Disclaimer: I own nothing anyone recognises.

A/N: It probably isn't strictly necessary to read Indirect Encounters to understand this fic, but - as this is a sequel to it - it might well help. Similarly, there are the same warnings for this fic as for Indirect Encounters: namely that this is by no means meant to be a serious take on Colorado Springs, and that various people are more than likely going to be at least somewhat OOC.

However, some serious-type bits snuck into this when I wasn't looking. Oops. It was meant to be more consistently on the crack-ish side of the line than the serious. It was also meant to be a whole lot shorter than the eight and a half thousand words it ended up as.

Also, I don't usually make any efforts to Americanise my writing (mainly because I lack necessary knowledge), I have in this case used the term "cell phone". It very nearly destroyed my soul. Please appreciate the effort that took, along with the roughly a thousand uses of the word "mall" (only moderately painful, in comparison).

Also, thank you to everyone who reviewed/favourited Indirect Encounters. This probably wouldn't have been written, otherwise.

Near Miss Encounters

Knocking on a closed door should not, Buffy told herself firmly, pose a problem. It should not, in fact, be a source of worriment, tension, anxiety, or any other such emotion. Unfortunately, Buffy's mind was betraying her in this small matter and she was standing outside her sister's room, apparently lacking the guts to knock on the door. Buffy closed her eyes, took a deep breath, raised her hand, and knocked before she could convince herself otherwise.

After a mildly-fraught moment, Dawn's voice came through the door, a little muffled.

'Yeah?'

Buffy gave a glance backwards, saw nothing to provide her with an excuse to delay, and opened the door. Unwilling to venture further inside her younger sister's room – although with the floor all but disappeared from sight, covered by an uneven layer of clothing and other debris best left unknown, that would have been difficult in any case – Buffy leant against the doorframe, doing her best to appear unruffled and calm. Which she obviously was.

'Dawn?' she asked the recumbent figure of her sister. Dawn was lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling, with earphones lodged firmly and – knowing Dawn – probably passive-aggressively in her ears.

There was another pause.

And then: 'Hmmm?' Dawn said.

'I was thinking of going shopping soon,' Buffy said. There was no response. 'Do you want to come?' Buffy asked, trying not to show her somewhat desperate desire for a favourable answer.

Dawn only grunted unpromisingly, otherwise ignoring her sister's presence completely. Buffy's shoulders slumped, just a little.

'Okay,' she said. 'Give me a call if anything comes up.' Buffy didn't sound hopeful that this would ever occur, and she knew it. She sighed, and finished 'I'll see you later, then.'

Dawn's hand came up to wave goodbye without its owner looking in Buffy's direction at all. Buffy stepped away, closing her sister's door behind her and resisting the urge to slam it. Dawn probably wouldn't hear it through whatever music was being piped through her earphones anyway.

Upon reaching the kitchen, Buffy shrugged at the inquiring expressions of her two closest friends, and shook her head. Xander frowned slightly, turning back to his sandwich-making endeavours that – given the quantities of bread he had gone through in recent days, and the sheer variety of unpalatable toppings involved – were now verging on epic, and worthy of being immortalised in song and legend, or at least in mildly unknown trashy pop music.

Willow looked sympathetic. 'It'll work out,' she told Buffy as the Slayer reclaimed her earlier seat at the table.

Buffy grunted disbelievingly in a fair imitation of Dawn's earlier reticence, even if it was probably an unintentional imitation to which she would not be pleased to have her attention drawn. Xander would have added an appropriately empathetic comment at this juncture, if he hadn't just taken a bite of his latest sandwich that had apparently - and unsurprisingly - proven to be unwise, judging by his peculiar facial expression. Buffy made a disgusted facial expression of her own.

Willow ignored him entirely. 'I'll stay here to keep an eye on her,' the red-head suggested, watching carefully to see how her friend took the offer.

Buffy hesitated. Dawn was probably able to look after herself, but there was no telling what might happen if she was left unsupervised, and potential ensuing events wouldn't even have to be Dawn's fault. And as much as Buffy wanted to at least browse a shoe shop, they really did need to buy food.

'Are you sure?' she asked.

'Of course,' Willow said. 'I've been wanting to do some deeper research into telluric currents recently anyway.'

'And getting us out of the way so you can have some quiet would probably help?' Xander asked, not really expecting an answer. He didn't get one.

'Telluric currents?' Buffy asked.

'Mmmm,' Willow nodded eagerly. 'They're electric currents that pass through the earth, or under the sea – or, well, I say electric, but – but there are debates about just what the currents consist of, and what energy is contained within them, because there obviously is energy, the question is what it can do. And humans can alter the currents, but sometimes they change course, or voltage, or patterns of interaction, for no detectable reason at all,' she enthused. She paused. 'Anyway, they're totally interesting. And the currents around here are a little strange.'

'Dangerous strange?' Xander asked, with his mouth still full.

Willow only shrugged. 'It's hard to say, really.'

Xander rolled his eyes, safely positioned behind Willow's back where she couldn't see him. 'Alright,' he said, because she could devolve into a lengthy explanation as to why, exactly, it was hard to say. 'You sacrifice yourself to keep an eye on Dawn, and I'll make the far larger sacrifice to take Buffy shopping.'

The two women made faces at him.

'Alright,' Buffy agreed. 'Do we have any of the latest shopping lists hanging around?'

'This place,' Steph asserted confidently, 'is going to fall down one day.'

Her friends looked at her a little strangely.

'What?' Nick ventured, and immediately took a courage-instilling gulp of caffeine-and-sugar-laden coke.

Speaking over the top of him, Miranda somewhat more impressively said 'Well, yeah. Isn't that a given? Everything humanity builds will one day decay and-'

'Not what I meant,' Steph interrupted hurriedly, taking affirmative action before Miranda could get into her doom-saying kick again.

Her friends relaxed, not so much due to Steph's possible reassertion of sanity, which had always been in doubt, but due to her effective silencing of Miranda's tendency to philosophise irritatingly and morbidly. Cassie started on another mouthful of noodles, no longer in immediate danger of needing to reassert what passed for normalcy to the conversation.

'I meant,' Steph said, 'that one day, this mall won't survive any more property damage, and will collapse around our ears.'

The other five looked speculatively around them at the mall – or the food court, anyway, that being all that was in sight – and then shrugged almost simultaneously.

'Yeah,' put in Chris a touch dismissively, 'but it'll probably squash the latest bad guy when it goes, so does it matter?'

Yeah, thought Cassie in the tones of one who has had their inner ruminations confirmed; normalcy is relative.

She stole one of Jon's fries, grinned happily, and said 'As long as we don't get the blame, it doesn't matter.'

'Except we won't have a mall anymore,' Jon contributed, stealing some of Cassie's noodles, tipping his head back to drop them into his mouth.

Cassie frowned at him, but Miranda got in first. 'Don't do that,' she said. 'Eating noodles with your hands is disgusting. And,' the girl added, 'I get the feeling that if we weren't here so often, the bad guys wouldn't turn up here so often either.'

They considered this for a moment. And then ignored it almost completely.

'They've gotta be somewhere,' Chris said practically. 'So've we.'

Miranda rolled her eyes.

'Besides,' Nick commented. 'It's not as though they follow us around.'

'Yeah. We follow them around, via a psychic early warning system,' Steph put in, gesturing at Jon.

Jon made a face, but didn't disagree. There was silence for a moment. Cassie stole another fry. And then she frowned.

'Is it just me,' she started, with her mouth still half-full, 'or has the floor started making noises?'

No one spoke for a second, and then groaned simultaneously. The rate of eating suddenly accelerated all around the table.

'Low rumbling noises, you mean?' Nick said. He finished his drink, gulping down the last mouthfuls. 'Cos then, yeah. It is.'

'Typical,' Miranda mumbled indistinctly around a mouthful of her own, abandoning the good manners she had earlier promoted in favour of finishing her lunch as quickly as was humanly possible. 'That's just absolutely typical.'

Steph drained her can of lemonade, stuffed the last of her fries into her mouth, and grabbed her bag with her free, relatively non-greasy hand. 'Okay,' she said, standing. 'Where to now?'

On cue, a faint scream drifted up from the floor. The other five teenagers stood up, Cassie shovelling her last forkful of noodles into her mouth as she did so.

'Right, then,' Steph said, staring speculatively at the ground.

Cassie assumed that the other girl was trying to remember what was directly beneath them, and how easily the stores there might catch on fire.

Jon nodded. 'Time to move.'

The six ran full-pelt for the escalators, leaving the rubbish from their lunch abandoned on the table, drawing no attention whatsoever from the adults who were busily attending to their own lunches. As the six pairs of footsteps clattered down the escalator, however, every single other teenager who had been eating lunch swiftly and without undue panicking stood up and headed directly for the escalator going up to the level above.

When the situation required it, survival instincts could be learnt with extreme rapidity in Colorado Springs.

Lying flat on her back on her bed, Dawn Summers stared listlessly at the ceiling. One of her earphones had slipped out, sitting neglected on the pillow beside her ear, but she hadn't replaced it. Dawn had initially put on the appearance of extreme lassitude purely to get on her sister's nerves, but it was contagious, the lethargy seeping its way into her mind. She simply didn't want to move; and she had nothing to do anyway, even had she wanted to.

She'd heard Xander and her sister leave the house earlier, taking the van they'd all four been living out of, in between cheap motels, until coming here. She hadn't bothered to get up and watch them leave. Her windows would have offered a perfectly good view, but she knew where the two were going.

And anyway, Buffy would no doubt have noticed her watching, and Dawn planned to give her sister a bit more of the cold shoulder treatment before she gave in.

Dawn stared at the ceiling. Plain, white, no cracks or stains, the ceiling had nothing to distract her from her thoughts, and nothing, she had learnt, that would stop her from completely zoning out. There had been a lot of boring ceilings, on this interminable road-trip. Most of those ceilings had been in cheap motels. Some of them had had interestingly patterned stains. None of them had actually done much to distract her.

It was a pity, really, because it wasn't as if her sister had at any point permitted Dawn to do anything. Holding down the fort, or the motel room, or whatever, was apparently all she was good for.

Dawn sighed, soundlessly tapped her fingers on the blanket, and sat up with a quiet groan. She tugged the remaining earphone free from her ear, turning the device itself off. She paused, staring out-of-focus at her legs, and wondered if she actually wanted to move. Maybe she should just lie back down.

On the other hand, it wasn't as though she had been doing any exercise to make her tired, she thought. She was just – and Dawn mentally cringed before admitting it, even in her own head – sulking.

Dawn sighed again.

And then her stomach rumbled. Loudly.

Dawn swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up, preparing to brave the kitchen.

Surely there'd be something left in the bags she'd helped haul in from the van the other day.

Downstairs, Dawn discovered, there were indeed remnants of last week's shopping trip. They were few and far between, scattered across the pantry, the fridge, and the kitchen counter. Theoretically, there was enough to make a meal. In reality, Dawn suspected from her first cursory glances, the few scraps of edible food left seemed to be along the lines of chocolate biscuits, olives and jellybeans. Dawn blamed Xander.

But on the other hand, jellybeans were both addictive and sugar-filled. And it was unlikely Willow would complain about her choice of sustenance, she thought, looking over at the redhead bent closely over whatever it was she was doing at the kitchen table. Dawn appropriated a handful of jellybeans, and ate them slowly, staring over at Willow, who still hadn't seemed to have realised she was being watched. Unless she was being polite, which Dawn's mind was tempted to interpret as being patronising.

Willow was intently focused on – Dawn squinted, and ate another jellybean – a map. With the helpful aid of a new handful of jellybeans, Dawn came to the conclusion that it was their map of Colorado Springs. What Willow was actually doing with the map, though, Dawn didn't know.

The logical next step would be to wander over and casually ask what Willow was doing. That was clear enough. Except that would mean conversation, and half-heartedly curious as Dawn was, she wasn't really in the mood for conversation. It would mean having to talk, for one thing. And Willow was her sister's friend, not Dawn's, which meant it was awkward enough talking to her anyway, because Dawn wasn't sure how she was meant to treat her, and so she usually ended up sort of ignoring Willow and Xander and Buffy alike, which meant it was even more awkward when she actually wanted to talk to either of the two not her sister, because she'd sort of been rude to them, but apologising would mean acknowledging that, and so she just didn't know what to say.

Trying to cut off her train of babbling thought, Dawn finished her current handful of scavenged food. And then she blinked in surprise when she bit down on olives instead of jellybeans. Her hands, it seemed, had not seen fit to inform her of what they were doing. Maybe she was stressing about this a bit too much. After all, she could just go back to her bedroom and stare at the ceiling again.

Dawn stopped to contemplate that for a second, and ate another olive while she was at it.

Then again, Willow wasn't Buffy. So it was okay to talk to Willow without meaning it broke her cold war with Buffy.

And it wasn't as though she had anything else to do.

'Anyway, what the filings are supposed to be doing,' Willow said, and frowned down at them unhappily before returning her gaze to Dawn, 'is positioning themselves according to the corresponding layout of the telluric currents in the real town. And then they should cluster in density to show how strong the currents are, or intersections with other varieties of ley lines, and of course the patterning is symbolically important.' She paused in her excitement, and added, more downhearted, 'But they're not. Well, I mean, of course they have, you can see that, but the patterns look normal. A couple of strange swirly bits, but nothing much out of the ordinary. Which means it must be wrong, because this town,' Willow said, emphatically waving a hand at the room around them, 'is not normal.' She bit her lip in thought. 'So now, I have to figure out what went wrong with-'

'Uh, Willow?' Dawn interrupted shakily.

Willow stopped talking, and the teenager extended a finger to point at the map. Willow looked down at it, and then almost stopped breathing before she caught herself. The iron filings were trembling. As the two young women watched, the thin scrapings of metal shuffled slowly across the paper, rearranging themselves into new alignments.

Willow blinked. 'Ah.'

Dawn pointed at a newly-formed epicentre. 'Didn't Buffy and Xander go to the mall?'

'Yeah,' Willow said. 'They did.'

'Okay,' Buffy began, as they passed through the mall's automatic sliding doors. 'Do we have the shopping list?'

Xander pulled it out of his pocket, held the folded paper triumphantly aloft. 'Here,' he announced.

'Alright,' Buffy said. 'You can keep a hold of it then.'

He mumbled something negative and unintelligible under his breath, but obligingly shoved the paper back into his pocket. 'Where are we going, then?' he asked, having finished the expected grumbling.

Buffy debated just what sort of joke she would let herself in for if she asked Xander how she was supposed to know her way around. She didn't end up needing to ask.

'Malls are your home turf,' Xander continued blithely.

Buffy hit him on the shoulder, but only lightly, because he could probably have come up with worse. They were far enough inside the mall, by this point, to be surrounded by shops even if Buffy wasn't sure which direction to head in to find the supermarket, or whatever shop it was they needed to get everything on the shopping list. That didn't stop Buffy idly window-shopping, because they were strolling along slowly enough for that to be feasible, and because Xander had known her long enough to know exactly what she was like when faced with new shopping opportunities.

And because this was her life, and the universe conspired against her in so many ways, that was also the point when the sounds of distant screaming reached her ears.

It was simple enough to find the screams, but then in Cassie's experience it usually was. A dash down two escalators, a brief sprint of a few hundred yards, and they met an exodus composed mainly of teenagers, with the odd adult scattered amongst the crowd looking either faintly stunned, or irritated at the latest irresponsible student prank. And around the corner from the bulk of the escapees were four screaming teens, three scarily motionless bodies, two large piles of clothing, and one violet-skinned alien.

The six school students slowed as they took in the scene. The alien was humanoid, albeit with something like four or five arms too many, each individual limb too long, and each equipped with taloned digits. Its squat, short stature seemed similarly disproportionate, niggling unhappily at the back of Cassie's mind. Two of the still bodies – let them just be unconscious, Cassie thought, let them just be stunned – were lying together, blood trickling between them. The third was a little apart, slumped half-sitting against a wall, and was stirring.

Another scream snapped her attention back to where a teenaged boy – Mike? Mick? She knew him, she was sure – was scrambling backwards, away from the viciously fast swing of an alien arm. The other three conscious teens were likewise stumbling backwards, and as Cassie watched, two of them managed to make it past the alien to reach the freedom of unobstructed open corridor. That left two unconscious teenage bodies, one just stirring, and two still on their feet.

Right.

Okay, then.

They could do this.

Jon caught her gaze, and quietly hissed 'Cassie!'

She nodded, and then muttered at him absently, with her mind elsewhere. 'Yeah, yeah.'

Half a second later, the security cameras around them simultaneously stopped working. One broke into several pieces that clattered to the floor. Cassie would be concerned about the consequences of this wanton destruction of public property, if she and her friends weren't about to incur a great deal more property damage in the next few minutes. And besides, far stranger things had happened in the mall without anyone noticing, so she supposed they would be safe. In any case, the mall staff were probably very used to replacing suddenly and inexplicably faulty security cameras by now.

There was something wrong with the LCD monitor Willow was trying to use to see what at the mall was disturbing her telluric currents, not to mention cell phone reception, but she hadn't explained the cause of the problem to Dawn. The image was transitioning between black-and-white and psychedelic colour. Any blurred figures that could be seen through the static were doubled, or tripled, in ghostly trailing after-images. The audio, when it wasn't producing reverberating echoes, was out of sync, or shifting its volume. The zoom function was malfunctioning.

Dawn was having trouble, all in all, making out anything. Going by her expression, Willow wasn't faring much better. There was a shorter figure in the centre of the mess – what the mess what made of Dawn couldn't tell, but there was definitely an obstruction – that might have been the cause of the trouble. It might not have been. It might have been a pot plant. Or an octopus. Or a hatstand.

There were other figures, on the ground, or falling, or moving too quickly for the monitor to keep up with. One figure in the background turned to another, and said something Dawn couldn't hear. The picture swivelled on its axis, sickeningly, and the background had become the foreground.

The second figure said, too loudly to be natural, 'Yeah, yeah.'

The colours fluctuated again. And then the picture dissolved into pure static, and blinked out completely with a last flash of brilliant colour. Willow looked outraged.

She said: 'Again?'

Improvised weaponry was something of a specialty for Cassie's friends. And there were all those clothing racks just hanging around. With sturdy metal frameworks. They were even on wheels.

Really, they were asking to be launched at any alien menace within range.

The alien went down in a gratifyingly chaotic jumble of limbs. The two conscious teens stared at the point of collision in a gratifyingly relieved sort of shock. They scuttled around it on their way to safety, only to be temporarily waylaid by their rescuers. The said rescuers had since taken advantage of the alien's indisposition to drag the other three teens away from the scene.

Or, rather, they had begun to drag the other three teens away from the scene, before two of them made a miraculously rapid return to consciousness to reveal that they had in fact merely made an experienced strategic decision to play dead and were entirely capable of walking on their own. The third teen, legitimately groggy after having been tossed at a wall, proved to be entirely capable of letting his pride dictate his actions, walking on his own, falling over, and then grudgingly condescending to lean on a shoulder.

The five rescued teens were directed to help each other make good their escape from the scene. On their way they were to appropriate the metal barriers generally used to block off the escalators at night, and put them to the more immediately important purpose of blocking off access to the current incident.

There were no complaints about either course of action, other than the obligatory wounded-teenage-male-pride grumblings of being able to walk on his own, really, dammit, his head didn't even hurt, and neither did his ankle. Or his knee, and no, he didn't have a possible concussion, and it wasn't affecting his judgement (even these rote objections faded suspiciously fast, however, when faced with the girl who had volunteered to help him limp away).

And that meant that they were out of the way. No more innocent bystanders hanging around to worry about.

Of course, there was still the alien left to deal with. But a second volley of strategically aimed clothing racks was widely thought to be capable of stalling matters long enough for some sort of plan to be formed.

Buffy had frozen in mid-step when she had heard the screams, but Xander hadn't. She was used enough to the supernatural hijinks her life threw up in her face that she had quite smoothly converted the paralysis to a study of the nearest shop window. Xander was used enough to the typical state of their lives to have noticed.

'Trouble?' he asked her, in a muttered undertone.

'Screams,' she agreed.

'Ah,' he said. 'Not "I found a great bargain" screams, then?'

Buffy gave him a Look. It was more effective than a randomly-selected bystander might have given her credit for.

Xander grunted acquiescence. 'Where?'

She shrugged. Waved a hand down the corridor. 'That way?'

'You don't sound sure,' Xander said, even as he began walking in the direction Buffy had indicated.

She opened her mouth to reply, and then winced. Xander was pretty sure it wasn't what he had said. It had been something he hadn't heard, and no prizes for guessing what.

'That way,' Buffy said decisively.

She started jogging. Xander followed.

'We should do that more often,' Miranda said enthusiastically.

Worryingly enthusiastically, because Miranda, Cassie knew, was usually far more reserved. But Miranda had also, it seemed, enjoyed her unofficial strike at the fashion industry via judicious use of clothing racks far more than the rest of them. At least, that was what Cassie hoped her friend was referring to.

'You'll get your chance,' Chris muttered. 'The shackles of fashion can wait.' He poked at a scrape on his hand. 'We have a plan?'

'Kill it with fire?' Steph suggested, with the usual worrying glint in her eyes.

And whatever that tactic's usual merit, Cassie didn't even need to think about her response to that suggestion. 'These are clothing stores. Clothes burn. Fires spread. That would be bad.' Her friends shouldn't have needed to think before coming to that conclusion, either, and Cassie didn't bother using full sentences to get the point across.

'And probably more property damage than we can get away with, yeah.' Steph hesitated, giving up trying to speak as she scuttled backwards away from a far-too-long limb, and winced as she hit the wall with her back. 'So how are we doing this?'

Automatically, everyone turned to look at Jon. They all then immediately turned back again to keep an eye on the alien-whatever, which was thankfully still busy making its way out of the mess of clothing and metal around it.

But Cassie thought that that instinctive reaction just went to show – well, something. Jon's innate sense of command, or something like that. If she hadn't already believed the "Uncle Jack was abducted by aliens and cloned" story, way back when, then she would have been convinced by the way everyone looked to Jon to give the orders – including Cassie herself – even if they weren't technically orders. Setting up something very like a cult of personality at a high school was, well, sort of telling.

Jon narrowed his eyes at the scene of shop-front destruction, possibly contemplating how best to enhance the damage. 'Okay,' he said. 'Remember that Definitely Not Star Trek Incident last year?'

'Number Three or Number Five?' Nick asked (and Cassie had a flashback to the exhausting argument as to why there would not and could not be a "Number One", because Steph was apparently that much of a geek).

The shopping mall had become incredibly deserted, Buffy noted absently as she jogged down its broad hallways and trying to figure out both where she and Xander were, and where they were trying to go. It was probably a good sign – less innocent bystanders – but it wasn't doing anything to help her growing sense of unease. This was the second time in under a week that there had been a supernatural attack in Colorado Springs – and, Buffy thought anxiously, this was only the second incident that she knew about.

The frequency was too high for anywhere not the site of a Hellmouth. But Willow hadn't come across anything to change her considered opinion on that topic. A Hellmouth Colorado Springs was not. It was just subject to a similar regularity of unnatural occurrences, and as far they knew without even a Slayer around to help fend off the forces of evil. It wasn't right.

And on that thought, Buffy skidded to a halt. Xander stopped right behind her, experienced enough by now not to have actually crashed into her, and concentrated on drawing in gulps of air.

'The screams have stopped,' she said abruptly.

Xander blinked. 'Good or bad, you think?'

Buffy turned slowly on the spot, trying to find any turn-offs because she was sure they had come this way before. 'Maybe a little better than worse.' She completed the circle, coming face to face with Xander again. 'That way,' she added, gesturing in the direction that she thought might be their best bet.

As they moved off, walking a little more slowly this time, opting for observation and relative stealth over speed and going in circles, Xander said 'So we're going with the scenario that the good guys either won or are winning, resulting in no more need for screaming, rather than that the bad guys won, meaning anyone who would scream is now in a really bad, non-noise-making-capable place.'

'I do try to be optimistic.'

'So we're also assuming there were actual demon-fighting good guys around, not just random innocent bystanders?'

'Optimism, Xander.'

'Right.'

Cassie really didn't enjoy playing sheepdog. It felt less effective, somehow, when the sheep in question was far better armed than she was. Better armed in every sense, she thought, and swayed away from a limb slicing through the air by her head.

But for the moment, they had the alien surrounded. Surrounded, admittedly, in a quite large and somewhat wobbly ring, but they'd dragged across the barriers on the far side, blocking off the area at least superficially from that approach, and were closing in. The first stages of the plan were working. And for the moment, Cassie thought, it wasn't going too badly.

And then she heard Miranda scream.

They were lost, Xander thought.

That much was undeniable. With the screaming stopped – not that Xander had been able to hear it in the first place – there was approximately nothing to guide them in the right direction. Stumbling upon deserted sections of the mall was a clue they were getting close, he thought – but then they'd make a wrong turning and suddenly be engulfed in swarming crowds again. Or hit a dead end. Or end up where they'd begun. Depressingly, this was about what their tracking skills had now boiled down to.

There was something off about it, and Xander was pretty sure that wasn't just his pride talking. Unfamiliarity with the building didn't help, but it was nothing they hadn't learnt to deal with since leaving Sunnydale. They should have found where the screams had come from by now. Even if only through trial and error. It was almost as if there was something blocking their progress, confusing their path, but Xander didn't know what. Or how, because he had never really understood when Willow or Giles had tried to explain how that bit of magic worked.

He did know that whatever might be turning them around, however impossible it might be to get past it, neither he nor Buffy were about to give up. No matter how hopeless it was. But that knowledge wasn't nearly so helpful.

'We're not getting anywhere,' he told Buffy.

'No,' she agreed. 'But-'

And then someone screamed. And this time, Xander could hear it too.

They ran. Maybe this time they might reach it.

Time seemed to freeze - and then Miranda was stumbling backwards, utterly pale, her left arm hanging limply. Blood suddenly covered her left sleeve. Was spattered over the floor. Dripped from the alien's retreating taloned upper limb.

Miranda's back hit the wall. She slumped, sitting limply with her head hanging, drawing in gasping breath after shuddering, gasping breath. Blood slid down her arm to trickle from between her fingers.

Cassie swallowed, ducked a wayward swipe aimed at her own head, caught Jon's eyes, and grimaced at him. He nodded. Cassie turned side-on to the alien, keeping her eyes fixed on it, and scuttled towards her friend. Reached her side, and crouched there, murmuring to her quietly and meaninglessly.

There was too much blood. Miranda wasn't moving. Conscious, still, but in too much shock and pain to summon the willpower or mental coherence to move. Cassie – slowly, carefully, painstakingly – peeled the raggedly torn edges of Miranda's jacket away from her arm. Miranda sucked in a breath. Cassie blanched. It was too deep. Far too deep.

Okay. Alright, then. One step at a time. Blood loss.

'Miranda?' she said softly. 'I'm going to try to stop the blood. Can you press here?' she asked, and moved Miranda's right hand for her, so it rested against the cut in her other arm.

Miranda took in a deep breath, lifted her head, and said faintly 'Yes.' She pressed. Blinked in pain, and kept her hand there.

Cassie kept her hand over Miranda's, and looked around for something to use as - there. Maybe all the clothing everywhere was a really good idea after all. With her spare hand, Cassie picked up the scarf, and looped it roughly around Miranda's upper arm, above the cut.

'Ready?' she asked.

'Sure,' Miranda said, a little more strongly. 'Right. What are you doing?'

'Tourniquet,' Cassie replied. 'What's happening with the alien?'

'Um,' Miranda said. 'Um, um.' She sounded distracted. Like she was still trying to pull her thoughts together. Understandably. 'Everyone still OK. Alien – ah – further away.' She paused. 'Tourniquet?' Miranda glanced down at Cassie's hands on her arm for a moment, and said 'You do know that the use of tourniquets is still – ow – controversial, right? A large school of thought believes that the, uh, ow, benefits of stemming blood loss are, um, outweighed by the toxic and, and, and very detrimental substances that build up when blood flow is-'

'We don't have many options, Miranda. Focus,' Cassie ordered tersely.

'Right.' The girl blinked, carefully looked away from her arm, and concentrated her gaze once again on the small figure wreaking havoc amongst the shop fronts. It wasn't a comforting sight, although it was arguably better than her blood-covered arm.

Cassie pulled the knot tight. Miranda's answering indrawn breath was shuddering, shaky, pained. The blood slowed. Miranda breathed out, slowly. Her hand slipped away from her arm, smearing blood across her front. Cassie watched her friend's eyes close; a long second later, she heard Miranda take another breath, and breathed out herself. Okay.

Okay. Miranda had been right; a tourniquet was a stop-gap. Cassie looked over at the alien, now further away from her, and decided to hope that the movement had been deliberate on her friends' part, and spoke to a certain amount of control over the situation. She wasn't feeling too in control herself.

'Jon!' she yelled.

Cassie was part of a group of high school students who faced threats to their lives on a semi-regular basis, via all manner of weird alien crap. Of course, most people did. But unlike most people, Cassie and her friends knew about it, and therefore saved the world, or at least the Colorado Springs bit of it, on a regular basis. And all in all, they'd acclimatised to the situation quickly, if not always easily, and with occasional relapses. Jon had probably had a great deal more trouble with the "high school students" bit, rather than the "life-threatening danger" or "weird alien crap" bit, but even so Cassie had never heard much more than an ill-tempered mumble about it from him, in what was probably an example of admirable self-restraint.

But despite all that, Jon still hated reminders of how deeply the weird alien crap affected him personally on a cellular, genetic level; Cassie knew this. They didn't talk about it, just like they didn't talk about her oddly lingering ability to break CCTV cameras with her mind. She wasn't sure what the alien legacy left in him by the DNA of the Ancients entailed, or why it had shown itself in him – but not, as far as she knew, in her Uncle Jack. But she did know that he rated the protection of other people above his own ingrained need to stolidly ignore the weird alien crap. On a more minor level, he used it every day, letting the intuition and instinct that both she and he knew wasn't precisely natural warn them of potential alien incursions.

So, even while frantically flicking her gaze between the alien and her injured friend, Cassie knew what Jon would do before he did it, reaching out a hand to clasp Miranda's upper arm where it had been laid open almost to the bone. He squeezed gently, eyes closed, and muttered something under his breath, although Cassie would have been hard-pressed to say what it was.

Several moments later, the muttering stopped, and Cassie could feel Jon relax where he crouched next to the two girls. She looked back down at Miranda's arm to where a faint blue glow was fading around a wound that was now significantly smaller and barely leaking blood at all. Cassie swiftly untied the improvised tourniquet, and grinned, relieved and grateful, at Jon. He grinned back brightly, adrenaline clearly not quite drained from his system, which Cassie guessed was all keeping him from feeling the effort it would have taken him – as they had learnt from erratic, trial-and-error experience, and as Cassie knew would soon manifest itself in severe hunger and exhaustion – to heal the deep wound.

Cassie swept the ex-tourniquet over what had been a deep gash in Miranda's arm to get rid of the worst of the blood and then, at a loss as to what she should do with the blood-soaked cloth, balled it up and shoved it into her bag, doubtless getting blood all over everything. She'd have to replace it all. Again.

Miranda, going by what Cassie's brief not-really-an-examination could tell her, was now almost entirely fine, if unconscious. Jon had already swivelled on his heels to watch the other three as they continued dodging around the alien, keeping well out of range of its arms, or in fact the range of any of its limbs.

Between them, Chris, Nick and Steph had managed to do a not-at-all-bad job of herding the alien, and it was backing towards the planned empty stretch of wall; although it admittedly wasn't the stretch of wall they had intended to use, and was only empty because the clothing racks previously in front of it had since skidded away and overturned.

But the first phase of the Plan was almost complete. Of course, the second phase was to play it by ear, which Cassie was less comfortable about, no matter how often their Plans included that exact step. But she'd let Jon deal with that, Cassie decided, as he jogged over to re-join the other three in their herding efforts. Cassie turned back to Miranda, who was still slumped upright, half-sitting against the wall. More encouragingly, it looked like she was coming round. Her eyes opened, drooped, closed. Opened again, and stayed open.

'What?' she said.

'How are you feeling?' Cassie asked.

A pause. 'Better.' After a shorter pause, Miranda added, 'Tired, though.'

Cassie nodded. It sounded truthful enough. 'Alright,' she said. 'Don't move. You're still recovering.'

She carefully didn't say what the other girl was recovering from. Miranda murmured an affirmative, and, with one last searching look at her friend, Cassie left her there.

In the brief space of time her attention had been elsewhere, the alien had retreated still further. As Cassie reached Jon's side, the short creature had its back against the wall, and her friends were warily watching it for signs of sudden movement. It gave none. And now they were, it seemed, up to the "play it by ear" stage. For a silent, strained, awkward moment, no one moved. Not the many-limbed alien, and not any of Cassie's friends.

'Okay,' Steph said finally. 'Now what?'

All eyes turned, again, to Jon. After a second, the alien was looking expectantly at Jon as well, and Cassie had to fight the bubbling urge to giggle. It was adrenaline. That was all. Because her friend's arm had been cut to the bone, and now they had the alien who had done it against a wall. Except the humanoid was only trapped until it realised that Cassie's friends had the advantage of numbers, but that was really about all they had.

And then Cassie staggered as Miranda came up behind her, looped an arm around her shoulders, and leant all her weight on her. Apparently she'd become tired of watching the action, Cassie thought, frustrated, and decided to forgo her needed recuperation in favour of a jaunt back to the danger. An ill-advised jaunt, which Miranda should have known. And which she particularly should have known because Cassie had advised her against it less than two minutes ago.

'It's scared,' Miranda said. Or, well, slurred.

Cassie snapped her head around to look at her. 'What?'

Miranda nodded, with the clumsy conviction of the drunk. 'Scared.'

Cassie wondered if Jon's Ancient healing powers, or whatever they were, had slipped their friend some seriously heavy-duty painkillers as well.

'Miranda?' Jon said.

'Panicked,' Miranda replied. 'Look,' she said, waving a hand at the violet-skinned alien.

None of them had in fact stopped looking at it yet.

'Well, we knew it isn't exactly the, you know, epitome of calm thinking,' Chris said.

Miranda frowned at him. 'It's calmer now,' she said. She sounded less woozy. 'No one's screaming at it.'

But on the other hand, Cassie thought, they had backed it against a wall, were surrounding it, and were pointing knives at it. Not to mention a stiletto of the high-heeled shoe variety which Steph had appropriated from a nearby pile on the ground. Was that a whole lot better?

Jon looked like he was having some kind of flashback. At a guess, it probably involved Cassie's Uncle Daniel. He also looked like he was keeping up a steady internal commentary that consisted mostly of expletives, but then that was pretty regularly par for the course in this sort of situation. And his expression, however grumpy, had that nuance Cassie could read as: yeah, well, alright. Fair point.

Because the sheepdog tactic wouldn't have worked if the alien had actually been motivated and determined enough to get past them. If it had been vicious enough, it could have escaped past them to wreak havoc – and with the limbs, and the claws, and the alien-ness,it could have wreaked some pretty chaotic havoc. Of course, they would have caught up with the alien eventually and put a decisive end to its mayhem, because it wasn't like they hadn't done that before.

But the point still stood: the alien was dangerous, but it wasn't attacking them now – now, when they were distracted, when one of them was woozy, when they were considering it to be less of a threat. The alien, with limbs and claws and all, was just standing there. The alien, which was – blurry.

Cassie blinked. And then blinked again, and stuck a finger in the corner of her eye to get rid of any potential vision-impairing sleep-gunk. No such luck. The alien still looked blurred, was more blurred than before, its edges indistinct. Away to Cassie's left, Jon's swearing had become audible, muttered under his breath, and joined by a brief spattering of surprised invective from everyone bar the still-groggy Miranda. It wasn't just her eyesight, then, that was playing tricks. Good to know.

But a second later – less than a second, even – it wasn't just the alien that was fuzzy. It was the air around it, too. Air that was beginning to look almost solid as it moved around the alien. A seeming solidity lent weight, Cassie thought, staring, by the way the air around the alien was also turning colours. And the air was turning increasingly opaque colours, at that; icy shades of blue, interwoven with veins of violet, and seams of sea-green. Opaque enough, as they wrapped themselves around the alien, that Cassie was finding it hard to see the alien.

And, actually, yeah, she couldn't see the alien. She could tell where it was, or at least where it should be – right behind all the swirly colours – but she couldn't see it. Jon had fallen silent, his swearing either over or internalised again, and when Cassie glanced at him, he was tense. Unsurprisingly. So was she.

When the twisting colours started to fade, and she hadn't had time to do anything but stare, Cassie didn't have any expectations. Not really. But where the swirls of colour disappeared, patches of clear air shifting like wind being blown through smoke, Cassie could see nothing but the bare, blank wall.

No alien.

Well.

That was new.

There was an escalator.

An escalator, moreover, that Xander had never seen before. And he knew he hadn't seen it before, despite all escalators looking much the same, because he and Buffy had passed this particular stretch of mall approximately a thousand times in the last five minutes. Give or take. And on each of those previous passes, there had been no escalator in sight.

But now there was. Sitting there, mocking him, in a display of blatant disregard for its prior non-existence. It sat there as if it was meant to be there, as if it had been there all along, merely hidden from sight by a twist in reality, and was that really a possibility any weirder than an appearance from nowhere?

It didn't matter.

Buffy and Xander pelted down the escalator.

The final ethereal swirlings faded away, and left in their place a complete absence of violet-skinned aliens, a deep silence, and then a collective relaxation. Miranda breathed out slowly, and sat down again, looking abruptly wobbly-legged. Cassie joined her, and used the opportunity to check on the other girl's arm again.

'Okay,' Steph said again. 'Now what? Is that it?'

All three of the boys shrugged simultaneously.

'All bar the clean-up,' Nick offered.

Everyone else seemed to accept that. Cassie looked around herself at the piles of clothes, the toppled and broken clothing racks, the dents in the walls, the broken security cameras...

'I don't think we want to be here for the clean-up,' she said.

Jon chuckled, and, grinning, walked over to help Miranda up to her feet. Chris looked over at them from where he was poking at a pile of shoes, spread around what had once been a table.

'We should probably get out of here,' he said over his shoulder, 'before someone realises it was only us that put up the barriers.'

'And messed up the shops.'

'Yeah. What do we do about the blood?'

Jon paused in thought for about half a second, and said 'Leave it for someone else to worry about. They can clean it up.'

'It's not like anyone'll guess why it's there,' Steph agreed.

'And the blood's all dried,' Nick added. 'No chance of-' he wiggled his fingers, which Cassie took to mean something along the lines of "wannabe evil sorcerers using our blood for their evil purposes, because I have no intention of being brainwashed like that ever again".

Cassie nodded in agreement, and stood up. 'Let's get out of here.'

If the mysteriously appearing escalator hadn't already been enough to tip Xander off that they'd finally found the right path, or if the latticed barriers cutting off that path hadn't done it, then the abrupt change in shopfront décor would surely have managed to convince him. No matter what their merchandise, shops didn't generally throw it across the floor. Nor were clothing racks usually so haphazardly arranged. And actually, Xander thought, surveying the damage, "haphazard" was an understatement.

He and Buffy were standing in a clear patch in the middle of a stretch of shops that looked straight out of a warzone. Or, well, the urban, supernatural, covert, adults-are-blind-and-actually-believe-the-PCP-excuse warfare sort of warzone, anyway. Xander could recognise their like at a glance. And there were some obvious signs.

The dents in a wall, for one – broad and shallow, but undeniably there. The clothing was dumped in piles on the floor, or still attached to the tangled, toppled clothing racks. There were two lopsided tables, legs cracked, shoes heaped around the bases. Windows had the spider-webbed fractures of blunt force impact, radiating outwards. There were two, no, three, separate smears of blood on the floor, one significantly larger than the others.

And there were no people.

Whatever had happened, it had been over before he and Buffy had arrived. Long enough over that Xander couldn't guess at what had gone on, hadn't had a chance to know. Long enough over that they hadn't had a chance of putting a stop to it.

'Do you think this is going to be happening a lot?' Xander had meant the question to be rhetorical. He hadn't even specified "this". If they had still been in Sunnydale, it would have been a joke. Admittedly, not a joke worthy of any response, but…

But Buffy wasn't taking it that way. She was silent for a moment, though, staring at a pile of clothing, and Xander had enough time to think he might actually be able to get away with the comment without Buffy having a fit of renewed overprotectiveness.

Then Buffy said 'Are you sure it was the right idea to enrol Dawn at this school?'

Xander carefully didn't make any sign of disappointment at the return to this topic. Because it wasn't even unwarranted overprotectiveness. Not really. Instead, he said 'This isn't Sunnydale, Buffy. Dawn will be fine.'

They walked another few feet, and then Buffy said 'Alright.' Then she added, 'But then why have there been two attacks since we got here?'

Xander shrugged. 'Maybe Willow will have figured something out.'

'Are we sure this isn't a Hellmouth?'

'Aren't we?'

'It can go on the list,' Buffy decided.

Xander didn't ask what list. As long as he wasn't expected to answer the tricky questions, it didn't much matter. But speaking of lists...

'We still have to go shopping,' he said.

Buffy groaned. Clothes shopping was one thing. Shoe shopping was another. Grocery shopping was entirely different.

'How long is this likely to take?'

The sounds of conversation quieted as the two left the scene of chaotic, possibly-demonic destruction. When it was muted altogether by virtue of some great distance, a pile of clothes shifted awkwardly. A minute later, after a brief struggle, a teenage girl emerged from beneath the quicksand of fashion, brushing herself off and removing an errant pair of leggings from her shoulder.

One hand absently went to her ponytail as she stared speculatively in the direction in which the strangers' voices suggested they had disappeared. A new girl at school? That was not only interesting, it was gossip; and Lea Sheehan was the first to have heard it. Grinning, Lea pulled her cell phone out, shook it to make sure it still worked, and started tapping in a phone number.

Listening to it ring, she abandoned her window shopping plans in favour of something far more immediately worthy of her attention. Not only was the school about to gain another student, it was about to gain a student with some strange guardians. Strange guardians were usually a symptom of other strangeness. Maybe it was time for another strategic break-in to the admin staff's filing cabinets, Lea thought, giving the idea some serious consideration. Her semi-regular efforts at that accumulation of gossip-fodder were usually worth it.

Lea grinned more widely.

Her call connected.

[-end-]