Jack, Alyssa and Gabriel Mossberg discovered the radio signal was being jammed when Alyssa tried to call Honey to see if she had an answer for the presence of the tire tracks outside the lodge. Jack, as the smallest mammal, had been the one to volunteer to take a closer look.

A quick sweep of the lodge confirmed it was empty. He signaled for Alyssa and Gabe to break cover and join him in the grassy space between the tire tracks and the building.

"There's something wrong." He said. "Any luck with the signal?"

Alyssa shook her head.

Gabe suddenly dropped down on one knee, one paw propped near a set of footprints formed by the mud beneath the grass. "I think Jack may be right. Even if Slothfeld isn't here, we should give the place a thorough check."

Jack bent down beside Gabe. "What are you seeing?"

Gabe turned his head to look in the direction of the tire tracks. "Three sets of tracks. All of them were wearing winter boots. They were species more inclined to hot weather. Judging from the size and shape, at least two of them were prey. One hippo, one rhino… one bovine."

"Officer Hopps's coworkers at the ZPD." Jack muttered. "I see feline tracks here."

Gabe was silent as he examined the tracks further. "Two. A lion and something smaller. Maybe a jaguar." He looked at where the first three tracks started at the car. "They came out the car on their own. Not in a hurry. They must have come to search the lodge." Gabe's curious finger moved to the drag marks formed from damaged grass smeared with mud. "Something was dragged back and taken away in the car. Something big." He stood up and started following the drag marks, never taking his eyes off the ground. Alyssa followed while Jack stayed put to keep a lookout. Hearing nothing but the rustling ambience of the forest, Jack swiveled his ears to the sound of his fellows as they walked out the corner of the lodge.

"There was a struggle here." He heard Gabe saying, putting out one short sentence after another like he would put pieces on a jigsaw puzzle. "See that large patch where the grass is completely crushed? McHorn fell here. Knocked out, or killed, because there's no rhino tracks going away from the site. Higgins came over to help him. Two predators came after. Both officers were subdued and dragged from the scene."

Jack started walking, following their voices.

"They dragged a rhino?" Alyssa sounded understandably skeptical.

"Most police cars have a winch cable for the not-so-urban districts." Jack said upon turning the corner and seeing them crouched near the edge of the ravine. "They probably used that."

Alyssa nodded. "That makes sense. What about Bogo?"

Gabe pointed to the edge of the ravine. "He was attacked over there. He was knocked to the ground, then forced over the edge."

Jack strode to the edge and looked down. "I don't see him." He pulled out his night-vision binoculars and took a closer look. "Son of a gun."

"What? What is it?" Alyssa asked.

"I think he survived."

Alyssa joined him at the edge. Jack's breath hitched when her thick tail brushed the back of his legs. "How do you know?" She said.

"See where the rubble's been disturbed? That was recent." Jack said. Alyssa had to rely on her own natural night vision to see what he was talking about. "He stopped falling midway down, then climbed the rest of the way."

"You've got to be joking." Alyssa said.

"Buffalos are pretty tough S.O.B.s." Gabe said. "It's possible. We should search the lodge before moving on."

"Wait, what about Bogo?" Alyssa shook his head. "You know we can't go down there after him."

"But-"

"Slothfeld is the priority." Jack barked. "Every minute we delay means it's more likely he'll disappear again, probably for good. The mission must come first, Alyssa, and it's taken way too long already."

Alyssa narrowed her eyes. "If I'd put the mission first when we found you on that road, you would be dead right now."

Jack scowled and turned to the lodge. "The point is that putting ourselves at risk by trying to climb down that ravine would not be the wisest thing to do. If Bogo is already dead or captured, it would also be a complete waste of time. The best thing to do is to find the mammals responsible for this mess, find a way to restore communications, and end this conspiracy by tearing it out at the roots. By the way, that lodge is booby trapped."

"Don't try to change the subject, Jack."

"I'm not changing the subject. The subject is no longer up for discussion."Alyssa's fur stood up. "How can you be so callous?"

Jack shot her a tranquilly furious look. "Do I need to remind you that we are on a time limit?"

"Quiet, both of you!" Gabe snapped. "Savage, you need to phrase your words without sounding like a ruthless jackass. Alyssa, what the bunny with trust and teamwork issues is trying to say is that we'd be better off finding the mammals who attacked the officers instead of spending all night searching a highly dangerous ravine for a mammal who's probably not even down there anymore. And if we can find the jammer and disable it, we can also call for someone to help out the missing officers."

Jack thought of how he'd met Captain Bogo and his sister several weeks ago, both of whom had been more honest and cooperative with him than anyone from City Hall. And for the first time in years he felt ashamed of his pragmatism. "We're not leaving him for dead, Alyssa. You have my word on that."

Alyssa still looked unhappy as they began their search of the lodge and found signs of another struggle. Jack had already seen the partly muddy prints, sprung traps and fired darts and envision the scenario in his mind. Two traps, a leg trap and a shotgun trap, had been sprung, and a physical altercation had ensued. The confrontation had continued outside, at the edge of the ravine. The search of the lodge had turned up no secret entrances, but tripwire had been discovered in the dining room. Had it been tripped, it would have caused the chandelier to fall.

Then there had been what they had found in the trophy room.

Even Jack had had to swallow back bile as he found Alyssa, who had entered the trophy room first, throwing up in the grass outside. He tapped her shoulder and offered a bottle of water as she wiped her muzzle.

"It will get easier." He told her while she rinsed her mouth and spat into the ground. Truth be told it was missions like this that made him want to give up on mammality entirely, and give himself fully to the darkness that made him such an efficient killer.

Alyssa's ear twitched when Gabe emerged, shutting the front door behind him. She had a haunted look in her large eyes. "You… you don't…"

"Hm?"

"You don't think Cheryl had anything to do with this… do you?"

Jack didn't answer.

"We should move on." Gabe said. "Slothfeld's not here and we only have four days to find him and unlock the data disk. How far to the asylum?"

"An hour maybe more. But the asylum may be another dead end." Alyssa said.

"You have a better suggestion?" Jack asked.

Alyssa wordlessly pointed to the tire tracks.

They set off on foot, moving deliberately and quietly through the cover of darkness and foliage as they followed the tracks on the dirt road. Jack's ears were erect throughout the journey, and the rest of the rabbit was on edge, his grip tight on his silenced handgun. It had been on a dark night like this when he'd been ambushed by that otter, felt the poisoned knife cut his arm, and almost died of anaphylaxis. He could not, would not let that happen again. The first sign of trouble would get a bullet between the eyes. He had to multitask his excellent hearing skills, listening both for hostiles and his fellow agents creeping through the forest nearby.

It was another two hours before the tracks led them out the forest and toward the bridge to Founder's Mount Asylum.

"Huh." Alyssa muttered.

Jack smirked as he used his binoculars to search for security cameras. "Still a good idea. Now we know for sure this the place."

Jack and Alyssa searched the nearby guardhouse while Gabe stayed behind to examine the tire tracks and footprints they'd found on the damp ground. The guardhouse was empty, and looked to have been empty for days.

"Guys!" Gabe called, striding over to them. "I think we've found it!"

Jack and Alyssa spun round. "You have?"

"There're two sets of tracks. Two cars came up here recently, but one of them stopped here. Two mammals got out. A rhino and a cheetah."

Alyssa's head jerked sharply to the asylum up ahead. "Ben."

"Cunninghorn." Gabe snarled the name. "He stopped the car here. Since his tracks go to and from that guardhouse, he probably had to raise the boom so he could drive across the bridge."

"That bastard's probably up to his neck in this Project Twilight stuff." Alyssa said."You don't know the half of it." Gabe said. "He's the one who abducted me and Starlight. He's probably responsible for every missing predator case on the ZPD's list."

"And Cheryl." Alyssa pointedly checked her weapon. "Just to be clear, we don't need him alive, do we?"

"Nope." Jack said.

"And if we find Ben along the way, you don't have any objections to us rescuing him, do you?"

"Not at all."

Alyssa smiled. "In that case, I am no longer angry with you."

Women, Jack thought irritably.

The satisfaction of finally getting a break in the case was short lived when they examined the area further and discovered claw marks and old, dried blood on the stone sign beside the bridge. Thoughts of Lemming's corpse, the slaughter in the sawmill and the lodge's trophy room put them back on edge and they began quietly discussing a plan. It was decided at the start that the bridge was a bad idea. It was too exposed and easy to get cornered on. There were even cameras stationed halfway down. They were prepared for that. Jack, Alyssa, Gabe and Honey had spent hours examining all the maps and blueprints Honey could dig up until they found a more discrete way in. For the sake of caution Jack raised his binoculars and examined the lights, the windows, and the closed gate at the other end of the bridge. The power was still on, he could confirm that much. Other than that, the asylum looked uninhabited.

Isn't that always the case? The asylum looked so ominous it bordered on cliché. In fact, he thought he saw a shadow pass by one of the upper windows when Alyssa nudged him.

"There it is."

Jack looked and saw a metal pipe partly protruding from the far cliffside, pouring a steady stream of water into the river down below. "Now we're talking."

Alyssa looked at Gabe. "You got your Mag-ryder, love?"

Gabe pulled down his sleeve. Jack checked his own grappling hook to make sure it was still in functional condition. So far he was the only agent in the ZIA to possess such a device, since the RD department had yet to develop a motor strong enough to lift any mammal bigger than a fox. It was the source of pride for him, the first proof that bigger didn't always mean badder.

Alyssa flicked at finger. "After you."

Jack took careful aim at the upper part of the pipe and fired. He'd done this a hundred times. The barb shot in a near-unnoticeable arc, hitting the metal. Jack kept his eyes on his destination as the line went taught. Any other mammal would half felt a thrill as he soared through cold, open air, spinning his body just before he hit the floor of the pipe and rolled to his feet. The water wasn't high or flowing fast enough to be a problem, so he stepped aside and signaled for the next mammal to follow. The super magnet flew past his head, bringing Alyssa with it. She rolled to her feet just as the rabbit had done, then cursed at having to roll in freezing sewer water. Gabe did the same ten seconds later, but with even more cursing.

"Shit, shit, shit! I think I put my knee in some shit!" He shook the worst of the wetness off his sleeves before dipping his stained kneecap in the stream. "I suppose I should thankful I made it in here in one piece."

Fortunately for the two predators, and Jack's waning patience, it didn't take long for them to find a way into the building above. Gabe used his kukri to pry open the grate, and they ascended one by one into a male's restroom. Alyssa's face contorted as she scanned the room with her weapon. "Someone keeps forgetting to flush."

"Or bury their dead." Gabe said, also sniffing the air. "I'm going to advise in advance against splitting up once you're finished the security room."

Jack didn't like that. Going solo made it easier for him to move around unnoticed, but with the headsets unusable he had to concede. There were no cameras in the restroom, but there was no telling what kind of security was outside. Jack crept to the door and saw it was already partially open. Lucky him. He knelt down and peeked through the gap.

Immediately he saw that the building indeed had power. All the lights were lit, making the colorless hallway look deceptively ordinary. It looked just like how Jack would imagine a hospital hallway would be on an uneventful evening.

Except for the splash of old, dried blood covering a door halfway down.

"Aw, bugger." Alyssa hissed. "Gabe's right. Something bad happened here."

Jack took a closer look at the blood with his binoculars. There were pawprints on the floor, and smeared hoofprints on the door and the walls on either side. There had been an attack here, and it had ended fatally. The hoofprints looked like they belonged to a pig, and no pig could survive losing this much blood. "This blood looks like it was spilled months ago."

"Months? That can't be. The staff would have cleaned it up by now." Even as Alyssa said this, Jack could see from the look on her face that she was coming to the same conclusion he was.

"We have to get to the security room." Gabe said. "Where's that vent?"

Jack pointed up at the rectangular grate in the ceiling above the urinals. "Keep an eye on the camera in the hallway. When the red light goes out, you'll know it's safe. You two remember what we do next?"

"We regroup in the first floor office." Gabe said.

"With communications down we'll need to alter our plans." Jack checked the string on his crossbow. The limbs of the weapon were collapsible, so he should be able to take it with him into the vent. "Once the cameras are disabled, we should make the jammer our next target."

Alyssa and Gabe had no objections to that. Jack used his grappling hook to raise himself up to the ceiling until he could reach the grate. He had to act quickly before the lactic acid building up in his arm became too much for him. Fortunately the screws were easy to remove, and he was inside the vent within four minutes.

With the map of the ventilation system almost perfectly memorized, Jack quickly found the security room. The room was empty other than the corpse sprawled in a chair near the center. The back of the bull's skull was gone. A pistol was in his hoof. He'd been dead for months.

Jack tried to force the vent open, but the screws held fast. He had to kick it one, two, three, eight times, the metal bending further with each kick, until the cover popped free.

Jack dropped into the room and hopped onto the control board. He scanned the monitors, searching for the jammer, Slothfeld, and any sign of life he could find. He eventually found the jammer in an office on the top floor, but that was yesterday news compared to what he saw in the other monitors.

The cafeteria was an unusual mess. It looked like someone had flipped all the chairs and tables and then spilled food, drink and visceral fluids all over the place. Except the furniture had been righted without the spills being cleaned. Two thirds of the halls Jack saw had suffered some amount of blood and damage. There were no bodies to be found.

Jack turned his attention to the underground floor, particularly the modernized patient cells that had caught his eye. What he saw confirmed the suspicions he'd had since seeing the blood in that hallway.

"Looks like the test subjects have had enough."

The monitor showed a long room full of empty glass cells. Stamped on each thick glass door was a number. Jack countered ten that he could see. He flicked a switch, changing the camera and the angle, and saw more cells labelled eleven to twenty. There was blood on the floor in the hallway between the rows of cells, as old as every other stain in this forsaken place.

Jack pinched the bridge of his nose. Llater had told him that Slothfeld had recently been in contact with Mayor Swinton concerning the escaped test subjects Gabe and Sedor. Then he remembered the things Alyssa had told him, what she had learned about Slothfeld from his disgruntled former coworkers. Slothfeld had been a typical insufferable genius, unable to accept responsibility for his mistakes or even admit that something had gone wrong in the first place. Remembering that, Jack wouldn't be surprised if Slothfeld had been downplaying the situation to his benefactor all along, too prideful to call for help until it was too late.

Jack sighed deeply, leaning over the control board. Once the jammer was disabled, he would have to immediately report the situation to HQ. And he'd have to tell Miss Morton that the mission may not be possible to complete.

From now on, they'd have to consider the possibility that Dr. Slothfeld may already be dead.

Trying not to think about what this would mean for Zootopia, Jack starting flicking through more monitors using the various switches, a little curious as to why everything was covered in dust. He froze, his breath hitching in his throat, when the image on the monitor in front of him suddenly showed him a sloth.

The sloth was unmoving, an ill-fitting lab coat covering almost his entire body, as he sat tied to a chair in the Director's Office on the top floor. His back was to the camera, his head hanging limply from his long neck.

Jack had to get back to the others. Fast.

He switched off the monitors, by extension switching off the red lights on the cameras, and dropped down from the control panel. The security room door was locked, from the inside judging from the dead body in the chair. The test subjects had likely never made it inside. Jack found a keycard in the pocket of the body and made sure to lock the door behind him as he left.

Alyssa and Gabe were already waiting in the first floor office when he arrived. "I think I've found Slothfeld." He told them immediately.

With that they made straight the Director's Office, treading carefully even though every room they passed through was empty. There was the possibility that hostiles had managed the hide in the cameras' blind spots, or had set up booby traps like the ones found in the lodge. Their need for extreme caution was clashing infuriatingly with their sense of urgency. If Slothfeld was still alive, he may not be for much longer. They had to get the decryption key out of him before it was too late.

They stopped outside the sophisticated wooden door to the Director's Office, Gabe turning to Alyssa.

"You stay out here."

"Why?" Alyssa didn't like that.

"I don't like that Slothfeld's been left alone. Either he's dead or we're walking into a trap. Maybe both. Someone needs to stay outside and cover us."

Alyssa nodded and pointed her gun down the hallway. Jack and Gabe pressed themselves to the walls on either side of the door. The room beyond was silent. Gabe reached for the handle and pulled.

Gabe and Jack stopped in the doorway, sweeping the expensively furnished office and silently confirming it was clear. Gabe reached Slothfeld first, moving around the chair, and then he swore.

"What is it?" Jack asked.

Without saying a word, Gabe turned the chair around.

A mannequin. Of course it was.

Something dropped from the ceiling vent and clinked on the floorboard. Jack looked down. The object was small, cylindrical and black. He didn't even have a split-second to recognize what it was before everything turned bright white and his sensitive lagomorphic ears exploded with noise.

He yelled for Alyssa, unable to hear his own voice for the ringing in his ears. Blinking away the worst of the blinding light, Jack found himself face to face with himself. He had to see beyond the lingering purple flashes to recognize his own reflection on the visor of a motorcycle helmet.

On instinct he raised his weapon to put down the threat.

On instinct the other helmeted wolf behind the rabbit jammed a taser into his back.