Megan Young was born in a small industrial town in Ohio in 1969. Her parents both worked for the local canning factory to bring in enough money to scrape by and feed Megan and her four siblings. Megan, the middle child, was easygoing and largely either bullied or ignored by the other kids, something of an odd man out — bright, inquisitive, always buried in her books. But those books made all the difference. At 15, she won a literature contest that earned her a small scholarship to a college of her choice. At just shy of 18 (1988), she graduated valedictorian of her high school class of thirty-four. With two small scholarships along with an AFROTC scholarship to pay her way, Megan went to UNC-Chapel Hill for their nursing program and graduated magna cum laude in 1991, just in time for Operation Desert Storm/Shield. Serving her active-duty military term entirely on German and Turkish soil, Megan left active duty in 1999 and proceeded to head to the New York area to serve in the Reserves (McGuire AFB, NJ) until her full contract term was up in 2009. She has been deployed to active duty in Haiti in 2002, the Indian Ocean in 2004, and when the Bomb went off in 2006 she was considered activated for that event as well. In January 2009, she was finally released from duty.
Upon arrival in New York in 1999, Megan began working at St. Luke's hospital as an emergency room nurse. She has served the hospital in this capacity since then, seeing all kinds of tragedy from the World Trade Center bombs to the Evolved situation to the Washington Irving disaster. In 2005, shortly before the public acknowledgment of the existence of the Evolved happened, Megan was put in a position that now shapes her career. During a "routine" crazed Friday night in the ER, Megan was working on a patient who had been brought in by ambulance. The patient was little more than a child, perhaps 14, and had been caught in a drive-by shooting. Both lungs were hit, and he had massive internal injuries. When he flat-lined, it did not shock Megan a bit… what did shock her is that as she covered him up afterward, he reached up and pulled the sheet back down. Meeting her eyes, he looked at her with a desperate expression. 'Help me!' he mouthed. But… he wasn't breathing! Grabbing a stethoscope, Megan listened for a heartbeat and found a very very faint, shallow one. Calling for a doctor and more units of blood, she immediately pulled a team in to help the boy. Ultimately, they saved his life. As he recovered in the hospital, it became clear that the reason for that was that he had a healing ability — very low-level, just enough to keep himself from dying, but it was there. It helped him mend faster than expected, as well, though not so terribly much faster that he could just jump and run away. On his eighth day in the hospital, the Men in Black showed up and started asking questions. And Megan, listening to the kinds of questions asked, made a split-second decision. She was leaving shift anyway, and she slipped into the room to get the boy out.
In the stairwell, Megan and the boy — Chris Jones — ran into a young brunette woman. She seemed shocked to find Megan already helping Chris out, but not looking a gift horse in the mouth, she stepped up. The two women got Chris out, and Megan was introduced to the Underground Railroad of the twenty-first century. Stunned at the breadth of the operation, and at the number of Evolved that appeared to actually exist, Megan took a couple of days to decide what to do. But she could see the writing on the wall, and she agreed to become another link on the Ferry. Her position at the hospital gives her a unique vantage point, and she calls in help whenever someone comes in alone and potentially in need.
Though she took a hiatus from the hospital to take on a position with Chicago Air as a nurse and base commander in 2009, the company went belly-up. She then went on to take a full-time position at the Suresh until September 2010, when she determined that she could not in good conscience continue to stay in light of the knowledge that the hated Institute was stealing people right out of the place. She does continue to volunteer her time there because the PEOPLE who go need the services she can provide, but she has resumed a position in St. Luke's emergency room as one of the senior nurses on the floor. She doesn't want to do management, so she's content being not the boss.
