Jesse heard the plane a long time before she saw it, because the night was cloudy. Finally she saw its belly lights, and it landed. She tried to hide her terror, breathing deeply as her personal trainer had taught her. A ramp detached from the plane and extended towards her. Through the light flooding out of the plane, she could just see the silhouette of a man exiting the ramp. He moved like a predator, she thought. He left the plane slowly, as if he expected an ambush.

"Hel-" As she started to reach for his hand, he grabbed her shoulders and spun her around. She shrieked as he expertly knotted the cord around her wrists. After she had been bound, she felt a gun being place against her head.

"Now, I want to know exactly what happened to my apprentice." He growled in her ear.

She gathered up courage she hadn't known she had, and said, coolly, "Have you gone mad or something? Don't you recognize me?" This could go well for her, or very, very badly, and get her killed. At this point, though, she was so petrified that she didn't especially care. The man spun her around again, and this time shoved her to the ground. She landed hard, and had her breath knocked out.

He knelt in front of her and said "You know as well as I do that you're not Bastet-Mau. You're far younger than her, and she would never have allowed her calls to be traced. You didn't even know I was doing that, did you?" He looked away. "She was my apprentice. She was like family. And now you get to pay for her life." He pointed the gun at her again.

Jesse knew she should be afraid, but instead she felt only anger. She was not going to die like this. She was not going to put up with this creepy man's crap. Her foot lashed out, and she felt it connect with his gun. He didn't drop it, but it was knocked away from her. She expected him to yell or jump away in surprise, but instead he leaped forward and knocked her back, pinning her under his superior strength and weight. As he started to choke off her air supply, he suddenly seemed to think better of it and stood up. He looked down at her, trying to fill her lungs, and said,

"I won't kill you, not yet, not if you tell me how you managed to kill a trained assassin and then hack into her database."

She thought a moment. "I didn't mean to kill her! It was an accident. She came in through the window while I was asleep, and I wouldn't even have known she was there until it was too late." She shuddered slightly. "But she stepped on a creaky covered my mouth so I couldn't scream. We wrestled around for a while, and fell off the bed. The door was weird there, the frame stuck out a lot, and we rolled over there. I had her head in one hand, and her shoulders in the other, trying to keep her from biting..." The man laughed softly, in spite of himself. "...And..." She broke off, remembering the horrible crack that had followed, and the body under her going limp. "And what's this about hacking? I didn't hack anything." The man looked sharply at her.

"You didn't? Then how did you get into Mau's phone?"

"There was a weird voice that said something about DNA tracing, and I thought 'Uh oh, that's that plan gone', but then it said that I had access, and called me Bastet-Mau."

The man was quiet for a moment, then shook his head. He looked back at her.

"Come on. I'm going to take you back to the Complex, but I'm going to need something to call you other than 'girl'."

"My name's Jesse. Jesse Rheinhertz. Call me Jess. No one does." She sighed. "What should I call you?" She said, cheekily.

"I'm Apoc. Once we're back at the Complex, you're going to need to meet a few people. Namely my, er, partner... and the doctor. He may creep you out, but he won't actually hurt you without your consent, so you'll be Ok. Probably." He then extended his arm toward the ramp, and Jesse gave him a sidelong glance. She looked back at the country behind her, shook her head, and trotted resolutely up the ramp.

The man, Apoc, followed her and thumbed it closed. He went up to the cockpit door and rapped on it, then he sat next to Jesse, saw the utterly confused look she was giving the arrangement of safety restraints, and began to reach over to help her. She hissed, bared her teeth at him, an utterly Mauesque expression, and figured it out herself.

Once the jet was up in the air, Apoc started instructing Jesse in a few basic things she would need to know inside the Complex. Such as, how she should stay utterly silent around Dr. Caisson, he could probably turn anything she said into agreement to participate in an 'experiment'. And how, no matter what, she must look as if she had lived in the Complex for years. This meant that she would have seen countless lessons about properly concealing a body. Or random, unplanned sparring (fondly known as 'hallway sparring' by the student body). Apoc also taught her how to properly turn down a hallway sparring match. And, above all, he said, she must keep up the pretense of amnesia for her own safety at all times.

She listened patiently through all this, regarding Apoc evenly. She took it all in carefully. She thought all this stuff sounded rather-disturbing-to say the least, but it was too late to go back now. Why is he keeping me alive? She wondered. There's no reason for it... She snapped her attention back to what he was saying, and the plane flew on.