'Like the butterfly effect,
It was only just a speck
That made into a broken-hearted mess.
Like the butterfly effect—
It's so easy to regret.'

"Butterfly Effect" ~ Before You Exit

They dive around another bend in traffic, going at illegal speeds that would make Spike proud. They've nearly been T-boned five times on this chase alone. A slew of cop cars with lights on pose as their escort to the airport, and even they are having trouble keeping up.

"Nothing yet?" Sam asks, for the millionth time, though he's the one driving like a maniac and he's supposed to be paying attention. He's not bleary eyed anymore, wide awake. "Jules?"

"We're working on it, honey."

"But—"

"We'll get it, Braddock."

At the use of his, their, last name, Sam shuts up.

Greg's finger hovers over the redial button on his phone, which is currently plugged into the laptop on Jules' knees. He's still trembling faintly from the brief, fuzzy sound of Spike's voice talking to an unfamiliar man. They hadn't heard much, even when replaying the recorded call.

It was still enough to make Greg's skin crawl.

Dean pokes his head between the seats. "We can't call back, Dad. What if the ringtone alerts his captors?"

"You're right." Greg rubs a hand down his face. "I know. I just…"

Suddenly the phone rings for him, making everyone jump.

Lazlo, one hand still holding a cellphone to his ear, where a British tech agent is talking him through the process, circles his free index in the universal signal for tracing a call. "We've almost pinned a location, but it must be an older phone with little in the way of GPS—we'd be faster with him on the line. Accept it."

Greg does so before he even finishes speaking. "Spike? Is that you? Is it safe to talk?"

There's no reply, except for the distant, tinny sound of Spike's voice and someone else. Saul maybe? It's not the accented voice from before. The one who had taunted and threatened and demeaned Spike with every word, who had made Greg's hands itch to close around Almasi's throat.

Sam pulls up to the airport and swivels in his seat. "Where is he, Jules?"

"We got it!" Jules taps the screen with her nail. "The call came from France! I can't narrow it down any more than that."

"France?" Dean sounds a touch panicked. "They flew him all the way to France? Why?"

"The phone's stopped moving," says Jules. "Though I doubt it's his final destination."

Lazlo snaps his fingers to get their attention. "It's not. My Interpol contacts flagged a rented hangar—rented in a hurry—in Reims just before a plane took off from the abandoned runway there."

Greg grips the overhead handle hard enough that it bruises. "Are…are you saying that…"

"We lost him?" Dean again reads his mind, his devastated voice ringing in the cramped SUV. "We pinpointed his location only for him to leave! They could be anywhere!"

"Interpol is on it, Mr. Parker." Though Lazlo sounds just as discouraged. "Along with the Parisian government, the International Criminal Tribunal, and a host of other anti-trafficking organizations. We'll find him."

"Are you sure of that? Are our chances good?"

Lazlo doesn't answer this one. His silence screams louder than any of them can stand.

Finally, Jules sighs and takes Dean's hand. "No, they're not."

Greg looks to Sam beside him. There's a plea he doesn't even bother to censor in his eyes, roiling and scorched through the tears.

Sam reads it, loud and clear. He nods sharply. "I'm on it, boss."


Seminal memories are a funny thing. One never gets a choice in how they're formed or what stays in the mind for life.

But they all have one thing in common—

Instant learning. Associations connected or experienced in a lightning strike.

Spike's earliest memory is the smell of burning hair—his own—when his little toddler hand had reached out to explore the red burner on their run down stove in Italy.

He'd barely lain his hand on it, yet it was still enough to singe hairs on the back of his right wrist. They've never really grown back, leaving him with one smooth hand and one with light, feathery hair.

There's the smell of something burning alright, but this time it's a cigar.

And rather than the shrieks of his mother, there comes the cheery laughter of Saul and his men. Spike can't see anything, thanks to a new blindfold over his eyes and hands tied to a support column in the back of the sitting area, near the bar.

Even this, with all its humiliation and fear, is not Spike's newest seminal memory. Thrown onto the larger private jet, just before they tied the blindfold on—

Spike looked through the window down at night falling over this foreign country, the way it faded away with their ascent. And he knew he would never see any of his family again. That if by some miracle he survives, and he won't, they'll never know where to look.

For Spike himself doesn't know where they are.

The plane has landed several times already, mutters in Arabic and Farsi exchanged through rushed interactions whenever the door opens. The sheikh got off at one of these recent stops.

Now they're in the air for good, the longest stretch so far. Spike shivers, his body deteriorating. His eyes, if they weren't veiled and someone were to get a good look at them, are empty. Vacant.

His greatest comfort is knowing Greg and the others will stop at nothing to trace his phone call. Ed will be found and returned safely to his wife and children.

Just as it should be.

Spike would never forgive himself if it were Ed on the floor of this plane, flying away to worlds unknown.

"You still alive over there?" Loud foot falls thud, thud, thud their way over to Spike's corner.

Saul punctuates his words with a puff of smoke in Spike's face. Spike can smell its waft around a scrunched face. He refuses to give Saul the satisfaction of coughing, even though breathing has become twice as hard in the last hour alone.

"I still don't think you're worth all this fuss, but I don't make the orders. Funny, my cell phone went missing and they found it on the other plane. Sloppy trick."

Spike's lips pinch. "Worth a shot. Where are we going?"

"You've been harder to sell so we're keeping you closer to home for now."

Something occurs to Spike, not for the first time. "You were taken, like the others."

"Right-o, officer. Grabbed during my very first undercover operation and flown where we're going, just like you."

Spike hesitates. "Did they torture you? You don't seem brainwashed like the others apparently were."

Saul is the one silent this time. The men are playing a wooden tile game near the cockpit, one Spike doesn't recognize.

"At first they did." Saul speaks quiet enough to keep this exchange private. "But being abandoned is an irreversible thing. Human beings aren't designed to be tossed aside, and to do so…it's a break you can't fix."

The words cut Spike down to the quick of his heart, all that pain bleeding into his chest cavity. He sucks in a quick breath.

Just like I abandoned Ed.

"The FBI never stopped looking for you," he says. "Or at least Hartford didn't."

There's a rumble of dark laughter and then Spike yelps at a pain on his neck—the hot end of the cigar. It leaves a blistering disk along his skin that smells horrid in the cramped space. He can't help but cough this time, and it sounds wet.

"Oh yes, he did. Had a memorial service and everything. Let's just say my Arab friend made me a better offer than a tombstone."

Sweat slicks along Spike's back, borne of adrenaline and his body's fight or flight response. "You're the only one who worked with him of your own free will."

"You got it." Saul shuffles and his voice sounds lower, closer, as if he's crouched down. "For him it's money. For me…"

"Revenge." Spike prays the cigar's sweet smoke doesn't come closer. Ulcers ringing his lungs throb, wail, pinch. "Bitterness out of what happened to you. That's why you hate Ed and I so much, what we represent."

Saul hums, a bitter, amused sound. "All that talk about brotherhood and no man left behind—it's a lie, officer. I was thrown away, 'missing in action,' for six months before he made me a deal, let alone the twenty hours you've been re-taken. No one is coming for you."

Saul's words are the dove released after a flood, the final messenger of a nearly extinct people. Spike feels their syllables pummeling inside his veins like a last man standing at the end of a battle no one wins.

"I know," says Spike, voice hollow and steady.

It will probably be the last thing I ever know.

After that, there is no more talking.

Even the men at the card table are tense, and when the plane does a smooth landing, it's so quiet that Spike hears a barely-there hissing. Tap, tap, tapping away, an all encompassing sound.

It takes Spike a minute to realize this particular sound is not man-made.

Only when the door opens for one final time, and a blanket of oven hot air bursts inside the cabin, does Spike understand. He begins to sweat in earnest, an instant reaction on his body's part, which is not helped by Ed's fleecy sweater.

And to his horror, the blindfold is taken off. He can see all the mercenaries' faces.

It seals the deal from theory into reality—death will be a mercy.

"There we are." Saul's sneering mug is much worse than the dark. He unties Spike to haul him to his feet, then zip ties his hands in front. "Can't have you tripping too much and breaking a leg. Then I'd finally get to shoot you."

Spike says nothing.

The air pressure here feels different, and, stepping out into the blinding sun, there is nothing—absolutely nothing—as far as his squinting eyes can see.

Pennsylvania was positively urban compared to this. There are no trees. No buildings. No bodies of water. Aside from a Humvee, their ride, and the tarmac, there is only miles upon miles of…

"You learn to love the sand," says Saul. "If you live that long."

Spike has read lots about the desert, has heard all of Sam's stories about tours in Afghanistan.

But this. This isn't Antoine de Saint-Exupery's rolling dunes, knee deep powder like in all the old romantic films.

This is hard, cracked earth, coated in a fine sienna mist. The grains of sand are what he heard, swirling around the belly of the plane.

They swirl around Spike too until he's forced into the back of the armoured hummer, and when he looks down, his sweater is turned grey. In the hummer's rear view mirror, Spike can only see his hair and he looks like an old man, coated with it.

How fitting. It's appropriate, somehow, since all of his life, its shortened wick, is to be burned up within the month. By that timeline, he's positively elderly. I'm sorry, Greg.

That's who he feels he's letting down the most, with this defeatist thinking. Now that Spike and Greg are finally close, building that relationship through blood, sweat, and grief, he's letting it go. Guilt simmers underneath the teardrop shape of Spike's bottom ribs. His only hope is that he goes down with dignity and that they find Ed alive. Anything else that happens to him doesn't matter, so long as his family is safe.

The heat is a dry one, but it still feels more roasting than Mama's stove top. Spike has no idea which desert this is, how equatorial or how close to the ocean.

They drive for hours and hours, long enough for night to fall. He dozes with his eyes open before resting his chin on his chest. Saul makes several calls throughout the day, until finally he gets through to his superior.

"We've landed and are on our way…are you sure you want to start him right away? We usually let them recuperate…"

A pause.

"Yes, sir. Glad you've found a buyer so soon." Saul chuckles into the shiny new burner cell at his ear. "Investment for an upcoming attack. Understood, sheikh. I'll have the chamber ready soon."


Manhunts or missing person cases are not in and of themselves a novel thing for Europe.

If one could have eyes in many places at once, regardless of time zones, they would see UN and state offices lit up at night in London, Paris, Geneva, Rome, and Bucharest.

Toronto and Washington federal buildings bustle with mad dash conference meetings and satellite telemetry and suspect profiles. Phone lines at the FBI headquarters are all lit up, blinking red.

For this particular missing persons case is not the usual fare. It seems a lot of hassle for two Canadians, not even federal agents at that.

It is the voice on the other end of his static filled cellphone call that has spurred everything. A Middle Eastern voice.

A well known voice. Sheikh Almasi's name alone sets off alarm bells around the world.

That, and it's the first time since the Vietnam War that a human brainwashing case has been confirmed. A whole host of cases. In reopening the abduction ring case, the truth of it all settles like noxious dust, that these men fired on their own friends because they'd lost all sense of self completely against their will. It's a domino effect across the North American Eastern seaboard and half of Europe. There are no leads, but that doesn't stop them from trying.

Almasi has virtually dropped off the map, nowhere to be found. Those with suspected ties to buying human assets have only just started to sing—to rat out the truth of what's been happening for the past seven months.

The market value of a trained human being, sold only to be used up like a tissue…the thought alone sends half the world's intelligence community into a furious whirlwind. There's no stopping it now.

Agents are called. Specialists consulted. Even the US President, waking for the day, gets a tiny line at the bottom about it on his daily memos.

The Canadian Prime Minister never went to bed at all.

"Parker?" asks an accented voice. "Is that his name?"

The young man's supervisor, also standing around the coffee machine with a dozen other Geneva and Interpol agents, nods. "He's been calling every half hour on the dot for the last three hours."

"I heard he even called the AG's office in Washington!" says one woman, gesturing with her coffee mug. "I have no idea how he got that number."

The young man's brow quirks. "Probably the same way he got our number—his new FBI buddy, Lazlo. The FBI is in serious trouble, man."

"Trouble?" the woman frowns.

Their supervisor sighs. "There's officially a White House investigation open into who cooperated with Almasi by covering up all these disappearances at the Bureau and who issued a kill order hit on the Canadian couple. Talk about a scandal."

"Wow!"

"Crazy, right?"

"I just can't believe it." The young man blinks fast. "Kidnapping trained agents and then selling them to warring countries it's…it sounds like something out of a science fiction."

"I hear Hartford stole government documents, lied about how much he knew, and faked calling in a tip."

The man scowls. "I never liked Hartford, when we worked together on that money laundering case a few years back."

"Ha!" The woman laughs. "That's nothing—I heard the SWAT lady gave one border guy a concussion! Using a pit maneuver!"

Their supervisor offers a grim smile. "Better that than the one who ran in front of a moving airplane. Even when it caught on fire."

"Wait, what—"

Suddenly, an agent runs into the break room and catches herself on the door frame. She's rosy, clutching a laptop. "We just got a tip!"

The supervisor does a double take. "Where? How? We haven't had intel for hours."

"It's a long story—an incredible one at that." She hands him a dossier. "The better question is, how fast can we get a satellite on these coordinates to scout the area?"

The man snaps his finger at an aid standing nearby. "Right now. General Marks owes me a favour."

Almasi's voice is the cell call heard around the world, a dry match to flames. The bonfire spreads faster than anyone anticipates or can keep up with. For they would never have had evidence to pursue him without that auditory proof.

Agencies come to know one man's voice when he calls for updates, his tenacity and insistence, no matter what station of person he's talking to—he even snaps at a Pentagon general without a hint of remorse—

At the center of it all, holding that lit match, is Greg Parker.