Wunderkind

by The Thistle Girl

Jack Dalton's DXS team's last mission left his computer-genius partner Riley Davis with a bullet wound, their analyst Nick Carpenter dead, and a canister of a deadly virus in the wind. Their only chance may be a young former vigilante currently serving time for domestic terrorism, known to the criminal underground as "the Phoenix", and to law enforcement as "Angus MacGyver".

6. Wrench

PHOENIX TRAINING ROOM

THEY'RE NOT JOKING WHEN THEY SAY BECOMING AN AGENT IS BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TEARS.

Jack slams his fist into the punching bag one more time, then shakes out his hand. Beside him, the kid's doing the same thing, but moving a lot more gingerly. Thankfully, the medical assessment when they got back from Germany revealed that his ribs weren't broken, just cracked and bruised. He's awfully lucky. And by Monday he was back at the Phoenix, despite Patty's insistence he could take a week off. At least she didn't send him back to R&D. Apparently that didn't go well for him. It's been a week and a half, and Jack swears he's never seen anyone bounce back this fast from such clearly painful injuries.

He hopes it's just that Carl's Jr.'s still young, and a quick healer to boot. Sadly, it's probably just that he got good at hiding how much pain he was in. Jack's pretty sure the kid's taken similar damage, maybe even worse, given some of the things he's said, as a vigilante. And then he had to go home and hide it from everyone but his best friend. From what Sam's picked up from her interviews with the kid, Bozer's mother was probably too drunk most of the time to notice when something was wrong with the kid, but Boze's sister would have gotten suspicious easily.

And for a while he was still going to high school, and after graduation he had a day job in a mechanics' shop and took a couple college classes from Western Tech on the side. How the hell did he do all that when he was going out and getting shot at and beaten up on a consistent basis? And none of the family, his professors, classmates, or co-workers ever noticed. From the way Carl's Jr. reacts to being injured, it's clear this is nowhere near his first time. He's lucky to still be alive. But that doesn't mean Jack wants to keep depending on that luck. Because one of these days it's going to run out.

Jack hadn't really thought about how much danger the kid was in out there with them on missions until he stumbled off that train covered in bruises with a boot print in his chest. Jack had sort of taken for granted that a former vigilante who'd spent two years in prison could handle himself in a fight. But that was against random street thugs, guys with no real training. Out in the field, they're going up against mercs with special ops level skills, and grabbing some dirt and throwing it in their face isn't always going to be enough.

The fact remains that Carl's Jr. is an amateur. And in this line of work that's liable to get him killed. He doesn't have Jack's years of CIA, Army, and Delta training that makes him react to any attack on instinct. He doesn't even have Riley's CIA Farm experience. And the next time they go up against hired guns like Wexler's, he might be outmatched.

He's barely had time to recover from Germany, to be honest, but they could be going back in the field any day, and Jack does not ever want to see the kid come home with that level of damage again. I thought I was going to be able to watch his back enough that this wouldn't be a concern. But the more we put him in the field, the more it seems like the right move is to split up sometimes, to let him do his thing while Riles and I do ours. Jack had fully expected to have to watch the kid like a hawk so he didn't run or do something to sabotage them. But now he knows that's not gonna happen. I can trust him to go off on his own and actually do the job. But not if he's gonna get killed first.

Jack figures they're warmed up enough. He and the kid are both sweating and Jack can feel the slight buzz of rising adrenaline. You don't get any warmup in the field. But we're starting slow.

"Since you've never even had entry training, like a normal operative, we're going to start with the basics." And so you don't kill yourself trying harder moves on damaged ribs. The kid's a tough one, Jack will give him that, but it's clear he's starting to hurt. But the thing about field training is that you learn to fight when you by all rights should be giving up and dying on the ground.

"Jack, I know how to fight." The kid throws the gloves on the ground and stares at Jack from under the fringe of messy, sweaty blond hair.

"You may have learned how to scrap in prison, Carl's Jr., but trust me, a two-bit drug lord and a trained Somalian merc are two different things."

"They go down the same if you kick out their knee."

Jack sighs. "Yeah, but sometimes these guys have a little more protection. Which means you gotta learn more ways to beat them. And I don't mean whipping up some gadget from a lightbulb and a paperclip. A lotta times, surviving in the field comes down to muscle memory."

He has to admit he's not prepared for the kid to suddenly close the distance between them and swing a kick toward the side of Jack's leg. He's really glad his own muscle memory does kick in. That would have been embarrassing. He grabs the kid's ankle and flips him on his side.

He tries to ignore the soft grunt of pain when Carl's Jr. hits the floor. It's your own damn fault, kid. "What was that about?"

"I fight my way. And it works." He grabs Jack's arm and pulls him down, driving an elbow against the side of his head. Damn. I didn't see that coming.

"Okay, fine, kid." Jack knows he shouldn't want to just one-up the kid, but his pride is stinging a little because if this had been a real fight that kid just might have beaten him. "If that's what you want to do, then you're gonna prove to me that you can win that way. But this time I'm gonna be ready for you." Jack shrugs his shoulders and drops into a fighting stance. "Come on, again."

He'll admit the kid isn't an easy mark. He fights dirty, of course he does if he learned inside. He bites, claws, and struggles like a pinned wildcat. Once he uses a wall to flip over behind Jack and pin his arm.

If I lose to this hamburger kid, I'm gonna be a walking joke. The thought gives Jack a new surge of adrenaline and he breaks the grip choking him and rolls over, pinning the kid's hands and digging a knee into his sternum.

"Okay, I gotcha, kid. Tap out already." He's chuckling until he sees the look on Carl's Jr.'s face.

His blue eyes are wide and terrified, and they have that thousand yard stare Jack knows too well. He's gasping for breath, struggling weakly to throw Jack off, and close to hyperventilating.

"N-no, get off me!" the kid yelps, breathless and panicky.

Jack does. This might be a training exercise designed to make sure the kid survives the field, but it's not going to do anyone any good if he has a panic attack right here and now.

Carl's Jr. is shaking, rolling over, and Jack doesn't miss the way his fingers clutch the waistband of his pants in a death grip. Oh man. He guesses he should have expected as much, a pretty boy like that in a supermax with a bunch of lifers, but he'd been pushing the thought out of his mind. And the kid had never acted like anything had happened…

Showing weakness could have got him killed in there. He's not gonna change any time soon. No wonder the kid liked solitary so much.

"Hey, man, I didn't mean…" Jack reaches out a hand to help the kid to his feet and he bats it away, flinching. Jack stutters to a halt, the half-finished apology hanging in the air between them like steel bars.

"I-I'm gonna take a shower." The kid shudders, his whole body cringing away from Jack. Aw, shit. Jack watches the tenseness thrumming like a live wire through the kid as he walks away.

…

NICK CARPENTER'S APARTMENT

IF YOU'RE GOING TO BREAK YOUR OWN PROMISES, TAKE A FRIEND

"Don't judge me," Riley mutters as the lock disengages. This is at least the tenth time I've broken in here. Now it's almost as fast as if I have a key.

"Does this look like my judgment face?" Sam asks.

"Well, you're the one who told me you'd handle this…"

"And he left the key for you." Sam glances sideways at her as Riley pushes the door open. "Something about this is all wrong. If he's running, why leave you clues like this?"

Riley goes straight for the small box on the desk, and tries the key. Not that one I guess. "I don't know. I was hoping you might have some kind of idea."

Sam runs a finger through the dust that's forming on the kitchen countertop. "Either he's trying to drag you into his game, implicate you somehow, or he's asking for help. In over his head."

"You didn't see him in San Francisco," Riley mutters. She tries the key on two other small boxes. Why didn't it ever strike me as odd before that he liked little lockable boxes so much. What normal person has this many? She tries desk drawers, an antique dresser, Why didn't I ever notice his strange taste in furniture, and a file cabinet. Nothing.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"He was insane. It was like I was talking to some kind of brainwashed robot." Riley shudders at the memory of the cold look in Nick's eyes. He didn't care that I got hurt. He didn't care that the virus he was going to unleash would have killed millions. There was something horrifying in that blind dedication to the Organization. I never thought Nick was that kind of guy.

"Could he have been threatened? Something to do with his family?"

"I don't think so." Riley's been to see Nick's mom. She went after Como. Granted, they'd had to sell her the cover story that it was a car accident on a business trip, but still, Riley hadn't noticed anything unusual. The woman seemed safe and as comfortable as a widow who just lost her only child could be. She hadn't seemed unusually skittish or acted like she was being harassed.

Riley flops down on the couch out of habit, fingers automatically moving to the loose edge of fabric on the arm. "Sam, do you think I'm crazy? Or stupid? For not giving up?"

"No." Sam leans on the counter. "I think you're being a good operative. But I think you're treating it like just another mission so you can lie to yourself about how personal it is." She walks over to sit down next to Riley, gently taking the key from her hand. "What Nick did hurt you. More than it hurt anyone else at Phoenix. And you're trying to prove, over and over, that you can be objective and distant and do this job. And I don't think that's a lie. But I think you want to be objective. You want to distance yourself from it, treat it like any other mission. Because you don't want to admit that you got hurt."

Riley sighs and leans her head back against the couch. Damn it, she said it better than I could have ever fumbled my way through. Because it's so much easier to do this. It's easier to compartmentalize, to see Nick as the enemy, as a rogue agent to be hunted. If she looks into his eyes and sees someone she used to think she loved, how is she supposed to do this job? I want to believe I was fooled because he was a good operative. Not because I let my personal feelings compromise me. And more than anything, she wants to forget about it. Nick isn't an ex. He's a target.

"You know, you don't always have to be Riley Davis, the unshakeable secret agent. Sometimes you can just be Riley Davis, the girl who got her heart broken." Sam sighs. "I get that it's hard sometimes to be a woman in this job. I know what it feels like to have people underestimate your skills, think you're overly emotional. But the people who really matter in your life already know how strong you are. You don't have to keep pretending nothing fazes you."

Riley nods. "Do you think I should take a break?"

"I think what you have here is a dead end and a good reason to step back for a while." Sam puts the key in her pocket. "I'm just gonna hang onto this so you don't have to see it."

"Thanks." I couldn't ask for a better friend. She might pull all my secrets out of me without my knowledge, but she sure does it for all the right reasons. "Want to go get coffee so I can complain to you about my shitty ex?"

"Sure." Sam stands up and brushes her hands over her black jeans. "I already have one thing about him I hate. His house is a dust pit."

Riley laughs. She doesn't have to know I'm going with a few ulterior motives of my own. Sam might talk about needing to deal with the demons in life, but it's clear she has more than a few of her own. She talks an awful lot about not needing to be okay all the time, but she's never let down her guard with any of us.

Sam's past is a black ink spill of redacted dossiers. The first real information on her shows up when she was recruited, under unclear circumstances, to an Australian intelligence agency. And her official documents have that too-pristine feeling that they're all part of one of the best backstopped cover IDs Riley's ever seen.

She did some digging, when they first became roommates. When a few things Sam said set off the little alarm bells in her head. It's a shame Nick didn't do that. From what Sam's told her, and the stack of IDs she uncovered, Riley can tell Nick has been living a double life. Or maybe a quadruple one. Where was he really going on all those weekends off? When he didn't offer to take me along?

But she needs to stop letting her mind go down that trail. Because Sam is enough of an enigma to keep her occupied. And now that she's giving the whole Nick thing a bit of a rest, maybe she can start getting Sam to be a little more forthcoming about her past.

The strangest part of this, to Riley at least, is that Cage doesn't have a digital presence at all. It's not just that she's not a fan of social media and has no accounts anywhere, not even one of those embarrassing childhood MySpace ones that apparently everyone ever forgot to delete. I once found a serial killer through his. Prior to 2012, there isn't a trace of Sam anywhere on the web. Not one speck of a digital footprint. Not even a stray selfie capture in the background. Either she was fantastically good at not being seen, or someone scrubbed her entire existence. And Riley's inclined to assume the latter. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make sure Samantha Cage didn't exist until they wanted her to.

Riley's tried to find out who went dark around the same time Sam was recruited. If she was any kind of rogue agent or assassin for hire, there should be a trace that ends in 2012. But she's coming up empty. If Cage ever was anything like that, she didn't advertise her services on the dark web. She might have relied on word of mouth. And there's plenty of chatter on some older Australian networks about a few different people who seem to have stopped working around that time. But Riley can't be sure if any of them are Cage. There's a "fader" who from most of the chatter sounds like a man, a con artist who specialized in 'acquiring' unique musical instruments for unscrupulous collectors, and someone touted as a 'negotiator'. The terms of that particular job are vague, but Riley's guess is that this was someone a company or individual might hire to make a problem go away. Someone who would contact a whistleblower or someone who could reveal some scandal, offer to buy them off, and very likely, if all else failed, kill them. Cage is an expert manipulator. Could that have been her?

Riley knows just enough to wonder. And maybe any sane person would decide that living with someone who's only 'existed' for four years is asking to be murdered by some crazed serial killer. But nothing about Riley's life choices can be considered sane.

She's thought about asking Patty. Who must have Sam's full, unredacted file, because she certainly wouldn't hire her without it. Patty would shut that down so fast I wouldn't know what hit me. But that's not the real reason. She's going to tell me when she's ready to tell me. And against all the logic that says it's a mistake, Riley would trust Samantha Cage with her life.

…

Jack's phone is buzzing with messages when he steps out of the locker room shower. Damn it, why does someone always text me when I can't answer?

He's kind of glad the kid was long gone by the time Jack finished destroying a punching bag. How do I look him in the eyes after that? Jack knows that some part of him knew, all along, what had happened to the kid in prison. But he'd never, ever, expected that he'd end up triggering a flashback like that. He still feels sick.

I would never, in a million years, even think about hurting him. Especially not like that. Jack's seriously regretting losing his cool and letting his wounded pride get the best of him. I just wanted to prove to him he was wrong, for once in his life. It's not even like he's actually that frustrated with the kid anymore. Jack just doesn't know how to lose or be wrong, and someone else paid for it.

Jack doesn't even know how to apologize for this. Sorry I was a complete idiot and forced you to remember being horrifically violated?

He picks up his phone, glancing at the string of messages. It's not, as expected, Patty asking why training was cut short and their consultant left the building without a word of explanation. It's not even Riley fessing up to breaking into Nick's apartment, again. Sam texted me when they left the house.

He grins when he sees the name that popped up on the messages. Swiss. It's Charlie Robinson. The last EOD tech Jack was overwatch for in the Sandbox, and currently the person who's trying to prove Carl's Jr. isn't a terrorist.

Jack, I'm working a case in LA. Want to catch up over a beer tonight?

Is that vigilante kid still working with your team?

Just got permission from the LA field office to bring in consultants on this. I'm coming over to Phoenix now.

Jack rapidly types back.

Yes we still have the bomb nerd with the silly hamburger name. What's going on?

Charlie's two-word answer is enough to shake Jack.

The Ghost.

Jack's heard of this guy. He wasn't operating when Jack was still in the Sandbox, but some of his friends who were still there came back in the past couple years, and they had stories of a bombmaker who used risky builds, unusual components, and liked to watch his victims suffer.

Rumor had it the guy was U.S. based, selling his bombs to anyone who would buy them. No two are the same, but there's always a signature. A video camera used to capture an image of the victims in the final moments of their lives.

The Ghost is sadistic. And if one of his devices turned up in L.A….There are at least two more that no one's found. The Ghost's other signature is working in a pattern of three. He asks for prices that end in the number 3, concludes sales on dates that end with a 3, and always creates three bombs for his customers. A decoy, a main explosive, and a failsafe.

Jack's seen a lot of bomb makers in three years as an EOD overwatch. He's seen people who were threatened into carrying bombs into crowded buildings. He's seen people who truly believe that they're carrying out some kind of holy war. He's seen people who just want their city or their homeland to be left to itself. He's seen a lot of reasons drive a person to create something that will kill anyone around it. Fear, anger, passion. But none of them scared him as much as this Ghost.

He kills because it gives him some kind of sick pleasure. Jack doesn't understand what drives a person to that point. What makes someone find pleasure in causing someone else pain.

The same kind of people who've got that poor kid so traumatized he's terrified of me. Jack's never seen the kid lose it like that, and he's seen him in pain, scared, and even drugged up on painkillers. But to his knowledge, Carl's Jr.'s never had a flashback like that.

What else is gonna set him off? Jack's got a pretty good idea that being pinned to the floor with someone on top of him was what triggered this incident. That doesn't take a genius to figure out. But now that he thinks about it, Jack realizes there's a lot more times the kid's probably had less severe flashbacks. He's seen that haunted stare before, he just didn't realize what it was.

When he almost got choked to death in that warehouse in Myanmar. Every time Riley or I grabbed his belt to keep him in the car. He remember Mac barely undoing his shirt enough to show Jack the boot bruising in Frankfurt. He never showers with me after training, or after a mission. Jack didn't really think anything of it until now. He often has the locker room to himself and most people leave in a hurry anyway once he starts warming up with Metallica or Iron Maiden. What? The acoustics are great. But now it strikes him as odd that the kid always waits until Jack's done before he takes a shower, making some excuse about cooling down, or about needing to call Bozer and tell him he hasn't fallen off the face of the earth.

How have I not seen this the whole time? Jack wonders how often he's run into the kid accidentally, congratulated him roughly after a success, said something offhanded that hurt. Damn it.

He wants to go back to the training room and punch something again. Or better yet call Patty down and go a few rounds, because he's the one who needs a good thrashing. That kid needed someone who wasn't gonna hurt him more, and all I've done is give him a hard time.

…

Riley's sitting in the car with Sam, both of them finishing the last of their coffees and laughing about the time Sam set her own training officer's car on fire.

"He said it was a real-world simulation. So I did exactly what I would have done under the same conditions in the field."

"What did he do?"

"He passed me for the training, but my pay was docked my entire first year to pay for a new vehicle," Sam grins. "Worth it though. The look on his face was priceless."

Somehow Riley just can't imagine that Sam, this fun, playful prankster, was ever some sort of cold blooded killer or international criminal. How do I reconcile that with the girl who just decorated my apartment for Halloween with the most over-the-top display I've had in years, puts fake spiders in the shower, and couldn't stop laughing when the scarecrow's head fell off and rolled into the kitchen?

But all Sam's records paint a far different picture. There's no reason to redact a file given to another covert agency if the only things in it are past training. Missions wouldn't be mentioned in detail, but Sam should at least have academic records, next of kin, something that makes her seem more like a real human being and less like someone who could have been manufactured at a moment's notice. I've been watching too many sci-fi movies with Jack.

Her phone buzzes. Think of the devil...Jack's text is short and to the point. Phoenix. New job came up.

"What's that?" Sam asks.

"Jack. He said something's going on at Phoenix."

"Consider us there." Sam stomps the gas, and swings her Mini Cooper out of the parking space and into traffic with the practiced ease of someone who has years of pursuit driving training.

Jack doesn't text again with any more details, which is odd. Usually Riley has half a mission briefing on her phone by the time she gets in, if Jack's there before her. At the very least he often gripes about Patty taking the opportunity to remind Jack of what he's not allowed to do within the parameters of the mission.

Something's eating at him. The last time he was this uncommunicative was after she took a knife to the stomach in Bogota when they got split up and she was captured. He's worried about something, or he feels guilty. She's not sure if he's still thinking about what happened to Mac on the train. Jack had showed up to her apartment the night after they got back, at three a.m. Riley hadn't said a thing, just put on a pot of coffee, and let Jack sit on the couch until he told her he'd had a nightmare about the kid getting killed. "It would have been my fault," he'd said, staring into the depths of his coffee mug. "I told him to go alone. If he died, that would have been on me."

Riley knows how much Jack takes the safety of everyone on his team. Sometimes he worries too much. But how do you tell a parent not to?

Jack and Mac are both waiting in the War Room when Riley gets there. But Jack looks incredibly uncomfortable. He's actually sitting properly in one of the chairs, rather than on the arm or the back of it. And Mac has made at least a dozen tiny paperclip sculptures; they're laying all over the table in front of him. They all look like hands.

"What's going on?" Riley asks immediately.

Patty glances up from the tablet she's holding. "We've just been pulled in as consultant partners with the Los Angeles FBI field office."

"Working on what?" Riley pulls up her rig and logs into the War Room's closed system, ready to pull up the briefing the second it loads.

"Hello, Jack." She jumps when she hears the unfamiliar voice; she's not used to having more than their team in a briefing. Someone's standing in the door. It takes a blink and a few seconds to recognize him. Charlie Robinson?

"Good to see ya, man." Jack's already across the room and pulling the newcomer into a massive bear hug.

"Charlie?" Riley asks. "What are you doing here?" She's met Jack's former EOD tech a few times, but it's been a while. Especially since he got his promotion with the FBI and got permanently placed in Washington.

Maybe he has the evidence to prove Mac didn't kill Ramsay. But from the serious look on his face, Riley's pretty sure that's not the case. Consultants...FBI...wait, is he the reason we're here? Are we working a case with him?

"Got called out to the field office for an investigation I've been heading up, and some unusual circumstances have come up. It's the first big lead we have on a major new player. Heard of the Ghost?"

Riley nods. The past couple of years, there's been a ton of chatter on the dark web.

"Well, he left us a little surprise in one of the suburbs today." Charlie frowns. "As far as we can tell, he's working with a cartel, but I'd like to confirm that. And I hear you have someone on your team who knows an awful lot about how the LA criminal underground operates."

"Yep. If you wanna know about cartels, or things that go boom, Carl's Jr.'s your man." Jack's voice sounds wrong, a little forced. And he doesn't look at Mac when he says any of this. What happened with them? Did Mac do something to piss Jack off? But she's not really sensing anger. It's more like they're uncomfortable looking at each other. Like there's something they know that they can't go back from. Something that changed the way they think of each other. It reminds Riley of the way she and her mom avoided each other when Riley came home with her first tattoo.

Whatever it is, it can wait. Right now, we've got a bomb and a dangerous killer to deal with.

"So this is the kid I've heard so much about." Charlie glances at Mac. "He looks even younger in person." Riley flinches just a little. Please tell me you're actually taking his case, and him, seriously. She knows Mac doesn't look dangerous. And it's all the more reason to keep him from having to go back to prison.

Mac continues fiddling with his paperclips, glancing up at Charlie momentarily. Damn it, you're not making a good first impression. Mac, you want him to like you. He's the only person who might be able to make sure this conditional release turns into actual freedom. She tries to cover Mac's apparent apathy with a question. "What did you find?"

"LAPD's had two deep cover cops working at a gym that fronts for the Los Diablos cartel. When they showed up to open the place this morning, something about it bothered them, and they noticed the door had been rigged with a trigger, and called in backup. At first glance it seemed like simple cartel territory rivalry. But when the bomb squad showed up to defuse it, their scanners picked up a video feed going out on a special frequency. They contacted the FBI field office and confirmed that it matched the Ghost's signature. I was in Sacramento already, working on a briefing for local field teams, so I came as soon as they called me."

"So what do you need us for?" Jack asks. "Not that I'm not glad to see you, but…"

"I know the Ghost. But I don't know the cartels. And there's a secondary bomb with the Ghost's that obviously cartel work. If I let LAPD bomb disposal in on this we're going to get into a jurisdictional nightmare and I can't afford any red tape right now."

"Why bother to hire a professional bomb builder if you're going to do the work yourself?" Mac asks, apparently actually interested now. He doesn't really do small talk; he needs something to catch his attention. Something that he can be doing. She guesses spending two years in a place where you have to disappear to survive didn't really do much for Mac's social skills.

"That's what I want to find out." Charlie sighs. "Think you can help with that?"

"Maybe. I know the cartels, I know some of their methods. But why me?" I know what he really wants to ask. Why does an FBI agent want to work with someone convicted of terrorism and murder?

"I've been looking over your file. A lot. And the minute this came up you were the first person I thought might be able to help me. You were a major thorn in the cartels' sides for over three years. You learned their patterns, anticipated their moves."

"It's been two years since...since that. They've probably changed. A lot." Mac sets down a paperclip in the shape of a police car.

"But some things are still the same. And better yet, you have a reputation for being able to think on the fly. A lot of bomb disposal techs are only able to do what they've been trained to. And since the Ghost likes testing new materials and builds in each of his designs, it would be nice to have someone on site who might be able to think ahead of him."

"But...I…" Mac bites his lip. "You know I went to prison for building a bomb that killed a man, right?"

"I do. Because I'm the guy trying to prove someone set you up." Right. Mac wouldn't have known Charlie from Adam. We never actually mentioned him by name when we said we had someone on the case.

Mac's eyes widen almost comically. "You really don't think I did it?"

"At the very least I don't think you intended to. It doesn't fit your usual pattern. And I've tracked a lot of bomb makers long enough to know how to figure out a pattern." Charlie shrugs.

"But you can't prove anything." Mac glances away. "So I might as well have done it. And even if it was an accident, he's still dead." It's true. We might be able to prove Mac wasn't intending to kill Ramsay, but if his bomb did it, he's really no better off than he was before. Riley'd finally gotten so fed up with the lack of progress she'd risked talking to Patty last week. She was willing to help Mac get a new PO, so I figured she cared a lot more than she let on. Patty had told her pretty much the same thing. Charlie had been easily able to prove that a kill like that wasn't Mac's pattern. Enough to convince her she was making a good choice in hiring him. But proving the bomb itself didn't kill Ramsay accidentally is harder. They might be able to successfully clear Mac of murder, but terrorism is going to be a harder charge to shake.

"I need evidence, and the LAPD is giving me the runaround," Charlie says. "But everything in that warehouse was incinerated. They shouldn't have been able to ID the body as easily as they obviously did." Wow. Way to make it both reassuring and creepy. Riley doesn't know how the man talks about this with such calmness. Wonder what kind of hell he...and Jack...lived through in the Sandbox? What have those two seen?

Charlie turns back to Patty. "Thank you for agreeing to loan out your team. I promise I'll take good care of them." He grins. "This time, Dalton, I'm pulling rank on you. So get your ass outta that chair and let's hit the road." Jack groans.

"I'm never gonna hear the end of it, am I? Be honest with me, the real reason you asked for this team was to give me grief."

"I could have just borrowed your bomb nerd. But you're right, payback's been a long time coming. And revenge is gonna be sweet." Charlie grins as he starts to follow Mac and Jack out the door.

Riley pulls him aside. "Charlie, did you tell him everything?" I just have to ask. I have to know.

"Yes." Charlie's face is blankly confused. "Why?"

"I just...I thought by now you'd know more."

"I'm an FBI bomb squad tech working a case that was never assigned to me, for an agency that for all intents and purposes does not exist. And there are limits to what I can request because of the case being labeled as a terrorism charge. I'm calling in favors and exploiting loopholes and doing whatever I can."

Riley sighs. "It's just...it's been rough for him." Mac needs to be able to put this in the past. And as long as he still has that conviction hanging over him, he can't do that.

"I can imagine." Charlie glances pointedly at Mac's blinking ankle tether. "Believe me, Miss Davis, I'm doing the best I can."

…

SUMMIT FITNESS CLUB

THESE GUYS WERE SELLING A LOT MORE THAN PROTEIN POWDER

Mac's disarmed a lot of bombs. At least one for every year he's been alive. But this is the first time he's actually had the right protective gear. And he hates it. How does anyone do anything in these suits? He feels ridiculous and even worse, he feels slow.

Pena would have grinned. "Working fast gets you dead fast," he used to say. But Mac's always relied on his quick reflexes and an ability to grab whatever he needs from around him. In this suit, it would take him a day just to get a screw out of the door handle, if he happened to need one.

He can't breathe in this suit. He knows that's not actually true, but it feels like it. He's already too hot and his legs and arms feel like they're encased in concrete. But he knows better than to ask Agent Robinson if he can take it off.

I'm pushing my luck as it is. He can't believe he lost it that badly in the training room this morning. That was stupid. Get a grip. He can't let the past wreck his future. You mess up, you go back. So don't mess up.

Mac fumbles with his helmet, unable to figure out how to attach it to the rest of his gear. He jumps when Charlie takes it out of his hands.

"They're a little tricky at first. Let me do it." He expertly positions the helmet and attaches the connections."

Mac feels more like he can't breathe than ever, but he's just going to have to push through it. "Thank you. For everything, Agent Robinson."

"Please, call me Charlie." The man holds out one gloved hand. "I don't think we were properly introduced back there. Cause I already know your given name's not Carl's Jr."

"No. It's Angus, but I go by Mac."

"Goes without saying naming you after a restaurant chain was one of Jack's ideas." Charlie grins, Mac can just barely tell through the helmet. "He gave everyone in the Sandbox dumb nicknames. Mine ended up being Swiss."

"Why?"

"Well, first he called me Swiss Family Robinson. And then he decided that was too long." He shrugs. "He called me that for two months. And then I saved his ass in Kabul and told him if he wanted me to do it again, the nickname had to die." He chuckles. "He still writes it on my Christmas card though."

Mac's never really thought of Jack as the kind of guy to send Christmas cards. After what he said about my letter to my dad, that's the last thing I would have expected. But now that he knows Jack a little better, it does make sense in a way. For as much as he pretends to be an unattached lone wolf, Jack cares an awful lot about people.

Am I one of those people? Mac glances at the bomb. Figuring out how to make something not explode was always so much easier than trying to figure out people. "Okay, what do you need me to do?"

"You've got experience with the cartels' work. I can't get a look at his bomb until I get it out from inside theirs." Charlie kneels down next to the crude device. "I need you to walk me through disarming this one. Or you can do it yourself." He shrugs. "That's up to you."

Mac kneels next to the bomb, taking in the build at a glance.

"Cartels might do pretty sloppy work, but mark my words, it's effective. Just because they've got wires tangled around haphazardly doesn't mean you're gonna be any less a memory if you mess up." Mac pushes Pena's voice out of his head and glances down at the bomb. He was only half right. I messed up, but it wasn't me who paid the price for it.

Mac studies the device. "Looks like they already hosed it down to fry the electronics." There's water on the plastic covering a white powder packed in under a the guts of a cell phone.

"They did that when they first found it because of the electronic trigger. Took out the wireless signal at the same time. Unfortunately, they didn't realize that signal was important until one of their guys who'd been an EOD got a look at the scanner. He's the one who told them to call it in." He sighs. "They weren't trained on how to deal with work like this. If the Ghost had waited a week, I'd have been here doing what I was in Sacramento and this would have been a hell of a lot easier. We might already have the guy in custody." While he talks, Mac carefully cuts into the packaging and removes a bit of the powder. He pulls off his helmet to sniff it carefully.

"This looks like Merida work. Petin was their specialty, made from the heart medication. Risky, but they had the facilities to make it. For a while, they were making as much money selling black market bomb components as they were selling drugs."

"I'm guessing you changed that."

"Actually, it was my mentor. Alfred Pena." Mac quickly shuts down the memories and goes back to the bomb. "The trigger's already been destroyed, but there could be a manual failsafe." He carefully pulls the waterlogged cell phone away from the rest of the bomb. This is almost too easy.

Cell phone triggers are pretty standard for cartel work. But this one doesn't look like it was connected to anything. Why place a trigger if you're not going to use it? Something about this doesn't sit right with Mac. Maybe someone just made a mistake. Cartel thugs don't usually have engineering degrees. But the last time he had a gut feeling this bad about a bomb, Pena died.

"Are we good?" Charlie asks.

"As good as we're gonna get." Mac sets the phone aside, and cuts through the tape to remove the petin bomb. Inside is a small white box.

"That's a 3-D printed polymer. Now this, this is the Ghost's work." Charlie says quietly. He carefully pries up the lid. Mac hears a soft beep. "Oh shit," Charlie gasps.

There's a small vial of something inside, and red digits counting down from a minute. It's a setup.

Mac doesn't hesitate, they can't afford to. He shoves the bomb into the helmet he never put back on and races outside. There's a manhole a few feet from the door. He rushes to it, pulls it up, and drops the helmet and bomb inside.

"Dumpster!" He gasps, and Jack and Charlie, both of whom have been staring at him like he's insane, spring into action. Thank God for military training kicking in. They'll at least follow orders in a crisis situation. "Tip it over the top and run!" Mac yells. They do, and they barely get far enough that it could be considered safe before there's a loud roaring bang and all three of them are flung onto the pavement.

Guess that bomb suit was useful after all. Mac's bruises and ribs are complaining, but it would have been so much worse without that protection. He glances at Jack and Charlie, relieved to see that they're mostly undamaged as well. Jack has a long raw scrape on one arm, where his t-shirt didn't protect him from skimming the asphalt, but he pushes himself to his feet with only a mild grimace.

Charlie looks back at the smoking dumpster. "I didn't have much time to get a good look, but I've never seen anything quite like that before. That bomb wasn't made to be triggered remotely. And I didn't see a timer."

"What do you mean?" Jack asks.

"The Ghost's device wasn't going to go off until someone came to disarm it. The real target wasn't the Los Diablos. It was whatever bomb tech was unlucky enough to come up against it."

Mac shudders as the realization sinks in. "This was a trap. He was hunting you."

"Hey, take it easy, kid. He had no way of knowing I was going to be in the neighborhood. This isn't personal. But you are right about one thing. He was after the bomb squad who would have come to disarm it."

"If they hadn't had someone who knew what they were dealing with, they'd be dead." Mac shudders.

Charlie begins pulling off his suit. "They would have taken this back to their lab, more than likely, to investigate the components and see if there were links to other bombings, given the cartel involvement. When they took it apart in there, God knows how many people it would have killed."

"And it would have destroyed their equipment." Mac's starting to see the big picture here, and it scares him. Someone wanted to make sure that it would be a lot harder for the LAPD to respond to other bombs in the city. From the briefing Charlie gave them on the way, he already knows the Ghost likes doing more than one thing at a time.

I couldn't understand why you'd want to get caught, put everyone on alert. But this...It makes sense in a strange way. I've done similar things. Left a trap that was clearly a trap, gotten everyone distracted from what I was actually doing. He tries not to think about how often that was his and Pena's go-to tactic. We have to find him before it's too late.

…

"I traced the wireless signal. It came back online as soon as you triggered that second device. It's streaming to a location right here in LA. Over in Westlake." Riley's still a little jumpy. If Mac hadn't thrown that bomb into the manhole, we'd all be dead. Charlie can't be certain what was in that vial, but whatever it was would have taken out everything in a hundred-foot radius, he says, based on the blast they saw.

"Okay, let's go." Jack slides into the car. "He won't be waiting around long. If he was watching, he saw them figure out how to beat his bomb."

"No he didn't." Riley grins. "When Mac shoved it in that helmet, it lost visual of what was happening. For all the Ghost knows, they didn't know what to do with it and got blown up. But he's going to figure out soon enough when it's not splashed all over social media and the news channels."

If Riley didn't have complete faith in Jack's driving after five years, she'd worry he was going to kill them before the Ghost does. Mac, in the backseat, keeps getting flung side to side as they go around turns and looks vaguely sick. Good thing you haven't had to sit with him in a cargo truck with faulty brakes on mountain switchbacks. Riley's still not sure how they survived that one.

The building in Westlake is an unassuming little apartment over a pawnshop. Riley follows Jack and Charlie up the stairs. The two move in a rhythm born of months spent together. They don't even need to discuss tactics. Charlie scans the door for potential triggers while Jack prepares to breach it, sticking some small device under it that must be a camera scope of some kind.

When Charlie shakes his head, Jack prepares to kick in the door. "He's in there," Charlie whispers. Jack nods, then throws his whole body weight against the door. It rattles but doesn't fall. Oh no. This isn't just some crappy cheap apartment door. He reinforced it.

"Damnit!" Jack shouts, and his second kick shatters the door part-way off its hinges. He and Charlie slam into it together and it goes down hard. But they're already too late. The window is wide open and whoever was in the room is long gone.

Just in case, Riley clears the small kitchen and bedroom with Jack, but no one is inside. But he didn't have time to grab this. There's a computer sitting on a table in the box of a living room, and when Riley opens it, it boots up. It was only in sleep mode. We got lucky.

Riley shoves aside a newspaper that's spread out haphazardly over the table, covered with coffee cup rings. This might be the break we need. She starts typing, only to realize the keys are freakishly warm and the keyboard is smoking like she's been typing too fast in a Superman cartoon.

"Is that supposed to be smoking?" Jack asks.

"No." Mac yanks the laptop out of Riley's hands and begins prying the keyboard cover off.

"Wait, what if that makes it blow up?" Jack yelps.

Mac continues tugging at the cover until it pops off. "Plastic explosives," he mutters.

Oh no. There was probably some password he entered somewhere in the system. So the computer would self destruct if anyone other than him got access. It's way more effective, and deadly, than a password protection for the computer itself. Passwords can be hacked. You can't hack exploded, melted silicon.

"You don't think it's going to explode if I plug into it, right?" Riley asks. "If you can't save the computer I'm at least going to download what I can."

"It's probably safe." She plugs in her own rig and starts the cloning process. But it's going to take a while. There are huge video files on the Ghost's laptop and downloading them takes time.

"Shouldn't we be getting outta here?" Jack asks. "I'd rather not die in LA, man. Like, even Frankfurt would have been better. Dying in Westlake's gonna suck on an obituary."

"Nobody's dying!" Mac shouts. "I can disarm this. But we have to go outside." They rush down the stairs, Riley stumbling awkwardly next to Mac since the computers are connected. At least if this goes off it oughta take me out instantly. As Jack told her once, "I'm not afraid of dyin', I just don't want there to be any pain." She can agree with that.

Mac sets the computer on the hood of a car and glances down the street. A garbage truck is lumbering along, coming their way. "Jack, stop that truck!" The two of them run off toward it, and Riley's left staring at the smoking computer and wondering if she's just been bailed on. Charlie is right beside her.

"How long have we got?" She asks nervously.

"Based on the rate the smoke's increasing, less than a minute."

The world slows to a crawl. She can hear Jack yelling, "Hey, stop that stinky thing!" And the truck driver's cursing at someone. And then Mac comes running back with some kind of liquid in a hubcap. The smell registers just as he starts pouring it over the keyboard.

"Wait, you're adding fuel to a bomb?" Riley yelps.

"Plastic explosives are partly made from gasoline. Diesel fuel will dissolve it enough to remove the trigger," Mac pants, pawing through the now-stringy putty and pulling out a thin wire.

"That's impressive work," Charlie mutters, and Riley can see the respect in his eyes. "Risky, but impressive."

Jack jogs up, shaking his head. "You do realize we had to tell him he's gonna have to call the Phoenix to claim damages, right? Patty's gonna be pissed."

"Not as much as she would have been if we'd lost this intel." Riley's computer is over halfway done cloning, and it looks like the Ghost's laptop is in good enough shape for her to get most of the data off. "Nice work, Mac."

She paces like a caged tiger while the computer finishes its download. We need to hurry. Charlie says the Ghost likes all his work finished in one day. And it's past one p.m. now. She should be hungry, but she's gone past hungry to the point where she feels like she can keep going indefinitely on the granola bar she ate before breaking into Nick's and the coffee with Sam. That feels like forever ago. It really was just this morning?

Mac's sitting on the front step, head down. He's probably in shock. Nearly died twice in one day. That's par for the course in this business, but sometimes she forgets he's new to it. He fits in so well. Sometimes I feel like it's been a lot longer than a couple months. Working with Mac feels right. Like they're supposed to be this trio. Riley on the computers, Mac improvising their way out of tough spots, and Jack watching both their backs. It's seamless. It never felt like this with Nick. She didn't realize how much better a team could be until she saw it right in front of her.

"Hey, thanks for saving us again. Sorry I yelled at you while you were doing it," Riley says, sitting down beside him.

"I get it. You were scared." He shrugs, but Riley sees something run down his nose and splash to the concrete. He's crying?

"Mac, it's over. We did it. We're gonna track him down and catch him with what I found on there, and we're gonna make sure he doesn't do this again. And it's thanks to you." She rests one hand gently on his shoulder. "You're a hero, you hear me?"

He glances up at her, and his wide eyes are glassy with tears. "No. No, I'm not." He sniffs. "Alfred Pena taught me that trick. He's still saving me even when he's been dead for three years." A single tear trails down Mac's cheek. "He saved my life so many times and I couldn't save him." More tears splash onto the hot concrete.

Riley leans back against the step. I'm surrounded by people who have so much pain in their pasts. And all I can do is be there when they want to talk. If they want to talk. She'd thought once that the hardest part of her life as an agent was going to be keeping secrets from other people, people she loved. It's not. The hardest part is when people you love keep secrets from you. And that's certainly not something unique to the life of a secret agent.

"Alfred Pena?" She saw that name in Cage's dossier on Mac. But it's familiar for some other reason she can't pinpoint.

Mac's silent for a few moments, and then he glances at her again, and something in her face must convey that she's safe to talk to, because all of a sudden he starts talking and can't seem to stop. "You know how I told you, when we went to Russia, about the cop who taught me everything I know about disarming bombs?" Riley nods. "That was Alfred." Oh man. That's why his name's familiar. Riley remembers seeing the news stories about a rogue cop supposedly killed by a bomb he made. I guess that's not the whole story. And then an even more horrible thought comes to mind. Like mentor, like kid. Another misunderstanding, another assumption of guilt. At least Mac only ended up behind bars, not dead.

"He was like me. Spent his days defusing bombs on the job, spent his nights breaking up cartel work. Ran into each other taking down the same shipment one night, and he kind of took me under his wing. We stopped a lot of bombs together." Mac sighs. "He was the best there was on the squad. And then I got him killed."

"Mac, whatever happened, it wasn't your fault."

"He told me to get out. He knew things were going to go wrong." Mac sniffs and swipes his hand over his face, then turns away from Riley.

He's too young to be carrying around so much guilt. No wonder thinking Ramsay dying was his fault tore him up so much. He already thought someone else died because of him. "Mac, it wasn't on you."

"Yes. It was."

…

"Hey kid, are you with me?" Alfred waves a hand in front of Mac's face.

"Yeah. It's just...It was a long day." Greg, one of the head mechanics at Weathers's Body Shop, smashed his hand up in a chain binder, and Mac's been doing his own work and Greg's for the past three days. It pays well. But it doesn't leave him much time to rest. "I'm good."

"Los Diablos aren't messing around. You need to focus or you're gonna wind up dead." Pena shakes his head. "And do something about that mess you call hair. They let you work on gears and motors with that hanging in your face?"

Mac chuckles. What a dad. Ever since he started letting his hair grow out, Pena's been giving him grief about it. Mac pulls what he can back into a small ponytail at the back of his neck. One stubborn chunk refuses to stay put and falls over one eye. He grins at Pena cheekily.

"This better?"

"One of these nights I'm gonna pin you to the ground and take a pair of scissors to it myself," Alfred grumbles, but Mac can see his grin, white teeth glimmering in the dusky light.

"You could try, old man." Mac chuckles.

They slip as quietly as they can through the alleys. There's been a lot of action on Los Diablos's turf recently. The cartel's moved into the protection racket as a side job, and one of the smaller neighborhoods is actually fighting back.

They're being organized by Carlos Rivera, a former Army medic who opened a clinic in the neighborhood. He's helped Mac out of plenty of jams before, patching him up when something's too serious to be dealt with at home. Carlos is a good guy; he genuinely cares about this neighborhood and keeping it safe. But that's made him a target.

Carlos texted Mac this afternoon saying Los Diablos gave him an ultimatum. Leave them alone or suffer the consequences. He's taken his family to stay with a friend, and he's lying low at a neighbor's house. But he's refusing to close down the clinic.

Mac tried to convince him keeping it open was dangerous. But Carlos won't take no for an answer.

Those people need my help. Every day. I can't leave them to suffer because I'm afraid for my own life. It's not right.

Mac admires the man's bravery. Carlos was military, he knows what it means to sacrifice your own safety to keep others alive. But Carlos can't help anyone if he's dead.

"If they're going after him, the logical thing would be to target the clinic," Mac tells Pena. "Everyone in that neighborhood knows that's Carlos's passion. He'd rather die than close it down."

They approach the clinic from the back. There's a window partially forced open, and Pena checks it for triggers before he and Mac shove it up the rest of the way and drop inside.

Pena groans. "I'm getting too old for this." He rubs one shoulder ruefully. "My wife keeps saying I need to find a safer line of work."

"Is safe even in your vocabulary?" Mac chuckles.

"I know, but my little girl, she's turning three in a couple days. And I'd like to get to see that. I'd like to watch her graduate, go to college, you know?" He sighs. "There's a position in evidence cataloguing opening up."

"You? Behind a desk?" Mac mock-gasps. "Who are you and what have you done with Alfred Pena?"

"I'm a father," he replies, suddenly serious. "I'm just another man who wants to watch his family grow up." He smiles and claps Mac's shoulder. "And as for all this hero and save the world business, I think I'm going to be leaving it in pretty capable hands." Mac's glad the clinic is dark so Pena can't see the blush heating his face.

They make their way slowly through the clinic, watching for tripwires or any other triggers. When they reach the front lobby, Pena holds up a hand.

"Under that chair. Second from the door."

It's an unassuming lump. Totally invisible from the front door. And wires stretch over to the knob.

"Doesn't seem to have any kind of remote trigger," Pena whispers. "It's only going to react to the door. Or to being disarmed." Los Diablos have a reputation of making their devices hard to defuse.

The bomb is a complicated mess of wires and tape. There are a lot of redundancies. "Okay, hand me the bag." Pena pulls out a pair of pliers. "Hold these for a second, will you?" Mac reaches for them, but that's the exact second his overworked body decides it's a good time to yawn. He fumbles with the pliers and they fall to the floor with a clatter that, in the silent office, is deafening.

He takes much too long to pick them up because he doesn't want to see the disappointed frown on Pena's face. So much for being a worthy successor.

But when he hand over the pliers, there's genuine concern in the man's eyes. "You really haven't slept much, have you?" Mac shakes his head and muffles another yawn.

"I've got this one. You go watch our six, okay?" He rests one hand on Mac's shoulder. "This is nothing I couldn't do in my sleep." Mac laughs at the horrible slight pun. "I don't need you fumbling around and getting us both killed, klutz." Mac grins. He's always been on the slightly clumsy side. He guesses it comes with the territory of having legs that seem too long for your body and hands too big for the rest of you. It's gotten a lot better since Pena taught him ways to focus and control his breathing and movements, but every once in a while if he's tired or his concentration breaks, he reverts back to what Pena called 'the golden retriever puppy on crack'.

He finds a spot to sit on the fire escape of the next-door building, a condemned apartment complex. This neighborhood is in rough shape, but Carlos has never stopped seeing the potential and helping make his dreams a reality. A couple weekends ago he and a group of the neighborhood kids went around and asked business owners if they could paint over the gang graffiti on their walls. From here, Mac can see the gecko and vines painted on the little grocery store and a swirl of red, gold, and teal on the front of a family restaurant. The colors start blurring and shifting. He blinks and presses his cheek a little further into the rough brick, hoping that's going to be enough to ground him.

Mac doesn't want to fall asleep, but he was up until two doing homework for his physics class, and then he spent twelve hours at the shop today. Someone has to look out for the Bozers. Wilt has film school and all the hours he has to put into shooting and editing eat up a lot of the time he could be at his restaurant job. And his sister's so smart, she shouldn't have to be putting work before her last year of high school. She wants to be a paramedic. She'd be so good at it. She's got such a soft, caring, calming side, and Mac's seen it more and more lately as Mama Bozer's cirrhosis is getting worse.

She'd be the first to say Mac should be taking college classes full time, not worrying about balancing a class load and a full time job. I could have gotten a scholarship. I could have done anything I wanted. There's enough money left over from Grandpa's savings that he could have at least paid his way for a couple years through anything a scholarship wouldn't cover. But he can't leave Wilt and Sarah. They're family. And family shouldn't just bail on one another.

He's not sure when his eyes closed, but all he knows is that when they open again it's because sirens are screaming and lights are flashing. What the hell?

He doesn't know if they set off some kind of alarm, or if the cartel thugs did, or if someone happened to see them climbing through the window and called it in. But the police are here. And he can't see Pena. Mac knows he should run, before someone decides to sweep the scene and sees him there on the fire escape. But he feels frozen. He huddles down as small as he can in a corner and watches.

A tall man with a severe face climbs out of one of the cars. He pulls out a bullhorn and shouts, "You're surrounded. Come out with your hands up."

Pena yells back, muffled by the closed windows. "I can't. There's a bomb in here."

Mac can't hear the exchange between the officer with the bullhorn and the man below him. He's too panicky. There's a loud buzzing in his ears and he feels like he's falling.

"I'm going to ask you one more time, exit the building now!" The man shouts.

Mac can't hear Pena's reply. He can barely think. This can't be happening. It can't be. This isn't real. But it is. He'd known this could happen to them any time, but now that it actually is he's lost. It doesn't feel real.

There's so much chaos down below. Mac can see people fanning out, looking in through the windows. There's all kinds of chatter down there but it's just a blurred roaring in Mac's ears. He can't tell what anyone is saying, he can't even tell if he's been seen. He doesn't even know if he cares. Everything is blurry and shaky and he might fall, but he can't tell.

"It's over, Pena. Come out with your hands up! This is your last warning!" And then Mac sees the man below him training a sniper rifle through the window.

There's no answer. Mac knows Pena must be in the middle of the process. He can't talk or even move wrong at this point, or the whole thing will go off. He just needs a few more minutes. They should give him that. They should.

The officer outside gestures to two men fully geared up. That's the go sign. He's going to have them take Pena out. This is escalating too fast, this isn't right. But everyone's on edge since the last La Ola bombing took out three officers at a warehouse. No one's taking chances and too many of the cops are trigger happy and out for blood. There were rumors that La Ola had a dirty cop on their payroll. And now, to these cops, it looks like that's been Pena the whole time.

"No!" Mac's voice has finally kicked in, but it's too late. A shot cracks through the night, and less than a second later there's a dull roar and an inferno that flings back anyone close to the building. Officers are thrown over the hoods of cars, Mac throws his arm up to deflect a spray of glass and grit, and the world is all heat and ringing and shock.

Run. Or you're going to get blamed too. Mac hates everything about this. This is so wrong. Pena can't be dead, he can't be. It's all my fault. I wasn't there to help. And I couldn't even stay awake and keep a lookout like he asked.

Mac stumbles across the roof, half-blinded by the afterimage of the explosion burned into his eyes. He doesn't go home. He goes to the spot under an overpass that he likes, the one he's got a spare backpack stashed in, and curls up there. I don't deserve to go home. Pena's dead, and it's my fault. I might as well have killed him. Mac doesn't fall asleep. He just stares out at the city lights and wonders when everything went so wrong.

…

Carl's Jr. jumps when Jack sits down next to him and Riley. The kid rubs frantically at his face, but there are tears dripping down and he's not going to be able to hide it that easy. Jack doesn't dare touch him, not after this morning, so he settles for talking instead.

"Hey, you okay?"

The kid sniffs. "If I say I am you won't believe me, will you?"

"Not when you're sittin' there leakin' like a busted pipe," Jack says, trying to sound lighthearted. "We're all still alive, you did good."

"Not good enough," the kid mutters dully. "I didn't save Pena."

"The cop you used to work with." Jack saw the report Cage had made about Carl's Jr.'s vigilante years. Alfred Pena. LAPD bomb squad, until he died in what the reports called a bombing he orchestrated. But the kid said he was trying to disarm it. Cage doesn't have much surrounding the man's death. Jack guesses she didn't want to push too far. This kid's got so many jagged edges and shattered pieces. He's so fragile. And everyone but Jack has recognized it and treated him more carefully. I went and in typical Dalton bull-in-a-china-shop fashion scared the hell out of him.

"He taught me all of this. And I messed up and he died." There's a fresh trickle of tears, and the kid's getting all snotty-nosed and sniffly too. Damn it, why does he have to be a messy crier? He looks so much like a little kid, lost and scared. There's no way on earth I can even pretend to hate him. Jack sighs.

"Hey, listen, I know how it feels to think you're walkin' around with some good men's blood on your hands, okay?" God knows Jack's lost enough buddies out there. And every time I asked myself two things. Why didn't I do more to save them, and why wasn't it me? "And I get that this is bringing up a lot of memories for you. Wanna call it quits for the day? I can run you back over to the Phoenix."

"Charlie still needs our help." The kid whispers. "Alfred wouldn't have ever forgiven himself if someone died because of him. Because I was too upset to do my job." He scrubs the back of his hand over his face and Jack feels like crying himself at how small and vulnerable the kid looks. "I still want to help."

Riley's computer chimes, and she jumps to her feet, breaking up the moment of emotion. "Cloning's complete." She grabs her computer and starts combing through the files. Jack leans back against the step, watching the kid get his crying under control as Charlie hangs up his phone and walks over.

"Field office wants anything we can send them. They're going to send a full forensics team to comb the apartment and they'd like those cloned files as soon as possible."

Riley glances up at them. "Sending now."

"Any luck with those files on your end?"

"Not yet. There's a huge backlog of video files, even one from today at the gym, but I can't find anything about any job in the past two months. There are emails older than that, but I've cross referenced them with Charlie's files and they're for the Shanghai and Rio bombings. Which already happened." Riley's got that look on her face that says she's run up against something she doesn't understand. "I've got access to his bank records, and there haven't been any deposits in the past month. The only thing recent is a withdrawal of ten thousand."

"He always asks for payment in advance," Charlie says. "There should be a deposit for this job." He's doing that thing where he cracks his knuckles when he's worried. That used to drive Jack crazy in the Sandbox. Charlie would do it whenever they cleared a town too easily, or if they were driving a stretch of road that was known for having IEDs planted. He's more worried than he'll admit.

"None of this makes any sense," Jack mutters. Why is he taking money out? For components to build the bombs?

Riley stops typing. "I've got something. He owns a warehouse under a shell corporation. Not too far from here."

"Let's go. Chances are he's already packing up shop," Charlie says. "He knows we're onto him. He's going to move up his timetable, so we have to get ahead of him."

Jack follows Riley's directions to the warehouse. The place is a ramshackle dump. Looks like minimal security. "I've got a bad feeling about this," Jack says as he and Riley step out of the car. And then a massive explosion flings them to the ground. This is getting old!

Jack shakes off the buzzing and ringing, and the memories that are clawing at his mind. A tipped humvee in the mountains. Fire all around him. The guy next to him with his neck snapped and face half burnt. Blood staining his uniform. Legs pinned under a warped dashboard. Sand and sunlight and fire.

He scrambles to his feet. Riley. She was on the side of the car that took the brunt of the hit. Jack leaps over the ash-covered hood. Riley's scrambling to her feet, and the side of her face looks like she got too much sun, but she seems mostly intact.

"What happened?" She yells.

"He probably saw us coming and torched it!" Jack shouts back. I'm not gonna be able to hear normally for days.

"Damn it." Charlie slams a hand on the hood of his car. "We just lost our best lead." The building is burning so hot that Jack thinks it might be best to get the cars out of the way. "What's that smell?" he asks.

"Triacetone Triperoxide," Carl's Jr. and Charlie answer at the same time. Charlie gives the kid an approving look.

"How'd you know about TATP?"

"Pena told me about it. He said if I ever came across that smell I should get the hell out of wherever I was. Because they don't call it the Mother of Satan for nothing." He shrugs. "One of the cartels tried to synthesize it once. Blew their building worse than a meth lab explosion."

"It's incredibly risky to make. Wonder if he just made a mistake?" Charlie says, shading his eyes and looking up at the flames.

"At just the time we showed up? I doubt it. And I might be able to get us answers." Riley's typing rapidly. "Most of the video cameras on the adjacent buildings got torched, but one of them had instant wireless cloud backup. I'm hacking it now."

The others gather around as she pulls up an image on her computer. It's a set of freeze-frames, that just manage to capture a door at the back of the warehouse. And less than a minute before the explosion, a figure steps out. Riley stops flicking through them and presses play.

A stocky man, his face half-covered with a hood, steps out. He breaks into a shambling, limping run, and the hood falls back from his face. Jack feels his stomach turn over a little. Half the man's face is a mask of shiny, old burns.

And then he turns and glances back presumably as the explosion happens, and the less damaged side of his face is visible for a fraction of a second. Jack hears an audible gasp from behind him and turns to look.

Carl's Jr. stares at the retreating figure on the camera, a disbelieving whisper slipping out. "Pena?"

…

Mac feels like the whole world just fell out from under him. He shudders, collapsing against the side of the car. The hot metal under his hand shocks him back into a sort of awareness, but everything still feels fuzzy. His ears are still ringing from the explosion, maybe that's it? He stares at the freeze-frame on Riley's computer, willing himself to have made a mistake.

He's just on my mind, that's all. I can't stop thinking about him, and now I'm seeing him everywhere. But the figure on the camera is unmistakably Pena. Mac's seen that face too often to forget.

"Mac, he's dead." Riley's trying to reason this out, but she can't, because he's not dead, he's right there. And he's tried to kill them, to kill Mac, three times.

"No. No, that's him." Mac takes her rig, praying one last time that he's wrong. He's not.

"How is that even possible?" Jack asks. "He died in an explosion over three years ago."

"No one ever found a body. There was nothing left to find at the scene." Mac shrugs. He feels so detached that telling them what happened doesn't even hurt. "I got a call from a doctor I knew that was dealing with a protection racket, and he'd been threatened. Pena and I went to his clinic and found a bomb someone left for him. I...I wasn't at my best, so he told me to go watch our backs. And I fell asleep." He shudders. "Someone had sent an anonymous tip to the LAPD that there was a break-in at the clinic. When they showed up, Pena was already too far into disarming the bomb to leave. If he had, it would have gone off."

"But they forced him to?" Charlie asked.

"He tried to tell them to get back, that there was a bomb." Mac sighs. "The officer in charge of the team thought Pena was setting up the bomb and had him shot. He hadn't finished disarming it and the whole place blew. Two of the officers died later from injuries."

"Oh man." Mac can see the genuine sympathy in Jack's eyes.

"Everyone thinks Pena was a cop gone bad. There had been rumors floating around that there was someone dirty on the bomb squad, someone taking money from the cartels, and Pena became the scapegoat. No one but me knew what really happened that night, and obviously I couldn't come forward. That officer covered up any evidence that Pena had actually been trying to disarm the bomb, and got himself painted as the hero."

"What was his name?" Riley asks.

"Who?"

"The man who killed Pena."

"Carlton Ames." Mac's never going to be able to forget seeing that man's face in news interviews. Watching him drag Pena's name through the mud and villify the one man who was anything close to a father Mac had had in years.

"The newspaper," Riley gasps. Mac can't tell what she's thinking, but she's started typing frantically. "I think I just figured it out. This wasn't a job. This was personal."

"What do you mean?" Charlie asks.

Riley holds up her computer, open to an LA news site. "Ames is going to be honored for his service to the department. Today, at City Hall, at 5 p.m. Pena must have seen it and decided to get revenge."

"It's four now." Jack jumps into the car. "Let's go!"

Mac sits in the back of the car. Jack's still driving like a maniac, but he doesn't even feel the sharp turns. Was I wrong about Pena all along? Was he really getting paid off? But Mac just can't reconcile that with the man he knew. What happened? Why is he doing this? He feels sick, but not from Jack's driving. That man was my world. I trusted him. He was the closest thing I had to a father, after everything. And he turned out to be a criminal.

This can't be happening. He's going to wake up and this is just going to be some terrible dream. But no, it can't be. His fingers are scorched from the hot car metal. He's aching and bruised from taking that fall when the first bomb went off.

This is actually happening. He can't think or feel or do anything. What do I do now? Then Jack slams the car into park and they scramble out into a mob of civilians surrounding the steps.

"We're never gonna find him in this crowd," Jack mutters.

"He's going to be counting on that," Mac says dully. "He liked...likes using distractions. The bomb isn't on any one of these people either. It's going to be hidden in plain sight."

"Podium?" Riley asks.

Charlie shakes his head. "No. LAPD does sweeps of all public events like this, especially with the recent bomb activity. They would have had dogs all over this. The bomb had to be brought in later."

Mac looks back at the car. Pena liked using vehicles as cover. Whether it was setting them on fire and rolling them toward guys shooting at them, or just hiding behind them, the man took advantage of them whenever he could. And Mac can't stop thinking about all those "trojan horse" box bombs they disarmed together.

"He brought it in a vehicle. Riley can you get a satellite view?" She pulls up an image. Mac scans it, looking for anything out of the ordinary. And then he sees it.

"That's the second Channel 8 news van parked here. And it's on the wrong side of the building."

"That's our guy!" Jack says. He pulls his gun. Mac's voice catches in his throat. He wants to say, please don't shoot him, he's my friend, but the fact remains, that man who just tried to kill them, that's not Mac's friend anymore. What happened?

Mac follows Jack and Charlie to the van. Charlie moves toward the front and Jack flings open the back doors. There's a scuffling sound and Mac catches one brief glimpse of Pena's face as the man looks back at them from the front seat. Please, whatever might be wrong, you have to remember me. Please remember. Please don't do this. And then Jack leaps up into the back, there's an audible click, and Mac's world narrows to Jack's horrified face and the pressure plate under his foot.

"Jack!" Riley screams. Mac vaguely realizes Charlie's running up to them.

"He had a car," Charlie gasps. "I winged him, but he's long gone." It doesn't matter, not right now. Jack's going to die if we don't do something.

Mac feels sick and shaky and lost and terrified. I can't lose someone else today. He feels like Pena died all over again, because this Ghost isn't the kind, caring man Mac remembers. Everyone I care about, everyone who cares about me, they get hurt, or they disappear. I'm not going to lose Jack too.

"I'm gonna get you out, Jack." Mac whispers.

Jack's standing perfectly still, but there's a slight tremble in his legs. "Go on, get outta here."

"No way. You go kaboom, I go kaboom, okay?" Mac glances up at him.

"We have seven minutes left until the ceremony starts," Charlie whispers. He's looking all over the outside of the van, and when he opens the lockers next to the wheels he grimaces. "This is bigger than we thought. Riley, you have to go get as many people out of the area as you can."

"I can't leave Jack!" Riley shouts.

"You have to, baby girl," Jack whispers. "Those people don't deserve to die."

"Neither do you!"

"I've got two of the smartest bomb nerds in the world workin' on this. I'll be fine." Jack gives her a shaky grin, and she runs off, shoulders quivering.

Mac takes a deep breath. Calm down. What can kill you first? He hates that it's Pena's voice talking him through this. You did this! This is your fault! But then he hears Jack. "You got this, kid. I know you do."

"We have to find the trigger," Charlie says. "There's got to be wires under the pressure plate." He pulls out a small multitool from his pocket and tugs at a red wire barely visible.

"Wait!" Mac grabs Charlie's hand. "It's another trap!"

"What are you talking about?"

"Pena...he liked to say thinking something was simple was the surest way to die. And every time we worked together, he had a backup plan. And the camera, where's the camera?" Charlie looks at him, wide-eyed as he realizes his mistake. He's as panicked as I feel. And if you panic you make mistakes, and you die. Mac gives the ghost of Pena in his head a grim smile. You made one mistake. You taught me how to beat you.

...

Jack's legs are turning into jello. This isn't the first time he's been on a pressure plate. But it never gets easier.

This feels like the Sandbox all over again, watching Charlie fish out the wire. Okay. Just clip the right one, and we're home free. It's a gamble every time, but Jack always feels like it's one worth taking. Everyone takes more risks in life than they think. Mine are just more obvious. And Riley's getting people to safety. Hopefully getting herself out too. She's as much a self-sacrificing idiot as I am. But hopefully she'll be busy long enough…

And then Carl's Jr.'s jumping in the way, pulling Charlie back. "Wait!" Jack cringes. He's right. That would have been too easy. There's a failsafe somewhere. He feels sick. If the kid hadn't stepped in, we'd all be confetti.

"Jack, see if you can see a camera!" The kid's glancing up at him, looking both absolutely terrified and insanely determined. Jack glances around, then sees a small lens tucked into the wall, behind some sort of air vent.

"Found it."

Mac hands in his Swiss Army knife. Jack takes it almost reverently; it's like an extension of the kid's hand. Like Jack's gun or Riley's computer. Letting someone else touch it, especially someone the kid clearly has trust issues with, is a huge act of faith. He's letting me in. Telling me I'm important to him. Jack wants to hug the kid then and there. If they wouldn't all die if he moved, he would. Instead, he opens the screwdriver attachment and carefully removes the air vent. A screw pings to the floor and all of them flinch. He can't tell exactly what's packed around that camera lens, but it can't be anything good.

"Okay, what am I looking at?" Jack asks.

"A secondary bomb. Rigged to the first one. Disarm the pressure plate, the vent bomb goes off. That's a bolt fuse," Charlie says. "It has to be pulled straight out, or that secondary device goes off."

"So, like operation?" Jack grins shakily. Never was much good at that game.

"Yeah, but you're not gonna pull it out yourself. Your hands are shaking too much," Mac says.

"There's a rig for removing them but it would take too long to get one," Charlie says. He's cracking his knuckles again.

Mac looks pretty much unfazed by that. "We're gonna rig something to pull it out." He starts scrounging through a nearby dumpster, pulling out a frayed extension cord, some tape, and the string from the opening of an onion bag. He flips over a battered shopping cart and comes running back, carrying the random trash.

"Jack, wrap the tape around my knife and use that to secure the extension cord to it, but leave six inches sticking out. Then wrap that, counterclockwise, around the fuse, and put the wrench on the bolt. Do NOT step off that pressure plate." Jack nods. He follows Mac's instructions to the letter. "Now run the end of the cord through the handle of that locker." He does. "I'm gonna need some distance to make this work." Mac steps back, and Jack can see all the fear and heartache in his eyes. Kid's been through hell today. He's had to relive the death of a man he clearly looked up to like a second father, only to find out that the man isn't who Mac believed he was. And now he's about to watch someone else die because of that man.

Mac stares up at him. "I can't lose you too, Jack. I can't. I'm gonna fix this. I promise. I'm gonna do it right." The kid's working as fast as he can, hands steady, focused and determined, but there's a panicky fear in his eyes.

"Listen, whatever happens, it's not your fault, okay?" Jack asks. I'm not letting him walk around with someone else's death on his conscience. That ends today. "None of it was your fault. Not Pena, not Ramsay. And I won't be either." For all the times I've joked that he's gonna be the death of me, he's really been the one keeping me alive. "It's not your fault." He wants to be sure that's burned into the kid's brain. There are no guarantees it will be, but Jack's gonna do the best he can.

Maybe he had a lousy deadbeat of a father and his mentor turned out to be a psycho criminal, but he's always gonna have me. Jack closes his eyes as the kid runs the cable over the cart tire like a pulley. Please don't let me die. He needs me.

There's a rattle and the bolt falls to the van floor. Jack sags in relief, and then hears Mac yelling. "No! It's not safe! Don't move yet!" The kid is running, flat out racing, to get to him. He grabs up his knife and reaches for the pressure plate wire, cutting it. "Okay, now you can move." Mac sinks into a boneless heap on the van step. Charlie sags against the open door, and Jack drops down, sitting on the defused plate.

"Thanks, Mac." The kid stares at him. "Yeah, I know your name. Don't give me that look." This is at least the fifth time the kid's saved his life. I think he deserves to not have to listen to me joke about his name anymore. "But don't make me regret it. Or I'm gonna start calling you McMuffin." Mac chuckles weakly, leaning on the side of the van. Now that it's all over I just can't be serious anymore.

"Could you maybe think of something not food-related?"

"Hey, you're talking to the Wookie here. Always thinkin' with my stomach," Jack says, and growl-laughs. "And speaking of my Wookiness, I'm pretty sure I owe you a Wookie life debt like three times over at this point."

The kid sighs, and it sounds wet and teary. "Hey, you're not gonna start cryin' again, are ya?" Jack asks. He slides down to sit on the step next to Mac.

"No. Like you said, we all lived." Mac's shoulders shudder softly. "I just...It's been a long day, you know?" Jack nods, expecting the kid to clam up as per usual, but he keeps talking. "I...I didn't think...I thought Pena was...well, he was everything my dad wasn't." He's barely talking above a whisper now. "And...and I kept thinking of him...and I forgot about you. And then you almost died because of him."

"Hey, it's okay." I mean, I'll probably have nightmares for a month, but it's fine, right?

"No, it's not. But it will be." The kid looks up at him. "You're still alive. So it will be."

Jack normally smacks people on the back after a job well done. It's just something he learned from Gramps, Pops, and every other good ol' boy who came out to the ranch. When he rode out his first bucking colt, lassoed his first calf, made county whip cracking champion; it was just the way you showed someone you were proud.

With Riley it's devolved into a playful cuff on the back of the head cause she's a little shorter than most of Jack's buddies were, growing up. He'd missed her shoulder so many times it became a tradition.

But his hand stops inches shy of Mac's back. If I hit him, he's gonna panic. Maybe he won't curl up in a shivering ball like he did in the training room, but he's going to remember. Even if he works hard not to show it.

Instead, Jack pulls his hand back and makes a fist, holding it out toward Mac's own shaking hand. The kid gives him a confused look, and Jack just raises an eyebrow. And then slowly, Mac's fingers curl into a fist, and he holds up his hand. Jack's fingers brush against his, and in that moment, they start to laugh. The hysterical, uncontrollable laughter of knowing you cheated death one more time.

"I'm sorry. For this morning." It feels like a lifetime ago.

"You didn't know." Mac shudders. "Like you said, it's gonna be okay."

Yes, yes it is. Jack tips his head back and laughs, just as Riley comes dashing around the corner, gasping and possibly crying, but smiling. Everything's gonna be just fine.

…

It's been two hours and Mac can't stop shaking. He still can't believe he did it. Whatever else Pena might have done, he taught me well.

"Sure you can't stick around?" Jack asks, as Charlie climbs into his car.

"Nope. Ghost got away again. So my training in Sacramento is as urgent as ever." Charlie sighs. "And thanks to you, Mac, I'm gonna be able to tell them a lot more about him. Sure you don't want to come with me?"

"Yeah." Mac doesn't think he could stand there in front of dozens of officers and talk about Pena without breaking down. This morning, he was a ghost to me in one way. Now he's another one entirely. And neither is what Mac would have wanted. Or what the Pena he remembers deserved.

Charlie glances from Mac to Jack and Riley. "Hopefully the LAPD will be a little more willing to cooperate with my investigation after we saved City Hall and a couple dozen of their officers. After what I saw out there today, there's no doubt in my mind that you didn't kill Ramsay. All I have to do is find a way to prove it." Charlie smiles. "And I'm not quitting until I do." He drives away and Mac is left standing with Jack and Riley.

Riley sighs. "I don't know about you, but I want to go home and get this smoke smell out of my hair."

"Jack doesn't have enough hair to worry about that," Mac says, glancing at Jack as he says it. We're okay. Jack's still alive. He doesn't even want to think about any alternatives. Jack can't die. I can't lose him. He lost his father, he lost Alfred twice over. Jack's not going anywhere if I have anything to say about it.

"Hey, do you want to walk back to your place?" Jack chuckles. And that reminds Mac of something he needs to do.

"I can't go home yet," Mac whispers. "There's someone I have to see."

They drop Riley off at a bus stop, at her insistence, and Jack drives Mac into a small, run-down residential neighborhood.

"What's this all about?"

"Pena's wife. She's going to hear about all of this. And it's going to hurt." Mac's watching a little girl playing out in the front yard with a broken doll. "She had to move in with her father when Pena died. I always wanted to go see her, tell her I was sorry. But I didn't think she'd want to talk to the person who was the reason he died." He holds up a hand to stop Jack. "I know what you're going to say. But I'm the one who called him and asked for help that night. I'm the one who fell asleep. And I know I can't go back and change it. So I guess maybe closure is a little more important than avoiding being hurt." But he can't make himself get out of the car. "How do I tell her that this whole time, the man she thought died a failure survived, but became everything people claimed he was?"

"Because that man out there isn't her husband." Jack sighs. "I've seen guys like this. Watched one of my buddies' EOD techs get caught up in a bomb he couldn't defuse fast enough. Piece of shrapnel went through his helmet. And when he woke up in the hospital two months later, this kid who I never heard cuss out anything, not even when he dropped a humvee toolbox on his foot, swore like a drunk Texan every three words and wouldn't stop making crude comments about the nurses. Somethin' gets broken in their head and they might be livin', but they never came home."

Mac sighs. He pushes open the door and walks up to the house, knocking gently. "Maria Pena?"

A worn-looking woman opens the door. "If you're another Jehovah's Witness, you can leave right now."

"No, my name's Angus MacGyver. I...I knew your husband," Mac whispers. "And any minute, someone's going to call and tell you everything you thought was a lie." She's starting to get angry, but he pushes on. "He...he was a vigilante. So was I. He saved my life more times than I can count. He was a good man. And...he didn't die when that bomb went off. But part of him did. Whatever you hear about him, whatever anyone says, I want you to know he really was a good man. And he loved you and Annabelle."

The woman breaks down sobbing. "They called. Already," she says. "I sent Annabelle outside so she wouldn't have to hear. She deserves to remember her father as a good man."

"Yes she does." Mac whispers. "Could I talk to her?"

Maria only nods. Mac walks over to the table where Annabelle is arranging a set of mismatched small dishes. She looks so much like her father. The same little frown when she's concentrating, the same careful movements. Mac swallows and sits down across from her.

"Hi, Annabelle."

She looks up. "I don't know you."

"No, I know. But I knew your dad." She clutches her doll to her chest. "Hey, is there something wrong with her?"

"Her wings don't work." Annabelle suddenly loses her shyness. "She's broken."

"Maybe not." Mac gently reaches for the doll. "May I?" When she hands it over, he can see the rubber band that held the wings and made them flap has snapped. "Could I borrow your hair tie?" She pulls it out and hands it to him, staring wide-eyed. A few twists later, the wings flap perfectly.

Annabelle clutches the doll to her chest. "Did you really know my dad? Wasn't he a police officer? When I told Mama I wanted to be one for Halloween she cried. But she let me get a shirt that looked like his, do you like it?" She tugs on the stiff blue button-down that already has grass stains on it. She probably hasn't taken it off since she got it. Mac knows all too well what it feels like to want to hold onto any bit of a parent you can. I haven't been able to part with Dad's leather jacket all these years later.

"Yes I did know him. And he was one of the best men I ever met; and you look so much like him, Annabelle." Mac leans back in the very-much-too-small chair. "You want me to tell you a funny story about him?" She nods. "Okay, well, he'd just met me, and he liked to tease. So one day, he decided to start telling me I had to cut my hair…"

…

AUSTIN, TEXAS

JACK DIDN'T MISS THIS CONCERT

Jack's ears are ringing for the third time in days. But this isn't because of a near death experience. Honestly, he's never felt so alive. The pounding drums and screaming guitars are vibrating through him and he can feel every note.

"This is awesome!" He shouts. Beside him, Cage is yelling the lyrics, off key, in her Aussie accent, so he's got to talk over both her and the band onstage. Guess love of Metallica is like a universal thing.

"Hey, I had to keep you alive so you could cross this off your bucket list!" Mac yells back over the music.

"Okay, how 'bout we make a deal then?" Jack yells back. "You don't let me die till I've crossed everything on that list off!"

"Even Putin in space?"

"Hell yeah!" Jack shouts back. "Cause knowing you you'll find a way to make it happen!"

"Either that or you're just going to end up being immortal!" Riley laughs.

Jack turns his attention back to the stage, watching the lights and the smoke and the pure aliveness of all of this.

There's nowhere I'd rather be right now. Maybe that bucket list could use just a little tweaking here and there. Because spending time with this little family he's accidentally adopted along the way is the best reason he can think of for wanting to live through one more day, one more mission.

Not my time to ride the lightning yet.

A/N: 107 is coming next and that one is seriously very dark. So I'll be posting warnings at the top of the chapter for that one, but just know that that's coming.