A/N: Thank you to the last anon guest review; that one really cracked me up. This chapter may potentially answer a few other questions addressed in other reviews, so hope you enjoy this one.

Also big trigger warning towards the end of the chapter for potential visual/auditory triggers because the description gets quite intense there.

"Why Toby?"

She slipped her now-cold coffee into the cup holder as Gilliam slid into the passenger seat beside her and slammed the door shut. She had asked where his fancy black sedan was—he was already at the police station, in the middle of processing the camera footage from the stores Jack had mentioned during interrogation, when the call for the new crime scene came in and he decided to hitch a ride with one of the other officers instead.

"I thought the kid had an alibi for the night of the previous murders." She plugged the key into the ignition and turned the engine on at the second try. "Plus, he's been in our holding cells since last night—"

"I'm not saying Rogers did it," Gilliam sighed with a strain in his breath as he secured the seat belt over his chest. "But he might know who did."

Her eyes rolled briefly to the back of her head as she released the parking brake and planted both hands on the steering wheel. "You know, maybe at this point in time, you'll stop speaking to me in ambiguous riddles and just go straight to the point—"

"It's his girlfriend."

She froze, then cocked an eyebrow as she turned to glare at him. "His girlfriend?"

The agent nodded but kept his gaze down as he fiddled with the strap of his watch. "Natalie Ouelette—otherwise known as the self-named serial killer Clockwork."

"Another serial—" Bishop paused to close her eyes, take a deep breath, before turning her gaze back forward as she began to put the car into drive. "Are they all part of some serial killing book club or something here?"

Gilliam tilted his head back and forth in uncomfortable uncertainty. "Something like that."

She scoffed, blinking several times in disbelief but kept her focus on the road as the car made a left turn to the direction of the main street.

"And she's about as crazy as they come—well, excluding Jeff, but she's pretty close," Gilliam continued. From her peripherals, she could see him gazing out the window, head bobbing slightly every now and then. "A thrill-seeker who kills for the sake of killing itself and just because she can. Like most of the others, we haven't been able to predict where she's going, or who she's going after next. One of the few things that we do know about her is the fact that she has ties with the one and only Tobias Rogers."

"Toby? Really?" She tried not to wince at the thought as she tried to maintain her focus on the road ahead of them. From what little she had seen from the youngest in the bunch, he seemed rather quiet and timid—didn't speak much unless spoken to. Never in a million years would she ever expect him to go for someone Gilliam literally described as 'about as crazy as they come'. "Why do you think it's her?"

Gilliam took a brief pause, then shook his head before finally responding. "I can't be a hundred percent sure about it, though. She has a signature killing style, but it doesn't come out cut and dry through the evidence. All we know is that she likes to leave a mess and enjoys toying with her victims. She can also be quite—" He coughed into an enclosed fist and cleared his throat. "—'artistic' with her work sometimes."

Bishop cocked another eyebrow. "Like pinning her victim up against the wall, painting the entire area in his blood and tearing his insides out for all of us to see?"

"Something like that," Gilliam admitted with a single nod. "Among other things. As I said, it is a weak connection at best, but it's an avenue worth taking a look at, considering the past two murders have been replicated to look like some of her 'mutual acquaintances', per se." He paused to take a deep breath and leaned his head back against the worn-out headrest. "If our suspect is emulating all these other killers from the same group of psychopaths, then—"

"Is there someone else in that group who could've done this?" She gave him a brief glance before turning back to the road and making a right turn. "Someone whose signature is copying other killers' M.O.s?"

Another shaking head. "Not that I know of, no. 'Group' itself is a very loose term to describe these people—these freaks of nature." He turned his head to gaze out the window again. "Most of them act on their own. Some of them know each other, but alliances are rare. Unless they're achieving some sort of common goal or share a common enemy, it's much more often to see them stabbing each other's backs the second they are turned."

"What about Jeff and Jack?" Bishop asked again, frowning. "You said those two were partners at one point, right?"

"And we see how Jack feels about his former partner now since his escape," he scoffed, no doubt thinking back to their interrogation last night. The eyeless man did use some particularly unkind words when speaking about the other killer, even harsher than those he used when speaking to the Foundation agent thus far.

"But I'm not entirely sure about those two." Gilliam cleared his throat as he shifted in his seat, turning his head to gaze out the window. "Though I do have a developing theory of sorts about that partnership of theirs. It's not anything pertinent to the case, of course—we've already confirmed Jack's alibi with that footage I retrieved last night, and if what he stated about Jeff was true, then neither of them have much involvement with our current string of murders other than as victims of framing." He paused then coughed again. "It's just something to think of after the case is over."

Bishop chewed on her bottom lip as she nodded. "And what about Toby and this clock killer—"

"Clockwork."

"Yeah." Interesting choice of name, she thought. "Were they like partners or something?"

He hummed and turned his head at a small angle. "Not quite. We have surveillance footage and a couple of cases with evidence to prove that those two were involved in them somehow."

"And you know they're together because?"

Though she trailed off, she frowned and turned to look at him when his response didn't come as quick as she expected it to be. "After we contained them—Rogers and Martin, since they were living together at the time as well—" He made another deep intake of breath, and exhaled out slowly. "We found a stuffed giraffe among Rogers' possessions."

She couldn't stop the snort blurting out of her nose when his words quickly registered in her mind. "A stuffed giraffe?" she questioned, cocking an eyebrow. "Like a kid's toy?"

"A kid's toy wouldn't have bloodstains, nor look like it had been ripped apart limb from limb, then stitched horribly back together into some shapeless form barely resembling what it once was," he scoffed, offering her a grimacing look before turning back forward with another sigh. "We have reason to believe it was the same stuffed giraffe Ouelette took from her family home after she murdered her parents and her brother."

Bishop blinked and sucked her lips behind her teeth. "Oh."

"Her aunt claimed it was her favorite," the agent continued, turning his head down. "For Toby to be in possession of said stuffed giraffe, we can assume she held him in quite significant regard, to say the least."

"Where's that giraffe now?" Bishop found herself asking, despite knowing it likely had nothing to do with the case at all. But she was curious—curious about these strange dynamics between apparent psychopaths and sociopaths, even if two of the three kept in the holding cells back at the station this moment appeared nothing like such.

Gilliam hummed quietly. "Rogers snatched it out of our evidence locker when they escaped containment. I've had some of your boys search the house for anything incriminating after we arrested them yesterday—no signs of the giraffe yet, but we did find two hatchets stashed underneath one of the beds upstairs, likely the ones Rogers used to kill his father and all his other victims while he was still active."

Her first instinct was to slam the brakes right then and there, but she managed to restrain herself, resorting to snapping her head towards the agent with a wide-eyed glare. "So, it's true?" she asked loudly. "Toby has taken lives of his own?"

There was some time before Gilliam answered her again, the silence beckoning her to make quick glances in his direction, trying to study his expression with what little glances she could catch of him.

"His father had a drinking problem," Gilliam finally spoke, beginning with a sigh as he sunk slightly in his seat. His voice was low and even—an indication that it was a difficult topic, as if his first few words hadn't told her that already. "His daughter—Toby's sister—filed a restraining order against him, but it was waived soon after she died."

The detective grew silent as her partner spoke. She remembered Skye mentioning something about Toby's father during yesterday's interrogation. Her hands remained planted on the steering wheel even as they arrived at a red light, arms and legs stiff as she turned to him momentarily with a softened gaze.

"How did she—"

"Car accident," he quickly replied with a small, solemn nod. "And Lord knows what a man with a history of aggression can do when he's had too much to drink. Of course, I don't condone murder, but a kid like Rogers with all these… conditions he had to live with his whole life—" He clicked his tongue and made a feeble scoff. "Kids can only take so much, you know?"

From the corner of her eyes, she saw the stream of cars heading sideways beginning to stop, forcing her to turn her head back to the road as she waited for the red light to promptly turn green.

"How old was he then?" she asked as she pressed her foot on the clutch and shifted gears.

"Seventeen, I believe—it was a year after Nichols' incident, so that's about four years ago."

The traffic light flashed green, and she slowly pressed on the accelerator to let the car drive forward again.

"He got a taste of blood after killing his father and didn't stop?"

In her peripherals, Gilliam shook his head. "Not quite." He took a long, deep breath as he shifted in his seat. "I know what I said yesterday, but Martin was right. The kid took lives, but it wasn't his choice—at least, not entirely."

She frowned. "What do you mean?"

"It's not something we can discuss right now," he answered instead, and rather quickly, too, without needing to give much thought into it. "But I figured it wouldn't be out of the question if the kid somehow decided to start killing again. Old habits die hard, you know—even if someone else enforced them upon you."

"But he has an alibi for all the murders so far," she said with a shake of her head, trying to ignore what he said about Toby's apparently enforced 'old habits'. They made a deal, she thought—him and Jack, about Toby and Skye's arrest. She was almost positive that in this situation, the FBI agent's authority alone would almost certainly trump hers. "Unless he somehow snuck out of his holding cell last night—"

"We're asking him about his girlfriend, remember?" Gilliam gave her a tight-lipped smile as he straightened his posture, but leaned his back fully against the worn-out car seat. "He's the only one of the three we haven't questioned yet. Let's just hope he'll be able to give us some answers."

There was a commotion the moment they arrived back at the station. Just a few steps down the back hall to where the holding cells were, Bishop heard voices calling frantically and loudly from the end of the hall, followed with two junior officers rushing past from one side of the room to another, before another one darted into the hallway they were in, almost rushing past them until she reached a hand out to stop him by the shoulder, forcing him to look up at them.

"Parsons." She frowned at his wide eyes and pale face, then glanced back down the hallway. "Hey, Parsons, what's going on?"

The poor man almost looked like he was about to pass out but blew out a sigh of relief when he finally recognized their faces. "Oh, Detective Bishop, and Special Agent Gilliam. I was about to call you—we, uh—" He paused in between his stammers, heaving short breaths as a bead of sweat rolled down his face. "We're not sure, ma'am. They've been sick all night, but it got worse this morning, and that monster thing has been demanding us to let them out—"

Bishop's frown deepened. "They?" Her eyes then blew wide in realization at what he just said, snapping her head around to meet her partner's gaze. "The monster—"

Gilliam nodded. "Jack."

"Ma'am—"

She didn't wait for Parsons to finish—she turned her heel around and immediately jogged towards the end of the hall with Gilliam following close behind her, arriving at the station's detention section within mere seconds, and caught the sound of banging metal and a series of loud, unbelievably harsh coughs before she could even reach the cell block their three detainees had been kept in since last night.

The detective froze upon hearing the coughing, and an image of Skye bent over the table in the interrogation room with her hand over her mouth flashed inside her head. It sounded worse this time, though—worse than that brief moment when the younger woman quite literally coughed out her own blood into those tissues she had to retrieve for her, the image of the deep crimson stain against the white still imprinted in the forefront of the detective's mind.

Whoever was suffocating moments ago had devolved into wheezing, forcing their entire lungs out like someone suffering from severe pneumonia—absolutely nothing like Skye's coughing from last afternoon.

"Let us out!" A deep voice shouted from the other end of the hall, from the exact same direction they were heading, followed with more banging against metal. She could hear the slight, deeper reverb echoing from those words, sending chills down her spine and almost gluing her feet into the ground until she forced herself to keep moving. "Agent Gilliam, you sonofabitch, let us out!"

"Jack?" Bishop found herself calling out, then quickened her pace until she reached the end of the hall and made a sharp turn right to where the voice was coming from. "Jack, what's—"

She caught a glimpse of him before she could finish speaking—the ash-skinned cannibal with his fingers wrapped around the slightly rusted metal bars that kept him confined in the tiny, four by six-inch holding cell to the right, his eyeless gaze directed straight towards the two cells opposite to him.

When she stopped to stare at him, he froze where he stood like a deer in headlights, then tilted his head and pointed his nose to the air for a brief second, as if sniffing out hers and Gilliam's presence within the confined space, before finally turning his head toward them with furrowed eyebrows.

"Detective Bishop," he gasped out, licking his lips as he stepped over to the leftmost edge of the cell door, pressing his face against the small gap in between two of the metal bars. "Detective, please, you have to help them—you have to let us out—"

"Jack." Her frown deepened, and she shook her head in confusion. "I can't—"

Another series of loud spewing from her left drew her attention towards the other two cells, but even as she peered inside, it took her another second to fully register exactly what was going on.

Skye was sitting on the ground of the cell closest to her, leaning her head and upper body against the far wall, making her almost completely hidden behind the metal half wall separating them. Her face was pale even under the dim light and the distance between them, and she was curled up in a fetal position with her legs overlapping each other, contorted at almost an uncomfortable angle, twitching and convulsing as though she was suffering a seizure—that was, until her body suddenly jerked and lurched forward, as another brutal wave of coughs overtook her, forcing her to double over and fold herself in half as her hands painfully clutched her chest and stomach, like she was choking on her own breath.

A splash of blood shot straight out of her mouth and spilt over the concrete floor beneath them, except unlike last time, it didn't stop there.

"Skye—"

The young woman's heaving breaths overlapped with yet another series of harsh choking coming from the cell right beside her, the furthest one from them—inside was a young man, almost about Jack's height and build but smaller and shorter, with chestnut brown curls on top of his head and his skin shaded in a deathlike pallor. She could see a fading scar stretching from where his mouth should be to halfway up his cheek, almost hidden behind the olive-green unbuttoned parka that he wore over his black shirt.

Like his cell neighbor, he too was completely incapacitated, the entire length of his body lying on the ground with one of his arms pinned underneath his head and his legs outstretched towards the cell door. He was also shaking, writhing on the ground in the midst of a similar seizure overwhelming his entire form until he suddenly shot up to a sitting position, only for his hands to fly straight in front of him to cover his mouth, allowing only a small burst of blood to spray from the crevices in between his fingers, before his entire upper body fell limply against the same wall Skye had been leaning against—the only thing separating the two friends from each other.

"Toby!"

Bishop twisted her body around to see Jack now frantically rattling against the metal bars keeping him apart from the rest of them, closing his eyes and gritting his teeth as his knuckles began to turn white from the sheer amount of effort he was putting into his grip around the bars.

"Wait, what's—" The detective felt her own breath expel from her lungs as she turned towards back towards the two in the opposite cells, glancing back and forth between the two of them before she found herself rushing towards the nearest cell, legs propelling her forward until one of her own hands pressed against one of the rusty metal bars to Skye's cell, eyes staring wide at the young woman curling on the floor in front of her. "Gilliam, what—what's going on? What's happening to them?"

"I don't know—"

Her eyes widened even further as she snapped her head in her partner's direction, glaring at him. "What? What do you mean, you don't know?"

"Let me help them! Let them out! Please, you have to—"

"Someone call an ambulance!" Bishop threw her head over her shoulder, wide eyes casting a glance back down the hallway just as one of the other officers made a turn towards their direction. "Call an ambulance—now!"

"No."

She inhaled sharply as she snapped her head back to the other cell, frowning at the eyeless man desperately gasping, leaning against his bars.

"No, an ambulance isn't gonna help them," he seethed through his teeth, voice straining from overuse. "The pills—they need the pills—"

"Pills?" She furrowed her eyebrows and shook her head. "W-What pills?"

"The pills they had at the house—" His breath gave out just as one of the two in front of her began coughing again, although this time, it sounded worse—a lot worse than it was before, enough to yank her attention back forward to catch them heaving out another choke of harsh air and more blood spilling over their enclosed hands.

"Skye?"

"Gilliam! Gilliam, you let them out of there, you sonofabitch—"

"The keys." Gilliam turned on his heel towards the detective, a bead of sweat sliding down the side of his face as his forehead twitched, before he spun around and faced the other end of the hallway. "Someone get me the keys to their cells—"

"Detective… Bishop."

Bishop forced herself to turn back to Skye the second she heard the latter's straining voice gasping out to her, moving forward to press herself closer against the bars. The brunette had lifted her head weakly to face the detective, her sunken features twisting into a wince the moment she did so. "Skye—"

"Officers!"

"—we're going to get help for you two, alright?" Bishop almost crouched down to meet the brunette's gaze until the latter's head fell again to spit out another few, larger droplets of blood. "Just hang in there, Skye—"

"Get out."

Bishop shook her head. "What? No—"

Skye clutched her collarbone as her neck lurched at an attempt to hold back another cough, throat gagging in the process. "It's too late—" There was a strange echo in her voice that Bishop almost missed—a deeper, hoarse voice following her words that made the detective frown deeper until the younger woman started hacking out more droplets of blood onto the floor, snapping Bishop out of whatever stupor she was briefly in. "It's too late. He's coming."

"What—" The detective shook her head again, more frantically this time. "No, Skye, we need to get you both out of here—"

"The pills."

Bishop snapped her head around at Jack's voice. His forehead was pressed firmly against the bars, his eyelids were closed and his lips curled back, snarling toward them with his sharpened teeth bared toward them.

"You need to get their pills," he growled through clenched teeth. "They must've confiscated them from the house—"

Beside her, Gilliam gasped. "The evidence locker."

"No, it's too late—"

Skye's wheezing voice had grown too inaudible for anyone to hear her—only the detective crouching down in front of her could, but the latter found herself frozen in place, panic overwhelming her mind and breaking her line of thought as she struggled to even stand back up again.

"Where's the evidence locker? We need to—"

Gilliam didn't get a chance to finish his demand, because the next thing Bishop saw was a wince overtaking his face and both his hands reaching up to clutch his temples, before he plummeted straight down to the ground, forced to double over with his knees being the only one left to support his entire weight.

"Gilliam!"

His face contorted briefly towards her with gritted teeth before a blood-curdling scream split the air around them, but it wasn't from him.

It came from right beside her.

She snapped her head around and caught sight of Skye back in a fetal position, mouth wide open as she screamed at the top of her lungs, hands clawing into her skull and almost tearing her own hair out of her scalp, but she couldn't do anything about it, not when another ear-piercing screech stabbed through the air like a dagger—the last thing she heard before all that filled her ears was nothing but ringing.

A loud, deafening, shrill ring that resounded in her ears, echoing through the depths of her skull and invading her mind unlike anything else. It felt like a needle drilling through her temple and straight into her brain, causing an unbearably agonizing pain to spike inside her head until there was nothing she could think about—nothing else she could feel but the ringing pain shrieking from inside her own head.

She didn't know when she had grounded herself to her knees, but with what little sliver of sane mind she had left inside her, she forced herself to peel her eyelids open, barely registering the entire world had tilted an entire ninety-degrees before her—barely registering the flickering lights and the black spots clouding her vision—until the static began to overwhelm her sight, clouding her mind and filling her ears, amplifying the ringing and creating yet another, more agonizing spike in her head the second it appeared, and a clog forming in her throat and blocking her windpipes, preventing her from screaming any louder than she could.

With what little strength she gathered onto her arms, she propped herself up only to lurch forward and choke out the clog in her throat, before collapsing back down to the ground with her hands wrapped tight around her aching neck, and a small sliver of warmth began to trail down from one of her nostrils.

Somehow, she managed to peel her eyes back open again—still trying to fight back the wave of unconsciousness threatening to overwhelm her—when whatever part of her mind that remained awake began to notice something different about what should've been the same blank wall she had been staring at for the past five seconds—something odd, flickering in and out of her vision as if it was flickering in and out of existence itself.

It was a black shoe, she thought at first, attached to what she assumed was a leg, disguised amongst static distortions that grew worse the longer her eyes remained on whatever figure appeared before them all. But as she forced her head to tilt skyward for as much as she could to follow her gaze up the limb until she reached at what she thought was a torso, she noticed it had the figure of a man, albeit much taller than any ordinary human man could possibly be. Its towering figure almost reached the high ceiling, dressed in what she soon realized to be a black suit, complete with a dark tie, its entire image still blinking in and out of sight as she struggled to remain awake as long as feasible.

And then her eyes finally trailed up to see its face, only to feel all the blood draining from her face when she saw nothing—absolutely nothing, but a plain, smooth layer of paper-white covering where she expected one's facial features should be, save for slight indentations in either sides that almost resembled wrinkles, though she merely caught a glimpse of its entire face before another wave of noise and static engulfed her perceiving senses, forcing her to shut her eyes tight and her lips to part once more as another shriek left her throat the moment the throbbing pain returned to her skull.

"No!" She couldn't tell who was yelling—could barely even hear her own wailing in her ears—but the echo resounded at the edge of earshot, like a strange, whispering reverb creeping up from the back of her own neck. "No, no—you fucking bastard! Toby! Skye—"

And then everything stopped.

Bishop inhaled the deepest, longest breath her lungs could take and manage, nostrils flaring at the sudden burst of fresh, cold air rushing through her nose and down her trachea before another clog formed in her throat, forcing her to expel it out in a series of harsh, painful but dry coughs. Her face fell back down cheek-first against the concrete immediately afterward, feeling as though she just vomited her entire lungs out, as the noise and the ringing began to dissipate, becoming a dimming echo at first until suddenly, it ceased to exist at all.

And yet, the throbbing in her head remained as dull flashes of aches like a pounding migraine, but she was able to muster enough strength into her arms to lift herself up so that, when she finally peeled her eyes open again, she was staring down at the concrete floor beneath her, watching in stunned silence as two drops of blood fell right below her hanging face.

With a shaking breath, she threw herself back into a sitting position, head and shoulders almost slamming against the metal bars of the cell door behind her. Her chest was heaving as if she was breathing for the first time, and warmth began to brim in her eyelids and trail down her philtrum.

In front of her, Gilliam was almost crawling on the floor until his arms came close to giving into themselves, and he was left with no choice but to throw himself back against one of the cell doors as well. He was pale and sweating, unlike she had ever seen him before—a small trail of red streaked down from one of his nostrils down to his lip.

The room hadn't stopped spinning, but the lights were no longer flickering—no longer giving her a sense that she was suffering from some epileptic seizure or something worse.

All that filled the large space around them were their heaving breaths until she heard the now-familiar sound of banging against metal again, causing her to turn her head towards its source—Jack's cell.

"Skye?" the eyeless cannibal gasped out. Her eyes had yet to focus in on him—all she saw of him was a dark blur almost curled up at the edge of the cell door, slowly standing up before a blackness enclosed around one section of the rusting bars—a weak limb that looked like it was barely attached to his bending figure. "Toby?"

A silent echo was all that responded back to him, save for their collective billowing gasps of air that seemed to resound all over the empty space of the cell block.

"No." His voice was straining into a stifled whisper, as he wrapped his other hand around the adjacent metal bar and leaned his head once more against the gap, trying and undoubtedly failing to squeeze his skull through the open crevice. "No, no, no—"

He then began to lean back slightly, straightening his fragile posture until all of a sudden his arms began to tense and buckle before he started violently shaking the bars, shoving against them as his lips curled slightly back to show his gritted shark-like teeth as a low growl began to emanate from him.

"Jack—" The rattling of the bars was enough to snap her entire consciousness back into her body and gather all the energy left inside her to push herself up to a standing position before propelling herself forward. She dragged herself all the way over to his cell with her arm stretched out in front of her, almost stumbling over her own feet as she made her way there. "Jack, stop." Slipping her arm through the narrow gap, she caught him by his shoulder, holding him in a vice grip and digging her nails into the fabric of his jacket hoping it would stop him. "Jack, stop, you're going to hurt yourself—"

He almost yanked her arm with him as he tore himself away from the metal bars and was repelled a few steps back. The growl slowly began growing louder as his snarl grew wider, his eyeless gaze glowing in her direction, just slightly past her shoulder though it was more than enough to send her reeling back a few steps of her own as spiders began to crawl up her spine again.

"They're gone," he wheezed out through gasping breaths, and despite his gravelling voice, she could see the way his jaw was trembling, even more so at the sheer force at which he was clenching his teeth together. "They're gone again, and it's all your fault."

Her breath caught stuck in her throat for a moment before she had to consciously choke it out herself, eyebrows furrowing as she struggled to process his words. "Jack, what are you—"

"He took them!" The volume of his voice startled her, almost shoving her even further back until she heard the crack in his voice—a brief, slight glimpse of the conflicting emotions churning inside him, when his feral façade suddenly broke away, crumbling right before her eyes as his jaw loosened and his lips fell back to cover his teeth, his face stretching into a pained grimace while his stare lingered in the direction in front of him. "That bastard found them here and he took them—and now, they're gone again, and it's all your fault."

Bishop shook her head. "Jack, who—"

Her breath gave away in one single exhale the moment she realized exactly what he was talking about, her eyes growing wide as she twisted her head around her shoulder to peer into the two cells opposite to him.

She expected to see two people there, one in each cell, still lying on the ground or leaning against the wall, silent and unmoving, still trying to recover from what the hell just happened, same as she was, and as Gilliam was on the floor beside her.

Instead, all she saw in the cells were the bare furniture they came with—a steel bench leaning against one side of the confined space and a steel toilet-sink unit built into the back walls—and small puddles of blood surrounded with crimson droplets in the middle of the floors of each cell.

There were absolutely no signs of Toby nor Skye anywhere inside them.

Staring wide-eyed at the small red pools, Bishop slowly began to approach them, still with heaving breaths as her mind struggled to process what she was seeing in front of her.

"Wh—what—" She snapped her head around to find Gilliam in the midst of pulling himself up to his feet, his eyes also situated straight into the two cells opposite to him. "Gilliam—"

"Where are they?" The words slipped quietly through his barely-moving lips, before his dark eyes wandered back up to the detective's, meeting her perplexed, disbelieving gaze. "Where the hell are they, Jack—"

"He took them."

The pain in Jack's voice drew their attention back to the dark-skinned cannibal, who had turned his head down as his body fell against the side wall, leaning almost his entire weight against it before he choked out what she was absolutely sure was a bitter sob.

"The Operator." The eyeless man bowed his head down and raked his fingers through his scalp as one sob turned into two. "He took them again."