Lunch in the school cafeteria was every bit as bad as Fusco remembered it being from his own school days. Lee met them at the door and showed them where to get their trays. They had a choice of hot dogs or mac and cheese. He took the noodles; so did Christine. They had no choice about the sides: limp green beans, canned peaches, a small chocolate chip cookie, and a tiny carton of skim milk.

Of the fifty-six kids in Lee's grade, about fifteen had parents with them. The boy couldn't seem to decide whether to be embarrassed or delighted.

As they carried their trays to the end of a long table, Fusco heard his son say, "Hey, Marisa, your mom's not here? You want to come sit with us?"

It sounded a little practiced and forced, but the kid wasn't bad.

He sat on one side of the table with Lee. Christine sat across from them, and Marisa sat next to her.

It had been four weeks and two days since one of the men who'd been molesting the little girl had been shot dead in front of her. Marisa looked, in Fusco's eyes, a lot better than she had then. She'd gained some weight, and the dark circles under her eyes were gone. She had a little color in her cheeks. She wasn't afraid to make eye contact, at least briefly.

She wasn't afraid to talk.

She didn't talk about the shooting, of course, or about the men. Instead, she talked about how gross the lunch was and how much she hated green beans. And how she hated her English teacher for giving them so much homework. And how mad she was that they couldn't go out for recess because it got too cold and too many kids didn't bring winter coats.

She sat very close to Christine, so that their arms touched.

Every time her words slowed down, the woman fed her another question and she was off again.

Fusco watched the two of them while he ate the paste-like macaroni. He didn't know exactly what had gone down between them before the shooting in the precinct, but it was obvious that the girl adored Christine and trusted her completely.

Well, the hacker had saved what was left of Marisa's childhood, and probably her life.

He knew from Lee that Marisa and her mother had been seeing a counselor together. He knew that the girl hadn't been very upset about the man killed in front of her, but she'd been worried about Christine getting shot. Lionel had talked to the girl, shown her the picture of Christine and him at the hospital, tried to reassure her. But there was nothing that could take the place of sitting right next to her hero.

Scotty didn't say much, and she didn't eat much, but she smiled more than Fusco had seen her smile in a long time.

At his side, Lee started to giggle.

"What?" Fusco asked quietly.

"She never talks like this," Lee whispered. "She's like the quietest girl in school."

"Not any more," Fusco mused. He chuckled a little, too.

The captain came out of his office and looked toward Fusco's empty desk. "Where's he at?" he demanded.

Carter knew where Fusco was, of course. The first rule of asking your partner to cover for you is that you let them know when you need them to cover for you. "He was trying to track down a witness on the Rogers case," she lied easily.

The captain sighed. "Thought that one was dead in the water."

"He got a lead. Maybe."

"Huh." The man stomped back into his office.

Carter waited until he sat down. Then she pulled out her phone, blocking it from his view, and sent a quick text to Fusco.

The first rule of covering for your partner was telling him what lie you'd told to cover for him.

She smiled tightly. She wouldn't have thought so at first, but she really liked having a partner. She put her phone away and went back to her case report.

"Mr. Reese," Finch called over the earpiece, "how is Mr. Cutter?"

"Still being a pain in the ass," Reese answered. He was in scrubs again, roaming the Emergency Department at will behind a stolen ID badge. He had the benefit this time of knowing his way around.

He'd stationed himself in the treatment bay across from Cutter's. From there he could hear the young man complaining – about how roughly they transferred him to the bed, about how many times the nurse checked his blood pressure and asked his name, about how long it took the doctor to get there. About how tight his oxygen mask was. And about how the paramedic who'd wheeled him in had dropped his backpack in the corner. "Be careful with that! My computer's in there!"

The nurse reported that her patient was still 'confused and combative'. Reese could have told her that Cutter was always like that, but he stayed out of sight and quiet.

He couldn't see any way to get at the computer.

The equipment in the ER kept him from communicating with Finch.

"You need to leave that on, sir," the nurse said patiently.

Cutter's voice was muffled behind the oxygen mask. "It makes me all sweaty."

"You have carbon monoxide poisoning. You need the oxygen."

"When's the doctor going to get here?"

"He'll be here soon. He's been given report on your situation, and he wants you to keep the oxygen mask on …"

"I want to go home."

"We're going to keep you a few hours, just to make sure you're okay."

"I'm fine. I have a headache. Just get the doctor in here so I can go home."

"Tell me about your headache," the nurse said. "Where would you say your pain is, on a scale of one to ten?"

"It's a ten," Cutter barked.

"I don't think it's a ten …"

"Just like the pain in the ass I'm getting from you! Go get the damn doctor!"

"Sir, I know you're confused still, but you need to …"

Reese stepped into the bay with them. "You need me to watch him for a few minutes?" he offered.

The nurse looked him up and down. Her eyes lingered just for a second on the ID badge. "You new here?" she asked.

John nodded. "Just on loan from oncology. Heard you might need an extra hand or two." He shot a quick glance at Cutter.

The woman got it. Sometimes a confused patient needed a calm, soft voice. Sometimes he needed a large man who would calmly not take any shit. She nodded gratefully. "I'll go find the doctor, see if we can get a mild sedative for him."

"Mm-hmmm."

"I don't want a sedative," Cutter protested. "I'm not confused. I just want to leave. I feel fine. Did they even lock my door? I better not get home and find my place emptied out."

The nurse nodded to John and walked out of the bay.

Reese walked around the bed and picked up the backpack.

"What are you doing?" Cutter protested. He lifted the mask. "That's mine, put that down."

"Need to borrow your computer for a moment," Reese answered serenely.

"Screw off. Get your own computer. Put that down."

"I'm trying to help you."

"I don't need your help, you f—"

There was a sharp, soft cracking sound. Cutter convulsed on the bed, then went limp. The lines on the monitor jumped and spiked.

Reese put the tazer back in his pocket, held the bag behind his back and stepped into the hallway. "Nurse! Nurse! I think he's having a seizure."

The nurse hurried toward him, a young doctor right behind her. Another nurse came out of a second bay. They rushed to Cutter's side.

Reese walked down the hall the other way calmly. He found an empty bay, brought out the Number's computer, and booted it up.

There continued to be scurrying activity around Cutter. After a minute, Reese could hear the young man begin to complain again. He smiled tightly. He wasn't sure Cutter was a would-be killer, but he did know that the young man was thoroughly unpleasant and rude individual. He didn't regret tazing him at all.

The computer came up, and Reese slipped his thumb drive into the port. It downloaded, but of course it couldn't send the data to Finch from here. He glanced at his phone, but there was no signal. Hospitals played hell with their communications.

He wasn't sure it would do any good, but he stuck a small transceiver onto the bag and uploaded one of Harold's programs onto the computer.

When the data was downloaded, Reese shut down the computer and put it back in the bag. He walked down the corridor, dropping the backpack off just outside the now-noisy treatment bay where Cutter was insisting loudly that he hadn't had a seizure.

He grinned one more time and kept walking.

Fusco's phone chirped when they were still twenty minutes from Chaos. He ignored it until they were stopped at a light, then pulled it out and read the text. He smiled and put it away. "Carter," he told Christine.

"You in trouble?"

"Nah. She covered for me."

"I really appreciate this, Lionel. It was good to see Marisa again."

The light changed and he drove through the intersection. "She's coming out of her shell, isn't she?"

"In a big way. She … "

There was a sudden and very loud noise in the car. Fusco couldn't begin to identify it. It rose and fell like a slow siren, but it sounded more like a cross between a high-pitched scream and a wolf howling at the moon. It made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.

It was clearly electronic, not human or animal.

He didn't know where it was coming from until Christine grabbed her own phone and slapped at it until the noise stopped. "What the hell was that?" he demanded.

"Rally cry," she answered sharply. She looked around, then pointed. "Pull over there. At the bank."

"What?"

"There. There."

She opened the door as he nosed into the curb and was out of the car before it stopped moving. "Here!" she shouted, pointing her phone toward the bank.

"What?" He threw the car into park and followed her.

Alarms went off inside the bank. Christine pushed through the door. By the time Fusco got there, people were pouring out, not just from the bank but from the office building above it. He snagged a man with a bank name tag. "What's going on?"

"Bomb threat," the man answered. "We need to evacuate the building, sir."

Fusco flashed his badge, then gestured to Christine. "She's with me."

The man just shrugged and moved away.

The tellers had already locked their drawers and were moving out. Another employee was locking the vault. In thirty seconds, the bank was empty except for the security guard.

Christine stood behind the railing, next to the bank manager's desk. She gestured with her head to the guard. "He needs to go."

"Go," Fusco said. He flashed his badge again.

The guard hesitated, then headed for the door.

"The FBI will be here shortly," Christine called. "Tell the agent in charge he can come in. Have the rest secure the building."

"Um … ma'am?" the guard asked uncertainly.

"Not you," she answered absently. She dropped into the manager's chair, pressed one button on her phone and set it on the desktop. "Nine," she announced. "I'm here and clear."

"Bad Wolf Nine," the phone answered, in a mechanical voice. "Stand by."

Fusco shoved the guard out the door and closed it behind him. In the street, hundreds of people evacuated from the building shivered against neighboring buildings. More continued to stream out from the office lobby.

He looked back toward Christine. She was staring at the three monitors on the bank manager's desk, but they were all blank. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard.

The bank lobby was dead silent.

"What the fuck?" Fusco asked under his breath.

And then the screens lit up.

Nicholas Donnelly was on the treadmill in the tiny fitness center of the Hunting Wolf Hollow Lodge and Resort, twenty minutes into his workout, when his phone made a noise he'd never heard before. It sounded like a wolf howling, if the wolf had swallowed a fire alarm. It was loud and awful, mechanical, and it sent instinctive shivers down his spine.

Maxwell had been in the dining room, acting like the Assistant General Manager that he sometimes was. He threw the door of the fitness center open while Donnelly was still toweling off. "Den now," he barked.

Donnelly followed him swiftly down the hallway and through the concealed door to the abandoned water park. "What the hell is that?" he asked.

"Rally cry," Maxwell answered swiftly. "Bad Wolf."

Another shiver ran down Donnelly's spine as they entered the stairwell. "I don't know what that means."

Maxwell was trotting down the steps as fast as he could go. It was hard for Donnelly to keep up, with his prosthetic foot, but he did his best. "The Source," Maxwell answered, "in the case of imminent emergency, can assemble a group of pre-selected programmers – hackers – and task them to address the issue."

"Who are they?"

"We don't know. Nobody knows. Except the Source."

They ran down the hallway and into the Den. The room was louder than Donnelly had ever heard it. The other operators were already there, crowded around the tables in the central hub. They all had headsets on, but none of them were talking. The chatter that filled the room came from the speakers. The big screen was activated, and everyone at the room was staring at it.

"Bad Wolf," Poole said swiftly. He gestured Donnelly to a chair. "Broadrange Asset Designation. You take Nine."

"Nine … what?"

"Bad Wolf Nine. Don't speak unless she speaks to you directly. She probably won't."

Donnelly stared at the screen, trying to figure out what was causing all the panic. A map of Manhattan took up the center of the screen. To the left there were several windows of scrolling data. To the right there was another map, tracing four flight paths and trajectories …

He sat up straight. "We're shooting missiles at Manhattan?"

"We're not," Poole snapped. "But somebody is."

"But those are our missiles," Maxwell stated. "What … Tomahawks? Cruise? Where did they come from?"

"Launched off a naval ship in Norfolk," Irini answered. "Launch codes and guidance protocols have been breached."

"Nuclear?"

"Conventional, thank God."

"Bunker-busters," Poole added. "They'll still make a hell of a mess."

Four missiles, Donnelly thought. Conventional warheads. Call it one city block each … better than leveling the whole city, yes, but … 9/11 times four, in terms of devastation. Depending on which four city blocks they hit, the casualty county could be …

"Why not aim them at D.C.?" he wondered aloud.

"We'll sort that out later," Poole snapped.

"What do I do now?"

"Just watch. Be ready if they need help. When it's over, we'll take this apart, try to find out what happened and why. But for now, it's in the hands of the hackers."

"Jesus Christ."

"If you think He knows how to hack," Maxwell answered, "get him a keyboard."

Donnelly sank into the chair. He pulled the keyboard to him, then pushed it away again. There was not a damn thing he could do. Beside him, Irini was literally wringing her hands. He could feel the woman's impatient frustration. It exactly mirrored his.

Missiles screaming toward Manhattan, and they were sitting in the Den doing nothing.

But the hackers – he listened to the voices. They were overlapping, quick, crisp. But there was as much chatter as jargon. And there was music – fucking music – in the background. Some rock song with a repeating phrase: Light 'em up – up – up. "Jesus Christ," he murmured again. And then, louder, "How long?"

A countdown clock appeared in the corner of the top screen. Seven minutes, forty-five seconds.

He picked up a headpiece and slipped it over one ear. He raised the mouthpiece so it stayed mute. Then he put his hands down and gripped the front of his chair, hard.

The conversation flew over his head. Donnelly had learned to hack from one of the best, but he could barely keep up with what they were saying, much less comprehend it. The hackers chattered like monkeys on speed. Their voices were calm, cocky, but he understood from their speech patterns that they were scared.

He shivered as the adrenalin response his phone had caused faded. It was deliberate, he knew. That tone, that pitch – it was carefully designed to hype up the response system on the hackers. They were like monkeys on crack, by design. Asena had shot them up when she called them in.

Donnelly looked up at the screens. The center one was the light path of the missiles. The screens on each side were lines of code. They grew and changed at an alarming rate. In the upper screens were transcripts of the Bad Wolf conversations. That would be useful, later, to decipher exactly what had happened. If there were still there.

"We need to lock down the other missiles," he said aloud.

Poole nodded. "Order's already out. All ships, all stations. Everything's locking down."

"Locking down electronically?"

"Fuck," the director said. He turned away from the screen, keyed a button on a keyboard, and spoke to someone swiftly.

White House? Donnelly wondered. Pentagon? Department of Defense? It didn't matter.

There was, he realized, much too late for his own comfort, two distinct conversations going on. One was the hackers. The other was the Suits. Bureaucrats, military people, intelligence. They were talking to each other and to themselves. When he concentrated, he determined that the Suits could hear the Hackers, but not the other way around.

The hacker's didn't give a rat's ass what the Suits had to say. They had work to do.

Wolf One said, "Five, you in yet?"

"She's groveling like a bitch," Five barked. "Give me a second."

"You hack like my mother," Six shot back. She was, unexpectedly, a woman. Donnelly shook his head. The best hacker he'd ever met – with one possible exception – was a woman. He shouldn't be surprised.

"That's what she said," One teased.

Light 'em up – up – up.

Nine had not spoken at all.

And then Six said, "Nine? You wanna handle the fighters?"

"You know I do, baby," she answered.

Donnelly gripped the chair tighter. He knew that voice. Of course he knew that voice. He'd been expecting her.

Christine Fitzgerald was talking in his ear.

He looked up at the camera in the corner and nodded, just once. Thank you, Asena. Now please let her live.

One said, "I'm not sure we can crack these guys. They're good."

"They're damn good," Six agreed. She was the other female voice among the hackers. "They might be better than any of us."

"Better than any of us," Christine began.

"But not better than all of us," the Bad Wolves answered in chorus.

"Let's crack these bitches," Five said with what sounded like glee.

"Oh my God," Finch said.

"Finch?" Reese answered immediately over the com. "What's wrong? Is it Cutter?"

Harold shivered. "Mr. Cutter's peril may be … inconsequential," he said faintly.

"What?"

Bear crowded against Finch's legs, anxious. He reached down and gripped the dog's fur. "They've … someone has … there are missiles," he managed to say. His mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton.

"Missiles where?" Reese demanded. "Finch, what's going on?"

"There's been a …security breech." Finch picked up his tea and made himself take a sip. He swirled it in his mouth enough to make speech possible. He looked towards his screens, but of course they were unchanged. He did not have access, and the Machine was not going to give it to him. He could only listen over Christine's phone. "An electronic breech. They've launched missiles. At the city."

"At New York?"

"Yes."

"Can you stop them?"

"No."

"Finch!"

"There's a protocol," Harold said quickly. "There's a protocol in place. I created it when I … in case there was no advance warning. Christine … and the others …

"Christine?" Reese's voice was suddenly sharp. "What's she got to do with it?"

"She's helping. Her … others … hackers, the best hackers … in case of … I can't stop this, but there are others …"

"Finch, get out of there."

"There's no time." Harold took a deep breath. He was suddenly calm in the inevitability of the situation. He opened his hand and smoothed Bear's fur down. He had created a protocol. He had called it Designated Hitters in his mind, but Nathan had dubbed it B.A.D. – the response when things were very, very bad. It wasn't until later that Bad Wolf had crept into the description, and that had been introduced by the hackers themselves. He hadn't argued about the names. He didn't care about them. The Machine had a way to respond; that was the critical thing. It had worked before. It would work now. Or else he would die. He and John and everyone they cared about might die. It would depend on where the missiles hit. But he had done the best he could.

Their motto. Better than any of us. But not better than all of us. That had to be true. That had to be true.

It was in the hands of the Machine now, and of the hackers the Machine had designated.

It made perfect sense, of course, that Christine Fitzgerald was one of them.

He hoped to the god of cyberspace that Root wasn't one of them, too.

He could hear a woman's voice, but it didn't sound at all like his former captor's.

Since there was nothing to be done, he let himself sink into fascination, listening to the process unfold.

"How long?" Reese asked.

"I don't know," Finch admitted. "Not long."

"I'm coming back."

"There's no point, Mr. Reese. By the time you get here …" He paused. Either he would be dead, or he would be safe. Nothing his partner could do would make any difference. John might be safe where he was. Moving toward the library might put him in harm's way – or save his life. There was no way to know.

"I'm coming back. Let me listen."

Finch considered. He shouldn't have been able to listen in: the Machine should have cut off all outside contact when it initiated the protocol. It had made an exception for him. He wasn't sure it would extend that exception to Mr. Reese.

But then, it had made exceptions for John before.

He touched his phone and let Reese listen to what he was hearing.