"I told her she was bad luck...not her fault I guess," Soldier muttered as he plodded along behind Sniper, the setting sun at their backs as they rushed out of the tunnel and found themselves out in the middle of the desert. "She did bring a hell of a fight with her, I like her for that."

The tunnel the robots had burned and chiseled through the rock had spat them out a quarter of a mile away from the facility, behind a rock formation that sloped sharply down into a ravine - the perfect cover both in terms of vision and sound, as the solid rock distorted the echoes of their boots and the clatter of dislodged stone. There were heavy tread tracks in the now-dried dirt; the robots must have brought some sort of machinery, or transportation, to this spot, driving it straight up the side of the ravine - the tread marks cut a ridiculously clear path down to the ravine's bottom, then turned to follow it south.

"Come on, and watch your feet," Sniper grunted, crouching and beginning to partly slide, partly walk down the steep and rocky incline.

"How far you think they got?" Scout asked, his bat dragging along with clinks and clunks as he skated unsteadily down, off to Sniper's left. "I mean, we found the tunnel pretty quick and whatnot, and we ain't found her dead yet and Spy's with her..." He trailed off and instead focused on not slipping and tumbling down the ravine, the three males finally stepping down onto the bottom of the ravine and almost sinking into the soft sand. "All right, so, they went that way. What's the plan?"

"We follow the tracks and find our woman and blow up some robots," Soldier replied, grinning. "In that order."

Sniper was already moving, boots scuffing through the sand; this ravine was three miles long and led up to a bluff that in turn led up into a forest, the starting base of the mountainous terrain that ringed this area on three sides. Unless the tracks suddenly veered back up the ravine there was nowhere else for the robots to go but forward, though the ravine veered to the right somewhere up ahead. "Scout, get up ahead of us and see if you spot them. There's a blindspot ahead and I don't want us gunned down when we get there."

"Yeah yeah, I got this. Gonna have sand everywhere when this is done..."

The smaller male sprinted off in a spray of grit, leaving Soldier and Sniper to hurry along in his wake. The rest of the team was loading up, resupplying, and would be following along in a truck, but until they caught it up was down to them...just the three of them and Spy, wherever the male had gotten to. He hadn't seen any sign of the man but then that was sort of Spy's job, getting into and out of places without being seen and leaving no trace of his presence. For the briefest of moments Sniper had the wild daydream of Scout coming back with Spy and Shiloh in tow, the spook having already retrieved her and dispatched the robots that had taken her in the first place.

It wasn't until he heard the quiet sounds of Soldier huffing and puffing just behind him that Sniper realized he had moved into a jog while having his little daydream; he started to slow down but then the sound of gunshots up ahead came bouncing back to them.

"He found them, come on!"


A great deal of pain woke Shiloh - a throbbing pain around her collarbone, a bruised neck, both knees burning in agony, her stabbed hand aching and feeling as though it was five times the size it should have been. Consciousness was difficult to get a grasp on at first as on top of the pain she was also dizzy and felt faintly nauseous so it took a moment for her to realize her head was wedged into a corner and she was actually standing upright, but...propped up, somehow. She wiggled and found her weight was resting against her knees, and then to her horror it occurred to her that wherever she was she barely had room to breathe; she was upright only because the space she was in was tight enough that her bent legs were braced against the surface in front of her, and with her head and shoulders in the front right corner of this tiny enclosure she'd remained upright.

She jerked at that thought and banged her against the wall behind her; there was a hollow clang - she was inside a metal...something, a very narrow metal something, barely two feet side and a foot deep, and its height she could only guess at, only knowing that as she painfully stood up - her feet had gone numb and now they had that pins-and-needles feeling - her head did not reach the top of the enclosure. It was pitch black in here and wherever she was it was silent outside of her little prison; all she could hear was her own breathing and her heart pounding in her ears.

She tried to clear her head and think, tried to organize her thoughts before the haze wore off and panic set in. 'All right...you're alive. This is good...this is better than expected. Step one - don't die, huge success. All right, all right...calm, breathe...assess. Where are we? We are in a box, a metal box. Does it have a door? Of course it has a door, how else did I get in here... I don't see cracks around a door - I don't see anything at all, too dark, but I don't see light so maybe the room I'm in doesn't have a light on, or maybe I'm not facing the door.'

There really wasn't any room to move more than an inch or two in any direction; as she wiggled she found her holster had been removed - she'd dropped the revolver anyway - and her hands were bound at the wrists and her arms bent at the elbows, trapping her hands up against her chest. There was definitely not enough room to lower her hands but she tried anyway, banging against the metal walls of her prison enough to realize the Spybot's knife was still in her pants pocket...she had a weapon, just no way to reach it.

'Ok, all right...we've got a weapon, just can't get to it. What am I in?' She began to run fingers against the wall in front of her, feeling ridges in the cool metal but not feeling any door mechanisms or latches she could fiddle with, nor did she feel anything that confirmed she was facing a door at all. There were no other raised spots, but by banging the toes and heels of her boots against the four walls she could tell that the one directly in front of her face was hollow, so this HAD to be the door there was just...no way for her to interact with it.

She jumped when there was a noise above her, then a breeze began ruffling the hair on top of her head; a fan somewhere above her had kicked on, at least solving the mystery of how she hadn't suffocated in this tiny space yet.

But that also meant this space had been prepared specifically for her, didn't it? When was that door going to open and spill her out into the waiting company of the man who wanted her dead?

Closing her eyes she tilted her head back as far as she could manage, letting the metallic-tasting air blow across her face. Calm, she needed calm, she needed calm to think and to plan.

'My arms are stuck up against my chest - I'm stuck in a position where I'm already shielding my heart and lungs, I guess? And I can duck to shield my head if that door opens, maybe, if I move fast enough, but maybe I can move fast enough to knock the guy over? Lunge off the back wall and just clobber the shit out of him, my hands are together and I've got leverage...'

She curled and uncurled her toes, wincing as she worked the tingly feeling out; when that door opened she needed to move quick if she was going to have any chance at survival - she had the fleeting thought of being left to rot in this tiny metal coffin but just as quickly forced it from her mind...and besides, if the plan was for her to die inside here then there'd be no reason for there to be a fan to blow in fresh air.

For now she needed to remain calm, not panic, focus on that door, and be ready to move the moment it opened. She was not going down without a fight.


In the ravine, a quarter of a mile up from where it had turned to the right, Scout was engaged with a handful of robots.

There were only four of them but one of them was a Heavybot and currently had Scout dancing around in circles to avoid the stream of bullets flying in his direction; the other three robots were Scoutbots which provided their own bit of difficulty as they just added more bullets to avoid while managing to avoid any return fire Scout sent their way.

There wasn't any sign of Shiloh or Spy here, just these four robots and what looked like a sort of miniature tank with some weird-looking excavation attachment on its front. It wasn't even that big - maybe the size of Sniper's camper van, if that - and near as Scout could tell the thing was completely turned off and parked there in the middle of the ravine. He also noticed that the robots weren't shy about shooting in the tank's direction as his first thought had been to dart over toward it to discourage their fire and quickly learned they didn't give a damn about putting holes in their own vehicle.

This left him ducking, dodging, and sprinting in circles to try and get them to shoot at one another in attempts to hit him - this was moderately successful in at least getting them to stop firing, they were at least smart enough to not put holes in one another.

The fact that there wasn't any sign of Spy or Shiloh kept him from just blasting the robots outright - there was actually a part of his brain pointing out that it was kind of important to find clues to the whereabouts of his missing teammate and their missing guest and blasting the robots that took them when the missing persons were not actually here...probably not the smartest thing to do. Granted, it also wasn't smart to let them shoot him to pieces, something was going to need to give here and very quickly.

The "give" as it were was actually the arrival of Soldier and Sniper, both of which made quick work of the robots before Scout could shout them down.

"Aw damn it, why'd you go and do that? I totally had that and now we don't-"

"-are they here?" Sniper interrupted.

"Nope, just these things and that thing," Scout used the end of his bat to gesture at the tank, still sitting immobile and powered down. "You two chucklenuts just blasted what probably took 'em though."

Soldier swung his launcher out of his hands and onto his back, switching to his shotgun, then stomped passed Sniper and toward the tank. "Did you even look inside?"

"No."

"Stand back, men." Soldier moved to the tank, circled it a few times, then moved to the single hatch door on the tank's rear; with Sniper and Scout standing nearby Soldier ripped the door open and jumped inside with an incoherent battlecry followed by a thud, a sound of multiple metal things striking metal, and then a single shot from the shotgun.

"What the hell just happened?" Scout moved up to the hatch to peer inside.

Soldier reached out plant a hand on Scout's face and shove the smaller man away before coming out with his shotgun in one hand and a smoking, broken, and useless stand of what had once been a teleporter in the other.

"Engineerbot. He broke his toy and pulled a gun, I shot him in the head but we are out a teleporter."

Sniper swore loudly. "They got away by teleporter..."

"Teleporters got a range to them though, right? They can't have just gone anywhere they wanted to, they have to be somewhere nearby." Scout bent over, hands on his knees, to stare at the broken machinery. "Guess that explains why this thing was just sitting here, can't take a tank through a teleporter - hey, how'd this tank get down here anyway? The tracks just freaking stop."

Sniper lifted his hat to run a hand through his hair, gritting his teeth in frustration. He walked around the tank a few times; Scout was right that the tracks stopped where the tank sat...that didn't make sense though because this thing couldn't have traveled in only one direction, especially not if the trail started from their facility - the tank had to have come from somewhere. The ravine walls rose on either side of them, steep and devoid of any sign of tank treads...so it hadn't come down the walls. Where did this gorge end?

He stared up the ravine, thinking - it pretty much dead ended where the mountainous area started (in fact, this area might have been a river at one point). Sniper had no idea how one could obscure or disguise tread marks but the only other possible place of origin for this tank was from that direction. If they knew the range on the teleporters, maybe...

"You two get up to the trees," he finally said, spinning on a heel and heading back the way they'd come, looking for a less steep place. "I'm going to get up there and have a look from above, flag the others down. Teleporters don't have an infinite range, maybe Engineer can give us an idea-"

"-you think we'll find them?"

Sniper began scaling up the rocks. "Spy has to still be following them or else we would have found him by now, Shiloh can't be dead yet. Might be we meet them coming, but we won't be helping anyone by standing around and staring at a dead end. Only place around here they can hide in is that forest up ahead of us."


She waited so long for that door to open that her feet were beginning to go numb again, but the sudden explosion of light into her dark prison spurred her forward; she sprang out of that metal box with her fists in front of her, swinging down to solidly connect with whatever it was directly in front of the door. She heard a grunt of surprise as she and her target hit the floor in a tangle where she was immediately placed at a disadvantage - her hands were tied, her target's hands were not.

Kicking and struggling to keep her arms away from grasping hands, Shiloh rolled off to the side and to her knees but was immediately tackled by the person she had just slapped, sending them both to the floor but with Shiloh pinned under someone much heavier than her.

There was a robot on top of her, fighting to try and grab her struggling form. Finally it managed to clamp a hand over her mouth and Shiloh thrashed until the hand slipped between her lips; out of instinct she bit down and felt her teeth sink into something fleshy, felt the tang of blood spurt up around a canine tooth that had broken skin. Skin, blood...?

There was an exclamation of pain and then a hissed "stop it, stop it and be still, you idiot," from the "robot" on top of her. It spoke with a human voice and continued to hold its hand over her mouth and wrestle to stay on top of her. "Would you stop it before you get us both killed?!" The thing thrust her tied hands under one of its knees and put all of its weight there, then grabbed a handful of the hair on top of her head and tugged until she stopped biting down and simply held its hand between her teeth in a stalemate.

Huffing around the hand in her mouth, Shiloh glared up at this flesh-but-robotic thing. Very slowly, from the top of its head and working its way down, the robotic visage gave way as a maskless man de-cloaked in front of her eyes; he had a darker skin tone, black hair shot through with silver and dishelved, a squared jaw with a jagged scar from the corner of his mouth back toward his ear, with his cheeks covered in easily a week's worth of stubble, and gray eyes that were glaring at her.

"I am going to remove my hand from your mouth," he hissed at her, bending low to push his face near hers. "You are going to be still or we are both dead, do you understand?"

Biting him as she was and with his hand over her mouth she wasn't exactly in a position to verbally respond, but she did open her mouth to let his hand loose; he slowly leveraged himself off her, kneeling at her side. He had on a rumpled suit of blue with rips and tears in the fabric, and down one whole side of it was one large brown blood stain.

"Stay there and do not move," he ordered, standing and stepping back a few paces.

Shiloh looked around and blanched when she saw what she'd just leapt out of - it was a locker, an honest-to-god, store-crap-in-this locker. Hers was one locker in a line of lockers along the wall behind her; there were twenty total inside this small room, the walls and ceiling made of metal with two light panels in the ceiling giving off a harsh white light, and with a key pad glowing brightly beside the single door across the room from her.

The room was incredibly bare otherwise - no furniture, nothing on the walls, just the lockers and a small briefcase sitting beside the door. Whoever the man was - and he was not the man Shiloh had encountered in Sandville - he moved slowly toward the door, pressing an ear and his hands to it, silent and listening. He stayed there for several breaths, then bent to pick up the briefcase and move toward her again; she tensed as he knelt beside her, popping the clasps on the briefcase and opening it.

"Your hands," he said quietly, holding out one of his own with the other hidden behind the lid of the briefcase.

When she hesitated he irritably snapped his fingers at her, his other coming back into view with a pair of surgical scissors in hand. Slowly Shiloh extended her hands to him and watched as he used the scissors to snip away the thin cording that tied her hands together; she rubbed her wrists when they were freed, her hands suddenly feeling hot as unimpeded circulation returned and the gash in her left palm beginning to bleed again.

"Are you nauseous?"

"Not anymore..." she replied cautiously, scooting from him a bit. "What the hell is going on? Who are you?"

"I will explain but only once," he replied, voice soft as his attention turned to the briefcase again. "All you need know is I am not here to hurt you and if you trust me you may make it out of here alive, both of you."

"...both of us? As in, someone besides me and you?"

From the briefcase he lifted a little glass vial, dark orange in color with a silver-and-rubber top, and a syringe; Shiloh slid back from him as he inserted the needle and drew out a measured amount of whatever was in the vial. His eyes flicked to her briefly then back to the syringe, flicking it to dislodge air bubbles.

"This is not for you, not now at any rate. Had you felt nauseous then you would be getting a dosage, but..." He stood and moved back to the wall of lockers, pulling a small key from his pocket and opening a locker three down from the one Shiloh had been in; he let the key drop to the floor afterward, Shiloh watching as he caught the limp form of Spy as the man tipped forward out of the locker toward him.

The blood-stained man stuck the barrel of the syringe into his own mouth to free his hands, then dragged Spy over to where Shiloh still sat in the floor and laid him out beside her; Spy's face was pale and he was most definitely unconscious, and he'd also been stripped of his jacket, mask, and gloves - there were four little spots of blood on the front of his white shirt and a cut across his face that seemed to have a sliver of glass still stuck in it. As Shiloh watched, wide-eyed and silent, the man rolled up one of Spy's sleeves and jabbed the needle into the vein, injecting him with whatever was in it and then carelessly tossing the emptied syringe aside.

"With luck he will awaken before we are found. He should consider himself fortunate the sedative he was shot with was not a fatal dosage."

Shiloh gently touched a hand to the sore spot near her collar bone - sedative...that made sense, she supposed. "Who are you?"

"What do you know of our conflict?"

"I know there's a man who wants me dead, and there's killer robots everywhere. Beyond that-"

He cut his hand through the air in a sharp gesture, silencing her. "No, no no, not of that, not of this - the conflict that came before this."

"Uh..."

His lips twisted into a smirk. "Clueless..." He plucked at his rumpled suit. "Do you see my suit? Do you note its color?" She nodded silently. "And what color do the mercenaries you have seen wear?"

"...r-red?"

He nodded, brushing a hand down his lapels. "There was a singular conflict long ago that prompted the hiring of mercenary teams to steal land from wealthy but warring brothers... That conflict has long since turned into something other than a familial scuffle, but a most general explanation is there are more than the mercenaries you are familiar with - I am a member of one such team."

"Why are you here then?"

He held up a single finger and she jerked her head back to prevent him from placing it on her lips. "Silence. Stay here, watch over him, I will return shortly. Preparations must be made...the moment your Spy awakens, we will need to move quickly."

The briefcase clicked loudly in the silence as he closed the clasps and stood, his robotic disguise falling back around him, again from the head down; Shiloh shivered a bit as she stared up at the face of the 'robot' in the few moments before he turned, punched in a code to unlock the door, then left - she heard the door lock behind him, then she was alone with Spy.


Consciousness came back slowly, punctuated by the stinging of the syringe holes in his chest. Spy opened his eyes and blinked until he could tell clearly that he was staring at a wall; he felt woozy, almost hung over, like his head was packed with cotton. He had been drugged - with what he didn't know - and he closed his eyes and began to focus inward, going through a few mental and breathing exercises he'd devised to help find clarity after being drugged.

"Spy?"

His eyes flew open and he turned his head to look beside him; Shiloh was sitting not six inches from him, her knees pulled to her chest and her arms around them.

"Miss MacKenna..." He raised a hand and pressed it to his forehead, then frowned when he realized both his mask and gloves were missing and one of his sleeves was rolled up. His head swam as he made an attempt to sit up; Spy instead rolled to his side and pushed himself upright that way, inhaling deeply through his nose and exhaling slowly. "What do you know?"

"I have no idea where we are but we were stuffed into lockers and we both got drugged. There's also a uh...a man in a blue suit, human, said if we listen to him he'll get us out of here alive."

Spy stiffened. "A man in a blue suit, you say?" She nodded and he grimaced. "Lovely...exactly what is he wanting?"

"He said something about explaining things to us, but beyond that..." Shiloh eyed him, gaze moving from the cut on his face down to the bloodspots on his front. "Are you feeling all right?"

"Do not be concerned for me," he said, rolling his sleeve up to match the other. "What of you?"

She held up her stabbed hand and looked at it, then winced as she tried to flex her fingers. "I'm breathing, that's enough."

Much as she had done to him he took a moment to look her over; aside from the injured hand and bruising around her neck she seemed relatively unharmed, and despite her mentioning they both had been drugged she seemed far more alert and focused than he felt at the moment.

"What do we have?"

Shiloh shifted and stuck her good hand across her body into her left pocket, then pulled out the knife he had folded up and given to her, offering it to him; he took it and flicked it open experimentally. It was not his knife but it would suffice and he had nothing else on him at the moment anyway - it would seem the robots had thoroughly checked him, but not Shiloh.

"I am surprised they missed this blade."

Shiloh frowned. "Yeah, I thought that too...if I weren't so busy contemplating my near-demise I'd be a bit more pissed that not only did they turn me into a damsel in distress, they also didn't think I'm threatening enough to check my pockets."

He smiled faintly and closed the knife. "Cherish being underestimated, it may save your life one day."

They both looked up sharply at the sound of the door unlocking.