True startled. "Oh, no. Not the swimming through dirt thing again. Not even for just the stick!" the feisty girl squeaked, leaping onto the steel flooring that was nestled underneath the cargo crates that made up their desks. She landed with a solid thump on her still shaky feet to protect herself. "Uly! Talk to me, you ugly frog. If your scaley friends are coming to see you, we'd better tell the others right n--"

She saw Uly's eyes begin to glow the familiar color of Morganite orange and he stood transfixed, as if his Terrian staff held him bound. "Do not save the child. She is cast away. The sky mind has touched us through her!" came his strangely mind amplified voice. It created a feeling of bugs crawling in True's mind. "Stop it. Stop it now!" the boy cried.

True couldn't decide about the boy's last plea. Was it the Terrians talking to Uly or the other way around?

A bolt of lightning shot up and away from Uly's staff tip, striking the communications antennae linking Yale with the rescue party's remote gear, destroying it in a shower of sparks.

True's inbred sense of self preservation kicked in and she ducked, covering her head with both arms. "That's enough mumbo jumbo for me for the rest of the century. Yale! Yale!!" she shouted, fleeing the boy's stormy pyrotechnics. "Help me! Uly's gone crazy!"

The boy did not hear True, nor did he try to stop her.

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The young Danziger found Yale flattened and flailing on the ground near his tent, still getting shocked from secondary static arcing through his temple implant from his suddenly magnetized head gear.

True quailed. "Yale?" The tutor opened his eyes with difficulty, feeling the girl's hands on his body that were instinctively checking his breathing rate.

"Get it off! Get it off!" he twitched as he desperately gripped his head in involuntary reflex. "You won't get burned. This battery effects only me." he said, clenching a fist over his temple medallion. "Please. Ahh! Remove my head set-t!" he grimaced painfully.

True jerked it off quickly, flinging Yale's away. "Mine's not working either. Are you okay?"

Yale sat up, breathing hard. "I am now. What was that?" he said, eyeing up his smoking virtual gear with shock.

"It was Uly. He decided to share a sudden story with a free light show." she growled.

"Were the Terrians speaking through him?" Yale asked, letting her help him to his feet.

She nodded.

"What did he say?"

"Too much. You're not going to like it." True replied. "I think they were talking about killing Mary because of Eve."

Magus shot around the corner, running for the two of them in a full fledged emergency regrouping. "Yale! I can't get a hold of the others. Everything's just gone dead." she said, waving her useless gear set at them.

"I know. And I have a feeling that that's not all." Yale replied, glancing over his shoulder towards the mountains.

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Alone in the school's camp clearing, the boy continued mumbling. "Immunity. Seeking immuni--." Ulysses gasped when his tranced connection with the Terrians suddenly broke as the sun came back out from behind a cloud. The odd earth stone's glow in his eyes faded out, leaving behind a terrifying void of non-feeling. It was coming from his human side, a sickening absence. He felt hideously shredded mental tatters in a bond that he had known since birth. And even they were rapidly disappearing. "Mom? Mom!" he shouted, dropping the Terrian staff. It lay forgotten in the dust. Uly dashed for the sleeper ship as fast as he could run to get to her side.

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John Danziger, Julia Heller, Alonzo Solace and Cameron were working feverishly to revive Mary.

"Keeping going." the doctor ordered as she re-analyzed the horribly burned girl's cardiac muscle chemistry with her diaglove. "She's almost ready for another shock."

Danziger had taken over for Alonzo at Mary's head to spare him the effects of rescuer's dizziness from hyperventilation. His self hyped skills at respiratory first aid were paying off. Mary's complexion was finally pinking up with their CPR.

Alonzo kept up even compressions, giving Cameron a chance to shake out the cramps in his palms and shoulders from his previous efforts. "Why isn't the glove working?" the pilot grunted as he worked hard to maintain Mary's circulation.

"She dehydrated. Her plasma volume's way down because all of her burns are oozing. I'm pushing in fluids and the proper stimulants as fast as I can." Heller replied. "It'll take at least another minute for the acid buffer I gave her to kick in and start working enough to correct her metabolic imbalances." she said, taking another body sweep reading of Mary's battered form. "She also has some fractured ribs issues that we caused."

"That's gonna happen with CPR." John gave Mary another careful, effective breath, to limit inflicting more damage. "Better hurry it up. The skin on our mouths and palms are starting to flake off." he grimaced, keeping his eyes shut to protect them from acid fumes.

"The acid on her's weak. It must have rained last night. The three of you will be fine. Nothing past first degree burns. One more medication here, and I'll try again with another cardioversion." Heller replied, touching an injector to the side of Mary's blistered neck. "Okay." she said. "Get clear of her." They moved away. Then Julia gave a command to the diaglove. "Cardio-vert!"

Mary's body arched up inside of the ring the others made. An ugly, strangled moan rushed out of her on a borrowed breath as she settled back onto the ground when the electricity had run its course.

"What was that?" Cameron said, scrambling instinctively backwards for the Magpro he had left behind.

Julia grew irritated at the man. "Reflexes. Don't be ignorant. John, keep helping her until her lungs catch. I'm finally getting a pulse." Julia reported, breathless from strain. "I'll start disinfecting and sealing off her wounds. Let's get the rest of these soaked clothes off."

Alonzo looked around their glade thoughtfully as he helped prepare Mary for the doctor. "Julia, what do you think caused Mary's burns?"

"That's no puzzle. A little swimming. The lake's just over there." Cameron snapped sarcastically, knowing the girl's burns had been intentionally inflicted. "No one would be able to leap into that kind of hell, not even someone with suicidal thoughts. She was thrown in."

"Yeah, but how'd she get out and up here? We're at least a thousand feet up the hill from the beach. How'd she find the strength to crawl so far her condition?" Solace asked.

John lifted his face away from Mary's after delivering a final breath. Mary's chest began to rise and fall on its own. "Okay, that one did it. She's breathing again." he said, keeping her head tilted back in his lap to keep her air passages open. He sat cross legged on the ground, watching the fragile young woman closely as she fought for life. "Alonzo, about Mary? Somebody else carried her." theorized Danziger.

"Who?" Cameron asked.

"Who else is there?" Danziger frowned, studying Mary's face for any signs of returning consciousness. There were none.

"More terrians?" Cameron asked, not understanding the implications.

"Different terrians." John replied.

Julia was fast, putting two and two together.
"Was there a conflict over Mary again? Between the Purists who denied Mary her Terrian abilities for helping us and the home Moon Pool clan who raised her?" Julia wondered as she swiftly applied a body sized dermal gel foam blanket which sealed like a soft gray suit around every inch of Mary.

"It's the only thing that makes any sense." John shared as he rolled the girl over so the doctor could treat the areas that had been resting against the ground. "Rival clan wars are something we haven't really considered all the way through yet."

"So which side actually rescued her?" Julia wondered, working fast to stabilize Mary.

"There's only one choice. I'm betting on her second family." said John. "Clans are tight. I can't see one abandoning a member easily once a bond is formed. We see them behave that way towards Uly all of the time."

Their ship pilot was off on a new tangent. "Wait a minute. All it takes is one set of arms or one mind to dirt carry someone." Alonzo added. "Maybe it was her adoptive Terrian mother, the one who found her in the first place crying over her human parents' dead bodies who saved her." he murmured in excited discovery. Alonzo closed his eyes and slipped into the Terrian dreamscape before anyone could stop him. He dropped limply to the ground.

"Alonzo.. no!" Julia warned. "The others who hurt her might be the ones to answer you!"

But Solace was already too far away to hear her.

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Alonzo entered the Plain.