Rick lead. Daryl hung back, as Rick had made him promise to do, over and over again on the car ride in. He mostly looked at the floor. He was a hot head and he didn't normally like to be told that, but today he knew he could himself, Rick, Beth and probably all the folks out in the trees waiting for them killed if he didn't hold it together, so he was determined not to go off. As soon as they had rounded the corner, seven or eight guys had appeared, well armed. When Rick stepped out of the truck, they all raised their weapons, but he held his hands up and slowly, carefully lowered them to his gun belt, removed it, and tossed it in the dirt at their feet. One of them kicked it aside. He had the air of a leader about him. He jerked his head, and a couple of guys stepped forward and frisked Rick. They nodded to the man in charge and he stepped forward. "Welcome to Fairyland. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourselves?"

"Name's Rick Grimes." Daryl's head snapped up for half a second, but he realized immediately that in their new world, names were about as useful in tracking someone down as social security numbers. Who the hell was Rick Grimes? "These guys, myself and three others got a camp about ten miles from here. We recently started trading with some guys on the other side of the river, there. They have a couple of young ladies in their company and us being just men alone, we asked them where they thought we could get ourselves a similar situation and they sent us to talk to you."

"These guys have names?"

This was where it got a little dangerous. What if these guys knew Alexis had killed off her captors? Or what if they simply asked questions Rick hadn't thought to ask Alexis? "Jerry, Mark, Lorenzo, and that big guy, what's his name?"

"Steve."

"Yeah, him. They've got other guys with them, I think, but those are the ones I know."

"Yeah." The leader spit in the dirt. "That was a real nice one they took from us a couple months back." Daryl shifted his feet in the dirt. He didn't like the idea of Alexis being with those guys for a period measured in months. He had never asked her how long, but for some reason he hadn't imagined it being months. "We've got one of that nature with us at the moment. Let's talk about what you've got."

Rick jerked his head, now, and Tyreese brought around a gas can and set it down. One of the guys that had frisked Rick carried it over to his boss, who smelled it. "There's more where that came from," Rick told him.

"There'd have to be." The man replied. "Depending on the girl, we'd be talking about quite a bit of this.

"We've also got good hunters. We've been curing meat and we've got some to spare."

The man nodded, slowly.

"The last thing I'll put on the table," Rick said, "is one of the guys back at our camp was a plumber. He's well able to come do a full service on whatever you've got here. He could dig a well, build a good outhouse, just fix the toilets, whatever it is you need."

The men glanced at each other and Daryl could tell this had been clever on Rick's part. "All right. Why don't we have a couple of you come take a look at what we've got on offer."

They were each patted down as they went, single file into the building. They had brought a couple guns, for show, but nothing they weren't prepared to lose. They didn't want to draw suspicion, but they didn't want to seem like a threat, either. Their meager weapons were gathered in a sack on the porch as they went down the stairs into the basement of the massive house.

"Where'd you find this place?" Rick asked.

"Actually, it was my parent's." The leader told him. "My dad and I raised pitbulls for fights. Sure has come in handy!" When he said this, they hit the bottom of the stairs and his flashlight beam touched chain link. He switched on a row of lanterns daisy-chained to a battery and the whole basement was illuminated. On either side, stretching out in front of them were rows of small, chain link cages. More than half of them were occupied by people. Mostly, they were women, though not all the women were young or pretty. Some of them had boys, though none older than fourteen or so. They didn't seem to have been abused, per se, but they looked defeated. They were hungry and they didn't have space to lie down. At least one of them had died and was now gnawing on the side of her cage. The girl next to her was pressed against the opposite wall, staring at her but not screaming. She seemed to have adjusted to this as a part of her reality. "You boys take a look around," the leader told them. "With what you've offered so far, we'll certainly be able to discuss terms for almost everything in here."

This was a particular moment on which Rick had coached Daryl, closely. "Keep your eyes on the ground," Rick had told him. "Don't get too eager. We can't let on we're looking for anyone in particular, so don't you go running toward anything, you hear?" Daryl had agreed and agreed at the time, but now he found the only way to keep his feet from betraying him was to walk behind Rick and insist on replicating his steps. For each of Ricks, he too took one. He pretended he was tracking him, watching the empty footfalls in the mud, rather than the actual ones on concrete. "That one's nice," he heard Rick say. Rick wasn't great at this, either. He wasn't a natural liar. With a stab, he wished they had Merle with them. Merle would have been a master of this. He watched Rick's feet come level as they reached the opposite end of the corridor and froze as Rick turned and started, still slowly, back. "This one, here, she's the age we were thinking, about. You ain't got any white chicks, though? We talked about this last night and we were fixing to find ourselves a blonde." Daryl felt the cold sweat on his forehead form a bead. He watched it fall to the ground. No. No, it couldn't be.

"Nah, not at the moment. Ain't too many of those left around. Happened on one not a week ago, now you mention it, but we had a buyer waiting for such a piece and we were able to unload her day before yesterday. First one we'd had in a while, too, so I'd start thinking real hard about how picky you're prepared to be."

Daryl couldn't help it. He looked up. He scanned the right-hand side of the room. Seven occupied cages. He scanned the left. Four occupied. No Beth.

Rick rolled his head to his chest and spoke directly to the cigarette pack in his breast pocket. "That's a damn shame." He said. "The seven guys you got outside, four upstairs and three down here in the basement, and you can't keep the blondes in stock?"

A hundred feet to his right and above ground, Michonne couldn't help a small snort. Deception was not Rick's strong suit. Holding the baby monitor up to her ear, she conveyed the information he had given them through hand signals and they all spread out. The idea was to reconvene and head back if they heard the vehicles leave and to go in if they heard shots fired. Alexis stayed close to her.

"So," the leader was saying. "What do you think of what we got?"

"See, problem is we really had our hearts set on that blonde." Daryl stepped forward, past Rick. Rick laid a hand on his chest as he passed, trying to restrain him without revealing the tension of the moment, but Daryl was determined. "This girl you just let go, where is she now?"

"We can't tell you that. Ain't no good for business. We got a real pretty little asian girl just behind your friend, there. Why don't you take a look and-"

"Listen, I don't give a rats ass about your damn business. I want something and I aim to get at it."

The leader cracked his knuckles. "Fine. You can put in an order and let us know where you're at and we'll let you know if we pick anything up, but I can't make any promises."

Daryl turned away and looked into one of the cages. Behind him, Rick was negotiating with the leader, trying to maintain his position as a casual buyer and learn more about where Beth was. In front of him was a woman in her forties. She was pretty in a soft kind of way. Matronly. She couldn't meet his eye. In front of her were two plates, each with about a thousand calories on them in candy and cheetos. She hadn't touched them. Her sweater looked hand-knit. He wondered whether she had made it herself. The conversation behind him had become friendly again, and Daryl turned back to hear Rick and the leader striking a bargain. They'd wait two weeks to see if any blondes turned up and if not, they'd buy a little older woman, a redhead, for less. The asian, it was decided, would be worth more to another party than they were wiling to pay for her. The whole posse began trudging up the stairs and Daryl, bringing up the rear, cast one last glance at the woman in the handmade sweater. She was looking back at him and the kind of defiance he saw in her face was like a punch in his gut. She no longer appeared matronly to him. She looked fierce. In that moment, all he could see was Carol, down in one of those cages. His breath caught a moment. He looked at the asian girl and saw Beth, scared and small and trying to be brave. He looked at the redhead and saw Andrea. He looked down the row of cages and saw Maggie, Lizzy, Michonne, his mother, the woman Judith might grow into, maybe a daughter of his own and then he just saw red. When he reached the top of the stairs, one guy remained on the top step to close the door behind them. As he passed him, Daryl laid a hand on his gun. As he crossed the threshold, he turned, raised a foot, placed it in the middle of the man's chest and pushed him back down the stairs.

A second later, Michonne and her crew heard the signal they had been hoping would not come.