A/N Another long chapter, here! Would like to say a massive public thanks to xXjaziXx for her shout-out for this story in A Boy, a Girl, and a Sister. Check that one out - it's got a ton of awesome reviews and it's such an original story (with much Fax later on :D). Now, on with the chapter. I hope you'll enjoy this; you've all been saying you want to know what's happening with Fang, and so you shall!

'Dylan, Kate, Ratchet – you guys need to find The General and apprehend her somehow…'

The group raced through the corridors, knowing that stealth wasn't going to help them. They couldn't evade the whitecoats, so their best bet was to get to The General as quickly as they could, laying out anyone who got in their way.

'Two around the corner,' Ratchet hissed, slowing a little; as fast as they were going, the element of surprise was crucial to make sure any threats were neutralised before more attention could be drawn to the group. They moved towards the end of the corridor, listening hard for the approaching whitecoats. The scientists reached the corner, turning unsuspectingly into the hallway only to be met with swift blows to the head; they dropped instantly, the attack coming so quickly that they didn't have a chance to identify the source before being knocked out cold. After their first few encounters with whitecoats, Dylan, Kate, and Ratchet had worked out the quickest ways to render their opponents unconscious, giving them no time to call out and alert others nearby.

Kate bent down, slinging the limp bodies over her shoulder.

'Where to?' she said briskly. Ratchet moved forwards to take the lead, directing the group to a door going off the hallway.

'No sound coming from in there,' he whispered. Pushing the door open slowly, he peered into the darkened room before nodding. 'No one inside.'

Laying the unconscious whitecoats on the floor, Kate paused in the doorway.

'Someone's gonna find them eventually,' she said. 'Or any of the others. The rooms might not be being used right now, but someone will need them at some point.'

Dylan nodded.

'Yep. We just have to hope that that point doesn't come too soon. It's the best we can do. Besides-' He glanced up at the clock on the wall. '-we've been going for nearly ten minutes now and nothing's gone wrong so far. That's almost half time, and if Jeb was telling the truth about where The General's office is then we should be nearly there. Once we're in there with her then it won't matter whether anyone's found the bodies or not – it'll be pretty obvious that we've escaped.'

They set off again, running through the hallways.

'What does bother me, though,' Dylan said as they hurried along, 'is the fact that she said we're all being constantly tracked and monitored. Someone must know that we've broken out, so why isn't anyone doing anything about it?'

'I thought Max was the only one they could actually watch directly,' Kate replied. 'The way it sounded, they could tap into her eyes and ears and stuff with that Voice thing, but for the rest of us it was just a kind of satellite pinpoint.'

'Even so, if that pinpoint was specific enough then they'd be able to see our movements within the building. And they must have noticed a spike in heart rates and adrenaline levels and all that. They must know something's going on.'

'Folks, what's the point in discussing this?' Ratchet interjected exasperatedly. 'Either way, we're doing what we're doing, and they're doing what they're doing, and we can't change that, so let's just get on with it.'

He saw the others nod out of the corner of his eye, and smirked in response. At that moment, a keening siren assaulted his ears, just about knocking him off his feet; he went stumbling into the wall, hands clutching uselessly at his head. Through the slits of his scrunched-up eyes, he could see the panicked expressions of the other two. They couldn't afford this, couldn't afford to stop and fail to reach The General and get caught and… Kate took hold of his arm, her eyes worried not just for the group in general but for him specifically, and tugged him forwards. Ratchet's feet caught him, but only just; each step was halfway to a fall, only instinct stopping him from taking a faceplant. This close to The General's office there wouldn't be hoards of frantic staff members running around, but he was sure that they could count on security being drawn to the area where the organisation's most important person spent her time. They had perhaps a minute at most.

Ratchet wasn't sure how long it had been – he guessed at maybe thirty seconds, but when every moment felt like an hour of staggering pain it was hard to tell – but sometime after the alarm began he was hit by a second wave of sound, the two climbing on top of each other to form a noise that he could almost see as a blinding, agonising light. That doctor guy can rethink his theories – two sounds do not make silence. Somewhere in his pain-addled mind, a connection sparked; if he was hearing that first high-pitched noise again, that had to mean that either the earplugs had stopped working (please don't let the earplugs have stopped working) or the tone being piped through the School had been turned off. One of the sounds had disappeared, leaving the other un-cancelled. Reaching up, hands shaking, Ratchet ripped his headphones off, feeling like his head would rip in two as his line of defence was removed. He pulled the earplugs from his ears, pressing them the way he'd seen Jeb do the first time, then pushed them back into place. At once the pressure in his head released – both sounds had disappeared. He didn't know why that first noise had been turned off, but he was too relieved to care. Now the plugs were keeping that awful alarm away from his ears, and that was good enough for him. He straightened up, ears still ringing, and faced the other two.

'Let's get going,' he said, not giving them a chance to reply before sprinting off down the corridor.

Guards appeared as they rounded the second corner, The General's office door visible to Ratchet at the other end of the hallway, and an ungraceful fray started up. As a group they covered a good range of fighting techniques, each of the three of them using a different style; Ratchet utilising the "foul play" that he'd picked up during his time on the streets, Dylan waiting until the last possible moment in his rival's attack before delivering clean, sharp counter-strikes, and Kate swinging out devastatingly strong blows which could take out more than one opponent at once when they landed right.

The guards, unable to keep up with the onslaught of such a mix of fighting styles, were all down within the minute, leaving the three teenagers to race along the hallway to The General's door. The alarm still blared around them; it could only be a matter of time before more guards showed up, and this time they were unlikely to be completely human.

The door facing the group was metal, like a vault hatch. There was no handle, no keypad lock, no slot for a swipe card.

'Kate, looks like this is one for you,' Dylan said, taking a step back.

Kate nodded, but before she had the chance to strike out at the door it slid upwards with a slight whooshing sound, revealing a normal, handled one behind it. She glanced back at the two boys, uneasy, but they'd come this far; no time to be too cautious, they just had to get into the office and face whatever was waiting for them as best they could.

The door swung open easily, and the three of them stepped inside, eyes landing immediately on the woman sitting on top of the desk at the other end of the room.

'Dylan, Kate, Ratchet,' The General said calmly, the gun in her hand pointed at the group as the metal door hissed down again behind them. 'At the risk of sounding like a clichéd movie villain, I've been waiting for you.'

He knew that cry. Angel?

It was like torture waiting for the whitecoats to finish sewing up his back. If he'd been Max, he would've jumped down from the table and ploughed through the surgeons with still-open incisions. But he wasn't. He was Fang, and Fang was more logical about his actions. If he tried to escape and rescue Angel before the scalpel-wounds in his back had been closed up, he wouldn't make it very far before blood loss got him; he'd figured out that much way back, when the first, newly-resurrected Ari had taken a chunk out of his side and he'd practically fallen out of the sky a few minutes later.

So he lay there, feeling the sting of the needle as it stabbed into him again and again, pulling the edges of the cuts in his back together.

'How much longer do we have him for?' one of the whitecoats asked.

'About an hour,' replied another. 'Enough time for us to get him out the door and onto the aerial deck for a bit.'

'Is it free now?'

'That first one, the girl, is finishing up in about five minutes, I think.'

'And we'll be able to see the effects of the modifications straight away in this one's flight patterns? No worries about the stitching coming undone?'

'Shouldn't be. The muscles are laid in a very peculiar fashion, as you saw. There's a chance that the superficial stitches on the skin will pull, but the deeper ones should be held by the layering of the internal structures.' There was a sigh. 'You know, it's a shame that we're only allowed to use retiring subjects for early surgical investigations; if this one has worked then I'm going to be mighty pissed to see it going off to be destroyed.'

Fang heard instruments being laid down on the metal surgeon's tray, signalling the end of the procedure.

'Okay, get those straps undone and we'll take him next door.'

He braced himself, waiting, waiting for the first rip of thick Velcro restraints being unfastened before hitting out, knocking down the first whitecoat in a single blow. Reaching over, he tore open the strap that held down his other wrist, then twisted backwards to get access to the ones on his ankles. It was a difficult stretch and he cursed inside his head – getting out of these things whilst face-down on a table was so much more of a nuisance than doing it face-up. Pausing for a second to swing a hard punch at the second whitecoat, Fang finally managed to undo all the straps holding him down, and in one fluid movement he had rolled off the table and landed in a crouch on the floor. The stitches in his back tugged at his skin and he felt a slight wince cross his face, but he'd fought through worse before. Taking a split-second inventory of the room, he was mildly disappointed to see that the tray of surgical instruments had been removed as soon as the procedure was over; not the end of the world, but a weapon from there could've been very useful indeed.

The theatre he was in was a small one just off the aerial deck, only used for flight-modifying procedures and any emergency work required to fix injuries obtained during airborne tests, so there wasn't a full surgical team hanging around for Fang to get through; the whitecoat who had come to fetch him (or rather, come to fetch Dylan) had been met by the second guy outside the theatre, and the 77.31 subjects had disappeared once Fang was secured onto the table. It was clear that these two guys didn't hold a lot of authority in the School – neither was particularly well-informed, and by the sounds of it their ideas about flight modifications didn't have a lot of sway with the higher-ups.

Darting towards the door, Fang was about to burst through to the aerial deck when he heard a shuffling behind him, and turned just a fraction too late to see the first whitecoat pulling himself off the floor and thumping a fist down onto a small, red button by the X-ray equipment. Immediately a siren pierced the air, and Fang heard shouting erupt from the other side of the door. He threw his weight against it, not bothering to go back for the dazed-looking whitecoat who was now slumped against the wall, and suddenly he was on the aerial deck, looking out over a large room below the strip of balcony that ran along the wall. A second door was positioned at the end of the deck, leading out into the hallway that he'd been brought along on the way to the theatre.

For a split-second he almost didn't recognise Angel as she struggled desperately in the air against blasts of wind coming from a huge fan positioned at the end of the room; that tiny person couldn't possibly be her, with a bare scalp and small, weeping holes spaced across the curve of her head. But there was no mistaking the cries issuing from her as she fought against the fierce wind. It was Angel. Feeling rage well up inside him at what the School had done to that little girl, to his little girl, Fang leapt forwards and laid into the aerial deck observers, who had turned to face him when he came through the door. Punch here, kick there, spin and bring up the knee as the turn finishes; the whitecoats weren't fighters, and Fang was fuelled by anger, not even feeling the pull of his stitches anymore. It didn't take long for him to get through all of them; one was sent over the edge of the balcony, falling a good thirty feet before he hit the floor. Fang didn't know if he was still alive or not, and in that moment he didn't care. Springing towards the railing that bordered the deck, he swung himself over it into the open space ahead, only to drop like a stone as his wings failed to push down properly.

He barely succeeded in catching himself, feeling clumsy and precarious in the air as he just about managed to propel himself forwards through the wind. Whatever those whitecoats had done to his wings, they didn't feel like his own anymore; he didn't recognise the way they worked, couldn't make them do as he wanted. But as he made the laborious, awkward journey towards the point where Angel still struggled, too trapped in her own world of exhaustion to have noticed anything going on in back of her, something seemed to shift: it was as if his brain caught up with the new configuration of muscles in his back, and then suddenly his movements became smoother. So smooth, in fact, that Fang actually had to take a quick glance behind him to check that his wings were still moving at all. They were. He quirked an eyebrow and turned back to Angel, powering through the powerful blast of air with a sudden ease that he'd never experienced before. Well, what do you know? Seems like the School's actually been helpful for once. Must be having an off-day.

Within seconds Fang had reached Angel, reaching out towards her as she was buffeted around in the wind; she didn't fight, barely even responding to his hands pulling her out of the air and bundling her up against him. As he made his way back to the deck, the rush of the wind and the wail of the alarm in his ears, he looked down at the thin, fragile thing in his arms. A straining feeling started up in his chest and he instinctively tightened his hold on her, needing to feel her there, needing to know that he had her, that she was with him, that she was safe now.

He didn't know what he was going to do next. His plan hadn't really gone past 'get Angel, get out'. But now wasn't a time to think; it was a time to do. If he managed to get the two of them out of the School, then that was when he could start to think about the others, but until then he had to focus on the task at hand. With that in mind, Fang reached the balcony and stepped over the still-unconscious bodies of the whitecoats, making his way through the second door and out into the hallway.

Star sent a disturbed, worried look over at Holden; the 77.31 kids were coming down the hall…

'Down here!' Holden ducked behind a metal cabinet that stood by the wall, motioning to Star to do the same.

'What do we do now?' she whispered, appearing next to him, her eyes watching the doorway. The small creature was just behind her, crouching on its heels, knees splayed outwards and webbed hands resting on the floor between its flipper-like feet; it looked like a small child doing a frog impression.

Holden stared around the room, eyes narrowed as he took in the surroundings. He could hear the footsteps of the 77.31 subjects now, what sounded like all five of them marching in unison down the hall together, loud enough to be audible over the siren that still rang through the building. His gaze landed on a pile of cylinders in the corner of the room furthest from the door, arranged haphazardly by a large stack of now-empty cages; a smile spread across his face when he saw the yellow label adorning the containers.

'The gas in those canisters is flammable,' he muttered quickly to Star, turning to face her. 'I'll distract the Laser Kids – they can't hurt me – then you move round behind them and get out of here. Take-' He looked at the flippered creature crouching behind them.

'Kokoe, say scientists,' the thing replied in its low voice.

'Take Kokoe. Once you're out, I can lure them over to that pile of cylinders; they'll shoot at me and hit the gas tanks, and the whole room will go up. They'll be blown to bits.'

Star frowned.

'That's very noble and all, but would you survive that? I get that you're a super-healing starfish guy, but can you get through being ripped apart? You'd be right at the centre of the blast.'

'I'll be fine.'

She rubbed at her face, shooting a look over her shoulder at the doorway. The footsteps were very close now, almost at the entrance to the room. Star whipped back around to face Holden, her face suddenly looking more uncertain and anxious than he'd ever seen it before.

'Kate would kill me if you-… She'd kill me if I let you die,' she ground out, not quite meeting his eyes.

Holden softened for a moment, bending his head a little to study her expression.

'You really love her, don't you?' he said gently, and Star's face crumpled. A sound at the door told them that the 77.31 subjects had arrived, and she wavered, looking lost for a second. Then she turned to him, and her voice was a quiet yet astonishingly fierce whisper:

'Can you do it? Honestly. Can you survive that?'

Holden looked at the floor, taking a fraction of a moment to think about what he was suggesting.

'Yes,' he murmured, looking up at her with a firm nod.

She stared at him for a second as the Laser Kids took a few steps into the room.

'Okay,' she said softly, and he could see her hands shaking a little.

'Wait until they're right inside, away from the door,' Holden breathed. 'Make sure they can't see you moving behind them; if they catch a glimpse of you, they'll turn and shoot.'

Then he burst out from the cover of the cabinet, drawing the aim of the lasers, racing around the room as dozens of small holes appeared in his skin only to heal up within second of the shots being fired. He moved in an arc, pulling the gaze of the subjects around until their backs were all to the cabinet, facing away from Star and Kokoe. He taunted them the whole while, his voice ringing out above the sound of the alarm, and the two noises together gave Star's light footsteps more than enough cover as she moved quickly out from behind the protection of the cabinet, silently urging Kokoe along with her. Reaching the door, she slipped into the hallway and stood there, pressed against the wall and on the alert for anyone else coming towards the room.

Holden saw Star leave, moving into what he hoped was the relative safety of the corridor, and he took a breath as he prepared himself for his next move. In what had become a near-automatic gesture since the groups had split off, he shot a look at his watch: thirteen minutes down. Only about three gone since the alarm started.

It felt like much longer.

He sprang suddenly to the right, and the tiny darts of red light moved with him, following him as he sprinted towards the corner, following him as he jumped, following him as he rolled behind the stack of cylinders. For a split-second nothing happened, and he had a chance to pray that there was still gas in the tanks, that Star would be protected from the blast outside of the room, that he really could survive it. And then he stopped praying, because suddenly Holden's world erupted in a burst of flames.

A/N That bit about Star loving Kate can be interpreted either as romantic love or platonic - it's for you to decide within your own head, because I don't think there's going to be much more said about it. I just wanted to show that they're very close and that, despite how cold she can act sometimes, Star does truly care for Kate.

Now review, my lovelies, because I KNOW that people are reading this and not reviewing, which makes me sad. Writers need feedback! Plus I think that I'm generally fairly good at responding to it and making sure my readers are happy, so the more you let me know you're there then the more likely it is that you'll enjoy the way things go.

It's a win-win!