The time for jokes was pretty fucking much over. Not like going after the heirs of the Initiative was ever going to be happy fun times, but seeing what they were capable of? Shit. Another thing proving that having a soul didn't stop you from being outright evil.

She knew about that already, of course; shit, she'd lived it already, but didn't mean it didn't suck to see new evidence.

Nikita said to Willow, "You say you know where Amanda is."

"I do," Willow said.

"Where?"

"About 300 feet up, a bit to my left and front," Willow said. They were still in the storage hall. Ryan was at one end keeping an eye out, while Alex was at the other.

"300 feet up?" Nikita asked.

"Yeah, I know. That means she's out of the complex and somewhere inside the Laurel Center itself."

Into her earpiece, Nikita said, "What's the fastest way to the top?"

The question had been for Birkhoff, but Willow answered. "I blast a hole in the ceiling," she said grimly, "And we fly straight up until we reach her."

"What're the chances of you doing that without going Dark Willow?" Faith asked.

"50-50."

"Not odds I want to play," Faith said.

Sighing, Willow said, "Me either. But this? Very tempting."

"Repeat that, please," Nikita said. "Okay. Thanks." To everyone else, she said, "The vastest way would be take the stairs we just took, but they'll probably be crowded with guards soon enough. And the elevator is out for obvious reasons. So that leaves us heading to the far end, of –" she pointed – "that hall, and going up until we get to the office level."

"Let's go, then." They hurried along the hallway – which seemed quiet; Faith would have thought that in an evacuation they would have been carting this stuff out of here. That they weren't was kind of scary. Meant their thought process was on the order of, "Aaah, leave the body parts behind. We can always go get more."

Some of the storage units were open, though not many of them . A few even had people still unloading things, and while it was tempting them to pound them until they couldn't feel it any more, they'd pretty much agreed that they weren't going to fight anyone who wasn't actually getting in their way.

The definition of "getting in their way" was pretty loose, though, as a couple of people found out who were rounding a corner with a cart full of something when they all hurried by. Alex hit one of them with a punch and pistol-whipped him in the back of the skull when he fell to the floor; he was out by the time he got there.

Faith got the other one herself, and she didn't need to bother with any weapons; one punch from her, pulled a bit because the chick was human, was enough to knock her unconscious. She barely had to break stride.

Shortly after that, as they got near a side doorway that was probably the stairs up, Nikita held up her hand in a "shush" gesture and then made "spread out" motions. Everyone moved to one side or the other of the doorway.

There were people coming down the stairs. A couple of them. ". . . a waste," a female voice said.

"I know," a male voice said. "But we don't have time for all of them. We have the crucial experiments out. Everyone else is just going to have to get the gas."

"At least they won't suffer," the woman said.

"I think this counts as 'in our way," Alex said grimly.

"Damn right," Michael said. Faith yanked open the door and everyone poured into the stairwell. The two never had a chance, not like they deserved one, anyway. Within thirty seconds they were unconscious and tied to the hand rails, their phones broken, and their wallets lifted. (The last part was less to get some ready cash and more to inconvenience them as much as possible.)

"Up now?" Willow asked.

"Up, now." Nikita said.

Their trip upstairs – as fast as Willow could go, and while she wasn't a trained athlete, a decade or so of taking on things a shitload stronger than she was had left her in pretty decent shape – ran them into three more office drone/scientist types, one suit – even underground, they had a dress code, which sucked for them – and a couple more guards. Unfortunately, the guards were a couple stories up.

"There's more of 'em!" one of them said, and began shooting.

"We're going to have to dodge out here," Nikita said. But she was talking mostly to empty air, because Ryan, Willow, Alex and Willow had already opened the nearest door and sprinted into the area beyond.

Faith followed them, and Nikita came in a couple of seconds later, after exchanging a bit more gunfire. "That one's no good," she said into her earpiece.

The area they were in was – different. Looked more like a luxury hotel than anything else. While Nikita was talking to Birkhoff,Faith said, "I don't think we want to be leading a trail of these guys up to Amanda."

Michael said, "Ambush?"

Faith nodded. "Yeah." Michael tapped Ryan on the shoulder and pointed to an open door. Faith kicked down one door and entered a suite – and damn if the place didn't look nicer than anywhere she'd ever lived; shit, it looked bigger than the place Rachel and Monica lived on on Friends – and shut it most of the way, positioning herself to jump whoever came through the door. She heard everyone else keep running down the hall.

A few seconds later, she heard a muttered, "Where are they?" and then some footshifting.

Shit. These guards were smarter than the ones downstairs – and they had guns. Right as she came to the conclusion that she might want to get out of the way, a bullet came through the door, proving her right. The bedroom was to the right. She dove through the doorway as another bullet came through the door. Immediately afterward, one of the guards kicked the door open and came into the room.

Faith didn't hesitate, taking one of her knives and hitting the first guard in in his gun arm. He dropped the pistol and yowled as Faith charged forward, hitting the guard and door simultaneously, trying to knock anyone following this guy back into the hall.

It worked; there was a thud and then a woman began swearing. In the meantime, the wounded guard with no gun was no problem; one punch took care of that.

Shit! More gunfire in the hallway! Faith rolled to her feet, peered through the door crack, and saw one guard down who wasn't going to be getting back up – shots to the head tended to do that – and a third holding up her hands. Relaxing a bit, Faith walked out into the hall –

And swore again. Ryan had been hit and was bleeding from his left arm. She ran out and said, "Tommy!"

Ryan said, "It looks worse than it is."

Faith said, "Good, 'cause it looks like shit."

Everyone else came running down the hall. "What happened?" Nikita asked.

"I didn't see them go past me and a few seconds later I heard them shoot through Faith's door. I waited until they were just heading in before coming out and drawing my weapon on the woman – and that guy, down the hall –" he pointed to the dead guard – "shot at me from maybe fifty feet away. I hadn't even seen him. He started running up and I returned fire. She was smart enough not to try to join in."

The woman said, "I'm not getting paid enough and you wouldn't've shot Jackson if he hadn't shot you first."

"Good," Nikita said. "You get to live, then." They moved back into the suite Ryan had been hiding out in – it was a mirror image of the one Faith had been in.

Willow and Alex tended to Ryan's wounds. Nikita bound the cooperative guard, and Michael, every once in a while, snuck a peek down the hallway.. "This'll look and smell weird," Willow said, getting some kind of paste out of her carry-bag, "But it'll keep the wound from getting infected. Alex. There's a bandage and some gauze down there off to the left. Reach in and get it, would you? I have to clean off the area first."

Alex reached into the bag, felt around, and yelped when she realized her arm was in the bag up to the elbow. "What the – it's bigger on the inside?"

"Yeah, it is," Willow asked, grimly avoiding the usual Dr. Who joke, which Faith would never admit she got anyway. "Sorry. It's my, to quote Andrew, 'Bag of Holding.' I've got a lot of stuff in there. The bandages are about a foot down on the left hand side."

"Got them," Alex said, pulled out a medical kit, and opened it. "Here you go."

"Hold on a bit," Willow said. "This will sting but only for a second." She started rubbing the paste on and Ryan reacted like he'd just been jabbed with a needle. "Hold still!" Willow commanded.

"Okay. It's gone," Ryan said. "What's in that stuff?"

"You've never heard of most of the ingredients," Willow said. "But the main one is venom from a European hornet." She took the bandage and gauze from Alex.

"Hornet venom?" Alex asked.

"I said it would sting," Willow said. "What did you think I meant?" In the mood they were all in, Willow probably wasn't joking, either.

"If you're done reenacting MASH over there," Michael said. "We should probably get going."

"You okay?" Nikita asked Ryan.

"Well, I've been shot and stung, but otherwise I'm good," Ryan said sarcastically.

"Good to know," Nikita said. "Willow?"

"'Mom," Willow said, and yeah, Faith could hear the quotes around the word Mom, "hasn't really moved. She's still above us."

"Hold on, I'll ask. Birkhoff wants to know how far up."

"At this point, somewhere between 175-200 feet. Why?"

A second later, Nikita said, "Because that would put her not in the abandoned mall, but on its roof."

"How sure are you that that's where she is?" Alex asked.

A little irritable, Willow said, "Pretty damned sure. But, you know, that means we could have bypassed this fighting our way up and just climbed up the outside of the building. It's like we're in a freaking video game."

gWhat's she doing on the roof?" Michael asked.

"This is Amanda," Alex said. "She probably thinks it's funny to look down on all of us scrambling around."

But Nikita was shaking her head. "No. Not from Amanda. At least, that's not all of it."

Faith said, "Why ain't as important as where right now. And where is up and out. I'm guessing we're too far away from any exits to make just going outside a good idea?" Faith asked.

Nikita relayed this to Birkhoff, who said back, "Yeah. There's only one way in below the surface, and that's how we got in here."

"Okay. Wolfensteining it it is," Willow muttered.

"The hallway's clear of guards as far as I can see," Michael said.

"Birkhoff says there's a freight elevator a bit off in that direction," Nikita said, pointing.

Faith said, "Naaah. Once we're on an elevator we're screwed if any of their tech guys figure it out. I can climb a few hundred feet, and probably the three of you can, but Red's not up to our standard – no offense – and Tommy's got a bum arm. Now I could carry him if I had to, but I'd rather not have to."

"Stairs it is," Ryan said.

"Okay, then," Nikita said. "We're not going back the way we came. The second closest set is in the same direction. So I say we go in the other direction."

"Sounds good to me," Faith said. Everyone else agreed.

Looking out the cracked door quickly, Michael said, "Hall's still mostly clear."

The new marching order put Ryan and Willow in the middle – Ryan's good arm still holding his weapon – Faith and Alex in the front, Nikita and Michael in the back. They jogged down the hall a hundred feet or so, past a couple of people who were still lugging shit around like they were going to make it out of here before someone stopped them, and hung a fast left.

Brought up a question. "Yo, Nicky," Faith said. "Any word from Shaggy about how the rest of the crew're doing?"

"Pretty good," Nikita said. "One group came in through the garage, the other through an entrance that came out in – well, Birkhoff said Gigi called it a lobby. They've both made some progress. The first group is headed down where the prisoners are kept, in hopes of finding someone alive – apparently the garage was packed and it took them a while to fight their way through."

"Okay. Good. They know the priorities." Buffy always said that rule number one was "Don't die." Good idea, yeah, but if 'don't die' was the first thing a Slayer should give a crap about, they'd be doing a whole lot less running around saving people. Which were you more likely to die from? Facing a horde of vamps, or sitting at home watching reruns of The Golden Girls?

Still, Buffy was pretty stubborn about shit like that, so they'd just made up rule zero: Don't let someone else die.

This far into the evac, and given what they'd heard out of the assholes on the stairs, probably anyone left down there was dead or dying. Still, though, if there was a chance, they took it.

Faith was just glad it wasn't Gigi, though. Ever since that Russian mobster'd shot Claudia – he'd been aiming for Gigi, but Claudia'd shoved her out of the way – Gigi'd been damn near a fanatic about making sure no one else got hurt. And she went apeshit when innocent people were hurt. She found torture victims down there it'd take a squad of slayers to hold her back.

"Here's the stairs. This should take us up to the top, and from there we can find a way into the mall and then the roof," Nikita said. "That good for everyone?"

"Fine by me," Alex said. Everyone else said they were good, too.

"Okay, then," Nikita said. "Up, up, and away."

Willow said, "And watch out for people saying Guten Tag."