Reese helped Shaw make quick work of applying the C4 to the door, an admittedly nervous energy running through her as she set the detonator in place and walked around the opposite side of a large beam to avoid the impending blast. When it happened, louder than she expected as it always was, the two ex-agents shared a sideways glance before leaving their respective safe locations and heading towards their impromptu doorway with their weapons drawn as if it was second nature by this point (and if they were being honest, it probably was). The door was effectively blown open, pieces of mortar and scorched metal strewn about the small space where it once stood; as they walked a little closer, the dust began to settle just enough so that they could just barely make out the sheen of buffed linoleum floors and clean white walls.

"So", Reese drawled out as they crossed the threshold from the decrepit warehouse and into the clearly newly built hallway, waving to clear the air, "it looks like Decima has put some work into this place after all."

Shaw grunted in response, choosing to instead focus all of her attention on taking in her new surroundings. There was no doubt Decima had done a lot of work there since they began using the warehouse, as if the new cipher lock wasn't indication enough. The entire back portion of the warehouse had seemingly been transformed into some sort of Decima facility; off of the long hallway the two agents found themselves in, there were several doors on either side. While passing one, Shaw looked in and saw flashing blue lights she knew all too well to be indicative of computer servers.

("Why is it so bright in here?", she had asked Root one day while attempting to stealthily snoop through the hacker's safe houses. Root had only invited Shaw at the smaller woman's insistence; she was convinced that Root didn't even have a safe house, and the thought of Root not having a single item to call her own unsettled Shaw for a reason she either couldn't find or admit to herself. Inside there was simply a mattress on the floor, a dresser against the far wall that Shaw was unaware was filled with guns and magazines and not a single shred of clothing, and rows upon rows of computer servers, blinking out of time and putting out more heat than Shaw knew could be comfortable, even in the frigid winter temperatures. Root only offered her a noncommittal noise from the closet where she was stuffing what few articles of clothing she had into a bag to prepare for whatever insane mission the Machine had planned for her next.

Root was off to Syria, or so she had told Shaw earlier that evening. 'I could use some warmer weather', she said with a wink to the agent's protests.

"How can you even sleep with all these lights on?", Shaw tried again, trying to hide the sound of opening a drawer - a drawer that housed nothing but a tangle of wires and one half-empty bottle of bourbon. She closed it a little rougher than she meant to, frustrated by not being able to find anything interesting. After thinking on it for half a second, she opened the drawer back up and took out the bottle. "And all this fucking noise. It's like you're sleeping inside of an actual computer."

Root sauntered out just then, a duffle bag on her shoulder and her signature coy smile on her face. She brushed by Shaw's shoulder, rubbing lightly against her forearm and leaving a wild fire in her wake, which Shaw responded to by distracting herself with a large gulp of the bourbon.

Shaw struggled to swallow against the burn as she turned on a heel to follow Root out of the apartment.

"Maybe that's why I like it so much, Sameen.")

"Computers?", Reese asked Shaw after sauntering up beside her, as if he needed any confirmation.

She simply nodded at him without a glance and continued down the hallway.

"It's too quiet", Reese tried again. He was clearly a little on edge; no one would believe that he got a little chatty when he was nervous, but Shaw knew all of his tells as if they were her own by this point. Unfortunately, she was in no mood to indulge him; not being this close to Root. Not with this much on the line.

"It's a big warehouse. And this hallway has been soundproofed… probably because of all the noise those damn computers are making."

Reese noted that Shaw wasn't wrong; there were countless servers in the rooms coming off of the hallway, and in addition to raising the overall temperature of the space at least 10 degrees, they filled the small area with a relatively loud humming noise.

"If they've got her here," Shaw added, "she'll be in the back. Now shut up and follow me."

John looked a little jilted, but nodded resolutely and let his partner take the lead. She lead them down the remainder of the long hallway, past several more rooms of servers, to a dead end. Just as they came to it, Harold opened a line and quickly muttered 'go left' at them before disconnecting it just as fast. They went left as directed and through a set of large double doors where two large Decima agents were sitting at a fold out table and enjoying what had to be dinner by this point (or was is breakfast? Shaw had long ago lost track of what time it was). The pair sat up, obviously caught off guard, and reached for their weapons – one of them even still had the chopsticks held awkwardly between his fingers as he picked up his pistol, but neither of them moved nearly fast enough. They were kneecapped before they even had the chance to aim their weapons.

The room that Finch had lead them to appeared to be a lounge of sorts; it was small, with a counter and fridge in addition to the table and chairs (and the two Decima agents on the floor). Upon further inspection, Shaw found several Tupperware containers filled with food – they were even labelled. Reese looked over her shoulder and actually laughed.

"You could almost believe this was just a regular day job for these guys."

"It is for us", Shaw responded flatly. Reese didn't relent; he was even still grinning when Shaw shot him a look. "There's for food… what? 15, maybe 20 guys in here? And we've taken out at least 10."

"So we might just have a few agents between us and Root."

Shaw was about to respond when a name on a container at the back of the fridge caught her eye; it looked like lasagna, not the homemade kind but the Stouffer's microwavable variety. She reached in and pulled it out – reading the name with a grimace, she straightened and shoved it in John's chest roughly.

"Maybe. But that one's mine."

Just when he was about to ask how Shaw could be thinking about eating some poor schmuck's leftovers at a time like this, he read the name scrawled on the post it note stuck to it.

Martine.

After tying the Decima agent's in the lounge together, the two would-be rescuers made their way through the only other door in the room. It lead them to another hallway, much smaller than the one that had brought them to the lounge previously. In this hallway there were only two doors – one on either side. Shaw and Reese both froze once they heard voices wafting through the space. Through one of the doors was the voice that Shaw was waiting to hear – Martine's – while through the other the soft murmuring of none other than Jeremy Lambert could be heard.

"I've got Martine. You take care of Lambert."

"On three?"

"I'm not going to countdown for you again, John. We move, now. If they realize that we're here before we make our move, there's no telling what will happen to Root."

Reese acquiesced, but placed a hand in front of Shaw to stop her from charging in right away. She looked at the hand as if she was ready to blow it off, but didn't say anything.

"No survivors, Shaw."

"I wasn't aware that was up for debate", she said through an evil grin.

John and Sameen broke off then, each making their way to their respective doors. Shaw took one last breath before raising her pistol defiantly, setting her jaw, and kicking the door open. (She heard John kick in the door on the other side of the hallway just a split second later, but at the time things moved much too fast for her to pay attention to what he actually found behind door #2.)

What Shaw stumbled in to, to her chagrin, appeared to be a meeting for all the remaining agents on the compound. There were 5 agents sitting at a round table with Martine at the head of the table, on the opposite side of the room, and the entire half dozen of them looked up at Shaw with nothing short of terror when she kicked the door open.

The agent closest to her, a burly man that surely would have given her a run for her money if he hadn't indeed been the unlucky bastard within 5 feet of her, caught the first bullet between his eyes before he could even stand. Two of the agents flipped the large table in an instant, and used it as cover for themselves and for their boss. Shaw quickly spun behind a row of filing cabinets close to the door, moving just a beat too slow to avoid a bullet to her upper arm. She had enough adrenaline running through her to not feel at, at least.

"What a pleasant surprise", Martine yelled out above the gunfire. Shaw could hear the smirk in her voice, and it made her tighten her grip on her pistol even tighter. She ducked out quickly and caught one of the uncovered agents in center mass with several rounds.

"Like I said, Martine. You have something that belongs to me."

When she heard nothing but a laugh in response, Shaw dared to stick her head up and earned the hot graze of a bullet to her left temple.

Too close, she thought as she dropped as quickly as the bullet had come and gone. Way too close.

"You had better hurry than, Sameen. Before our dear Jeremy gets a shot at her."

With a growl, Shaw fired the last of her pistol rounds in to another agent that attempted to creep around the other side of the cabinets. That was three down and two to go, not including the apparently unarmed Martine hiding behind the table.

Shaw liked those odds.

Without wasting another second, she pulled her last flash grenade off of her belt and aimed it at the wall behind the makeshift cover – it had its intended effect, hitting the wall then falling to the ground just behind Martine and the agents, who all yelled out when it went off. It gave Shaw just enough time to sprint out from behind the cabinets and spray the area with her AR-15. She heard two of the bodies drop, but kept her weapon raised as she worked her way around the table.

Martine had been shot – none fatally, Shaw noticed with a grin – in the leg. The force of the round had pushed her back against the wall, where she still stood.

"Just kill me", she spat at Shaw. "Get it over with. I'm sure Jeremy has already taken care of our little friend."

"Oh, I'm going to kill you alright." To Martine's surprise, Shaw threw her rifle aside. Then her empty pistol, and her grenade belt. She even took off the Kevlar vest she was wearing, adding it to the small armory now piled up off to the side of the now destroyed room. "But I'm going to do it with my hands."

Not giving the taller woman the chance to process what she had said, Shaw launched herself at her in the same breath she had spoken the sentence. She landed several solid hits to her jaw before Martine was able to deflect her and deal her own damage. After avoiding what would have surely been a devastating blow, she thrust her palm up and in to Shaw's unguarded nose, surely breaking it, and used the momentum of her doubling over in pain to deliver a knee to her abdomen. She was relentless, though, now more than ever – she could practically see Root like she was the light at the end of a tunnel, could hear her lilting voice in her ear and feel her warm flesh beneath her calloused fingers, and it all drove her on with more force and determination than she had ever felt before – and was up and swinging before she had even caught her breath again.

Shaw was an excellent fighter, practically an expert on hand to hand combat, but Martine had size on her. It made for a much more evenly matched fight than Shaw wanted to admit. The impromptu boxing match went on for almost 15 minutes before both woman were starting to get run down.

It was in that moment – her nose bleeding, her ribs throbbing, the bullet wound she sustained earlier causing the muscles in her dominant arm to lock up – it hit Shaw.

She didn't have to fight fair. And why should she? It wasn't as if Martine had in any moment before this one, and this one could hardly count. It wasn't as if the Decima agent had much of a choice in the matter this time.

"You know", she said as her and Martine circled each other, both out of breath, "I have been looking forward to this moment since you blew my cover."

"What a coincidence. So have I."

"There's no way you're getting out of here alive."

"I was about to say the same to you."

With what appeared to be the very last vestiges of her energy, Martine lunged herself at Shaw with what could only be described as a battle cry. Shaw was prepared for it, however, was expecting it even, and at the last second, she pulled the ceramic knife from her thigh and let Martine use her own momentum to drive herself on to it. The force of her attack had broken Shaw's frontal bone – she could feel the snap of the bone above her eye, vaguely registered the pain it caused – but it also drove the knife straight through Martine's sternum and no doubt serrated at the very least one of her lungs.

With a gasp, the Decima agent fell in to a heap on the floor. Shaw unceremoniously lent down and pulled the knife from her chest.

"You'd be surprised how many people live with that sort of injury", she said as she wiped the blood off of the knife and on to the front of her shirt. "But that isn't something I am willing to risk. Not this time."

Martine tried to argue, tried to protest – or at least, that's what Shaw assumed she was trying to say, though it was mostly gurgling – but Shaw wasn't hearing any of it. Was there a chance that Martine really could survive from the stab wound she had just sustained? Perhaps. It was a small chance, a very small chance considering the fact that help was either not coming or would be much too late, but it was too much of a chance for Shaw to take.

"If your God can hear this, I hope it knows: you won't get away with this. None of you will."

With that, Shaw slid the tip of the knife across Martine's throat. It took only seconds for her to bleed out then, in combination from that and the chest wound, but Shaw made sure the Decima agent was dead before she retrieved her rifle from the pile in the corner – she left the vest and the now empty pistols and grenade vest, seeing no need for them now – and left in search of her partner.

She needn't look far, of course; the door on the other side of the room was labelled eerily 'Interrogation', and was a large room divided with chain link fences and curtains to make it several smaller rooms. Shaw followed the gunfire to the furthest small room, where John was holding Jeremy Lambert, in nothing but his underwear and a pair of socks, on his knees with Reese's pistol pushed roughly to his temple. Stepping over the bodies of several agents, all dead as opposed to kneecapped like she expected (John may have said 'no survivors', but she honestly wasn't sure if he meant it until that moment), she made her way through the maze to him.

"Do I want to know?"

He looked up at her – his nose appeared to be broken too, and he was bleeding from the neck where a bullet had grazed him (luckily, nowhere near the carotid) – with steel in his eyes.

"Root is in that room", he said, but stopped Shaw from rushing in right away. "But you need to know that Mr. Lambert here was in the process of boasting to his friends about what he was going to do to her as he took off his pants when I walked in."

It took Shaw a moment to process what he had said, and what he was trying to imply – she had a one track mind sometimes, after all, and all tracks lead to Root at this point – but once he did she understood why he stopped her.

He was offering him to her, to kill as she pleased. John knew that Lambert had to die, even without what the deranged man had been planning to do to Root, but with that knowledge in hand he wanted to give Shaw the opportunity to deliver the justice as she saw fit.

Leaning down, Shaw took Lambert's chin between her thumb and pointer finger – roughly – and forced him to look her in the eyes.

"There's a special place in hell for people like you. Make your peace."

With that, Shaw stood back up.

"Make it hurt, Reese", was all she said to her partner before taking off in the direction he had indicated Root to be in.

Once she found her, however, all the adrenaline rushed out through her feet. She froze in the doorway of the small room, sanctioned off by chain-link fence and devoid of anything but a sink in the corner, a surgical tray that had been knocked over, and the chair where Root herself was.

Shaw had literally jumped out of, in to, and through fires, explosions, and hails of gunfire with more conviction than she felt now looking at Root. The hacker's body was a road map of Martine's torture - of bullet holes poorly stitched, of burn marks and scratches, of dark bruises and needle marks. Her head hung, unconscious, and her hair - matted to her head with sweat and dried blood around her left temple and ear where a large blow went untreated - curtained her face off from Shaw's view.

"Root?", Shaw asked quietly from the doorway, far too quietly to actually rouse her.

She crossed the room in an almost sprint, stepping over instruments, syringes, weapons and what she could only assume were instruments of torture at some point in order to reach the other woman. Slowly, and as gently as she could with hands that she couldn't remember ever shaking this badly in her life, she cupped Root's chin and tilted her head back. As the hair fell from her face Root's eyes opened, unfocused, and Shaw could see her straining against the lights and through her pain to see who she was.

"Root", Shaw said again, straining to speak just a little louder than she had before, "it's me. It's Shaw."

"I'm here", she added as she pulled the still blood stained ceramic knife from her thigh and began to carefully cut the zip ties off of her wrists. For the first time it really hit Shaw how exposed Root was, in nothing but her underwear in the florescent lighting of the cage; she removed her jacket and placed it gently over shaking shoulders, mindful of the injuries it was covering. "You're going to be okay. We're going to get you out of here."

Suddenly her eyes gained some focus and cleared enough for her to see the owner of the hands touching her, more gently then she'd been touched since being pulled from the apartment building who knows how many hours ago now.

"There's no way you're Shaw", Root croaked out. "She's never this nice to me."

Shaw almost cried at the sound of her voice, hoarse and pained and still telling bad jokes at worse times, but there. Root was alive, and Shaw had never heard something as beautiful as her name tumbling from those cracked lips.

"Yeah, well. It's a special occasion. And you're a little underdressed for this party, so how about I take you home?"

"You've been trying to get me to go home with you for months", Root joked with a small laugh that quickly dissolved to a cough. Blood trickled from the corner of her split lips, and she brought a trembling hand up to wipe it away.

"How about we save the flirting for when you're not bleeding internally?"

"You're no fun."

Glad that Root had at least enough presence of mind to go back and forth with her, Shaw slid an arm under her knees and used the other to pull Root's weak arms over her shoulder. Carefully Shaw hoisted her up into a bridal carry - Root was light, deceptively so, considering how tall she was, and Shaw was able to carry her with relative ease. Root sucked in a breath quickly while Shaw was shifting the hacker's weight around between small steps to make her more comfortable; Shaw assumed it was an intake indicating she was in pain, so she stilled herself.

"I'm okay", Root said quietly when she sensed they had stopped. "I mean, I'm not. I'm pretty sure I'm dying. But I would really like to get out of here."

She dropped her head unceremoniously onto Shaw's shoulder, exhausted.

"I have never been so thankful to know a doctor", Root mumbled into the soft fabric of Shaw's shirt. She felt as if at any moment she could wake up from whatever dream she was living now, but couldn't find it within herself to keep her eyes open. Breathing in whatever it was Shaw was wearing - something musky and earthy yet not masculine, tinged with the scent of gunpowder - Root thought that if this was a dream she would rather not wake up.

"And a hot doctor at that", she added almost as an afterthought.

Shaw swallowed thickly when Root let her nose accidentally brush against her neck. After the emotional rollercoaster of the last 24 hours, Shaw could just cry with the knowledge that Root was with her, in her arms, being taken away from the place Martine had tortured her. It didn't hurt at all that Martine herself was dead in the room adjacent – Shaw decided to not tell Harold that she had killed her, and would urge John to do the same about Lambert when she saw him next. Not yet, at least. She had enough lectures from Harold, and Shaw would rather bask in the light of Root's rescue than rush back in to feeling like a chastised school girl again.

"I should probably start charging you", Shaw responded a beat too late for it to be natural as she started off towards the exit once more. "I'll accept most insurances."

Root hummed sleepily into Shaw's shoulder, and Shaw picked up her pace just slightly as she felt the hacker's grip begin to slacken.

"I knew you'd come for me, Shaw."

"Because your machine told you?"

"She didn't need to", Root murmured, and seconds later unconsciousness claimed her.