Hello, everyone. As you can see, things are happening. Aren't you all glad? Now, I know this is jinxing myself in the worst possible way, but I have a feeling that the rest of Paradise regained will have a somewhat faster writing tempo than the first half. I do much better when I'm writing action scenes. Also, is it too early to start openly begging for some reviews? I could just use some validation, is all.

(And I need to know your names to steal your souls, so there's that.)

---

The look exchanged between Ruth Truewell and William Anthros after hearing the girl's voice from the safe room defied easy description. It wasn't just confusion or concern or reassurance, but a complex mélange of all those and more, an uneasy cocktail mixed from a recipe concocted in earlier high-pressure situations. On Will's face, a major note of intellectual curiosity could be found: the girl's voice was another piece of the puzzle, and his mind was abuzz with all the ways it could fit into the rather sparsely populated jigsaw of clues he had access to. Truewell's expression had a bitter flavor; her primary objective, even beyond doing her job, was to get out of the hot zone, and talking with a frightened little girl was an obstacle.

That didn't mean she wouldn't do it. Beyond all the possible interpretations of the delay between the girl's cry for her dad and Truewell's response, the fact that Truewell replied at all weighed supreme.

"Hello," she said. "Your Dad isn't here right now. My name is Ruth. What is yours?"

Whatever subjective measurement of eternity it had taken for Truewell to make this reply was doubled in the wait for the girl's response. It was enough time for Will to consider that there might be a button they'd have to press to talk back to the girl, consider telling Truewell that, discard the idea upon another look at her face and go back to trying to fight the spread of an almost supernatural tiredness through his legs and arms.

"I'm Madison," the girl replied. Just from her voice, Truewell pegged her at eight years old or thereabouts. "Have you seen my Dad, Missus Ruth?"

"Your Dad is sick," Truewell said. "We took him to a doctor. We would like for you to come with us, Madison."

"He told me not to leave until he comes back, Missus Ruth."

"But he didn't know he would get sick."

"I heard screaming," Madison said, quieter than before. "Are a lot of people sick?"

"…yes," Truewell said. "That's why we want you to go with us."

"Us?" Madison asked, suspicion creeping into her voice.

"Me, and my friend Will here. He's a doctor. He made your daddy better and he'll make sure you don't get sick."

"So you're friends with my daddy?"

"Yes," Truewell lied easily, "and he asked us to go here and get you. He's worried about you."

"Okay. But I need to unlock the door first. It's pretty complicated!"

"No!" Truewell said, almost shouting before she got her voice back under control. "Please don't do that now, Madison. There's something in the air that makes people sick."

"What about Bobby?"

"Who's Bobby, Madison?"

"My puppy," the girl said. "Daddy didn't tell you?"

"He must have forgotten," Truewell replied. "We saw his house outside, but he wasn't there. I'll see if I can find him. My friend Will wants to talk to you, so be nice to him and do what he says, okay?"

"Okay," came Madison's reply, quiet and flat. "Please, you have to find Bobby. He gets…you know, he gets very scared, Missus Ruth."

Will took Truewell aside.

"What exactly are we going to do?" he whispered to her.

"I'll make the call," she replied, "you figure out how to get the girl out of there."

While Will began talking, Truewell moved away from the safe room and back to the house's front entrance. Nightfall outside was complete now, illuminated only by sparse street lamps. She wasn't afraid of the dark, but this would have been an excellent time and place to start.

---

The countdown in Special Agent's Brown head was accelerating. His function here was to observe and influence subtly; ideally, to keep Berkut from discovering too many clues too quickly. Not all contingencies could have been accounted for, especially regarding the mayor's preparations. But as Sun Tzu had written: Know your enemy and yourself, and you need not fear the results of a hundred battles. (Which translation was that, anyway? Brown couldn't remember.)

He had converted one of the containers shipped in by the National Guard into his private base of operations, and subsequently gone out of his way to not give them any reasons to watch him all too closely. His gear, such as it was, accounted for one duffel bag half unpacked and a backpack he hadn't touched yet.

His room had the good fortune to hold two radio sets; one, he had received from the Guardsmen to "stay in touch" with the investigation, and it was essentially useless since the Berkut guys refused to communicate on the frequency they had agreed on with Captain Fleming. The other was a rather more sophisticated set fit for low-grade electronic warfare, a police scanner on steroids. He had jacked into the only cell phone tower in range and expected to have to forward his findings to the home base for decryption, but conveniently enough, his opponents had foregone even that laughable attempt at secure communications. Sniffing out their radio frequency hadn't been hard.

"…and get that girl out," Bledsoe said, his voice unmistakable even through radio. "Maybe there's something in the air filter of the safe room you can analyze."

Brown considered that. From what he understood, this was an unlikely scenario, but it was one worth watching. The distant thunder of helicopter blades slicing through the night sky stirred something in him; he stood up and grabbed the unopened backpack. The rest of the conversation between Bledsoe and Truewell was hopelessly banal, the usual pep talk platitudes and assurances when cogs in a machine started to behave like people. How quaint.

He stepped out of his container and locked it behind him; the padlock he'd brought with him to secure the door was a high-security model with a hardened shroud for the shackle, made of a tough boron-steel compound and equipped with a military-grade secure key cylinder system. He doubted that the unit had anything fancier than a medium-sized bolt-cutter on hand, so they would have to open the container the hard way.

Then again, maybe not. In ten minutes, opening the container would no longer be on anyone's mind.

Brown whistled a cheery tune as he walked through the semi-dark with a flashlight in his hand, though if you had stopped him and asked about it, he couldn't have told you why he had music on his mind: he just did. It was one of those nights.

His steps led him close to the quarantine tent, and the guards tensed when they saw him approach. With his free hand, he flashed his FBI badge – not that anyone here didn't know him already, but still, protocol and all.

"Call came down from headquarters," Brown lied, "I need to speak with the mayor before you evacuate him."

"I don't think he's conscious, Sir," the guard replied.

"Then that's what I need to report, but I gotta cover my ass."

The guard shook his head wistfully. "Sir, if you don't mind me sayin': same shit, different club."

"Ain't that the truth," Brown replied with a smile. "You have a good one, soldier."

"See you in a minute, Sir."

Inside the tent, things were as expected: the mayor unconscious, the medic distractedly catching up on some paperwork. Brown smiled and approached the bed.

"Anything I can do for you, Agent Brown?" the medic asked.

"Just thought I'd check in, but I'm good. Need to take down a visual description before I lose this guy."

"Knock yourself out," the medic replied.

Brown lowered his backpack and opened it. His body rebelled briefly at what was to come, but in the end it only amounted to a shiver. He retrieved a bottle of lighter fluid from below, unscrewed the cap and poured it out over the mayor's body.

"Hey, what…" is as far as the medic's shout got. Then there were two bangs, and Brown turned his pistol to the tent's entrance. Both guards rushed in, rather stupidly. BANG BANG BANG and they dropped, too. Brown couldn't allow himself the time to gloat or pat himself on the back for his marksmanship; the cries outside rose quickly, and he was running out of time to destroy the evidence. He finished pouring out the bottle, opened a second and poured that over the mayor's body, too. The heart monitor next to the bed increased the frequency of its beeps – it was as if Peters knew what was going to happen. Well, Brown had seen stranger things.

He retrieved a lighter from his jacket and clicked it open, his attention split between trying to get a flame going and keeping his gun aimed at the entrance. The people outside were assembling for a dynamic entry, and he still had two things to do.

He held the flame close to the mayor. The body went up like a bonfire and something like a scream escaped the dying man. Brown's left hand bore fresh burns from being so close to the flash of flame, though his sleeve hadn't caught on fire. There was no pain. It was an interesting experience he wouldn't remember, because now he was on the last step of today's agenda.

"This had better work," he said to himself, then opened his mouth and inserted the muzzle of his gun. Despite the procedures, there was a shake to his hand that he couldn't quite get under control. A survival mechanism – how laughable. Brown wouldn't remember that, either.

He pulled the trigger. 645 joules of energy erupted from the barrel in the form of a jacketed hollow point slug, crashed through his palate and nasal cavity before smacking through his skull and scrambling his brain into a nasty mush of dying neurons going out with a final electrochemical storm.

Fleming's soldiers soon entered the tent. They found five bodies: three shot, one suicide, one extra crispy.

---

After pondering whether to tell Becca or not for a moment, Jaime left without informing her little sister. She might have been able to explain this away, sure, but it would have introduced more worries, and Jaime had decided that she didn't need that for Becca right now. Let her believe that things are going well, Jaime reasoned. She probably won't even notice.

Jaime slipped out of her room with her beat-up leather jacket and the Berkut bag slung over her shoulder; Becca was watching TV, as she had said. She would then go to her room to finish her homework, maybe surf the Internet a bit, then go to sleep by eleven.

Normal. Routine. Jaime was starting to appreciate that.

Outside, her eyes fell on her car. It was the same old thing she'd driven for years, a hand-me-down Honda from a coworker who had moved back to Chicago. All things considered, it wasn't fancy, but it wasn't old enough to cost more in maintenance than it was worth, and it got Jaime and her sister from point A to point B. But after today, Jaime felt something sinister about it. This car had been followed. The bad guys knew about it. Did they have the license plate, access to her registration…was there a hidden tracker on it?

The car radiated danger. Jaime stepped away from it and fell into a brisk walk away from the house.

Inside the house, a curtain closed, and Becca turned away from the window. She didn't know how to react to the sight of her sister walking away, but it didn't put her at ease. Truth be told, Becca had been suspicious from the start, ever since Zucker had told her about Jaime's behavior at the bar. And leaving without telling her, that was definitely not like Jaime at all. But the suspicion didn't add up to anything solid, not even a vague shape of something, and without that Becca had no idea how to breech the topic with Jaime. Her big sister was a private person, sure, prone to doing things that Becca wasn't privy to. But Becca wondered…

She walked past the door to Jaime's room, her hand brushed up against it – and withdrew. No, she thought, not like that. She walked back to the couch, sat on it and tried to watch TV. After a minute, she got the feeling that the episode wasn't very good. She didn't want to see it. She had to…

Becca walked into her room, grabbed the netbook from her desk and walked back into the living room. After a minute, the small device had finished booting up, and her finger danced over the small touchpad to open the web browser. A few seconds to start the program while the netbook hooked into the neighbour's wireless network, and she was online.

Becca googled "Jonas Bledsoe".

---

At the Wolf Creek operations center, Nathan Ambrose's multitasking skills were still in the process of being pushed to the limit by everything he had to do. Calling the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency had led to rather quick results: no satellite overflights or drone images of Paradise from the last 24 hours. Similar things were heard from the Idaho Department of Transportation: Oh, they had plenty of pictures from traffic cameras all over Idaho, but none of the truck weighing stations had images of a tanker truck matching the details of the rig from the image. Nathan felt like he was on the verge of another idea, but it didn't come out.

It was perhaps excusable, then, that he only noticed Jaime's telemetry spiking after a minute of activity. With an easy tap of his index finger, he brought a detailed status report of Jaime's systems onto his screen and jacked into her communication system.

"Yo, Sommers," he said, "what exactly do you think you're doing? The boss tells you to come in and you're going for a jog!"

"Can't use the car," Jaime replied. "I think there's a tracker on it."

"Yeah, no shit," Nathan said. "Of course we're tracking your car. So?"

"No, somebody else…on the way back home, they followed me."

"Hold on, you had a tail and you didn't tell us?"

"…I screwed up."

"Well, Sommers, if you'd told us then, we would have them in custody and maybe we could get some freaking answers out of them. But yeah, that ride's grounded until we can take it apart, good instinct. Now, mind telling me why you're running?"

"Hard to predict, hard to track," she replied. "Impossible to follow me."

"First off, fast as you're going, you're sticking out. I'm reading you just south of some busy streets; people are going to see you run the Olympic 100 meter sprint. Besides, you can't sustain this speed."

---

When Jaime had accelerated herself to running speed, it had been one long moment of cognitive dissonance: there was a certain sprint speed she knew she could get to for a few seconds, but with the augmentations in place, she'd gone way past that with little trouble. It felt like she had the strength and stamina to spare to go even faster, maybe race a car for a short distance, even. Only now was there something like a slight burn in her lungs. It felt great.

That's why they call it the endorphin rush, she heard Nathan explain in her head. But you don't run on cold fusion. You have a few more minutes before your body puts on the brakes and then you'll be no good to anyone.

A low, rolling thunder echoed through the street, strong enough for Jaime to hear.

"How close am I to the BART?" she asked.

Mapping it now, Nathan replied. Uh, you're about six hundred meters west of the tracks, Colma station coming up.

"Schedule?"

There's a train already inbound. But it'll be there in two minutes, and you have to cross a highway.

"Guide me."

Jaime picked up more speed.

---

In Paradise, Ruth Truewell waited. The minutes on her air supply timer counted down steadily, as did her nerves. A few minutes ago she'd even imagined something like shots in the distance. She was getting too jumpy for her own good. She switched her flashlight on and waved it through the darkness.

"I am uncomfortable," she told herself, "but this will pass. We will pick up Madison Peters and then we will leave. We will leave and then there will be nothing more to worry about."

Just a few meters from here, William Anthros crouched next to the door on what Truewell estimated to be his fifth wind, at the very least. The stimulants weren't wearing off like somebody had just flipped a switch, but they were getting erratic, and the periods where Will felt dull and tired were getting longer. Soon enough, even staying awake would be a struggle. He'd just have to work fast; then again, his work was almost done.

"It's hard to breathe, Doctor Will," Madison said from the other side of the security door, with the telltale muffled voice of wearing an NBC protection mask. Will had expected more drama, but the room was stocked with gear fitting children – including a full-body chemsuit. Will wondered, once again, just how Mayor Peters knew what to prepare for.

"That's okay," Will said. "It won't be for long. Now, Maddie, I need you to check everything again, okay? You're wearing the suit, the boots, the gloves and the mask, yes?"

"Yes."

"Good! Do you see any rips or tears anywhere?"

"No," Madison confirmed after a brief pause.

"There should be a drawstring in the hood of the overall, Maddie. I want you to pull that closed, as tight as you can, over the edge of the mask. Can you do that?"

"I did it, Doctor Will. Are we done?"

"In a moment, Maddie. Do you know how to tie a knot without looking?"

"…yes."

"Okay, if you have any trouble with this, you can tell me, right? What I want you to do now is take the ends of the drawstrings and tie a knot under the mask's filter. Make it good and tight, it has to hold while you move."

"Okay."

Will considered Madison's situation. He couldn't help but admire how well the girl was keeping it together; but from a certain angle, he didn't think that her getting out of here alive was a good thing. Even if her father survived the night, everyone else she knew from the town was dead, and the terror of this day would weigh on her for a long time. As for the chemical agent, Will still couldn't wrap his head around it. An aerosol still seemed the likeliest, but no standard sensor could pick it up. His readings from Mayor Peters's blood were still the only thing that could confirm its organophosphate nature – there seemed to be no puddles, no resin in any obvious places. And once Will had admitted to himself that it could hardly be VX then, new options had opened up. The phrase Novichok lingered in the back of his mind, a boogeyman of chemical weapons history supposedly not only invisible to US chemical sensors, but specifically made to go through standard protective filters. If that was the poison dripped onto the apple of Paradise, there was a good chance that he would watch Maddie die.

From an even more detached point of view, that would be vital experimental data, useful in finally narrowing down the Paradise agent. Will shivered. Sometimes, his mind went to places that were very dark, indeed.

"All done!" Madison shouted from inside the room, sounding a bit proud of her achievement. Will reconsidered his move. It would be easy to tell her not to leave the shelter, but was it safer? Whatever air filter the room used, it would soon stop working, wouldn't it? Certain death, Will reasoned, and so it would be worth the gamble to take her with them.

"Alright, Maddie," Will said. "You're a clever girl, and we're done with the preparations. You can open the door now."

"Okay!"

As the door groaned from releasing its locking mechanism, Truewell strolled over, waving her turned-off flashlight like a talisman.

"I'll carry her," she offered. "The less she moves, the less she breathes, right?"

"Makes sense," Will replied.

The door opened, and Madison stepped out at a pace one might charitably call reluctant. She took a deep breath, as if the test the filter attached to the mask. Will winced, but said nothing.

"Hello," Truewell said. "I'm Ruth."

"You look weird with that mask," Madison replied. "Do I look like that?"

"It'll be over soon, Maddie." She turned to Will. "Anthros, make sure you grab the filter from inside."

"On it," Will replied, and stepped past Madison into the small safe room. He started moving emergency supplies aside to get to the room's air filter.

"It's dark out there, and you must be tired," Truewell said to Madison. "Come on, I'll carry you." She crouched down, held out her hand to the girl and whispered "When we're outside, you close your eyes, okay, sweetie?"

The flash of light reflected in the lenses of Madison's mask preceded the sound of the explosion by a split second. Truewell whirled around just in time to see a small fireball rising from the direction of the base camp; her hand snapped to the radio and switched to the guard channel. At once, the headset came alive with frantic shouting and barked orders.

Madison had a rather simpler reaction. She just ran away.

"Maddie!" Truewell shouted, frozen for half a second before she ran after her. Her flashlight flicked on, and the beam of light moving with her arm created a bobbing cone of light, sometimes only catching the ground, then rising back to rest squarely on Madison's back again. The little girl was fleet from fear, but Truewell easily closed the distance until she almost had Madison in reach of her free hand…almost…

Truewell had paid too much attention to the girl and not enough to what was in her path. There was a brief sensation of falling as she stumbled over the curb. As if in slow-motion, she saw the swinging air hose dangling from her mask catch on a fencepost and stretch with her tumble. The last thing she clearly remembered was hearing that awful sound of reinforced plastic and rubber tearing, and then she hit the ground, pummeled all over by the heavy gear on her back and lacking the time or the grace to catch her fall.

Almost at once, Truewell's breath – already laborious from chasing Madison – grew frantic. There was nothing she could do that seemed to fight the feeling of her lungs tensing up. It was like trying to breathe concrete, the valve in her mask preventing her from being exposed to fresh air. By reflex or instinct, her hands shot for the mask, grabbed at whatever wasn't slick, tried to move it, to jostle it, anything to keep breathing; and finally, with a herculean effort, she ripped it off. The sound! The sound of adhesive tape ripping free, rubber being bent, cool evening air rushing in on her hot face. Her arms felt numb, and so did her legs. There was no relief from the fresh air, either. Nothing seemed to get past her mouth, a wheezing sound in her throat but no oxygen getting into her lungs, nothing going where it needed to go.

Her eyes were wide open in fear as she saw Will kneel down over her, and her efforts to raise her arm – she wanted to grab him, hold him, shake him until this passed – were futile. Her body was frozen from shock, raw terror coursing through her blood. All her mouth was good for was to gasp with, like a fish being held just inches above the water by a mean child. She spat out something like "Can't breathe!"; or maybe that was just her imagination. She looked at Will fumbling with a plastic cylinder, and realized it was an autoinjector.

Please, she pleaded to whoever would hear her. God, please. Not like this. Please.

---

Jaime raced through the station's southwestern parking lot, drawing stares from the few people still present at this hour. All things considered, her velocity still felt unreal, even if she had slowed down to a more "plausible" sprint speed. She could hear the train slowing down before the station, and trying not to spook anyone was steadily slipping lower on her list of priorities. Far below actually catching the train, that was for sure. She raced through a pedestrian overpass with Nathan's voice as the angel on her shoulder.

Rooftop parking lot has stairs going down into the station main, he said. From there, you can reach the platform.

"No time for that," Jaime protested. "I'll jump."

Over Nathan's objections – but fortunately out of sight of any obvious civilians –, Jaime barreled straight off the edge of the roof with a jump, a precisely calculated trajectory onto the roofing over the stairs to the platform. For a moment, there was doubt: would the roofing actually hold up to the impact? But it did, and the thumping sound of her landing was mostly swallowed by the wailing brakes of the city-bound train coming to a stop on the platform. With a roll and a reversal worthy of an Olympic-level gymnast, she left the roof, caught the edge with her hands and swung down just in front of the turnstiles.

"Made it," she coughed, finally out of breath. The feeling of triumph dulled measurably when she saw what she was faced with: full height turnstiles, and no ticket to operate them. Her brain briefly filled with various moves to circumvent them, but she could already see a transit cop looking her way, no doubt wondering how she had gotten into that position.

Swipe your arm over the TransLink sensor, Nathan's voice came, and figuring that she had nothing to lose at this point, Jaime did just that. The turnstile opened for her, and to the tune of the unbearably loud signal that warned passengers to step away from the train, Jaime slipped into the car with just a second to spare.

---

This, Will thought, this isn't good at all.

People frequently told him that he had a talent for understatement.

"Stay calm!" he admonished Truewell, desperately trying to think of some way to pacify her, but coming up empty. The best thing to do, he figured, was to start treating her before the agent could finish what it had obviously already started. He'd never seen an organophosphate acting that quickly, but even if the effect hadn't fully spread to her limbs yet, it was already shutting down her lungs. Second-guessing would have to wait; he jammed the injector against her thigh and hit the button.

A needle shot through Truewell's chemsuit and skin, depositing doses of atropine and pralidoxime into her body. She flailed against the pain of the injector stuck in her leg, but he held her down as he scrambled for the discarded mask, vainly trying to retrieve it. Maybe he could place a filter on it and put that back on Truewell to at least keep her from sucking even more poison out of the air.

What happened next caught Will completely off-guard; Truewell's arms, instead of relaxing, renewed their flailing, and her breath grew even shallower. Now, Will figured, was the right time to second-guess; he felt her pulse or lack thereof on her neck, but touching her chest revealed a desperately out of control heartbeat.

Tachycardia, he thought, and then it dawned on him. Atropine overdose.

By now, desperation was starting to grab his features – Truewell finally, mercifully, passed out, but that didn't leave Will home free. What had been a racing heartbeat degenerated into weak quivers, and the only gear he had on him were more autoinjectors. And if you call within the next ten minutes, we will upgrade your standard tachycardia to ventricular fibrillation, absolutely free of charge!

The precordial thump was a panic move; Will made his right hand into a fist, took aim and struck a blow against Truewell's chest, hoping against all odds that he'd catch a break, but nothing of the sort happened. Her heart quivering ineffectively, preventing oxygenated blood from circulating. He only had a few minutes to come up with something else, but in what might have been the first positive development in the entire chain of events, an idea struck him at once: the safe room. With no other choice but to get to it, he left Truewell on the ground and ran off, sprinted back into the house. Whether it was the adrenaline or the nootropics kicking in for one last hurrah, he wasn't sure, but it carried him back there in what seemed like two seconds. The safe room still loomed large, stocks of emergency supplies crammed into every corner, but a large, brightly-colored piece stood out: an emergency orange bag, bearing the large, white letters "AED". Will grabbed it without further delay and sprinted back to Truewell. The air supply computer on his arm beeped to tell him that he was digging into the safety reserve, the last fifteen minutes of air. He hadn't checked his supply in some time, and he wasn't about to start then, either. With a sliding stop, he threw the package down next to Truewell's prone form.

The chemsuit was hard to grip with his gloves, but he managed, and with the single-minded strength of a man with a mission, he easily tore the suit apart. He spilled the bag onto the ground: an automated external defibrillator revealed itself, packaged with a thin illustrated manual that was about as relevant for Will's next actions as a 1933 edition of Jane's All the World's Aircraft. Simply removing the device from its packaging brought forth a pleasant female voice, speaking in clearly enunciated tones for the benefit of the suspected-to-be-clueless user.

"Attach pads to victim's bare chest," it said. Will briefly – very briefly – wondered if there was anything to that bit of chat he'd heard once about the bra's underwire burning the skin when exposed to the electrical shock of, say, defibrillator paddles. Maybe? Besides, as the nice voice had advised, he was supposed to attach the pads to a bare chest.

Why take chances now?

"Sorry for that," Will managed to say.

"Analyzing rhythm," the device said, "do not touch victim."

"It's fibrillating, alright?" Will almost shouted. He felt the seconds tick away. Being at the mercy of whatever medical supply store Peters had bought the AED left Will with a profound sense of helplessness.

"Shock advised," the AED said, then added a belated "Charging."

"Come on, come on…" Will said, checking Truewell's neck for a pulse and her airways for blockage, but neither had manifested. Zero sum game, that.

"Do not touch victim. Press shock button now."

Will pressed the button. The AED discharged. For a fateful moment, Will was frozen.

"Start CPR," the device said nonchalantly. "Begin with compressions."

Will knelt beside Truewell, his hands moving over her naked chest in quite possibly the least sexy circumstances imaginable. They interlocked just between her breasts, and Will bowed forward, straightening his arms. He felt no heartbeat beneath. In this situation, that was good news: at least the shock had bumped her heart out of hummingbird mode. Now, all he had to do was restart it, and with a little bit of luck, normal sinus rhythm would resume.

He started compressing, and kept going. All he had to keep in mind was the rhythm, and he found to his distaste that the Bee Gees method kept him on track fairly well. The whole enterprise had seemed much less exciting on his last date with Rescue Annie.

He was about twenty compressions shy of the AED's next piece of sage advice when Truewell drew a sharp breath, and her eyes flew open. Will's hands quickly faded from her chest; two fingers on her neck confirmed a normal pulse.

"What the," Truewell coughed, "what the hell was that?" She looked at Will, her eyes tearing up from stress. "I thought I would die."

"Yes," Will replied, and after a few more of her breaths, concluded that there were, indeed, no signs whatsoever of her suffering from nerve agent poisoning. "Well, the good news is, you're not dead or dying. The bad news is," he said, "I officially have no idea what the fuck is going on here."