitor that was still flat-lining in silence. "I know what I
see is one thing and what I hear is another." He let his wrist go, and
went for a syringe. "Are you in any pain?" Dr. Fox asked as he tried
to take a blood sample. How many times had they tried to do this while Nick was
unconscious was anyone's guess. All the same, it was going nowhere.
    "No. I don't feel any pain."
    "Hmm…" Fox said, his clever eyes reaching
conclusions Nick could only guess. "I keep thinking that if I convince
myself there's blood actually filling this vial, I'll see it."
    "You're not seeing what you wish to see,"
Nick explained. To him, the needle was going right through him, not into
him. "You're seeing what I have energy enough to project. Like the pulse,
or my breathing, I keep thinking I have them, so I project them. Blood being
drawn, on the other hand… is just not happening in my head."
    "Is there any kind of sample we can take?"
Fox asked, retrieving the needle and placing it on a hollow metal container.
The sharp scalpel beside it was not lost on Nick. 
    "No. Even if you were to cut me in half… I'm
sorry to tell you, but… this form? It won't last long enough for you to see
under a microscope if you did that. I would vanish, probably." To be
honest, he had no idea what would happen if he were cut in two. Either he would
keep his form anchored enough for it to not matter, one side vanishing and the
other staying as a half of a human body; or he would, indeed, vanish
completely. He didn't want to risk it, and by the look on Fox's face, neither
did he.
    "Let's get you somewhere more comfortable,"
Fox said with a smile.
     
    8
    "Any luck finding the real Nicholas Logan?"
Mitchell asked, circling Logan's name on a notebook, over and over again. His
lunch rested untouched on a tray beside him.
    "No, sir. Besides his car and his name signed in
the entry book of Trail No. 810, we haven't found anyone, yet."
    "Keep me posted."
    "Yes, sir."
     
    9
    "No, General," Mitchell said, his eyes glued
to the monitors as he spoke over the phone. "He keeps refusing to answer
our questions until we have his wife here. He claims she doesn't know a thing,
but for all we know, she could be one of them."
    "Let's wait and see what she does," the
General said on the other side, several muffled conversations on the
background. "I don't want two of those things in the same state, but we
cannot afford to upset a living nuclear weapon. Until we get intel, though… we
don't want to terminate it."
    The phone went silent. On the screen, General Mitchell
followed their new guest. He projected himself as a human to the point that
physicians would actually get stats from him. He played with their perceptions
but could not fool machines. So Mitchell kept looking at him through the
monitors, unwilling to let himself be deceived.
    What are you? And what do you want?

Chapter Seven Missing
     
    1
    Nick was carried from the examination room lying on a
gurney. Strapped down as if he were going to attempt an escape, he concentrated
on looking at the ceiling instead of the curious looks of the people moving the
bed. He didn't think he'd ever felt more vulnerable in his entire life, even if
there was no way they could hurt him. Under their gaze, he felt truly alien. He
arrived at his new room, was unstrapped and helped to sit up, hop off and sit
down on his new bed.
    By the time everyone left him alone, he found himself
in a hexagonal cell with glass windows, that God knew what they were using for
when aliens were not running around.
    He had to give it