Although Buffy had assured him that he was fitter than most of her fighters, Giles was stumbling with exhaustion by the time they found the first patrol group. Tim told them that they were to come in, and they offered to share their meal and campfire with Giles' group. Giles took advantage of neither, as he was asleep almost before he finished collapsing to the ground.

The next "day" Giles and his two companions bid farewell to the other patrol and then the two groups headed in opposite directions: the others headed back towards home base while the three members of his small group went looking for the next patrol. Giles felt vaguely guilty that he hadn't learned the names of any of the people from the other group, but this feeling was short-lived. Another day filled with long brutal hours of walking and virtually no rests exorcised all feelings of regret rather nicely ... as well as all other cogent thoughts. The end of the second march was just like the first, although at least Giles managed to stay awake long enough to eat this time.

When the third "day" turned out to be identical to the other two, Giles began longing for the chance to lay down and die. Or maybe he was already dead; he certainly felt like a zombie. Luckily, however, Michelle did not succumb to the same mind-numbing exhaustion that had overpowered Giles and Tim. Hours (perhaps days?) after they had left the second camp, Michelle spotted a group of "slavers." Giles had heard these creatures referenced several times, and was very curious to see them.

Tim ordered Giles and Michelle to press close to the wall, but the Watcher snuck a peek around the corner. They were hideous. The "slavers" had dirty brown skulls, with patches of raw oozing skin showing through in spots, and glowing red eyes. Giles gagged and plugged his nose when he realized that the odor of decay that they were emitting was even less pleasant than their appearance. Michelle shot him a quick look of sympathy, and Giles wondered what sorts of torments these creatures had visited upon her. They looked capable of anything.

It took several minutes for the column to march past. Giles spent the time mentally reviewing his list of warrior creatures from distant demon dimensions, trying to place Tim's "slavers." The only one that even seemed close was the Jai'il, but that seemed unlikely. The Jai'il were certainly vicious enough to capture humans and throw them into slavery, but traditionally they were too obsessed with their constant fratricidal wars to bother with other races. He couldn't understand why they would go to the effort to enslave a relatively weak race such as humans ... unless they had sustained massive losses in one of their pointless wars. Were they suffering a labor shortage? If so, then Buffy could probably make allies with one of the other clans. Unless human laborers were one of the spoils of war over which the various clans fought... Hmmm, what were the main Jai'il clans again? The Kvu'ot, the Osh-shutz, the Krayzeem, and one other that he couldn't recall for the life of him. Still, he was pleased to remember that much, and hoped that Buffy would be able to make use of some of his knowledge.

His thoughts were broken when Tim touched his shoulder and whispered, "Let's go. I think they're gone, but we need to move quietly just in case." Giles and Michelle nodded silently, and they were off.

Their pace was slower than before, as they made an extra effort to move silently and cover up their tracks. But in the end, it was dumb luck that proved to be their undoing. Michelle, who was in point, ran headfirst into a Jai'il who was rounding a corner in the tunnels at the exact same moment. Luckily it was a small patrol rather than a column like the one they had encountered earlier, but they were still outnumbered by seven to three.

Within the blink of an eye, Giles was tackled by two demons. They were even more fearsome and pungent in close quarters than they had been at a distance, and Giles had to admit that the chances of them getting out of here alive were very slim indeed. The Jai'il were just as strong as they looked–Christ, they were strong! – and close quarters made the fighting even more brutal.

The narrowness of the corridors also made it impossible for Giles to check on the progress of his two companions, so the Watcher decided that he needed to focus upon his own survival. To his delight, Giles soon discovered that the blade that Buffy had given him was stronger than it seemed. Within five minutes or so (given the inherent difficulty of gauging the passage of time while in combat), he managed to decapitate both of his original Jai'il and stab a third through the heart. Giles grinned happily when he noted that he had come out of the fight with nothing worse to show for it than some small scrapes and the beginnings of a large bruise on his thigh.

After checking himself for injuries, Giles swung around to see if any of his companions needed help. He abruptly lost his grin. Tim was surrounded by three Jai'il; he was still holding his own, but the blood pouring from his shoulder suggested that he wouldn't be able to do so for long. Hell, with that kind of blood flow he wouldn't even be conscious for long. Michelle was dead. Tiredly lifting his sword, Giles went to rejoin the fight ... only to be stopped by a hand on his shoulder.

The Watcher spun around to face this new opponent, sword already raised. It was a group of nine humans. Of course, this must be the third patrol that they were sent to find! Giles slumped to the ground in exhaustion, and watched the newcomers quickly dispatch the three remaining Jai'il. One of them stayed to talk to Giles. "I don't recognize you, and I sure don't recognize those clothes!"

"I'm Rupert Giles, a friend of Buffy's," he breathed tiredly. "I came below to find her."

"Giles," the stranger asked. "Like her son?"

Giles was surprised, though he supposed he shouldn't be. This was a very insular community, so it made sense that all its members should be familiar with each other. "Yes. Buffy did name Giles after me." He grinned for a moment. "Very nice of her, I thought."

"Yeah, well your coming down to hell after her is pretty nice too." The man looked bitter for a moment. "She's probably the only person down here who has anybody who would care enough to do that." He abruptly stuck out his hand to help the newcomer stand up, and Giles gratefully accepted the assistance. "I'm Hugh. Are you okay to walk? It's gonna be tough carrying both you and Tim, but we can do it if we have to."

"I'm fine," Giles assured Hugh. He looked at Michelle, and then muttered under his breath, "I'm fine." Hugh's eyes flashed in sympathetic recognition, and Giles quickly blinked away some incipient tears. "In fact, why don't I leave the guard duty to you and your oh-so-timely friends, while I carry Tim?"

Hugh raked a critical eye over Giles, apparently debating the wisdom of letting him carry Tim when he was so obviously exhausted, but in the end he just nodded. "Let's get back to our camp. It's pretty secure, so we can stay there a day or two."

"Thank-you. That would be..." Giles hesitated, trying to think of a word that could adequately express his gratitude for a day of rest. Finally, he settled on, "That would be lovely."

Hugh nodded again, and then turned to his people. "Come on, let's get back to camp. The slavers will be looking for these dudes soon, and I don't want to be here when they find em."

When Giles went to support Tim under his uninjured shoulder, the wounded man gave him an inscrutable look. "You handled yourself pretty well. I see now why Buffy trusts you." Giles smiled shyly, oddly touched to have earned the trust of such a hard-bitten man. Tim grinned back and added, "I'm still not sure that I like you though."

"Fair enough," Giles answered lightly. "I'm not sure that I like you."

"Can't think of anybody who does," Tim chuckled.

Giles chuckled quietly with Tim until he noticed that his companion was terribly pale, and getting more so by the moment. The laughter immediately died in his throat, and he wondered how these brave people were able to laugh at all under these circumstances. The thought of Buffy living this way for a decade or more nearly crushed him.

~*~*~

They stayed at the outpost camp for two days, waiting for Tim to recover enough to travel. While they waited, Giles went out on five short patrols with various members of the outpost, which resulted in two brief and bloodless skirmishes. Because these patrols were short, Giles was able to rest up completely during his down time in camp. While in camp, the nine members of the outpost told Giles everything that he wanted to know about their small community. What he heard horrified him.

All of the men and women that he had met below had been taken as teenagers or children, sometime within the last twenty-four hours. Apparently, the Osh-shutz members of the Jai'il clan (or so Giles assumed them to be, when one middle-aged woman mentioned that Buffy always called them the "Jell-O Shots") had fashioned human masks for themselves. Using these disguises, the Jai'il Osh-shutz went to various human cities around the world looking for young runaways. They would find the most desperate children and entice them into their homeless shelters. Once the children entered these shelters, they were transported here, to the Osh-shutz's home dimension, and forced to work at various manufacturing jobs. When the children became too old and infirm to maintain productivity, they were returned to their city of origin and left to die of old age. An efficient method for the Osh-shutz to solve their labor problem, but a bleak existence for the young people who were tricked into coming here.

Apparently, the Osh-shutz had always been brutal, but they became far more so about twenty years ago when an entire work cell had escaped one night during rest hours. The Osh-shutz had been furious, killing every member of the cells on either side of the missing dorm room, and had thereafter been very quick to kill any human who didn't obey them immediately and without question. There had been absolutely no resistance of any kind from the day of that mass escape ... until Buffy's arrival.

Each member of the outpost shared his or her recollection of that day, how glorious Buffy had been in her defiance, how fearless and how flippant. Their descriptions were so vivid that Giles could almost believe that he had witnessed this scene for himself. And each described how terrified they had been by her courage, for every slave knew that there was a stiff penalty to be paid for challenging the Jai'il, and each of them expected to be the one to pay it. Their fears seemed to come true when Buffy left them to their fates in the company of a very small group. And then a miracle had occurred: she came back.

None of the slaves had dreamed that an escapee would ever come back, but Buffy had done just that. Every day she attacked the Jai'il, and every day she liberated a few slaves. Some days she freed twenty or thirty at a time, and some days only one ... but she never failed to do what she could.

It had been tough going at first, because she had to work on her own. True, she trained every slave that she freed how to fight, but all of them were in very poor shape for months after they were rescued. Everything turned around for her, however, when she encountered the work cell that had escaped a decade or so before her arrival. Their original crew of twenty men and women had been whittled down to eight, but those eight were all trained fighters in excellent shape. (Giles was not surprised to learn that Tim had been one of those original escapees, for he had the hard look of a man who had been fighting for a very long time.) There might have been conflicts between Buffy and the other group were it not for the leader of the work cell. Jahari Davis quickly recognized the fact that Buffy was a better tactician and warrior than he was, so he turned leadership of his group over to her. And he fell in love with her.

Everyone agreed that Buffy and Jahari had been an unstoppable team. Buffy was the strategist; Jahari was the morale officer. Buffy had decided when and where they should strike, and then fought alone; Jahari had led everyone else into battle, following Buffy's battle plans but his own instincts once he was on the field. The two of them together were a formidable force, and thanks to them, there were no longer any humans still serving the Osh-shutz.

Eventually the Osh-shutz realized that the humans had become a definite threat to them, one that was looming larger and larger by the day. Instead of waiting for the humans to raid them, they began seeking the humans out and attacking them. This backfired, however, when the humans began inflicting some extremely severe defeats upon the demons. In fact, Buffy and Jahari were on the verge of wiping the Osh-shutz out altogether when a catastrophe occurred. Jahari was killed during a surprise attack upon the human colony.

Apparently Jahari had defended the colony well, killing a large number of Jai'il and giving most of the humans an opportunity to escape, but it was still a devastating loss. Not only had they lost one of their leaders, but Buffy--their surviving leader--had lost her drive and ambition along with her mate. Luckily, the Osh-shutz had lost a great deal more and were unable to take advantage of the humans' loss of focus. So, for two years, it had been a stalemate between the two groups. The humans and the Osh-shutz continued to patrol, and sometimes they fought short bitter skirmishes, but mostly they avoided each other. Both had lost too much to the other.

Giles was beginning to understand what this rescue meant to these people. They had all come to accept that this was how they were going to lead the rest of their lives, constantly fighting and scratching for their existence; and now, he had come to lead them back to their own dimension. It was a heady feeling, to know that he had given these people hope for the first time in decades, but this euphoria was tempered with an intense anxiety. *He* had crashed into their lives with promises of returning home, so that meant that *he* was responsible for making sure that they got there. Oh, he knew that no one had made him accountable for his or her escape, but the feeling lingered anyway.

The edginess he felt finally caused him to talk to Hugh. "Um, while I have appreciated your hospitality a great deal, I really feel, uh, what I mean to say is, shouldn't we be pressing on?"

Hugh gave him a hard look. "You think I don't want that? I do, but take a look at Tim. He's getting worse, not better, and it's going to take two men just to move him. I can't leave the group with less than five fighters, so that leaves just two people to send with you."

Giles was confused. "But, when Buffy originally sent us out, there were only three of us. I don't understand the problem."

Hugh sighed in frustration and ran his hands through his hair. "The problem is that Tim is easily worth two fighters. I saw what you did to your three slavers, and I guess you count for two as well, so Buffy figured that you could get by with three. See, I don't have any fighters that are anywhere near Tim's ability, so two people aren't really gonna do ya. But two people are all I have, unless Tim gets better. Or dies. So we're stuck, until Tim makes up his mind."

"Do you want the portal to close, because we didn't get there in time," Giles asked harshly. "Buffy needs us back at home base, helping to make sure the colony is protected while it moves. And that last patrol deserves to know that they are going home. I say eight of you back at home base is better than none; leave me with two people who know their way to the next patrol and we'll take our chances."

Hugh glared at Giles for a moment, and then gave a curt nod. "Fine. Which patrol are you going to find?"

"I, um, I–"

"You don't know, do you," asked Hugh nastily. Giles nodded bashfully, and Hugh threw his hands up in the air. "Fine. We'll ask Tim." Before Giles could bend down to waken the injured man, however, Hugh grabbed him roughly by the arm. "Listen, English guy, you'd better be *damn* careful with my people. I'll be *really* pissed off if you get any of them killed." Giles flinched. Hugh's expression became less fierce, but he still didn't let go of Giles. "I didn't mean it like that. It's not your fault that Michelle died; you had your own slavers to worry about. But still, don't get my people killed."

"I will do my best," Giles assured his new friend.

Hugh released the Watcher and smiled at him. "And hey, don't get yourself killed either. Something tells me that Buffy wouldn't like it, and I would hate to have to be the one to tell her."

Giles grinned boyishly at him. "As a young friend of mine recently told me, that's part of our whole mission statement. Don't get killed.' Sage advice, that, and I intend to follow it."

Hugh nodded thoughtfully. "Cool."