My Brother's Shadow

Title My Brother's Shadow
Rating PG-13

He figured it was like being a younger sibling – hell, that's what Max kept saying anyway. But not. They weren't a family, 453 – Ben – wasn't his big brother. He'd been an anomaly that had plagued Alec... 494 since he found the darkness.

It'd been bad enough in '09. The guards at Manticore had 'evaluated' all of the X5s who shared genetic markers with the escapees. Evaluation. Such an innocuous term.

Then 453 had started killing, and the evaluation turned to incarceration, turned to experimentation, turned to torture.

And Max still couldn't see why Alec wasn't about to play happy families.