Oliver slammed the basement door of his headquarters shut behind him.

The ride back to Verdant, his club, had given Oliver time to think, time to let a little of his anger toward his cousin's revelation burn itself down. In part, this was because the farther away Oliver got from the twerp, the easier to was to convince himself that Stephen had, in no way, done what he claimed. Read minds? Powers like that were hard enough to swallow without what Oliver had seen, though he'd seen enough to only be skeptical toward the "how" rather than the "if." The idea that Stephen had read Oliver's mind was a step too far, though. Like everything else about himself post-Island, everything Oliver did and thought and felt was tightly controlled because he couldn't afford for it to be otherwise. There was no way that someone could have been poking around in his head without his knowing it.

His anger diminishing, however, did not mean that it had burned itself out.

Felicity was scowling at the spread of monitors that were her workstation. Her blonde ponytail hung askew, like she'd been tugging on it, and her shoulders were as tight with tension as his own. Without even acknowledging her, Oliver headed to his punching bag and unleashed all his frustration in an upper-cut that resonated through the basement with a solid thunk. The bag rocked back, its support trembling. Barely had the bag swung back when he pummeled again it with a series of powerful jabs and crosses. The sting the impact brought to his bare knuckles grounded him in a way that little else could. Back-hand, elbow strike, cross, cross, jab.

What was he missing? Stephen had been snatched off the street while out jogging. A couple hours later, the kidnappers had called the Queen household with a ransom demand. That part was straightforward enough. Even 'why Stephen' seemed obvious, until Oliver considered what he'd learned about his cousin. A bead of sweat dripped into his eye. With a flick of his head, he dismissed it, not once slowing or halting in his assault on the punching bag. Left hook, right hook, cross. His breath was coming faster, though not from exertion. Why had Stephen been taken?

And why had he pretended to need saving?

Oliver's well-earned paranoia told him that the whole thing had been a setup to get to him. Except that didn't make sense, either, because then why would Stephen have stepped in to protect him from Lance? Why would Stephen have shared what he could do at all?

His next swing was blocked, his fist hitting a surface more pliable and warmer than a punching bag. Oliver looked in confusion at the dark mass that appeared to be absorbing his hand before realizing that it belonged to the much larger mass that was his friend, confidant, and bodyguard. John Diggle cranked Oliver's arm around in a swift move that would have pinned a smaller or less-trained man. Oliver twisted out of Diggle's control and took a step back, his fists coming up in a challenge that had nothing to do with loosing frustration.

The expression written on Diggle's face stilled Oliver. The lines that marred his normally smooth forehead and the resolve burned into his brown eyes were those of a person with bad news. "I'm sorry, Oliver." He lifted his palms in a gesture that could have been meant to block an attack, or to stall one. "We just found out." Swallowing hard, he continued, voice lower, "I'm sure you did everything you could."

Oliver looked askance at his friend. "I did," he agreed, brows furrowing. The damp basement air felt thick with tension. "The situation got-."

"Oliver," Felicity interrupted. She swiveled on her desk chair to face him. Even from this distance, he could see that her eyes were red with repressed tears. "We thought...You said...Oh, god..." She trailed off, her hands coming up to cover her mouth, and her gaze dropped to the cement floor.

Looking back to Diggle, Oliver lowered his fists and forced his fingers to unclench. "What's going on? What happened?" The way his friends were acting was too familiar, the wounds through his soul from past losses still so raw that he'd never be able to mistake his friends' hesitance for anything else: Something had happened to someone he loved and they didn't know how to tell him. His thoughts flashed through the short list of possibilities. Laurel? Thea?

His mother?

He took a step closer to Felicity. As imposing as he could be, as threatening, she wasn't fazed. Her shoulders twitched through her pink sweater and he could see the gouge marks in her palms from where her fingernails had dug in, but her reaction wasn't to him.

She murmured something—half apology, half sympathy—that he didn't hear. Behind her, the monitors glowed with the displays from the sources she'd been perusing when he came in. Over her shoulder he could see a blog headline in large letters: "Dead Teen." The rest was cut off, hidden at the angle he was standing.

"We'll find out who did it and make them pay," Diggle stated, his tone flat. The words filtered into Oliver's consciousness as if disconnected from any context or meaning, and it took him a moment to connect them to what he was seeing. "Whatever you can tell us..."

As he moved closer, more of the blog's story came into view. Though he couldn't yet to read the text, the picture beneath the headline showed a shot of the Starling City marina. It was a stock shot, one not related to the headline except to supply establishing information. Even so, the remembered scent of rotting fish and diesel fuel filled his nose.

Despite the efforts of the marina's owners and the Starling City tourism department, the marina had a dark streak to its reputation: drugs, extortion, and trafficking of all varieties occurred under the decks of the boats that used the docks there.

Corpses, too, had been known to surface. The occasional murder. Suicides. Sometimes, accidental deaths from people making bad decisions around water—or, so the official story was recorded.

Oliver knew more about the seedy side of city's water denizens than most people could even begin to guess.

"Hands and feet bound together," he read, the words jumping out from the surrounding text as if they'd been enhanced just for him to see. "Shot once in the head."

If there was a picture of the victim, it was on a part of the screen that he'd have to scroll down to see. Regardless, he knew what picture he wouldn't see. And he suddenly understood why his teammates were acting the way they were.

With a gesture at the screen, he said, "That's not about Stephen."

"What?" Felicity asked. She straightened up so fast that the chair rocked. "Oliver? Are you sure? I mean, the article came in...and all the details...and then you came back so upset..." She bit her lip and stopped talking, waiting for Oliver to respond.

"He's alive," Oliver spat. "I saved him." He spun around, running his hand up over the back of his head. The short hair bristled under his touch. "That story's about a different kid." Who had been tied up the same way Stephen had been when Oliver'd found him, which meant the kidnappers were killers, as well as repeat offenders.

Which meant that Stephen's kidnapping had probably never been about the ransom money.

Which meant that Stephen may have been the victim, after all.

Unless he was orchestrating the deaths of other kids just to bolster his own cover—and even Oliver had a hard time believing that about his cousin.

A grunt of exasperation escaped Oliver's mouth and he again felt his fingers curling with the anticipated need to punch something.

Diggle's jaw tensed, his brown eyes hardened. Oliver could see him struggling to give the benefit of the doubt to Oliver's sanity. "Are you sure?"

"He's alive," Oliver repeated. He mentally ran through the events of the afternoon, trying to figure out how to summarize them in a way that wouldn't confirm to his friends what they already suspected about his mental health. The mere fact of his alternate identity already pushed the line of what they were willing to tolerate from him; he could only count himself lucky that they had agreed to help his cause instead of trying to save him, and he couldn't damage that now. "We got out of the building and got away. I went back to deal with the kidnappers." That seemed simple enough so far as an explanation, with the benefit of being true. However, he knew it wouldn't be long before Felicity brought up the glitch in his boot tracker again. "By the time I got back, they were gone, so I came here."

Crossing his arms, Diggle took in the slacks and polo shirt that Oliver had on, and his expression grew even more wary. "Didn't you have your Hood gear on when you left?"

Oliver nodded. "I had to ditch it along the way. Ran into Lance."

Diggle's eyebrows went up. "That's a strange piece to leave out of the story. Did...both of you survive this run-in?"

The ringing of his phone interrupted Oliver's answer. He glanced at the display, noted the name of the caller, and then held the phone up for Diggle to see. "If he didn't, then he's figured out how to call from beyond the grave. Not that I'd put that past him." Pushing the on button, he answered, "This is Queen," reaching for his best bored playboy voice.

"I have your cousin down at the docks," Lance responded, without any preamble. "You're going to come down here and get him."

With a sigh that Oliver didn't even try to keep to himself, he asked, "What kind of trouble did he get into now?"

"Let's start with driving without a license," Lance responded. A scraping noise obscured the phone signal, then Oliver heard Lance's muffled voice talking to someone in the background. When he came back online a moment later, he sounded weary. "Look, Queen, I don't have time to get into it. I have a murdered kid down here to investigate and a different kid who doesn't belong at a crime scene. His mother isn't picking up her phone, so I called you. Despite what I think, the law does recognize you as a responsible adult."

Oliver looked around at his friends, both of whom were watching him, their curiosity to hear Lance's side of the conversation so strong on their faces that he had to give them something. He offered a slight shrug and splay of his unoccupied hand like he couldn't believe what Lance was saying. That Felicity had thought to patch into the call surprised him. "He's probably safer with you," Oliver suggested. "A little tough love should straighten him right out."

A gust of breath into the receiver crackled the connection. "Try me a different day, Queen. Until then, if you don't come pick up your cousin, I will charge you with interfering with police business," Lance snarled, and the line went dead.

For a couple moments, Oliver regarded the phone and the number that was still displayed on the screen. Hitting the end button—just in case—he pocketed the device. "Stephen's with Lance down at the docks. I have to go pick him up."

"Detective Lance?" Felicity asked.

"Stephen," Oliver corrected. He crossed to stand behind her, his eyes already sweeping the computer monitors for anything useful that she might have left unguarded. His steps echoed through the open space. "Speaking of which, did you find out anything else about him?"

Felicity narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms, for the moment, at least, unwilling to jump to his requests. "There's something going on here that doesn't add up. Maybe even lots of somethings." She held the glare, her fingers gripping into the sweater's weave while trying to wear down his defenses with the power of her will. Oliver stood his ground and stared back. In only a few seconds, his eyes began to dry and he had to steel himself not to blink. He refused to give in, and so did she.

With a sudden awareness that made her bounce in the chair—and that broke the standoff—Felicity announced, "You know more than you're telling us."

Rubbing his eyes, concentration momentarily broken, Oliver volleyed back, "I'm never going to tell you everything. A good relationship always has some secrets." The comment was out before he had a chance to think it through. Rather than try to take it back, he ignored the blush that had sprung into Felicity's cheeks—as well as the fact that Felicity probably needed to know everything he'd learned so she could do her research properly—and reached over her shoulder toward the keyboard. As expected, she swatted his hand out of the way and closed herself around in the keyboard in the clearest mine gesture he'd ever seen.

"How about we start with what you figured out?" Oliver asked. "Bring me up to speed."

Felicity hesitated a moment longer, then swung into action with her usual eagerness to share her findings. "How well do you know your cousin?"

"I haven't seen him in five years, if that's what you mean," Oliver responded wryly.

The blush deepened until she turned back to the monitors where their pale light washed the color away. "So this is the interesting thing. I've been digging into his history like you asked. He's only a teenager, so you wouldn't think there'd be a lot on him. But he's a teenager of the digital generation, and most of them have massive electronic footprints."

"Are you going somewhere with this?" Oliver asked. "I have to get down to the docks before Lance sends a squad car to find me."

"Actually, yes." Felicity smiled and tapped the keyboard. A Facebook profile popped up on one screen.

The profile was mostly whitespace and requests to fill in information. The picture was a blurry, partial profile of someone who could be any white teenager. Oliver only recognized it was Stephen because of how close they'd been over the last couple of hours. "That's his?"

"Yes. Well, no. But yes."

"Felicity?"

"This wasn't what his page looked like when I first pulled it up." She gestured at the screen. "For starters, his page was wide open for anyone to see. Not that there was much to see. Even my Facebook page is less socially depressing." She rolled her lips together, pursed them thoughtfully, then shook her head. "This page is what I found when I went back. It was locked down tight and all of the info on it was erased. Now, unless your cousin has suddenly become worried about online privacy, this is really weird."

"Could it be a coincidence? Maybe he got a little spooked." Diggle asked. He had come in to flank Felicity's other side while she and Oliver were talking. The three of them standing together like this sapped some of the tension from Oliver and he leaned in even closer to them.

"That was my first thought, too," Felicity answered. "Then I started to wonder. It seems a lot like closing the barn door after the horse has died." She flinched and cast a sideways glance at Oliver. "Or, in this case, after the horse has been captured and is being held hostage. I mean, if I were in that situation, the last thing I'd be using my cellphone for is erasing my online profile. I'd be tweeting 911s to everyone I knew.

Oliver nodded. Though he was still getting up-to-speed to the sheer proliferation of social media that had taken over while he'd been away, the wisdom of calling for help made sense no matter what method was used. The way Stephen's hands had been bound, though, would have prevented any use of his cellphone, even if he had been able to get it out of his pocket.

Then again, after the rescue, Stephen had been back at the mansion by himself. He could have done anything in that time.

"So someone did it for him," Oliver concluded. "He has an accomplice."

"Sure," Felicity answered. "But why? So I dug a little deeper." She hit a key and the screen changed. Oliver had to squint to see the tiny letters contained in the screen capture pictured on it. "This was sent to him right around the time that your boot locator glitched." Again, she gestured at the screen, though this time Oliver caught her peering at him from the corner of her eye while she spoke. She really was not going to leave that alone.

To keep from getting sucked into explaining what had happened during the "glitch," he read out the cellphone text message that Felicity was pointing to. "'I've started fumigating. I will let you know when the air is clear.'" While he let the message sink in, his eye skipped up the screen, noting the date and time of the send as well as the sender's name. "Who's Tim?" Another detail sunk in, and he set one hand on the back of Felicity's chair, while he confirmed that he wasn't reading wrong. "And why doesn't he have a last name?"

"Those," Felicity answered, "are both excellent questions."

"It sounds like a code," Diggle interrupted. "Not a very good one either. Fumigating? You said this message was sent right before the Facebook page was erased?"

Felicity nodded.

"Did this 'Tim' say anything else?" Diggle asked. "Did Stephen respond?"

"No, that's the only message Stephen has received all day," Felicity answered. She swept a loose tendril of hair behind her ear and scowled as it promptly fell back across her nose. "Did I mention that he doesn't seem to have much of a social life?"

"So we need to find out who Tim is," Oliver stated. With a glance at his watch, and a cringe at how long this short conversation had already taken up, he added, "And I need to get going." He straightened up and swung his arms back, seeking to loosen muscles that had gone from active use to unmoving with no warm down. His shirt stretched taut with each swing.

Next to him, Diggle murmured something in Felicity's ear, then stood up as well. "I'll drive."

"I've got the bike," Oliver argued.

"The more we learn about what's going on, the less we know." He stabbed a finger Oliver's direction. "Your story has so many holes in it that even a slumlord would complain. I get nervous when the intel doesn't add up. So, I'm going to drive, and you're going to fill us in on everything that happened. Everything you found out." He headed toward the door, his solid step and confident posture that of a man leading the troops and having no doubt that they would follow.

Oliver rolled his eyes. It wouldn't be hard to give Diggle the slip once they were outside. Then again, he had picked up a few clues about who the kidnappers might be. "Fine," he agreed.

"I'll just keep plugging away," Felicity offered from behind them. She sounded more excited about the task than a person getting left alone in an empty basement should. "This Tim has just met his—or her—match. I'm going to find out everything he never wanted me to know."