Mason had laid himself down on the scruffy, soft, unmade cot that took up one corner of his tree house. The candlelight from the outside lanterns was flickering and fading, but he didn't want to put the electric lamp on. He liked the soft amber flames, and he liked watching them dance as he drifted off to sleep.

On the walls above him were drawings he had done, right onto the wood of the wall, with a permanent marker. They were neatly organized into rows, and had the simplicity and narrative of ancient cave art. Most of them featured a little boy, and a fairy nearby him. Mason had never told anyone - it seemed very girlie and a little babyish - but he loved fairies.

He tossed and turned more than usual, even though he had to get up for school in the morning. And he knew he'd need to take a shower, since it was getting too cold too keep sleeping outside. If he took a hot shower, it would warm him up in the mornings before anyone could notice how chilled his skin was. He might get a couple more weeks before people started making him sleep in his bedroom.

It wasn't the cold that bothered him, though.

It was an idea.

Henry Mills had gone into that mine for something. Mason had heard from one of the other children that Henry had been making a spectacle of himself the day before; during his mother's speech, he begged her not to pave over the big hole in the ground. He kept saying that there was something down there.

Mason wanted to know what it was.

After a few more tosses and turns, he sat up and kicked all of his blankets off. The desire to have the mystery solved would not leave him alone. Normally, he would have gone to ask Ada for advice, but this didn't seem like the kind of problem she was good at. It called for a more practical mind.

He went out to the balcony and blew out all the lanterns except one, which was in a small glass jar with a honeycomb pattern on it. He put down the ladder, held the candle in one hand, and made his way down to the ground.

The grass was cold and hard. Not yet crunching with frost, but it would be soon.

"I should have brought my sneakers." The boy said to nobody at all, and looked around the deep shadows of the forest to get his bearings. The particular tree he wanted could be tricky to find, especially in the dark, when he couldn't use the glass house to orient him.

He wove between the tree trunks, walking in total silence, the little lantern casting strange shadows like a kaleidoscope, until he found what he was looking for. A giant white pine, with an enormous trunk and thick wide limbs, its needles soft as velvet and so dense that the stars above couldn't be seen between them.

Mason peered at the lower branches, but they all seemed to be empty. Maybe it really was getting too cold.

Just as he was turning to leave, a powerful arm reached down and grabbed the back of his T-shirt. With a slight tug against his neck, he was suddenly up off the ground, then on a sturdy limb looking into the strange pale eyes of Govinda Jadhav.

"You're supposed to be asleep." Govinda said. He was sat as casually as you like, with one leg dangling off the branch and the other curled beneath him.

Mason was not the only person on their street who spent his summer sleeping in trees. It had never been discussed openly, though Govinda was positive that everyone knew and nobody was talking about it out of politeness. And the only person who had ever come across him at night was the boy - probably because everyone else was sleeping in their houses. Like sane people.

"I have a problem, and I wanted to ask you about it."

This caused Govinda to raise an eyebrow, which managed to look very intimidating thanks to the flickering candlelight.

"I think that there's something in the mine," Mason explained, "Something important, that would help us do what we're supposed to do."

"Do what we're supposed to do?"

"Yeah. Don't you ever get the feeling that we're all… on a mission? But it's like we forgot it? I've been feeling that way a lot lately, and I think that part of what we're supposed to do is buried in the mine."

Govinda looked at him for a long while.

He had indeed felt as though he was part of a forgotten mission, ever since the strange morning where he had woken up with the sudden urge to assassinate Regina Mills. He had since dismissed it as the usual small town malaise. Everyone wanted to kill their mayor sometimes. It was normal. But now that Mason was talking about it, so plainly, it seemed correct.

And it was odd that it seemed correct.

"What is it?" He asked.

"What is what?" Mason wrinkled his face up in puzzlement.

"What is the thing buried in the mine?"

"I don't know. That's what's driving me nuts. I bet if I had it to look at, everything would be really clear."

"You can't go, it's too dangerous," Govinda said, looking off into the night, "And they're going to start paving it over tomorrow. Go home and sleep. I'll figure something out."

Mason looked at him skeptically.

"You promise you're going to actually do something?"

"I promise."

Govinda helped Mason back down the tree, and watched the lantern bobbing in the distant direction of the tree house. When he was confident that the boy had gone completely, he walked out of the forest and into his own backyard. For a moment he paused, organizing the order in which things would be done.

Then, he began to put that order in motion.

Across town, on the road that led to Boston if you stayed on it long enough, parked next to the city limit sign, was Whitaker Lapin in his courier van. Even though it was past midnight, he was wearing his work uniform. He was writing notes on his clipboard, waiting for the next delivery. After it, he would be done for the night.

The trucks from Boston came between ten o'clock at night and one o'clock in the morning, which wasn't the most unusual part. The fact that they always transferred their cargo from their trucks to ones from within the city limits was the strangest part. It was actually illegal for the delivery trucks to drive beyond the sign.

It was not unheard of for small towns in Maine to have silly old laws and regulations in their town charters, but most of them either ignored those laws or had them repealed. Storybrooke, however, took its crazy old laws very seriously.

So Whitaker, by virtue of schedule rotation, was forced to sit out on a lonely and notoriously dangerous road in the middle of the night. Alone. His only protection a flashlight, a ballpoint pen, his Taser, and an impressive willingness to hit an assailant with his vehicle.

He was, true to his nature, terrified.

This terror was not alleviated in any way when his cell phone made the little beep-boop noise that meant he had a text message. He did not usually get texts. Especially not so late at night.

He looked at his phone.

The message was from Govinda, and it read:

Are you still at work?

Whitaker replied:

Yes is something wrong?

A pause. Then another message from Govinda:

Meet me at the abandoned mine in forty minutes.

Whitaker's heart seemed to beat so fast that it stopped for a moment as he stared at the ominous message. So this was it, he thought. It had finally come.

With a sudden burst of defiant courage he typed out a reply:

Are you going to murder me?

But he didn't send it. He just held his thumb over the send button, worried that he would only embarrass himself by overreacting. Still, the mine was a very good place to hide a body. Especially since they were filling the whole thing with cement the next morning…

In the end, he just decided to accept his fate and sent back a humble O.K. If not now, it would happen later. Perhaps in a way that gave Whitaker less of a chance, or a way that came suddenly and without warning.

On the other side of the communication, Govinda found himself very much relieved that Whitaker had agreed to help him. He was more than slightly claustrophobic, and the more people he could convince to go into the tunnels instead of him, the better.

Which was had brought him to Will's door. He rang the bell and waited, wondering why nobody he knew could ever answer their door promptly. He had forgotten what time it was.

The downstairs light went on, and a bleary-eyed Will opened the door with a baseball bat in one hand.

"Oh, it's you," He groaned, "What do you mean coming over here unannounced at this time of night? I thought you were a home invader."

"Home invaders don't ring the bell."

"The courteous ones do."

Govinda rolled his eyes. Everyone he knew was a clown.

"Do you still have that stupid mask of yours? From the stake-out?" He asked.

"Yes…?"

"You might want to bring it. I'll wait here while you get dressed."

"This may come as a surprise to you," Will replied, "But you haven't actually told me what's going on. At all. And I'd like to know, so that I can agree to participate or decline at my discretion."

"I'm cashing in my favour. You said that you owed me one, and after this you won't. Go get ready."

Never ask a lawyer to help you do something fun. It turns into some kind of contract for later obligations. Will sighed with great annoyance, and nodded reluctantly as he headed back up the stairs.

"Oh!" Govinda snapped his fingers and called after him, "Do you have any sturdy rope? And maybe some flashlights?"

"Check the shed!" Will called back, pulling off his t-shirt as he nudged the door to his bedroom open. He paused, the shirt half way over his head.

Sturdy rope?

Outside, Govinda was already beginning his rummage through the various supplies in the garden shed. He had several coils of rope, of various widths, slung over one arm; and he was trying to decide if he needed both of the large, emergency flashlights. One would probably do. There was also a first aid kit; the kind that came in the big red bag, and had glow sticks and a space blanket in it. Govinda took it, just to be on the safe side.

He was loading all of this into the back of his car when Will walked over. By then he had dressed in his official sneaky-business uniform, minus the mask. Since he didn't know what they were doing he had opted not to wear it. After all, he didn't want to look out of place.

"Don't you want to take the truck?" He asked.

"No, I want a quieter engine. We need to be like a shadow."

"What the hell for?"

"I'll tell you once it's impossible for you to extract yourself from the situation," Govinda explained, "It's called being on a need-to-know basis."

"That is so massively incorrect, I don't even know where to begin…" Will shook his head as he got into the passenger's seat and fastened his seatbelt.

Over at the mine, Whitaker was already pulling up in his truck. He knew he was early, but he'd met the last of the deliveries that night, and didn't think that he would have time to unload at the warehouse and get out to the rendezvous point in time. Besides, if his coworkers arrived in the morning and found that he had never checked in, or that his truck was missing, they would think to search for him.

He wouldn't mind being dead, he supposed, as long as his body was properly taken care of.

"Hi!" A friendly voice piped up, and Whitaker nearly jumped out of his skin.

"Mason?" He balked, looking at the young boy standing right next to his truck, "What are you doing out here? Did you miss all of that hullabaloo where a little boy almost died playing around here?"

"I wanted to see what Govinda is going to do," Mason shrugged, "He promised he'd do something, so I want to know what it is."

"Do something about what?" Whitaker asked, and then came about his senses, "My goodness! It's nearly one o'clock in the morning! Did you walk out here by yourself? Shouldn't you be in bed? Where are your shoes? Get into this van at once! At once! I am taking you home."

"Don't give yourself a heart attack," Mason replied with a note of annoyance, "I did walk out here by myself, and if you try to get rid of me, I'll just do it again. I should be in bed, but I'm obviously not. My shoes are in my tree house because I forgot them, and you're not taking me home. It would be a waste of everybody's time."

Whitaker could never understand how people got through conversations with Mason. He was sincerely tempted to just drive away, and leave the boy for Govinda to deal with when he showed up.

"This is because they let you run wild. Like some feral child on the news…"

"Maybe." Mason shrugged.

Govinda's black sedan rolled up slowly, it's tires still making dragging noises on the gravel parking area. It stopped, and sat still for a long time. This looked rather ominous to Whitaker and Mason, but it was really because Will was demanding to know why he had been brought to the abandoned mine, and what Whitaker was doing there.

Govinda did not tell him.

They got out of the car and walked over to where the courier truck was parked. It was then that Govinda was on an angle to see the boy, who had been specifically ordered home to bed. He was not pleased.

"Part of our arrangement was that you would go home." He said to Mason, causing Will to feel even more confused.

"I didn't realize it was part of an arrangement," Mason explained, "I thought it was a suggestion."

"If you don't mind my asking," Will said, for what seemed to him like the millionth time that night, "What are we doing? Exactly. With as many details as possible, please."

"There…" Govinda began, very slowly, dragging the word out while he collected his thoughts, "Is something important inside the mine. We need to get at it before they pour in the concrete, so tonight is our last chance. I called Whitaker, because I knew he was still awake and because he seemed to know so much about tunnels. I brought you, because you're the one going inside."

Will waited, maybe for Govinda to ask if that was okay, maybe for him to explain why he had chosen Will. He didn't seem to have anything more to say.

"You do realize that this is insane?" Will asked.

"Yes."

"And I take it you're not going to bother telling me what, exactly, I'm supposed to look for?"

"At this point, that's actually a little up in the air," Govinda said, glancing at Mason, "You'll likely know it when you see it."

"If you don't want to go, I can do it." Mason offered.

Will looked over his shoulder at the dilapidated rubble. In the dark of night, it looked like the shadow of crumpled paper. It seemed in no way safe.

But he suspected that this was an important step in his quest to restore his happiness.

"Give me the flashlight." He said.