By "soon", the agents meant later that night. Crendan and her partner rapped on the door of the Benning household around 8pm, and Damon let them in.
Without needing to be told, the agents waltzed to the bedroom Damon and Sam shared, knocked briefly, and entered, closing the door behind them.
All of this happened without Ty noticing, but Damon thought he ought to know. And so he found his brother in the living room, telling him Staties had come to take Sam away.
Ty put Helia down quickly but carefully. He reached Sam's room in long sprinting strides. When he opened the door, Sam and the two agents seemed annoyed at his intrusion.
"Yes?" Sam's jaw was tight, but she wasn't distressed. It looked as though Crendan and Zeemo were merely questioning her for the third time.
Ty grasped at the edges of his reasoning for an excuse.
"Nothing really." He grabbed at the first thought. "I thought Helia might be hiding in here."
"Would you allow us the Christian right to privacy, Mr. Benning?" Zeemo asked, illustrating that he had a tongue after all.
The phrasing of his question put Ty off guard.
"Sure, no problem." He closed the door on his way out.
Damon hovered behind him. He elbowed the younger Benning in the chest. As Damon complained, Ty dragged him to the master bedroom.
"They didn't come to take her, stupid."
Unfazed, Damon kept his air of superiority.
"They're not here for tea and composite cookies either. Something's up."
An hour later, the agents left, without Sam in their custody. Ty and Damon watched them go. After the front door clicked shut, the two men went to see how Sam was doing.
She sat on her bed, her face white.
Ty asked if they had done anything. Sam shook her head. He then asked what they had come for. Did they know about the clone? Sam shook her head.
"What the hell? What'd they want?" Damon asked.
Sam tossed a business card on the desk, the heavy cardstock scraping against the wood surface. Ty picked up the card to read:
PROMINENT CHURCH 102. JOIN OUR FAMILY.
"They asked me all the same shitty questions they did the first time, about how I ended up at Good Time, about my supposed attack, or if I remembered anything. Bastards."
She explained how the interview had progressed from questions to a physical violation. Crendan had wanted to take her biometric information by scanning her eyes with a strange pen-like device. When Sam had refused, the Agents had accused her of Un-Diligent Conduct, a punishable offense, unless she elected to attend Church for an undetermined period of repentance. Crendan had called it a re-education camp.
The agents had referred her to Prominent Church 102. Sam was expected to be present for services every Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday.
"Are you serious?" Ty wasn't sure he was hearing her right.
As further proof, she handed over a thin sheet of paper. It looked like a speeding citation, only it was a much worse sort of citation. The ticket re-stated everything Sam had told them. Prominent Church 102 was listed in bold letters.
"This can't be real " Ty said, re-reading the ticket for the tenth time.
"It's our fault," Damon said.
Ty waited to hear his brother blame him yet again for all their troubles, but Damon continued, speaking in generalities.
"We out-sourced the police force to these Prominents to curtail some of the mass shootings. In return for a marginal amount of safety, we got these fanatics, and now we have to follow their rules."
Sam nodded, agreeing with Damon for perhaps the first time of her existence. "I feel like they came here looking for a fucking excuse to force me into going to this cunt of a church. Or camp, whatever the fuck they call it."
In Ty's view, this was potentially good news. Maybe the Agents had decided Sam's story was true (her being assaulted at Good Time), and they wanted to save her soul, the one thing hardcore Prominents felt compelled to do.
"I don't think that's it at all," Damon said. "They know everything, and they're fucking with us."
"But why?" Damon had crazy ideas, and Ty needed clarification on his latest one.
"How the hell should I know? I'm not a Prominent-mastermind, but I am smart enough not to clone a version of myself, a damn female version nonetheless."
Sam got in Damon's face. "Damn female version? What's that mean?"
But Damon wasn't intimidated. "Oh, step off it, feminist."
Sam scoffed. "I remember how people treated me when I had a cock, the superiority. Now, I want to be treated like a human being, and not thought of in terms with what's between my legs. Is that feminism?"
Damon ignored the central question of Sam's argument.
"I can't get through to it, Ty," he told his brother.
"I'm not an 'it', you douche!"
"You don't get it!" Damon was suddenly as loud and animated as Ty had ever seen him. "I'll never see you as anything other than an 'it'! You weren't born. You were created with radiation and an adhering of chemical and elemental properties. Man or woman, you're nothing to me but a warped science experiment."
There was more yelling on Sam's end, but Damon heard none of it. He shook his head in disgust and left the room.
"Little arrogant fuck." Sam was panting in her anger. "Think's I'm a thing." She appealed to Ty. "Is that how you see me? Am I a thing?"
Though he wanted to lie, he found he couldn't.
"I did feel at first, but now...I don't know."
She sighed and sat on the bed. "It's better than Damon's shitty answer."
Sam was quiet for a long time. Ty was about to leave the room when she asked, "Am I just a thing?"
Ty sat next to her. He thought about what she said, and how best to answer. Finally, he came up with an answer.
"You have your own thoughts, feelings, desires. Isn't that what makes us human?"
Kindness gave his words weight, a weight Sam took note of.
"Startin' to sound like a fag." She was only half joking.
Ty cleared his throat noisily.
"What a word choice." He handed her the business card. "You're certainly going to have to convince those Prominents at Church 102 that you're human, aren't ya?"
Sam smiled. "You're goddamn right."
"You'd better work on what you're gonna wear."
She glanced down at her button-down shirt and khaki pants, pulled together with a green neck-tie.
"Why does every shithead in this town keep telling me that?"
"Sometimes shitheads have a point."
"No, shitheads are too full of shit to make sense."
To her point, Ty mustered no counter-argument.
~*~
A/N: Sometimes shitheads do have a point, and I think that bears repeating :D