Jean opened her eyes and let out a sound of surprise when she heard the lock being taken off the doors outside. She looked up and saw them open up and two people came in and dragged her out. There was a warm breeze out tonight but it felt like air conditioning to her after being in that shed all day. The sun was starting to go down though it was still light enough out to see everything. At first she didn't have enough strength to get up so she just lay on the ground, then she shot up sputtering and gasping as two buckets of warm water were dumped on her.

"Consider that your shower for the night," one of the guards told her.

"Mm-huh," Jean weakly groaned as her head swam and she glanced around in disorientation. She brought her arms up and covered her face and her head as if she was simultaneously protecting herself from a pending blow, and waiting for everything to stop spinning.

The guard marched off and two of the boys grabbed Jean and helped her up. She limply swayed from one side to the other like a dead weight and fell down again. Then she opened her eyes and when she saw the guards were out of sight, she sat up and asked the others, "You think they bought it?"

Several of the teens about collapsed from the shock.

"You're alright?" one of the girls asked.

"No, but I'm better than they think I am," she replied.

She'd had no way of knowing what time it was in the shed, but sometime between waking up and falling back asleep she had drank both bottles of water and then stuck then back in her pockets to try and refill later.

Jean had learned a long time ago how to sleep in the heat and become oblivious to it, she'd grown up and spent several summers in a house that didn't have air conditioning and the place had a tendency to heat up to 95 degrees inside and stay that way until the next morning.

One of the older boys leaned over to her and said, "Your friends didn't come," sounding like he knew they'd been set up.

"They will," Jean replied, "You have to remember these guys are wanted by the government and the military, if the MPs came sniffing around, the first thing they had to do was get out of sight. They sent me in here, and if they were going to leave me for dead, they would've done that long ago. Other than this, everything else is going according to plan?"

"What plan?"

"Hannibal always has a plan," Jean said, and that was all she got out before they had to scatter when one of the guards came to get everybody sent back to their own quarters.

It had been a lot to remember, Jean had told Hannibal that before she ever came here. She lay awake on her bunk while everybody else was asleep that night, and she thought back to everything. She didn't know why they hadn't come today, she tried not to think about the many possibilities that could be responsible. If they hadn't come today, then they would come tomorrow, that's all there was to that. But as far as everything else was concerned, it was all according to Hannibal's plan, everything else was right on schedule.

Hannibal had told her to find out how bad it was, he had also told her to see if it was true what Rocky had said about the shed, he had suggested she do whatever she thought was necessary to get locked up in there, and find out if it was true, if the kids did get locked in, if they were deprived of food and water, if they were locked in all day until the night…yes, oh yes, she had found out firsthand that it was all true. They'd let her out 2 hours after the mess hall had closed for the night, and she honestly couldn't figure out which was worse, starving through another night and another day or having to swallow another one of those powdered breakfasts. As she turned on her side she decided she'd deal with that problem tomorrow when the situation arose.

Hannibal had thought of everything possible for this mission that he could, he had walked Jean through a hundred different scenarios that might occur while she was here and cut off from the others. He'd gone back into full commanding officer mode and did his best to make sure she was prepared for anything that might happen here. She'd never questioned it before, but during those few days Jean started to wonder if before B.A., Face and Murdock, Hannibal had been in charge of other troops and if he got a kick out of ordering them around. He seemed to slip into the role of drill sergeant very well, and was unapologetic for everything he put her through, only warning her before they'd started, "It's nothing personal kid, just stuff that you're going to have to know when you go out there."

She'd stood straight and stared him dead in the eyes and replied, "The Army couldn't break me, and you haven't yet either, and if you haven't, they won't be able to. So go ahead and do your worst."

And he had. He'd spent three days training her, screaming at her constantly, berating everything she did, just like the Army, nothing was good enough, do it again, get it right or else, he'd also pushed her until she started screaming back at him, and he cued her on what to and not to say, regardless of what happened or how mad she got at the guards. A few times, out of nowhere, he'd also gotten physical with her, not so much actually causing any physical pain, just to see how she would react, how she would fight back, what techniques she might use.

The heat was getting to her. Memory and delusion were starting to blur, somewhere in the dark recesses of her mind, Jean remembered, or thought she remembered, at some point during this training regiment, they were both fully engulfed in their parts, going at each other like no tomorrow, only he was still the drill sergeant, the commanding officer, he gave the orders and she obeyed without question, without resistance, or should've anyway. She would almost swear that she could remember him grabbing two fistfuls of her shirt and slamming her against the wall, screaming into her ear, "You're either going to get this right or you're going to do it again and again and again un-til you PUKE!"

Jean's eyes flew open and she sat up on her bunk. A dream, that's all it had been, a dream, Hannibal was good but he wasn't that good, not in this decade anyway. Still, he'd been six-inch-nails tough with her in preparation and she'd learned well, he was a great Colonel and a good man to know now, but she could just imagine him being a perfect nightmare having to answer to back in the Army.

But then, there had been that final test, to see just how well she could endure being locked in a small space in excessive heat for hours on end. They'd had a few various ideas on how to go about conducting that little experiment, finally they decided they would use the tool shed behind the garage at Jean's house. It was all metal so it would be considerably hotter than the wooden shack, still, it was as close as anything else they could come up with. She'd gone out with them and agreed to be locked in the shed, somebody would stand guard outside at all times and if the heat got to be too much, she was to pound on the door and they'd let her out. She'd gone in without a watch so she'd have no idea how much time had passed, knowing it would work the same way at the camp. She sat down in the middle of the floor and stayed quiet, and waited. Waiting and silence put together was a nerve wracking, mind blowing experience, and she would imagine a lot of people would go crazy from it. The air was hot and stuffy and everything smelled like dirt, she really didn't know how long she'd last until she started choking on it. It was so tempting to just fall asleep and become oblivious to the heat, but she knew she had to stay awake, if she started to feel disoriented or if it felt like she wasn't able to breathe, then she'd pound on the door, but not until then, she decided.

Ultimately she had fallen asleep, for how long she didn't know, but they opened the doors and carried her out and after she drank a thermos full of ice water, Hannibal told her that she'd lasted for five hours in there.

"How about it, kid?" he'd asked, "You think you'll be able to handle the real thing?"

Jean gasped and huffed over another swallow of water and told him, "Yeah, I'll do it, I'll be fine." What choice did they have? They didn't have anyone else who could go in and do it.

She felt Hannibal's hand on her back and she about jumped out of her skin, he told her, "I'm proud of you, kid", and that just about sent her all to pieces. It wasn't something she hadn't heard before, but it still took getting used to.

That was one of the last things Jean remembered before she left, Hannibal had said he was proud of her. He couldn't possibly know what that meant to her, it was nothing she took lightly, she had earned it and she knew full well just how hard she'd had to work to get that. So far she'd played her part very well, she'd done what needed to be done. And tomorrow would be the second half of Hannibal's plan, Jean went over all those details in her head to make sure that she hadn't forgotten anything…and then she realized something and she quickly got up.

There was something about this whole setting that took her back to when she joined the army…hmmm…some things just went full circle, she realized. She hadn't wondered before why she wasn't worried about being caught when she sneaked out to contact Hannibal on the radio the other night, and now she knew why she hadn't. She remembered when she'd first met the A-Team, something she'd told Hannibal:

"I've always been an elusive person, I had gotten pretty good at slipping out unnoticed after lights out,"

It just seemed that that's the way she'd been her whole life, who knew that it would finally start to pay off?

So far so good, Jean had managed to get into the boys' cabin without being detected so far, now came the hard part, waking everybody up without starting a panic. One by one she managed to get everybody up and alert so they'd pay attention when she talked.

"Sometime tomorrow those guys are going to come here, first there's going to be a man and a woman pretending to be with the press, they're the bait to get these nuts to open the gates. Once that happens the others are going to come in a very big truck so they just knock the gates down. They're all expert shots, one well placed bullet and all the electricity's going to go out, meaning that gate just becomes another gate. That's going to be our cue to scramble over to where the buses are kept and get out of here, everything else is going to be fair game for them to run over, shoot to pieces or blow up," she explained.

"And we get out of here with them?" one of the older boys asked.

"That was the original plan," Jean said, "But I know Hannibal well enough to know he's not going to be content just to turn his back and walk away from this, he's going to want to find out what is buried here that everybody's digging for. Meaning when the time comes to escape, we are likely going to be on our own, now is there anybody here who can handle driving those buses out of here?" A few hands went up, "Fine, when we get close to zero hour we're going to take the temp guards out and get their keys, everybody remember to be on alert tomorrow, we don't know when they're going to come but when they do we are going to have to act fast if we're going to get out of here. Now, that just leaves that other matter, what are these people looking for?"

Unfortunately nobody seemed to have any ideas. Jean scratched her head and said, "Whatever it is, it has to be somewhere close by and it can't be very deep in the ground, otherwise they'd be using jackhammers or heavy machinery diggers or even dynamite…but whatever it is, they don't want to risk it being destroyed, that's why they're having it dug by hand, as hard and rocky and petrified as the ground here is, they're looking for something buried in it, and they don't want to risk anything damaging it when it's dug up…so anything metal or covered in metal would be out…leaving what?" She scratched her head and tried to think.

"So what do we do tomorrow?" one of the newcomers asked her.

"I've already explained how and where they're going to come in, the idea is to be out of that line of fire, and over towards the buses, and to do that everybody's going to have to inch back from where the ditch is being dug…"

"The guards will notice if we do that," another boy told her.

She looked at him and explained, "No they won't…I'll see to that, I am an expert at distractions."

Jean had gone back to the girls' cabin, got them all up and relayed the same message, that way everybody knew what they were doing tomorrow. Now she just had to work on her own part, and she already had a good idea what she was going to do. She just hoped that she could remember enough from her history classes in school to be convincing for what she was going to do. For no more than she'd been here, she hadn't really gotten the hang of figuring out anybody's names, prisoners or guards. Theirs wasn't a first or last name basis, it was more a 'hey you!' basis, so she really couldn't tell who was who. When she thought of the guards she thought in terms of animals: one looked like a rat, the other looked like a ferret, that woman looked like a mangy cat where Jean was concerned. Then those temporary guards, well, they really weren't around long enough to worry about.

Jean felt a horrible pain in her stomach, no wonder, not having eaten anything since breakfast. Good Lord, she pulled up her shirt and looked at herself and felt her stomach and her ribs. Between what she'd lost working on that war movie and what she'd sweated off today, she ought to be just about ready to get fitted for a numbered tattoo on her wrist. Ooh she was looking forward to getting out of here and having this mission done with. All the same, she didn't want to even think about seeing herself in a full length mirror or what number would ring up on the bathroom scale once they got home. She felt sick enough as it is, she didn't need anything reinforcing that awful feeling, and she knew the truth would do just that. She thought back to what she would have to remember tomorrow, and in connection to that, she hoped that the others did come tomorrow, she didn't know that she'd be able to survive another day either out digging that ditch, nor locked in the shed.

The next morning Jean resumed her beaten dog act and had to be forcibly removed from her bed. She remained quiet, sluggish, lethargic, she kept her gaze down and would not make eye contact with anybody. And then, she recognized a pair of boots that were coming her way, they belonged to one of the two male fulltime guards, the rat, she wouldn't raise her head but her eyes looked up to see him sneering and grinning at all once while he laughed at her, clearly pleased by what he thought was accomplished. Suddenly she felt like she was back in training with Hannibal, this man parroted just about everything he'd said to egg her on, pushing, pushing, looking to shove her right over the edge so she would either fight back or break down; carrying on about what a miserable excuse for a person she was, how she was never going to amount to anything, how her life was going to be hell from here on out, how he was in her face and was going to stay there for the rest of her stay here, how her life was about to get a whole lot worse, etc., but to the best of her abilities, she did nothing. And then, when he stopped gloating, a low, guttural laugh started to rise up in her, in her own ears it was Renfield eagerly anticipating Dracula's bidding, she was getting ready for the kill.

The guard wasn't smiling now, and everybody looked at Jean as if she had gone crazy, well, so far so good. She picked her head up and looked straight ahead at him and showed her teeth in a sickening grin, like she was trying to stretch her face out to resemble The Man Who Laughs, or even Mr. Sardonicus.

"You picked the wrong person to mess with, you know that, Chuckles?" she asked him as she flashed a shark-like grin, "You see all these other kids here, they're all scared of you," she laughed maddeningly as she shook her head, "But not me." She inched over towards him and said menacingly, "Come here, let me tell you a little secret…if you try to hit me, I'll bite your arm off," she laughed again.

He didn't know how to respond to that and he actually took a step back before he'd realized he did it. Jean grinned big and wide and told him, "You think you're so tough because you make everybody work for 12 hours a day in this heat digging that rock, because you can lock me in that sweatbox for a few hours? Ha! You'd be the first to die at Bataan." She laughed again, like a certified lunatic, and she could see she had his attention. "You remember the death march? I do…80 mile march on foot, no water, no food, anybody stop for any reason or even ask for water, they were executed on sight. 80 miles traveling on foot, dragged behind trucks courtesy of a rope around your neck, slanted eyed rice eating psychos decapitating soldiers with samurai swords as they passed by." She started snarling and laughing again, Renfield through and through, and then when she spoke, it was almost something not even human, "Have you ever had to bury a comrade alive or risk being executed on sight yourself? You never forget those screams, the moans, the noises of the barely living and the silence of the dead, they stay with you for eternity, and I would know, I was there."

She didn't know if these people believed in ghosts but if the look on his face was any indication, she was doing a very good job of making him believe she had become possessed by one of the American soldiers forced into the march. By now she knew she was zigzagging between historical fact and her own demented ideas but she decided it would be all the better for this plan to work. Truth was stranger than fiction but crazy was something else altogether.

"They march us, they starve us, they bayonet and decapitate us, they laugh as they hit us with the butts of their rifles, when they finally do allow us to stop and sit, it is in the full blown heat of the sun with no shade, for hours on end, then we get rustled into train cars without ventilation and boxed in like cattle with no room to move, and they take us out to the Camp, and then they bring out their doctors to experiment on us and the quacks running this country give those butchers immunity against all war crimes…they think that what happened to us over there doesn't matter, that Europe and its problems were the top priority of America's affair relations with the rest of the world, well there are 11,000 soldiers dead who are not resting peacefully who would beg to differ, and that's just those who died on the march, twice as many died in the Camps in the beginning, and far more to follow until those cowards surrendered, only one third of us ever got home alive, and you know what? I was not one of those…have you seen my head rolling around here any place?" She cackled like a tried and true maniac.

The rat took another step back from her but Jean lunged at him and grabbed him and told him very calmly, "You know when people are deprived of food and water long enough, they start to think things that normal people would never dream of…" she looked him up and down and laughed sinisterly, "When you're trapped and there's no food, people…start to eat each other…go without any water to drink long enough and you start to settle for blood, I'll drink your blood my friend…"

Quicker than he could see, Jean lunged forward and bit the shoulder of his jacket, then ducked behind him and wrapped her arm around his throat and pressed against his windpipe so he couldn't scream. A few of the boys had taken the risk of coming over to help, they crowded around and Jean put the guard in the sleeper hold and waited for him to slump into unconsciousness. It worked, and she lowered him to the ground and stripped off his jacket and also took his hat and his sunglasses and put them on. She turned to the others and said, "We've got to get rid of him."

"This isn't going to work, Face," Amy said as she, he and Murdock went up to the front gate, "No reporter in their right mind would come out here."

"Amy, if reporters were in their right minds, they'd stay home," Face replied.

"Nobody's going to come 10 miles off any road resembling the way to civilization out to this place to get a story," Amy insisted.

"Just remember your lines," Face murmured through the corner of his mouth as he saw one of the guards coming their way.

The man who met them looked about 40 years old, his eyes were hard and his face looked like the desert life had aged him about another 10 years, he was a few inches taller than Face and bulkier than Hannibal, and for the moment Face was actually relieved that there was an electric fence separating them.

"Who are you people?" he asked.

Face took off his glasses and said, "Hello sir, allow me to introduce myself, John Richards, Channel 8 news, would you by any chance be Irvin Teasdale, the owner and operator of the Winchester Camp for Youthful Offenders?"

The man took a look at the three people and he drew back when he saw the other man carrying a video camera that seemed to be running.

"Why do you want to know?" he asked.

"Ah, well," Face turned to Murdock and said, "Turn the camera off for a minute, would you, Dave?" He turned back to the guard and said, "You know how around this time of the year we go into a wide variety of local news stories? Well it's come to a lot of people's attention that the Winchester Camp is becoming the popular choice of residence for the city's juvenile delinquents, and it was decided by our bosses upstairs that doing an exposé on the camp and the men and women behind it who make it the big success it is would be a real ratings grabber. And," he added, "A little free publicity to you that will make the public aware of all the good work you're doing with these troubled kids."

Teasdale looked them over and told them, "Just a minute, I have to clear this with my partners."

"Oh, you know what?" Face asked, deciding that this plan wasn't going to work and it was time to go to plan B, "That won't be necessary, I'll just clear it with my boss." He turned around and signaled Hannibal and B.A.

Jean had just locked the padlock on the shed doors and turned to look towards the front of the camp and she saw Face, Murdock and Amy standing outside talking to one of the other guards.

"They're here," she told the boys, "Get the others, and everybody get ready to move."

A large truck came speeding up the rocky path and from the sunroof, Hannibal emerged with a rifle and opened fire on the power lines up above and ahead. There was a mess of sparks as the wires were shot down, and everybody scattered when they saw the truck coming right at the fence. The truck knocked the fence down and proceeded to drive into the camp, still with Hannibal firing at everybody who looked older than 25, and had them all ducking for cover. Some of the kids mauled the drivers and stole their keys and everybody ran for the buses. Face, Amy and Murdock got back in the car they'd come up to the camp in and drove it into the camp and sped and swerved every which way, causing a nice distraction and making sure none of the guards were able to get at any of the teenagers. Face brought it to a sudden stop and they all jumped out with guns and opened fire at the men.

"Amy!" Face called over to her, "Find Jean and make sure she gets out of here!"

"Right!"

Murdock laughed maniacally as he made the guards dance by shooting the ground near their feet, they'd hold them off until everybody was out.

"Dance, puppets, dance!" he yelled with glee.

Amy ran over to where there were about 50 kids scrambling for the buses, keeping an eye out for any tall girls with red hair. Jean was throwing away the guard's jacket and hat and glasses when she just about collided with the reporter.

"Amy!"

"Jean!"

Amy's first reaction was to ask if she was alright, but instead she grabbed Jean by the arm and said, "Come on, we gotta get you out of here."

Hannibal looked out of the corner of his eye for a brief moment when he heard the buses start up, he saw that they were speeding towards the road out of the camp and he also took notice that nobody seemed to be left behind, for which he was very grateful, that made their job a lot easier, or so he thought. They had seemed to have the guards right where they wanted them, when he heard the click of a gun behind him and heard an unfamiliar voice say, "That's far enough, don't move too quickly."

Hannibal and the others slowly turned around to see who was talking to them, and they all saw a man in a black suit wearing black sunglasses with an automatic pistol in his hand, aimed at what had been Hannibal's back. And behind him stood half a dozen other men who also looked like they had relatives in the orangutan family.

"Drop your weapons," the man said simply but firmly, and emphasized, "All of you."

Hannibal looked back to the others and said, "Well, you heard him, guys."

Reluctantly they all dropped their guns and waited for whatever came next.

Everybody's attention was drawn to the sudden sound of tires squealing, they looked and saw Face's car coming at them in reverse at full speed. Everybody jumped out of the way and tried to take cover as it swerved one way and another and went in full circles all the while driving backwards. Then one of the back tires hit a particularly elevated patch of rocky ground and the whole car flipped over, and rolled a few times before coming to a complete stop upside down.

Two of the armed men went over to the car and jerked the door open and Jean half rolled, half fell out of it and onto the ground. She was jerked to her feet and marched over towards the others.

"Sorry, Hannibal," she said with a shrug and a smug smile when she was able to get right up next to him.

"It was a nice try, kid," he said simply before they were marched off at gunpoint.

Hannibal felt like he'd swallowed some of the rocks they were digging and that the air in him was trying to get around them so he could actually breathe. The sweat was pouring down his face like a melted painting and his tongue was thick as leather and his throat felt like sandpaper, and he knew the others were the same way. They'd been put to work continuing the ditch an hour ago, and he knew that Jean hadn't been exaggerating, it was just about impossible to break up the ground with the tools they were stuck using. But there were about five guns aimed at them that gave them all the initiative to keep working until they found whatever the hell these men were looking for.

Face, Murdock and Jean were all working alongside one another careful not to hit each other with the pickaxe or the shovels, and when the guards had walked past them, Face leaned over to Jean and asked her, "Why didn't you leave with the others?"

"I did what needed to be done," Jean told him as she grimaced and ran her wrist over her forehead, "I got the kids out, I got Amy out, I made sure she was on the first bus leaving. She'd never be able to survive this place."

Face had half a mind to make a remark about her faith in Amy being so overwhelming, but he thought about the fact that Jean had already spent two days in this place, and he said, "Yeah, I guess you're right."

Jean turned and looked at Murdock, who for as hot as it was, and as they all were, still had his jacket on and zipped up, she didn't even know what to say about that. She turned and looked the other way, and she noticed something. None of the kids had ever gotten this far when they were digging, and from here she was able to see another wooden shack, this one was larger than the shed they locked the kids in, and there wasn't anybody standing around the place to guard it. Hannibal noticed it too, and it gave him an idea.

After another half hour of busting up the ground, Jean let out a sudden moan and collapsed on the ground. The Team dropped their picks and shovels and crowded around her to see what had happened, she was unconscious and all her skin was bright red, even her eyelids had gotten burnt.

"Come on," Hannibal nodded towards the shack, "Let's get her out of the sun."

B.A. picked Jean up in his arms but as they got up, they heard one of the guards get their rifle ready to shoot them.

"Get back to work," the man in the black glasses told them.

"You go to hell, pal," Hannibal told him, "If you're going to shoot us, go ahead and shoot, otherwise we're moving her."

Surprisingly, the guards did nothing and let them pass. They went over to the shack and found the lock broken, so they took Jean in. There was a small window so the light could come in, but with the door being open it was fairly well ventilated and a bit cooler than outside. It looked like the place had been used for storage of some things; Hannibal was able to get a makeshift table put together out of two old sawhorses and a couple of large boards that were lying around. He also found some old sheets that had been used for drop clothes and tried beating the dirt off of them to use. B.A. laid Jean out on the table and she still was not responsive to anything that was happening. Hannibal started tearing the sheets into ribbons and told her, "Alright Jean, the coast is clear."

She slowly opened her eyes and asked in a weak, tired voice, "Think they bought it?"

"Could be," Hannibal said, "Anybody who doesn't know you would probably buy it, personally I thought it was a little overly dramatic."

Jean heard the sound of a zipper and she looked and saw Murdock was opening his jacket, and now she saw why he'd kept it on in the heat. They hadn't come unprepared, he had a water canteen tied against his ribs. Jean closed her eyes and a few seconds later felt the mouth of the canteen pressed against her lips. She opened her mouth to say something and instead had a mouthful of water running down her throat. She coughed and sputtered and when she was able to talk again, she weakly shook her head and told Hannibal, "You shouldn't have wasted the water."

"You needed it worse than we do," he replied.

Jean coughed again and tried to clear her throat, she felt a buildup of mucus and tried to dislodge it, and then opened her eyes as she realized it was blood she was tasting, a second before blood started pouring out of her nose.

"Oh! Geez," Face said as he took a step back from the table.

Hannibal hovered over her and noted, "It's not gushing out, probably just a blood clot," he ripped off a piece of the drop cloth and told Jean, "Here, blow it out."

She did and then the bleeding seemed to stop. Hannibal doused another piece of the sheet in water from the canteen to clean her up, Jean had protested but Hannibal had pointed out the bugs would eat her alive otherwise.

"Alright, Jean, you stay here and rest, be quiet, and we're going to go back out there and see what the hell all these people are so anxious to find, I have a good idea that whatever it is, we're close to finding it."

Jean looked at him and said, "You knew you'd get caught, didn't you?"

"I expected there was more going on here than just what met the eyes," he said, "I suppose you could say that."

She managed a weak laugh and told him, "I suspect half the time you plan to get caught, you can't ever leave anything half done."

Hannibal said nothing to either confirm or deny, only flashed a small knowing smile at her.

Jean could hardly keep her eyes open anymore and it was no wonder, the whites of them were bright pink, burnt from the sun and the wind, matched the rest of her face almost perfectly. Hannibal had her lie back down and he wetted down a third rag he tore from the sheet and placed this one over the top part of her face and he told her, "Keep that on there, don't move, don't say anything, we'll come back for you as soon as we can, alright?"

She nodded lightly.

"Alright," Hannibal gently took her hand in his for a second and squeezed it, "Bye-bye."

One by one she felt the others touch her hand or her shoulder on their way out, Murdock was the last to leave, he stayed behind for a few seconds and ran his fingers through her hair since he didn't want to touch any part of her that'd been burnt.

"We'll get out of this somehow, you'll see," he told her.

Jean peeled back one corner of the rag and winked at him with a weak smile and she replied, "I know we will, I managed to get a message sent out with Amy, I suspect help's already on the way, and ought to be here just in time for Hannibal to make his oh so important discovery."

"What help?" Murdock asked.

Jean giggled and said, "These guys are about to face an ambush of their own, I called in a favor to some of the other stunt workers I know."

Murdock couldn't resist grinning when he heard that, "Well, looks like the cavalry's going to be on its way after all." And he went out to join the others.