Kait always hated this time of year. The lights, the candy canes, the fat men with fake beards and fuzzy red suits, the reindeer, the trees, the presents, all of these things danced around obnoxiously in store windows, on signs, on big screens, and everywhere throughout he city. To most kids, these things spelled excitement and anticipation. For Kaitlyn, it felt like everyone was making a collective effort to taunt her. Hey, kid, check out all this cool stuff that Santa Claus and your parents could get you this year. Or, would, if Santa Claus and your dad didn't both hate you.

When she was eight, the big jerk didn't even care enough to give her coal for Christmas anymore. Now, seeing all these stupid red-clad fat men made her want to blast their stupid fake beards right off their stupid faces and whack them on their stupid heads with those stupid bells they kept ringing.

That said, there was something kind of ironic about what Kaitlyn was doing right now. Dressed in an almost festively red coat, she was getting ready to give a heavy backpack full of shiny new toys to all the girls and boys in the Oracle shop. Only, the "toys" were actually listening devices and transmitters and all the cool stuff Lisa helped her get. Alister needed Kaitlyn to bring all of them. The future of the world depended on it.

When she got to the shop, it was still early. As in, before-the-shop-was-supposed-to-open, early. She knocked on the front door.

Alister had kicked him out. Apparently, copying a light based heat power was not conducive to sleeping and something about having two Crows was really freaking Julia out. It hadn't bothered Jude any, but it did get him exiled from the bunk room to the front room's purple couch.

That was where he was when he heard the knock since he had been so rudely jabbed in the ribs and told to move. On the purple couch buried under a fleece blanket that was far too short to over both his feet and his shoulders.

"I am going to kill Calley." Kill him dead. Then he could never ruin one of Jude's mornings again. The frenchman peeled his face away from the couch arm and ran his hands through his hair where it stuck up on one side. He'd ditched Crow's power for Elias' even though that would mean a trip to see Chase soon. Shark teeth was the easiest mutation to sleep through.

He slung the fleece around his shoulders like a cape and opened the door for the cat boy. Only, it wasn't cat boy. "Kaitlyn." Jude changed his fleece tactic from cape to boxer shorts cover up. "Uh. Come in. Let me help withs zat." He scrubbed his eyes and tucked the blanket around him like a towel before helping with the big, bulky bag.

Kaitlyn didn't recognize the man who met her at the door. He was twenty-something years old, and he had the same kind of teeth as Elias. This wasn't Elias. The accent seemed familiar, though. She decided she would hold off on asking his name until she was really sure that she didn't know who he was.

Either way, it was a real relief to not have to carry that thing anymore. Her shoulders were starting to hurt. As soon as they set the bag down, she started taking stuff out of it. A laptop. An antenna doohicky that fit into the laptop's USB thing. A power chord. "I put a bug in Sebastian's new room," she said proudly as the laptop started to turn on. "We can listen to it from here, and he should be waking up soon. Can I plug this in somewhere?"

Suddenly, she realized where she'd heard this guy's accent before: Jude had the same kind of accent!

They probably knew each other really well!

So this was a great opportunity to ask about him.

"Does Jude already know what Sebastian did?"

A bug? In Sebastian's room? Jude was more than happy to help her find a plug. He had to move one of the plush purple chairs, but there was one there. He remembered seeing it when he future gazed them setting up the Christmas tree... which would go right in front of the table where the kids usually did their homework.

> "Does Jude already know what Sebastian did?"

Was that a trick question? "I know Sebastian went crazy and moved in withz a brown haired girl." Maybe it was talk in third person day and someone forgot to tell him? The Frenchman plugged in her power cord and came back to the glowing screen that was would give him answers.

"How did you know we've been watching zem? Or even get ze listening device in his room?" She was a Christmas angel. Seriously. She came out of nowhere and brought presents!

It was notable that this guy didn't say anything about Jude; he only talked about what he knew himself. Kaitlyn took that as a statement of what all of them knew, as a group. And if that was really all they knew... oh man did she have a lot to tell them about!

First, she was going to tell him about listening devices and sitting on invisible people. She sat down on the couch and set the laptop atop her lap.

"Katrina told me!" She explained, a little bit too excitedly for this early in the day. "We were both spying on Sebastian and following him on a bus, and I accidentally sat on her, 'cause she was invisible. Then she brought me here."

Finally, she could type in her password! Computers took forever to turn on. After a few clicks on the keyboard, she kept talking, this time about the bug. "Before all that, I got one of the guys in the Sanctuary to pretend he was my brother, and he had to babysit me. That's how I got into the gym. And when everyone was working out, I picked the lock on Sebastian's door and sneaked in, and then I taped the bug under his bed!" Kaitlyn was so proud of herself, she was almost beaming.

Blink. "Well zat is one way to do it." Now Jude was wondering how many people were following Sebastian around. So far the count was up to two at least.

He tried to catch the password she typed in, but all he really saw was that there was an "A" in it... at least, he thought he saw the A key go down. Now he was even second guessing that.

"So you're still at ze Sanctuary zen?" Jude was just trying to make polite conversation, really, since he wasn't sure where the whole listening device under the be thing was going. He remembered dropping her off there with Ghost and thinking that he was lucky to have someone adopt him. Of course, that was back when they were both kids. Now at least one of them was grown up.

"Fight any pirates lately?"

Even though the password was in, they still hade to wait a while before the laptop could actually start doing things. Sometimes, this wait really bothered Kaitlyn, but at least the laptop was faster than the computers in the Sanctuary library.

Was she still at the Sanctuary? This question made Kait pause. The "still" implied that they had talked some time before, and that she was in the Sanctuary then, too. Kaitlyn knew for a fact that this guy didn't live at the Sanctuary himself; the Sanctuary residents were a tight-knit bunch. Kaitlyn would have known him immediately if that were the case. Though there was something familiar about him...

"Yep," she answered, finally. Not knowing who this guy was was starting to drive her crazy.

When he made that pirate remark, Kaitlyn started to connect the dots. He was a lot older, now, but he still looked... and those eyes... and the hair... and the face... but... he couldn't... and...

"Jude?" Her exclamation was equal parts surprise and disbelief. This couldn't possibly be Jude.

But he was.

"How did you get so... old?"

"I told you I was older." He reminded her in the most kind voice he could muster. Yes. Playing pirates and princesses had been fun, but as an adult he could do some more fun things. Also some less fun things, but mostly more fun since people stopped questioning why a kid was alone wandering around.

"And I'm a mutant now." Okay. He grinned because he couldn't help but brag a little. Also, because Kaitlyn was a friend. Not one he had seen often, but they were pals.

The adult in him realized that she hadn't recognized him. She'd just walked in off the street to the shop of a half clothed man and started spilling her secrets to him. He should have told her to be more careful with sensitive information. Instead, he found himself teasing her. "Guess what I can do!" It sure wasn't the psychic stuff he'd told her about before. That was the future. This was the now.

"But... but..."

Okay, he was a mutant now. But, no, Jude wasn't that much older. That was wrong. Kaitlyn knew that it was wrong. She knew this because she had spent five hours with Jude about a year ago. This made her qualified to judge these kinds of things about him. It's also worth mentioning that she didn't have a crush on him, despite anything that one or two other Sanctuary residents might have said at any point. A crush that she didn't have was not affecting her judgement here. Or, rather, it couldn't affect her judgement. Because it didn't exist.

Also, she knew he wasn't older because "...you said you dreamed you were older. In a dream. That's not the same thing." And it wasn't the same thing. She looked him in the eyes when she said this, for emphasis.

Jude actually being that old now made everything weird. It made things weird because of reasons. Reasons that weren't crushes, because those kinds of things simply weren't present in this situation. Boys were gross and they had cooties, so Kaitlyn wouldn't have a crush on one. Exhibit A: Stephen, the rat boy. He was gross, and he had cooties, and possibly bubonic plague. She read once that rats carried bubonic plague, and Stephen was a rat mutant, so he probably carried the plague. He was also a boy, and so was Jude. So Jude probably carried plague too, like all boys, who were also gross and who had cooties and who were not being crushed on by any eleven-year-old Orderlings.

This is stupid. Jude is stupid. Crushes are stupid. Everything is stupid. Kait glared at the laptop's stupid screen. The stupid program still hadn't loaded. She was starting to get irritated at how stupid all of this was. Because it was stupid.

>>"Guess what I can do!"

What a stupid thing to say. Kaitlyn already knew what kind of stupid mutant Jude was. He told her the day they met. He could...

Jude. Was a telepath. That meant. That he could read minds. Was probably reading minds. Her mind. Right now. And was reading her mind the whole time. And was probably looking into all of her other thoughts, and her memories, and...

Kait winced. Her face turned a little bit red.

"...You can read minds?" She managed to squeak. She also managed to not blow up the Oracle shop at that moment, which, in retrospect, was pretty cool. Though Kaitlyn was a a bit too distracted to notice the decidedly not-blown-up state that her surroundings were in.

"I am zis old." He insisted. "I'm twenty-somesing. Seriously." Why did everything Kaitlyn did make him feel twelve again? "It wasn't just a dream. I lived it. I am old." He didn't know how to explain it any better than that. He felt this old. Why couldn't he be this old?

"Turnz out I'm not a psychic." He was quick to reassure her because, well, she sounded pretty nervous about the whole mind reading thing. She even turned red and that meant she had been thinking something really good. Rats. What a time to not be a psychic!

"Not right now. I mean, I could be if I wanted to." Just like he could be old if he wanted to. "I can copy powers. See?" He opened his mouth real big and showed off his pointy shark teeth. Not normal, right? Totally copied from a shark boy. He would show her, but he was asleep right now... "You exsplode, right? I could exsplode to show you too, but I don't want to ruin what we just fixed here." Uhm... so if she wanted him to prove it, really there wasn't a good option...

What were they doing again? Oh right. The computer. "So zis sing is listening to Sebastian." That was a much safer topic, really. His getting old just didn't sit all that well with people who knew him young.

He wasn't a psychic. And the power-copying thing sure explained his teeth. Kaitlyn felt like she really should have caught on to that earlier. Jude had Elias's teeth, so of course he was doing some kind of power-copying thing, and not a mind-reading thing. She exhaled in relief. She was relieved about this because, if Jude was a telepathic psychic person, he would be able to steal her Order secrets right out of her head. But he couldn't do that, because he wasn't a telepath. This was why Kaitlyn was relieved. Not for any other reasons.

Anyway, listening devices. Jude was asking about them.

"It isn't listening to him right now," she explained. "It only listens when they're talking. Then it records what they said, and then we can listen to it later. Like..." She clicked through a few menus, then double clicked on a sound file that was supposed to be from a few nights ago. The laptop's cheap speakers crackled to life, as if warming themselves up for the earth-shattering revelations about to blast forth from them.

"Move over," whispered a voice in the recording. Though the sound quality was low, Kaitlyn could tell that this was a woman's voice. Noel's voice. Kaitlyn knew her name because of this recording.

"Oh, sorry," Sebastian's voice whispered back. There was a rustling of sheets, then ten seconds of silence before the recording cut out.

Actually, maybe this wasn't the right recording. It was one of the ones from that night, anyway. Kaitlyn suddenly felt the need to prove that this listening device thing was actually useful. "In one of the other ones, he called her 'Noel,'" she mentioned. "That's her name." That was useful. What else did she know about Noel, that Jude might not know?

"Also, I... uhh... I think he tried to... do it with her, right there, when this place got wrecked and all of you weren't here that one time." Kait pointed at a spot by the table a few meters from where they were sitting. It was clear that she found the mere thought of anyone doing it, or anything related to that activity, completely repulsive. Earlier, Kaitlyn intended not telling Jude about that, but it seemed like something Jude might want to know. And that he might be able to handle knowing about, now that he was exactly twenty-something years old.

Jude's eyebrows furrowed. Sheets rustling? And they were both heard talking... like close proximity talking. They were in the same bed and that was entirely alarming. What about Ghost? Why didn't Sebastian care about Ghost anymore?

"Noël." Jude repeated the name Kaitlyn supplied so that he would not forget it. Christmas. What a stupid name. "Did you meet her?"

Kaitlyn had one better.

> "Also, I... uhh... I think he tried to... do it with her, right there..." She even was able to point out the very spot. Which was close by. Way, way too close by. Jude scooted over a bit just to be safely out of range.

"Ewww. Zat's my... ewww. Are you sure it was him? Are you sure it wasn't her making ze moves? She looks crafty to me." Not that he had seen her up close ever. But she just looked that way. "I bet she has him under a spell." What a witch. That had to be it. "I'm so relieved that you came to tell me about the witchy spell Sebastian is under. That explains a lot."

Jude scrubbed his eyes. This was just another sleepless night in a string of many. He was entirely too old for this. "Will you stay here, Kait? Or do you have to go back somewhere?"

Kaitlyn wasn't sure where Jude was coming up with all this 'spell' stuff. It would probably seem a lot nicer to him than the truth, but it wasn't the truth, and she wanted to tell him the truth. Alas, she didn't have time to set him straight before he tried to change the subject.

"Alister just told me to bring all this stuff, and he said he'd tell me how I have to help. I dunno if he wants me to stay." There certainly wasn't anywhere else she had to go back to. Though she really wanted to go back to the Sanctuary tonight, if Alister told her she had to stay, she would. Kait needed to get Alister's trust. Lori was counting on her.

And Jude still had to know the truth. He deserved to know. "...And, uh, actually... Sebastian... I mean, Noel didn't... she didn't sound like she wanted to. She had to hit him over the head with something to make him stop... I dunno why she brought him home with her." There was very little Kaitlyn knew about romance or its subtleties. Even so, she had the feeling that girls aren't supposed to like guys who try to force them to do it. And they definitely aren't supposed to take off their dresses for those kinds of guys; at least, not voluntarily, anyway.

"Actually, I guess he was holding a sword when he asked her where she lived, so..."

Nöel hit him and then Sebastian took her away at sword point? Did he hear that right? Jude tapped his hears just in case. No. They didn't seem to be full of anything.

"So… she iz a hostage?" But the rustling sheets and the request to move over… that didn't sound like this Nöel was chained up or anything. "Or at least she's not ze one making demands." If Jude was a balloon it was this news that deflated him. If it wasn't Nöel's fault, then it had to be Sebastian's.

"But… he isn't like zis." It just didn't make sense.

Jude really shouldn't have sent him away, but the dude was immortal. He'd figured sending him home to take care of Ghost was the absolute safest place for him. It wasn't as if he could die. Physically. What was wrong with him? He'd failed at keeping Ghost safe, failed at keeping his pregnant wife safe. What kind of man did that?

"He didn't used to be…" Jude picked at a hole in the heel of his sock as the cogs turned in his head and he fount off another yawn. This wasn't a conversation for this late at night, but like it or not it was the conversation that was happening. "You don't sink, he was pretending before, do you?"

Did someone do something to make him a different man or was this how he really was all along? He and Ghost might have been too naive to tell the difference.

If Jude had Ghost or if Ghost were to talk to Sebastian, Jude was sure they would be able to figure something out. But she was still missing in action. Not dead. Just missing.

Jude wasn't taking all of this very well. He obviously had a lot of respect for Sebastian, and Kaitlyn couldn't blame him, judging from how much the unicorn man seemed to care. She couldn't imagine her own father searching for her as intensely or for as long as Sebastian searched for Jude. Or, really, caring about her at all either way. Was all of that caring actually just pretending?

"I think... I dunno. I thought he cared about Ghost, but... then he tried to kill her."

There wasn't an easy way to say that, but Jude probably already knew about it. It was on the news.