A lot of people were very upset about the way the last chapter ended and I received several not-very-nice messages and comments. Which is fine, no one in forcing you to read it and I in no way want to discourage you from commenting regardless of how you feel about what I have chosen to write. I just wanted to say that I thought the visceral reaction I got from some people was a bit much. I also want to put out there, for those who may be worried about it, that there is in no way, shape, or form going to be a rape or non-con scene in this story. I used it as a plot device because in my opinion it added another level to the sense of urgency and angst in the story while giving a little bit of a background to Decima's more recognizable agents.

For those of you that have reviewed with both negative (but constructive) and positive comments, I appreciate you! Thanks again for reading.

Returning to the subway just sunk the weariness Shaw had felt outside even further into her bones, so she decided to try to sleep some as the boys ate. Reese was of course concerned that Shaw didn't show any interest in the food Fusco had brought, but she waved him off without a word as she walked to her cot.

"We'll try to save you some", the detective called out to her from the subway car through a mouth full of Philly cheese steak. She grimaced, not hungry at all, and walked a little quicker.

To her surprise, she fell asleep almost instantly even with the burning she still felt, and dreamt of Root despite her best efforts not to think of her.

(This isn't your fault, she told Shaw with a small smile - the one with her head cocked to the side, the one that reached her eyes. The one that Shaw knew was reserved just for her.

It is though, Shaw replied as she reached out to touch her. Her fingers went right through her, however, leaving behind white wisps in their wake as if she was a ghost already. I can't lose you, Root. Is it fucked up that you're all I've got?

Not at all. Just listen to the Machine, Sameen. I do.

She pulled back her hair to tap lightly on her scar, the scar Control had gifted her when she took Root's ear.

You haven't lost me. Just... misplaced me, she continued.

Is there a difference?

Root just smiled at her again, that twinkle in her eye that Shaw knew signified something she wouldn't like was about to come tumbling out of the hacker's mouth. She waited for words that never came - instead Root leaned forward and placed her lips gently against Shaw's pout.

Shaw woke with a gasp, sitting straight up. She brought a finger to her lips, wondering why that kiss had felt solid and warm and real when Root had disappeared under the fingertips when she had tried to touch her just before that.)

She got up and stretched to try to relieve some of the soreness in her muscles. Grumbling when it did nothing of the sort, she started off towards the subway car where Finch was typing away on his computer while Reese and Fusco were pouring over a map of the city. She walked closer to them and noticed that they had marked where they had already searched with a red marker, and used a blue one to trace all the paths that they had followed up until this point. Behind them, on the glass of a subway window, was a pyramid of pictures of Decima agents with Martine and Jeremy as the second row from the top, and a picture of Root at the pinnacle - it was a picture pulled from some security footage, a little blurry and with the timestamp still on the bottom, but Shaw knew that a proper picture of Root were probably a little hard to come by with the Machine taking such care to conceal her real identity. Next to the picture was the printed out list of medical supplies that Decima had stolen earlier in the day, which Harold had written Root's suspected injuries on in scribbled black pen. Above the picture he had written 'Samantha Groves' with a dry erase marker; Shaw ran over the ink with a broad stroke of her thumb, effectively removing it, and picked up the marker to write 'Root' there instead. Everyone in the subway stopped what they were doing when they saw her writing, but it seemed as if her team members were hesitant to say anything to her about it.

"Do we have anything?", she asked to break up the silence.

"Nothing solid", Reese replied, standing up straight and stretching his arms above his head. He looked as tired as Shaw felt, still wearing the suit from the day before and sporting a nasty purple bruise on his jaw from when Shaw had punched him.

"We found the doctor that Decima kidnapped", Lionel said with a frown. He passed her a file folder with pictures a of him and of where they had found his body, killed execution style just north of the city limits and left on the side of a back road. "All they found on him was a pair of bloody gloves, stuffed in his coat pocket. They'll run the DNA at the prescient but if it's CocoaPuff's I would bet it isn't going to show up in any of our systems."

Finch pushed himself away from his computer slightly and offered her a sympathetic look before continuing where Fusco had left off.

"The hospital they had kidnapped the doctor from, a trauma surgeon by the name of Charles Camp, also had reports of a stolen car earlier that evening. It seems a group of masked individuals hijacked it from a paramedic just ending her shift right around the time that you had gotten to the apartment building where Ms. Groves had been taken from. I pulled the security footage, but there isn't anything to go off of there; just the three masked indivivuals, who meet a blonde woman just within the camera's view. It would be safe to assume that the woman is Martine, and therefore that this is how they transported Root without anyone noticing."

He played the footage again, surely for Shaw's benefit - just as he had said, three masked men held the terrified paramedic at gun point before pulling her out of her beat up Suburban and climbing inside of it themselves. They stopped in the parking lot, right on the edge of the camera's scope, to pick up a blonde woman. It was too blurry at that distance to see her face clearly, but there was no doubt in Shaw's mind that it was Martine.

The footage was timestamped just under 2 hours after Shaw received Root's last transmission.

"Can the Machine track their movements after that?", Shaw asked with more hope than she had felt all day; she knew the ambulance was their only lead at the moment, and perhaps the best one they had gotten so far. She had to believe that this would lead them somewhere.

"Not exactly. We can track it to a shopping center north of the city, but it hasn't moved from there sense."

"So, we've got nothing."

"Well we know they're north of the city", Reese offered, "and we know that they know we're looking for them, so they won't be using any of their usual safe houses in that area. So Finch ran a check of all residences and business owned by Decima and it's counterparts."

"Of which there are dozens. I've told Mr. Reese and Mr. Fusco that it's nearly impossible for me to narrow down the list without more information with which to conduct my search."

"And we've told you, Glasses, that we've got no more information for you and there's no way for the three of us to search all of those damn buildings before you're down a team member."

Fusco stood up, anger clear on his face, and Shaw wondered if he had always cared about Root - despite his many jokes about her mental stability - or if this is something new developing in response to the happenings of the past 24 hours. Of course, when Fusco stood up and took a step towards Finch Reese felt he had to intervene as Shaw just stood and looked on, standing between them as the two men started to bicker. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to ignore her frustrated teammates, who's arguing was threatening to turn her headache into a full blown migraine.

Shaw thought back to her dream, trying to remember every detail because Root had seemed so alive and so real, so there, even when her fingers had gone through her, and she needed to remember Root like that and not think of what she could actually be right now.

So Shaw thought of her smile, the one that Shaw knew was just for her regardless of how little she wanted to believe that, warm and inviting beyond reason. And her voice, lilting and sing-songy, honey sweet even when viscous, always hinting at secrets without having to say anything about them. Even the way she smelled; like coconut and gunpowder, two of Shaw's favorite things at once.

Shaw thought back to the way Root had reached up in her dream to pull cascading brown curls away from her long neck, the muscles in her forearm tensing just under the skin and making the few scars there dance with the movement. Root tapped the scar just behind her right ear, the scar Shaw had known to be the result of a shoddy stapedectomy when she had first seen it without Root having to explain it to her; Shaw remembered when Root had broken into her apartment, for the tenth time in as many weeks, and how she was so prepared to shoot the hacker without remorse until the saw the blood soaking through the arm of her jacket and running down her neck. Silently she sutured a still-shaking Root, who only spoke to thank her with a small smile as Shaw left to get some pain killers. How mad Shaw had been when she had come back and seen that the hacker had gone out through the open window in her living room and down the fire escape to who knows where - she had convinced herself at the time that the anger stemmed from the fact that Root had broken in again and that she had left the window open upon her departure despite the freezing temperatures that night, but she knew now that there might be much more to it than that. It might not have been anger at all, she was coming to realize, but instead a heavy worry that sat on her chest.

A toned down emotion similar to the one that was consuming her now.

I love it when you play doctor, Root had said the next time Shaw had patched her up, leaning in too close and earning one of the ex-agent's better glares in response. Shaw had thought she was foolish for getting the implant in the first place when an earpiece seemed to do the job in a much less permanent way, but there was no coming between Root and her precious Machine by then.

Wait, Shaw thought, snapping her eyes open.

Her subconscious had already told her the answer to their questions as she slept. She just needed to listen - just as Root had told her to in her dream.

The implant.

"Finch", she practically shouted, interrupting whatever he had been in the middle of saying to Reese and a still-fuming Fusco. "I think I know how we can find Root."

It took close to thirty minutes for Finch to find the information he needed, but when he did they finally had something useful.

The implant Root had did not return to her the ability to fully hear outside stimuli in her right ear (which they all agreed was not her first priority anyways); it instead offered her a direct link to the Machine through a small chip that could create an internet connection off of surrounding wireless and cell signals. Even nearby bluetooth could be picked up by the chip, and turned into a working connection directly to the Machine. The chip also encrypted the signals as it hijacked them, making the process virtually untraceable. Even by Samaritan.

At the time he had integrated it with the cochlear implant Root had provided, Finch was unaware of the extent of the microchip's abilities. He would never admit it to Root herself, but he had his doubts that day about what it was the chip could even do. After looking in to it however, and finding an article highlighting the specifics of the chip and how it - the only one of it's kind - was stolen from the Nirushima Center for Technological Advancement (a center owned by none other than Decima Technologies), Finch was able to develop a code containing an algorithm that would be able to reverse the polarity of the waves it used.

Effectively leading them directly to Root's location without giving anything away to Samaritan.

"It might take several hours for this to find Ms. Groves", Harold explained to an impatient Shaw, who was determined to prepare for their assault regardless, "but as soon as it does we should have a location for her, accurate within 10 feet."

Shaw was hardly listening as she loaded her nano, checking the safety before putting it in her borrowed holster with some extra clips. She also loaded the M9 she had stolen from the Decima agent and stuffed it in the waistband of her jeans, strangely comforted by the cool metal against her lower back. Reese walked over to her, and she was prepared for a lecture, but instead he threw a kevlar vest at her and began to load his own guns; she grinned at him before slipping the vest on and securing the velcro straps on either side. He mirrored her action and secured his own vest, and Shaw didn't even complain when he double checked her's for her.

"It's not tight enough", he murmured at her when she lost her patience and swatted his hands away from her side, where he was trying to adjust it for her.

"If you so much as imply that I don't know how to wear a vest I will give you a matching bruise on the other side of your jaw."

Finch quietly observed their banter as they suited up, knowing it was useless to argue with them. They were preparing to rescue a member of their team who had gone through hell and back and all in the course of a single day - of all the times for them to be overzealous, he supposed this was not the worst.

(He even kept his mouth shut when Shaw strapped an excessively large ceramic knife to her thigh with a grin that could only be described as devilish, and when Reese secured several grenades to his belt.)

"We're just going to head north", Reese said to Finch before he could ask where the two of them were going. "We know that they're going to be north of the city, and with traffic there's no telling how long it's going to take us to get there. Just let us know when you have that location."

Still knowing better than to argue, he simply nodded and extended the hand holding the car keys out to the two ex-agents - Reese snatched them before Shaw, just barely, and she muttered to herself all the way up the stairs.

"Please be careful", Harold said like a prayer after they had left.

Shaw was upset that Reese got to drive Finch's new Mercedes, but busied herself by double and triple checking the magazines to her guns. The vest Reese had gotten her was heavy but familiar, reminding her of her days in the Marine Corps. Absently, she rubbed at the tattoo on her forearm. Reese picked up on the action, and knew it to be one of Shaw's very few (if not her only) nervous habits.

"Are you going to answer my question?", he asked cautiously as they pulled up to a red light; the traffic wasn't as bad as he had feared but much worse than he had hoped, and he knew it was going to take them longer than expected to get out of the city.

Shaw looked over at him disinterestedly, still running her fingers over the caduceus on her arm.

"And which question would that be again?"

"Are you okay?"

She looked away from him then, pulling her hand away from her tattoo and instead busied herself by pulling at the stray strings coming off the velcro strap securing her knife to her thigh. It dug into her a little uncomfortably in this position - it certainly wasn't made to accommodate sitting - but she just used that to distract her from Reese even further.

"You don't have to answer", Reese offered for her as if she was considering answering in the first place. "I know what it's like. I remember when I thought I lost Carter - before I knew that I had lost her. I was ready to take down every and any thing that stood between me getting to her. You, Root, Fusco, Zoe, even Finch. I didn't care what you all had to say or what help you had to offer because when it came down to it, I felt that it was all my fault and therefore my mess to clean up."

He heard the cocking of a gun, and took his eyes off the road for a second. He was met with the muzzle of Shaw's fully loaded nano, her dark eyes boring into him from behind it.

"I did tell you I would shoot you if you brought this up again, Reese. I'm not having this conversation."

Undeterred, he continued - Reese knew that Shaw needed him to help her save Root, at the very least, so she would wait until after that to shoot him. Knowing her, she wouldn't have any bullets left by that point anyways.

"You have to know that it isn't your fault. Whatever happens, whatever we find, you have to accept that."

"You're saying that like you think she's dead."

Reese stole another quick glance in his passenger's direction; her gun was still raised but it had dropped slightly, and her eyes were no longer watching him, but looking out ahead of them and watching the cars they rushed past. He knew suddenly that Shaw had more belief in finding Root's body than finding her alive; he knew from experience that that belief would make her reckless, even more so than she already had been, and would put not only all of them in danger, but Root as well if Shaw didn't curb that fear.

"I don't. I really don't. And you can't, either. Because you are a soldier, with or without the uniform, just like I am. So I need you to remember what that means, and to turn whatever you have going on in your head into focus. She can't afford for you to fall apart this close to the end Shaw."

Shaw gulped, partly because Reese was right, and partly because she was scared and didn't want to admit it. She had faced down literal armies, had killed terrorist and destroyed men in ways both physical and emotional and felt no fear before nor remorse afterwards. Now she knew why Cole had always prayed before every mission.

She wished she believed in God, because she would pray now.

They drove in silence after that. The traffic slowed their progress considerably, but they finally made it out of the city limits and pulled to a stop at a small gas station no less than an hour after leaving the subway. Reese went in and got coffee for them, which Shaw only accepted to warm her freezing fingertips, and the two of them sat there watching cars pull in and out without so much as a single word to each other. Shaw watched men fill up their trucks, women with screaming children fill up their minivans, some teenagers pay off a wandering bum to buy them cigarettes.

Life was going on outside of the car like the world wasn't ending, and that made Shaw angry. The world had been ending since late the day before, she wanted to tell all of them, when Shaw tripped on a puddle of blood in an abandoned apartment building and learned in that moment and every moment after just how long a fire could burn.

Her's was still burning.

What felt like hours had passed, but only twenty minutes after they had arrived Finch called Reese.

"I'm sending the GPS coordinates, and a blue print of the building", Finch told them hastily, and Shaw could hear him typing away. "It's an old port authority building on the water; Decima doesn't own it, but the owner works in their security department."

Reese punched the coordinates into his phone and didn't even wait for them to load completely before starting the car and heading east towards the water. Shaw reviewed the blue prints Finch had sent them, setting her jaw as she developed a plan for infiltrating the building.

"You better tell her we're coming", Shaw said quietly. Reese could barely hear her, but realized that she wasn't talking to him before he asked her to repeat herself; Shaw was talking to the Machine, if you could call a one-sided conversation filled with demands talking. "You had better tell her that I'm coming for her."

Her throat was too raw to scream out again, so as the amphetamine hit her system and coursed through her veins in a painful way, all she could do was sob. Marine had the audacity to laugh as the held the emptied syringe just before Root's unfocused eyes.

"That's the last one", the Decima agent said with genuine remorse in her voice. "I hope it was as good for you as it was for me."

With that she sauntered over towards the small table holding all the empty needs - Forty six in all, the Machine counted for her, Chance of survival 21.8% - and dumped them unceremoniously into a trashcan. Jeremy, who had been sitting off to the side watching with a disgusting glint in his eye, looked at Martine with a faux pout.

"No more, then? What a shame. I was really enjoying the show."

Root bit back bile rising in her throat just long enough to watch the two of them walk away talking excitedly amongst themselves; she turned her head to the side and emptied her already empty stomach onto the floor. She continued to sob then, overtaken by a hopelessness she had never felt before. It was a miracle she had survived this long, she knew, but she was beginning to wish that she hadn't even made it to this point.

There was no way she would be able to tell Martine where the Machine was, nor could Finch or Shaw or Reese or anyone else, so what was it that she was suffering for? Just delaying the inevitable, she assumed. She wondered if this could be considered a 'good end' and thought back to her conversation with Harold so long ago. If only Root had given Shaw the message she had wanted Harold to give her then, or on any of the days that followed - it seemed to be the least of her concerns at this point, bleeding out and full of drugs with no end in sight short of death, but she still regretted being too cowardly to bring it up to Shaw herself.

What would I say now if I had the chance?, she wondered. I love you, she thought she should start with, but decided against it; Shaw would recoil at that, at the sudden outburst and the emotion behind it. I think we would be good together, she settled on, because it was sincere but lacking the passion of the word 'love'. And then she would kiss her before Shaw could answer, like she had thought about doing so many times before.

The Machine interrupted Root's hypothetical with more statistics on her health, and she let out a short laugh at that. Even at a time like this, the Machine was nothing short of reliable with it's information.

Chance of survival 47.9%, She then said, catching Root's attention - how could her chance of survival be going up even as she felt herself slowly getting even weaker, even before Jeremy had gotten his shot at her?

Chance of survival, 49.3%, She said mere seconds later. Root was now confused, and afraid that there was something incredibly wrong with her reliable God.

"How?", Root dared to ask just above a whisper. She looked up with still blurry vision to make sure that none of the Decima agents had heard her; thankfully, the lackeys that had been in the room with her and Martine were starting to pack things up in preparation of leaving and paying her no attention, and Martine and Jeremy were much too far away to hear anything she was saying.

Suddenly her implant replayed to her the sweetest thing she had heard in hours, in days, in quite possibly her entire life - Shaw's voice, gruff and tired and Root almost smiled because she could tell just from the way she sounded that she hadn't eaten in who knows how long.

"You had better tell her that I'm coming for her", Shaw's voice filled her head.

They will come, the Machine said again just after, and for the first time since all of this had started, Root believed Her.