You all ready? Careful before you answer…things are not looking that much better for Cal in this chapter.

Guest: I must say it's good to know the suspense is killing you, that was the goal. There's a lot for them to talk about if they make it through, but first thing first they have to find Cal

This is going to be another tough one, in all fairness the following one too. So what does Warton have in store for Cal and Gillian?

The second video came in nearly three hours after the first one. With no warning, no heads-up sign of sorts. One moment the monitor was dark and silent and the second after images and sound were on.

They were all in the room when it started, Gillian, Loker and Reynolds. The agent had managed to lure Foster out of Cal's office, breaking the endless loop of her watching the video over and over again, by explaining that he had been working on calculating how far Warton might have gone in the time frame they had established. She had shown genuine interest, glad there was a new avenue to explore and seeing the potential in it, and they were in the lab bouncing off ideas on the possible locations when the video came on.

Reynolds was the first one to catch the change in the monitors and immediately groaned, distraught, not only because it was a sign of terrible things to come but mostly because of what he saw.

God no! He thought, watching Lightman lying on a bench belly up, a rag covering his face, a gag on his mouth and a tank of water on a chair next to him. Not this!

For a second he thought about getting Gillian out of the room with an excuse before she could see it, but when he looked at her to formulate something he knew his own face was giving him away. It took Gillian one fugitive look to violently drag her attention away from the screen with the map and walk over to the monitor, barely holding back a gasp when she saw, and understood, the new setting. Part of her brain tried to focus on the positives. If they could be called that: it looked like the same room, Warton hadn't moved to a different location, and Cal was breathing somewhat normally. The list ended there, because nothing else of what she could see was reassuring, starting with Cal's right ankle loosely bent in an odd way flopping from the edge of the bench he was tied to.

She got hold of a chair and sat down, inching closer to the screen, her eyes never leaving Cal's face. All of a sudden he moved, waking up in a jolt that made the rag fall to ground revealing his face, now barely recognisable with all the injuries piling up on the surface. His eyes were open, as much as they could after the latest round with Warton's fists, and when they started scanning the room around him Gillian bit at her bottom lip, thinking he looked like a caged animal dreading the upcoming whip.

Or like a man sentenced to death waiting for his executioner to come.

Behind her, Reynolds had started barking orders to the tech team so they could try to trace the signal of the incoming video, but like her his attention was on watching. He remembered what kind of number Martin Walker had done on Lightman with his waterboarding torture, even though the scientist had sort of known what he was getting himself into back then, and all of the things Warton could have done to him that was probably the worst one. He wondered if Cal was thinking about the same thing, watching closely at how Lightman started to breath fast and panicky, realising he was tied up and seeing the water tank next to him. Then he looked down at Foster, knowing she was thinking the same things he was, and gently placed a hand on her shoulder.

Not that she felt it, she probably would have appreciated the gesture if she had, but her whole body was focused on the images on the screen. Cal looked terrified, easy to understand why, and was looking around the best he could considering his position. For a moment she had the impression that he did a double take, his eyes passing then coming back to a specific point, but before she could make something out of it Warton came into the picture.

Warton smiled down at Cal, shaking his head like a disappointed parent as he picked up the rag and placed it back on his face. The moment the rough fabric touched his face Cal's body jerked, he shook his head violently and tried to take his face out of reach. Gillian held onto the armrest of the chair, knowing panic and possible some form of PTSD was kicking in as he realised what was about to happen, her soul shattering as she wished she could at least talk to him.

And to tell him what? A really mean voice barked inside her own head. That he's not going to die, just being tortured a little?

Warton was clearly enjoying his fruitless fight, to see him squirm and wiggle like a trapped animal, and gently placed a hand on his forehead before shushing him with a finger on his lips. Then he tossed the rag on Cal's chest as he kept wobbling and trying to wiggle out of his restraints, pulled out some duct tape and rolled it around his forehead and the bench, locking his head into position. After that, he put the rag back on Cal's face to make sure he was no longer able to shake it off by moving his head. Then he picked up the tank and shook it right by Cal's ear, wanting him to listen to the sound of the water splashing back and forth inside the plastic container. Cal did, his whole body reacted to the noise by arching upward, his arms and legs tied to the bench with nowhere to go, as a scream of fear of pain muffled through the gag over his mouth.

They all knew what was going to happen next, but it didn't make any better when he started.

Warton poured water on Cal's face, just a few teasing drips at first and then a steadier flow. Cal's reaction was immediate, his body wanting to get away but unable to do so, the rag on his face getting soaked and dripping water all over, his mouth gagging and gasping for air. It went on for a while, until Cal seemingly stopped breathing and fighting back, and that was when Warton stopped and let him recover.

Before going for the second round.

There were two more after that, two more times they watched Cal nearly drown and then be let able to breathe somewhat freely. Even with something stuck in his mouth, Gillian could hear his ragged breathing in between, his moans of pain and terror every time the rag was back on his face. In between rounds, she could see his terrified face and his horrified eyes looking around, lingering sometimes, and she realised no matter how much training she would get she'd never be able to fully describe that look.

Eventually, as suddenly as it had come, the video disappeared.

The moment the screen went black a fallout of actions happened around Gillian, with some agents checking their equipment to see if they had gotten a trace and others rushing to create copies of the recording and pass them around for further studies. She took a couple of minutes, not realising Reynolds had removed his hand from her shoulder as he had gone coordinating something with his colleagues, then she turned around on the chair. Loker was there, in a way ready to catch her although he looked like he could use some support himself, but she gave him a reassuring nod and instead went back to the screen displaying the map they had been looking at.

The area they had identified was so vast it nearly made her cry, especially on the back of what she had just seen, but she forced herself to focus on what they had been working on. Denial at its best, she was going to ignore what had just happened and try to get her mind back into a more productive gear by doing what, for the first in hours, had given the feeling she wasn't completely useless.

After a few minutes, Reynolds came and stood next to her, trying to catch her attention only to quickly realise she couldn't bear to look at him as he delivered the bad news.

"We couldn't trace it," he confessed, painfully. "He's scrambling the signal, we're looking for a way around it." Gillian nodded, folding her arms and staring at the map. "Foster-"

"I think you're right, they must be somewhere fairly isolated. Somewhere he could go back and forth without being noticed before he got to Cal." She turned around to give him a glance, her face begging him to just play along. "He must have had some kind of setup ready, or to put up. He's got cameras, he must have some other kind of equipment."

"It has to be somewhere where he can tap into electricity, perhaps even a wireless connection." Reynolds caved, deciding that was probably more productive and less painful than dwelling over the video. "Niko, what do you think?"

Niko Kawase, the agent who had set up the electronic map, typed away on her keyboard inserting new criteria and a couple of areas seemed to disappear from the map, no longer viable. Then she suggested that Warton was probably stealing electricity and internet connection from an existing registered user, and that they could try to get hold of the network companies in the areas to see if the volume of usage on some of the accounts had suddenly gone up. Reynolds liked the idea and asked his colleague to look into it, then went back to the map and to Gillian. He caught a brief of something, hoping it was a sign that she was getting more confident in that process and would keep supporting it, but after a few more minutes of discussion she asked Loker if he was ready. Reynolds knew what that meant, realising she had been hanging around and possibly humoured him just because she was waiting for the video to be uploaded onto the Group's system.

When Loker responded affirmatively, Gillian nodded to herself and left the room. Reynolds followed her, having already decided that if he couldn't stop her from torturing herself he was at least going to be there while she did so.

He grew restless after the second rewatch, nauseated after the third and by the fifth time Gillian pressed play he was about ready to give up. Instead, he focused on Gillian. She stood there, facing the images on the wall like David ready to slay Goliath, her hand clenched around the remote and her entire being concentrated on taking in every frame of some of the worst things she had ever seen in her life. He wondered, not for the first time, how she did that. That was her friend, her business partners…the man she loved, being tortured right before her eyes and she was stubbornly watching it happen over and over-

"There," Foster mumbled then, freezing the image and rewinding a few frames. "There!"

Reynolds straightened his back on the second take, alerted by the tone and the excitement in her voice. He looked at the image she had stopped on, watching as she walked closer and closer to the wall and absently touched Cal's face. Reynolds found the gesture odd and out of place, so much so that he started to wonder if Foster wasn't finally about to lose it, but then she stepped back and picked up the keyboard, typing away until the screen was split in two, doubling down on the same frame of a wide eyed Cal looking around at the beginning of the video.

Reynolds still didn't know where she was going but she clearly thought she was onto something, so he approached silently and let her finish whatever she was doing. Gillian worked the computer and remote together, keeping the frame on one half of the split screen and pressing play on the other. The video went on there, once again going to the sadly familiar sequence, until she stopped once again on a different frame and created another boxed image for that frame. She did the same two more time, freezing two more images of Cal looking around in between rounds of torture.

"There," she said again, this time in the low voice of someone who was still thinking about it. "Look at his eyes."

Reynolds did, trying his best to see what she wanted him to see. Cal was looking around…no, Cal was looking at something. His mouth slightly open, Reynolds thinned his eyes to watch more carefully and then asked Gillian to play the full thing from the beginning again. She did, feeling validated for all the times he had tried to convince her not to do that, a little thrill going through her when she looked at the agent and realised he had seen it too.

"He was looking at something," he muttered. "The first time, there." She stopped when Cal did that strange double take at the very beginning. "He sees something and goes back there. And these-" He looked around, fumbling for a second and looking around until he found the marker, using it to trace lines starting from Cal's eyes in all the frozen frames. "He's always looking in the same direction, at the same thing."

"Yes, he is." Gillian nodded, then pulled up the previous video and watched it again, far from being desensitised but needing to find confirmation for her theory. "Look, here too."

Reynolds struggled to believe it even if he could see it with his own eyes. In the first video too, more than once Cal's attention seemed to have gone to a particular spot, more than once.

"I'm going to get someone to work on this," he announced then, still mesmerised by the discovery and how it had come about. "We have a 3D rendering software, we should be able to create a virtual version of the space and establish if he is indeed looking at the same spot. I'm not sure what it is but it has to be something."

"Yes, I think so too." Gillian agreed then stood up from behind the desk where she had been managing the equipment. "His face, that expression…"

"What is it?" Reynolds asked when her voice trailed off, nearly jumping out of his skin, eager as he was to know what else she had discovered.

"Surprise, at first." They both turned around, surprised to see Torres standing by the door of the room. She looked ashamed and not sure that she should have been there, but also desperate to be heard and, possibly, forgiven. "The first one, then it's recognition."

"You mean he saw something he recognised."

"No, not something," Gillian whispered, taking a step back for one last look, an absent smile somehow finding its way to her lips. "Someone."

If something finally working out in Gillian's favour? Will Torres get a chance at redemption for her earlier behaviour?

The next chapter will pick up from this same moment, maybe providing some answers you've been asking and a more