He was done here. Whispering to Rick that he was finished, he tiptoed out of the office, making sure that the hallway was empty before stepping out into it. He could still hear the soft murmuring from the office next door that told him whoever was working there was still on the com. No danger from that side.

Making his way to the staircase, he was just starting to descend the stairs to the second floor when he picked up the footsteps of someone coming up from the first floor. His eyes widened in panic as he took a step backward, frantically calling out to Rick. „Where do I go? Is there a roof access? An empty office? Anything? Someone's coming up, I can't get out!"

Rick in his head, yelling back, equally excited - if not more. „Yes, there is, go down the hallway and there's a roof access - but don't miss it, it looks real narrow, and there might be a door in front of it, too. I'll look for the fire escape ladder for you. GO!" His voice rose on the last word and Daryl realized that Rick was way out of his depth. He had never been an agent himself and couldn't relate to how unnerving it was to have your guide completely lose his shit in a situation like this.

Throwing a last glance at the stairway, with the footsteps coming ever closer, he started to run.

.-.

He briefly regained consciousness as they dragged him toward the stairs he had just climbed, fighting the pain of his damaged body for every single step he had had to take - and now they had all been in vain. His left arm was pulsing in time with his heartbeat - getting dragged along by it certainly wasn't helping -, and his left leg, with his knee dislocated or broken, throbbed with every minute movement, along with his head. His left foot got snagged on the carpet in front of the elevator and he uttered a hoarse scream of pain when nobody noticed and they just continued yanking and pulling on his arms to keep him moving until his foot came loose again.

The pain was crashing around his body like a wave, rolling back and forth, sometimes cresting and breaking and flooding him with agony. Through a red haze of blood in his left eye he saw the wrong angle at which his lower left leg was sticking out. From the way this looked, this time he was going to lose it for sure - if he even lived long enough to get to a hospital where they could amputate it.

Dimly he became aware of Rick screaming at him in the back of his mind, buried under the pain he was in. Clearly, he still hadn't learned not to panic in such situations and instead try to keep his agent calm. „You need to let me see where they're taking you!" Rick yelled, completely beside himself with panic and light years away from making any attempt to calm Daryl down. Listening to his guide shouting in his head, Daryl finally tried to do for himself what he had done for Carol when Ed had taken her - he had to start thinking again, or he would die in here.

Hershel had been maintaining a one-way link with him that they had both opened up as needed, and he couldn't imagine that Hershel was unaware of what had happened, with him pumping out his panic and agony the way he had been. Rick knew where he was, as did Glenn, by now, in all likelihood. Help from any or all of them was probably on its way - all he had to do was hold out. On the downside, Carol also had to know where he was by now, and with the timers already counting down, the compound was the last place on Earth that he wanted her to even be close to.

Fighting against his overwhelming, mind-numbing fear that was keeping him from thinking straight, he tried to calm his breathing and slow down his racing heart. He did all he could to block the agony in his left side, but although he managed to suppress some of it, the sheer amount of pain he was in was really too much to contain - but at least he managed not to be overwhelmed by it any longer. Luckily - and unluckily at the same time - one of the two Feina dragging him across the ground dropped his right arm as they started down the stairs.

With his mind already focused on controlling the raging pain engulfing him, he immediately took this opportunity to dip his free good hand into his right pants pocket as he hung in the grip of the other Feina with his broken arm and dug out one of his white painkiller pills. Dropping it on purpose, he watched it roll down the next two steps, as he guessed he was out of time again already and wouldn't be able to reach his mouth with his hand - just as the Feina who had let go of him by accident grabbed him once more and pulled him up again. He let himself sag and touch the floor with his face for a moment when he approached the pill on the floor, his lips closing around it. Biting down on the pill and crushing it between his bloodstained teeth, he swallowed the bitter powder in dry gulps as the two Feina started walking down the stairs again, completely ignoring his injuries and dragging him down mercilessly over the edge of each individual step.

Another crashing wave of pain towed him under, and blackness surrounded him.

.-.

Holding the key card against the reader with shaking fingers, Carol waited for the glass doors to open while at the same time trying her best to lock out the searing pain she was receiving from Daryl while still trying to get all the visual information from him that she could. Looking around herself inside the building, which mysteriously didn't light up as they stepped into it, she got her bearings and tried to figure out where they had taken him. In the distance she heard what might have been a heavy metal door banging closed. In the absence of any other clues, she'd have to go by that, hoping that the stairs next to the elevator she'd taken up to Esnik's office were those they had dragged him down. Nodding back at Glenn, she set out across the marble floor of the echoing hall.

Dimly she took note of the fact that the metal detector which had scanned her on the first day of their mission seemed to be off - it wasn't blinking or producing any sounds. Looking around herself once again, she saw that none of the devices in here that Sandra had used that day seemed to be online and realized that Rick had probably switched them off. But hadn't Daryl wanted to keep all the security equipment online, probably so Rick could check if any Feina or human guards were coming up on him?

Suddenly Glenn gasped loudly behind her. Thinking that he had spotted something, she whirled around, wide-eyed, and was surprised to find him sprawled on the floor. He was holding one hand up to inspect it in the light from the fluorescent street lamps flooding the hall through the glass walls. „This is blood", he whispered, turning his hand so she could see his palm.

Returning to his side, she knelt next to him on the polished marble floor and ran her fingertips over it. Feeling the moisture on her skin, she turned into the light and looked at the red smear glistening on her fingers, her heart thumping painfully in her chest. Feina blood was greenish. This was Daryl's blood. „Are you okay?" she whispered and was relieved to see Glenn nod.

She helped him to his feet again, then concentrated on her active link. „Hershel", she panted softly. „Can you still access the security camera feeds from the admin building? Are they online? Is Daryl really in here somewhere or has he been taken to another building?"

The calming voice of the old man came back almost instantly. He was prepared for her question and had probably only been waiting for her to calm down enough so she would be open to new information. „The cameras are still online, you'll see them blinking at the ceiling. Rick's only taken out the motion sensors that switch on the lights", he told her soothingly. „They caught Daryl when he was already on his way out of the admin building. He had almost reached the door, but he fell and they caught up with him and are taking him to the cells in the basement. Rick tells me he didn't see the Feina coming up behind him from the dark hallway - but even if he had … Daryl was already running. He couldn't have gone any faster."

Carol felt white hot rage rising inside her and was amazed at herself. Normally she considered herself rather patient and mild - but this outrageous act of negligence had her up in arms immediately. „What was he doing?" she raged at Hershel, but tried to control herself as soon as this one tight knot of emotion had escaped her - rehashing what Rick had or hadn't done would not get them anywhere.

Reining in her anger, and trying not to imagine what running and falling would do to Daryl, she approached the staircase next to the elevator and reached out for Hershel again. „Down here, I hope? I don't know any other staircase in here." She had certainly felt him being dragged down some stairs through their link before he'd passed out. She still felt sick to her stomach with second hand pain from him. How he could go through this without screaming his throat raw was beyond her. Receiving a brief nudge of confirmation from Hershel, she looked back over her shoulder once more, making sure Glenn had caught up to her and still had her back, before beginning to descend the stairs.

Unnoticed, her right foot crunched down on a pinch of a coarse white powder dusted over the third step down.

.-.

He could feel the heat ouside through the metal door, even though it was a sturdy one. Downstairs, the footsteps that had come up onto the third floor were now approaching along the hallway he had run down to get here, but there was always a chance that this was just a random person working here, instead of a guard. Trying to hold his breath because his panting was drowning out all sounds that might have penetrated the door to the roof, he whispered to Rick once more. „Have you found any cameras for the roof? Are there any guards out there?"

„You really wanna do this now?" Rick sounded aggravated. „There's someone coming up the hallway behind you right now, and you want me to go looking for cameras to make sure the roof is empty?" His voice was dripping with disbelief and disdain. „Get your ass out there, Daryl, you're running out of time! We've never seen any guards going out on the roof, have we? Get moving!"

A scraping sound on the other side of the door sent Daryl's heart rate through the roof again. „But I can hear something - there's gotta be someone out there! At least check that I'm not running right into them, make sure I'll have time to hide!" Looking down the narrow staircase he'd come up, he listened for the footfalls on the floor below him. They had slowed down, but were still approaching. „Will you please look for one goddamn fucking camera, Rick!"

„There's no time - and there have never been any guards up there that we know of! It's gotta be a … a bird or … a playin' kid … " Rick shot back. „Just get out there, and I'll try to find out when that person on the third floor is gone again so you can go back down and get out - but you'll have to move your butt now! You'll be okay, you'll see!"

Another scrape on the roof. Daryl could feel his frantic heartbeat throughout his body by now. If he waited any longer, he'd probably drop dead from high blood pressure. He was seething with anger. Even Rick himself had to know how ridiculous he sounded - playing kids on top of an office building! The footsteps below were still coming closer. Between Rick not even trying to find a camera and whoever was down there still coming closer, he had run out of options. He would just have to hope for the best.

Grasping the door handle, he pulled the metal door open, feeling its heat on his skin, and stepped out onto the roof, directly into the path of a Feina looking down at him.

.-.

Once Carol and Glenn had reached the bottom of the stairway, they found themselves in a dark hallway, lined with blinking red dots along the ceiling which gave away the cameras - still online, as Hershel had said, but more or less useless in the near blackness of the corridor. Hardly any light was filtering down from the hall above them. All they could record now was heat signatures.

Glenn started walking backward immediately, making sure that nobody was sneaking up on them from behind, while Carol scouted ahead.

She was thoroughly distracted, though, by the constant thrum of pain she kept receiving from Daryl - and now, probably because she was getting closer to him, she was getting visual input as well even though she was concentrating on something else. That in itself was nothing new - their subconscious bond had become so strong that it didn't surprise her that she was getting input from him even though he still seemed to be unconscious. The unnerving thing about the highly emotional visual transmission she had been receiving for some time now was that it didn't remotely fit his current situation.

Hershel had by now confirmed that he had spotted the heat signatures of two Feina dragging an obviously unconscious human between them down this hallway. About halfway down, he told them both as they crept along the hallway, they had opened one of the cell doors with a key card and entered the cell with their prisoner. They hadn't come back out again. What with the darkness filling the hallway, he wasn't quite certain which door it had been, so they would have to check.

Daryl's input, however, put him on the roof of a low building in broad daylight, and a hot day it was, too. She had been with him in her mind when he had run down a hallway, opened a metal door to blinding sunlight, urged on by Rick who had refused to make sure he wasn't running into danger, and stepped out onto the roof - only to be faced with a Feina staring at him and brandishing a weapon right away.

Her blood ran cold.

He was unconscious, and dreaming again, of that last mission that had ended with him lying on the street after jumping off the roof to evade capture.

And he was sharing it with her.