to the Kanawha River, the source of the water. With a gravity-fed distribution system, they had good water pressure and didn't have to worry about maintaining any complex machinery. The purifying plant itself was also rather ingenious, for it used nothing more than three networks of open-topped pipes with specially designed units above them, and three PPG-powered heater units. Unable to purify water by normal standards, Tom and Mike's system was nothing more than three large boilers that boiled water into steam, collected the steam, then condensed it back into water. That distilled water was pure and drinkable. The moving water in the open-topped pipes didn't _completely_ boil away, and it went down a different pipe and right back to the river after going through a cyclonic pressure-based cooling unit to lower the temperature of the water, so it didn't go back into the Kanawha at a near-boiling point.

Jason was _impressed_. The cyclical nature of the water drawing system meant that there were no filters to clean, _ever_. Dirty water was pumped up, and dirty water flowed right back down, just with some of the water removed. Using distillation to produce clean water was both ingenious and efficient, without the need for chemicals or filters or complicated purification systems. The entire purification system fit in one building, and it only required six PPGs and the use of equipment that was plentiful and didn't need much customization. Jason had only been called upon to build the coolant system control unit and the interface between the PPG and the pump.

The only drawback of the system was that it had a very slow water replacement cycle. The water was only partially boiled to take a portion, then the steam had to be collected, condensed back into water, and then cooled. It used simple gravity and ambient air temperature for collection and cooling, but the system could only produce 300 gallons of water an hour. But, that was what the huge water tank was for, Jason realized. It would become drained during the day, then refill at night, and have a huge reserve for emergencies, such as putting out a fire.

That wasn't the only thing getting done, though. The barrels Jason had set out quickly filled up with scrap gold, jewelry, silver, and lead, until he had some impressive piles gathered up in one of the unused rooms on the first floor of the mansion. Wanda Watkins had minored in geology in college, and she had been going through the jewelry people brought in, weeding the fakes out and assessing each piece for what she would consider to be a fair price to ask for it. Jason had went out with Mike Colbert between sessions teaching to address the cable issue. That had been Steve's baby, but with him dead, now it had to be finished. But Jason didn't have the time to check all those miles of cable and set up a little miniature relay station the way Steve had in Chesapeake. Instead of doing that, Jason opted instead to exploit all the satellite dishes laying around. He set up a downward-pointing transmitter up on the hill next to the water station and hooked up a comm panel receiver to it, so it would then pick up all the TV stations. He then programmed it to organize the stations it received into a new channel format, and then broadcast them out via the transmitting dish. He just told everyone to get a dish, point it at the dish on the hill, and hook it up to their TVs. And it worked. Jason's solution was faster and easier than Steve's had been, but the TV pictures did get a little fuzzy when it rained. To Jason, that was a fair tradeoff for spending weeks climbing up and down telephone poles, fixing repeaters, isolating sections of the network, and running miles of cable. He just didn't have time for it.

It was before Jason went with the dish solution that he found out that Temika was actually making headway with her phobia. Mike Colbert was probably about the only man that had been in Chesapeake that Temika had shown any interest in at all. He was a tall fellow, but he was almost as wide across the shoulders as Wanda was tall. He was awesomely built, a career Air Force electronics technician before the subjugation that also competed in bodybuilding tournaments. "Can I ask a personal question, Mister Jason?" he asked, right out of the blue, as they had been surveying cable runs on telephone poles on Virginia Avenue.

"Well, I guess so," he answered.

"Do you think a regular guy like me could ever have a decent relationship with, uh, one of you?"

"One of us? Us who?"

"Uh, you know, a telepath."

Jason had glanced at him, and had made the connection quite quickly. "Well, I think that would depend on you," he said. "You'd be entering into a relationship with a woman who had an ability that makes her quite different from you. You'd have to be willing to accept those differences, and be willing to enter into a relationship with all kinds of special conditions and issues that you wouldn't find in a normal relationship."

"Yeah, I've thought about it a lot," he'd answered honestly. "Nothing would be like I think it would be. I could never have an argument with her, she'd just zap me."

"I think you underestimate Temika's tact, Mike," he'd chided him. "She'd never do anything like that. We taught her better. All I can really say is that you'd have to give her a lot of support, and some leeway. She's a strong woman, but what the Faey did to her means she needs a gentle touch and a man willing to be patient enough to help her work through her problems without pushing her."

"What did they do to her?"

"Her phobia about being touched stems from a time when a Faey used telepathy to interrogate her," he answered immediately and honestly. "It was very traumatic to her, probably more so because she has talent."

"I didn't know that."

"Now you do. Just don't let on that you know, or she'll skin me."

"Wouldn't she just..."

"Mike, she won't do that," he sighed. "I told you, we taught her better. If I caught her prying into the minds of the others, I'd skin _her_, and she knows it. That's the cardinal sin among the four telepaths here, Mike. We _never_ invade the privacy of those around us, not unless we have explicit permission to do so, or it's a life or death emergency."

"Well, that's good to know. But if I wanted a relationship with her, I'd think she'd want to invade that privacy."

"You're right there," he agreed. "That's what telepaths do when they're in a relationship. She'd want to know your mind, and you'd need to be willing to share it with her. That's one of those special conditions I mentioned. You'd have a rough road ahead of you, Mike I won't lie about that. You'd have to be willing to give more than a man usually gives in a relationship with a girl, and be willing to deal with a woman who has a power that you don't. But I think you have that kind of strength. And besides, Mika is worth it. She's one hell of a woman, and you'd be an idiot for letting her slip through your fingers."

"What's it like to be a telepath?"

"Not all that much different than not being one," Jason had answered. "With the restrictions we place on ourselves, it's really nothing more than a cell phone in my head I use to jabber at Mika, Tim, and Symone."

Mike had laughed at that, and then the matter was quietly dropped as Mike pondered on what he'd learned about Temika, and Jason had silently watched the burly black man with a slight smile on his face, knowing that Mike would indeed consider Temika to be worth that kind of an effort. Women like Temika didn't come around very often.

Mike hadn't made any overt moves yet, but that was probably because Temika was still healing. She was out of the sling now, her arm bandaged from shoulder to fingertips, and Kiaari had ordered her to wear an oven mitt over her hand so the medicated moisturizing lotion that she had to rub into her skin didn't wear off. It had been a horrid burn, but Faey medical technology was going to allow her to make a full recovery, with full range of motion and only a few very faint scars, where she'd have been _much_ worse off without it. If they hadn't have had that Faey medical equipment and supplies, odds were that Temika would have never regained use of her arm, and probably would have never regained feeling in it either. Most of the pain was gone now, only a dull ache where the worst of the burns had been, but Jason could tell that it still hurt when he watched her do her rehabilitation exercises. Her hair had started growing back as well, and that was where the permanent mark of her injury would be with her, for a streak of hair starting just over her left ear and extending back to the base of her hairline on the left edge of the back of her head was growing back bone white, a striking contrast to her thick, coarse black hair. Jason wasn't all that surprised to see that, since he had a small patch of hair on his right shin that was white, hair that grew out of an old burn scar. She was very self-conscious about that new streak of white hair, though, and was waspish and defensive if anyone made any comments about it. Jason thought it looked nice on her, but Temika had this notion that there was no way the hair could be anything but ugly.

If there was one real star in the people taking flying lessons, it was Luke. He passed the written exam in a matter of days after starting into it, devoting every waking moment to the task before him that wasn't taken up with other work. He passed that written exam by acing it, not missing a single question, and it meant that Jason had his first practical training pupil. At night, after the sun went down and it was safe to take the skimmer out, Jason took Luke up for training flights, teaching him the controls and letting him put the skills he learned on paper to use in a working environment. Studying about what to do was one thing, but applying it was something that took practice. Luke was a fast learner, which surprised Jason. He knew that the big man was good with his hands and was a skilled mechanic, and would be a good engineer, but Luke showed him that he was as smart as he was handy with a wrench. He picked up the basics of flight and cockpit controls quickly, and now Jason was just letting him log hours behind the controls to get proficient. The only problem Luke really had was the pinpoint landing drills that Jason put him through, forcing him to take off and land from awkward sites, a skill that Jason figured that they'd all better have with what was coming. He'd come along well enough to start him on instrument flying, using nothing but his gauges and instruments to fly, which also included the basics of navigation by using maps. The skimmer could use the GPS system that was still in use around the planet, a holdover from before the subjugation, but Jason felt that a true pilot had to be able to navigate the old fashioned way, with a clock, a compass, a speed gauge, and a map.

Luke was at the controls, with a map in his lap as he labored to calculate their position, while Jason sat in the co-pilot's chair with this feet up on the dash and a reader in his lap, reading over some messages that Kiaari had emailed to him. She was out again, and had been gone for two days, collecting more intelligence about a variety of subjects. She'd sent him a message so long he dumped it to a reader and brought it with him, some twenty odd pages of text. He was almost through it, and saw that Kiaari had been a very busy little girl. She'd been all over North America in the last couple of days, chasing down leads that might direct her to the information she was seeking, but she'd regretted to admit that she'd come up empty. She even noted in the message that Miaari was going to have her ears for her inability to perform her job. Trillane had virtually dropped the slaving operation in a hole in the middle of nowhere and buried it. Kiaari couldn't find anyone who knew anything about it, and her light infiltrations into Trillane's house computer network as well had come up empty. But Kiaari also made mention of the fact that odds were, nobody involved in the slaving ring was probably on Earth, and the data about it was being held in hard storage, which would take her time to track down.

She'd also made her first visit to Cheyenne Mountain, and her report about that area was... not good. The place was in shambles, an absolute disaster, and it wasn't the Faey or scavengers that had done it, it was the U.S. military. They had destroyed Cheyenne Mountain from the inside, literally using explosives to destroy entire sections of the secret base, probably some kind of last-ditch act of defiance to deny the Faey access to some military secrets or something stupid like that. Jason couldn't fathom why they did it, but they had. They would have _months_ of rebuilding ahead of them when they moved in, clearing out debris, rebuilding tunnels and chambers, shoring them up, and installing basic services. Kiaari did report that there was a series of huge storage chambers inside the mountain that could house dropships, but there was no way to get them in there unless they dug a new tunnel. But that was something that Kiaari noted in her report that was entirely possible. One of the storage caverns was relatively close to the outside of the mountain, some 300 _shakra_, and that was a distance that would make cutting a tunnel a viable option. She wrote that they could build doors to place over the tunnel that appeared to look like the mountainside, and could conceal that construction under a hologram. Jason had to admit that it was possible, but there were only 61 of them, and cutting a tunnel that would need to be 40 feet wide and 60 feet tall, high enough for a Stick to fly in carrying two stacked containers, would take them a _long_ time, even if they used the most advanced Faey mining equipment. The standard shipping container was roughly twenty feet high, fifteen feet wide, and thirty feet long. Two containers carried by a Stick would be about 55 feet high. Sure, cutting the hole would be easy, there were any number of mining tools that could shear into solid rock very fast. If he got some good equipment, he figured it would only take a week to cut through to the outside, but the real time investment was going to be in the reinforcement of that tunnel. If they didn't shore it up, it was going to collapse. That would require someone versed in _real_ structural engineering, and considerable time to build the supports and install them. That was a project that would take a couple of months to complete.

Jason figured it was about time to smack that girl down with a healthy dose of reality.

There were some other issues, as Kiaari had thoroughly surveyed the site and included it all in her report. She estimated what it would take to repair the damage the military had done to the place, install what they needed, set up basic utilities and services, organize storage, set up training areas, and whatnot. Not counting the idea of the tunnel, Kiaari estimated that they were looking at a whole summer of work on Cheyenne Mountain, maybe even into the winter a little bit. She still held firm to her recommendation that it was the best place for them to set up, however, despite the unexpected bad condition of the facility. It would let them do some large-scale work and remain hidden, and the surprising find of the massive caverns within the mountain, something not on any of the maps they'd found of the place, was an added bonus.

Jason did have to admit, those caverns made Cheyenne Mountain look more appealing as a base. It would take a hell of a lot of work, but if they buckled down, they just _might_ be able to figure something out. They may not be able to cut a new tunnel for the dropships, but they could work out some way to get containers in and out using the existing tunnel, which _was_ large enough for a container to go through it.

One thing was for sure, they couldn't stay in Charleston. The place was too open, and it was too close to Chesapeake, and the ghosts that that place raised in most of the survivors. They needed a fresh start in a place far away from that place.

"Mister Jason," Luke called.

"You don't have to call me that, Luke," Jason sighed. "Just Jason will do, or Jayce."

"Sorry. I'm picking something up on this scanner here," he said, pointing to one of the scopes in the center between the two chairs, a proximity radar with a range of only about forty miles.

"There shouldn't be any traffic in this area," he said to himself, sitting up and buckling on his restraints. When Luke saw him do that, he buckled his seat belt and shoulder harness as well. "Says here it's a dropship," he said, bringing up a scanner readout on the main window. "Transponder is Imperial military. Looks like it's a sensor dropship, scanning the area. Where are we now?"

"Umm," he said, looking at the map in his lap.

"This is serious, Luke, bring up GPS."

"Sorry," he said, throwing the map aside and then bringing up global positioning. According to GPS, they were south of the abandoned city of Beckley, in an area of rugged mountains. "We're just south of Beckley," he reported. "The dropship is moving at 10 _kathra_ an hour to the northwest."

"Ten? That's it? It must be doing a sensor sweep," Jason said. "Give me the controls, Luke. I don't think you're ready for this."

"Switching over," he called, flipping the main switch that transferred master command to the co-pilot's chair. The master command was a system that caused one set of controls to be dominant. Jason could use the controls on his side at any time, but if commands were input from the pilot's controls, they would override his own. That Jason had been letting Luke fly with master command was a testament to his progress. "What are we going to do?"

"Go take a look," he answered. "Who do we know around here?"

"I think The Wilsons have a place near here," he answered.

"Alright, let's make sure they're not hunting for anyone. If they are, we'll jump on the CB and warn people."

Jason drifted his skimmer to within a mile of the sensor dropship, which was oblivious to their presence since it was incapable of detecting the craft.

"Look there!" Luke called sharply, pointing to the left.

Jason did so, and to his surprise, there was wreckage strewn out on an overgrown field that looked to have once been a livestock pasture. The craft had hit hard, and from the blackened area around the debris field, there had been a fire. But the grass was starting to regrow in that blackened area, so the wreck itself had to have been a while ago, at least a week. From the look of the debris, it was a dropship, and it had crashed _hard_. Jason brought up his own sensor pod and trained it on the wreckage, then brought up a visual image of the scanner's findings.

It was a dropship alright, a passenger dropship, one of the smaller ones. It had the Imperial crest on what was left of the nose, which meant that it was a dropship owned by the Marines. Odds were it was a passenger dropship that ferried officers from the planet's surface to ships in orbit above. Skimmers could also do that, but the military vessels exclusively used dropships for it, since they were more heavily armored. Jason used the touch screen to survey the wreckage, and couldn't see any clear-cut evidence that it had either crashed or been shot down. It had burst into flames when it crashed, but Jason couldn't really see how, unless drive plasma conduit in the engine systems ruptured, which would spray metaphased plasma all over the place until the PPG and the dropship's power plant finally went offline. Metaphased plasma was safe at room temperatures, but _safe_ was a relative concept, since it could easily set fire to grass or wood if it was exposed to a ruptured conduit.

"I wonder what happened to it," Luke said.

"I'm not sure, but it doesn't add up," Jason replied. "I can't tell if it crashed or shot down, but why haven't they come to collect the wreckage yet? It's an Imperial dropship, they wouldn't just leave it here. And it's been here for a while. The grass around the debris is starting to grow back, see? But why would they have only _one_ sensor dropship here surveying the area? That doesn't make any sense."

"Maybe they're getting ready to come get the debris, and they sent the sensor ship out to look around first," Luke speculated.

"That's possible, but why did they wait so long? That's the part that doesn't make sense. That wreck's a week old, maybe more, but they left it out here."

"Maybe they were seeing who might come to look at it," Luke grunted. "Left it as bait."

"It's not good bait if they have a pod ship sitting over it," Jason said.

"Yeah, but it's dark out, and they don't make much sound. You'd have trouble seeing it from the ground."

"I don't know, maybe. It doesn't make much sense though. You can hear them if they're close enough, someone on the ground would"

He reacted violently, which caused the entire skimmer to lurch to port, when the faint sense of a familiar mind reached him.

It was _Jyslin!_

He knew exactly where she was, but it confused him. She was out here! She was about twenty miles due east of him, and she was in pain and afraid.

What had happened? Why was she out here? It didn't make any sense? Was _she_ the one in that dropship that was wrecked out here?

"Jason? You okay? What's wrong?" Luke asked in surprise, his hand darting towards the master control, but pulling back when Jason righted the skimmer.

"Quiet!" Jason snapped as he centered himself. "Take over!"

Luke hastily grabbed the controls as Jason let go of them, putting his fingers to his temples and focused his attention inward. With that dropship in the area, that put other telepaths out in the region, so he had to be careful. "Take us that way," he ordered, pointing to the east. "Now!"

_Jyslin!_ he sent, putting both tremendous power behind his mental call, and also tight focus, a laserbeam of a sending that would only go in one direction, and that was towards Jyslin. _Jyslin! JYSLIN!_

_Jason?_ came a weak reply. _Oh, thank the Trinity. I'm hurt, I need you to find me._

_What happened?_

_I couldn't live without you,_ came a frenzied yet utterly sincere response. _I couldn't be apart from you anymore._

Jason couldn't say anything to that. _Are you alright? I'm in my skimmer, we're coming to you, but there's a sensor dropship nearby. Can we pick you up? Can I land near you?_

_I, I think so, I'm in a small cave. You'll have to come get me, love, I can't walk very well. I think I broke my ankle._

_What happened?_

_Remind me to let _you_ do the flying from now on,_ she sent back ruefully.

"What is it, Jason?"

"It's _Jyslin_," he answered intensely. "She was in that dropship."

"Jyslin? Here?"

"Yeah, that's what I said," he answered. "We're getting close, slow down a little."

Luke brought the skimmer over a sharp hill with a meadow on the south side, which was directly over where he could sense Jyslin. "Where's that dropship?" he asked, looking at the scope.

"Looks like it's about fifteen miles northwest of us," Luke said. "Want me to set her down?"

"Yeah, right there. Jys says she can't walk, we have to go get her."

"Got it, lowering landing skids."

Jason was out of the skimmer before it even fully settled on the ground, using his sense of Jyslin to lead him straight to her. His mind swam with both elation and confusion. Why would she risk coming out here? She didn't even know where he was! Why do it now, when she could have come earlier? And what hell would her family and Lorna have to pay for her desertion?

He saw her, and his heart soared. She was standing with one foot raised at the mouth of a narrow, jagged cave entrance about ten feet up a jagged rock face, leaning against the side of her tiny cave. How she had gotten up there with a broken ankle was a mystery, but she had. She was dressed in a white jumpsuit of some kind that was absolutely filthy and had some burn marks on it, with the left shoulder torn and exposing the blue skin of her upper arm. Her face looked gaunt and pale, and she had streaks of dirt on her forehead and cheeks. Her auburn hair was dirty, stained, and matted. She looked a fright and was dirtier than he'd ever seen her, but at that moment, she had never looked more beautiful to him. He scrambled up the rocks and embraced her without a sound, as she clung to him, her arms trembling, as her mind opened to him and shared the entirety of the last few weeks with him in a fleeting instant, an act that drained what little strength she had and left her weak as a kitten, forcing her to grab onto him and hold on just to keep from falling over.

It was his visit that had triggered it. She had been crushed when she thought he was dead, heavily depressed, but then she found out he was alive, and that information made her realize that she would rather live with him as an outlaw than continue to live apart from him. So, after long days of worrying and stressing and furious debate with herself, she had deserted from the Marines. It was that simple. She wanted to be with him, and she wanted to be with him so desperately that she was willing to throw her entire future away... in her mind, a future without him was no future at all. She set out in her car at first, but she was picked up outside of Lynchburg about six days ago. They held her in the brig overnight, but then, when they were taking her back to Washington, she escaped and stole the dropship in which they were going to transport her. Unlike Jason, she was not a pilot, and managed to get that far before she crashed, which was five days ago. She broke her ankle in the crash, and she considered it a miracle that that was the only injury she sustained. She used a cargo loader like a skateboard, riding the flat antigrav unit used to load heavy loads to get far away from the crash site, but it had broken down not far from her cave. She carried it with her while she hunted for a cave, where the earth overhead would help hide her from sensors, using it as a crutch until she found the cave where he found her. She had been hiding since then, waiting for her ankle to heal so she could continue on foot. She really had no idea where he was, but she had this idea that if she found squatters near Chesapeake, they might know where he'd gone.

"You little fool," Jason whispered in her ear, running his fingers through her glorious auburn hair.

_I just couldn't go on without you,_ she told him. _You told me before that you were willing to risk your life for something you believe in, my love. Jason, _I believe in you_, and I'll stand right beside you and take the same risks. As long as we're together, I don't care where we are or what we're doing. You mean everything to me. I'm just sorry it took so long and took me thinking you were dead to finally understand that._ She pushed away enough to look up into his eyes. _You told me before that until I left the Marines, you wouldn't accept me. Well, I've given them my resignation,_ she sent with weary impishness. _Is there still a place for me with you?_

_It's the only place I've wanted you to be,_ he sent in reply, then he leaned down and kissed her, a kiss he'd waited months to deliver.

"Jayce, we'd better get going," Luke called from below.

Jason opened his eyes and gave his pupil a truly ugly look, one that was hidden by the darkness. "He's right, there's a sensor pod dropship cruising the area," he told Jyslin aloud.

"It's been looking for me for two days," she answered as she looped her arm around his shoulder. "I think they spotted me on a surveillance camera when I crashed and left the wreck, and then the dropship showed up. I think they know I can't walk. It's passed over my cave three times in the last two days. Its sensors can't penetrate down into this cave, and they'll never find me with talent, so they've just been biding their time, waiting me out."

"Well, they can just keep on looking," Jason said as he beckoned to Luke. The big man came up to the edge of the rock face, and then Jason physically lowered Jyslin down to him, kneeling down and letting her slide down the rock as she kept hold of him with the arm around his shoulder. He grabbed her by her leg, then hauled her in gently as Jason lowered her by her hand, until he was holding her cradled before him.

"Hi," Jyslin said to him with a light smile. "I'm Jyslin."

"Begging your pardon for not putting you down, ma'am, but you shouldn't be putting any weight on that leg," he told her. "My name's Luke. It's a pleasure to finally meet you."

"Oh, he talks about me, does he?" she asked, giving Jason a loving look as he scrambled down the rocks.

"Only about every day," he answered.

"Well, it's good to know a girl isn't being forgotten," she laughed as Jason got back down, then collected her up from Luke.

"Never that," he told her, looking into her eyes. "Let's get her back to Charleston, Luke."

"Yeah. I just hope it's not that bad."

"It's bad enough," she sighed as Jason rushed her back to his skimmer. She looked at it curiously as they approached the stairs. "Did you paint it? I've never seen a black paint that... black. It's like it swallows the light."

"That's exactly what it does, what you're looking at is the visible effect of the cloaking screen," he answered as he rushed her up the stairs and into the cabin. "Luke, get us the hell out of here," he ordered as he set her down in the chair behind the pilot's seat. Luke squeezed past in the narrow cabin and sat down, then closed the hatch, raised the stairs, and pulled the ship into the air. Instead of sitting in the copilot's chair, he sat instead in the seat beside hers, and kept hold of her hand. They remained seated until Luke had them at a level altitude, flying back towards Charleston on a northwestern course after circling _very_ wide of the patrolling dropship. Once they were level, Jason unbuckled himself and knelt by Jyslin's chair, and immediately started working on getting her boot off.

"How did you get out here, Miss Jyslin?" Luke asked.

"It's a long story," she answered. She put her hand on Jason's neck, letting her touch on him amplify her telepathic connection to him and allow her to send despite her exhausted state. In a brief moment, Jason and Jyslin traded vast amounts of information. Jyslin relayed to him much of what her life 