Disclaimer: Credit to Jonathan Nolan, Greg Plageman, and the POI writing team. Bolded sections are straight from the episodes.


QUEENSBRIDGE PARK

Chapter 45: end of M.I.A.


Root and Reese follow their last and only lead — a refrigerated truck that had left the stock exchange the same time Shaw had been taken — to a seemingly quaint little town in upstate New York that is actually an experiment being run by Samaritan.

"Sameen?" Root calls as she runs to the figure lying tied to a bed in the middle of a Samaritan warehouse.

The dark-haired woman slowly turns her head to look up.

Not Shaw.

"John, Samantha," Finch's voice sounds in their earpieces. "The blood from the truck, the test came back. It isn't Sameen's."

"Please let me go home," the woman begs quietly.

"Who are you?" Root asks.

"Delia Jones."

"You were in the truck?" Root says, almost to herself. "It was you the whole time?" She runs to the doctor they'd kneecapped on their way in. "Have there been any other patients here in the past three days?" she demands, pointing her gun at him as he lays on the floor.

"No, just her!" the doctor says.

"We followed the wrong clues, Finch," Reese says, approaching the bed himself and looking down at the pale, dark-haired woman. "Why was Delia at the stock exchange?"

"She was a secretary there," Finch explains. "She must have been shot in the firefight. They got rid of the witnesses, but it seems that they brought Delia here to test the neural implant."

John Reese doesn't leave people behind. It doesn't really matter who they are or what they've done. As long as they aren't currently, actively trying to kill someone, he'll do anything, including laying down his own life, to make sure that person makes it out alive.

But it's more than altruism or his hero complex that makes him pause to free Delia Jones and pick her up, even as he can hear gunfire nearby. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she was a secretary. Or maybe it had something to do with her dark brown hair. Or maybe it was the combination of both those things.

But it never crosses his mind to just leave her there. So he scoops her up into his arms and carries her to safety.