Gladiolus had no idea she was in danger.

When she went home that evening, relaxed and happy after spending the day with Knuckles, she realized another headache was starting. It was going to be worse than the first-her eye already felt heavy and swollen.

"It's your own fault for sitting out in the sun all day with reprobates," her mother said, handing her an ice pack for her eye.

Glad lay on her little bed with the cold pack on her face. The pain flowed steadily across her skull, growing like the tide. Maybe this would be the last one. Maybe it was too late and the curse would kill her. No! Not after she had made up with Knuckles. Not when she was so close!

She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out Dr. Gunther's card. "I met this new doctor," she told Poppy, her own voice rattling in her head. "He said he could help me. Can you call him?"

Her mother examined the card with tight lips, then sighed. "All right. You're sure he was a doctor? This card says biospecialist, not MD."

"He has a new treatment for chaos infections," Glad murmured. "Seventy-percent survival rate."

"Seventy," her mother muttered. "That's better than they promised us at the clinic. I'll give him a call."

Glad lay with her eyes closed, listening to her mother's voice in the other room. Her aunt Hyacinth brought her a set of painkillers and eye drops.

As Glad took them, Hyacinth said, "Your mother says you're associating with a moon echidna."

"Yes," Glad said. She couldn't face telling them about getting married. There would be a fight, and she couldn't argue during a headache.

Hyacinth folded her arms. She was overweight and stood there like a mountain, towering over Glad. "You're a sun echidna, Gladiolus. Moon echidnas are nothing but trouble. I didn't think there were any left."

"What's so bad about them?" Glad asked.

Hyacinth glanced toward the door, making sure Poppy was occupied. "First, they're dirty, stupid, thieving liars with no sense of decency. Second, their whole race are sorcerers. If they can't get what they want by theft, they get it with black magic."

Black magic. Right. Glad thought of the fresh, green glow of Knuckles's aura, the same color as the Master Emerald. She hadn't seen anybody using black magic-except maybe NME. She wanted to say so, but she didn't want to argue.

"I like him," she said simply.

"He's probably manipulating you," Hyacinth sniffed. "A sweet, naive thing like you who knows nothing of the world. He's probably promised to marry you, too."

Glad's heart quivered. What if her aunt was right? What if she was missing all kinds of warning signs just because she was too inexperienced to see them?

"What would I look for?" she said. "He's been so kind to me."

Hyacinth grunted. "They're always kind, at first. Then after a while, the true self shows through. You get them in a tough situation with no food and no money, and the tiger shows its stripes real quick."

"He tried to keep Perfect Chaos from eating me," Glad said. "By letting it eat him instead."

Hyacinth said nothing for a long moment. Glad cracked an eyelid and saw her aunt staring down at her, chewing her lip. Finally she said, "What did you just say?"

"Perfect Chaos," Glad said. "The water monster that was trying to get Angel Island. It wanted me. But Knuckles made it take him."

"This was a dream or something, right?" Hyacinth said.

"No, it was three weeks ago," Glad replied. "When I was missing for a few days, and you didn't believe that I'd been on Angel Island."

At this point, Poppy came in, her thin face looking thinner than usual. "I reached Dr. Gunther. He's coming here right now with an ambulance air craft. He's taking you to the Bygone hospital."

"Oh good," Glad said. All the talking was making her head hurt worse.

Hyacinth said to her sister, "She said this moon echidna saved her from that water monster."

Poppy gave Glad a skeptical look. "Maybe she thinks that. It's probably not what happened."

"It is!" Glad exclaimed, opening her eyes and sitting up in a flash of anger. "Perfect Chaos wanted to kill me because I'm descended from Solaris. But Knuckles took my place."

"He's still alive, I notice," Poppy said dryly.

"Chaos couldn't kill him," Glad retorted. "I don't know why. But Chaos let us go."

Poppy looked at her sister and shrugged. "You can't talk sense with infatuation."

"It'll wear off," Hyacinth assured her, as if Glad wasn't sitting right there. "These first romances are all nice and fluffy. He won't visit her in the hospital, and she'll get over him real quick."

Rage made Glad's head hurt. Rather than say anything, she reached under her pillow, where she kept the headset Knuckles had given her.

"Come on," Poppy said, "let's get your things together. You might be in the hospital a few weeks, the doctor said."

Her mother packed her a bag, and insisted that Glad wear a jacket. Glad slipped the headset into one of the pockets. Her mother and aunt dropped the Knuckles topic and seemed to want to avoid any mention of him.

There came a knock at the door. Poppy opened it. Three humans stood outside-Dr. Gunther and two burly men with dart guns strapped to their backs.

"We've come for the girl," Gunther said.

Glad looked at the two soldier-like men and her heart sank. This was wrong.

Poppy said doubtfully, "Why the guns?"

One of the guards said, "Security, ma'am. We're trained orderlies."

"Yep," added the other.

Hyacinth ushered Glad toward the door. "Here she is."

Dr. Gunther studied Glad's flushed face, her long dreadlocks, the cold pack over her eye. "And not a moment too soon," he muttered. "Come with us, child. We may still have time to save you."

Glad went with them, out into the night where a hovercraft awaited them, like a helicopter with no rotors. She strapped herself into a seat. Dr. Gunther sat opposite her.

One of the guards remained outside, gun drawn. He raised it to his shoulder, tracking something through the trees. There was a soft, sharp click of a dart gun firing. Glad's chaos eye saw a streak of red and blue aura in the distance.

"Missed," the guard proclaimed, climbing into the hovercraft.

"He'll be back," Dr. Gunther said, smirking. "In the meantime, we have to repair fifteen years of chaos damage to this one. Poor child." Something in his voice implied that this was only the beginning of what he had planned.

"You were shooting at Shadow?" Glad said. "Why?"

"Tranquilizer darts," one of the so-called orderlies said, patting the butt of his gun.

Gunther shot the man a repressive look. "We need Shadow, too. Hold on."

The hovercraft's engines spun up, lifting them off the ground. Glad hung onto the armrests, the noise and vibration worsening the headache. As the craft began to move, streaks of light passed through her chaos eye. It was seeing things through the cold pack, things made of chaos energy.

The flight seemed to take forever. Glad dozed a little, waking to find that nothing had changed. All three men were staring into glowing phone screens, paying no attention to her. She dozed again. The headache grew worse, the pain crawling across her head and down her neck. It was so bad this time, her eye felt like it was heavy as stone, trying to drop out of her socket. Phantom lights danced before her vision.

After a long time, the hovercraft's engine dropped to a rumble. They descended and landed on a helipad. Glad could barely open her eyes by this time. The men guided her out of the craft, and her feet touched concrete. One of them took her hand.

"This way," Dr. Gunther said in her ear. "Follow me. We'll get you situated as quickly as we can."

Glad smelled the inside of a building-air conditioning, air freshener, and an undertone of chemicals. Light blazed through her eyelids. Voices spoke in the distance. She seemed to walk for miles, following the pressure of Gunther's hand. Finally she reached a hospital bed and was able to lie down. The blankets were rough, and the mattress was hard.

"I need to examine your eye," Dr. Gunther said. "This will feel a little cold." Fingertips pried her eyelids open. Her chaos eye saw nothing, but she felt the slight warmth of a light shining into her pupil.

"It's so advanced," murmured a female voice nearby. "Will the process have a chance of working?"

"It has to," Dr. Gunther said. "I'm not losing this one. Call Gerald. Tell him I need him here."

Footsteps hurried away. Another set approached. This time the voice belonged to Dr. Eggman.

"I checked my records, as you asked, Doctor. Turns out, this chaos crystal was sourced near Pilings. It may be the one."

Glad forced her good eye open. Eggman was handing a sealed lead box to Dr. Gunther, who wore a lab coat, rubber gloves, and a face mask.

"I remember what it looked like," she said. "I can identify it for you."

Gunther opened the box and tilted it. Light blazed out, searing her chaos eye. Glad gasped and covered it. The chunk of crystal inside was raw and uncut. Part of it was clear, but the rest shaded to blue at the other end. It had haunted her dreams for so many years that she remembered every facet, every flaw, every smooth glimmer. "That's it."

"Good," said Dr. Gunther, snapping the box shut. "We will begin. Hold on, Gladiolus."


It was the sort of nightmare that Knuckles never wanted to think about again for as long as he lived.

He and Sonic went to Bygone Island via chaos control. It was completely dark by this time, the only light coming from the scattered street lamps of Pilings. Knuckles led the way toward Gladiolus's house.

"Her family hates me," he told Sonic as they followed a path through the trees. "It'd be better if you knock. You're the famous hero."

"No arguments here," Sonic said, grinning. "You hide back here and make sure nobody tranquilizes me. If they do, deck 'em."

Knuckles ducked behind a tree and watched Sonic knock at the shack's front door. The night was peaceful and still. Crickets chirped in endless chorus all around. It was hard to believe that Glad had been kidnapped or something, and that Shadow had been drugged. It left a sick feeling inside him.

You're a failure as a Guardian, a tiny voice whispered in his head. You didn't protect your love. You sent her straight to the enemy.

He ground his teeth. The idea of sweet, kind Gladiolus suffering at the hands of indifferent scientists made him want to break things and hurt people. And it was his own fault she was gone.

The shack's door opened and a thin female echidna with stringy dreadlocks peered out. "Yes?"

"Hey there, sorry to bother you," Sonic said. "Is Gladiolus here?"

"No," said the echidna, squinting at him in the porch light. "Who are you?"

"I'm Sonic the Hedgehog," Sonic replied, completely assured of his own awesome. "I heard Eggman was hanging around and I wanted to make sure she was okay."

"She's just gone to the hospital in Bygone Village," the echidna said. "A specialist is treating her chaos eye. We're going to see her first thing in the morning."

"No sign of Eggman?" Sonic asked.

"N-no," the echidna replied.

"Okay, thanks!" Sonic said. The echidna retreated back inside and locked the door.

"Hospital," Sonic said quietly, returning to Knuckles.

"At least she spoke to you," Knuckles muttered. "That was the mom, the one who said all that stuff about me."

"Everybody trusts the hedgehog," Sonic said. "And I hate to break it to you, Knux, but it's the dreads. They make you look like a scoundrel."

Knuckles took a half-hearted swing at Sonic, who dodged as a matter of course.

"Okay, Bygone Hospital," Sonic said. He pulled the green chaos emerald out of his belt pouch and gazed into it, focusing. He laid a hand on Knuckles shoulder, who waited, tense.

"Chaos control!"

They reappeared in the back parking lot of the hospital, out by a row of palm trees where nobody would notice them. Knuckles's stomach curled in a knot as they hurried toward the lobby doors. "You think they have a secret lab under this place where they experiment on people?"

"I don't know," Sonic said, his buoyant mood losing steam. "I've been here lots of times, and I always thought they were super nice."

They went inside, and the nightmare got worse.

No, Gladiolus Lark isn't in our system. No, no echidnas have been admitted in the last twenty-four hours. Was she coming here? Who's her doctor?

Sonic and Knuckles waited while the admitting clerk called various other people, trying to find Glad or Lewis Gunther.

"She's not here," Knuckles muttered.

"Secret lab," Sonic said. "They wouldn't put that in the system."

"She's not here, Sonic," Knuckles repeated. "Ten to one they took her to Eggman's."

The hedgehog nodded, thinking this over. "Yeah, now that you say it. His base has lots of room for secret labs."

Knuckles shook his head slowly. "But what if she's not there, either? What if they dragged her down into that ruined lab below Bygone?"

"They wouldn't do that, would they?" Sonic said. "I mean ... it was all ruined, right?"

"They might have been refurbishing it in secret," Knuckles said. "Gosh, Sonic, I don't even know what to do." He rested his elbows on his knees and rubbed his face. "I'm so freaking tired."

Sonic glanced at the waiting room clock. "Yeah, it's almost midnight. What time did you get up this morning?"

"Before dawn," Knuckles said, looking haggard.

"I was up at sunrise for my run." Sonic smiled, showing a little wear around the edges for the first time. "Neither of us are any good to Glad half-dead of exhaustion. Tell you what. We tackle this in the morning."

"But Glad's in trouble," Knuckles protested.

"We'll find her," Sonic said. "That guy who took her wants all of us, remember? He won't have gone far."

Knuckles gave Sonic a long look, as if he'd never seen him before. A blue hedgehog with super speed, acting the leader even now, planning, strategizing, and making sure his team got enough rest. No wonder GUN was trying to tap into the power of the Ancients. It wasn't only their chaos power that had made them great.

"All right," Knuckles said.


Gladiolus sat in a reclining chair, dressed in a hospital gown, eyes closed. Her headache was nearing its peak, and the sounds and lights around her were pure torment.

She tried to stay aware of her surroundings, opening her good eye now and then. Her chaos eye saw all kinds of crazy things right now-shapes, lines that followed the horizon, the outlines of people here and there. The chaos crystal nearby was a constant sun, burning her brain. Her eye was trying to kill her with too much vision.

Her good eye showed her only an ordinary room with a collection of strange machinery in it. Facing her chair was a thing like a giant video camera with multiple lenses like spider eyes. The crystal had been placed in a black metal sphere in the back of it, where it was being bombarded with lasers at different frequencies. Dr. Lewis Gunther worked over the machine, while his assistants, a man and a woman, watched a collection of computer screens.

The woman approached Glad. "I'm going to brace your head now, Gladiolus," she said. "We're going to shine a laser into your chaos eye, and you must not move."

"Will it hurt?" Glad asked as the technician tried straps around her forehead and chin.

The women looked at Gunther, who said, "The intent of this surgery is to stop the pain. If it hurts, tell us, because it's not supposed to."

Slightly reassured, Glad submitted to having her head strapped down and her eyelids propped open. They stuck little metal sensors all over her head and face. It felt strange, but nothing hurt worse than her head right now. They could have beaten her with a stick and it wouldn't have been as bad.

Dr. Gunther rolled the camera-machine right up to her face, until she was nose to nose with the lenses. Her blind eye couldn't see them, of course, so to her good eye, it looked a little off-kilter.

"Beginning the lowest frequency," he said.

The machine began to hum. A point of red light appeared, visible to her chaos eye. Glad gazed into it. It didn't hurt, but it didn't do anything else, either.

"Nothing," she said.

The male and female tech moved around Glad, checking instruments. "No change in the readings," the woman said.

The light changed to orange, then yellow. Glad's headache shifted and began to pound in a new rhythm.

"Activity in the theta levels," the male tech said.

"Advancing wavelength," Gunther said.

The light turned green. The Master Emerald leaped to Glad's mind, as well as Knuckles's living green glow. She relaxed a fraction, and her headache abated a tiny bit.

"Blood pressure just lowered two points," the female tech said.

"We're getting there," Dr. Gunther said. The light changed to blue-green, then blue, and finally purple.

After green, Glad began to notice the pressure of the straps around her head. They seemed to grow tighter and tighter as the light turned blue, then purple. Pain blazed through her eye and poured into her head. She made a sound that wasn't quite a scream.

"Blood pressure spike," the female tech exclaimed. "Watch her vitals!"

"New activity in the retina," the male tech exclaimed. "The infection is shrinking."

"Put it back to green!" Gladiolus begged. "Please, quick!"

The light cycled back to green. The pain dropped immediately. Glad drew a deep, shivering breath.

"I'm increasing the bombardment on this wavelength," Dr. Gunther said. "She's responding to the higher frequencies."

"Shrinkage has slowed," the male tech reported.

"Vitals returning to normal," the female said.

The laser light grew brighter and brighter until it was like staring into a green sun. Or like the light in the center of the Master Emerald. Glad struggled to gaze into it, not to let her eye roll back in her head. A new pain grew in her eye-a stabbing sensation that drew her headache into one concentrated point of agony.

Her mind swam away from the pain into a strange dream. She was leaning against the Master Emerald, looking through it at Knuckles on the other side. He was trying to reach her, but the gem's diamond-hard bulk stood between them. But it wasn't the Master Emerald-they were under water in a green sea, trying to reach each other and still too far apart.

Then she was burning, burning on a pyre of green flames. Or maybe it was only her eye that was burning, seeing smoke and ashes. Above the fire loomed the dragon head of Perfect Chaos, the fire reflecting in his watery skin like a thousand Master Emeralds.

"You cannot defeat me that way," he roared in a whisper. He fell upon her, quenching the fire, burying her in darkness.

Glad awoke in a dark room. No laser machine. No shouting doctors. She was lying on a hospital bed, and there was a thick bandage taped over her chaos eye. It saw nothing. No distant glowing people, no weird lines or spots. It was totally blind.

She sat up and looked around. There were no windows and only one door, which was locked from the outside. She could see its bar engaged in the frame.

"They don't want us escaping," said a voice nearby.

Glad turned. The only light came from a dim florescent bulb near the door. In its light, she made out a female hedgehog sitting in a neighboring bed.

"Who are you?" Glad tried to say. The words came out as a whisper. Her throat was dry and parched.

The hedgehog handed her a half-empty water bottle. "I thought you were dead when they brought you in. You've been laying there most of the night. I'm Rigel."

Glad took a drink of the water and felt like cobwebs were being washed out of her throat. Her headache was completely gone. In fact, she felt as she had the night after Metal Sonic had healed her-perfectly well.

"I'm Gladiolus Lark," she said, her voice working a little better this time. "I think ... did the surgery work?"

"What surgery?" said Rigel.

"I had chaos eye. They were trying to correct it, and I must have fainted."

The hedgehog shrugged. She was a light color-maybe yellow-and wore a hospital gown like Glad's. Her spines stuck out all over her head in a way that seemed stylish, and her upper arm was bandaged. Rings of black metal encircled her wrists, ankles, and neck.

"That's scary that you had surgery already," said the hedgehog. "All they did to me was draw blood and take quill samples. I've been here a couple of days. The food's not bad."

Glad touched the bandage over her eye. Her eye was still there-she felt it move when she looked around. But it saw nothing. Maybe the bandage itself was blinding her. Had they corrected the chaos eye? She hardly dared hope.

"If you're in here," Rigel said, "you must be one of us weird people. Are you an experiment or descended from one?"

"My father," Glad said faintly. An inkling of the danger she was in began to dawn on her.

"I'm first-generation," Rigel said, "though I don't remember much. Too young when the accident happened. I live on Serpent Isle. Where are you from?"

"Here. I mean, Bygone," Glad said.

Rigel nodded. "They think I have powers, but I swear I don't. They put these rings on me and everything. Do you have a power of some kind?"

Glad wracked her brain for a power. Her brain was tired and slow in the aftermath of headache and surgery. "Oh. My dreadlocks let me fly. Or more like I can glide."

Rigel smiled brightly. "That's really neat! I wish I could do something like that. But I can't do anything, even when I play with chaos crystal."

Glad leaned against the head of the bed, envying her fellow prisoner the freedom to handle chaos crystal without ill effect. "I just want to go home."

"Me too." Rigel pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. "It's salmon season, and they need me on the boat."

"My mom and aunt are coming to the hospital to check on me," Glad said. "They'll get me out."

Rigel groaned. "Maybe you were too sick to notice, but this isn't a hospital. This is that new wing Eggman built into his fortress last year. We're on a remote volcanic island with no way to get home."

This news crashed into Glad's psyche like a wrecking ball. Eggman's fortress! She slid down to lie on her bed, fighting tears. Only a few hours before, she had been so happy about Knuckles asking her to marry him. Now that couldn't happen, not if he didn't even know where she was. Her jacket with the headset in the pocket was nowhere in the dim room.

"Don't cry," Rigel said. She hopped off her own bed and patted Glad's shoulder like a concerned mother. "Hey, it's okay. We'll get through this. Fith is looking out for us."

The words comforted Glad a little. At least they shared deities. "I'm supposed to get married," she choked.

Rigel bowed her head a little. "Is he a good guy?"

Glad smiled, despite her tears. "The greatest."

"I knew a good guy once," Rigel said softly. "But I haven't seen him in a long time. Hopefully, your guy will come riding in on a white horse and save us. Or an attack helicopter. Do princes fly attack helicopters?"

"Better," Glad said. "He's friends with Sonic the Hedgehog."