A/N: Hey, new chapter. I know they're not very long at this point, I'm working on that. Hope you like and thanks for the reviews.

The place was crowded and had the accompanying smell to it. But as soon as people noticed Kara, they fell silent and stared at her. They also made way. It was a little eery, but Kara was used to this kind of behavior by now.

"Detective Sawyer?" she asked the desk sergeant as she walked by. He pointed into the crowd and Kara zoomed in on the lone figure in a corner where nobody else seemed to venture. She walked over.

"Detective?"

Maggie looked up, blinking. She seemed to have been so emerged with whatever she was reading that she only now became aware of the precinct having gone almost completely silent. Only phones were ringing now.

"Supergirl. What... what brings you here?"

"I have to talk to you. Can we go somewhere where we can speak in private?"

The detective seemed to think about her request, pulling her eyebrows together. Then she stood. "Come with me," she said, pulling her jacket from her chair.

As they walked through the crowds, she bellowed: "Would someone answer those fucking phones?"

It seemed to pull people out of their paralysis and everybody went back to work. Kara saw Maggie shake her head at her colleagues, then she followed her through a door and into the precinct's stairwell. They descended the stairs into an underground parking garage.

"Is this private enough for you?" she asked as she turned toward Kara.

"It'll do. There's been an incident at the... the D.E.O.," Kara said that last bit out of the corner of her mouth.

Maggie squinted her eyes at her. "And?"

Kara shuffled her feet. The detective sure had an intensity about her. She was very no-nonsense, but Kara failed to see what her appeal was beyond being a good cop. Alex wasn't one to make female friends easily, Kara could only remember two from high school. That she should be friends with this... brash woman was surprising.

"Do you know anything about Palkopeans?"

"Other than they're dead-ugly and highly poisonous, no."

"You wouldn't have any idea where I could find an antidote against their poison, would you?" Kara already knew what the answer would be, but she was hopeful to a fault and had to ask.

Maggie shook her head. "Will you tell me what this is about?"

"Some D.E.O. agents tried to move a Palkopean prisoner and it got cut. One of the agents sealed the room before the poison could escape, but now there are four agents locked in a room with the dead prisoner."

"Jesus, that's... wait a second. Why're you here? Why didn't Alex call... she's one of the agents," Maggie said.

Her face seemed to fall a moment then morph into a determined, hard mask. "I might know someone who could help us."

"Oh, good. I'm slowly running out of options. I've never come across a Palkopean and our data base had very little information on them."

"They're rare. As far as I know there's only one in Natio... and I guess that was your prisoner, right? Great. Maybe you guys should start gathering information BEFORE you kill those aliens?" She was angry.

"He attacked those agents, okay? The D.E.O. doesn't just kill anyone, they try to protect the city from hostile aliens."

"Well, maybe somebody should start protecting aliens from you lot!"

Kara got angry so fast, she could just barely hold herself back. She was balling her hands into fists at her side, heat flushing her whole body. "Us lot?! You seem to forget I'm an alien too. Nobody set out for this to happen and now my... Alex and Hank are trapped in a room, poisoned! Do you wanna help, or do you just want to throw blame around. Because I got more pressing things to do than listen to your... your insults."

"You were about to say 'bullshit,' weren't you?" Maggie smirked.

"Was not!" Kara answered. "So, you said there might be somebody who knew something?"

"I think you know her too. M'gann?"

"Miss Martian."

"Yes, she meets many different aliens at the bar. It's a safe haven. You wanna come?"

Kara nodded. "Yes, I do."

"Okay, so... how do we do this? Will you come with me in my car, or..."

Kara stepped up to Maggie, but the detective took a step back. "Whoa, what...?"

"Sorry, I just thought we'd fly. It would be a lot quicker."

"Quicker..." Maggie looked at her intently for a moment and Kara could only guess at what she saw. "It's bad, isn't it? Is she injured?"

"Not badly, but... I don't know anything about this poison. Who knows how quickly it works, how it even works."

"All right, let's fly then."

Kara stepped up to Maggie and put an arm around her waist.

"Just fyi, it's polite to ask a woman before you... take her out for a mid-morning flight."

"I really don't have time for this," Kara mumbled under her breath, before she pushed off and zipped through the garage and into the sunlight.

Alex was kneeling over the dead alien body, wondering what else there was to do. She'd attended alien autopsies, but for most of those procedures she lacked the right equipment. She'd collected samples of the blood and the acid-y substance on the tentacles that had burned her and Henderson's skin. She'd even found the valve in its skin where Henderson had cut through and where the gas had escaped. She'd dabbed at that with some tissue and hoped there was residue on it, though she couldn't see anything.

Now the problem was how to get these samples into the lab. The lab guys currently argued if they should send someone in or if they should...

Alex suddenly felt faint.

"Whoa, there." It was Hank, he pulled her backward and up. "You all right, Alex?"

"Yeah, probably just been kneeling too long." She shook her head.

"You almost fell into the blood. Could it have to do with your arm? We should probably do something about that." He pointed at the wound that had turned an angry purplish red.

To Alex it throbbed with the infection and she tried very hard to ignore it, knowing that there was nothing she could do at the moment. "Wish I knew what," she answered Hank.

He flinched.

She knew he was probably thinking feverishly about how to help her, but so far had come up empty.

"You should probably eat one of those granola bars from the med kit," he suggested. "Blood sugar and all that."

Alex looked at him. There was a nagging thought at the back of her brain, something she couldn't quite grasp. But then she looked around the room and at the cell in its center. "The food chute," she said.

"The..."

She didn't leave Hank time to repeat what she'd said, she walked into the cell. She kneeled in front of the bench and knocked on the front where she suspected the tiny chamber was where the prisoners extracted their food. "It's how they get their food, Hank. The food chute."

"We could use that to get things in here."

Alex looked over at where she left the samples. "And out."

"Brilliant," he said as she already grabbed for her walkie talkie.

She stood as she clicked the talk button. "Vasquez, you there?"

"No, it's me Winn. How you guys doing?"

"I need to talk to Vasquez, where is she?"

"She's in engeneering. She-"

"Listen, Winn, go get her. We may have found a way to get things in and out of here. I've got samples that need to get analyzed. And we really need some more medical supplies and water. And food, I guess. I was thinking: the food chute. We could use-"

"I was trying to tell you, that's why Vasquez went down to engeneering. She had the same idea," Winn interrupted.

"Oh, good. Okay, tell her... tell..." The room suddenly started spinning.

"Alex?"

A faint sound of running footsteps was the last thing Alex heard and then...