There is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen. D.H. Lawrence


Samantha Groves looked around the empty space as the man at the desk scampered away. The happy fervor fell from her expression, and was replaced by hurt confusion. She looked at Harold. "Where is it?" she demanded.

Finch looked around the vast space, too. "I'm sorry," he answered with quiet satisfaction. "You said you wanted to set the machine free. I already did."

She turned and spoke to the echoing room. "Where are you? Please talk to me." Then she faced Finch again. "You lied to me. I believed you." She glanced over her shoulder to where the Machine had been. "I believed in you."

"Ms. Groves —"

"My name is Root!" She raised her weapon and aimed it at him.

Harold stood very still. He was going to die. He was surprised at how calm he was. There was nothing to fear, he supposed, now that death was inevitable. It was almost a relief. Yes, he would die, but the Machine was safely out of the reach of the government, of Decima, and of Samantha Groves. He wondered if Reese would be able to make sense of it all …

A gunshot echoed through the space.

That didn't hurt, Finch thought in surprise. I didn't feel it at all. He guessed that it was very serious, the wound so critical that his ability to experience it had been short-circuited by his brain. He guessed that it was likely to be fatal almost immediately.

He watched as Root grabbed her shoulder and sank to the concrete floor. The pain still did not take hold. Dimly, after a long moment, he realized that she was the one who had been shot. That made more sense, of course, though he could not quite work out how she had been shot. He turned his head slowly. John Reese and Joss Carter were standing just inside the door. Ah. Finally the whole event made sense.

Reese hurried to his side. Detective Carter moved toward the injured woman more slowly, her weapon lowered but still at the ready.

An emotional blanket Finch recognized as shock wrapped around his thoughts. His mind became pleasantly fuzzy.

He was going to live. Well. That was certainly unexpected.

Reese touched his arm. "Harold? Are you okay?"

Finch wanted to say something reassuring, but no words came. He nodded.

Carter kicked Root's gun away, then bent to collect it. She looked around the room, then back toward the door they'd come in through.

"Is this what you expected?" John asked.

"It's what I hoped," Finch managed to answer.

"You didn't do this yourself?"

Harold recognized that, beyond his inborn curiosity, his friend was trying to draw him out of his shock. It was a prudent action, and he forced himself to cooperate. "I couldn't. I'd locked myself out." His thoughts sharpened a bit. "The Machine was designed to accept alterations in its programming only as a response to an attack. I knew that sooner or later someone would try to take it over, but I didn't know who. So I made sure that when they did, they'd do it with my code."

"You hid a virus within a virus?"

Finch looked at his kidnapper. She was still huddled on the floor, weeping inconsolably, devastated by her loss. But his own head cleared as he told his partner the truth. "I realized that the people Nathan and I had entrusted the machine to were the wrong people and that the only way to protect it would be to teach it to protect itself." He looked at Carter, and then back at John. "I didn't want to involve you in this business, either of you, because I had hoped that, if I hadn't returned, you would continue what we had started."

Reese gave him a little smirk. "That's not good."

"We should go," Carter said, gesturing towards the entrance.

"She comes too," Finch insisted. "If we leave her, they'll kill her."

"I'm not coming with you!" the fallen woman shrieked. "She'll come for me. She'll save me."

"The Machine?" Finch asked. "It's not here, Miss Groves. And it's not going to save you."

"She'll save me."

Reese cocked his head. "We have to go now." He looked around, then gestured toward the far wall. "There."

Finch couldn't see an exit that way. "Are you sure?"

"The Machine is."

Root looked up sharply. "She's still talking to you?"

Beyond the entrance there was noise, commotion. Boots in the corridor. "Let's go," Reese said, taking Finch's arm.

"Miss Groves …"

"She'll save me. She'll talk to me. I won't leave her."

"Thirty seconds," Reese said tightly. He pulled on Finch's arm.

Harold let himself be pulled across the vast space where the Machine's servers had once stood. He was aware that Carter moved behind them, close, half-sideways, her weapon still at the ready.

Reese pushed at the corner of one of the blank panels, and the secret door swung open silently. The op peered into the opening, then gestured for Carter to go ahead of them. He pushed Finch that way, but Harold paused and looked back. "Miss Groves …"

She turned her head defiantly away.

Reluctantly, Finch stepped through the secret doorway and left her.

He felt more than saw Reese hesitate behind him, with his own weapon in his hand. For one moment he felt how badly his partner wanted to kill the woman. It was understandable. She had caused them both so much grief. But then John pushed the door shut, took his arm again, and hurried him down the narrow corridor.

Harold honestly didn't know whether to feel relief or despair.


Reese was grateful that the electronic voice in his ear gave him a way out that didn't involve shooting a bunch of government agents. But he was also relieved when the voice finally fell silent.

He far preferred Harold's voice in his ear.

He paused at the exit and considered firing his weapon at Root's unprotected head. It would have been an easy shot, a clean kill. There had been a time when he wouldn't have hesitated. Root had murdered Alicia Corwin and Denton Weeks, and others. She'd kidnapped Harold, twice. She'd aimed missiles at New York City. She'd poisoned countless people with energy drinks, which had resulted in more than a dozen deaths. She'd poisoned Taylor Carter. She'd poisoned John. She'd force Christine to kill a man. Any one of those actions would have been sufficient reason to kill her. Kara Stanton would not have hesitated, and would have likely killed John if she'd know he'd hesitated.

But Stanton was dead, and Reese was not the man he'd been then.

The hacker, their great nemesis, was only a defenseless woman now. She was crying, bleeding, helpless.

Reese let her live.

He pushed the panel closed, wondering how soon he would regret that decision.

Carter took point. Reese followed closely, holding Harold's arm. The genius appeared uninjured and walked on his own, with nothing more than his customary limp, but he seemed dazed, detached. Compliant. The corridor led along the side of the warehouse space and ended in a single emergency exit door. It opened onto a fenced space full of scrubby weeds. The employee parking garage was only twenty yards beyond the battered fence.

John picked an older sedan to steal. He helped Harold into the back seat and had him lie down, then covered his head with his own jacket. But the precautions seemed unnecessary; the guard shack at the side entrance was empty, and the barrier gate swung open as the car approached.

Reese threw a grateful nod to the surveillance camera above the gate and drove out.


Once they were safely off the base, Carter reached over the seat and helped Finch sit up. He was pale and visibly shaky, but he straightened his glasses and then his tie in a way that was reassuringly Finch-like. "You okay?"

"Yes. Thank you, Detective." He touched his glasses again. "I honestly did not intend for you to become involved in this."

"Well, I could come with him," she answered, nodding toward Reese, "or I could follow the trail of bleeding kneecaps. It seemed easier this way."

"Of course," John said, "it would have been a lot easier if you'd told us where you were going."

"I couldn't," Finch answered. "She threatened Grace."

"Who's Grace?" Carter asked.

He shook his head. "She's safe, for now. I suppose the government really will kill Miss Groves."

Reese shrugged.

"They'll keep her alive until she finds out everything she knows," Carter offered. She wasn't sure if that would be any comfort, but it was obviously true.

"What she knows … can't be of much help to them now."

"Because you moved the Machine?"

"It moved itself."

"To where?"

"I have no idea."

Carter looked past him out the back window. There was no tail evident. Reese would keep watch for one, of course. "But who controls it?"

"As of now," he said flatly, "it controls itself."

Finch seemed very calm about that concept, but Carter felt her own anxiety rising. She'd only barely come to terms with the Machine's existence. The idea that it was entirely self-controlling now …

"The Numbers. The national security numbers, will they keep going to the government?"

"That will be up to the Machine."

"If they don't start up again, the country is defenseless."

"No. Just less well-defended."

"But …" The only thing that had made the idea of the Machine and its constant surveillance acceptable to Carter was her certainty that it was necessary to protect them. And her faith in Finch. "It's … on its own now. Your Machine. Making its own decisions."

"Yes." Finch nodded, just once. "I recognize that that's not a particularly comfortable notion for you, Detective." His voice remained flat, calm. He seemed almost uninterested. Or shocky. "I assure you that I am not entirely comfortable with it, either. But it was unavoidable. The only option was to leave it vulnerable to people like Miss Groves, or Decima, or the government. If they had not attempted to take it over, it would not have been necessary for it to become autonomous."

"Great," Carter managed to answer.

"I am hopeful," Finch added, "that it will continue to fulfill its primary purpose of protecting people. But I have no control over that now."

Carter sighed and settled back in her seat. The setting sun in her eyes made her squint. She glanced at Reese. Of course they were headed west. Even behind his sunglasses his eyes were narrowed against the glare. But that same sunset would also be in the eyes of anyone who attempted to follow them. He could use that to his advantage, if necessary. "What's the plan?"

"Just to drive, for a while," he said. His posture was nearly as stiff as Finch's, and his jaw was a tense line of clenched muscle. "Then we need to split up. The three of us together are too easy to spot."

She nodded. The A.P.B. on the three of them wouldn't need any details at all: Two white males, one black female. Traveling together they'd be much too obvious. She didn't think for a minute that Reese was going to let himself be separated from Finch. "So you're kicking me to the curb, huh?" she teased lightly.

He unclenched his jaw enough to give her crooked half-smile.

"As I recall, Detective," Finch offered from the back seat, "you have a graduation party to be preparing for."

Carter rubbed her neck. In the crisis of Finch's disappearance, she'd forgotten about her son's upcoming graduation, and the ever-growing party that would accompany it. "That's true." She shook her head. "Seems weird to be worried about that, when …" She paused. Finch was right. If the Machine wasn't watching over them anymore, other agencies still were. The C.I.A., D.H.S., F.B.I. – they would have to go back to doing things the hard way, but they were still there. And by now they had to be aware that their source of information had dried up.

She was still deeply uneasy.

Joss looked at John again. He was still watchful, but he was beginning to uncoil. He seemed unconcerned about the new threat presented by the possible absence of the Machine. But then, he'd told her that he'd never completed trusted the supercomputer. He might even be relieved to have it off-line for good.

Neither of the men seemed to have considered the possibility that the newly-freed Machine might actually begin to work against them. But if it was, as Finch said, fully autonomous now, that wasn't outside the realm of possibility. "Damn," she said quietly.

Reese glanced over at her. "It's still got Finch's programming," he said, as if he'd known exactly what she was thinking. "It's out there on its own now, in its own place. It will make its own friends, its own choices. But it has a good solid value system. Good upbringing. It won't go too far astray." He shrugged. "Kinda like Taylor."

"The Machine is not a child," Finch said peevishly. "It's not human."

"No," Carter said, "but we are, and it's easier for us mortals to think of it in those terms."

He grunted. "As you wish."

Carter gave Reese a little rueful smile, and he smiled back. Nothing was settled, and things could still get bad, but Finch was safe and well enough to be snippy. That was enough for now.

It had to be.


Nick Malone – formerly Nicholas Donnelly – sat up against his headboard, absently massaging the stump of his missing leg and half-watching reruns of some TV show about cops and lawyers. He wasn't interested in it, but it was better than nothing. The judge was pretty, anyhow.

Without the TV, the room was much too silent.

There were no new Numbers in the Den. His co-workers had gone out to dinner. They'd invited him, but he'd begged off, claiming that his leg hurt and he wanted to prop it up for a while. That was true, actually. But Donnelly knew that the source of his pain was his anxiety; his tension caused his missing foot to ache.

He wanted to be alone.

That part was a lie. He didn't want to be alone. He wanted to be with Asena. With the Machine. He wanted to be there when she came back online.

If she ever did.

She had told him it would only be one day. But he wasn't sure if that day was a specific twenty-four hours or something more generic. He wasn't absolutely sure she'd manage to reboot after clearing the virus she'd been afflicted with. He wasn't sure she'd be able to kill the virus at all. And if she could, he wasn't sure she'd still be able to contact him.

Or if she'd want to.

He wasn't sure of anything. And he couldn't do anything about it.

He could only wait.

His laptop was on the bed beside him, idle. The monitor had gone dark. The tiny lights at the edge of the keyboard were the only indicators that it was running.

Asena knew how to reach that computer, or had known, before the virus took her under.

"Watched pots never boil." Donnelly sighed and tried to focus on the television.

His computer remained silent.


Reese parked the stolen sedan in the parking lot of a strip mall, just across from an Enterprise Rental Car office. Carter got out of the car and stretched. "Sure you don't want me to stay with Finch?" she offered.

Both men got out of the car, too. "I'm sure," Reese answered easily. He'd relaxed to about sixty percent soldier, Carter thought. That was about as unguarded as he ever got in public. "But thanks."

"Yes," Finch added. "Thank you, Detective. I hope I haven't disrupted your plans too badly."

"Disrupted …." Joss almost laughed. She'd dropped everything and chased across the whole country beside a madman – and she'd do it again in a minute. "I'm glad you're okay." She took his arm and squeezed gently. "You're okay, right?"

She looked at John. He nodded, just once, with a wry little smile playing around his lips. The man could say more with a little twist of his lip and a sparkle in his eye than Finch could with all the big words in his impressive vocabulary. She nodded back. "Try to stay out of trouble."

"We always try," Reese protested.

"Try harder." She gave Finch's arm one last squeeze, then strode toward the rental office.

By the time she came out, with a car easily booked with her fake ID and matching credit card, the stolen sedan was abandoned and the men were gone.

The detective silently wished her friends Godspeed.