A/N: I made references to another fandom that I enjoy in this chapter, and points to whoever can spot it.


"Cutter's out of his mind. What the hell's he thinking, lettin' that lot in here?" Danny hissed as he watched the security monitors; the screen he gazed at was showing a live feed of the medic room. Connor had been taken there to be evaluated, so had Becker to get his wound stitched up. Connor, in his odd, hypnotised state, had opened a deep laceration in the captain's side. It was a miracle that he hadn't been gutted. The other members of the Dozen were all there being looked over, though not a one of them had so much as a stubbed toe. It seemed that Cutter had been telling the truth—they really were made to be living, breathing weapons.

Stephen, however, ignored the copper's angry muttering. He was watching the footage of the fight in the central hub of the ARC, a look of concentration on his face. The professor had told them that the twelve people had not been given the moniker 'Deadly' Dozen for no reason, but he was only now really believing it. None of the Dozen looked like fighters. If he met them on the street, he would say they looked fairly unintimidating, honestly. They weren't physically intimidating—they weren't muscular or big in any shape or form. The bloke called Whiskey Two Lambda was tall, sure, so were a few others, but they were also thin as beanpoles and looked as if a strong wind might knock them down. The women, for the most part, were all small and petite, slim little things that didn't look like they could swat a fly.

Yet, as he watched the footage, he silently vowed that he would never make assumptions based on appearance ever again. These twelve people that didn't look at all intimidating were cutting down some of the most highly-trained soldiers as if they were no more than untrained kids on the street, not even breaking a sweat. The Dozen didn't seem to ever really use guns. They all had a set of pistols, yeah, but they didn't use them. They liked their knives better, it seemed. They wielded the deadly blades with a smooth, skillful precision that took years of practice to achieve. Stephen watched as they spun and whirled and slashed, moving in perfect synchronicity with each other, an almost ballet-like flow of movement. He wasn't one for poetry; he wasn't one for words at all. He didn't have an eye for scenery or whatever else people found to be beautiful. Stephen had a very different idea of what was beautiful. Women were one thing, of course. He liked their curves and hollows and all the subtle angles about them that made them so pleasant to look at and touch. That wasn't too odd, of course. But he also thought that his guns were beautiful, some of them. He liked how all their little parts fitted into each other and interacted so perfectly, graceful proportions and smooth metal. His very favourite gun, his rifle, Vera—nobody else knew that he named his guns, and he would keep it that way—was particularly beautiful, though he knew he was alone in that.

And the Deadly Dozen were unspeakably beautiful. They were practically a work of bloody art. 'Beautiful' wasn't a word he'd ever use to describe another bloke; he didn't lean that way in the least. But what he felt wasn't anything like physical attraction. The Dozen were beautiful in the way that Vera was beautiful. They were weapons, guns made up of muscle and bone instead of steel and lead, flowing through the violence of the fight the way water flowed around rocks in a stream. Stephen, looking past the fact that they were fighting ARC security, had to admire the way they all moved so perfectly together. He knew he was a good fighter—he'd won more than his fair share of fistfights and bar brawls—but the graceful force they had made him positively breathless. He wondered if perhaps they would be willing to teach him how to blur into the fight until he became the fight the way that they did.

His eyes gravitated to Connor, following the errant young student through the brawl. He had always seen Connor as a clumsy, hopeless little geek, but he would still consider the young man to be his friend, one of the few he could boast of. Just like the rest of the Dozen, Connor moved like nothing else Stephen had ever seen before, blades flashing in hand, never once missing a step or losing balance. Stephen fast-forwarded to where Connor had fought him and the rest of the team. Before his disappearance, the tracker could have easily wiped the floor with Connor, yet he fought him, Becker, Danny, and Cutter all at one time with ease. It was amazing.

"Stephen!"

The raised voice made him jump slightly in his seat, and he turned to see Jenny standing not far behind him, watching him expectantly. "What?" he asked.

"That's the fourth time I said your name," she answered with eyebrows raised, and she walked closer to the table, leaning at the waist to look at the video he'd been watching. Something in her face shifted as she took in the sight of the recording, though he couldn't quite recognise what it was. "Unbelievable," she said in a low murmur. "They're all so…young, and yet…." Her voice trailed off as she shook her head slowly.

"I know," Stephen agreed, his voice just as quiet, then turned his gaze to her. "Was there something you wanted?"

Jenny nodded and straightened up. "Yes. Lester is laying down some ground rules with the Dozen, wants the team there to hear," she answered. "C'mon."

He turned off the laptop and stood up, following her down the hall to Med. The soldiers that had all been taken out in the fight had been sent to the hospital already. Some thirty-odd men had been put out of action by the Dozen, and four had been killed. Now Becker was the only soldier in there; Connor had near about gutted the captain with his knife, and only the protective vest of Kevlar he wore had prevented the blade from going fatally deep. The other eleven members of the Dozen were sitting quite calmly and patiently—not looking at all as if they'd just taken out half of the security force of a top-secret government facility—and allowing the medics to take their vitals and prod at them curiously. Connor himself was laid up in one of the cots; Abby, somehow, had managed to manoeuver herself up onto the cot beside him. Danny lurked in the corner, his expression stormy as he eyed the Dozen warily; Sarah stood close to him, appearing just as anxious around the eleven people. Cutter leaned against the wall, his arm resting around Jenny's waist as she stood beside him. His hand was bandaged from where he had turned aside one of Connor's blades with his bare hands.

Lester stood in the midst of it all, looking cool and unmovable. "Seeing as how Mr. Temple is currently incapacitated—" His gaze flicked briefly to the prone form of the student. "—and the rest of his…" He paused, seeming to grope for the proper word to describe the Deadly Dozen. "…team refuses to leave him alone and unprotected, it would seem that you lot are now under the protection of the ARC. This means that there will have to be some new rules to be adhered to. You will relinquish all your weapons to Captain Becker and explain what they are and how they're used. You will answer all questions put to you, and you will do so truthfully. You will tell us everything you know about this Complex, the genetic experiments, and yourselves. None of you are to go anywhere in this building without supervision," he said, addressing the black-clad people; they all sat and watched him with identical, unblinking stares. Their faces were all carefully blank. If they felt any particular way about Lester's proclamation, damned if anyone else could see it on their faces. "If I even suspect that there is any foul play or intent to cause this operation or its operatives any harm, you will be incarcerated indefinitely," he said firmly. "Is that understood?"

"Understood," all eleven replied in perfect unison.

He turned to look at the team. "And you lot are to keep a fair eye upon them. The good professor has told us that Helen Cutter has a regiment of…hybrids, I do believe was the word, at her command. Is this true?"

The curly-haired woman that had helped rescue Whiskey—she had identified herself as Sierra Eighteen Zeta—nodded, making her copper-coloured ringlets bounce about her ears. "They are the hounds of hell, her dogs of war, tied up in leashes of wire and code," she murmured quietly.

"She has the canine hybrids implanted with the impulse regulator chip; they're fully under her control," Cutter translated, noticing the blank looks of confusion all around the room. A lot of what the Dozen said was confusing and convoluted, but he'd come to realise that what sounded like nonsense was actually some sort of metaphor or allusion to what they were trying to say. The dogs of war were the canine hybrids, and the leashes of wire and code were actually the impulse regulator chips that controlled the hybrids' brains. Granted, there was some of it he couldn't figure out, but most of what they said did make an odd sort of sense. Of course, that could just mean that he was certifiable as them.

"Now, Professor Cutter," said Lester.

Here it comes, he thought in silent dread, though he didn't let it show. "What?"

"I believe that there are a few other of these…hybrids within the city. Ones that are, more or less, under your command. Is that true?" asked the bureaucrat silkily.

Cutter tightened his arm around Jenny's waist, drawing her in a little closer to his side; she leant back into him almost imperceptibly, but even that was enough. "Yeah," he replied.

"If Helen does have these…dogs of war…under her control, not to mention those vapid clones of hers, then it seems to me that she has sufficient enough forces to possibly mount an attack upon the ARC," said Lester in that same damnably level tone of voice. "It would be wise, then, to bring these other hybrids in, would it not? A precautionary measure, of course, a way to perhaps defend ourselves should Helen decide to attack?"

Dread dropped into the pit of his stomach like a ten-tonne weight. Cutter dug his fingers into the soft skin at Jenny's waist almost compulsively, then loosened his grip even though her fingers didn't relax their iron-tight hold on his wrist. Had he been human, her grip would have bruised him. He forcibly swallowed past the lump of cotton in his throat. "That…would not be too wise," he answered at last, and Lester's eyebrows rose in silent query. "The other felids, they aren't like me. I managed to keep it together better than the rest, but they…they don't have quite as good a handle on their more predatory instincts. Some of them, they're more animal than man," he said softly. "Bringing them here would not be the wisest suggestion, not unless you've got somewhere separate from everything else to keep them." He knew that having the rest of the hybrids brought to the ARC would result in blood and violence—it was what they were built for, after all. Whilst he saw the logic in Lester's argument, he still knew that it wouldn't turn out quite so well. In his mind's eye, he remembered Gavin kneeling over Jenny, tearing her skirt, about to tear her apart in more ways than one. If he hadn't shown up when he had, Cutter had no doubt that Gavin would have raped her, tortured her, and killed her—though not necessarily in that order. As it was, he still felt the temptation to tear that sorry bastard apart. If they were brought to the ARC, he knew that things would get messy right quick.

"That can be arranged," Lester answered smoothly. "I want them brought in, as soon as all possible."

You have no idea what you're asking for, Cutter thought. "Alright," he said reluctantly. Jenny turned her head to look at him with anxiety in her eyes; he squeezed her hip again, this time in comfort. "I want the Dozen to come with me."

Lester froze mid-step on his way out the door, and his gaze snapped back to him. "What?" he said icily.

"Well, we are missing half of security. I told you that the hybrids will follow me, and that's still true, but they also spent a year or more in the Complex, a place not too different from the ARC. If they freak out about coming here, it'll be hell trying to keep them in line. You've seen how we fight," he said. Before the suited man could say anything, he turned to look at the eleven black-clad people. A part of him was still struck by how young they looked. Some of them hardly looked of age to be in college. He looked at Quebec Sixteen Rho, the small, petite little thing that looked so alike Connor. "You called him Echo," he said, gesturing to the still form of Connor himself, and she nodded. "I know him as Connor. Before the Complex, before I was a hybrid and before he was what he is now, he and I worked together. I was his teacher, and he was my student. I trust him with my life. Can I trust you?"

She stood up; she was so short that the top of her head barely cleared his chin. "Echo is my brother. We are bound in blood as well as silver cord. Without him, the puppets would still dance upon strings of spidersilk, darkness swallowing up their conscious." Her dark eyes moved up to his face. "Should the animals in human skin slip their lead, the serpent will be there."

"Thank you." Glancing up at the others, Cutter sighed. "Well...no time like the present. Let's get this over with."


Echo Thirteen Omega...or was he Connor Temple?...had lost his mind. Some little part of him was very vaguely aware that he had gone crazy. His sanity, a fragile cloth that had taken months to weave, had come unravelled, all his threads getting tangled up in spiderweb and wires. All the connections he spent so much time building had all collapsed, severing ties and blurring distinctions between thought and reality, between word and memory.

He had been unmade.

The endless screams of the silent dead and vile howling tore at his insides, carving him all up into ribbons. All his pieces had been thrown about and scattered, thrown into the dirt, swallowed up by the sticky darkness. There were so many pieces that weren't his own, ones that did not belong and had been shoved in regardless. He could not feel the others; the silver cord, whilst not severed, had been thinned away to only the finest cobwebby filament. He was alone.

He knew that he had to rebuild, to somehow put all the pieces back together, his or not, if he ever wanted to survive...but how? There was all so much of it, and everything was in tangles. The silent screaming never stopped, and he kept tasting the blood in his mouth. So much blood. Those people, the ones full of the sticky, oily darkness, they were swimming in blood, drowning in it, yet it never touched them, never stained. He was broken. Sad, pathetic, broken little toy, cast aside.

Connor...

He was not Connor. He was Echo Thirteen...wasn't he? He didn't know anymore. But he could still hear that voice, like the softest brush of velvet against his bare skin, like the scent of lilac and the colour of sunlight and moonstone. It was barely audible above the mournful wail of the silent dead, the snarling roar of animals in human skin that clawed at their restraints, yet he could still hear it. Vaguely, he was aware of a weight resting upon his shoulder, though the sensation was muffled, as if he felt it through many layers of thick blankets or his entire body was quite thoroughly numb. He felt detached, and all he could feel was a ghost-echo of sensation. He would not be able to reattach unless he put all his pieces back together.

You have to come back to us. To me.

The words shimmered across the oily darkness, untouched by the filth, and he could taste the indigo flavour of them on his tongue. Strange. He wondered how they managed to remain whole and didn't become all fractured and disjointed as everything else did within this madhouse that he called his own mind. The words bid him to return...but how? He didn't know how to put himself back together. Everything was broken.

I know you can hear me, damn it. You have to come back.

He felt his own thoughts turn yellow and scaly in frustration as well as desperation. Did the voice not understand that he could not return? He was broken, shattered. Blood didn't come out of silk, shattered glass could not be made whole. Theoretically speaking, he knew how to rebuild many things; the key was to start from the core piece and build outward from it...except that he had no core piece. The spider of doors had ripped him apart and put him back together so many times that he no longer knew what was his and what was not, and he could not recognise half of his own pieces, they had been mangled and twisted about so. It was maddening. And he was already quite mad anyways, so...

Again, the faintest ghostly pressure upon his chest this time, just above his heart, and Connor...Echo?...felt the faintest stirrings of something. There was something new. A piece that had not been there before. A thing-that-was-more-than-a-thing. It was a thread. Not a sticky, ensnaring bit of spidersilk or the gleaming filament of silver that bound him to the Manticore, but something else. It was delicate and thin, slender as a hair. It was knotted somewhere beneath his left ribs, and though he could not feel where it ended, he believed that the opposite end was knotted within the corresponding quadrant of another's frame. Another with the eyes that looked like new cornflowers or lapis lazuli held up to sunshine and the short white-blond hair that had no sense of boundary and oft went wherever it so wished. Abby. Her name is Abby... This new thread was strong. Delicate, yes, but strong. And if it were to be snapped, he had this rather disturbing notion that he would then begin to bleed internally.

Because I love her. The thought came from nowhere, yet it burst with fractures of light in gorgeous catherine-wheels of sparks and colour. Abby...yes, he loved her. The lizard-girl that he knew to be sweet beneath the bones, a brilliant flare of colour in a dull world. She was delicate as spun glass even though she was crafted of steel, sharp and distant and soft and caring. He wasn't sure why he loved her. There was no way to quantify the emotion, no way to define it or describe it. But it was his own. It was a piece that was all his own, untouched and undespoiled by the spider, not marked by the fire-agony inflicted upon him by the puppets with cold hands. It didn't belong to the Complex. It didn't belong to the Manticore. It didn't belong to the spider of doors. It was his own. He didn't know if he was Echo or Connor or neither, but he knew that his love for Abby was all his own. It was unique. Nobody in all the world had ever loved her precisely the way that he did, didn't feel exactly the way he did about her.

Start with the core piece. Build outward from it.

He had fractured because he had tried to rebuild himself without a proper core. That wouldn't work. All the pieces shoved together helter-skelter would do nothing but rupture, which they had. So, ravaged by the howls of the silent dead, tasting the blood he spilt within his mouth, feeling his own insanity clawing at him, he began to reassemble himself. No spider of doors would do it this time. He would do it himself. This time, he used that treasured little piece, his own unique love for Abby, the little bird, the girl who kidnapped helpless dinosaurs and smuggled them to her flat, the warrior woman that once stood face-to-face with a great feline with knives for teeth, and he used that for his core. It didn't matter if she didn't love him back, as he knew she didn't. It didn't matter if she never loved him. That pain would be lost within the thousands of other agonies that already plagued his shattered, broken mind. What was important now was that he rebuilt himself, and that he built upon a core piece that he knew without doubt belonged to him and him alone, even if he wasn't sure who he was.

There were so many other pieces that didn't belong to him at all.


Abby stayed with her head on Connor's shoulder, after the others had left, for she didn't know how long. She had her eyes closed, snuggled down close beside him, feeling the coolness of his skin against hers, inhaling the familiar scent of him; unconsciously, she began breathing in time with him, matching him inhale for exhale. From the way that the other medics in the room moved and spoke softly, she knew they thought she was asleep. She didn't bother to let them know otherwise. If they thought she was asleep then she would be undisturbed.

Connor, she thought to herself. You have to come back to us. To me. She wasn't sure that she could live without him, not after this. To have her hopes built up only to have the rug yanked from under her feet might drive her bloody crackers. I know you can hear me, damn it. You have to come back.

Maybe she really was going insane. A smile pulled at her lips. Well, if she was, then chances were that she and the Dozen would get on like a house on fire then. They were all certifiable. If she was crazy, maybe she would be able to understand them better. Swallowing hard past the lump of cotton in her throat, she shifted slightly and instead laid her head on Connor's chest, listening to the sound of his heartbeat. And she felt something hard beneath the black shirt he wore. Curious, she slipped her fingers into the collar of his shirt, felt a slim metal chain with her fingertips, and pulled it free. She couldn't believe it.

Her ring—Connor's ring—dangled from the chain, the very same chain that she had lost only two days before. He must've somehow found it after she lost it in the warehouse. Abby laid her head back on his chest, idly playing with the familiar ring, rolling it between her fingers. He never ceased to amaze her. Now she just wished he would wake up and perhaps be himself again.