Disclaimer: I only own Cadge and the story, nothing else.

Chapter 10: Betrayed

Sarah was embarrassed beyond words when Cadge had revealed how small FLAG was, but Spencer took it all in stride and after a little joking complimented that it was a good thing; the fewer the people in a secret operation, the less secrets could be hid. Spencer also turned out to be a good host, complete with low-alcohol wine so no one thought he was deliberately trying to get them drunk, small snacks of their choosing from his fridge, and not nudging into their personal business to much. Mostly, he just talked about what he called the "Three King Sports": Hockey, soccer, and football. Michael talked easily with Spencer while Zoe and Sarah conversed with Ms. Wild and Billy made himself comfortable with Kitt and Cadge. Cadge was playing a steady mix of soft rock and nice oldies. Everyone was comfortable as the night grew deeper around them, the bugs chirped else where, and everyone felt at ease. Until Sarah brought up Cadge.

"Ms. Wild," Sarah said. "I'm sure that you are aware that Cadge ran away, right?"

" 'Aware'? I let him!" Wild snorted. "Honestly, the things Masquerade Inc. were doing to poor Cadge were inhumane. It wouldn't have been so bad if he weren't a sentient being, but he is, and what they were doing was torture for any sentient being."

"Well, Ms. Wild, I'm afraid that it's time to consider taking Cadge back."

Cadge's music cut off and the silence drew attention to Sarah.

"Huh? Take him back?" Ms. Wild asked. "What do you mean?"

"Ms. Wild," Sarah went on. "Cadge is official property of Masquerade Inc., and he still has some minor glitches in his system that need to be smoothed out before they grow into bigger problems."

"Huh? Glitches?" Cadge asked. "What sort of glitches do I have that are serious enough to go back to Masquerade to fix them?"

"Your fear," Kitt spoke up. "Every time you become overly excited or scared, you become hostile and wild. You almost killed people on more than one occasion because of this and broke over twenty-two traffic laws coming here when you relapsed into the feral mode when you found out that Ms. Wild was here. These glitches are small now, but as you learn and experience more, these glitches may become more and more dangerous until there is no other alternative other than to stop you on a permanent basis."

"Permanent--?" Cadge exclaimed. "Hey! Just where do you get this kind of conclusions anyway??"

"Karr," Sarah said quietly with a small shiver. "We get it from Karr."

"Car?" Spencer asked. "What kind of car?"

"Karr, spelled K-A-R-R," Billy explained to Spencer. "Karr was the sentient car before Kitt, a long time before FLAG. He worked with Michael way back when, too. But then he kind of went hay wire and killed a bunch of people before he got put down. Michael was injected with stuff to forget the whole thing, but then he was brought back to partner up with Kitt. When the creator of Kitt and Karr, Sarah's father, Dr. Graiman, died, one of the guys called Alex torres in Knight Industries—what FLAG was back in the day—stole Kitt's programming and reapplied it to a secretly reconstructed Karr, hoping that Kitt's programming could fix his own glitches. It didn't. Karr went hay wire again and Kitt and Michael managed to defeat him."

"So you think that if Cadge's weird go-wild-when-scared thing is going to make him like a second Karr?" Spencer clarified.

"There is an 86.4 % that that will be the case," Kitt agreed.

"But-But-But I don't want to go back!" Cadge whimpered, backing up towards the exit as his side mirrors and the corners of his front bumper drooped. "They'll hurt me with their electric-shocks and their wires and cables…" He shivered and repeated quietly. "And their cables…"

"Cadge, I know it'll be scary," Sarah cooed, approaching the Porsche. "But it'll help you. You won't have to live with the threat of loosing control hanging over your head."

"I wasn't living with a threat of loosing control hanging over my head in the first place!" Cadge snapped, his engine gunning in anger as his side mirrors folded against him and his head lights narrowed. "You're just jealous because Masquerade made a smarter car than Kitt!"

"What?" everyone asked.

"Excuse me?" Kitt asked as his red light stopped pulsating for a second.

"Y-Yeah, that's right, you hear me! Face it, Kitt, you're not sentient; you're just a machine that can think for itself, but you have no emotions!" Cadge went on. "Hence, that's not true sentience! Sentience is the ability to feel both good and bad emotions; to feel anger, to feel sadness, to feel loneliness..."

He inched towards the gate.

"To feel fear…"

"Cadge, please, we're trying to help you—" Sarah tried saying.

"Cadge, you are over reacting," Kitt informed. "Please calm down so that we may call Masquerade Incorporated and--"

"KITT!" Cadge yelled. Unable to express his shock, he turned his sensors back to Sarah. "What if I come out worse than before, Sarah? What if I don't come out at all? I'm not going back!!"

With that, Cadge suddenly sped backwards out of the fence and took off through the mansion's park, heading for the road.

"Cadge!" Michael yelled, running forward a few steps.

"Let him go, Mike," Sarah said sadly, hanging her head. "It's my fault he's so upset. Let's just give him some room to cool off for a while."

"Way to go, Sarah," Zoe said. "You went and got poor Cadge upset!"

"I just didn't want him to be like Karr!" Sarah snapped.

"But Sarah," Billy said. "If Cadge was going to be like Karr… don't you think he would have started acting like it by now?"

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Cadge, mean while, was speeding down the back country roads at a dangerously fast pace, ignorant of all that went on around him. His window cleaner fluid was leaking out and he had to frequently wipe his windshield off. His Porsche underside, not built for gravel and dirt, was taking a beating beneath him, making his under side ache from the stones bouncing on him, but he ignored it.

How could he? How could he? How could Kitt conspire with Sarah to make him go back? Sarah, or any of the humans, he could understand; they were just human. He would have been hurt, but he would have understood. But Kitt--! Kitt was a fellow machine! How could he agree to harm another fellow machine? And Cadge had trusted him too, looked up to him, like a big brother! Oh, Kitt, why oh why oh why did you have to be so treacherous?

Cadge was driving with the forest on his left and a hill dropping down into open farm fields on his right. The moon hung high over head, ignorant and above the mortal world below. So upset and with in his own thoughts was he that Cadge failed to hear the roar of a Mustang engine that slammed at him along the side, tackling them both off the road.