A Note From Lara: Once again, my internet was down for several days. So I had this really productive writing day on Tuesday, but despite the new and [supposedly] better modem, I couldn't post anything. But better late than never, I guess.

--

Bennet lead me into the Primatech headquarters through a side door. As we entered a long, sterile hallway, I felt my spine trying to crawl out through my skin. The hall was lit by a long line of paired halogen tubes, and a couple down at the far end were flickering ominously. Everything was painted white, except the dark blue carpeting. "Acceptably creepy," I commented dryly. "I like it."

He glared at me. "I don't appreciate you confusing my daughter when you don't really know the truth yourself," he said.

I raised an eyebrow. "Then tell me the truth. I've been digging into this conspiracy, this Company, for nearly two months, and I'm no nearer to figuring out how you're all tied in with what's happening in New York than I was when I started, except that I've confirmed that you are."

"And just what is this big mystery in New York?" he asked, trying to appear nonchalant. He very nearly succeeded. If it had been anyone else, if I hadn't already been set on edge and humming with adrenaline, I wouldn't have been paying as close attention to his little body signals. But I picked up the tiny deepening of the little creases at the corners of his eyes, and the slight forward tilt of his torso that indicated that he was as eager for his answer as I was for mine.

Choosing to follow his lead and be enigmatic rather than helpful, I said, "You get your answer after I get mine. Take me to see Sylar, like you said. If you've really got him here, that shouldn't be too big a deal..." I gave him a look that suggested I thought he might be lying. He probably wasn't, but it would help my cause if I could get him ruffled. Angry people made mistakes.

He sighed, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses. "Fine," he said. "I can manage five minutes, I think, before anyone checks the security cameras and realizes that you're not supposed to be here."

"We'd better get going, then."

After a confusing series of twisting hallways and unexpected stairwells, he had lead me into what I was fairly sure was a secret level several floors beneath what everyone knew as Primatech Paper. One final, short staircase, whose walls were marked with Level Five in bright red letters, and then we had arrived at what I assumed was their holding-cell-slash-torture-chamber area.

Bennet approached the first door on the right and swiped his keycard through the electronic lock. The light turned green, and he pulled the door open, ushering me inside first. I proceeded cautiously, all my instincts alert for a trap. Hey, I wouldn't put it past Bennet to screw me over like that.

But what I fwas expecting and what I found were two entirely different things, and I was so surprised that I temporarily froze. The observation window had been shattered, and Eden McCain, of all people, had been dragged through it headfirst through it by a man I assumed must be Sylar. A gun tilted in her shaking hand, and he laughed. "Oh Eden, you know you can't hurt me."

The sound of his voice, so confident and smooth, jolted me into action, and I threw myself across the room, intending to break her out of his grasp, but before I had gotten halfway to where she lay partway through the window, she pulled the trigger. Bennet yelled something, Sylar snarled in rage, and blood spattered across the cracked glass. Eden's blood.

She had shot herself. Why?

But I didn't have the time to think about it before my momentum carried me smashing past her limp body to place a well-aimed flying kick against Sylar's head. Caught off-guard, he was knocked backward and smashed his spine against the raised cot in the center of his cell. I landed half on top of him but rolled away, dropping into a defensive crouch to prepare for his counter-attack. It didn't come.

Sylar was slumped against the floor, clearly stunned. He groaned faintly and put his hand up to the his jaw where I had kicked him.

I rose to my feet and glanced back at where Bennet was standing just inside the room. "This is your Sylar?" I asked incredulously. "Come on. If the rumors are true, he's left a dozen bodies or more scattered across the country, but you can take him out this easily?"

He didn't answer. Instead he stepped aside to allow a dark-skinned man who appeared to be Dominican, or perhaps Haitian, to enter the room. The man came to stand next to the shattered observation window. Once he was stationed there, Bennet approached and pulled Eden's bloodstained body out of the window.

I looked down at Sylar, who had finally got his wind back. "Who are you?" I asked.

"My name is Sylar," he said, wiping a few drops of blood off his lips.

"Yeah, I know that," I muttered with a frown. "I mean what's your real name? Your mother definitely didn't name you Sylar."

He glared at me, getting shakily back to his feet. I was unnerved to discover that he was significantly taller than me. I was used to being at least on eye level with almost everyone. "Sylar is my real name."

Bennet chose this moment to volunteer, "His name is Gabriel Gray."

Gabriel, or Sylar, or whoever he was, turned to shoot Bennet a hate-filled stare that I swear could have rivaled even my death glare. I was mildly impressed.

"You killed my friend Sam," I said, drawing his black eyes back to mine. "Why? What did you want with her?"

He smirked. "The same thing I always want. Power. I take away what they have that they don't deserve."

"By slicing open their heads?"

Sylar nodded. "I have to see their brains. I have to study them, to understand how it works. Would you like to know what pretty little Samantha did?" Without waiting for my response he pressed on. "She could freeze things- anything- with just a touch of her hand. She was quite an ice queen. I would show you, if that Haitian weren't standing there, cutting me off."

Anger bubbled up in me even as I glanced at the referenced Haitian. He had killed Sam... because she had a power. He killed her to... what? To slice open her head and look at her brains and figure out how her power worked so that he could do it for himself? That was just sick.

I struggled to keep myself from attacking him again, and he stood there silently, studying me. Bennet seemed afraid to approach the cell, and I felt my disgust for him rise a little more.

By the time I had restrained my bloodlust, Sylar was watching me with a puzzled expression on his face. "You aren't like them," he said, indicating Bennet and the Haitian. "They're afraid to come near me without thick glass and the Haitian's powers keeping us separated. You're not."

"I'm not afraid of anything," I said intensely. It was more or less a lie, but he didn't need to know that.

His eyes flickered from me to the hole in the window and I saw him tense his legs to prepare for a bid for freedom. "If you're thinking about using this opportunity to run," I said conversationally, "I'd think twice. You rely a lot on your powers, don't you? And... the Haitian blocks those, doesn't he?" It was the only logical conclusion after what he'd said about the man. "Without your abilities, you're not really much of anything, are you? Now, me, I don't really need any powers. I do just fine without them, as you already found out." I indicated his split lip and swelling jaw. "If you try to escape, I can put you down faster than one of Bennet's bullets." Also probably a lie. I was fast, but certainly not that fast. But it was close enough to the truth to count.

Sylar narrowed his eyes. "You... work for him?" he jerked his head toward Bennet.

I shook my head. "Nope. Not a chance. But in this case, his interests and mine intersect... surprisingly. He's quite pleased with himself for keeping you locked up here. As for me, you killed one friend, and pretty damn near killed another one last night."

"The hero at the high school?" he guessed.

I nodded. "Yeah. Peter's off-limits. Sam's murder, fine. Maybe I would have let you get away just now if it was just that. It would have been good just to piss him off." I indicated Bennet. "But once you messed with Peter... well, I'd be as happy to see you become roadkill as anything right now. You just be glad he can heal, or I'd do the honors myself right now. Consider yourself warned, Gabriel Gray. Next time you mess with my friends, I'm taking you out."

Climbing out of the window, bravely (or stupidly) turning my back on the shocked serial killer, I reflected on what exactly it was I had just done. Maybe the bravado was a bit much. But it was a tactic that had worked well in the past, particularly against one Lex Luthor. Serial killers tended to be as much megalomaniacs as Lex had been. I didn't see any reason why it wouldn't work just as well on Sylar.

As I stepped out of the cell, the Haitian descended into it, moving with a silent eerie grace that instantly made me wary of him. I sensed that he could be a great ally or a powerful enemy. Sylar apparently felt it too, because he backed hurriedly away from the Haitian, allowing himself to be driven into a corner before the dark-skinned man placed his hand over his eyes. The serial killer was driven to the ground, apparently unconscious.

I glanced at Bennet. "Cell transfer?" I asked. The bespectacled man nodded sharply, staring at the body still lying on the floor. I followed his gaze.

She lay, a crumpled broken form, delicate like a china doll, against the dark concrete. Her dark eyes, so like Tanya's, were thankfully closed. Her short cap of curls was matted to her head by her own blood, and streaks of it ran down her face, painting her pale cheeks crimson.

It was horrible, knowing that she had been alive just minutes ago, and if I had been just a little faster, I might have saved her.

Though I couldn't quite bring it in me to forgive Eden for trying to kill me (presumably on Bennet's orders), I realized that I felt very sorry for her. Now that I knew a little more about Sylar, I understood why she had shot herself. Eden had the power of persuasion, the ability to twist anyone into doing anything she wanted them to do. Sylar had been about to headslice her when we came into the room. She had killed herself to keep him from gaining an extremely dangerous ability. She got my respect for that. It had been the honorable, brave thing to do.

The Haitian had finished whatever it was he was doing to Sylar, and pulled a syringe full of pale blue liquid out of his pocket, injecting it into his neck. The already unconscious serial killer went even more limp, if that was possible.

"Alright," I said, looking back at Bennet. He had clearly cared about Eden. I was intruding here. "I... guess I probably need to go now." I still didn't really trust Bennet, but I also could see that they really were trying to do a good thing here. At least, if keeping psychos like Sylar locked up was all they did. Somehow, I didn't think it was, but there was really not much I could do about it right now.

However, I did add a note to the bottom of my mental To Do List. Investigate Sylar: check. Stop nuclear bomb: working on it Take down mysterious secret organization masquerading as paper company: if I don't die in said bomb.

But Bennet shook his head. "Miss Morten, I have the highest respect for you, but I can't let you leave. If anyone finds out you were here, and I let you leave without having the Haitian wipe your memory, all my actions would become suspect. If that happens, they could find out about Claire, and then all that I have done to keep her safe is for nothing. I can't let that happen."

Double-crossing sonofabitch! Had he just lured me here so he could wipe my brain clean of whatever he thought I knew?

I took a step back from him, only to bump into the Haitian, who had somehow crept up behind me without my realizing it. His hand crept over my eyes, just as I had seen him do to Sylar. Before he could do... whatever he was going to do, I rammed my heel upward, jabbing him right between the legs.

He let out a groan and doubled over, holding his crotch where I had kicked him. Smirking, I said, "No one takes Dianne Morten alive!" Then I whirled and sprinted out of the room, praying I would remember my way out from the twisting bowels of Primatech.

Before I had gone a hundred yards through the confusing corridors, an alarm blared, and warning lights began to flash all up and down the hall. "Shit," I muttered. "Damn him."

I could hear shouts and running footsteps just around the corner. If anyone found me, the jig was up, because pretty much everyone in the building knew their way around better than me. There was no way I'd be able to escape once spotted.

Without thinking, I darted into the nearest room, behind a door marked Records. Slamming the door shut, I leaned against it, breathing hard from anxiety and listening to the footsteps pound past my hiding place. Once the sounds had passed by, I relaxed slightly.

But I still wasn't safe. Until they had either caught me or searched every corner of the building, they wouldn't give up. At least, if they were any decent sort of secret organization, they wouldn't. I had to find a way to escape, and venturing out into the corridors didn't seem like the wisest idea right now. Glancing around the room, I spied a ventilation shaft in the upper part of the only wall devoid of filing cabinets.

Was I insane? This was so cliched it wasn't even funny. But at the same time...

Five minutes later, I had pushed the desk that occupied the center of the room over to the wall, and was standing on it industriously setting about unscrewing the grille that covered the vent opening. Once it had popped off, I ascertained that I could, in fact, fit inside the shaft. I thanked god that all the hours of training with Bruce had kept me slim, or it would have been an extremely tight fit.

Just as I was about to push into the vent, I spotted a short stack of files sitting on the desk I was standing on. The stamp on the top one caught my eye- Peter Petrelli. They had a file on Peter? There were two files beneath his, and I immediately grabbed them up into my arms.

The door I had thoughtfully blocked with a pair of heavy cabinets rattled. Without wasting another second, I dove into the shaft and set about army-crawling my way out of Primatech...

--

Matt Parkman and Audrey Hanson sat in her Honda, watching the front doors of Primatech. "Since when does an absence of noise warrant a stakeout?" she asked snarkily, though he could tell that she wasn't really as irritated as she sounded.

"Shut up and eat your Tex-mex," he joked, thrusting a burrito into her hands.

She smiled ruefully at him, and an errant thought crossed her mind, zipping into his as it did so. I gotta say, he can be cute... And after a moment, Oh god, did he just hear that?

"Did you just read my mind?" she asked.

He released the laughter he had been restraining, and she hit him in the arm. "You can't--! That was a stray thought, it didn't... You can't just... you can't do that." She glared at him, but he just kept chuckling.

"You really think I'm 'cute'?" he asked.

She was about to reply when the grill covering a ventilation opening about twelve feet off the ground suddenly shot off. A dark-haired girl came tumbling out, falling head-over-heels all the way to the ground. Rolling the landing, she jumped to her feet, rubbing her shoulder. Once she had regained her balance, she took off running with the manilla folders she was holding clutched to her chest.

Whoever she was, she tore past the Honda, pausing only for a fraction of an instant to stare at them with a pair of wide blue eyes, and then she disappeared, streaking away at a dead sprint down the street away from Primatech.

Audrey looked strangely at Parkman, in a did-I-just-see-what-I-think-I-saw sort of way. "Wasn't that... Peter Petrelli's friend? The one who wouldn't leave us alone last night until we let her in to see him?"

Parkman nodded slowly, staring after the girl. "Weird," he muttered. But his attention was suddenly distracted by the front doors of Primatech swinging open to let a pair of men out. One of them was Bennet, who was the cause of his suspicion. And the other... The other was the Haitian man he had seen that night at the bar, right before he lost a day of his life. Forcing past the block of mental static, he managed to pull one word out of Bennet's head before he was repelled with a shock hard enough to give him a nosebleed.

"Did you get anything?" Audrey asked.

He nodded. "Just one word. Sylar."

--

Another Note From Lara: Woo-hoo. Personally, I think this was a pretty good chapter. Normally, I'm not very happy with how chapters for WTRL turn out, but this one I really like. Maybe it's just because Sylar was in it and Sylar is SO FREAKING BADASS!!!! Except I guess he kinda got pwned a lot in this chapter....

Whatever. Review.