"You knew Angeal's head was regenerating tissue already, didn't you?"
Sephiroth drove the truck northeast, not trusting Zack to take the wheel in his current state of mind. Zack didn't blame him. Since he'd realized Angeal was already regenerating tissue, he'd been a mess, and every time he'd tried to explain to Sephiroth why, he'd fallen apart again. His earlier euphoria had crashed, and now he could only worry and fear that something in Angeal's regeneration might go wrong. It was unnatural, alien. Who knew how it would affect him?
Distantly, Zack understood that he was heading for a mental breakdown and he needed to get a chance to rest and process. Now he understood why Sephiroth hadn't been sleeping very much.
He understood, and he wasn't willing to nap, either.
"You knew," he said to Sephiroth, with his arms wrapped around himself and hunkering down in his seat. "You knew Angeal's head was regenerating tissue already, didn't you?" He glanced down at the covered specimen container between them.
"You've finally noticed," said Sephiroth. His face remained expressionless. "I wondered when you would."
"How long have you known?" Zack stared, unblinking, at the road stretching away into the distance. He barely noticed the truck jolt on some broken pavement.
"Please make sure Angeal doesn't bounce around too much when the truck hits bumps like that," Sephiroth said blandly.
Zack winced guiltily, and rested one arm on top of the container. "Please tell me. How long?"
"Since the first week after we rescued him."
Zack stole a glance at him, but Sephiroth just kept his eyes forward. He didn't appear to see any irony in using the word "rescue" to describe what he'd done to Angeal. He probably honestly did view it as a legitimate rescue. After all, he had believed all this time that Angeal could be regenerated, that he'd get his friend back.
Sephiroth went on: "I noticed the new tissue after a couple of days. A layer of thin, translucent skin grew over the raw edge of his neck stump and gradually thickened up. The growth has progressed ever since. I believe the new tissues he is forming will eventually differentiate into some kind of embryonic form."
"He'll be like an adult head on a baby's body?" Zack shuddered and swallowed down bile.
"Not exactly, but his cells will need to differentiate to form new structures. I suspect the process could be similar to fetal development. The bump of flesh at the end of his neck will eventually have to expand to form a body, assuming it doesn't deform into something unpleasant, like a pair of arms or legs with nothing in between, or some bare, exposed organs."
"Oh, Gaia," Zack moaned, now with new horrors brewing in his imagination. "We need to find Hollander pronto."
"Agreed. He needs to monitor the tissue development, guide it, and perhaps trigger new patterns of growth. He must know how. He created Angeal, after all. Hojo implied he knew how to trigger the full Jenova adaptations in him, but simply had not done so. Fortunately, Hojo did trigger those adaptations."
"Fortunately," Zack echoed faintly. Jenova adaptations. Alien cells infecting human cells, merging with them, twisting them into unnatural configurations to create bizarre biochemical changes and mutations. "You hope Hollander knows how to deal with this. You don't know for sure."
"I hope," Sephiroth said agreeably. "I am supported by Hojo's own words, though. I am also certain that Hollander will devote his full attention to his own son's survival."
"Yes, that's true." It was a weak affirmation, spoken with doubt. Hollander had used his son as a life-long research subject, albeit more gently than Hojo had done with Sephiroth. Hope and despair warred within Zack. It was a common state of affairs for him lately.
"We will find him and Genesis, Zack. Even if we don't, we shall do something to make certain that Genesis finds us. The problem is to generate some activity that will catch Genesis's attention without also catching Shin-Ra's."
Genesis. Zack automatically scanned the skies for one-winged men: Genesis or his copies. It wasn't the first time he'd looked to the heavens, hoping against hope that Genesis might be so obvious, so easy to locate. But no, like always, there was nothing. Genesis and Hollander had gone to ground, leaving no trace to follow.
Sephiroth pulled a flip phone out of a pocket and nudged Zack with it. "This is a pre-paid disposable," he commented, keeping one hand on the steering wheel and his eyes fixed on the road. "Old technology, so no location hardware. I've used a fake account and subscribed to some newsletters that report on Shin-Ra's activities, among other things."
Relieved at the change of topic, Zack accepted the phone, opened it, and stared hard at the old style user interface that lit up on the small screen. "No password protection?"
"Why bother? As soon as we review the news on it, we will take a detour to dispose of it and pick up another in a different town."
"Okay, that makes sense. Which news should I start with?" Zack saw emails from Shin-Ra News, the official source of information from the company, which he now knew was mostly propaganda; Shin-Ra Truths, the biggest underground source that was against Shin-Ra; as well as The Midgar Express, Planet Alerts, Eastern Interests, and Rocket Town News.
"Take a look at the last email from Shin-Ra Truths. I think you'll find it very interesting."
Obediently, Zack scrolled to the article in question and read:
Hot on the trail of the missing pod!
From: Reporter
Contents:
I had received word of recent activity in Modeoheim. The area was once a candidate for mako excavation, but now it's nothing but a deserted village. This reporter actually found a piece of equipment—a pod, to be exact—used in the experiments. When I revisited the facility at a later date for a more thorough investigation, the equipment was gone. A full-scale effort to follow the pod's trail revealed that it made a stop at Nibelheim before it was carried to another location.
Zack scowled. If this source could be trusted, Genesis and Hollander were dragging a mako pod around the Planet with them—that meant they were enhancing more G-copies or making makonoids. Maybe they were even creating more Angeal copies with whatever cells Hollander still had in his possession. "Is this reliable? The writing seems pretty amateurish."
"It's a lead. It indicates that our quarry is still active."
"But can we believe it?"
"Look at the earlier newsletters from Shin-Ra Truths," Sephiroth told him. "They accurately reported that Genesis, Angeal, and Hollander were in Banora. They also correctly reported Lazard's involvement."
Zack digested that. Did someone at that news source have inside information, or were they just that good at infiltration and investigation? He vowed to read through all the Shin-Ra Truths emails. The ramifications alarmed him, but it seemed that Shin-Ra Truths was a better source of information than the official outlets.
He said slowly, "So you think this report is correct, too? Could Genesis and Hollander really be in Nibelheim? Are we going there next?"
"No," Sephiroth said. "They might very well have spent some time there, but I doubt they're in Nibelheim anymore. Even that Shin-Ra Truths reporter states the pod was moved to another location and is no longer there."
"Another location," Zack said, re-reading the tail end of the article. "I wonder where that could be."
"It's almost certainly somewhere Hollander has a hidden lab. They might even have gone back to Modeoheim."
Zack shuddered at the thought. All that snow and ice, and the horrors within... "Shin-Ra ransacked the place. There's nothing there any longer."
"You thought Genesis died there, but no one found him despite many thorough searches, and then he turned up later to attack Junon and Midgar," Sephiroth mused, thinking out loud. "Shin-Ra would probably overlook them if they returned there. It would seem too absurd for renegades to return to their last known lair."
"The Turks are pretty devious, though, and Genesis knows it. He'd stay away from any place he knows they'd keep under observation. We shouldn't bother with Modeoheim except as a last resort."
"True enough," Sephiroth said. He slid his eyes towards Zack. "You encountered Genesis in a few different locations."
"By accident most of the time," Zack grumbled. "Aside from Banora and Modeoheim, they were places he and his army attacked. You knew Genesis personally, though. I thought you said you had some ideas of where he might have gone to hide."
Sephiroth recited: "Modeoheim, Banora, Wutai—"
"None of those seem like good options anymore," Zack interrupted him. "Shin-Ra's going to have them all under surveillance. Maybe Wutai, it's a big place with lots of cover, but Shin-Ra's got it under occupation now that they've won the war."
"It is also possible he found a bolt hole right under Shin-Ra's nose in Junon or Costa del Sol," Sephiroth said. "That would appeal to his sense of humor. He could be perverse like that. Additionally, being from the Mideel Islands, he likes warm weather and has always enjoyed spending time in Costa."
"Sounds nice," Zack said wistfully. "Gongaga's warm and tropical, too. I guess he and I have something in common besides knowing you and Angeal."
Ignoring that last remark, Sephiroth continued, "The Turks also know of his fondness for the tropics, though his base in Modeoheim should put them in doubt that he'd be so obvious. But Nibelheim? That had never once occurred to me before I read that newsletter, which makes me question the completeness of my personal knowledge of his behavior patterns."
The truck juddered on another stretch of damaged roadway. Zack clamped his hand down on Angeal's container to steady it before Sephiroth could admonish him.
They drove on.
NOTE: In the Crisis Core Original Game, Zack receives the email from Shin-Ra Truths referenced in this chapter while on the way to the Shin-Ra Mansion in Nibelheim after awaking in the Inn. However, this story series is an AU that deviates significantly from the original FF7OG and CCOG events and timelines from Modeoheim onward, so the dramatic events at Nibelheim never happen.