A/N Hey all! Just so you know, updates are gonna be slower for a while, 'cause I'm away on holiday and access to a computer for me to write on is sketchy. There aren't too many chapters left, but I'm not sure how many I'll be doing over the next two weeks. So that's slightly inconvenient. But the story will definitely be done by the end of the month - you might just have to deal with getting normal-speed updates rather than one-per-day crazy updates for a while. :P

'You might not have been burnt to nothing in that fire, but your clothes weren't quite so lucky. Cover up, man….'

…she kicked out at the door, the metal crumpling beneath the force of her blow, and the three teenagers made their way back out into the hall…

…then I bit back the tears that were coming, sucked in the unbearable, sickening relief that was trying to topple me, and turned back towards the others...

They ran, all of them, towards the meeting point that had been set. In The General's now-deserted office, a map still lit up the wall beside the desk, showing an enlarged image of the School's blueprint as it looked in real time; clear on the map were nine yellow dots spread through the hallways, moving towards the same exit. They were the only ones The General had been interested in – those, and the one that represented Nudge, still visible in the control room a couple of floors up. The locations of Ella and Angel hadn't been important to her. Perhaps they should've been. But they weren't. She had set the image to show only the positions of the ten members of the group who had made their way from Oregon to the School.

So yes, nine of them were moving…

We reached the door about two minutes after we were supposed to. I didn't know where the other groups had gotten to, or what I was going to do if they didn't show up, but in the end it turned out that I didn't have time to stop and ponder those questions; light from outside met our eyes as we turned the corner into the final corridor, and beyond the half-open door there was movement and noise, the sound of the alarm being replaced by the sounds of people milling around and shouting orders. I sped up a little, positioning myself at the front of the group. Iggy took up the rear, with Fang in front of him carrying Angel, and Ella and Gazzy stuck close behind me.

It would be a massive understatement to say that the goings-on of the last few minutes had been a shock. Fang and I had walked back to the others, and when Gazzy had laid eyes on his sister it looked for a moment as though he was going to collapse right there in the middle of the hallway. In that moment all I'd wanted was to give him a moment to just take her in, cry, shout, whatever he needed to do… Unfortunately the time-sensitive situation hadn't really allowed a long, emotional reunion, and as much as I hated myself for having to do it, after a few seconds of stunned silence I'd clapped my hands together in that way I have that I'm sure pisses people off. Then we were moving again, each of us continuing our own personal freak-out in the privacy of our own heads as we ran. In a way it didn't feel real – I still couldn't get my head around the fact that Fang and Angel were both alive and right there in the hall with me – and I'm fairly certain there was a part of me that thought it was all a dream, that fully expected to wake up strapped to a surgeon's table somewhere, about to be retired. But until that happened, we were running for the door, and I was the leader, and I had to make sure that no one got hurt. Well, no one on my team, of course. The bad guys could be tossed in a mammoth-sized blender and set to 'pulverize' for all I cared.

It wasn't until I'd reached the door and flung it fully open that I realised things weren't going to be so easy; spread across the grounds of the School, faces turned towards us as we burst from the building, was a sea of children.

My problem with the situation went something like this: I really don't like violence.

Okay, who am I kidding?

But I only like violence if it's being directed at the right people.

In my book, a bunch of kids doesn't make that cut.

The thing was that, as decked out as the Generation 77ers were with crazy-deadly abilities and whatnot, they were just children, and there was a big part of me that suspected they weren't the ones running things upstairs, if you get my drift. As we stood in the doorway staring at them, and they stood in the grounds staring back, it looked to me as though they had the same not-quite-there look about them as the Doomsday kids. Beating up evil kids was a grey area; beating up kids under the influence of some insane organisation's mind control was a no-no.

Which would've been great and all if the kids in question had been willing to step aside and just let us walk past. But then I wouldn't be having the moral dilemma in the first place, would I? Because what they seemed to want to do was fight. And whilst I didn't really want to hurt any of them, I wasn't too crazy about just sitting back and letting myself or my family get beaten to a pulp, either.

See, these are the kinds of decisions I have to deal with. Next time you don't know which cereal to choose in the morning, feel lucky.

It looked like they'd been told/ordered/forcibly programmed not to make a move before we did, because everyone seemed frozen in a weird kind of stand-off; we watched them, they watched us, and no one moved.

'Fang, you've got Angel. Get away as quickly as you can,' I muttered under my breath, not even daring to turn away from the Gen 77ers to face my group. 'Iggy, Gazzy, get Ella out of here. I'll stick around for as long as it takes for the others to show up, they can't have been here already.'

'Max, you can't face all this on your own,' said Fang quietly from behind me.

'I wouldn't need to fight them all, just hold them off,' I whispered back. 'All defence, no outright attacking.'

'Yeah, attacking would be stupid. Trying to defend yourself against a bazillion super-soldier kids sounds way easier,' Gazzy said sarcastically.

'Besides, they're probably under orders not to let any of us escape,' Iggy added. 'I don't think any of us are getting out of here all that easily.'

I scowled, clicking my jaw from side to side as I looked out at the mass of blank-faced, staring children. He was right, of course; if they were all standing here ready to take us on, it was unlikely that they wouldn't be expecting us to just, you know, fly away. They'd have measures in place to make sure that didn't happen.

Then the choice was taken out of my hands as Holden, Star and some kind of frog-like creature came barrelling through the door, knocking everyone forwards in a crazy domino effect that sent me stumbling into the front line of the zombie army.

And apparently that counts as a first move, because suddenly all hell broke loose.

Nudge waved him out of the way of the keyboard, her mind buzzing as her gaze fixed on that one word: delete.

'I think we're gonna be a bit late getting back to the others…'

It took a good few minutes to go through the files for the whole group, making sure that all their expiration dates were deleted from the system. Nudge knew that they'd gone over their time limit, and she was definitely worried about how Max would react once they joined up with the others again, but hopefully they'd all understand once she told them what she'd done.

'What's going to happen to all this if The General gets turned back into Dr Martinez?' she asked Jeb, skidding her chair along a bit to where a screen still held her search for the tone. That was what made this room so cool; if she'd needed to then she could've worked on about twenty different things at once, all on different screens, without having to worry about getting tabs mixed up or anything, just zipping around on her swivel chair.

'I'm not sure. Technically she'd still own the property – not that legal rights mean much when it comes to this place – but I doubt she'll want too much to do with it all after everything that's happened.' Jeb looked over at Nudge from his seat at the other side of the unit. 'What do you think should happen to it?'

Nudge frowned as one hundred different ideas came into her head at once, but she bit her tongue and looked down at her fingers moving across the keyboard, thinking about what she really wanted before replying.

'It would be good to know that the School had been destroyed. Like, that'd make it feel really safe and stuff, y'know? Even though saving Dr Martinez is going to stop everything from working, it would be all like the building was still there so the place where it all happened still existed, and that's kinda scary. But I don't know if it can be destroyed, because there are so many things in here that could help people if they were used by nice scientists like most of the ones on the Wendy K or something instead of crazy evil scientists who wanted to experiment on little kids. So maybe it shouldn't be knocked down, an-' She stopped herself, realising that her words had been coming faster and faster as she spoke. 'It couldn't be destroyed, could it? Not really.'

Sighing, Jeb watched the monitor as Nudge worked.

'Probably not, I'm afraid. You're right; there's a lot of work and equipment and research material held in this place that could be incredibly beneficial. It could help advance pharmacology, medicine, technology, anthropology, biology… There have been some great minds involved in this organisation, not all of them fully aware of what they were helping to achieve. It would be difficult to throw it all away. But I understand what you mean about the building being something you'd be happy to see go.' He grimaced, and Nudge realised that the School held some horrible memories for him, too.

'We could collect all the data and stuff, transfer it from this base to another one somewhere, then Iggy and Gazzy could blow the building up,' she said, smiling at the image in her head. 'Then we could make sure that only good people used the information for good things.' She nodded resolutely, pleased with her idea.

Jeb's smile was a little sad as he stood up from his seat and walked towards her, putting his hand on the back of her chair and looking up at the screen.

'Information is difficult to control, Nudge. You should know that better than anyone. But yes. That would be nice.'

The conversation seemed kind of over, so Nudge chewed at the inside of her cheek and enjoyed the sound of the keys under her fingers. It was a difficult hack; the data she needed was buried way deep in the system, and since practically no one knew it even existed, it hadn't been accessed in ages. The trail left by the last person to retrieve the information was long gone, trampled into nothing by the thousands of keystrokes and thoughts and personalities that had used the control room since. But Nudge still knew computers, and she still knew what she was doing – it was just taking a bit longer than it would have if she'd been left with a nice shiny track leading the way.

It took a few minutes for her to realise how hot it had become. She twisted to look up at Jeb, who was wiping at his forehead, his nose crinkled up in confusion.

'Are we next door to a boiler room or something?' Nudge asked, hands still tapping away.

'Not that I'm aware of,' Jeb replied, looking up towards the ceiling for any signs of an industrial heating system. His gaze fell on the set of screens that still displayed the camera feeds streamed from throughout the building, half-forgotten as attention had been turned back to saving Dr Martinez, and his eyes widened as realisation dawned on him: 'The fire. It's started to spread out. Star and Holden were on the floor just below us, weren't they? We must be close to being right above the source of the explosion, that's why we felt it so much. The heat's rising up through the floor.'

Nudge stared, her eyes fixed on a different screen.

'Jeb!' She pointed. 'There they are, Max and the others, outside, fighting the Gen 77 kids. They're completely outnumbered, there's no way… I should be there with them, or I should be helping from here...' Covering her face with her hands, she shook her head hard, her breathing starting to come in quick gasps. 'I can't do this anymore! Acting like a god and controlling everything was fun before, but I can't keep saving everyone because I don't know how, and my head's getting all screwed up and there's too much to get fixed and it's too hot in here!'

She felt a hand on her back, and Jeb's voice came from her left.

'You don't have to save everyone. It's okay, Nudge. You do what you were doing, just keep looking for that file. That's how you're helping. I'll deal with the rest.'

'How?' she cried, taking her hands away from her face and looking up at him.

'The Generation 77 project was the first to work directly with the Doomsday Group – all those kids will have been pitched at the same frequency, as it were, and it won't be nearly as well-guarded as Valencia's. I can find that, you keep going with your job.' His voice was calm, and it made Nudge slightly calmer to hear it. She nodded, brow still crinkled a little in worry.

'Okay.'

Jeb moved away from her towards the other end of the unit, but before he could reach it, there was an awful kind of creaking-crunching sound, and the floor beneath his feet gave way.

A/N So yes, I shall update whenever I can get my hands on my mum's laptop whilst I'm away, but that could mean updates rangin from within a couple of days to none for about a week or so (she can be really protective of her laptop - it's got all her work stuff on it). Try not to hate me for being slow!

Let me know what you thought of this chapter, and maybe I'll be able to use emotional blackmail to get her to let me use it ('Mum, look at all the reviews. Think how many people I'll be letting down if I don't update quickly!'). It's worth a shot. So review!