The first time I entered New Eden looking for Athan, I'd gone through 'relocation', the amnesty program that New Eden was supposed to represent. I'd found the process a bit painful, even as I cooperated with them at every possible stage, but understood the necessity of them tearing apart and confiscating my belongings, interrogating me for the nature of my powers and relations, asking me the same questions a thousand times a thousand ways to see if they could catch me in a lie.

Uncomfortable as that was, I learned quickly that it was honestly a pleasant experience compared to what those brought in by force might expect.

I was cuffed, gagged, blindfolded, and stripped. I was paraded barefoot through chamber after chamber, my bound hands unable to give myself even a sliver of modesty, as I heard voices and machines at work, doing unknowable work past my blindfold. Every time I was shoved forward into a new room, I found myself completely still, my brain grasping at the unknowable. Were there hundreds of eyes on me? Was there a machine scanning every crevice of my body? If some light turned red instead of green, would they snuff me out then and there?

I didn't know, and not knowing was almost the worst of everything else happening to me. At one point, the cuffs holding my arms behind me separated, pulling my arms wide, pinning me spread-eagle in the air while something whirred and clanked around me. I could feel cold air pushed past my skin when it moved, could hear the snap-snap of small machinery delicately adjusting as it did...whatever it did.

Took pictures of me, maybe, I thought, two rooms later, as I was blasted with decontaminating powders and fluids. The snapping maybe the opening and closing of a lens aperture. My age and undress didn't matter -- I wasn't a minor, I wasn't even a human. I was a thing to be documented and feared.

It was completely dehumanizing. I felt like meat being processed post-slaughter. And even when I was dressed and allowed to drop to my knees and the gag and blindfold were removed, the sensation of emptiness, of violation, lingered inside me for a long, long time, like a chill I couldn't get out of my core.

It was a few hours before I realized I was in a holding cell. I'd assumed this was just another in the series of probing and testing rooms, sterile metal and cold floors. It was only the fact that nothing had happened to me for a long time that tipped me off, and I finally looked around, distracted from what I saw by my disturbed thoughts.

A bed. A sink. A toilet, all built into the walls. A door which, if anything, appeared even more solid than the rest of the cell. A square light in the ceiling, embedded beyond a grate. Drain holes in the floor. Four walls, eight corners, no way out.

I touched the door and found it completely smooth and cold, recoiling at the sensation and wrapping my hand in my muted orange gown as though burned. Outside, I could still hear distant yelling and the sounds of action. They were much louder when I was being processed, but it was a lot further from my mind then.

This probably wasn't their typical processing flow, I hoped. I'd have expected a lot more questions and hands-on treatment, things I had prepared to face, but right now the city was in an uproar about the PA-system we'd activated. I imagined that right now, there were a lot of very deaf, very pissed Exhumans who were none-too-happy with the XPCA, and a bunch of XPCA whose tech wasn't functioning properly in range of the speaker-poles, trying to sort things out.

Which left other concerns like new prisoners a distant second. They wouldn't open the gates for any reason right now, not the least of which to add me to their current situation.

Thinking was nice. Getting out of my own head and situation a little. I looked around again, this time a little more alert and aware. This was the admission block. Somewhere around here were Jack and Rito, and the whole reason I'd broken out and back in. The whole reason I'd overridden the broadcast system...the whole reason I was still in New Eden.

I ran the sink and splashed some water on my face. I had to sober up. I could deal with the fact that the XPCA had just scanned and documented my every freckle, scar, and hair later. If I got out of here, if I reunited with AEGIS, we could delve their records and purge every inch of my skin from their servers. Those were ifs, they would never happen if I didn't pull myself together.

I shivered again as the water did nothing to wash away my shame and disgust. But shame and disgust were just feelings. Just like others I pushed away constantly. They weren't real things, not like this cell and the people outside of it were. That was what mattered.

I dug through my mess of hair until I felt one that was a little different to the touch, impossible to discern by any other means, and felt myself making stupid faces as I tried to isolate it from the others. They'd shaved the prisoners here once, but that turned out to be a bad idea as it kind of just advertised that anyone with hair was a 'sellout' and anyone without was a 'criminal'. There were certainly gangs here, but the XPCA decided they didn't really need to contribute to the problem.

Which worked for me, as I pulled the strand free, tugging it from where it was glued to my head, and nursing the sore spot for a moment with my fingertips. I felt around until I confirmed I was holding the right end, and then crushed the base of it.

Ironic, that they subjected me to so many scans out of fear of my powers and yet weren't prepared for future tech like this. The type of super-secret spy gadget that Taglock could be depended on to have and know about; a device so slim and sleek, probably even made of the same stuff as of hair, completely undetectable, almost even to me, and I knew it was there.

I looked around, wondering where the cameras in my cell were, and if I should even care. With things so hectic inside the city right now, would they even notice that I was screwing around with my hair? Would they even care?

As the minutes passed and nobody came, I had to assume not. I'd laid the strand to rest on the floor and was sitting on the bed waiting. Five minutes. Six. Seven. I counted the seconds in my head.

And then I heard a scraping noise, like metal grating on metal. I tensed, hoping nobody came at the last second, drawn by the noise. But nobody did, and soon, I saw it.

It almost looked like a centipede, long and writhing, with many legs that I knew weren't really legs but rather plasma emitters, allowing it to press itself against walls or ceilings as though they were a floor. Almost like Karu's jetpack, except a thousandth the size, and wriggling, and burrowing through the door to my cell with atomic-honed blades.

The infiltration drone shimmered and disappeared as soon as it was through, repurposing the power from its blades back to its optical camo, invisible as it had been all through the base to this point. I watched with fascination as...well, as nothing I could see crawled along the ground directly towards the strand I'd bent and left there. And upon reaching the beacon -- for that was what the strand was -- it decloaked again and...unfolded.

I was on it in an instant, pulling supplies out of the drone, all bundled and wrapped to fit in the compartment no wider than my finger. Two small clasps, a handful of strips which looked like tape, and many, many things which I left in the drone, about the size of my thumb and covered in warning text.

I had to run my fingers over the floor a few times to find the beacon strand, but when I did, I straightened it out, turning it off, and the drone disappeared at once, closing up and dashing right back out of the room. While he went, I tore off a few strips of the tape and began to apply it to my door, framing a small square at the base, just larger than I could crawl through.

And then again, I waited. Taglock always liked to remind me that about ninety percent of infiltration was waiting. "Some people call it luck," he'd told me once. "That the patrol just turned away, or just happened to round the corner. But if you know everything there is to know, there is no luck. There is only patience."

And so I waited, my heart pounding and my fingers on the backing of the tape, while the drone scuttled out there somewhere. I waited and waited and waited, my fingers twitching at every sound, my brain inventing a thousand failure scenarios, and my chest bursting with adrenaline.

And then, even though I'd been waiting for it, the sound of an explosion caught me by surprise. It was nearby, and it was loud, the dozens of explosive cells I'd left in the drone detonated as one. I ripped off the backing of the tape and took a few steps back, watching as the strips seethed and bubbled, the black material reacting with the air and beginning to swell.

At first it just looked like I'd made a very square mess, but as the reaction continued, the square began to glow yellow, and then red, and then white, as the parts of the door in direct contact with the tape literally melted and began to run across the floor as liquid metal, shiny and chrome, flowing down the drain on the floor with a hiss and a plume of acrid steam.

And then a thunk as the chunk of metal I'd framed fell away, the edges of it still bubbling and foaming and melting, but there was a hole in my door now, I could see into the hall beyond. I gave the tape another few minutes to start cooling down, and for the flow of liquid metal to subside, before crawling through.

Only burning both my elbows and the tips of my hair in the process. But what are you gonna do?

It was smokey out here, a caustic smoke that burned a little, so I stayed crouched and kept the collar of my gown pulled over my nose. The drone had exploded in the hallway adjacent, blocking off this entire row of cells with a tangled gnarl of concrete, rebar, and sparking wires. Alarms were blaring and the lights in here were flashing amber. I could hear crews working at the wreckage, people shouting at each other, issuing orders and demanding updates.

And as I emerged, they took notice. Many of the orders being barked were at me, telling me to get back into my cell. Some even pointed guns at me through the wreck, but I just strolled out of their sight, counting cell numbers as I went.

Until I reached the one I'd seen before. The cell number on the report I'd borrowed from a guard friend of mine. I unrolled a few more pieces of tape and settled in.

This time I burned myself a little less, looking up as I passed through the hole and meeting eyes with the man inside. Closed eyes, anyway.

Honestly, I hardly recognized him, but that didn't stop me from giving him a smile anyway.

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"Hello, Lia," he said through a smile. "Fancy seeing you here."

"Oh Jack," I found myself saying. It was hard to focus on his face when there were so many other parts of his body that demanded address.

He looked like he'd been beaten with an exosuit, numerous times, his limbs hung off his body at odd angles and there was more black and blue shine on his skin than not. The only of his wounds that was dressed in any fashion was on his chest, above his heart, but even the bandages for that were black with ancient blood, and yellowing with must. I had to wonder what the point was of doing surgery on him was if they were just going to beat him, but as someone who'd never beat anyone, it was just kind of out of my realm.

I walked over to the bed where he was reclined and reached out to him on instinct, feeling the same dehumanized sense of wrongness again that pervaded this place. He'd just been dumped in this cell like this?

"It's not so bad," he coughed.

"It IS so bad! You look awful."

"Maybe," he grinned at me with a smile now missing a tooth. "But I did earn it."

"What do you mean?"

"I killed a few dozen men on my recapture. And then another dozen when they tried to process me. I dare say it made me something of an unpopular sort with the management here."

"Oh Jack," I found myself repeating. "Why? Why did you do all this? Make such a mess, cause all this trouble, kill all those people?"

He smiled broadly. "Why not?" he shrugged. "I made sure Steffie was safe and then they refused to so much as hear me out. There are only so many times you can try talking to someone and having them attempt to fight before you stop talking. Nobody was willing to offer me an explanation, nobody would take my calls or respect who I was or what I'd done. In an instant, it was like I'd turned Exhuman all over again. Suddenly the distrust and resentment which was always there was set loose, and they were after my blood."

He shrugged heavily, and I frowned at the pain behind his smile.

"Steffie's waiting for you in New Eden. Come on," I told him. I sat next to him and gingerly helped him up.

He didn't take my help, just stared at me blankly. "No she's not. That's impossible. She was safe."

I blinked at him. "Yes, she is. She helped me to come rescue you."

"She can't be," he laughed, though it wasn't a laugh like I'd ever heard. "You must be mistaken."

"Uh, Jack?"

"Yes?"

"She's right in the city. Come on."

"No, she was safe. She was supposed to stay safe. There's no way she'd come into danger like this."

I scratched my head in frustration, which reminded me that the tips of some of my hair was burned. This wasn't supposed to be the complicated part of the plan. "Okay, dude, listen. She. Is. There. We are busting you out--"

"Which is impossible."

"--and then you join her--"

"Which is impossible."

"--and then we all get out together. What the heck?"

He pointed at the black bandage on his chest and glowered at me. "There is a bomb in my chest. If I leave this room, if I irritate anybody in the XPCA...heck, your entry into this room, if discovered, kaboom. It will be raining me for ten minutes. And not just me, anyone I am near. Do you know how much ordinance you can pack into a human heart?"

"Well I just collapsed a hallway with a drone about the size of three of my fingers, so yeah."

"So I am not joining her. And she knew that, which is why she was, above all, supposed to remain safe." I realized he wasn't smiling anymore as he ranted. "I told her I could endure anything, that my death was a long time coming and a long time earned, so long as I could know she was still out there. She said she understood, she knew what it meant to me, what she means to me, and that's why she wouldn't throw all of that away to come here. She wouldn't do something so stupid, short-sighted, and dangerous, all to chase after someone who can't even be with her. It's impossible."

"Sure. Impossible," I sighed at him. "Except it's true, you dumb nut. Did you ever consider that there's a lot more to her life than living?"

"Yes, which is why I provided her with everything she would need--"

"Everything? You can't think of anything she might find essential that's, oh, I don't know, currently beat to hell in a cell outside New Eden?"

He glared at me, his teeth barely visible through parted lips.

"What she needs--"

"Isn't for you to decide," I said, crossing my arms. "Now are you going to stop being an idiot or what?"

"Fine," he said, doing a weak approximation of throwing up his hands. "Suppose you are correct. I still cannot leave, as there is still a bomb in my chest. If triggered, I die."

I grinned at him and took one of the clasps I'd pulled from the drone and held it out for him. "First of all, odds are we are being watched, and that means they'd want to blow you up right now. But they can't. Because of this."

"What is this?" he asked, gingerly reaching for it. I handed it over and he ran his fingers along its surfaces, inspecting it with reverence with his eyes glinting, barely open.

"That, is a short-range broad-frequency jamming device. I had this epiphany about tides going out and in and waves and realized, they can't send a kill signal to your device if you yourself are a jammer. I took that same idea to wreck some havoc with the PA-towers in the city."

"And you did not think that it broadcasting on my kill frequency might trigger the bomb?"

"No bomb in the world is set to go off just by getting one signal, dummy. There's a message which has to bent on that frequency. Otherwise you could blow up every military arsenal just by blasting radios at it."

"Touche."

"So," I said, recrossing my arms. "All set then? No more whining to do? We've handled all your concerns?"

"Yes," he smiled. "My apologies for the petulance. I just did not appreciate the sudden shift in plans. Shall I take us out now?"

"First, take us through the other cells here. Rito should be in here somewhere, I'd like to bring her along."

It was kind of fun flickering in and out of reality and showing up in random occupied cells, there inhabitants looking at us like they'd gone crazy. A few started to talk, one even seemed to be preparing to attack, but we didn't stick around long enough for any more incidents. Most of the cells were empty anyway, and Jack seemed to have an idea where we were going, so it really wasn't that eventful when we showed up in Rito's cell a minute later.

My first thought was, well, they certainly knew to keep her on camera. The cell was rife with them, unlike the hidden ones in my cell, there were just a few dozen sticking out everywhere here, redundantly covering every corner. She squealed as we appeared, cowering behind the corner of her bed, for all the good that did.

"Hey Rito," I said airly. "Ready to go?"

"NO," she shouted. "GO AWAY."

I blinked at her and glanced around at the unflinching eyes around us. Given what I'd just been through they made me unusually tense, and I could not imagine she was having a great time staying here under their watch.

"It's us," Jack clarified helpfully. "Jack and Lia. We're escaping."

"I DON'T WANT TO."

"What?" I asked. "Why?"

She just glared at me like I was the crazy one here, her large eyes and broad mouth contorted in trembling fury.

"I knew as soon as I heard trouble outside that it was you!" she accused. "You are ALWAYS causing trouble! It's your fault I'm in here, I was with my mom, safe and sound--"

"And you can be again, dude," I offered.

"NO! They've got my records! They know where I live, they knew to catch me at the school...everything's ruined because of you!"

I glanced at Jack, who shrugged. "Uh. Look, we're short on time here, they'll be breaking through my cave-in any minute. Just come with us--"

"NO!"

"Jack, just touch her and get us all out."

Jack advanced on the girl and she veritably growled at him, his bruised hand hesitating as he drew near.

"It's not going to hurt," he said.

"GO. AWAY."

He touched her, and I held his other hand, feeling my stomach drop as his powers started to shift us away. But at the last moment, right before the floor dropped away under me, she swatted his hand off of her, and then we were elsewhere.

More specifically, Jack and I were elsewhere. Somewhere quiet and dark. Rito was nowhere to be seen.

"Where is she?" I asked, turning to Jack, who shook his head.

"Back in her cell still. She threw me off at the last second."

"Well let's go back and get her."

"Lia," he said, turning on me, "Let her be."

"What?"

"Let her be. Leave her in peace."

"Leave her in jail you mean?"

"If that's what she wants."

"That's stupid," I huffed. "She's just an idiot and just because she's too scared to do what's best for herself, doesn't meant she should be rotting in jail the rest of her life."

He grinned sympathetically at me. "Did you just finish lecturing me on how I shouldn't be deciding things for Steffie just because she was acting poorly by her own self-interests?"

I glared at him but his smile only widened.

"She's never been a fit for this whole Exhuman lifestyle," Jack shrugged. "I honestly think she'd be happier in a cell, not having to worry about things. She'll probably get into the city on good behavior sooner than later."

"Yeah, where she can be angry all the time."

"Angry and safe and guilt-free. It's not for you to decide."

"I guess. But for the record, she's still stupid, and she's going to make our plans a lot harder to execute without her powers."

"Well I'm sorry that someone else's decisions is making your scheming harder. I'm sure you'll find a way. Now grab hold and tell me where I can get to Steffie."

He smiled at me again, his teeth glinting in the dark room, and I just had to shake my head at him. Things were such a mess right now, and I still didn't have the first clue where to go to look for Athan. But at least we'd have everyone out of New Eden.

I sighed and took his arm, feeling my stomach dropping as soon as I did. It really wasn't a great way to travel, and without Rito, we might all be doing it for a long, long time to get out of here. That wasn't anything to look forward to.

But at least I could change into my slipskin. That'd be nice. Wear the mask, too.

As the world dropped out from under us, I thought again of where we'd been and where to go, who else was still missing and where they might be...and most importantly, where Athan was in all of this.

The only conclusion I could draw was that he thought the same way I did. He'd be wherever people needed help, and wherever there was trouble. With so many people missing, with so many in need, with so many missing pieces of information, I didn't know what he knew, but I also doubted he knew much more than I.

So my best guess for where he wound up was at the most obvious person in trouble.

That'd be Moon, and that'd be Japan. So as soon as Jack and Steffie and Tower and I finished cheering and hugging and explaining what happened, I informed the others that I thought we should leave the prison and all head west.