A/N: So sorry for the delay! I recently moved out of the country and have just now settled enough in my new home to write the next chapter. There will probably be long stretches inbetween chapters now as I continue to adjust and get my life sorted.

Anyway, here you go!

Hospitals were stupid.

Completely and totally inane concepts. Granted, she understood the why's of them. Human bodies were stupidly fragile and inefficient. Like flowers, they withered all too easily. She knew this. She understood the necessity of hospitals. What she did not understand was why humans reacted so terribly to them and in them. It was infuriatingly annoying.

Yes, your fellow human might die. What else did you expect? One would think that a human would know to expect terrible things to happen to another humans body and be able to deal with those things in a calm, rational manner.

They did not.

They wailed and cursed and bemoaned their terrible fortune with more emotion than was really necessary.

"Nessie!" came a young voice. Sophie was getting taller. She was getting less "child". Now there was an interesting human ability – growth.

Despite herself, Niska grinned. "Hello Soph."

The girl was running to her and slamming into her in a great full hug. Niska obligingly hugged her back. And kissed the top of her head.

"I can't believe you're here! I didn't think you'd ever come back!" Sophie cried.

Niska didn't address that. "Where's your mum, Sophie?"

Dutifully, the little girl pointed to a door. "She's there. Are you going to stay for a while?"

"No, I've got to find my family," Niska told her. She didn't flinch away when Sophie slipped her hand into Niska's and led her to the room.

"But you didn't want to be family anymore," Sophie pointed out.

"No, I didn't want to be around them for a while," Niska insisted. "And now they've gotten lost and they need my help."

Sophie thought about this for a long moment before: "And you've always got to help your family."

"Exactly," Niska confirmed.

Sophie nodded. She opened the door to a room with two beds and various bits of medical equipment. Only one bed was occupied. An unconscious broken woman was in the bed, hooked to various bits and boobs of medical equipment. Laura.

Joe was perched at her side. Toby was hunched in the far corner, trying to get lost in his phone. As she and Sophie came in, Joe was instantly alert.

"What the hell are you doing here?" he growled, giving her an unsavory glare.

"I had nothing to do with this," Niska snapped. "Stop looking at me as if I was the who beat her."

Joe's face twitched. His expression didn't change. Of course it didn't. Niska heaved a sigh and did her best to recalibrate her approach in this matter. Bluntness did not often grant her easy access to humans. It was another irritating thing.

"My sympathies go out to you and your family," she said tightly, recalling a similar saying on a card of flowers down the hall. "How is she doing?"

Joe looked down at his wife, his face pale. "She's been hit by a car."

Niska glanced at the chart. Several serious fractures and contusions. A nasty gash along her forearm. What was most serious, however, was the concussion. She hadn't woken up yet.

"I'm sure…she'll be fine," Niska said. Joe just looked at her. Niska tried to give him a reassuring smile. "Any word yet on Mattie and Leo?"

"No. Why are you here, Niska?" Joe snapped.

"Because," Sophie started, "she has to help her family. They need her help and they're family so she has to try to help them."

Joe looked from her to Sophie and back again.

"I don't know where they are," Niska admitted. "Any of them. They've all gone missing."

"When did you last contact them?" he asked.

"Last week. Could you please let me know when Laura's awake? I need to ask her some questions," Niska asked. She handed him a phone number scrawled across a napkin. "I'm going to find them, Joe."

Joe nodded silently. He did not trust her and she did not hold it against him. So she turned to Sophie and smiled.

"Be a good girl, Soph," she told the little girl.

"Are you coming back?" Sophie asked with wide eyes.

Niska didn't have an answer. She abruptly turned away and walked out. It was the easiest thing to do. She could only hope it'd be as easy to find DS Drummond.

Leo stared down at the corner of the room. His head felt stuffy and thick. There was a patch of numbness at the base of his neck. He didn't touch the numbness because behind a bandage was a piece of skin that wasn't completely attached and the thought of it made his stomach churn. He couldn't afford another provocation to his stomach.

"You really didn't know it was there?" came Mattie's far-away-tinny-distorted voice. Words made his head hurt. Badly.

He did not shake his head. "No. No I did not know that there was an access port in my skull," he grumbled with a curl of his lip. He shuddered a little violently and he didn't know why.

"How much do you wanna bet that it has something to do with your memory loss—"

"My family is dead!" he screeched. And then his vision went blurry for a few moments. Hot tears of anger leaked out of his eyes. Sad tears too. Devastated tears. When his vision cleared, Mattie was sitting down really close to him. She had a sad face on.

"We don't know that for sure," she insisted.

"I do," he said dully, shuddering again. A light strobed behind his eyes, streaks of pulsating green.

"Did you see bodies?" Mattie challenged. She was always doing that. Why did she have to do that? His life was hard enough as it was without some stupid girl fumbling around in his affairs. Never mind that she was clever and beautiful and didn't look at him like he was a freak of nature.

"They're gone, Mattie."

"But you don't know!"

"I do…"

"You don—"

"I KNOW!" he screamed. And then he regretted it. As soon as he reached the peak of his anger, he was met with a crushing wave of sadness. It cascaded over him with strobing lights and cold fingers of hopelessness.

Leo started crying in earnest. Great wracking sobs shook his weary frame. He curled into a tight ball and buried his head between his knees and cried. So thick was his sorrow that he didn't even care that Mattie had put her arms around him. He just leaned into her and rode out the seemingly endless wave of emotion.

It wasn't endless though.

When the emotion was spent, he found himself half in her lap and half on the floor, on his side. He sat there for several silent moments, exhausted. Achy. Shaky. Too hot. Then he sat up and shrugged away from Mattie. Human to human contact was a bit too weird.

"I think there's something wrong with me…" he mumbled.

"I think it's the valium," Mattie said softly. "It can really mess you up if you take too much. And I don't think it'd work the same ways for you as it does for other people. Since, you know, you've got computer bits."

He nodded in agreement and they were both silent for a long time.

"Walk me through it again," Mattie finally said.

Leo belabored a heaving sigh. "There's one…mad scientist. I was in an examination room or an operating theatre or something. There's two synths and they walked me through…a short hallway or something. This room was near by. There were stairs further on. That's it. That's all I remember."

"Windows, other humans…"

He shrugged, haplessly. "I didn't see anything."

"Or you forgot it," she added and he glared at her for reminding him that he'd forgotten before.

Mattie didn't see him glare. She was on her feet again, pacing, sandwich in hand. He wished she'd just sit down. Her pacing made him nervous in a slow and sluggish sort of way.

"You got anything on you that could pick a lock?" she asked him.

Leo gestured down to his single article of clothing, scrub pants, and gave her an exasperated look.

"Right, sorry," she said with a wave of her hand. "There's just…there's got to be a way out of this."

He ran his hands through hair, which was unnervingly clean. Mattie had the right thinking – escape. That's where his head should have been. But it was getting harder and harder to be motivated to do anything except sit. He felt like a hollow shell that was only filled with the smoky vapor of sadness and an electrical storm of despair. It didn't really matter anymore what happened to him. Not if Mia and Max were gone.

"Hey," Mattie was saying. She was kneeling in front of him and he realized that he was crying again.

Leo rubbed at his face and shook his head. "Don't. Don't do that. I'm fine."

She looked at him for a long moment. The sympathy there made his stomach churn. It made him feel weak. Small. Broken.

"Yeah, ok," Mattie said quietly. She gave him a small quirk of her lips and then she kindly looked away. "Synths can connect to other Synths, right? Can you?"

"I don't do that," he said flatly, staring at the floor, shuddering.

"Right but can you?" she pressed.

He nodded.

"Could you…hack one? From your own brain."

He just looked at her, letting all of the exhaustion and anger and bad feelings play across his face. To his surprise, she actually looked a little hurt for it and he felt bad. But he didn't say anything. He just slowly tilted sideways until he was laying on his side.

And then he closed his eyes.