Sorry I didn't make it more apparent at the end of this last chapter what was going on. I decided to switch perspectives because Ben was being whiney and I missed Riley already. So whenever it's in italics, it's going to be from the perspective of the Chinese man. Who is Riley's captor.

And this is when chapters start getting really short, I believe, otherwise the posts will be depressingly far apart.

Momiji'sunusedhalo – Can't say exactly what's going to happen to him, but if you can't handle moderate to extreme Riley angst… you may want to be careful what you read in the next few chapters… hope my above explanation makes it more clear what's going on, thanks for letting me know it was kind of obscure.

Durithyll – Haha, I appreciate your enthusiasm! It's contagious… sorry to let you down and take forever with the update, I wish I could update sooner. Oh, excuse my ignorance but what do you mean by 'whump'? For there will indeed be upcoming angst…

Dark Duchess of the Underworld – Hey, I like that idea! It would do a decent job of integration. I'll keep that in mind, thank you!

Thuraya Known – Thanks again for your review, I love your reviews. I'll be having a lot more Chinese Man POV's soon… Again, about the updating, I really wish I could update more now, but… I have the feeling everyone knows what I mean.

Disclaimer! Do we seriously need these every chapter? I actually have no idea. Everyone else is doing it. So I may as well jump on the bandwagon. Ben and Riley aren't mine. I just manipulate them with ink pixels!

"They haven't done anything yet," I announced to the Blackwells, tossing the phone into the glove compartment. Who the heck ever kept gloves in their glove department? Insurance, hand warmers, maybe a wrench and a screw driver. Random papers, gas station receipts. Illegal cell phones. Bah.

"Riley seems fine. The Chinese man is making it sound like they don't want to do anything to him." They all say that though. Not that I'd know. Really.

"I feel like I was saying something important before I had to call…"

"You were wondering why they wanted to kill everybody."

"Ah yes. Thank you." Suddenly I just didn't really feel like pondering that. I wanted to save Riley and I wanted to save everyone else. I was tired. Tired. Didn't want to strategize. Just wanted to do it.

Gun?

Had I seen a gun in the glove department?

I re-opened it. There was a gun.

"Blackwell, is this yours?" He glanced at it, sighed wearily.

"Yes, that's mine. There aren't any bullets though. It's been in there for years."

"Why do you have a gun?"

"I don't really know… my father was an officer, that's his gun. As to why I keep it in there… again, a mystery."

"But no bullets?"

"No." Dang. Not that I knew what I'd do with a gun anyways. Shoot someone? Could I kill someone? Dead-looking shrubby plants were whizzing past my face, patches of beeflower and some shocks of bright red grass mashing together to make a massive ketchup and mustard smear across my field of vision. Food. I was hungry. Hungry and tired and cranky. I wasn't going to complain about the hunger. If Riley was going to be hungry, well then, so could I. Even though I didn't know if they'd refuse him food. And what was the point in not eating, anyways? I'd just get more cranky and more tired and my mind would get even fuzzier. Part of my headache might go away.

I was rambling in my own head. I remembered such a feeling from my college days. Did I care what Rudolph Otto had to say about the 'idea of the holy'? Heck no. I'd distract myself with anything, if only to not read the dreaded packet of text. But what did I think I was doing, daring to not concentrate when the situation was so dire. I hated myself for even starting to distract myself. Wondered how I could have let myself think that was ok for even a minute.

I awoke some unnamable amount of time later, window cool on my forehead, neck cramped. I didn't feel refreshed at all. And now the guilt settled in for falling asleep while I had been telling myself not to get distracted. I looked over at Blackwell. The man looked tired. Century was staring out at the vast horizon. Or something.

Had to think of something. Something. Something. The word 'something' started repeating itself over and over in my head.

"Doc, I think I'm going crazy."

"Don't fall off the wagon yet, Ben, please. We need your brains."

"Brains? Who's the resident genius here?"

"We have our strengths but I believe you'll be the primary director behind this one." Excellent. Just what I needed to hear. All up to Ben Gates. I started to laugh, but felt like I was going to go insane and start crying, so I stopped.

"What are you going to do, brainwash me?" he asked. I ignored the question.

"Riley, do you know who we are?"

"…No." I heard the sarcastic comment bitten back. In the rearview mirror his face was grasped in his hands. Something surfaced in my mind that I'd been wondering.

"Why were you unconscious when we found you in the car?"

"I don't know." The way he said it assured me that he did know, in fact.

"You should tell us. I'd like to know if there's anything we should be aware of before we expect anything of you."

"So you don't accidentally kill me, you mean."

"Yes." May as well be frank with him. His hands sunk a few inches from his face and he tried to raise his eyes to meet mine in the mirror, but they didn't quite make it. Instead he just stared out the windshield for a moment, as if watching his inevitable death approaching rapidly. I felt an unwelcome twang of pity in my gut. If only he'd agree with us. A person like him didn't really deserve what we were going to do if he didn't cooperate. It just happened to be this oblivious young man who had no idea how deep in he was who ended up being the hacker prodigy.

Well, what had to be done had to be done.

"Keeping quiet?" I asked, glancing back at him. To my surprise he'd lost that sullen look. Not that I could see much of his face – it was buried in both hands.

"Riley?" I asked. No reaction. Was he crying? He seemed to be shaking a bit.

"Is he ok?" The guard in back seemed a bit hesitant to touch him, but brought no reaction upon shaking Riley's shoulder. He had better not be dying, was my immediate thought. That wouldn't be fair. I wanted to pull the car over but that would be too risky, here on the highway. We were on a strict schedule.

"Riley! What's going on?" He had started rocking back and forth and what little I could see of his face seemed warped with pain. And yes, I told myself, he was crying. Maybe he was having a panic attack. Or a nervous breakdown. He'd just have to sit there, then.

But why did he look like he was in such pain?

I glanced at the clock. Half an hour before they called again. Maybe I'd ask Ben what was up. Maybe Ben wouldn't tell me. Maybe Riley would be dead by then. How much longer before we got there? Another two hours. This had better not be serious.

Riley curled into the car door, as if he was trying to hide, slowly twisting his body into itself and into weird angles, what you'd expect to see from someone who was… in mindless pain. Like a skewered worm.

"Riley!" I said sharply, hoping to break him from whatever cage his mind resided in.

"What's going on?" No response.

I'd just have to call Ben then.

I dialed the number and waited for three rings before Ben's voice answered, puzzled.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Ben, it's me… "What was I doing, I was making it sound like we were life long friends.

"Um, something appears to be wrong with Riley… he won't respond to anything, he's just…" I looked at his form via the rearview mirror. "Kind of curled there, looks kind of miserable." I thought I heard Ben laugh on the other end. I wondered if I'd hit him too hard with my gun.

I knew the Chinese man was concerned that Riley was going to die on him. I laughed to myself. Let him worry. He couldn't do anything about it. And I wasn't going to tell him what was up; he might use it against Riley. He'd probably figure it out quickly enough without my help.

"Is there anything else you want?"

"Tell me what's wrong with him."

"No," I said simply.

"I can help him." Now, that made me mad. He was threatening to torture Riley, and yet here he was telling me that he'd help him.

"How can you say that? How can you help him if he's just going to die anyways?"

"We're all going to die someday, Ben."

"Which just makes the particular day it's on all the more crucial."

"Well, Ben, I hope for your sake that whatever's going on with him isn't deadly, or his death is in your hands." I scoffed. I wasn't really a scoffy person, so that kind of surprised me.

"Call back in twenty-five minutes, Ben." He hung up. I had the sudden urge to whip the cell phone out the window again. Frustration was clouding my mind, I knew, low blood sugar and lack of sleep pushing away any voice of reason I'd previously had. I didn't even want to be thinking about why I wanted to act without reason, but I had to. I at least had that much control. For now.

"So," I said, using that word to shatter the silence that had formed like stifling ice around us. Shatter the silence. What a cliché. And it held so much truth. It had annoyed me before that so many clichés were so true, so appropriate, and yet so many people used them that everyone else got sick of hearing the truths they carried behind their familiar words. I had killed the quiet. I had stabbed the lack of sound with one simple, short noise.

"We need to do something." I left it at that for a while. Of course we had to do something. What though? That was the question.

"What can we do?" It was like trying to analyze the Allegory of the Cave at three in the morning. I needed focus. I needed coffee, dammit.

"Coffee." Blackwell sighed dreamily, clearly sharing my desire. His face held a hint of sadness. It did. It wasn't just a cliché.

"What?"

"No buildings from here to Price," he admitted sadly.

"When we get out of all this and save the world, I'm going to install a coffee shop right up there, on top of that butte." I pointed to the monolithic formation jutting into the sky like those jutty things in the dinosaur part of the old Fantasia.

"No-one would be able to get there," Blackwell pointed out.

"It would be more of a… tribute to our achievement. People would look at it as they drove past and be reminded of our heroic accomplishment of saving the world without any coffee. And they'd be like, hey, if they can do it, so can I."

"Do what? Save the world? Hopefully it won't have to happen again."

"Well, if anyone passing by here happens to be trying to save the world and they need coffee, it would be great inspiration to them."

"The way you two are going," commented Century from the backseat, "We'll never get the chance. Let's plan our tributes after we save the world." Apparently women had some sort of weird store of focus somewhere in their bodies that men didn't have. A focus gland. That excretes focus when the body is in need of focus. Century's extra focus hormones kicked in and she spoke.

"I don't want to say this but it needs to be said. They're not going to kill Riley, they need his skills. We need to stop worrying about him. He'll live. We do need to worry about what they're planning on doing. We need to get to the core of their plan and disengage it." I laughed in my head. Disengage. What a funny word for her to use. "We need to do it ourselves, unless we can quick find a few trusted individuals to help us out. I think we need to get to Price first, maybe accidentally get lost, scope out the city. And whatever we end up doing it has to take them by surprise. It has to be something they won't expect at all, something that they won't even know how to respond to. We need to do something. If we screw it up, we're back to square one, we just try something new."

"Unless they kill us."

"That's something we should be aware of, yes. But again, it's kind of all or nothing. If we fail we're going to die anyways. Ben," and I jerked at my name. I knew what she was saying without really listening.

"You should get some sleep. Your mind needs a break. We'll wake you to greet China man." I couldn't really argue with that, even though I really wanted to. For the sake of arguing. For the sake of conflict. Like I needed any more conflict at the moment. I shifted around for a few minutes, trying to find the ever elusive comfy sleeping position. I wasn't really aware when my body finally sunk into a semi-acceptable situation and my mind was released. I spent the time before our next call drifting in and out, almost entering the deeper levels of sleep, awakened by that weird feeling in my gut I sometimes got when I slept in vehicles, probably due to the strange twisting of my body position.

Phone in my ear. I said Hello. I fell back into unconsciousness. This time I experienced a period of darkness, unaware of anything at all, peace embracing my soul. Then we arrived at the place they were keeping Riley. I stretched, got out of the car. No-one else there, at this weird abandoned factory with the fuzzy edges and obscure corners. My focus was really just on one door, blood-red and grimy, not a good sign, I knew. That door hadn't always been red. I reached for it and my hand froze to the handle. I drew it back in shock, a layer of my skin sticking to the metal, hand bleeding. Riley was in there, though, so I grasped the handle, turned it, pulled the door open.

It was dark inside but I could feel him in there. None of the bright sunlight illuminated the room, it was like a black hole. Riley, I called, and he didn't answer with words, but I felt a wave of frigid despair rushing from the room, spilling out, like fumes from the top of a nuclear reactor, engulfing me and I choked on the potency. Stumbling inside, feeling around with groping hands, searching for a body, my right hand encountered an empty area. Riley was there, but he wasn't. He was covered in transparent blood, his spirit leaking out of the many new holes in his body, sick and wilted and shredded into irrecoverable bits. Alive but gone. What makes a person?

Sharp breath, wrenched from sleep. Where was I? Where was Riley? Reality settled down upon me slowly, like motes of dust. Gently. I wished reality would have come crashing down on me like a bag of anvils because then I would have been able to banish the lingering sense of despair and sadness from my mind.

"I'm done sleeping," I said. Time to start planning.

Time to start planning, indeed. If it seems like nothing happened in this chapter… well, you'd be correct… It's hard to progress when you don't know how to. I don't know what's going to happen once they get to Price, which is why no-one really seems willing to come up with a plan. Eehhhh, it's so hard to concentrate on this story when there are so many things happening in my life.