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His closet was exactly as expected. She was in the process of trying on one of the big plaid shirts, when he came back with his phone in his hands. She flickered her gaze from him, to the phone, before her own was whipped out with lightning precision. She scrolled and sped through the comments, her skin paling the longer she read through them.

"What in the hell is all this s**t." She grumbled, stopping at a particular comment or two just to read it over carefully. It was the threatening tone in America's textual voice that had her pausing, along with Lex's sudden, unexpected empathy towards abusive relationship victims.

She didn't see that coming. And if she could have, she would have voted Leslie's reply down a thousand times.

"Has everyone gone insane?" She muttered, only slightly surprised. "And is it just me, or is America a little scarier than usual lately? I know she's been through some s**t, but, I don't know. It just - she sounds - weird."

She chose, without fail, the bed. She flopped on it, rolled until she was on her stomach, and looked up at him with a curious glance. Dawson had a secret? This was new. And she was fantastic at secrets.

"Okay. I'm listening. Spill." Maybe it had to do with Horace and Lawr, as well. Oh, she could just feel that this was going to be good.

Dawson would have seen Maebe react with the same level of horror only one other time, and it was the day Mimsy had been coming for her.

She scuttled back up and backed away until her back was on the wall, and her hands pressed hard against it. She could hardly hear what he was saying after he'd said the word clone. The blood rushed into her ears and her body shivered. She couldn't -

She'd been alone with that. For an entire day. She'd gotten her hair done, and they'd gotten massages together, and - and they'd wandered around town, hand in hand, and - and it was -

"Where is it now." Maebe's harsh, pained voice whispered. It sounded like she half expected it to jump out from under the bed and yell boo.

Keep it quiet?

She'd kept the clones quiet for so long. She hadn't said a word to Otto, back when she'd come home with a broken jaw, and her secrecy had almost gotten him killed.

She stared at Dawson, and his tentative move forward, and wondered just how long it would be until secrecy got him killed, too.

"You're asking me to keep it a secret that there's a deadly killing machine sitting around in towns. Just chilling. Talking on Twitter. Telling people 'hey, let's go out and get manicures.' Do you like my hair, by the way, Dawson?" She fluffed it with one hand - and yet the horror never left her face. "Yeah? Looks great, right? I got it done with that thing by my side. Holding my hand. Because no one told me to stay the ******** away from it."

She felt disgust coil quickly in her stomach, and her hands dropped from the wall, to curl up angrily on the bed.

"Has anyone told the division heads? Does Edith know? Does anyone?"

And the sickening feeling in her stomach sunk down even lower, as the next thought drifted unbidden into her mind.

"Is anyone out looking for America?"

Maebe put her hands against her mouth, clamping down. The feeling of bile was surging at the idea of Dawson comforting a clone the way he comforted everyone else, and how easily that clone could have snapped his arm, or his head or -

She was going to throw up. She was actually going to throw up. Through muffled hands, she asked him for a bag or a bucket. She put one hand down and started DMing Taym almost immediately, frantic for some kind of response. This led to her checking his personal twitter, and realizing how long he'd actually been gone.

The threat of vomit faded away, as she dropped her hand down and stared, breathlessly, at her phone.

Dawson was wrong about Taym having some complicated plan. She knew he was wrong, because she knew that he was smart, except when it came to the woman he loved. Then, he became extraordinarily selflessly stupid.

She dropped the phone down and let out a shuddering whisper. "He's trying to find her." Maebe breathed out. "He's out there. Alone. Somewhere. Trying to find America."

She was wrong - he wasn't really out anywhere, but he'd most certainly been putting himself in the amount of danger she expected him to be in. She just assumed that he had gone on his own, instead of using the resources Deus might have afforded them.

She sent off another text, this time to Edith. She thought she was telling her information that she did not already know.



"No, Dawson." Her voice took on a steely edge. "We can't. I just texted Edith. Now that she knows, they're going to handle the clone. That's their job. Now we have to do ours."

She pushed herself up off of the bed. "We can't let Taym do this alone. We need to find America. And that means we need to find him."

He shook his head wordlessly. The longer Maebe went on, the harder it became to swallow.

"Guy tweeted couple've days ago," he said, glad for contact. "You can check n' make sure though." The guilt ate at him, but his course had been set as far as Dawson was concerned. "We go look in Taym's room just in case, but, Maebe, no-one else hears this, okay?" He squeezed her hand, trying to convey how much he hated having to say so. "They want this hush fer some reason, we ain' gonna be the ones disturbin' it." He'd get around to telling her why she'd been confided in. Eventually.

He wished he had known about the surveillance before the DMs.

< You should have known they would have already had something set up, > Syn snipped.

Dawson ran his thumb over her fingers and told her, "Deep breaths, okay? One thing at a time. You got me a nice shirt t'go out with?" he asked with a weak smile.