The door of the escape hatch opened slowly. It had been a long time since he felt the cool caress of fresh air. He longed to feel the warmth of the sun, but that would come soon enough. He gazed around curiously, searching for something recognizable to indicate which planet he was on, and saw the three silvery moons in the black sky. Right back where he had started in this nightmare into the twilight zone, he groused. The ride down had been rough, he had no idea that the pod had been unable to clear the shield of the ha'tak, and had been pulled along with it. He could only surmise that he had never cleared the damned thing, because the smoking hulk was about half a mile away. He pulled himself out of the pod. He had to know. If he had been successful, and that sarcophagus had worked...

The stone lid opened with a grinding sound. She sat up, looked around. Poked her mind. Free! She was free of that damned thing! For the first time in a year she was once again alone in her mind, in complete control. She climbed from the sarcophagus. Whoever had put her in here must not have realized that Shai was dead. It took her a few seconds to realize that something was wrong. Very wrong. It was too quiet.

She was weaponless, but then, as the leader of Hathor's stellar cartographers, she wouldn't need a weapon. If she could just keep them believing that Shai was alive...she nearly panicked when she realized that without the symbiote, her voice and eyes would betray who...and what she really was.

The sound of someone attempting to open the door had sapphire blue eyes searching the room for anything that could be used as a weapon. Before she could find anything suitable, the door opened enough for a man to crawl through.

"Colonel?"

"Captain?"

Drawn like magnets, the two rushed across the room and into one another's arms. She began to cry.

"Shh, it's okay. Damned thing is down, Sam. We're free," Jack whispered softly.

"What?"

"We're on Abydos."

Footsteps in the corridor outside of the room had them ducking behind the sarcophagus.

"Kawalsky...Ferretti...Brown?"

The two happily followed Skaara into the corridor. The others of the tribe greeted them with surprise and joy. These strangers had made survival possible. If they were back, then the gods were truly smiling on them.

Like it did each time she thought about it, and the handsome men who had warned her away, Sha're's heart skipped a beat. She began to tell her friends what had occurred after their capture.

She stumbled into the temple, half dead. There had been no escape pods when she had raced for them as the ship lurched beneath her feet. When she found those who had taken them, she would kill them with her bare hands. It had been sheer luck that she had survived the crash of her largest ship. Madness had taken hold among her Jaffa, who spoke of ghosts and demons and witched staff weapons. The fools had barricaded themselves into the cargo holds. Which had been sheared from the ship as it tore across the sand of the desert floor.