Dark Angel: A Pound of Flesh (2/5)

[brihana25]

All disclaimers, notes, warnings and summary are in the Master post: A Pound of Flesh



Chapter Three

He'd expected to be interrogated about Zack, since they seemed so worried about getting him back. He'd expected to be worked over until he told them where Zack was, and he knew that he was probably just doped up enough for it to work. He'd expected to at least be asked about him, at least once.

He hadn't expected what was actually happening.

"You think someone's coming to save you, soldier boy?"

But he really, really hated it.

"You think anyone cares about the pretty little G.I. Joe doll?"

He really, really needed to get out of there.

Alec blinked against the fog in his brain and forced himself to think. He was still in the embalming room, but Lux had moved him from the table to a metal chair that had been standing in the corner before. He'd wanted to fight his way free when she'd moved him, girl or no, because he had to get out of there. But before she'd untied him, she'd dosed him with something else, something that kept his muscles sluggish but not as unresponsive as whatever Bird had used. Her drugs were messing with his head, too, because he found himself suddenly unable to say no to her, no matter how much he wanted to.

Of course, the fact that she'd sunk those damned spiked nails of hers into the back of his neck, only millimeters from his spine, might have had something to do with his willingness to behave himself, too.

So he was strapped into the armless metal chair with his arms down at his sides. There were restraints around his wrists and elbows, ankles and knees, with one strap around his chest and another around his head. She'd completely destroyed his shirt since he'd been sitting there, slicing through it and leaving it hanging in tattered shreds from his shoulders. She spent her time alternating between walking around in front of him, taunting him, and stabbing him with those spikes at random intervals.

"To make sure you're paying attention," she'd said.

Obviously, she didn't think he was paying enough attention at that point, because she sank the spikes on her right hand into the left side of his chest, curling them underneath his collarbone. He squirmed against the pain, unwilling to cry out and worried about the damage he could do to himself if he moved too much. He'd lost count of how many of those little puncture wounds he had covering his arms, neck and chest.

Lux leaned forward over him, her eyes filled with both lust and malevolence.

"So, who's coming to save you, pretty?" she asked, her voice oozing out of her mouth.

He turned his head away as far as the strap across his forehead would allow and refused to answer her, as he'd been doing for the past who-knew-how-long that he'd been in that chair. He just needed a minute, just to clear his mind and get his head back on straight. He just needed to get control of his own body again, so he could get himself out when Max got there.

Max was coming. He knew she was. Maybe she'd come alone, or maybe she'd bring Zack. Maybe she'd come busting through the door with Logan in his exoskeleton. He really didn't care who she brought with her, as long as she got there before too much longer, because the whole situation was really starting to get to him. But Max was coming.

Lux punished him for his lack of response by moving her hand, ripping through skin and muscle as she dragged her fingers down his chest. He felt the edges of the spikes catching on his collarbone and heard the grinding sound they made, and he couldn't hold back the small cry that passed his lips.

"If they're coming to save you, then where are they?" Lux continued. "If they care so much about you, then why aren't they here?" She stepped back slightly, keeping her nails embedded under his collarbone but tugging against them a bit. He moaned softly, but she didn't stop moving until he felt the insides of her thighs pressing against the outsides of his.

He refused to turn his head back to face her; he refused to answer her. The reward for his disobedience was the flash of spikes emerging from the fingernails on her left hand before sinking into the tender flesh under the ribs on his right side. He bit his lip to keep from crying out again, but a whimper escaped.

Max was coming. He just had to hang in there a little longer, because Max was coming. They'd grabbed him from Crash in front of dozens of witness. She had to know he was missing, and she had to know who'd taken him. Max was coming.

"I think I'll keep you when Eddy's done," Lux said suggestively. She retracted the spikes on her left hand from his ribs, and he felt the sticky wetness running down his stomach in small rivulets, but he ignored it. After so much time alone with this woman, they were far from the only places he was bleeding.

He could remember flirting with Lux once, what seemed like a lifetime ago, and he wondered why he'd ever done that. He hadn't actually been attracted to her, had he? Because he had never wanted to pull away from a woman as much as he wanted to run from her at that moment. But there was nothing he could do as she sat down in his lap and wriggled forward until her lower body was pressed against his. He turned back to face her again, but still refused to speak.

'Max is coming,' he told himself again. 'It's almost over. Max is coming.'

"My own little toy soldier. My own pretty, pretty doll to play with."

She brought the fingers of her left hand to her mouth, touching them with her tongue, tasting the blood that covered them. He wanted to turn his head and look away again, but he couldn't. He was almost frozen in place, his eyes locked on the bizarre sight in front of them.

'God, Max, where are you?'

"No one's coming. You know that." If he could just shut out her voice for a few seconds, if he could just concentrate, if he could just ignore her until these drugs got out of his system and he could focus again. She was lying; she had to be lying.

"Max is coming," he whispered. He didn't realize that he'd said it out loud, and he didn't understand the smile that spread across Lux's face.

He did understand what she was doing when she pulled her right hand away from his collarbone, and he felt the pull of the spikes catching on the edges of his bone again. She didn't bother licking her fingers this time, though. She bent forward and pressed her tongue against the open wounds, licking away the blood that oozed from them. She straightened back up, gave him a smile that showed her blood-covered teeth, then wiped away a few of the drops that stuck to her lips with the tips of her fingers.

"Max isn't coming, pretty," she whispered. She took the sides of his head between her hands and held him steady, forcing him to look at her no matter how badly he wanted to look away. She leaned even further forward, until he felt the warm gusts of her breath against the side of his neck and felt her lips touch the tip of his ear.

'Max is coming. Max is coming. Max is coming.'

"Max doesn't even know you're gone," Lux whispered into his ear before pulling back slightly and planting her still-bloody lips against his.

One of her hands moved away from his face, and suddenly she was shoving that damned needle into the side of his neck again. He felt his muscles go lax almost immediately. She reached behind his head and pulled on something, and the top of the chair reclined until he was almost flat on his back.

When she started pulling away what remained of his shirt and tugging at the waist of his jeans, he closed his eyes. He was a soldier, an assassin, built to be stronger and faster than any human, but there was nothing he could do to save himself. He'd been taught since childhood how to detach himself when he found himself in a compromised position from which escape was impossible. He'd done it before, and he was good at it. He let himself fade away, let his mind go almost totally blank. Only one thought remained.

'Max isn't coming.'

Max paced up and down the clinic hallway nervously.

What had happened in the parking garage under Fogel Tower would haunt her for weeks, if not longer. Zack had been completely under Manticore's spell, almost as though Renfro herself had reached out from her grave to take her revenge. He'd been determined to kill Logan, and had very nearly succeeded.

She'd been forced to electrocute him, send thousands of volts of electricity surging through her own brother's body, to save Logan's life. She'd thought she'd killed him.

But Dr. Carr had told them that Zack would be fine, that the electricity had erased his memory again, and that he'd be waking up not knowing who he was, but that he'd be all right. Max sincerely hoped that Dr. Carr was right about everything he said. She and Logan had come up with a good plan to get Zack out of Seattle, to keep him safe for the rest of his life, but it depended on him never remembering who he was.

Zack had gone into surgery an hour earlier, for a delicate but completely safe procedure that would remove the exo-harness from his arm. Zack would heal completely in a day or two, and Dr. Carr had decided to keep him sedated until all of his skin had grown back. If everything went according to plan, Zack would wake up believing he'd never been anything but a normal, average - if incredibly strong - human.

All in all, they were making the best of an incredibly bad situation, and she knew that. So why did she have a feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach?

"Max?" Logan was sitting on a couch in the waiting room, watching her pace back and forth. "He's going to be okay."

"Oh, I know," she answered. She made herself sit down on the chair across from him and forced her knee to stop bouncing up and down. "I've just got this feeling."

"What kind of feeling?"

"Like there's something wrong," she said distantly. She shook her head and focused on Logan again. "I can't explain it. I don't even know that it's anything to do with Zack. Just... something."

She'd had all the sitting still she could handle. She pushed herself back to her feet and started pacing again.

"Just relax," Logan said calmly. "Whatever it is, I'm sure we'll know about it soon enough. There's no point in getting yourself all worked up over something that hasn't happened yet."

"I know that. I do. It's just..." She stopped her pacing and turned to face Logan from across the room. "I can't shake it. Something really, really bad is going to happen, Logan. I know it. I just don't know what it is."

Alec wasn't unused to waking up in unfamiliar settings and not remembering how he got there, so that alone wasn't enough to bother him. He had been trained for this, after all, schooled time and again in how to interpret his surroundings and adapt to them in a matter of moments. He was also no stranger to waking up in restraints, feeling as though he were emerging from a drug-induced loss of consciousness. It hadn't been long since he'd woken up exactly like that in the basement at Manticore, when he'd had to convince PsyOps that he wasn't as crazy as his twin brother, the serial killer.

The problem was that in this instance, waking up in restraints, he knew where he was and how he'd gotten there. And he knew that it was most definitely somewhere he did not want to be.

It just wasn't possible for him to do anything about it.

It was a pain in his left arm that had woken him, a sharp, biting pain that told him some sort of needle - a big one, from the feel of it - was being shoved through his skin just above his wrist. He waited for the inevitable numbness to start spreading again, but it didn't. Instead there was a click and a whirr, and the vaguely disturbing and mildly painful sensation of suction against the inside of his vein. Then another sharp stab, another needle, and a rush of cold under his skin. Then both needles were taped into place.

He blinked his eyes slowly, trying to bring himself to full wakefulness so he could take in his surroundings. His jeans were back on and zipped up, which was at least a better situation than he'd been in when Eddy had gotten back. That wasn't a pleasant memory, either Eddy walking in or what was going on when he did, and it wasn't one he'd be revisiting any time soon. Alec honestly didn't know who Eddy had been angrier at, Lux or him.

The bruises he could feel on his face, chest and back - and since when could an Ordinary throw him around like that? - said it was probably him.

He was back on the table again, with the straps back around his ankles, wrists and chest. But this time, they'd gone even further, because his knees and elbows were secured individually, there was an extra strap across his hips, one across his shoulders, and he couldn't move his head. He'd been seriously injured before, so he recognized the feeling of the tube down his throat that was moving oxygen in and out of his lungs. That meant that he couldn't breathe on his own for some reason, but he was at a loss as to why. He also couldn't really move his muscles, though they did respond to him a little bit. He'd obviously been able to open his eyes with some effort, and he was twitching his fingers, hoping to work some muscle control back into the rest of his arm.

He felt Lux's hand on his forehead and wanted to pull away from her, but he couldn't. He turned his eyes toward her as she clucked her tongue at him.

"Poor stubborn pretty. You really don't want to be awake right now."

He didn't know what she meant by that, and he tried to ask her with his eyes, but she wasn't understanding him and he wasn't even sure why he was trying. It wasn't like she was an ally, not after what she'd done to him. Then he felt something pushing down on his lower right side. It didn't really hurt, it was just pressure, but it was hard enough to make his eyes water. Someone else was unbuttoning his jeans, tugging them down over his right hip, but that didn't make any sense. Lux was standing beside him, so who was doing that, and why?

When he looked back at Lux again, her expression had changed. Instead of the cold, taunting look she'd worn since he'd gotten there, she looked almost sad. Regretful? Apologetic? He didn't understand the change in her attitude at all, but he was pretty damn sure he didn't like it.

"You're going to want to hold still," she said. "I mean, I don't know what happens if you move, but I don't think it'll be very good."

"It'll kill him is what it'll do," Eddy said from the other side of the table, and Alec figured out not only who had been pushing on his right side, but why. He also realized that his jeans weren't being pulled off, but just out of someone's way. Words ran through his mind: Eddy telling Bird and Tuck that the boxes were full of livers and kidneys, saying something about "tinkering" with him, talking about having a fresh supply of organs...

Oh, shit.

Eddy leaned forward and waved a scalpel in his face. "Sharp little buggers, these. Figure they can slice clean through an artery if you're not careful. I'm only going for a kidney, but ya never know what I might hit if you're squirmin'."

This couldn't be happening. No, this wasn't real. There was no way he wasn't imagining this. No, no, no.

He felt the smaller, localized pressure of the blade against his skin, and his first instinct was to pull away, but his muscles were useless. Being able to wiggle the tip of a finger wasn't going to help him now. When he felt the knife break the skin, his body wanted to curl up around the pain, but even if he weren't paralyzed, the restraints would have kept him from doing it. He was completely helpless, defenseless, and at the mercy of a petty - and apparently psychotic - thug who really, really hated him.

Lux was right; he didn't want to be awake for this. But he was, and he could feel it, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

Eddy started making the incision larger, and Alec could feel every slice through every layer of skin and muscle. The pain had reached a level he'd never felt before, had never even known existed, could never have possibly imagined. It burned with both fire and ice, an indescribable agony that clawed its way along his nerves, leaving him incapable of thinking about anything else. His stomach was roiling and churning, and it took what little focus he had left to keep himself from throwing up. He had a tube down his throat, his lungs weren't responding to him, and if he threw up, he'd drown on his own vomit.

He wanted to run, had never wanted to run so much in his life, but he couldn't. He couldn't move. He couldn't think. He couldn't scream. He couldn't breathe.

He was going to die like this.

Max wasn't coming. No one was coming. No one knew where he was, no one cared where he was, and he was going to die here.

'Just pass out.'

But he couldn't. He was alone, and if he passed out there'd be no one on watch, and why did that even matter right now? He was dying!

He felt the cool hand against his face, wiping away tears that he hadn't even realized were falling, and he grabbed on to it with his mind. His vision was gone, and his open eyes saw nothing but a bright blanket of white. His hearing was distorted by a muffled ringing, but he could just make out the cadence and tones of a familiar voice whispering in his ear. It was softer and more soothing that it had ever been before, and he took comfort in its existence even though he didn't really know who it belonged to and he couldn't understand the words.

'Max... Max, you're here. Get me out of here. Help me, please!'

The voice slowly sank into his consciousness, and he forced himself to focus on it. The sounds formed words, and he began to understand what it was saying. He latched onto that voice and let it wash over him, grateful to have something other than the pain to ground him, no longer caring who was talking to him, only grateful that someone was there.

"Let go, pretty," the voice said. "Just let go. Stop fighting. It'll all be over soon."

He didn't care who said it; all he knew was that the voice was right. One way or the other, it would all be over soon. Maybe that should have bothered him, but he couldn't really bring himself to care. And maybe it made him weak, but he really didn't want to be around to find out how it ended.

He let his eyes close, let the voice carry him away, and let go.

Chapter Four

Max walked into Logan's apartment with a sad smile on her face. She considered her encounter with Zack in the hospital hallway to be a victory, but it was a bittersweet one that she worried would haunt for years to come.

"Everything went okay?"

She smiled at Logan as she perched on the arm of the couch in the living room behind him. The decision for Logan to remain behind at the apartment while Max went to see if Zack's amnesia would stick had been mutual. Neither one of them wanted a repeat of what had happened in the parking garage in the early hours of Saturday morning. Even if Max's face had triggered Zack's memories again, they figured they could keep him away from Logan long enough to get him smuggled out of the city.

"Adam Thompson is on his way home to the ranch."

"And he doesn't remember?"

Max shook her head. "No, nothing. I thought he recognized me at first, but he didn't." In fact, Max was fairly sure that he had recognized her, even if he only thought he'd seen her face before. But it had been so easy to convince him that he didn't know her that she wasn't worried about any other memories flooding back to him again.

"So he finally got his wish." Logan's voice was wistful, and Max let the feeling flow through her as she nodded in response. "A normal life," Logan continued.

"A safe one," she answered. She stood and walked toward the office, stopping to lean against the door frame. "White and his dogs'll never find him now."

Logan suddenly looked almost as sad as Max felt, but she knew that those emotions weren't for Zack. "And you're all right with it?"

Max crossed her arms across her chest and her legs at the ankles. "You mean am I okay with never seeing my brother again?"

Logan nodded his confirmation and pushed himself across the office to near where she stood against the door.

"No, of course I'm not. I miss him already, Logan. So much." She shrugged as she looked down at him. "But I guess it's my turn to protect him now."

"Can you do what he did?" Logan asked sincerely and not unkindly. "Can you protect them all?"

Max shook her head. "Not by myself, no." She let a small smile turn up the corners of her lips as she looked back down. "Maybe with a little help, though."

Logan smiled back at her and nodded, obviously pleased with her answer. "I was hoping you'd say that." He turned away from her and pushed himself back to his desk.

"You've got something?" She uncrossed her arms and stood straight, walking across the office as Logan tapped on his keyboard.

"I've got a potential lead on those Steelheads that had Zack."

"What?" If Max's interest in Logan's lead hadn't been complete before, it certainly was after that. "How?"

"I don't think this is going to require your... talents, Max. At least not at first. But I thought you'd be interested in it."

"Are you kidding?" She moved as close to Logan as she dared, positioning herself behind him so that she could see his monitor across his shoulder. "I can't make Manticore pay for what they did to him, but I can kick some Steelhead ass." She leaned forward in eagerness, catching herself just short of putting her hand on his shoulder and pulling back quickly. "So what have you got?"

"You remember when I told you that I'd been tracking them for months, for that black market organ ring they've been running?"

"Yeah."

"One of my informants got an email from British Eddy yesterday." Logan hit the enter button on his keyboard, and an email popped up on the screen. "It's a sales flyer."

"They're moving organs again," Max said with disgust.

"More than that." Logan turned toward her, his expression at once both excited and concerned. "The sale offer is for an organ described as an 'amped-up super kidney.'"

Max let her confusion show on her face. "Super organs?"

Logan nodded, picking up a pencil and threading it through his fingers as he spoke. "Eddy and his gang aren't the smartest bunch, but they do know better than to lie to their customer base. So if they say they're selling a 'super kidney'..."

"It's from a Transgenic," Max finished the thought for him. "Because of Zack, they know what we are."

Logan nodded slowly and continued. "So the next question is - is it Zack's?"

"No," Max answered with a shake of her head. "Dr. Carr said that most of Zack's organs had been replaced with biosynthetics."

"So if it's not Zack's...?"

"Whose is it?"

Logan spun back to his computer again, tapping his pencil against the desk a few times before dropping it and starting to type again. "You don't know of any Transgenics who have gone missing in the past few days, do you?"

Max shook her head slowly as she turned to look out the front windows, at Seattle's distinctive and still impressive skyline. "They've all gone missing, Logan," she answered softly. "It's the only way they know to survive."

"So we set up a buy," Logan said from behind her. "We buy it, have Sam run a few tests, and find out..."

"We'd never know who it was. Our DNA database was destroyed." Max had never thought she would regret the fire that had destroyed Manticore, but at that moment, she did. How much information had been destroyed that could have been vital to their survival? "Buying it would be a waste of money that we might need for something else."

"What about keeping the secret of the Transgenics' existence from getting out?"

"Unless Eddy tells people that he's pulling organs out of genetically engineered soldiers from a secret government program, they'll just think the donor was juiced." Max spun back to face Logan quickly as a thought occurred to her. "But I do want your contact to meet up with them. And I want it to be me."

"Max..."

"No, Logan. They're selling Transgenic organs, and what they did to Zack..." She paused, collected her thoughts and took a deep breath. "I'll get the proof to keep them down your way. But I want to take them down my way first."

Logan had been shaking his head the entire time she'd been talking, and he didn't stop. "They know you. Two of them have seen you. You took Zack away from them, and they're not going to forget about you that easily, no matter how stupid they are." Max inhaled and opened her mouth, but Logan cut her off. "And before you say it, Alec's out, too. He was with you when you saved Zack, right?"

Max nodded reluctantly. "They knew him before that, anyway."

Logan's eyebrows raised in surprised curiosity, but he didn't say anything.

"So what do I do?" Max asked with a sigh.

"Go to work, Max. Treat it just like any other Monday afternoon. I'll contact my informant and have him arrange a meeting with them tonight. Hopefully, he'll be able to get me enough information that I can trace them back to their hangout. Once I've got that, I'll probably need you and Alec to go snoop around for me. Quietly," he added quickly. "No bickering."

Max rolled her eyes. "I'll try. But no promises." She flashed another smile in his direction and turned to leave. "Thanks, Logan," she said. "For everything."

"You're welcome, Max."

The elevator doors dinged as they closed behind her, and Logan turned back to his computer once more.

The first thing Max noticed when she walked in to JamPony was that Normal had apparently gotten over whatever fear Original Cindy had instilled in him the week before, because he was already yelling at her across the counter about being late. She ignored his words, brushed him off with a wave of her hand, and kept walking down the ramp.

The second thing she noticed was that O.C. and Sketchy were both hovering around her locker waiting for her to get there. Cindy, of course, knew the whole story on Zack. Sketchy only knew a few sanitized pieces of it, along with whatever Cindy had come up with to explain Zack's sudden 'illness.' But it was obvious that both of them were waiting for her and wanting to know how Zack was.

Remembering that Zack was headed for the life he'd always wanted - that he'd always deserved - Max forced a smile on to her face. She'd almost worked up to greeting them semi-cheerfully when Sketchy saw her across O.C.'s shoulder. He gestured to Cindy, who turned to face Max as she walked up to them.

"How is he, Boo?"

"How's Zack doin'?"

"He's fine," she said, answering both questions at once. She didn't know exactly what O.C. had told Sketchy about what was wrong with Zack, but she knew enough to feel safe in continuing with the story she'd thought up on her way over from Logan's. "The doc says he's gonna be fine, but thinks he'll get better faster in the mountains. Something about thin air being easier on his lungs or something." Silently, she sent O.C. a message that she had more to say, and Cindy's expression confirmed that she understood.

"Poor guy," Sketchy said, completely oblivious to the wordless conversation going on between the two women next to him. "I mean, he just gets home, and he gets electrocuted in a freak elevator accident..."

Sketchy kept talking, but Max's attention wandered to Cindy, who was darting glances around the room as though she was searching for someone. Max looked, too, out of pure instinct, even though she had no idea who she was looking for.

"I mean, just the weirdness, ya know..."

"Where's yer boy, Boo?" Cindy asked, glancing around the room once more.

Max tilted her head in confusion. "I just told you, he..."

"Not Zack," Cindy interrupted. "Alec."

Max huffed in irritation and stepped around Cindy to get to her locker. She'd forgotten how angry she'd been at Alec the last time she'd seen him, but Cindy mentioning him brought it all back. She wasn't going to let herself think about the fact that he'd been right about Zack. She wasn't going to admit that if she'd listened to him, she might have been able to keep Logan and Zack both from being hurt, or that if she'd listened to Alec instead of yelling at him, she might have been able to keep Zack with her.

"He's not my 'boy,'" she answered hotly as she pulled her locker open. "And I don't know where he is."

"When's last time ya saw him?"

Even with all the irritation and anger she was feeling at that second, something in Cindy's tone of voice made Max drop the gloves she'd just picked up and turn back around. "Friday night, when he skipped out on the beer."

Cindy was worried, and Cindy didn't get worried over nothing. Max looked around JamPony once more, hoping to see the familiar dark blond hair and green eyes. But Alec wasn't there.

"He hasn't called Normal, either," Cindy added. "He's been asking everybody if we've seen him, and no one has. No one knows where he is. He's just not here."

"When'd you see him?" Max asked, her voice low. She was at a loss to explain the sudden sense of dread that was taking hold of her. A voice in the back of her mind was whispering to her, over and over, making her listen to it. She was putting one and one and one together, and she didn't like the three that kept turning up.

"Friday night, same as you. Sketchy, you see Alec since Friday?"

"No," Sketch answered with an abrupt shake of his head.

Max could read it in his eyes, that look that said he knew more than he was saying, but he didn't know if it was important, so he wasn't going to say anything. There was a healthy dose of fear in his eyes, too, and considering the last conversation he and Max had had about Alec, she couldn't really blame him. But she didn't have time to play with Sketchy right now. Her every instinct was screaming at her that something was wrong. That feeling of dread in the pit of her stomach was back with a vengeance, something was terribly wrong, and Sketchy might be the only one who knew exactly what that was.

"Spill!" she ordered.

"Steelheads!"

Max froze for a fraction of a second, long enough for Cindy to notice but no one else, and then she adopted a demeanor of pure malice. Her face hardened and her eyes narrowed, and before she realized she was moving she was stalking toward Sketchy, who was already backing away.

"What about Steelheads?" Max asked, every word dripping with venom.

"I didn't do anything!" Sketchy protested, his eyes wide in panic. He bumped the back of his leg on the bench between the rows of lockers, stumbling before catching himself and continuing to back away. "I don't know why they were there, Max, I swear!"

Sketchy jumped when his back hit the locker behind him, and he realized he had nowhere else to go. Max continued to move forward, not stopping until she was standing toe-to-toe with him, glaring up into his eyes.

"Why who was where?"

"At Crash," he stammered. "The Steelheads."

"There were Steelheads at Crash?"

Sketchy's head bobbed up and down frantically.

"When?"

"Friday night. After Alec left."

Max had known, had known from the very beginning, what Sketchy was going to say, but hearing him say it was a completely different story. The words hit her like a physical punch to the gut, stealing the air from her lungs, and she wondered if she looked as pale as she suddenly felt. From the confusion in Sketchy's eyes and the feeling of Cindy's hand gripping her arm, she guessed that she probably did.

"What's wrong?" Cindy asked.

"I swear, Max," Sketchy continued on. "I don't know why they were there. They were out front, looked like they were waiting for someone. There were three - the two that pulped me and another one. But everyone was already gone, so I just went out the back. And I didn't think about 'em again until just now."

Max pulled her arm away from Cindy and walked back toward the front door as quickly as she dared. She knew that she was walking right past the closest payphone, but she also knew that she couldn't use it. The phone call she needed to make had to be private.

She thought she heard O.C. calling out from behind her, and Normal yelling something about docking her pay, but she ignored them both. Her mind was swirling with thoughts of Steelheads, Transgenic organs, and a man who hadn't been seen in almost three days. One and one and one still equaled three, but now she couldn't deny it.

As soon as she was out of sight of JamPony, she blurred to the next nearest payphone, two blocks away. Her hands were shaking as she dialed, and she bounced her knee as she waited for the person on the other end to pick up. When he did, she didn't even wait for him to say hello.

"It's Alec!" she blurted into the telephone. "The missing Transgenic, the kidney, the... Logan, the Steelheads took Alec!"

It had taken Logan longer to calm Max down enough to tell him what she'd learned than it actually took her to say it. The Steelheads had taken Alec from Crash on Friday night - under her nose, she'd been sure to point out, on her watch - and Sketchy had seen them afterward. No one had seen Alec since then, and now those same Steelheads were selling a Transgenic kidney on the black market.

Logan had agreed with her conclusions with no hesitation, because there really were no other interpretations that would make as much sense. He had made Max promise to go no further than Crash without him before hanging up the phone, strapping on the newly-repaired exoskeleton, and getting in his car.

Max had been insistent about starting the search immediately, at the scene of the abduction. Logan wanted to think of it as the "alleged" abduction, because part of him was still hoping that Alec hadn't been taken, that he was holed up somewhere sleeping off a long weekend, that he was perfectly fine, safe, and all of his organs were where they belonged.

Even so, Logan was a realist, and he had to admit that Alec was in real trouble this time, arguably more trouble than he'd been in since Ames White had captured him. And Max was livid. Crimes against Transgenics upset her even when she didn't know the people involved. Now, the same group of people who had forced her brother to become a common criminal had taken Alec and were parting him out like a used car, selling pieces of him to the highest bidder.

Logan pushed his foot down on the accelerator and drove faster.

Part Three