He couldn't walk, of course. Reese pulled his arms over his own shoulders and carried Ingram up the stairs on his back. He didn't weigh much. John guessed that once they got him hydrated, he was going to be hungry.

In the kitchen, Reese had Christine pull the vinyl tablecloth off the table and spread it on the floor. She put a chair in the center of it, and he lowered Ingram onto it. He checked the small light over the stove, then clicked it on. Christine gave Ingram a little more water while Reese found scissors. He handed them to her, gestured to Ingram's head. "Beard, too."

"I don't know anything about hair cutting," she protested.

"Don't worry about it. Just get the worst of the clumps out for now."

She looked to Ingram for permission, but he was slumped in the chair, his eyes closed again. Saving his energy, Reese though. Smart. She sighed and started in. The clumps of hair fell onto the tablecloth around him. When the filthy outer layer was gone, the hair closer to the scalp was equal parts blond and gray.

The collar bothered her, but Ingram didn't seem to notice it.

John got his knife out and took Ingram's hand. The man opened his eyes, saw the blade, sighed in resignation. He clearly expected further torture. Instead, John carefully began to pare the twisted fingernails. Ingram watched with dull surprise.

They worked in silence. Every few minutes Christine stopped and urged Nathan to sip more water. After the second time she had to brush the mustache back, she turned her attention to trimming the hair above his lip out of the way. The line she produced wasn't stylish, but it at least above his upper lip. It would do.

When the fingernails were short enough to be clipped with regular clippers, Reese crouched to start on the toenails. Ingram gasped at his touch. John stopped, rested his fingertips on the swollen skin. It was very hot. He lowered the foot gently and stood up.

"Sorry," Ingram said softly.

John shook his head. "We'll let the doctor take care of them."

The man turned his head, looked around his kitchen. There were dishes in the sink, dirty and long-dried. Root had made herself at home here. "Is she really dead?"

"Yes."

Christine kept clipping. The scissors never hesitated. Not yet, Reese thought. Sometime in the future she would have to deal with the fact that she'd killed Root in cold blood, but not yet. Right now she had no regrets. She probably thought she never would. He let her go on thinking that. For now.

"She killed Alicia," John added.

Ingram's eyes narrowed. "She said it was the government."

"She lied."

"I suppose she killed Will, too."

"Will's not dead," Christine said calmly.

Ingram turned his head and glared at her. "Don't. Don't lie to me about my son."

She glanced at Reese. He shook his head. No point in pushing it now. She shrugged and went back to cutting tangles off his beard.

Ingram grabbed her wrist, hard. "Don't!" he said again.

His voice cracked on that single word. She'd hit a nerve. Sparked more hope than the man could bear.

Reese clamped his own hand over Ingram's wrist. "We talked about this," he said evenly. "Let her go."

Ingram let go of the hope and Christine's wrist at the same time. He slumped again.

"Shower upstairs?" John asked.

Nathan barely nodded.

"Let's go." He grabbed the man's other wrist, pulled his arms over his shoulders again, and lifted him onto his back. "Bring the chair," he told Christine.

Christine knew how to do this, John knew. She'd done it for him, and she'd done it for her father. He didn't want her to have to do it again. He had her put the chair in the bathtub, and drape a towel over the bathroom window so he could turn the light on. Then he leaned Nathan against the sink, and he kicked her out.

He turned the shower on. The water was rust-colored at first, but it cleared. He took off his dress shirt and set it aside while the water warmed. Then he cut Ingram's clothes off. Nathan didn't resist, physically. He was clearly used to far greater indignities.

The man had burn scars across his back and down the backs of his legs. The wounds looked as if they'd been treated, but the scars were only half-faded.

Ingram grunted. "Do your superiors know?"

"What?"

"That you're sleeping with your partner."

Reese shook his head. "I'm not."

"Then you wish you were."

"I had my chance." He lifted the painfully slender man, pivoted, and sat him on the chair under the shower spray.

Ingram closed his eyes and turned his face up to the clear warm water. He opened his mouth and drank some of it in. For a moment, John could see the tension leave him. He still thought he was going to die. He was letting himself enjoy this possibly-last moment of comfort.

John opened the cabinet and found a clean washcloth and an unopened bar of soap. He rummaged further and located a new bottle of shampoo. He snapped it open, poured some into his palm, reached for Ingram's head.

"I can do that," Nathan protested. His hands came up. He caught sight of his own wrists, rubbed raw and now bleeding as the dried blood soaked away. He dropped them again.

Reese worked the lather into the man's hair without comment. He shampooed the beard, too. It could use a better trim, but John wasn't going to shave it off. They needed the disguise.

The collar around his neck was still in the way, but it was loose enough to rinse under it. The skin on his neck was raw, breaking down under the friction of the device.

Ingram closed his eyes.

There was a definite need to rinse and repeat, and Reese did so, twice.

"Who do you work for?" Ingram asked quietly "Really?"

"I work for Harold," John answered. "My name's John."

"I won't take you to it, John," he answered without opening his eyes.

"We don't need you to," Reese assured him.

"I won't help you access it. I couldn't, even if I wanted to."

"I know."

"That's why she chained me up." He went silent for a moment. "Why are you doing this?"

John smiled tightly. "Because I don't want you in my car smelling like this."

Ingram made a noise that might have been a chuckle.

The third time he rinsed Ingram's hair, the water ran almost clear. He unwrapped the soap and reached for the washcloth.

"Let me," Ingram protested.

Reese soaped up the washcloth and handed it over. He turned his back, pretended to be fascinated by the contents of the medicine cabinet.

"A little privacy?"

"Not a chance," Reese answered. "Not while you're still suicidal."

"Not suicidal. Just realistic."

"Either way. We came a long way to get you."

Nathan grunted.

"Ingram. I need to know. When Alicia Corwin was killed, she had a computer chip in her arm. Did you know about that?"

The man continued to soap himself quietly. "Yes," Ingram finally said.

"Do you have one?"

"You don't know?"

"No."

"Yes."

"Yes, you have a chip?"

"So it couldn't see us. When we needed to escape."

"It hides you from the Machine?"

"From electronics. Mostly."

"Where did it come from?"

"I coded it."

John considered for a long moment. "The government had Alicia's chip. Could they have decrypted it? Created some kind of counter-measure?"

"I'm sure they could. I'm sure they did." Nathan shook his head. "So now instead of hiding me, it's like a dinner bell the minute I leave the valley."

"We need to take it out."

There was a second, longer pause. "Yes. I suppose so, yes."

Reese took a pack of razor blades out of the cabinet and opened it. "It'll hurt," he said.

"I'll live."

The procedure was quick. Ingram didn't even flinch. Reese removed the chip, pressed a second clean washcloth against the fresh wound, and turned off the water.

While Nathan watched, he flushed the chip down the toilet.

John eased the bathroom door open a few inches. "Find him some clean clothes," he told Christine.

"The blue …" Ingram called.

"The blue what?"

"Flannel …"

Reese glanced over his shoulder. "You really got into this whole farm life, didn't you?"

The man who had been Nathan Ingram – one of the wealthiest, most influential, and arguably handsomest men in the world – sat on a wooden chair in a bathtub in a boarded-up farmhouse, naked, bone-thin, tortured, sick and barely even able to wash himself. But his eyes, for one moment, lit up. "Happiest time of my life," he said simply.

Reese got him dry and put a small bandage over the razor cut. He helped him dress in clean clothes. They were all much too big now, of course; the jeans sagged over Ingram's hips and his faded blue flannel shirt was big enough to double over his sunken chest, but he seemed comfortable. He was also, by then, exhausted. Reese carried him to the darkened bedroom across the hall. Christine helped him sit up on the bed, one arm around his shoulder, and held a glass of diluted Gatorade for him to sip through a straw.

"Tell me about Will," Ingram said drowsily. "I know he's dead, but tell me the story you would have told me. I suppose he finished his residency. He's what, head of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins or something?"

"No," Christine answered. "He's pretty much out of medicine now. He and his wife are starting a non-profit to provide renewable energy in high poverty regions of the world."

"His wife," Nathan repeated, calmly amused. "Of course there would be a wife. She must be pretty."

"And smart, and rich," she agreed.

"Rich. See, there's the first flaw in your story. Will wouldn't care that she was rich."

"He doesn't."

"And renewable energy. That's not Will, either."

"Windmills," Reese provided as he put his own shirt back on. "A million windmills."

Ingram chuckled. "That's better. That's more like Will." Christine raised the straw again, but he turned his face away. "Windmills. He would have liked that."

She shifted a little, and Ingram leaned against her shoulder more heavily. "He has a scar on his forehead," Christine said. "Here." She touched Nathan's forehead just below the hairline. "Tiny, barely noticeable. Round, with little points."

"So you examined his body personally. How nice."

She shrugged, resigned. "As you wish."

Nathan turned his head, took another long drink. Then he sighed. "I was kind to you. When you were a child."

"Yes."

"If that means anything to you now, please just kill me."

"Mr. Ingram …"

"I know it's not true. I know Will's dead, Harold's dead. But what you said … I can almost believe. I can almost hope. So give me this mercy now. Let me die with that little piece of hope. Let me believe it while I die. And let me die before you do whatever you're going to do next and snuff it out." He twisted around to look at her face. "Please. I bought you glasses."

"That was Harold's idea, wasn't it? The glasses?" Her voice shook.

"I still paid for them." He shook his head, tears gleaming in his eyes. "Please. Please."

Christine didn't try to hide her own tears. "Mr. Ingram. Nathan. I don't expect you to believe me. You don't have to. But we're going to take you home. To …"

"This is my home!" He flailed angrily toward the room. "My home and Alicia's home, we were going to meet here, we were going to live out our lives here - this is my home and she took it, she lived her and she … and you … and they're dead, I know they're dead and you … and you won't even …"

He stopped, turned away from her, slumped onto his side on the bed, and closed his eyes.

Christine kept her hand on his shoulder for a moment. Then she stood up and wiped her eyes impatiently. She put the drink down, got a spare blanket, and tucked it around him.

She wouldn't look at John.

He wanted to grab her and hug her, but there wasn't time yet. He still needed her sharp. He took her arm, led her into the hallway, but left the door open. "We'll let him rest for a while. We have things to do."

Christine looked at him steadily. "Give me work," she said.

He loved her for that, and for the fact that he'd never had any doubt she would respond that way. "Sooner or later someone's going to come into this house. It can look like it was abandoned, but it can't look like someone was held prisoner here."

She nodded her understanding. "We can't leave him alone."

"And you can't restrain him. Which means you have to empty the shit bucket."

"I've done worse."

"Bring me a couple suitcases from the basement. Load all the computer towers in the car. Put the cot back in the store room. Gather up the blankets and that table cloth. We'll ditch them somewhere else. Leave the explosives; I'll get them before we go."

Christine nodded. He could see her mind engage on the task; she let her OCD impulses take hold. That was good; it would serve them well. "A couple hours," he said, "and then we'll need to move, get to somewhere with a signal and get his feet taken care of."

"When do we call Harold?"

Reese shook his head. "We'll figure that out once we find a doctor."

She nodded and went downstairs.

Reese went back into the bedroom. "Ingram?"

The man shook his head and refused to answer.

"Anything in particular you want to take with you?"

"No."

"We probably won't be able to come back."

A long pause. Then Nathan said, "No," again and fell asleep.

Ingram didn't move in all the time it took them to get the house cleaned. Christine did most of the work. When she was done, Reese ducked out of the room long enough to dismantle Root's booby traps. He packed the small explosives – enough to blow a man's head off, not much more – in the trunk of the car, just in case he needed them.

Shortly after sunrise, they put Ingram – conscious but unresisting – in the passenger seat of the sedan and reclined it as far as it could go. Christine climbed into the back, behind Reese, with her backpack tucked beside her. Reese drove. Half an hour out, she pulled out her phone. "Oooh, half a bar," she said. But she turned got her laptop out and turned it on anyhow.

She sat forward and examined the collar. "I'm sorry," she said, turning it carefully. "I don't mean to hurt you."

"Not yet, anyhow," Ingram growled.

She found the serial numbers and sat back to work for a time.

"Anything?" Reese asked after ten minutes.

"It's a five-digit number," Christine answered.

"We already knew that."

"That is the sum total of assistance the internet offers. She could set it to anything she wanted. There doesn't seem to be an override. At least not on the light side." She leaned forward again to examine the lock. "Are you sure it won't go off?"

"Pretty sure," Reese answered.

"John."

"The trigger's disabled," he amended. "It's a simple model. So no, it shouldn't go off. Unless Root modified it." He glanced at Ingram. "Did she?"

"Not in front of me."

Christine sighed. "In theory, then, I could just press in every possible combination of five digits until we get lucky."

"There must be some way to narrow it down."

"I can try the obvious things, but she's too smart for most of them. Birthdays, key words, same digits. We need to get into her head."

Reese looked at Ingram again. "How about it? You got a guess?"

The man looked at him thoughtfully. "No."

John shrugged. "It's your neck."

Christine wasn't so easily deterred. She pushed in a series of numbers, and then another. Nothing happened. She frowned and tried another set, also without result.

"Harry?" Reese guessed.

"And Finch. Forward and backward."

"Try Grace."

Ingram stirred, but said nothing.

Christine tried those combinations. Then she tried a dozen more. Nothing.

"She's a lot like you," Reese supplied, "only evil and bent on world domination. What would you use?"

"Something sarcastic." She kept pushing buttons. "What did she talk to you about?" she asked Ingram.

He hesitated, as if he were deciding whether to help them. "About the Machine, mostly. How great it was, how it was the next step in human evolution. The future. But she didn't want to control it, she said. She wanted to set it free. Whatever that means." Ingram thought for a moment. "She was insane, you know. She'd go off on these rants about it – about the Machine, and how evil Harold was to put it in a cage and take away its voice. About how he kept it in chains and tortured it. How we didn't even treat human criminals that way, and the Machine was a god and we didn't know what we were doing. When she chained me up, she said it was my punishment for letting Harold do that to the Machine. She said once, the Machine didn't even steal a loaf of bread to deserve to be imprisoned. I asked her why it would want a loaf of bread anyhow, but she said that wasn't the point." He shook his head, but carefully, not throwing off Christine's fingers. "She was just crazy."

"A loaf of bread," she mused. "A loaf of … "

"What?" Reese asked.

"Can't be that easy." She hesitated, then typed in another code. The collar opened with a click.

She eased it open and then off Ingram's neck. He reached up to rub it, but she caught his hand away. The skin where the collar had been was raw and bloody.

"How did you do that?" he asked.

"Loaf of bread. Prisoner in chains. Jean Valjean."

"2-4-6-0-1," Reese said.

"Yep."

"God." Ingram touched his neck gingerly. "Thank you."

Christine nodded. "Rest. We'll get you some medical help soon." She sat back and opened her computer again.

Off the highway was a small town, and just north of the town was a small nursing home. A nurse in blue scrubs and a carefully uninterested expression met them at the back door with a wheelchair, and they took Ingram inside. They took a service elevator to the basement, then passed through a dim corridor past maintenance rooms and boiler space to a locked steel door. Inside was a surprisingly bright, clean surgical room. The nurse helped Reese hoist Ingram onto the exam table.

John was very careful to ignore the obstetrical stirrups at the end of the table. The nurse folded them down to the side without comment.

Abortion was legal here. But legal and acceptable were two very different things in a small town. They would keep it very, very quiet. To keep away protestors, and shaming family members, and possibly firebombs.

The doctor was also a woman. She was probably sixty, with graying hair and deep worry lines. She looked Reese over quickly, then turned to the woman. "You're Daisy?" she asked.

"Yes. Thank you for your help."

The woman grunted and turned to look at Ingram. "God almighty."

She and the nurse collected a quick round of vitals. "Let's get an IV started," the doctor said quietly. And then, to Christine, "You said you rescued him from a cult."

"Yes."

"Looks to me like he was tortured."

"They didn't want me to leave," Ingram muttered. He let the nurse take off his shirt, leaving him in the too-big t-shirt beneath.

She scowled and moved around to look at his feet. Ingram jumped when she touched them. "Okay," she said soothingly. "Okay." The fact that her new patient was conscious and unresisting helped the situation. She looked at Christine again. "Ten."

"Fine."

"I can't find a vein," the nurse complained.

"I'll get it," Christine said.

"You can't …" the doctor began.

"She can," Reese assured her.

Christine went around the table, put on gloves, and took the needle.

"This is …" the nurse protested.

"Rather let her stab me than you," Ingram said mildly.

Reese made himself breathe steadily. Needles didn't bother him. Needles in Christine's hands did. She'd bought protection for herself, when she was young, by shooting up the most dangerous junkies in the city. Watching her bend over Ingram's bony arm, watching her teeth grind as she unwittingly invoked the desire for the high in her own veins – he concentrated on his breathing.

"Got it," Christine announced.

The nurse huffed and took over hooking up the IV.

Reese couldn't help himself. When Christine came back around the table, he took her arm, pulled her against his side. Ingram looked at him and smirked, just a little. He didn't care.

The doctor straightened. "What did you do, walk on broken glass?"

Nathan hesitated, then played along. "After the first time I tried to leave. To prove that I wouldn't do it again."

"We need to run a course of antibiotics before I try to get the glass out."

"How long?" John asked.

"Two hours."

Reese sighed. He was tired; his eyes felt gritty and his head thrummed dully. He could practically feel the weariness rolling off Christine. She had a lot more to be tired from. But he could also see the fever growing in Ingram's body. The man was too thin, too sick to fight off the infection on his own.

There wasn't any point in rescuing the man just to have him die from his wounds. "Okay," he said.