Darkness, darkness everywhere/

Do you feel all alone?/
The subtle grace of gravity/

The heavy weight of stone/

The gun looked very strange in Claire's hands—it swallowed them and seemed to distort their fragility with its bulky menace. She looked small and pale and determined, with two spots of color high in her cheeks that made her look like a queen or a china doll. For a moment, Peter wanted to snatch the ugly thing away from her, but he remembered her words about the people who protected her and managed to restrain himself.

"Keep it close to you, okay?" he told her firmly. "I doubt you'll need it, but it never hurts to be safe, right?"

She nodded resolutely, and for a second saw past her fear to a deeper level of indomitable grit, and he knew she would be fine.

"I'll be back really soon," he promised, hugging her, feeling the muzzle of the gun press into his collarbone, pinned between them. "I just need to make sure no one's suspicious, and make an appointment with Linderman, and then I'll come straight here."

"Don't worry," she assured. "There's no way Thompson can get free. You take all the time you need."

He kissed her in the top of her head. "You be good," he said, and he left.

---

"Come look at this," Nathan said to Mr. Bennet, calling him from across the room where he was brooding at the window. Nathan knew that it was killing Mr. Bennet to be back in this house. Even with the man's formidable skills at vagary and misdirection, it was clearly apparent that sitting in his own living room with a fast-talking, closed-conscience politician and not his family (never his family again—he had turned over the family picture as soon as they'd walked in) was putting immense strain on him. There were some thoughts that Mr. Bennet could not currently allow himself to think, or they would destroy him—being in his house reminded him of every one of them.

They hadn't had a choice—coming back to Odessa was risky enough, and they didn't dare check into a hotel so close to Primatech headquarters. The Bennet house, on the other hand, was the very last place The Company would expect them to go, so the Bennet house it was.

"What is it?" he asked as he circled behind Nathan, craning his head to look at his laptop screen.

"It's an email," Nathan said, "from Peter."

Mr. Bennet grabbed a chair and pulled it in next to Nathan, attention captured away from his late family members in favor of the one who was still alive. "What? What does it say?"

"He says he's sorry they left without saying anything, he didn't want us following them—too late for that. He says to tell you Claire is fine and you should be proud of her; that they're going after Linderman and they're going to take him down. He says to trust him."

"Obviously not an option," Mr. Bennet mused. "But perhaps this is why we haven't been able to find them. He says they're going after Linderman—does that mean they already have Thompson in custody?"

"I don't know," Nathan said. "Maybe they're better at this than we thought."

---

The instant he entered the hotel room, Peter knew that something was wrong. Instead of the TV chatter and ambient noise of Claire walking about, there was silence, broken only by a quiet, intermittent sobbing sound. Twenty thousand alarm bells went off in his head and he looked the room over for the problem, but Claire was nowhere to be seen. Concern mounting to dread, he followed the barely-audible sound into the bedroom—and found Claire, crying into her knees, shoulders bent over her as if to block out the rest of the world.

When his shadow fell on her, she started violently and looked up, revealing a pattern of blood spattered over her jeans and T-shirt and hair like macabre modern art. He fell to his knees next to her, and she threw her arms around him the as soon as he was close enough, sobbing into his shirt.

"Claire, what happened?" he asked her urgently. "Are you okay?"

He felt her gulping for air, trying to break through her tears long enough to explain. "I killed him, Peter," she said brokenly. "God, I killed him!"

Peter hadn't so much as glanced at the rest of the room, not after he'd seen Claire—now he looked, and sure enough, Thompson was lying against the opposite wall, four bloody bullet holes punched into his chest. The gun was lying a few feet away from Claire, where she had clearly dropped it.

"He got free, Peter, he must have had a knife or something," she explained in hurried gasps between sobs. "He was loose and he came at me, and I didn't know what to do so I just shot him. It was so easy and then he was dead—God, I deserve to be dead, but I'm never going to be!"

"Shh," he said, pulling her in tighter and stroking her hair soothingly. "It's okay, Claire, it's okay. It's not your fault, honey, you just did what you had to. You're going to be fine."

He cocooned her in his arms until she calmed, minutes or hours later, her sobs softening to shuddering, slow breaths. When he finally thought she was ready for life again, he drew back from her, wiping away the last tear streaks with the back of his hand. "Go take a shower," he told her. "I'll clean this up."

"I should—" she protested.

"No," he told her firmly. "You've had enough blood for one day, I'll do it. You just go get cleaned up, and we'll leave as soon as you're done. We need to get out of here before anyone finds this. I made an appointment with Linderman for Wednesday, and we have a flight to Las Vegas leaving tomorrow morning."

"Stage two," she said, giving him an almost-smile.

"Stage two," he said.

---

Hana Gitelman stared down at the words she had written, her suspicious mind wondering if the message was some kind of a plant, or if it could really be true. About an hour ago, the 'autopilot' parameters she'd set up to filter her ability had flagged this email with a truly alarming amount of red tape, enough to make her transcribe the whole thing down to examine.

'Nathan:' it read, 'I'm sorry that we left without saying anything, but we didn't want any of you to follow us. I wanted to let you know that I'm fine, and tell Mr. Bennet that Claire is okay as well, and that he should be proud of her. We're going after Linderman, and we're going to take him and The Company down. I know you don't think we can do it, but I want you to trust me on this, all right? Please don't come after us. I love you. Peter."

Bennet. Linderman. The Company. This 'Peter' knew exactly what was going on, maybe better than Hana did herself. The most intriguing part was that, apparently, he didn't just know—he planned to do something about it.

Hana would trace this message, and she would find this man. If he really was going after The Company, she would help him. If he was lying, and this was all some kind of a setup—she would kill him.