A/N My knees hurt. When I was in Portugal I decided to take up running - not too much, just a few km per day - and it turns out that I have flat feet and my trainers weren't right for me, so now my kneecaps aren't sitting properly within the joint. It hurts. -.- And now they're all strapped up so I can't walk or bend or do any of that fun stuff particularly well. Stupid trainers. Ah well, chapter time.

The confusion in the grounds was massive. One second it had been like Armageddon, with the shouting and the fighting and the utter hopelessness and all that cheery stuff. I'd been faltering, taking on more and more hits, and I remember thinking 'this is it. We can't keep this up. This is the end.' Then suddenly it was like all the Gen 77ers had had their strings cut; every single one of them just stopped fighting and looked around in bewilderment. The looks on their faces would've been pretty damn funny if I hadn't been so confused myself.

Slowly I became aware of a sound ringing out above the murmuring that was spreading through the grounds – so I had been right about the kids being brainwashed. My gaze snapped over to the place where Kate stood, staring around, her eyes wide. The body across her shoulders wasn't limp anymore; now it was struggling to be let down. Still The General, then. Not my mom yet. I moved forwards, shoving my way through the crowd – perplexed, only-just-unbrainwashed kids are so bad at getting out of the way – and by the time I'd reached Kate a second tone had started up. The figure she was holding stopped struggling and lifted its head, and then my mom was looking at me with horror in her eyes.

'Max,' she whispered, her voice thin and broken. Kate lowered her gently to the ground, and I gripped her shoulders as she stood shakily, looking around the bizarre yard at the children who were frowning, crying, talking to those next to them in hopes of understanding what was going on. I watched her cautiously, not wanting to let myself believe the tone had worked until I was absolutely sure of it. Her gaze met mine again and the remorse in her eyes made me want to cry.

'I'm so sorry,' she managed, before her face crumpled and tears started running down her cheeks. I hugged her then, my own eyes dry, and for that moment it was as if our roles had been reversed; I was the parent, and she was the child. I could see the other members of the group gathering around us, and then Ella barrelled through the circle, her face red and twisted with a mixture of shock and relief. I let my mom – it really was my mom – go and moved to the side so that Ella could reach her, watching as they clung to one another. Mom was whispering 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry' over and over again in my sister's ear, not seeming to care that her arm was bent at a weird angle, hanging at her side, clearly broken. I didn't understand how she seemed to know what had happened, what she'd done; by the looks of things, none of the Generation 77 kids had a clue. I guessed it was something that I'd have to ask later, once we were all out of this awful, soul-sucking place and holed up somewhere safe.

I scanned the rest of the group, cataloguing how injured each of them seemed to be: Holden, of course, was unhurt, but looking at him now I realised that he was wearing a lab coat and an ill-fitting pair of pants instead of the clothes he'd had on earlier; Star's arm hung at her side, and I guessed that the pressure of the fight must have caused the dislocation to recur; Ratchet, Dylan and Kate didn't appear to have any major injuries, and Fang still held an unhurt Angel against him; Iggy cupped his hand tightly over his seemingly-broken jaw, his other arm supporting Gazzy, who was doubled over and holding his stomach. I strode towards him, wincing at my own injuries, and helped him get down onto the ground. Pulling his shirt up, I could see some heavy bruising spreading across the lower half of his torso. Not good. And Nudge still hadn't turned up.

Fighting back panic, I turned to Mom from my place on the ground.

'You remember everything, don't you?' She nodded, her face pulled tight in grief. 'Alright then, I know that this is moving really quickly and everything, but I need you to use the School's contacts, any of them, to get a chopper or a plane or something here as soon as possible, okay? We need to get transport to a hospital fast.' I twisted to face the others. 'Those of you who aren't hurt too badly, look after the others. Kate, can you come with me to find Nudge and Jeb?'

'Of course.' Kate nodded, looking shaken but determined.

'Okay.'

Seeming to swallow her emotions, my mom snapped into fully-blown leader mode, ordering one of the evacuated whitecoats to show us the way to the control room. If the whitecoat was surprised by her boss' sudden change in objective then she didn't show it. As she led us back into the building, I heard Mom calling for someone to get her a phone, and despite how worried I was about Nudge, Angel, Gazzy, everyone, I couldn't help smiling a bit; guess I know where I get my leadership skills from.

We wound through the hallways, and finally we reached the top floor. The acrid smell of smoke was obvious even before we left the stairwell, and fear clenched in my chest as we pushed through the doors to see a grey haze hanging in the corridors before us. As we carried on towards the control room it became clear that we were moving towards the source of the smoke, and with every step my sense of panic grew. What had happened here?

'The control room's just around the next few corners,' said the whitecoat, choking a little as she took a breath. We turned into the next corridor, and Kate almost tripped over something on the floor. Through the smoke, thicker here than before, we could make out the unconscious (please just let them be unconscious) forms of Nudge and Jeb.

'Oh no,' whispered the whitecoat, but neither Kate nor I bothered to speak; pulling Nudge up into my arms, I watched Kate do the same with Jeb, then we turned and made our way as quickly as we could back the way we'd come. All I could think about was how long they might have been lying there, choking on the smoke – a long time ago, after one of Iggy and the Gasman's more elaborate pyrotechnic stunts, I'd taken the liberty of reading up about fire safety, and as we headed back down the stairwell I remember something about how the smoke will usually kill you before the fire does. Don't think about that. One step at a time, Max.

We burst out into the yard to the sight of a black chopper sitting in the middle of the space, its rotors still spinning slowly around. Before I could react, six doctory-looking folks had run up wheeling two stretchers with them. I had to fight all my instincts to punch their lights out as they took Nudge from my arms and laid her out on one of the gurneys, wasting no time with pleasantries as they raced her away from me towards the chopper.

As the helicopter lifted off the ground, I felt like throwing up with the strain of having to trust other people with my weakened-slash-injured family; they had taken Angel, Gazzy, and Star as well as Nudge and Jeb, and left three members of their emergency response team with us to deal with the more minor injuries that had been sustained until more transport could reach us. I was told that the first chopper had been one of a large group of emergency FBI vehicles located across the US, a set-up that was generally used to make sure that any agent can be guaranteed a pick-up within about half an hour even when they're working in the most remote areas in the country. The one that came to us made it in about fifteen minutes. Score one for the FBI.

The horrible part of the whole arrangement was that the rest of us had to hang around, keeping an eye on the still-confused Generation 77 kids and the possibly still-evil whitecoats and the definitely still-burning School. I wondered how long it would take for the fire to reach the no doubt large quantities of flammable and explosive substances that the labs held, and hoped that the fleet of 'copters would arrive before that happened; I seriously didn't think I could deal with any more chaos in one day. I looked around the grounds, seeing Mom getting her broken arm plastered up as Ella stood by her shoulder, and Iggy having a bandage wound under his chin and right up over his head to hold his jaw in place until proper X-rays could be taken, and the others spread out across the dusty ground, occasionally saying a few words to a passing Gen 77er. The evacuated whitecoats stood as far apart from everyone else as possible, talking amongst themselves.

Everything seemed a bit cloudy in my mind, and suddenly I realised that I was swaying where I stood, finding it hard to focus on anything; the immense pressure of the day seemed to be getting to me. I screwed my eyes up tight and opened them again to stare at the ground, trying to pull myself together, then before I knew it someone had walked up to me and wrapped me up in a pair of strong arms. Fang. My own arms wound around his back and I dropped my head onto his shoulder, feeling completely exhausted. We stood for a moment and then his voice drifted down to me like it was coming from miles away:

'So, saving the world… Turns out it's not so hard after all.'

I let out a weak laugh and nodded slightly against him.

'Yeah. Piece of cake,' I said shakily. I noticed a wetness on my hands and pulled back, feeling a stab of panic that was a bit like being suddenly doused in freezing water when I saw that they were red with blood. 'Fang!'

'It's fine,' he said, his voice calm as he placed his own hands over mine so that I couldn't stare at the blood on them anymore. 'Just some stitches that got pulled. It looks worse than it is.'

My head bobbed slowly in a kind of half-nod, and my eyes wandered away from him and back across the grounds, not really focussing on anything properly, not really taking anything in.

'Max?' Fang's voice drew my gaze back to him, but I couldn't keep my sight fixed on his face as my eyes kept on drifting around of their own accord. 'Are you alright?' His hands held my arms, steadying me.

I swallowed hard and took a deep breath, trying to wake myself up a bit.

'Uh-huh,' I said in what I'm sure was an entirely unconvincing way. 'I'm fine.'

A/N So please let me know what you think, and sorry again for leaving it so long! Review!