Chapter 3


There were forty-three variables in Fred's original equation. The original equation was one that she'd developed in Pylea and used years ago in an attempt to open up a portal home, but instead opened up portals all over Pylea. It was the same type of portal that accidentally sucked in Cordelia, and in consequence brought Angel, Wesley, Charles and Lorne.

And in the end, brought her home.

Remembering the equation was easy, she'd spent five years developing it, but she'd only seen the variables once. Out of the priest's book, only long enough to substitute and solve. Only long enough to summon the portal and get out.

Because without the variables, she couldn't control where the portal would open, and if she couldn't control that then she had a better chance of being struck by lightning than getting out of here.

Which, in Pylea, was actually fairly likely. Clouds were lower in the atmosphere.

She could remember twelve. They were the most memorable of the variables, symmetrical numbers, like 22, 55, 66, numbers that added into themselves 224, 145, 325, or the one that looked like pi, 314.

It was cold, Fred knew because her fingers were going numb and making it harder to write - not that scratching numbers into rock was could really be called writing. The corner of her thumb had split open on one of the sharper edges, and she found herself longing for the smooth writing of ball point pens, but Pylea didn't have those.

No pens, no showers, no beds, no soft words, no kissing, no holding, no warmth. No one.

Except Lilah. Lilah was a variable. She was the difference between then and now; and how she would affect the equation, anyone's guess was as good as Fred's.

She was out of room again. Her arm wouldn't stretch any higher, and she'd boxed herself into a corner where numbers and letters had begun to overlap. Overlap, and blur.

Fred rocked off her toes and onto the flats of her feet, straining her eyes to read what she'd written. Things like handwriting got worse in Pylea, because they lost importance. Handwriting, and grammar and knowing the difference between thinking and speaking, they all became unimportant.

Her stomach growled, and hunger nipped persistently at her insides.

The first streaks of morning light began to leak through the ceiling and illuminated her night's work. If she'd been in her nice, warm bed Charles would have picked her up by now. If it was an early day they might've already been on their way to the waffle house, her waffle house. Hot waffles and sweet syrup and the smell of his cologne. Those were the things that came with dawn, not the false darkness of caves.

Charles. He would look for her. He would argue with Wesley and they would fight, fight over how and where to look. 'Locating spell,' Wes would say, and then Charles would knit his eyebrows together in that way that he does when it's hopeless. 'Waste of time,' Charles would snap, and accuse Wes of a number of things, because that's what fear drew out of him. Then Wesley would glare over his glasses, over the text he'd been skimming, to remind Charles that he hadn't lost just one person, Wesley had lost two. Then Charles would tell him that he loved Fred, and that was more than Wes could say for his lover. Then one of them would swing, and noses would bleed and lips would swell, and they would get spit and blood all over the tile.

But all in vain, because Angelus would not tell them where she was. They would be left to wonder and search; if Angelus hadn't killed them already.

Fred's stomach growled.

Rotating herself around, she found Lilah, back against the cave wall, with her knees tucked beneath her chin, hair coaxed by Pylea's humidity into messy curls against her cheeks. The lawyer's gaze was on the floor, starring into another world.

The stone fell loosely from Fred's hand, and clattered to the floor.

Grey-blue eyes flashed up to meet hers, and Lilah's pale lips pressed together with a shadow of thought, contorting their full, bow shape into a much thinner form. The morning rays that crept in through the cave's cracks illuminated her face in a way that made it look surprisingly angular and gaunt, but as ever, unsettlingly beautiful.

"Anything?" The lawyer's eyes bore into hers with a new intensity, with a sense of need Fred had never seen in the woman's face, not even when she was bleeding her guts out on the office desk, waiting to be bandaged. Lilah needed her, needed her to find them a way out.

"No." The word dropped from Fred's lips heavily, and a curtain of tangled brown hair fell over her cheeks as she lowered her eyes to the floor. She couldn't save herself the first time, what made Lilah think she could save them now? She could almost feel Lilah's eyes narrowing in disgust as she hissed a trail of muttered, but vicious insults. Lilah knew better. She knew Fred was useless. Stupid. Crazy.

And even still, she could feel Lilah's eyes on her, expecting. Needing. A woman like Lilah was used to seeing results, all she needed was the right set of threats. Threats, and she could have her way. But not in Pylea, everything changed in Pylea.

Fred stared into the stone floor, and her stomach growled. No longer just nipping, the hunger bit with sharp, striking pains at her core, and mixed oddly with a growing sense of nausea. In the end, the hunger won out. It always did.

Coarse grain and thistles still grew there, she had seen them on the trek up the mountain. With them she could make 'oatmeal,' which went well with kalla berries. Five years practice made her mock-oatmeal dish almost tasty. Tasty, if you were a starving cow.

But cow was one step above corpse.

Moving across the cave she began to press herself through the crevice, to the dangerous - but inevitable - outside, when Lilah's sharp voice stopped her, "Where do you think you're going?"

Fred's gaze flashed up only long enough to take in the look of fury that contorted the lawyer's, answering in a thin voice, "To find food."

"You'll be back." It wasn't a question.

Fred nodded. She nodded, but turned away and did not meet the eyes she felt on her back as she left. She did not meet them because she knew by the malice in the lawyer's voice that there was fear in them. Lilah, needing her. Lilah Morgan, Evil Bitch Extraordinaire, at her mercy.

Something inside her shuddered with pleasure at the ironic, unbelievable nature of that statement.


The suns hurt her eyes, and instinctively Fred shrunk away from them into the shadow of the mountain. She moved quickly and silently, eyes flashing around her like a scared, wild animal; a persona that came back to Fred with disgusting ease.

Where was the girl that fought beside heroes? Apparently, she hadn't made it through the dimensional shift.

Fred didn't have to wander far before she found a patch of thistles, and she could crouch down to scoop them up, still within view of their slit in the mountainside. The plants piled up in her arms, and when she was convinced she had enough for two, she piled kalla berries on top. They were the same blood red that she remembered, and taking one in her mouth she was surprised at how bitter they were, so much more so than she remembered; bitter, sour, and at the end, with the right amount of imagination, the tiniest bit sweet.

Looking at the brown, prickly plants in her arms, she wondered if Lilah would even bother eating them. For Fred's first few days in Pylea's wilderness, Fred hadn't even cared enough to try. She would rather daydream about real food than eat what the scavengers had left. She had lived off of dreams and thoughts until her stomach tore sense into her, dragging her, kicking and screaming, back into reality.

But maybe this time she didn't have to come back to reality. If she could just close her eyes, curl up and just sit, she could push it all out. She could think of pancakes and warm touches and forget all the things - the lonely, dehumanizing things - that came with Pylea. Because she could not do this. She could not survive hell. She. Could. Not.

Not again.

But if she closed her eyes, then Lilah would sit up in that cave, the bandaging on her wound getting dirty and her stomach growling and her knees pulled against her. Waiting for Fred to come back, waiting for Fred to take care of her, waiting.

Because Lilah couldn't take care of herself, not here. Not without knowing what to eat and where to hide and how to clean out the gash in her side, and for some reason, that made all the difference in the world.

Fred's feet seemed to move under her without her full consent, carrying her in a daze back up the mountain's side.

Then, some place not far in the distance, she heard a scream. A high, squealing sort of shriek - the desperate cry of prey, and all at once, Fred was running.

Running and looking back. She needed to know that she hadn't been seen, hadn't been spotted. She needed to know that she could dart back into the cave, safely, and wait. Hide.

She let out a scream of surprise as a jerking motion moved from her feet up through her body, and the world was pulled out from underneath her. There was a painful pressure in her ankle, cutting off the circulation in her right foot as she dangled from it, up-side down, with her hair brushing against the dirt. Her upper body strained to see what was holding her, and clutching at the captured leg she pulled her head high enough to see the rope that had looped around her right ankle.

It was a trap, a hunter's trap.

Her heart pumped terror through her chest so loud she could hear it as she frantically contorted her dangling body in an attempt to reach her captured ankle, but all she could do was tug at it uselessly with shaking fingers.

She needed to get loose, to get free. She had screamed and they would have heard her, whoever set this trap. Pylean hunters did not stray far from basic snares like this one, because most of their prey was more than capable of clawing their way loose. Traps like these were only meant to present an easier target.

"LILAH!" She screamed the other woman's name at the top of her lungs, voice cracking in panic as her hands continued to claw desperately at the rope. When she next looked up Lilah's form had appeared on the mountainside and was limping down towards her at a dangerous speed, clutching her side and stumbling in what Fred would later remember as one of Lilah's rare displays of graceless panic.

In a matter of seconds the other woman was at her side, the tips of manicured fingers straining desperately against the rope as Fred gripped the lawyer's thigh to stop her body from swinging like a pendulum.

Then the hands at her ankle and leg against her cheek were gone and Lilah was beneath her groping around in the dirt for something - anything - sharp. Fred's heart leapt as, gripping a rough stone, Lilah was back against her, Fred again holding tight to the lawyer's lower-body for support.

The stone Lilah was using to rub away at the rope must have been nicking into Fred's ankle because little flickers of pain traveled through her leg, provoking her face into a grimace against the surface of the lawyer's thigh.

And then there was a low, brief whistling noise, and almost simultaneously Lilah let out a gasp. Stumbling back in surprise, the other woman's body moved away from Fred's as Lilah gripped her own shoulder, near the place that a small red dart was protruding from her arm.

There was the whistling again, and Fred felt a sharp pain in the side of her neck. Her hand found something small, the tip embedded in her skin.

She saw Lilah slump to the ground in front of her, and slowly Fred's own arms fell away from her throat to hang limp and brush the ground. Darkness pressed in on the sides of her vision, and steadily the world went black.