Riza really wanted a better plan. She'd initially shot down Jean's "driving in circles" idea because it would take too long and was agonizingly inefficient, and she was sure they could think of a better one. Even after they'd lowered the area to a manageable distance, Riza still hadn't wanted to cover every inch of ground looking for Al and Hughes. Unfortunately, they were running out of time and she was running out of the focus necessary to come up with anything else.

So now, after an hour's drive out to the phone tower, she'd been driving around in circles for thirty minutes. It was even more horrible than she'd feared.

"You could probably go faster. It's just a forest," Havoc said helpfully from beside her.

"Why don't you concentrate on navigating?" Riza suggested, resisting the urge to punch the Second Lieutenant squarely in the throat.

"Umm." She looked over to see Havoc squinting helplessly at a map, twisting it around and then craning his neck sideways, apparently expecting that to help somehow. "Umm, so we're over here…."

"Colonel Bastard is taking up way too much room," Ed yelled from the back of the car, and Riza flinched at the unexpected noise.

"My legs are longer than yours! I need more room than you do!"

"ARE YOU CALLING ME SHORT?!"

There was a sound that sounded suspiciously like a metal hand banging into a glass window - Ed must be flailing again. Honestly, Riza was glad to see that they'd been somewhat revitalized. Energy had been low when they'd left Havoc's place. Riza was still exhausted - her eyes felt dry and tight, she had a headache building at her temples, and she was finding it harder and harder to hold her head upright. Worse, this whole thing - the driving, the Kyrenol, even finding Hughes and Al - was starting to feel distant and a little fake. She felt like she was driving through a dream, which was a problem because the stakes were very, very high.

So she wasn't exactly annoyed at Ed and Roy's bickering. It was keeping them awake, and it was keeping her awake too. But still, she couldn't exactly have Ed destroying the inside of the car.

"Settle down, Edward," she said. "He didn't mean it."

"Come on, Lieutenant, not you too. He's being a bastard-"

"Be quiet, Fullmetal," Roy said. "I'm feeling carsick."

Roy had been feeling carsick since they'd started driving - he'd been complaining about it both loudly and frequently. Riza didn't remember him getting motion sick in the past, so she figured it must be another side effect of the cocktail of substances coursing through his body. So far, nothing had come of it.

"Whatever," Ed muttered. "Havoc, do you have any more of that jerky?"

"Yeah, sure," Havoc said, setting down the map for a moment. "I don't have that much left, but here, you can have the end-"

Roy made an annoyed huffing sound. "Fullmetal, I said I was feeling carsick. Don't you dare open that next to me-"

"But I'm hungry," Ed whined. "What are you gonna do, puke on me?"

Roy made a very dangerous sounding noise in the back of his throat, and Riza coughed. She knew she had to say something, anything, before Roy tore the boy's throat out. "Edward, are you still not sick at all from the meds?"

Ed paused to consider. "Well, I mean, maybe a little. But I think the beef jerky would help that, right?"

This pronouncement was met with a long moment of silence. "Chief-" Havoc started to say.

He was interrupted by the sound of all four alarms going off. The sound was so unexpected that Riza almost jerked the wheel. Havoc quickly turned his alarm off, and then reached over to turn off Riza's. It occurred to Riza that they could perhaps start setting only one alarm, now that they knew they would all stay together.

The air was still filled with a high, insistent beeping. "I can't find my meds," Ed said. "I swear I had them in my pocket…."

"Edward!" Riza said, loudly to be heard over the alarm. "Would you mind turning off your stopwatch while you look?"

Ed gave a loud, indignant huff, popping his medication into his mouth before shutting off the watch, and Riza was seconds away from snapping at him but managed to restrain herself. They were all tense, they were all exhausted, and some of them were pretty heavily medicated. She was not going to shout at Edward just for acting like the teenager he was, and she was going to remember that they were all trying their best.

"I'm carsick," Roy whined again, and Riza repeated her mantra over again. "Havoc, move your seat up. I said my legs were cramping. It's making me more nauseous."

Havoc jerked in surprise, dropping the map into his lap. "Umm…."

"Move your seat," Roy said impatiently, with a hint of the whine still in his voice. Riza could see him in the rearview mirror, arms crossed and looking half petulant and half utterly miserable.

"Umm, okay," Havoc said, casting a beseeching glance towards Riza as he moved the seat forward and folding his long legs underneath him in a position that couldn't possibly be comfortable.

Ordinarily, Riza would have intervened, but she currently didn't have enough brain space to stop the Colonel from bullying his Second Lieutenant. Havoc could survive being a little squished, and Roy could survive being a little carsick, and Ed could survive being a little tired. They would all be fine, as long as they could just find Alphonse and Lieutenant Colonel Hughes.

When they'd started, Ed had felt more awake than he had in over a day. He was going to see Al again, soon, and everything was going to be okay. But then "soon" had morphed into "after many, many hours, if at all," and Ed was starting to realize that this plan had the potential to take a very long time.

And that was frustrating. Not only that their plan wasn't an instant fix, but that Ed had actually thought that it might be. Ed could tell that he wasn't processing as well as he should be. It was more than the exhaustion, more than the headaches and the nausea and the shakes and the worry - there was something fundamentally wrong with the way his brain was working. He wasn't like this. He wasn't this emotional, or this fatalistic, or this angry. Ed knew himself well enough to admit that yes, he was all of those things sometimes, but this felt new and uncontrollable.

And worse than that, he felt slow and stupid. For Christ's sake, Havoc had been having better ideas over the past day or so than Ed, and that was unthinkable. Ed was the youngest State Alchemist to ever exist, and some stupid drug was stopping him cold.

Ed hadn't realized how much he relied on his mind until he felt it being taken away from him. Taking each fresh dose of the Kyrenol made a slight pang go through his heart.

"Hey, hey," Havoc said, sounding suddenly excited. "What is that?"

Ed's head jerked up - he hadn't realized he had gotten so deep in his own thoughts that he had actually started to nod off. It took him a second for his eyes to focus, but finally, he was able to lock on whatever Havoc was pointing at.

Smoke.

"Looks like it's from a chimney," Roy said.

"We've been driving for hours," Riza said. "This is the first sign of any sort of building that we've seen."

No one seemed to want to actually say aloud what they were all thinking. Ed cleared his throat. "It...it must be them. Right?"

"We have to at least check it out," Riza said. Her voice sounded completely flat, but it always did. Ed was pretty sure she was excited too, or she wouldn't have agreed to drive over there.

To get at the source of the smoke, they had to turn down a small dirt path off of the main road they'd been driving down. Ed would like to think they would have noticed and explored the path either way, but honestly, he wasn't sure. No one was really looking out the window anymore. Everyone was just staring straight ahead, as if they were just going to stumble onto Hughes and Al waiting for them in the middle of the road.

The drive down the path took maybe three minutes, and then a small cabin loomed out of the forest. There was nothing inherently suspicious about it, at least not from the outside, but Ed felt the hair on the back of his neck raise.

"This could just be someone's home," Riza said softly as they pulled into the driveway.

"I don't think so," Havoc said. "I mean...that's kinda weird, right?"

He gestured out the window. There was a huge van, of the type Ed would normally associate with transporting goods, parked outside. There were no obvious markers on it, and the windows were tinted.

"It's kinda weird," Roy agreed quietly.

Ed couldn't think of any rational explanation for what they were seeing. He'd gotten in trouble before for jumping the gun, for assuming things were a certain way without actually looking at all the evidence. But...now he just felt it. Al and Hughes must be in the cabin.

"This is it," Ed whispered, looking down as his hands began to shake. "Isn't it?"

"Think so," Havoc answered, reaching beneath his jacket and checking for the guns Ed knew he was carrying. Ed reached into his pocket, feeling for the Praxapan. He wasn't going to take it, not yet, but he wanted it ready.

"We need to confirm that they're here," Riza reminded them, putting the car in park and turning off the ignition. "Once we lay eyes on Alphonse or the Lieutenant Colonel, we take the Praxapan, but not before. We only get one shot at this."

Ed nodded, rolling the tiny vial around in his fingers. God, he was exhausted - every time he blinked, opening his eyes again was a challenge. The only thing that he wanted more than a nap was to see Al, and that was all that was keeping him going.

Even so, he didn't think he could take too much longer. Ed was running up against the limits of his own body. Even as he got out of the car and stood facing the house that held his brother, his second wind was just about limited to standing upright.

Of course, that was what the Praxapan was for. Ed pulled together his scattered thoughts and took a deep breath. Riza took a step forward, and both she and Havoc drew their guns.

"Let's take a look inside," Riza said, and crept towards the cabin door.

Al was really starting to worry about the Lieutenant Colonel. After he'd thrown up, Al had considered shouting for their kidnappers and trying to get him some medication, or water, or something. But Hughes didn't seem to think any of those things would help, and Al stayed silent. If he had really thought they had a chance of getting Hughes help, he would have called out, but as it was he thought it best if they stayed as quiet as possible. The less they talked to their kidnappers, the less of a chance they would be discovered.

But now, Al was beginning to question his decision again. Hughes had started out slumped against the wall, but then he'd slid down until he was curled on the floorboards, head resting on his elbow. His eyes were closed, one of them swollen shut. The left side of his face was still caked with blood, and his lip was swollen too. Even if he had been given food or water, Al thought his lip might have made it difficult to swallow.

He hadn't been responding to Al for a while. When Hughes had first thrown up, he'd been able to vaguely respond to Al's attempts at comfort. But for the last half hour or so, every one of Al's quiet comments had been met with silence.

Al promised himself that if Hughes hadn't revived a little in the next hour, then he would call for the men. Just sitting here waiting for rescue wouldn't do much good if Hughes wasn't alive to see it. He didn't think Hughes was that badly off, but he wasn't sure what exactly was in that IV line, and he didn't know how it would interact with a concussion (or possibly two).

Well before the hour was up, the door rattled and both men entered. The leader motioned one man over to Hughes, and he himself walked over to Al.

"Don't bother trying anything," the leader said, sounding almost bored. "We can always just hurt him."

"I won't," Al said quietly, as the man reached up and unlocked the chains. He kept his eyes on Hughes, whose handcuff was also being unlocked. "Where are you taking us?"

He didn't really expect an answer, but apparently the leader truly didn't see them as a threat anymore. As Al's second wrist came free, he stood back up and answered. "We're moving you. It's just a precaution, of course, but we can't have the military somehow tracking us down. This place was always meant to be temporary."

If Al had skin, it would have gone cold. He knew that Ed and the Colonel were looking for them, and had maybe even managed to figure out where they were by now. But none of that would do any good at all if they were moved before Ed and Roy could get to them.

"Hey! Get up!"

Still feeling slightly short of the breath he didn't need, Al looked over to the man standing by Hughes. The kidnapper was shoving him lightly as the Lieutenant Colonel struggled to get off the ground, arms trembling hard.

Panic made it hard for Al to concentrate. He'd known Hughes wasn't doing well. Of course he had. That had been obvious, and it had only grown more obvious with every passing hour. But this...it was clear Hughes wouldn't be able to stand, but at this point, it didn't even look like he would be able to get onto all fours. He was simply too weak.

"Stop it ," the man said harshly. "Get up."

"He's too weak!" Al yelled, suddenly furious. Couldn't they see that whatever they had done to him had gone too far? "You can't ask him to do this! You need to help him!"

"I-" Hughes was cut off with a helpless-sounding gag, and he lurched to the side to lean one shaking shoulder against the wall. He was still mostly lying down, and his eyes were closed. He was panting for breath.

The change had been so gradual that Al hadn't really noticed how pale he'd gotten in the past few hours, but now that he had seen it, it wasn't something he could unsee. Hughes' skin had taken on a waxy, sickly glow, and his eyes were red-rimmed and ill-looking. It was clear there was something very, very wrong with him.

Al had always suspected that Hughes had the same core of steely determination that Roy did, but it became obvious when he once again tried to push himself off the wall and into a standing position. He braced one hand on the ground and managed to get his knee most of the way underneath him, but then all of a sudden he reeled to the side and then he was lying on the ground again. He looked shocked, as though he'd really expected that to work. But there was also a scary blankness in his face - Al was reminded of the way Ed had been right after the automail surgery, when he'd been consumed by fever and drugs.

"We'll need to drag him," the leader said, bending down to unhook Hughes from the IV. The other man nodded, then lifted Hughes from under the armpit. Hughes flinched slightly at the sudden movement, but didn't react aside from that. His eyes didn't even open.

The leader grabbed him from the other side, and managed to haul him halfway off the ground. Then, they started dragging him across the wooden floor of the safehouse, ignoring his small moans of pain whenever he was jostled.

"Get up," the leader said when they got to the door of the cabin. He wasn't looking at Al, but it was clear who he was talking to. There wasn't a chance that he still thought Hughes might be able to stand.

Al probably would have obeyed anyways - his chances of escaping on his own seemed slim, since he wasn't willing to abandon Hughes. But at this point, they literally held Hughes' life in their hands. Al couldn't do anything to risk him getting hurt worse, so he got to his feet and made his way after them.

The two men holding Hughes dragged him out the door of the cabin, not to the van in the driveway that they'd arrived in, but to a normal car waiting beside it.

"Open the door," the leader said. "Get in."

Once again, Al obeyed. He climbed across the backseat, squishing his bulky body up against the window at the far end of the car as best he could. A second or so later, Hughes was pushed into the car. His head fell heavily against Al's shoulder, and Al winced at the solid-sounding thunk. But Hughes didn't react, aside from a slight flutter of his eyelids.

The leader slid into the driver's seat, then turned around and pointed a gun directly at Hughes' head. "Don't make a move, alchemist."

Then, he looked out the window and turned to the other man. "Go back inside, check around. All of the papers, the records, the notes - burn them. I'm not leaving a single scrap of evidence that could lead to us."

Without really meaning to, Al gave a soft, almost inaudible whimper. He knew he should be trying to be brave, but he just wasn't sure how Ed would find him now.

Roy pulled his ignition glove on as Havoc kicked open the door, falling back and covering the entrance. Roy stormed into the cabin, Praxapan in one hand as he readied his gloved fingers to snap with the other. The familiar feeling of battle swept him up and carried him, time somehow slowing down and speeding up simultaneously. The adrenaline wiped away the exhaustion.

The first thing he saw was the back wall of the room, set up with remnants of pins and string, along with a few tattered corners of paper. It looked as though someone had been planning something, but then they'd ended up leaving in a hurry.

The fierce surge of joy that Roy had felt upon seeing the wall began to drain, replaced with sick dread and disbelief.

"No," he whispered. "No, no-" He glanced around, hoping desperately that he was wrong, that maybe Hughes and Al were just being kept in another room in the tiny cabin. But as he looked around, an empty pair of handcuffs caught his eye, one end still hanging from the side wall. Next to it was an empty, crumpled IV bag, and on the opposite wall, large shackles were set up. Shackles that would hold even a gigantic suit of armor.

"Oh god," Roy whispered, sagging to his knees. He hung his head, his hair falling into his eyes, and put a hand on the floor in an effort to keep himself upright. "They aren't here."

Havoc pushed past him, and vanished into another room in the cabin. "Hey, this is where the fire is coming from!" he said. He sounded excited, which was stupid. The fire didn't mean anything, not now. None of this meant anything. Not when Hughes wasn't here.

"Oh," Havoc said, sounding a little sad. "This is all ashy...I think they were burning evidence here."

Roy felt a hand on his shoulder, and he looked up. Riza was standing over him, face filled with sympathy and grief. She didn't say anything, for which Roy was grateful. Riza wasn't one for empty platitudes.

Roy didn't feel like he was the leader of their little group. He thought he was perhaps supposed to be, but he was so sick and exhausted that he hadn't felt like that in a long time. But now...as hard as it was, Roy felt that he should pull himself together. If he fell apart now they...they might never find Hughes and Al.

"We can still find them," Roy said shakily. "We...we still have some time, and we still have the Praxapan…."

"Actually," said a shaky voice from the door, "um, about that…."

Roy swiveled around. Ed was standing in the doorway, shaking like a leaf. He had one hand braced on the doorframe.

"Fullmetal," Roy said dangerously, "what is going on?"

"I may have...uh, I may have...jumped the gun on the Praxapan a little."

Ed's eyes darted furiously around the room. He took a few unsteady steps forward, and Roy could hear his breath coming in harsh gasps.

"Edward," Riza moaned, and Roy wasn't sure he had ever heard her sound quite this defeated, "why-"

Suddenly, with a burst of speed almost too fast for Roy to follow, Ed whirled around and sank his fist into the wall. He pulled his hand back - his flesh hand - and Roy noticed a dent in the wall where Ed had punched it. If Ed was in pain, he didn't show it. That sounded about right. If Roy was remembering correctly from Ishval, Ed could probably be stabbed in the next fifteen minutes and he might not even notice.

"Fuck!" Ed yelled. "Fuck!"

Havoc poked his head back through the doorway. "Is everything okay in here?" he asked mildly.

"I thought...I thought Al was going to be here!" Ed was still screaming, but Roy wasn't sure he knew it. "I...I took my Praxapan."

"Oh," Havoc said, freezing in the doorway. "Fuck."

"Where is AL?" Ed screamed, and he was shaking so hard now that it looked like his limbs might fly apart.

Roy thought that he should maybe be doing something right about now, but it felt like every shred of strength had left his body, along with the last spark of hope. It felt like all he could do right now was just sit upright, and even that was asking a lot of him.

He simply didn't want to see a world without Hughes in it, and it was starting to look like he might have to.

"Hey, it's okay," Havoc cut in, nervously eying Ed, like he didn't quite trust him to keep his fists to himself. "Maybe we can find a clue, huh? Something that might tell us where they went?"

Ed peered up at Havoc through red-rimmed, massively dilated eyes. "Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that m-might work. Let's...yeah. I'm gonna…gonna find a clue, come on Ed, you just gotta find s-something, okay…."

Ed started pacing around the room, examining every inch of the walls and floors. He brushed past Roy, making a beeline for the empty handcuffs, and Roy could feel the twitching energy of his body just by sheer proximity.

Looking for clues…. It was nice of Havoc to distract the boy, but Roy knew that's all it would be. A distraction from the crushing disappointment of finding an empty room. The kidnappers had burned the evidence - they were cautious, prepared, and infinitely ready for the four of them. They weren't going to find anything.

On the edges of the room, Havoc began to wander around, peering confusedly into different nooks and crannies. Ed circled around them like a whirlwind, and with each successive circuit of the room watching him drained even more of Roy's energy.

"I'm going to help them, sir," Riza said quietly, and the pressure left his shoulder. Roy had forgotten that she was behind him, until she left. Still, he couldn't fault her. His men should help Ed look, that was good, that was the right thing to do. Let the boy keep some of his fragile hope, and Roy could just sit here and concentrate on losing his.