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He thinks it’s her for a minute, when the girl darts up and looks him in the face. He knows he’s wrong almost right away, and yes, he’d grasp at anything at this point, but she really is like Scully, he thinks, when he takes a second look at her. Something about her face. And her hair is mostly black, but he can see the red at the roots. No one has the time or ability to keep up with hair dying now, he’d imagine. He hasn’t shaved since this started.
Of course she’s too young to be Scully. She’s in her late teens, he thinks. She’s not even like Scully when he first knew her. He remembers her in those first days, eager to work, with a kind of open confidence that, at some point, they didn’t have any more. This girl doesn’t look open. She doesn’t look like she was happy, even before everything.
But she doesn’t run away from him either, which makes for a change. He thinks it’s been two weeks since he really saw another person. He’s caught glimpses, but everyone’s hid. He doesn’t blame them. He would hide himself, if he didn’t have to find Scully. He will hide, as soon as he finds her. They’ll hide together, somewhere this can’t find them.
This girl isn’t hiding: she’s staring at him, her arms crossed over her chest. “Who’re you?” she asks. And the voice is alike too, like Scully’s. Or maybe it’s just that he can’t stop thinking about Scully.
He knows you can’t trust everyone, and maybe the reason she’s not running and hiding is that she doesn’t have any reason to run and hide. Maybe she’s not under threat. Maybe she is the threat. But if she is the threat, why is she like Scully, somewhere around the mouth, around the eyes?
“I’m a friend,” he says, because he would like to be. “My name’s Fox Mulder. I’m just…I’m looking for someone who’s important to me.”
“Ohhhh,” she says, as if that explains everything, and maybe it does. She keeps staring.
“Will you tell me your name?” he asks, after a moment.
She sounds proud when she says it, almost defiant. “Emily.”
He thinks he begins to understand.
She knows how to get into the empty houses: it’s easy. Most of the houses are empty now. The house they go into is nice inside. It looks like the people have just gone out for a little bit, not like they’re never coming back.
It’s big too, and that’s different: all of this space just for her. And Mulder. But she wouldn’t ever have to see him if she didn’t want to. That’s how much space there is. She thinks she sees one of the others for a minute, behind a closet door, and she tenses up, but then the other one tenses up too and she sees that it’s just a big mirror. She looks into it for a long time. Pushes her hair back. There’s her face.
She sees him staring at her face too, when she goes back down to the living room again. He stares at her for a long time. “Where have you been?” he finally asks.
“You wouldn’t understand,” she tells him, and he wouldn’t, either. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she says, when he keeps looking at her.
“Okay,” he says. “That’s okay, Emily.” She likes hearing him call her that, just Emily. She’s always thought that everyone should call her that, because even if there are a lot of them she’s the first one. Well, the first one that worked, anyway. “I’m just glad you’re safe,” he says, and he puts his hand on her shoulder, so softly. “Scully…your mom…she’ll be so happy too. When we find her.”
“Let’s eat something,” she says. There’s a big refrigerator here too, and they won’t have to share.
She lines up the ice cream containers on the rug in front of her, one two three four. And she eats and eats and eats.
He wants to talk to her, but he doesn’t know where to start. She says she doesn’t want to talk about where she’s been, and he’s afraid of what that might mean. He remembers her as a little girl, picking her up, the weight of her head against his shoulder. He’d hated seeing her hurting. He doesn’t want to think about her hurting worse.
“Do you want to hear about your mom?” he asks her, finally. He’s not sure if this is more for her or for himself. If he can’t be with Scully, talking about her to Emily seems like the next best thing.
She looks up from the ice cream, which she’s been eating systematically. He doesn’t always make the best nutritional choices, but even to him it looks like a bit much. Still, she doesn’t seem to be experiencing any ill effects. Maybe it’s different for her.
She licks the spoon. “Sure,” she says. “If you want to tell me.”
“Do you remember her at all?” he asks.
She squints her eyes. “Maybe,” she says. “A little. She had red hair, didn’t she?”
“She did,” he says. “Does. You look a lot like her, actually.” She smiles at that. He hasn’t seen her smile before.
So he tells her all about Scully, and she sits and listens. She doesn’t smile again, just watches him while he talks. He doesn’t blame her for not smiling; he doesn’t feel much like it himself. Scully should be here. She should be here to meet Emily again, to see how she’s grown up, to give her a long, long hug. He knows how much she’d want to do that, even if they’ve never talked about it much.
“She didn’t know…we thought you were gone,” he says.
Emily nods. “I know.”
“But we will see her,” he says. “Soon.” He wants that to be a promise. “And she’ll be…she’ll be so surprised, Emily. I was really surprised.” Emily nods again. “But she’ll be so glad.”
Emily stretches. “Where is she?” she asks.
“She’s…I don’t know,” he says. He remembers that last day, when they promised to meet. He’s tried to keep track of how long it’s been, but he’s not sure anymore. It feels like he’s always been waiting. “But we won’t give up on her.”
Emily’s face is still. “Is she alive?”
“Of course,” he says quickly. “Of course she is.”
“I think you’re right,” Emily says, after a moment, and he wonders how she knows. If she knows. If there’s some sort of thread between the two of them, holding them tight, and if she might know how to find her mother.
He keeps talking to her. She should let him, she guesses, even though she’s tired of it. “How long have you been out here?” he asks. “By yourself.”
“A while,” she says.
“And you’ve been…getting by?” he asks. He doesn’t look in her face for very long, but she can tell he really wants to know. That it would make him sad, if she hadn’t been.
So she doesn’t know how to answer. What’s the right answer, that will make him feel all right about it. She can’t tell him the truth. Can’t tell him about the other night, in a house like this one, the bread that man shared with her and then his throat between her hands. (Not the first time. Not the only time. They’ve been preparing for this for years, and she was ready. She was always the best one out of all of them. The first, best, most special Emily.) He might run away, if she tells him that, and she can’t let him run away. But if he thinks she hasn’t been getting by, like he says, then he might worry more and keep asking questions.
Eventually, she says, “It hasn’t been easy. But there are a lot of houses like this one. I’ve been staying out of the way.”
“I know it’s been hard,” he says, and he puts an arm around her, and she lets him. “We’ll look out for each other for now, okay? The two of us. And then we’ll find your mom, and we can all look out for each other. We’ll keep each other safe.”
She doesn’t know why she should care when he talks about Dana Scully, the woman he calls her mom. She remembers her, but only a little, and it’s not like she was really her mom, like she really has a mom, like people have. She never needed a mom. Still, somehow she likes it when he says it. She was the only one who ever met Dana, after all. And maybe if she hears more about her, she’ll remember more, and it’ll feel more like it actually happened. Those first days, before they started training her with all the rest of them.
“Yes,” she says. “We can do that.”
“Do you want to sleep for a while?” he asks her. “I can keep watch, if you do.”
She’s not tired, but she smiles at him and says, “Thank you so much,” and of course he smiles back. There’s a shawl on the couch and he puts it over her. She opens her eyes a little to watch him when he’s not looking. He’s mostly watching her.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing, right now. They should be moving on: they’re not likely to find Scully sitting still, and it’s not like this place is really safe. Nowhere is really safe. But somehow he feels like he’s guarding Emily, if they stay here. That this is some kind of a home, even if it’s inadequate, even if they broke into it. And he wants to watch over her. He feels like he’s doing something for Scully, if he does.
He seeks out the moments when Emily makes him think of her. It’s not always easy, because of how closed off she is when he tries to ask her anything. He doesn’t blame her. He’s sure she’s scared. But he can’t get a handle on what she’s thinking, most of the time.
Sometimes it’s easier when they’re not talking. The faces are so alike.
When she sees him looking at her, sometimes she looks back and smiles. Because then he’ll like her. Because then he’ll trust her. People will like you and trust you if you smile. They told her that, because she wasn’t being subtle. She tried to hurt Emily 95 but she wasn’t able to, because they figured out she was going to do it, because she never acted nice to Emily 95. But she learned from it. After that she was a lot more subtle.
She thinks Mulder does like her, because he always smiles back when she smiles. And he always talks to her, about her mom, and about how they’re going to be okay. She knows she’s going to be okay, because she’ll make herself be okay, but she smiles when he says that too. And she knows he likes Dana, and she thinks that means he likes her too.
Sometimes she asks him questions. About Dana, about him and Dana, about her and Dana, the kind of things she thinks he wants to hear. He always wants to talk about it. He could talk about Dana all day and night, she thinks. When she gets tired of it, she lies down like she’s sleepy. He always lets her sleep whenever she wants to, and he keeps watch, or he watches her. Sometimes she lets him sleep, to be nice. Sometimes she pats his hair, because he did that to her once.
Sometimes when he looks at her, she pretends she doesn’t see, and then he looks at her for a long time.
He found a radio in the kitchen the first day, and he’s been trying to make it work. So far, no dice.
Emily watches him. “Let me try,” she says, eventually, and he hands her the radio. It seems to start the second she touches it, coming to life with a crackle.
“How did you do that?” he asks, but she doesn’t say anything. Instead, they listen to the announcer.
“…broadcasting from a new location,” she says, “due to increased alien activity. We hope we can continue bringing you the news.” A pause. “We’ve witnessed numerous fatalities in the past twenty-four hours.”
Emily sits hugging her knees. Her head is bent towards the radio, listening. Mulder wonders what she’s thinking. If she’s thinking, like him, about who might be among those fatalities.
“Increasing information has been coming in about the government cloning programs. The products of these programs appear to be resistant to the virus. Furthermore, they—” The radio splutters out.
“Can you get it back?” Mulder asks Emily.
She picks it up and looks at it. “No,” she says. “No, I don’t think so.” They sit in silence. “Don’t you think we should move?” she asks him. “I thought you wanted to find her. Dana.”
“Of course I do,” he says. “But we have to be sure we can move safely. I don’t want to risk you.” If it were just him, sure, he’d have been out of here ages ago, but he needs to put Emily first. He can’t imagine finding Scully and then telling her that he’d lost Emily. That something had happened to one of her loved ones, again.
“We can go tonight,” Emily says. His concerns don’t seem to touch her. “Once it gets dark.”
“We should see if there are any flashlights or candles,” Mulder says. “Or anything else we can take with us.” He feels kind of bad about it, though, even as he’s saying it. He’s not out here to be looting. He knows it’s not the worst thing anyone’s done recently, but still. If you let something like this change you…
“Of course,” Emily says. She gets up then and starts opening the kitchen cabinets, and after a moment he joins her.
She could be moving so much faster than this, if she didn’t have Mulder with her. She wouldn’t need the flashlights or any of that; she could find her way in the dark without anybody seeing her, and by now she could be halfway across the state. Getting everything she deserves to have.
In moments like this one, when he’s stumbling through the trees with his flashlight beam going everywhere in a way that’s probably going to bring people down on them any minute, she thinks about just ditching him. And really, ditching him is one of the nicer things she could do. She could leave him here to die, or she could make sure he’s dead before she goes.
She doesn’t know why she doesn’t do those things. She hasn’t ruled them out entirely, or anything like that. But for right now, he’s not bothering her or anything. He tries to help her, even though she doesn’t need help. He looks at her like he likes her, and he smiles at her a lot of the time.
Of course, he’s supposed to be her enemy; everyone is, who wasn’t part of the program or who isn’t one of the invaders. That’s what they learned every day in their training. You can use an enemy for as long as you need them, but in the end, you can’t let them live. She remembers that.
She doesn’t really need Mulder now—she doesn’t need anyone—but he helps her pass the time, and he doesn’t act like an enemy. But when she hears steps coming from behind them, she goes on the alert, because that could be an enemy, very easily. Two men step into the beam of the flashlight; they have guns, and they’re pointing them in their direction. “This is our land,” one of them says. “Give us whatever you have.”
Just ordinary people, Emily thinks, out for whatever they can get. She’s not afraid of them.
“Emily,” Mulder says. “Emily, run!” He tries to get in front of her, which is beyond stupid.
She pushes in front instead, advancing on the men. They don’t try to shoot at her. She expected that. That’s one of her advantages, which is another thing they used to tell them: you’re pretty little girls, you don’t look like a threat. You don’t look like you’re going to reach out and choke two men simultaneously, one hand on each of their necks.
Her grip is strong. Everything is like she practiced so many times.
When the men are slumped on the ground, not breathing, she turns back to Mulder. “We can keep going,” she says. He doesn’t say anything. He stares at her, but he’s not looking into her eyes. “I said we can keep going.”
“Emily…” he says softly. “You…why did you…why would you…how…”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. And then when he keeps gaping, “It doesn’t matter. If you don’t want something like that to happen again, we shouldn’t stay out in the open.”
When he doesn’t move, she thinks again about ending it here. Maybe they can’t keep what they have going, anymore. But at the last minute, he turns and starts walking again.
She follows him. He glances back at her. The expression on his face when he looks at her is not like it used to be.
She remembers him trying to get in front of her, only a few minutes ago.
He doesn’t want to judge her. He doesn’t. He has no idea what she’s been through. If she’s been traumatized to the point where she sees this as her only option, then it’s not her fault. If they could have saved her…
They don’t speak until she points to a house among the trees. “We should go into that one,” she says. “They still have internet.”
“How do you know?” Mulder asks.
“I do know,” Emily says. He trusts her on that. He’s beginning to think that there’s a lot that he, himself, doesn’t know.
“Do they still have…people?” he asks. He doesn’t want to judge her, but he doesn’t want to see a repeat of what happened with the two men. He really, really doesn’t want to see that.
She takes a few steps closer, cocks her head. “No,” she says. “No people.”
So they go inside, where they’re silent again. They arrange the things they’ve brought with them. He wants to talk to her, but he has no idea how at this point.
Maybe he wouldn’t be so bothered by what had happened if she seemed…moved. But when he looks at her, out of the corner of his eye and as quickly as possible, she doesn’t seem any different from how she seemed yesterday. He doesn’t know whether he should question her behavior or his own perceptions.
She reminded him so much of Scully.
Now he keeps thinking about how strong her hands must be.
That night he dreams about lost little girls.
She still can’t decide what to do. If she got rid of him, she wouldn’t have to deal with him looking at her in this way, like he’s really really sad, like he had a puppy and she threw it off the roof. She didn’t do anything to him. She helped him.
But if she doesn’t get rid of him, maybe she can make him stop looking like that.
She decides to talk to him, for now. About Dana, because that’s what he likes to talk about the most. She scoots over to where he’s sitting. “Tell me more about her,” she says. And then, when he doesn’t say anything right away, “My mom.” She’s never used that word before, because she doesn’t think of it that way. But it’s what he says.
That makes him look up; he even looks her in the face for a minute, but not that long. “What do you want to know?” he asks.
She thinks. “Tell me about something you did together,” she says. “Not something…not when you were working. Something…ordinary.” That was another thing they used to do. Learn how to act like people who were ordinary.
He’s quiet for a minute, and then he says, “For a few years, your mom and I were on the run together.”
That doesn’t sound ordinary, but she’ll let him talk about what he wants to talk about. Get back his trust. “Oh,” she says. “Like us now?”
He looks startled, but then he nods. “A little,” he says. “But…I know it sounds like that would have been a bad time, but really it wasn’t. We’d been apart for a while, and just being together, that meant so much.” Emily watches his face. “So the first year of that, we were somewhere in Colorado, and I wanted to do something special for your mom’s birthday. I wanted to surprise her. So I decided to make her a cake. Which I’d never done before. I’m sure you can see where this is going.”
She makes an oh my gosh face, covering her mouth. Like she knows all about it, about baking a cake when you’ve never done it before.
“We were in a motel with just a kitchenette, so that didn’t help. I tried to do it while she was taking a bath…There was batter and frosting everywhere. But when she came out of the bathroom, she just laughed, and we cleaned everything up. And I’d gotten ice cream, so I had that to give her, at least. And then…it turned out there was a little bar near the hotel, and we went dancing there.” He’s quiet, staring again, this time at something that’s not there. He’s not thinking about Emily.
“You love her,” Emily says, “don’t you?”
“Yeah,” he says. “So much.”
“And she’s my mom,” Emily says. She doesn’t know why she says it, exactly. Maybe to remind him.
“Yes,” he says, “of course.”
“Do you think I’m like her?” Emily asks.
“You look like her,” he says. “A lot like her.” He doesn’t say anything else. Maybe he doesn’t think she can be like Dana, now that he’s changed the way he looks at her.
“I could be like her,” Emily says. “I really could.” She’s still not sure what she means. From the look on his face, he isn’t either. She’s not used to being not sure.
They drift back into their old ways, after a while, the way it was at the first house. You can’t really help it—it’s too hard to avoid someone when you might as well be the only two people in the world. And even though thinking about what happened in the woods makes Mulder uneasy, he still feels protective of Emily too. He almost laughs at himself for that, because at least in terms of physical danger it seems like she doesn’t need any protection, but then he can’t forget that three-year-old girl. He can’t push aside how he thinks Scully would feel, what she would want him to do.
They have internet now, although it’s kind of patchy. A lot of the news sites seem to go down as soon as he clicks on them. Still, he makes what use of it he can, to try to find clues to where Scully might have gone.
Emily watches him. “Did you have a plan?” she asks. “For where you were supposed to meet.” He nods, and she asks, “What happened?”
“It was gone,” he says, trying not to think about the destroyed building, trying even harder not to think about the bodies.
“Do you think she’s looking for us?” Emily asks.
He wonders why she says us, if she thinks Scully could sense her presence. “Yeah,” he says. “Definitely.” Neither of them is going to give up on the other. That’s always been their promise.
“Will she like me?” Emily asks.
“Oh, Emily,” he says. “Of course she will. The two of you, you’ll love each other.” There’s no way that Scully, with her fierce capacity for love, isn’t going to embrace her daughter. No matter what’s happened.
“I’m glad,” Emily says. He thinks there’s something false in her voice. He wonders if he would have thought that, before what happened in the woods.
He tries to think back to those first days again. He remembers something she said. “Didn’t you say you thought she was alive?” he asks.
“What?” Emily says.
“You asked me if she was alive,” he says, “and I said she was, and you said you thought I was right. Emily…is there something you know? Do you have a way to tell if she’s out there?” He looks at her, hoping. Obviously they knew from the start, all those years ago, that Emily wasn’t exactly like other people, but that only made him see her as a kid who needed protecting. Now he knows that she’s able to fend for herself, and he wonders if there are other things she can do too.
Emily looks back at him. “I don’t know anything, exactly,” she says. “I just feel like…I think she is. I think I’d know if she wasn’t.”
“Why?” he asks. He doesn’t know what he expects her to tell him. He doesn’t know if any of this is fair. But he can’t let this chance pass, if it is a chance.
“Because,” she says, “I don’t feel any different. From how I did before. I think I…I think I would feel different if she were dead.”
He isn’t sure he understands, but he wants to. “Do you mean you can feel her?” he asks. “Like you know what she’s doing?”
Emily shakes her head. “It’s not like that,” she says. She sounds a little peeved, as if she shouldn’t have to explain this to him. “Usually I know if people are alive or not, that’s all.”
“What people?” he asks.
“People like me,” Emily says. He doesn’t know what that means either, and he’s about to ask a follow up question when she cuts him off. “You wouldn’t understand at all.” Her voice is final and a little bit fierce.
It’s a strong warning to drop it. He probably would, if she didn’t remind him of her mother, giving him the same kind of warning, times when he tried to ask after her, find out if she was okay. That’s what makes him ask the question. “Do you think you could find more out? Where she is or anything?” She gives him a blank look. “Just try? I know you wouldn’t be promising anything.”
When she speaks, her voice is soft. “Do you really, really want me to?”
There’s only one answer to that. “I do.”
She nods her head, jerkily. Her roots have grown out by now; he can see a lot more of the red, still with the black at the ends. “Then I will.”
“Thank you,” he says. He hugs her; he tried to do it once before, in the first days, but she didn’t seem receptive. Now she leans in. She holds herself stiffly at first, and then more loosely.
Emily knows she can do it. She doesn’t know if she wants to.
It seems like it would mean explaining a lot of things. She doesn’t want to explain them, because Mulder’s already different with her now that he knows even some of the things she can do, and she thinks that would just make him more different. Dana will probably be the same, if they find her. And besides, she shouldn’t have to explain. Even if Dana’s her mom, the two of them are just ordinary people. In the end, this planet isn’t going to be for ordinary people. That’s one of the first things she ever learned.
But when she asked Mulder if he really, really wanted her to, he said he did. That’s why she said she would do it. If nothing else, it will buy her his goodwill, it will buy her his trust, and those things are very important. There’s no reason she can’t keep buying his goodwill and trust for as long as she wants to. They’re not on a deadline here. Things will end when they end.
So she sits and concentrates. It’s not that easy to feel Dana’s presence, because she’s never tried to do it before. There was always something hovering in the back of her mind, but she never really paid attention to it or thought about what it was until Mulder started telling her about Dana and asking her questions. It’s always been behind a lot of noise, from the other Emilys. Their 117 minds all pushing at her.
She tries to push them aside. They trained them all the same way, but she knows she’s better than the other ones. She was the first. She bets none of them can feel Dana. How could they, when they’ve never met her?
She can’t feel all of them. She tries to pick out what’s different. Something’s happened to Emily 47, and to Emily 70, and to Emily 102. She shakes her head. They trained for years for this situation, and they shouldn’t have been stupid enough to get killed. This was supposed to be their time, when they got to go outside and do what they were made for, and have all the ice cream they ever wanted.
Still, it’s only three. They have a good survival rate. She thinks their teachers would be proud.
She tries to get past them, but just then there’s a big surge of adrenaline. Emily 12, she thinks, killing someone. She can see Emily 12 in her mind, for a moment; even though they all look alike, and they’re all supposed to be the same, they never really were. They knew it even if nobody else did. Emily 12 was one of the best with an ax. And she always smiled when she was wielding it.
They were always there, the rest of the Emilys, for almost as long as she can remember. She doesn’t exactly miss them. But even though she’s always wanted to be more special, and maybe meeting Dana will mean that she really is, it’s hard in ways that she doesn’t think any of the rest of them could understand.
She slows her breathing so she can concentrate. She can tell Emily 12 is doing the same, coming down from her high. She tries to breathe with her. Good job, Emily 12, she thinks, and she feels a little flare of warmth, like Emily 12 has heard her, like she’s saying Thanks. It helps her push on.
And then she feels something different, behind all the other Emilys and whatever they’re doing. It’s harder to reach it and at the same time it’s stronger, more intense; it doesn’t blend into noise the way all the Emilys tend to do. It feels more real.
Dana, she thinks, and she concentrates as hard as she can. At first, it’s disembodied; she can’t tell where Dana is or what she’s doing. But she’s alive, Emily can tell that, and she’s all right. She’s worried, tense, on the alert, but she’s not hurt or in immediate danger. She wants to find Mulder, Emily thinks, when she pays close attention, just in the same way Mulder wants to find her. Emily wishes Dana wanted to find her too. She knows Dana doesn’t know she’s here. That Dana is more or less an ordinary person, even if she’s sort of Emily’s mom, and she hasn’t been trained to feel these things, and even if she were trained she probably never could anyway. But Emily wishes she could, for a minute.
As she keeps concentrating, she can see that Dana’s in a room by herself. There’s nothing special about it; it might be another abandoned house, like the one where they are now. She tries to figure out if Dana has a phone or the internet. She can feel her presence now, but that’s the only way Dana will be able to see them back. Then she sees there’s a computer, and she concentrates as hard as she can, and yes, there is internet, and she’ll be able to get in touch with Dana, if she hurries back to their own computer before she loses the feeling.
She slips back through the Emilys into the house. “Mulder!” she calls, and he appears in the doorway. She’d told him to give her some space, but she doesn’t think he can have been very far away.
“Did you find her?” he asks. He looks so hopeful. It makes her almost glad.
“Come quickly,” she says, and she leads him to the computer. She opens the video chat program, and she concentrates. She can hear it start to ring.
She steps back then. She lets Mulder sit in the chair, in front of the screen, even though he’s still looking at her with confusion. Now, in this moment, she doesn’t want to talk to Dana first.
And Dana’s face appears on the screen. “Hello?” she says. “Who is it?” Her eyes widen. “Mulder?”
“It’s me,” he says. Emily steps back further. Maybe this would be a good time to go, to get out of all this. She can tell they’re not paying any attention to her. She could let him live, and go, and never tell anyone about all this. “God, Scully, it’s so good to see you. I was so worried…”
“Me too,” Dana says, softly. She looks like the little bit Emily remembers, just older, that’s all. Emily sees her reach out a hand towards the screen, as if she could touch Mulder through it. “I’ve missed you so much. Where are you?”
“Somewhere in North Carolina,” Mulder says. “What about you?”
“Ohio, I think,” Dana says. “But I don’t understand. How did you know where to call me?”
He’s smiling. “Actually, there’s quite a story behind that,” he says. “Scully, I found someone. Come here,” he calls to Emily. She waits a second, and then she steps forward, even though everything in her is screaming that she’s making a mistake.
When Dana sees her, she looks surprised. And it’s not a good kind of surprised. Emily thinks she remembers her smiling, but she’s not smiling now. Mulder’s still talking. “It’s Emily,” he says, and that makes her mad, somehow. Because she went through her whole mind to find Dana, just to be nice which she didn’t have to do, which she shouldn’t even have done, and now Dana doesn’t even know who she is and she’s not smiling at her like she was smiling at Mulder.
“Mulder,” Dana says, softly. “Have you seen the news?”
“What news?” Mulder asks.
“About the Emilys,” Dana says. Her voice sounds like nothing Emily’s ever heard, but she can tell it’s pain. “They’ve been…they’ve been killing people, Mulder.” Of course he hasn’t heard that news; Emily’s been blocking it every time it comes up.
“They?” Mulder asks.
“There are a lot of them,” Dana says. “They must have created them for this.” She’s still staring at Emily.
“We’ve been together for weeks,” Mulder says, his voice uncertain. “She hasn’t…”
They sound like they’re afraid. People are supposed to be afraid of them—of all of the Emilys. She’s always known that, so she wonders why she’s not happy about it. She pushes Mulder aside so she can get closer to the screen. “I’m different from the rest of the Emilys,” she says. “I’m the first one. I met you and you held me and you gave me your necklace.” She remembers things she never remembered before, while she’s saying it. “I’m the first one. I’m the special one.”
Dana’s face looks softer. “Emily,” she says, “I didn’t mean…I just wanted Mulder to know what was happening. I didn’t mean you weren’t special to me.” Her voice is careful, but maybe there’s something tender in it. “If you knew how much I’ve thought about you…how I’ve wished I could have kept you safe…”
Maybe there’s something tender in it, but it’s too late. Dana’s still upset about what the Emilys can do. And Emily’s no different from the rest of them in that. She’s not special there. When Dana says she wishes she could have kept her safe, Emily knows she’s imagining something, but it’s something so different from what Emily’s ever known that she can’t wrap her head around it, no matter how hard she tries.
She moves back again. “I keep myself safe,” she says.
Dana nods. She doesn’t say she’s proud or anything, which Emily thinks a mother is supposed to do, if her daughter can keep herself safe. “I just wish we could have…”
“We keep ourselves safe,” Emily says. Her and the other Emilys. They’re in the front of her mind for a reason. Dana starts to say something else, she thinks, but she doesn’t know what it’s going to be, because she makes the call cut out.
Then it’s just her and Mulder. He’s watching her, maybe thinking about what Dana told him. “You knew,” she says to him. “Don’t pretend you didn’t know.”
“Emily,” he says. “We’re here together now. Whatever you might have done before, you don’t have to—”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” she says, and she steps towards him. Grabs his shoulders. Her hands are so close to his throat. He doesn’t try to pull away.
She pulls back at the last minute. She doesn’t look at him as she leaves the house.