Ianto watched with dread as time passed. The percentage of Lisa's brain that was overtaken rose daily, and no new object of hope was found.

43.0%

One of them would now be sitting with Lisa throughout the day, with Ianto and Jack, naturally, taking the majority of the shifts. Their chatter helped, Lisa told them, giving her not only something to hold onto, but also something to take her mind off the struggle.

Ianto strongly suspected that, after he had forced Ianto to go home for a few hours of sleep each night, Jack was going back down to Lisa's room to keep a watchful eye over her while she slept.

If it wasn't for the fact that Jack didn't look sleep deprived, he would be utterly sure.

46.3%

Whenever he wasn't with Lisa, Ianto was desperately scouring the archives, hoping against all hope that he would find something that would prove the magic bullet they were in such dire need of.

He did find one item from the list he and Tosh had compiled from the artefact retrieval database, but – as they had strongly suspected when it had been found originally – a short examination told them that it wasn't going to be any help at all.

With every day, every hour that passed where he turned up nothing in the archives, he grew more desperate. He knew that time was running out on actually being able to do anything to help.

Time was running out on Lisa's self-imposed percentage limit. At the rate the numbers had been increasing, Ianto knew that it could be as little as a matter of days before it reached 60%.

50.7%

Ianto wasn't the only one with tears in his eyes the first day they looked at the scanner screen and realised that the number had topped 50%. He would deny it furiously if asked, but even Owen had been blinking suspiciously quickly that morning.

Lisa's struggle was becoming more evident daily; the tension was etched on her face constantly. The smiles that Ianto so loved to see on her face were all but gone as she directed all the energy she had left into staying on top of the new consciousness invading her brain.

Even Ianto's sweet tales from the past and Jack's outlandish stories of his various escapades could do little more than raise a grimace.

Every day, the cyber-programming grew stronger, and they still hadn't found any way of stopping it.

55.1%

Ianto knew that something was wrong from the look on Toshiko's face when she came to find him at the coffee machine after Jack had relieved her at Lisa's bedside.

"What is it, Tosh? What's wrong?"

Tosh hesitated before answering, which told Ianto more clearly than any words could that whatever it was, it was bad. He put down the coffee mug he had been about to fill as his hands started to shake.

"I think she's starting to lose the fight," she eventually said quietly, regretfully.

If he had still been holding anything, Ianto would have dropped it as his heart fell into his shoes. "Wh… wh… wh… what happened?"

"Just for a few seconds, a completely different expression came over her face. I know I don't know her as well as you do, but it didn't look like Lisa."

Tosh put a hand on Ianto's arm, trying to imbue what comfort she could. "A second later, she was herself again. I… I didn't say anything to her about it; I don't know if she even realised it happened, but I thought you should know."

"Thank you for telling me, Tosh," Ianto replied politely, the automatic response the only thing he could muster when his thoughts were in such turmoil.

Terrifying enough as he found it to hear about it second-hand, it was worse to experience it himself, and he didn't have to wait long for it to happen.

Yet, worse than the completely un-Lisa expression on her face was the voice that erupted during those few scant seconds. Grating and harsh, it was the anti-thesis of Lisa's own soft tones.

Lisa came back to herself to find Ianto in tears, but she didn't know why.

His watery-eyes almost obscured his vision as Ianto tilted his head to look at the number on the scanner. What he saw made him wish he hadn't looked.

59.8%