Chapter 10

"Alex," Max whispered. "Do you know how long Tess was mind-warping you?"

"Why…why do you ask?" Alex stammered, fear seeping into his normally calm eyes.

"The damages that Tess’s mindwarp left in your brain…they were bad Alex. Almost beyond my capability to fix."

"But you did, right?" Alex pressed, his voice shaking. "You fixed me, right?"

"Yeah, you don’t have anything to worry about now. You’re going to be okay."

"But I wouldn’t have been, would I?" Alex wondered aloud. "If we hadn’t found out about Tess I wouldn’t have been okay in the long run."

"Probably not." Max confirmed softly.

Max watched sadly on as Alex paled, the realization of his true danger sinking in, and Max’s heart went out to his friend. It isn’t every day that you tell a guy that he was dying and he didn’t even know it. At least for Max, he was able to stop it in time.

"Did you…" Alex swallowed, taking a deep breath before asking the next question. "Did you find anything in there about what she was up to?"

"I didn’t get a chance." Max admitted. "The healing was a lot more intense than I expected it to be, and it took every ounce of energy I could give it."

"Do you want to try again?" Alex offered.

"Not today." Max sighed. "I don’t have the energy to be honest, but maybe we should both sleep on this and try again in a day or two. Until then, see if anything comes back to you. Who knows? Now that your mind is whole again you may remember everything on your own."

"Max…thanks man." Alex replied sincerely, his voice hoarse with emotion. "You really have no idea how much this means to me. You gave me my life back tonight."

Max nodded to his friend. "It was the least I could do for all you’ve done for me. I’m glad we didn’t lose you."

~~~~~~ ~~~~~

Kyle winced as he heard Liz swearing under her breath through the closed bedroom door, followed by a soft crashing noise. She had locked herself in Tess’s room hours before, and hadn’t come out once. Usually she avoided her room like the plague, except for sleeping, so Kyle couldn’t help finding her behavior odd, particularly with the news from the day before that Max and Tess were officially dating again.

Liz had been in a mood ever since seeing them together, and Kyle wasn’t sure how he could help her. He had gone out of his way to distract her from the subject of Max and Tess for the past two days, but nothing seemed to be working. Every time Kyle thought he was succeeding in taking her mind off of things, she would get this sad look in her eyes, and he knew she had Evans on the brain.

Finally summoning enough courage to approach her, Kyle rapped firmly on the door.

"Liz?" He called to her through the door. "Can I come in?"

"Yeah, sure." Her muffled voice filtered back so softly that Kyle wondered what the heck she was up to, until he opened the door to behold the mess Liz had scattered across the room. Tess’s things were strewn all over the room, from her clothes piling up on the floor, to papers thrown around the room, open boxes with various objects hanging out of them scattered around the room. At the moment Liz herself was on a ladder in the closet, pulling yet another box down from the top shelf.

"What are you doing?" Kyle burst out in shock, taking in the sight around him.

"Research." Liz explained shortly, as she climbed down with the box. "I’m not willing to just sit here and twiddle my thumbs while Tess is off screwing with Max’s head. I need to do something to fix things, and I’m going to start right here, by going through Tess’s things and trying to find out what she was doing to Alex."

"Any clues?" Kyle asked curiously, sweeping his eyes over the mess for anything obvious to the naked eye.

"Well…remember that night at the meeting when the truth came out? Alex said something about Las Crueces. Well, I found this shoe box under the bed with some papers in it."

Liz paced over to the bed and grabbed the box, thrusting it in Kyle’s hands.

"Check it out." Liz prodded him, as Kyle pulled the lid off the box and studied the contents.

"What the heck?" Kyle exclaimed.

The contents were mysterious to say the least. There was an address for a dorm room at the University of Las Crueces, scrawled on a scrap of notebook paper. Beneath it there was a Polaroid photograph of a girl with long, blonde hair and blue eyes.

"Who’s this?" Kyle asked curiously, showing Liz the Polaroid.

"Good question." Liz dryly shot back. "I’ve seen her face once before, in Alex’s slide show of his trip to Sweden. He told me back then that her name was Leanna, and she was his Swedish girlfriend."

"But now that we know he was under a mindwarp we don’t know who she is." Kyle finished for her with a grimace. "Or how she could be connected to Tess’s plot."

"Exactly." Liz confirmed. "So we have to find out who she really is."

Kyle set the picture back into the box, before picking up the next item beneath it. It was a newspaper clipping from the Roswell Gazette.

"University of Las Crueces develops supercomputer." Kyle read the headline aloud. "Supercomputer?" He snorted in amusement. "That sounds like something right up Alex’s alley."

"My thoughts exactly." Liz replied, as she dug through her new box. "To sum up the article, which is from last fall, the University developed a new computer so intelligent that they still haven’t figured out everything it’s capable. What it specializes in though is cryptography."

"Cryptography?" Kyle asked. "What, like puzzles and codes and stuff like that."

"Yeah," Liz confirmed.

"So what would Tess want decoded?" Kyle wondered.

"I don’t know." Liz sighed in frustration. "That’s what I’m looking for now. Probably something alien, but I don’t know what, or why. If it’s alien than why wouldn’t she tell the others…and why would she use Alex against his will?"

~~~~~ ~~~~~~

Max knew he should go home and go straight to bed since he was so wiped out from Alex’s healing, but the extent of the damage to Alex’s brain had left Max unnerved.

He never even considered the possibility that a mindwarp could be so dangerous. Tess had mindwarped him before, more than once in various training sessions and whatnot. Plus how many times had she mindwarped him without his own knowledge? Every member of their group could have mind disintegration in their brains as a result of what had once been considered mild mindwarping.

So it was with a nervous energy that Max didn’t even know he could summon up in his state of exhaustion that he found himself standing in front of the Crashdown doors looking in. Liz was inside, moving around the room, putting up chairs and cleaning up the last dishes of the night.

A soft smile flickered across Max’s face at the sight of his angel. He could still barely believe that they were back together. It was like a dream come true…as long as he ignored the fact that she seemed almost like an entirely different person at times.

Pushing the negative thoughts from his mind, Max reached up and softly rapped on the glass door. Liz’s eyes quickly shot up, meeting his in surprise, as she crossed the room to let him in.

"Max, I didn’t expect to see you tonight." She mumbled softly as he moved past her into the restaurant.

"I know…but I really needed to see you." Max explained. She turned to face him, and he gently cupped her face with a tender touch, lowering his lips to hers for a quick, soft kiss before she pulled away, and moved away from him.

"I have a lot of work to do." Liz groaned. "It was one of those nights tonight…all of the customers were driving me crazy with their demands and requests."

Max watched her curiously as she started collecting the ketchup off of the tables. He couldn’t remember ever hearing Liz complain about the customers at the Crashdown before. Although her job was never quite perfect, she still took it all in stride on a daily basis without complaints.

"I just got back from Alex’s." Max cut her off with his quiet announcement.

Liz froze halfway across the room, her shoulders stiff and her back to him so that he couldn’t read the expression on her face.

"I know how hard it’s been on you to know what Tess has been doing to him, so I just wanted to let you know right away that he’s going to be okay."

"That’s great." She responded with a sigh of relief, turning around and crossing back to where he stood. "I’ve been worrying about him all night."

"You’re not the only one who’s worried, Liz." Max admitted softly, rubbing his eyes in anxiety. "His mind was a mess. Tess really screwed up his head. I almost wasn’t able to fix it. Liz…Alex would have died if we had never found out the truth."

"No he wouldn’t have." Liz shook her head wildly in denial. "There’s no possible way the mindwarp could have killed him." She stated with certainty.

Max stared at her in surprise. "Liz, I’m telling you, it’s true. I had to heal him. It took everything I had in me to do it. Tess’s mindwarps are dangerous. She almost killed Alex, and God knows she’ll probably kill someone else unknowingly if we don’t stop her from ever using that power again."