Note: So, like, less than a week after I got my ears pierced, I went in for surgery (who needs tonsils?) and of course had to remove the earrings from my swollen, sensitive, one-bacterium-away-from-infected earlobes; the backs stuck to the posts and I, being only seven, couldn't bring myself to tug hard enough to pull them free. My mom had to literally yank them out, and then the nurses had to bring me cotton swabs and antiseptic for the oozing, bleeding holes. I think that hurt more than the actual surgery. This is also why I stopped at one piercing per ear.

By the time Josh keyed in the security code and practically tore open the van's door, it had been full dark for at least three or four hours. His watch was telling him that that was because it was almost ten o'clock at night. A two-hour drive had somehow, without the aid of radioactive particles, hideously mutated into five. The best thing Josh could say about it was that he'd gotten a free roadside concert while the mandolin player had hiked to the nearest gas station and back. Too bad he wasn't a fan of bluegrass.

"Thanks for the ride!" he called to their good Samaritans, who honked back enthusiastically before chugging out of the hotel parking lot.

"Move it," Kat said, pushing past him and clambering up the short metal steps. "I have got to get these earrings out."

"We're still talking about the earrings?" he asked her, following her in and shutting the door firmly behind them. "Hey, Berto! You home, bro?"

He got silence for an answer to both his questions - silence and the door of van's ridiculously small bathroom banging against the wall.

"Guess not," he muttered, rotating his shoulder and grimacing slightly. It still ached from the impromptu mountain slide, and being trapped in a vehicle with Ethan hadn't made it feel any better. Team Raptor was at another hotel, one further down the road than Team Steel's, and Josh reveled in the distance of several city blocks between himself and that voice.

He made his way into the ridiculously small living room/dining room and saw no evidence that Berto had been there since breakfast - no food, no DVDs, no computer junk spread out all over the place. The trade show must have indeed kept him busy all day, but the trade show had to be done by ten, right?

Josh grabbed his cell phone from its unofficial resting place in a cupholder and hit Berto's number on speed dial. There was no need to worry, he was almost positive of that; Berto had probably found an all-night buffet or something -

A sudden "Ow!" from the bathroom made him pause in mid-thought and stick his head around the corner, concerned. "Kat?"

"Ow, ow, ow! These stupid things - they might as well be welded to my head!"

Sensing that anything along the line of "I told you so" might prove to be fatal, Josh went instead with a vaguely patronizing, "Just don't break anything, okay?"

She started to come back with something snarled and surly, but the exact details were lost when the phone at Josh's ear rang through to Berto's voice message. Josh hung up, thought for a moment, and then dialed his own voice mailbox to see if there was a message from their missing teammate.

There wasn't, but there were a few from some other people.

The very brief message ("Joshua. Call me when you get the water out of your ears.") from his father scared him the most, especially the part where Jefferson had used his full first name. The four from the trade show organizers confused him - he didn't know why the N-Tek booth had been closed from three o'clock on, either. The two from the orientation meeting, both with the same irritated voice asking where the devil was anyone from the N-Tek jump group? - those made him worry.

"Kat, we might have a problem," he said, hanging up and hazarding an approach to the bathroom. "And it's not your earrings."

She gave him the beginning of a really good death glare in the mirror, but his worry must have shown because the evil eye vanished just as quickly as it'd appeared. "Why? Where's Berto?"

"I dunno, but he hasn't been at the trade show since three and he never showed at the orientation meeting."

She reached up and gingerly touched the metal rings in her wounded ear, clearly mulling things over. He had to admit that the ear looked bad; what had been puffy and red at eleven in the morning was bruised and swollen and - green? was it actually green? - at ten at night. "That's not good."

He rested his hands on his hips and tried to neither gag at her ear nor let the worry for Berto show overmuch. "Yeah."

"So... what are we gonna do?"

He was going to answer, say something about firing up the computer and locating Berto's tracking device, when his cell phone shrilled. Josh flipped it open quickly, hoping to hear Berto on the other end. "Hello?"

"Oh, hey, Josh," Trip said. "Is Carlie there?"

Josh pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at it as though it might be a secret DREAD device, planted by Psycho in the hopes of utterly destroying his every chance at a life free from Team Raptor. The logo of the cell company stared at him impassively, denying it all. He reluctantly returned the phone to his head and said, "No, why?"

"Oh. She's like, not here, and she left a note saying something about the trade show, and like N-Tek and stuff, and we thought maybe... I dunno."

In the background Josh heard Ethan griping, quite clearly, about how if Carlie was so hot to join the other side, maybe they didn't want her for a manager after all.

Trip responded to that with a mild, "Dude, be cool," which apparently was the closest thing to a rebuke or an insult that a loyal puppy like Trip could make.

"Hang on," Josh said to everyone on the other end of the line, then put his hand over the receiver - over the whole phone, actually - and turned an accusatory glare on Kat. "Trip Thompson has my cell phone number?"

"Mine got trashed?" she reminded him, folding her arms across her chest. "What's he want?"

"No," Josh told her, "I won't make that joke. It's beneath me."

The evil eye returned full force. With the ear and the scowl, she looked a fair bit more intimidating than usual. Almost like a creature from a horror movie. Which he was totally not going to tell her, because he wanted to make it out of the van alive.

He relented on the heckling and cut to the chase: "He wants to know if we've seen Carlie, 'cause they can't find her."

Her eyebrow went up sharply, and Josh knew for certain that she was thinking the exact same thing that he was - if Fate had thrown Josh and Ethan together all day, then It had probably brought Carlie into Berto's orbit as well. Only fair to spread things around. "Berto's missing, Carlie's missing - ten bucks they're missing together."

"Gotcha." He uncovered the phone and resumed his conversation with the patiently waiting Trip. "I think she's with Berto. We're gonna go pick him up now."

"Oh, okay, cool," Trip said, relieved and happy all at once. "Hey, can I talk to K-"

Josh closed the phone and ended the connection. "Whoops," he said brightly.

"That was rude."

"What's up with you turning into Miss Manners all of a sudden?"

"Would you just go find Berto before we all die of old age?"

Josh turned to walk the three big steps to Berto's computer, calling, "You do like him."

"What if I do?" she called back, and even though it was laden with sarcasm, the question brought him up short. What if she did?

Then it was none of his business, he decided, and moved on to the more important matter of tracking down Berto before he could let what was none of his business bother him.

Berto had designed the trackers, and built them into watches that all three Team Steel members wore. The mountains might interfere with the signals, but Josh could always order an N-Tek satellite to swing over the state - Max Steel could do stuff like that if he felt like it, and nevermind the important research the satellite was tasked for in the first place - and that would do the trick.

It would also alert Jefferson Smith, so Josh was hoping he wouldn't need to use a satellite.

The tracker program was on the same computer that ran the biolink, and that was on Berto's laptop. Josh had never tried to actually use it, but he'd seen it done enough times that he didn't think it would be a problem. The laptop was on Berto's bunk, right next to the portable transphasic regenerator. Josh glanced at the latter wistfully, but he really didn't know how to run that; somehow, whenever he was in a position to observe it in operation, he was kinda more focused on living. Berto first, T-juice second.

"I still think he's at a buffet," Josh said under his breath while he powered up the computer. His bro loved free and/or cheap food like most people loved oxygen. But it wouldn't hurt to check.

He found the program easily enough and managed to decipher the technogeek, at least partly, and from there it was simple to get the program to look for Berto. Josh zoomed in on the resulting coordinates, trying to see where he was, but all the program would show was where the tracker had been. Current location unknown; last position... just beside the parallel lines of the bridge.

After a bit of effort, Josh finagled the machine into showing him the tracker's path for the entire time it had been turned on. That proved to be a very short arc indeed, but it went unerringly for the side of the bridge. And then the signal was lost. Not terminated - lost. The computer insisted the tracker was still on, but that it couldn't triangulate Berto's position.

Josh was not exactly an academic, but he knew the general story of how signals were transmitted, and he knew how they could be blocked. Several tons of steel would block anything the tracker could put out - but only if Berto was directly beneath it.

"I got the earrings out," Kat reported, leaning against the door and jingling her jewelry in one fisted hand. Her ear was now bruised, swollen, and very naked. She still looked like she could be in a horror flick. Maybe as an extra instead of the featured monster.

Josh turned the laptop so she could see the monitor and the glowing green trail of dots. "I found Berto. He was headed for the New River Gorge Bridge when his tracker's signal was blocked, and he's still there."

They exchanged a look that did a number of things all at once: indicated their shared concern for Berto, tabled indefinitely the petty bickering, and instantly erased the weariness of their very long day.

"Bikes are fueled and ready to go," she said, pushing off of the doorframe and unceremoniously tossing her precious earrings in her own bunk.

Josh stood and left the laptop running, retrieving his grappling gun from his backpack and following Kat to the rear of the van, where the motorbikes were stored. "I just wish I had time to recharge."

"I seriously doubt Berto has gotten himself into the kind of trouble Max can't handle at half-charge."

Josh tapped his watch and concentrated, briefly, then felt the nanoprobes do their thing and stopped being Josh for a while. "It's been known to happen," Max told Kat. Before her time, mostly (there had been that space escapade with Dragonelle), but it'd been known to happen.

"In Fayetteville, West Virginia?" She hit the button that lowered the rear door, which also handily served as a ramp, while Max grabbed the two bikes closest to hand.

"We seem to be getting into enough," he pointed out. He climbed onto his bike and she tossed him a helmet, which he caught without looking even in full dark and at half-power.

"True. And for the record, Steel, since you're so interested in my business," she said, tugging on her helmet and flipping the visor down, "I do not like Trip. That much."

Max slid on his own helmet and revved the bike's engine. "Good, great, fantastic. Let's go."