Sensing genuine threat to his continued well-being, Darien resolved the moment his questioner left to not wait for the guy to come back. Screw knowing who these people were, Darien wanted out!

During the interview, which had lasted some ten or fifteen minutes after the nameless man had assured him that things would get ugly if he continued to be uncooperative (which he absolutely did), Darien had quietly been at work on the ties at his wrists.

He'd learned long ago that most people haven't the faintest idea how to tie someone up so they can't get away, counting entirely on that someone to simply assume they can't. A surprising percentage of the world's population would accept that they couldn't get away as soon as they felt ties at their wrists. Maybe they'd tug a little, but if there wasn't immediate give, they'd accept that they were trapped.

But some clever poet back in the sixteenth century had pointed out that stone walls don't make a prison, nor iron bars a cage. There were a lot of interpretations of that, and it was generally considered most likely that the poet had been saying physical confinement and spiritual confinement were two different things. Darien chose to take it literally. Just because there were stone walls, it didn't mean they'd been put together in such a way as to make a prison, and iron bars in a pile couldn't cage anything, you had to put them in the right spots and weld them, if nothing else.

By the same token, just because someone had wrapped cord around Darien's wrists and tied it, that didn't mean he was hopelessly entangled. Very often, if you twisted around in the right way, you could find some concealed slack in such a tie, and thus find a way to slip free of it.

Even though Darien had discovered in the last half hour that he'd been respectably well tied, he nonetheless had found his bit of slack eventually, and was working at it. It had been noted by almost anyone who dealt with Darien for any length of time that he was actually very clever and highly resourceful, when properly motivated. In this case, he was quite motivated.

He hadn't at all liked the look in that man's eyes, and liked even less the tone of his voice.

The thing was, that guy had Darien more convinced than ever that these people -whoever they were- were exactly the sort of people who would have hidden cameras. That meant they'd know the second he made a move. So when he finally slipped the ties binding his hands, he had to figure out exactly what move he was going to make, commit to it, go fast and hope nobody anticipated it.

During his questioning, Darien had made a few guesses and taken a few stabs at goading his questioner into revealing just what sort of operation this was, who these people were and what interest they had in the Shepherds, but he hadn't met with any success, leaving him very much in the dark as to what sort of people his captors were. At this point, he'd pretty much decided ignorance was bliss as far as that was concerned, and had made escape his sole object of interest.

Since waking up here, Darien had only seen or heard one person, but four Santas had got him to begin with (not to mention the drivers of the two SUVs), so he had to believe the place was crawling with at least a half dozen big burly men who had probably shed their holiday outfits by now. Darien was neither big nor burly and he didn't really know how to fight except in the most amateurish way (normally a bit of a curse, but actually a small blessing whenever the Madness took hold; there was no telling how dangerous he might become if he went Mad and had learned martial arts or something).

It was a bit hard to make an escape plan without actually knowing anything of the building outside of this room, much less what might lie beyond the building itself, but Darien had no intention of staying here and seeing how ugly things could get. He'd just have to take his chances, trust to instinct, luck and the Gland to get him out. It wouldn't be the first time he'd done it, either.

Darien only wished that thought gave him more confidence than it did.

Trusting to instinct meant that his first move once he was freed was to lunge from his chair and dive over the desk in one move, get his shoulder under it and tip it over, sending the gargoyle-esque Santas crashing to the floor. Instinct said there were cameras in those Santas, even though he had no proof that there were any cameras anywhere. Still crouching behind the now toppled desk, Darien finally unleashed the Quicksilver Gland to do what it did best, namely render him invisible to the naked eye.

Silently, he slipped over to the wall with all the doors, and resisted the impulse to bolt. Security cameras or not, that crash would surely have been heard down the hall, and someone would be coming to investigate. Best to slip out when they came in to investigate rather than risk anyone chancing to see the door seemingly open by itself. People had been known to react in myriad ways when they saw the patently impossible, from fainting to shooting blindly at the impossibility as if some part of them sensed a human presence was behind it even though there was no visible evidence of it.

Darien had been shot before, and it wasn't something he fancied doing again. He'd found that being shot was monstrously unpleasant, and the treatment for bullet wounds wasn't much nicer.

Just as Darien had expected, both the door nearest the desk where his questioner had entered and another door at the other end of the room burst open within seconds in response to the noise. Two pairs of bewildered thug-types looked right through Darien at each other, then puzzledly entered the room, checking behind what little furniture as there was, closing unerringly in towards the desk, naturally assuming Darien was still behind it.

Darien didn't wait for them to figure out that he wasn't. He simply slipped out the nearer door and into a frustratingly featureless hallway. He looked up the hallway, and then down it, but neither direction promised anything except a series of doors and a sharp turn at the end that presumably led to another hallway. Darien hated buildings like this, because they didn't make any sense, and were carefully built to confuse you. It was as if the builders of these places had never been inside a building before, and had only heard the concept of rooms and hallways inexpertly explained to them.

And of course places like this always reeked of antiseptic and depression. Anyone who said depressing surroundings didn't have a particular smell had never been in one of these buildings before.

Selecting a direction at random, Darien jogged quietly down the hall and peered around the corner. A bank of frosted glass windows greeted him on the left, on the right were more doors, up ahead was more hallway. At the end though, there seemed to be a flight of stairs. That was promising anyway.

A shrill alarm went off suddenly, but that wasn't especially surprising. Hearing the goons thundering down the hall, Darien quickly ducked into the slight recess of a doorway and let them trundle past him.

If he'd known where he was going, he would have tried to outrun them, since alert guards at the exit would be a bit of an unwonted wrinkle, but he didn't really know where the exit was yet, so it seemed best to let the opposition do all the frantic running about and for him to stay out of their path so they didn't literally bump into him.

Still, he didn't waste time, primarily because he couldn't afford to stay invisible for long. As soon as the pair of goons had gone clumping down the stairs, Darien broke into a jog again. He did intend to go downstairs, since the light coming through the windows at his left suggested this was not a basement and that it was still daytime outside, but it seemed sensible to stop and listen at the head of the stairs, just in case the goons decided to come back upstairs.

Here at the stairs, he could see off to his right yet another extended hallway, at the end of which there appeared to be a recessed area, possibly for an elevator. But Darien didn't go to investigate. An elevator would be the stupidest place for him to go just now. Too easy to be caught -or shot- in a closed space like that, invisible or not. No, better to take the stairs and-

Darien's thoughts were interrupted by a sound coming from up the stairs, one that managed to cut even through the rather deafening alarm that still rang through the air. It was the sound of a young child, possibly even a baby, crying. It stopped Darien in his tracks, both physically and mentally. The sound of a crying child tends to have that effect on people anyway, they are practically programmed to respond to it (for good or ill) in some emotionally -and usually decisive- fashion. And of course, Darien had been assigned to find a baby-toddler. It seemed unlikely that the sound of a child's cry was coincidental. He felt a prickle of unease, as if he were being lured into a trap, the back of his imaginative mind pondered the possibility that someone was playing a recording of a baby's cry to get his attention. But that was too fantastic a possibility to be believed.

Selfish as Darien preferred to be, that pesky conscience he'd been endowed with started pecking at him, and he knew immediately that he would be going up stairs instead of down them, though he did put up a good fight in the form of three or four seconds of hesitation.

After that, however, Darien sprang into action. He went up the stairs as rapidly as quietness would allow, and found more featureless hallway and closed doors. But now he had something to use as a guide, specifically the sound of an increasingly unhappy (and thus increasingly loud) child.

Still operating on impulse more than thought, when Darien came to the closed door behind which he was convinced the child was crying, he tested the handle, found the door unlocked, and cautiously stood to one side when he pushed the door open. No shots greeted his intrusion, so he peered around the door and into the room, knowing anyone inside couldn't actually see him doing this.

There was some scattered office furniture, but the only thing Darien saw the moment he looked in was the little fair-haired boy with light eyes (he couldn't see color while quicksilvered, but he guessed blond and blue respectively, since this boy seemed to match the photo of Nicholas Shepherd). The boy was wearing a Christmas tree sweater (in this weather?), and had been stuck into a baby pen, which had a number of toys and a baby blanket. These had satisfied him until the alarm started blaring, at which time he became frightened,. as any sensible person of any age would be at such a god-awful sound.

Darien slipped through the door and closed it behind him, and then stopped to think. Obviously he couldn't just leave this child here, his conscience would not allow it. But he also couldn't get out with a crying toddler. Quicksilver made you invisible, not inaudible. Somehow, he had to quickly convince this probably pre-verbal child to shut up and come with him. Good luck with that.

Looking around quickly, he didn't see any sign that there was a monitor on this room. He wondered if one of the people who'd burst into the room where he'd started had been up here. Surely they hadn't left the kid all by himself for an extended period?

Not really sure what to do, Darien came forward and sat on the floor behind the playpen wall. He shook off the quicksilver and waited quietly until the startled child looked his way.

An adult would have been terrified by a man suddenly appearing within a few inches of them. Even an older child would likely have a fit. But at under a year old, Nicholas Balthazar Shepherd had a sense of wonder untainted by superstition or fear. He was frightened of the noise because it was painful to his ears, and louder than he could be. But it was not unusual for him to focus exclusively on something, and fail to notice if a parent or other relative entered until they talked to him and picked him up.

Of course, Nicky also had never been told not to talk to strange men, because so far he hadn't actually done enough talking to be told when not to talk. Like most children his age, Nicky was constantly being introduced to what he considered to be random strangers his parents had seemingly just picked up off the street and brought in to see him. He didn't know aunts, uncles, cousins, babysitters, family friends or doctors, and couldn't tell one stranger from another.

He could only formulate opinions based on minor, some would say peculiar, details. For instance, he didn't like men with very large beards. It concerned him that he couldn't see what their chins were doing. He didn't like women with bright lipstick, it had a funny smell. He didn't like it when people wore toques which hid their ears, because it looked like they didn't have any, and for some reason young Nicky found that particularly upsetting. He didn't like the men who had brought him here, because none of them ever smiled, and he had learned already that a smile is a friendly expression. They also towered over him in bulky clothes, and he couldn't see what their bodies were doing under all that black, and he didn't like that at all.

But this new person wasn't towering. He was just sitting on the floor, like Nicky's parents and babysitter did when they played with him. He had no beard and, though his hair was pretty wild, Nicky could see his ears weren't doing anything suspicious. In fact, this new stranger didn't have any of the things Nicky found scary about other people. Most importantly, however, this stranger smiled.

"Hi," the stranger said, as quietly as the all-consuming alarm sound would let him, "I'm Darien."

Nicky looked at him somewhat warily. At least he wasn't doing that goo-goo babytalk thing some other strangers did, which made Nicky suspect he was being mocked for his inability to talk like adults. But he was using words strange to Nicky, which made him feel a little excluded from this conversation. He stuck his thumb in his mouth and peered over his hand at Darien.

"Well," Darien muttered aloud, "At least you're not screaming anymore. That's something."

Nicky simply stared at him, uncomprehending.

"Why do I get the feeling that if I picked you up now, you'd try to bite me?" Darien asked, but of course he received no answer for this, so he sighed, "This might take some doing."