A/N: I just realized that I hadn't included author's notes with this fic, and the tagging system didn't allow me to specify the kind of emotional rollercoaster you're in for. So, just a heads-up: be prepared for the ninja having to cope with loss and grief; it will take a total of 10 chapters until this story concludes with a happy ending …


"Lloyd, this looks like a bigger thing than any of us probably expected," Nya stated. "It would be really helpful to know what Pix and Zane have found out in the meantime."

The green ninja nodded. "Exactly my thoughts. Have you contacted them already?"

"I tried. Last night right after we decided to keep an eye on that casket at the Shintaro exhibition, and several times this morning. Their mobiles and intercom devices are switched off – that's why I'm bringing this up. It starts to worry me that they should be so concerned about the usual means of communication being intercepted."

She hesitated briefly.

"I mean, I could run a search program on our main computer and try to locate their beacons; at least we'd know where they are, then. That's how I found out that Zane was on Chen's island during the Tournament of Elements. But I don't quite know how they feel about being tracked down by their friends like that when they're just on an ordinary mission ..." Nya paused and shrugged. "Any thoughts?"

"You mean you don't want it to look like we're babysitting them?" Cole asked.

"Nah," Jay threw in. "It's not like they're honeymooning and we're recording their every movement," he smirked. "Just like Nya said, this is a mission."

"And the whole team is on it now and needs information from them," Kai agreed. "I'd say go ahead, sis."

Lloyd and Cole nodded, and Nya left them to launch the search program at the hangar.

When Jay joined her half an hour later, he was surprised to see her staring intently at the screen with a frown. Sure enough, they hardly ever used this program, for the reasons they had discussed before; but it shouldn't have been overly hard to set up.

"Trouble with the settings?" He asked and drew up a chair beside her.

"No, everything works perfectly." Nya leaned back, looking confused. "But there's no trace of them. All controls are working normally, and I've already covered a 50-mile radius around the city. But nope. There. Is. No. Signal. Not the faintest one."

Nya didn't usually punctuate every word she said. It made all of Jay's alarm bells ring at once.

"Let me see."

Of course Nya was right. He hadn't doubted her ability to run the program correctly, but still checked all the parameters, muttering under his breath all along.

"You've got Pixal's frequency here, and this would be Zane ... double-checking with what we had saved in those files ... yeah, must be it. Running search again, no, stop it, let's do smaller intervals ..."

"Perhaps extend this range a bit."

"Yeah, good idea, Nya. Ok, then, give it a minute, but this doesn't look ..."

Jay glanced up. "This doesn't look good. At. All."

Now he was punctuating individual words as well.

"I didn't know that the beacon signal could be switched off. Not even Chen and Clouse did it when they captured Zane."

"Chen and Clouse were brutes," Nya replied. "Remember what they did to Pix? I doubt they had a real clue about the inner workings of a nindroid."

She frowned. "But you're right. I don't think this type of signal can be suppressed just like that. Unless the droid has been shut down completely, and someone messes severely with their hardware."

They looked at each other, highly alarmed.

"Nya, what was their last known location?"

She shrugged helplessly. "Borg Tower?" she suggested. "Five days ago. I don't know what they did afterwards."

Jay shook his head. "No, no, we've got another data point. Zane's call two days ago."

Nya's face lightened up. "Kai's phone!"

"Yeah. Let's get it."

Kai wasn't amused when his sister demanded to connect his phone to her computer.

"What for? Cole and Lloyd have gone out and I finally had a few minutes by myself, and apart from that, I don't want you to stick your nose in ..."

"You can text Skylor later, or whatever you were doing. And no, we had no intention to hack your chirper profile."

Jay's unusually serious tone made Kai look up. "Is something wrong?"

"Actually, yes," Nya said. "Zane and Pix have completely disappeared from our radar. The last time we heard from them was when Zane called you. I may be able to extract the rough coordinates of his mobile at the time of the call with the help of the records on your phone."

"Oh, ok," Kai nodded. "I'll come with you. This doesn't sound good."


"A junkyard!" Nya exclaimed. "A junkyard north of the harbor."

Jay frowned. He had spent his entire childhood on a junkyard and had only the best memories of that time, but in this context ... the mention of a junkyard did not bode well.

"Is it only me who has a bad feeling now?" he asked. "I mean, like … nindroids … probably shut down … last signal came from a junkyard ..." His voice trailed off.

Kai shook his head. "It's not only you. This is bad, and I think we may have more urgent things to do now than hanging out at the Shintaro exhibition. Let's find Cole and Lloyd; we should get the Bounty in the air, fly to that place and do a thorough search of the whole area."

They didn't get ready quite as fast as Kai had hoped. When the three ninja stepped outside, they saw that the dragon had returned, and Cole had apparently made some progress approaching it. Lloyd watched the scene from a safe distance.

"Come here, good boy," Cole said calmly, his hand outstretched. The dragon craned his neck. "We can be friends, ok?"

The dragon chuffed a little, and a cloud of white mist left his nostrils. It froze immediately in the cold air.

"That's it!" Cole praised the dragon. The animal came closer, settled down and nudged the ninja's hand with his muzzle. He even kept still when Cole began to pat his long neck.

"Well done, Cole," Jay stated admiringly. "He gave me quite a fright when I first saw his shadow on the roof, but now he looks as friendly as all our dragons before. I wonder what species he is. Do you think he's originally from a different realm? I bet you could ride him. But ..." He cut himself off when he saw Nya's impatient look. "Could you put your dragon training off for a bit? Because we ..."

Jay wasn't able to finish the sentence. While he had been talking, the dragon had become increasingly nervous. He craned his neck to look around Cole, sniffed, and suddenly got up to walk towards Kai, leaving it up to Cole and Jay to quickly jump out of his way.

"Hey," Kai called out in surprise. "I'm not smelling like a dragon treat, am I?"

He made a step backward and stumbled over Lloyd's kitten, who must have followed him outside and sat right behind him.

"Ouch! Stupid cat." Kai's ninja reflexes prevented the worst; he skillfully rolled over and immediately got to his feet again. The dragon took no notice of him, and the ninja realized what had really attracted the large reptile's attention.

"Mikka!" Lloyd yelled from his place next to the fountain.

The cat bristled and hissed while the dragon came closer and closer, unimpressed. Lloyd ran towards her, but at that moment, the cat decided that taking flight was much more promising than trying to scare off an enemy who could swallow her whole. She darted off in the opposite direction.

It was a spectacle that would have been hilarious if that wild dragon had not been so unpredictable, Lloyd had not been so sincerely concerned about his cat, and Zane's and Pixal's disappearance had not weighed so heavily on Jay's mind.

The kitten ran in panic around the courtyard with the dragon close on her heels, although the larger animal had much more trouble dodging the various training equipment that stood around. A dummy fell to the ground, wood splintered, and a stack of targets collapsed with a loud crash. The green ninja had taken up the chase as well, desperately trying to stay out of the way of the dragon's long tail that whipped left and right.

"Lloyd! Grab your kitten and get her inside!" Kai called out.

"Well, that's exactly what I'm trying to do," the other retorted and narrowly avoided being smashed into the wall.

"No, Kai is right," Cole intervened. "You're chasing the dragon, not the cat. Turn round, for the Master's sake!"

Leading by example, the black ninja boldly began to walk in the opposite direction along the wall of the courtyard so that the two animals ran towards him. The cat, briefly surprised, hesitated for a split second and then climbed up Cole's leg, making him yelp with pain when she dug her claws into some rather sensitive parts of his body. The dragon, unable to come to a stop so quickly, avoided the imminent collision by spreading his wings and taking off.

"Phew." Cole carefully removed the fur bundle that clung to him and held it out to Lloyd. "Here you are."

"Thanks," Lloyd muttered with slightly reddened cheeks; whether from the exertion or from embarrassment, Jay couldn't tell.

It took another twenty minutes until Cole and Lloyd were informed of the most recent developments, the cat was safe in Lloyd's room, and the Bounty was ready for take off.

Some time later, Nya landed the ship on a deserted field next to the junkyard she had identified. It was a desolate area, by no means comparable to the place where Jay had grown up. No one seemed to tend to the yard, which looked more like a general garbage dump than a recycling depot.

"I can't believe they let this pass!" Jay got worked up. He pointed at an oily puddle on the ground. "And so close to the city! This must be illegal. You can't just dump electronic devices on a landfill, there must be plenty of batteries hidden inside this," he gestured at the heaps of metal parts and electrical waste around them, "and once this stuff corrodes, it's bound to leak all sorts of toxic stuff. My father always said ..."

Lloyd put a hand on his arm. "We'll alert the environment agency to this. But first, let's not forget why we are here."

Nya had already taken out her high-precision GPS tracker and led them towards a little hill in the middle of the dump.

"Here," she said finally. "This is the place from which Zane called."

They glanced around. Seen from here, the place looked even more dismal, garbage and junk and frozen gray sludge as far as the eye could reach. The stench of leaked acid and machine oil was more prominent here as well. A wind vane – whatever it was supposed to be doing here – creaked incessantly above their heads.

"I tell you, it's illegal," Jay muttered angrily.

"Yeah, I think we can all see that," Nya agreed. "All the more I'd like to know what Zane and Pix were doing here. Let's have a look round."

"Wait!" Cole stopped them. He had been poking around with a stick in a nearby heap of junk and kicked some scrap parts away. Suddenly, he bent down and held out a device that looked brand new.

"Zane's mobile!" Kai exclaimed.

The ninja gathered around Cole and excitedly examined his find.

"You're right. That's it," Lloyd nodded. "Switched off. So what on Earth happened to him after the call?"

"Kai, can we listen to the voicemail he left?" Nya asked.

"Sure." Her brother pulled out his own mobile and put it on loudspeaker. The message was short, and Zane was speaking hastily and in a somewhat strained voice; it could also have been a slight glitch with his robotic vocal cords. But there was something else that intrigued Jay.

"Hey, guys," he piped up. "Did you notice there's no background noise whatsoever on the recording? I mean, I could hardly understand it because that stupid vane above us is creaking so loudly. But if Zane really called from here ..."

"... the creaking should have been on the voicemail as well!" Nya finished his sentence. "Jay, you're a genius."

Cole frowned. "This means ... he didn't call from here? But you identified the coordinates, and his phone is here, and ... First Master!" He looked at the others. "The message was recorded elsewhere, and someone used Zane's phone to send it to Kai?"

Lloyd nodded glumly. "Exactly. We have no idea when it was recorded. We don't know where Zane was two days ago. Back to square one."

"Not quite," Nya threw in. "We know that someone was here with Zane's phone two days ago. Let's search the area anyway."

Kai nodded. "Any idea what we're looking for?"

Lloyd shook his head. "Nope. But Nya is right. Let's switch on the communicators and split up so we can cover the whole junkyard. We start here, under the wind vane, and everyone takes a sector."

The ninja did as Lloyd suggested. Soon, they had spread out so far that Jay had lost sight of Nya and Lloyd, who were working on the other side of the little hill. He poked around in the garbage, looking out for anything unusual and grumbling at the carelessness of those who used this landfill to dispose of things that would have been treated very differently at his parents' junkyard. He was worried. How had Zane's phone ended up here, and what had happened to the two nindroids in the meantime? They weren't on an undercover mission, this much was certain. Someone must have forced Zane to record a message so that his friends thought him safe – and then?

A crackling noise in his earpiece interrupted Jay's gloomy thoughts.

"Guys? I'd like you to come over."

"Nya, what's wrong?" Jay replied, immediately alarmed. He knew his girlfriend's voice well enough; she was trying to choke her emotions, and somehow, this was worse than if she had been cursing.

"I ... can't tell you yet," she replied in that same, strange voice. "But I've found them. Please come here, all of you."

"What?" Kai sputtered. "You've found Pixal and Zane? What's the matter with them?"

"It doesn't look good," Nya said and cut the connection.

Jay was the last one to scramble around the heap of old kitchen devices that shielded the other ninja from his view. Nya was kneeling on the ground, surrounded by their friends, and bent over something he could still not see. Jay craned his neck to peer over Lloyd's shoulder and gasped. The next moment, he leapt forward and fell to his knees next to his girlfriend. In front of her, there lay two bodies; cold, motionless, powered-down. Every trace of light had gone from their eyes, which stared unblinkingly at the gray sky.

Biting her lip, Nya was busy with a screwdriver.

Lloyd's voice came from behind. "Are they ... have they been shut down?"

Nya didn't reply immediately, as she was about to open Zane's chest compartment. When she glanced up, she looked terrified. "Worse."

Jay was the only other one who had a clear view of what she was doing. He inhaled sharply as he stared aghast at the torso of the titanium ninja: under the chest plate, in the place where the power core was supposed to pulsate, was ... nothing. A gaping hole.

He looked at his deactivated teammate in disbelief, struggling to take in the meaning of what he had just seen.

"What could be worse?" Cole asked, concerned, and took a step closer.

Nya had shifted closer to Zane's head, running her fingers along his temple towards his ear. His scalp seemed to be loose, and she moved it an inch further to be able to look inside the head of the nindroid. The expression on her face turned into a look of blank horror.

"He ... he's ..." Nya took a deep breath. "He's gone!"

Jay exchanged a glance with her, and while the other ninja worriedly gathered around Zane, he scooted over to Pixal, parted her silver hair and examined her head a well. Then, he swiftly removed her jacket and took the screwdriver from Nya's hand.

He hesitated. It felt wrong to undress the android girl like that; deactivated or not, her body wasn't just a piece of hardware … she was a person. It should have been Nya examining her, or Zane, of course. But Nya was still busy with Zane's skull, and Zane himself ...

Jay compromised by pushing Pixal's top up only so far that he could reach a few crucial screws just above her waist; once he had loosened them, he could lift her breast plate enough to briefly peer under it.

He swallowed and glanced up at his friends who were bombarding Nya with nervous questions.

"What do you mean, he's gone?"

"See for yourself." Nya pointed at Zane's lifeless body. "His power core is missing. And his CPU. I fear ..." She looked at Jay, and he nodded.

"Yeah," he said gravely. "Same with Pixal."

It was as if someone had ripped out the hearts and brains of their nindroid friends.

Nya looked at the ground. "You understand what this means, don't you. Everything that makes them what they are is ... gone."

She turned away, and Jay heard a faint noise that sounded like a stifled sob.

Kai looked dumbfounded. "Are you saying that these are … no more than their shells, sort of? Just empty shells?"

His sister quickly wiped her eyes with her sleeve before glancing up at him.

"Yes. I guess that is what I'm saying."

Jay moved closer towards her to put a hand on her shoulder, keeping his composure with difficulty. When he bent forward, the wiring in Zane's open chest compartment caught his eye. He quickly blinked away the tears that stung in his eyes. What he saw was ... unexpected.

"Nya," he said in a low voice, "did you notice?"

He pointed at the wires that should have been connected to Zane's power core and now stuck out, useless and with unprotected ends. But they were neither torn nor overly twisted, and as far as Jay could tell, they hadn't been cut, either.

"Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing. They carefully unplugged the core without doing damage to the circuitry around it."

Jay's voice became more and more excited, prompting Nya to wipe her eyes again and bend over the nindroid with newly awakened interest.

"You're right," she murmured. "Now I know what struck me as odd when I looked inside his head. If the CPU had just been ripped out, there should have been a short-circuit, and I would have noticed burnt wires and other damage to his hardware. But everything looked as clean as if someone had meticulously taken him apart for repairs!"

She glanced up, a glint of hope appearing in her distraught face.

"Let's have a closer look," she suggested.

"Oh yes, definitely," Jay agreed. "Let's swap places; perhaps you could fully open Pixal's body and check the state of her hardware as well?"

With the other ninja watching in surprise, Nya and Jay examined the bodies of the two nindroids a second time.

"This is really, really weird," Jay remarked when he finally glanced up at his friends. "Pixal and Zane were shut down, their beacons tampered with, and their CPUs and power cores removed. But the rest of their bodies is in excellent condition. The missing parts were removed so skillfully, it almost looks as if someone had ... borrowed them," he added with a humorless laugh. "Some mad computer scientist in need of their artificial intelligence for a crazy project." Jay shook his head. "What do I know? My point is," he thoughtfully looked into the distance, "those parts must be somewhere, and they could still be functional. Pixal and Zane were ... droidnapped!"

"Droidnapped," Cole echoed, looking confused. "That's not much better, is it?"

Jay's face fell. "No, I suppose not. We have not the faintest hint as to where their CPUs and cores have been brought."

"At any rate, we're not going to leave the bodies here." Kai visibly struggled to suppress his anger at their inability to do more for their friends. "Let's get them to the monastery."

Lloyd glanced up. He looked as if he had just woken up from a nightmare.

"Definitely. Nya, could you bring the Bounty closer and get two gurneys ready? And Jay, can you reattach their chest plates, and fasten any loose parts ... I mean, can you make sure they don't … fall apart … or something … when we transport them?"

Jay nodded grimly. "Sure. We can't afford losing any more components."

"We should inform the Sensei," Cole said in a low voice. "And Cyrus Borg."

Kai dropped his gaze. "She was his daughter," he muttered.

"No, Kai." Lloyd gave the Master of Fire an almost angry glance. "She still is. I don't understand their circuitry any better than you, but I refuse to believe that we cannot bring them back." He turned round. "Jay, you and Nya can reinstall their drives and power sources when we find them, can't you?"

Nya, who had already turned towards the place where they had landed the Bounty before, stopped in her tracks and exchanged a glance with her boyfriend.

"It's technically possible," Jay began hesitantly. "As I said, the wiring seems to be intact. But ..."

"It's like doing brain and heart surgery at the same time," Nya interjected. "We've never done anything like this before."

"And we have neither the CPUs nor the cores," Cole reminded them.

"We'll find them." Lloyd straightened up. "Pix was designed to be an assistant life-form, but now she needs our help. Zane was built to protect those who cannot protect themselves, but now we will come to his rescue. They're our friends."

He looked at his feet.

"They're more than that," he added quietly. "They're part of the family."