In this chapter: With the cavalry to hand, Claudia, Steve and Pete are finding out what Helena is up to.

Claudia stormed into the hotel suite Pete told them to get to as soon as they landed. Steve stayed in the lobby to handle the LEOs.

"In here!" Pete shouted from the office, a side room in a suite that was probably half the size of the freakin' Warehouse. Claudia had never seen anything like it.

"So this is how the morally challenged live..." she quipped with a sarcastic smile that froze when she noticed the room: it was messed up, like, the Mountain and the Viper had a fight in this room messed up. There was blood everywhere. Pete was sitting with his gun drawn and pointing at Helena who was tied to a chair in front of the TV that had what looked like a looping run of Rorschach ink blots. It was strangely hypnotising.

Pete shook her by shoulder, "Don't look at the TV, Claud," his voice pulled her out and back to him.

"What in the hell?" Claudia looked behind her - there was a guy in the far corner of the room, his arms bandaged from wrist to elbow, blood slowly soaking through the gauze. Adding that to the blood that was spattered all over the room's hardwood floor in odd patterns, Claudia's best guess was that the guy was walking around while stabbing himself repeatedly with a -

She pulled a purple glove from her back pocket and slapped it onto her right hand. She bent down carefully, keeping an eye on the guy who was obviously passed out, and reached for a shard of metal that laid at his feet. Claudia picked it up between finger and thumb and held it up against the light.

"There was a second shard," Pete said. "And Dr. No Jr. here decided to mock the Mother of Villains with it. Big mistake."

Claudia unfolded a static bag and placed the shard in it before she heard Pete's meek "Don't...", because the shard sparked so brightly and for so long that the static bag melted.

She exhaled in temporary defeat and looked at Pete. "The Rorschach?" she pointed at the 50 inches of monochrome images.

"Artie is transmitting this, to keep her mind clean."

"And the gun?"

"We don't know for sure, but we think an electric charge will actually make her worse."

"Holy frackin' shitstorm, Petester," Claudia muttered. "How the hell do we fix this? Usually I'd ask Helena for help with working this stuff out. Oh! Wait! She came up with this new type of goo that hardens into, like, amber, you know like on Fringe? I just don't remember the formula. Dammit."

She walked back and forth through the Game of Thrones set, trying to avoid the blood spatter, and side-eyeing Helena anxiously.

"Can we wake her up, like for a minute, without her setting our faces on fire?"

Pete shrugged uncomfortably.

"I don't know, Claud. She was getting pretty terrifying before we worked out the TV thing. She was managing to hold on enough that she didn't hurt me, but I could tell it was a battle in there," he said, indicating Helena's head with a vague pointing gesture.

"Maybe I can remember it myself. otherwise, we'll be spraying that Bell from here to eternity and it won't make a damn bit of difference judging by the little pool of plastic over there," Claudia said, sitting down at the desk with a pen and some paper and a look of dedicated concentration on her face. Behind her, Pete watched Helena nervously, equally scared by and for her. God only knew what was going on inside that head of hers.

Two hours or so later, Steve walked in, having concluded matters with the local police.

"Who let the dogs out in here?" Steve asked with a worried frown, hands on his hips.

Claudia mumbled something from the desk over which she was pouring, then looked up. "Pinky here," she pointed at the slumped man in the corner with the back of her pen "was taunting Brain," she pointed at Helena who had a bit of drool pooling at the corner of her mouth, hypnotised by the TV, "with another piece of the artefact and Brain went all shades of bananas." she finished and went back to what looked like a doodle that stretched over a hundred pieces of paper. "Pete. Drool."

Pete got up and wiped the corner of Helena's mouth.

Helena, at first, had no idea where she was. The patterns on the television had drowned out the voices for a long time, and she had floated, thoughtless, aimless, in a womb-like void. It was probably the most content she'd been in years. But the whispers increased in volume until they could no longer be ignored. She felt Pete wipe her mouth and she whispered quietly to him. He leant over and untied her bonds, and she stood, suddenly free.

"Helena. Stop!"

That was Steve, who was standing in front of her, suddenly, in this blood-drenched room that she barely remembered. He had a tesla held steadily, pointing at her. Claudia was sitting at the desk, still absorbed in her task.

The voices told Helena to kill the girl; she was probably the only one capable of neutralising the Bell, and they needed the Bell. Something in Helena, however, would not allow that.

"Steve," she said, quietly, and he looked at her with wide eyes. "Get me the papers that Claudia has been working on and the remaining shard of the Bell. Tie her up gently, and follow me, both of you," she said, indicating Pete. She stood, and Steve, completely under her thrall, as everyone would be, soon, did exactly as she asked, tying a wide-eyed Claudia to the chair and taking the items Helena wanted. He presented them to her on his knees, as it should be, and she took them absently, walking outside and trusting to her subjects to keep her safe and bring her to the Bell. Soon enough, they would be able to infect others, making them her followers too. The being that used to be Helena Wells smiled, and had Myka Bering been awake and able to see that smile, she would have shuddered.

It could not have been more than a mile from the Hotel to where the Bell was. But given it was early afternoon, and the location was downtown Philly, and all it took for someone to join the mass of followers was for Helena to wish they get out of her way - by the time they reached the Bell, Helena was being followed be a crowd that was a thousand people strong.

The crowd simply stopped at the entrance to the waterfront warehouse, and Helena walked back into where she and Pete and Myka were held not a few hours ago - on her own.

That was probably a good thing, because the floor of that warehouse was littered with the blood and the brains and the bodies of the goons who bashed each other's heads open - quite the gruesome scene to walk into. Not that any of Helena's followers would have minded.

She approached the Bell with the second shard in her hand, her face lacking expression, breathing even and slow.

She held the shard atop her outstretched palm just above where the crack used to be. The shard began to glow and the Bell hummed - literally hummed - like electricity or a tuning fork, like it had never stopped ringing, and the shard melted in Helena's hand and dripped through her fingers and onto the Bell, leaving a nasty burn in its wake.

Helena's expression, however, remained unchanged. Her breathing still even and slow.

Then the humming stopped. Completely. In the Warehouse, in Helena's head.

For a split second, Helena's mind and eyes were clear and she took one long breath as herself, relieved that this was over.

But as that split second ticked away, a sound louder than anything tore thorough Helena's ears and she screamed in the agony of her eardrums being pierced. She collapsed on the floor, as the sound, and the hell-raising pain it induced, were draining life from her.

Outside the warehouse, one thousand people fell to the floor at once.

In a hospital not terribly far away, Myka Bering woke with a start. She had been having the worst dream - Helena was losing herself, had been taken over by something horrible. Since Myka didn't really believe in magic and dreams being real, and despite all of her years in the Warehouse, she didn't worry too much about it at first.

When she found her Farnsworth, however, and called Pete, getting no answer, she began to worry. She tried Claudia next - nothing. Then Steve. Nothing. She decided to try Artie next, a strange foreboding hunch telling her not to speak to Helena. Artie answered immediately, grumbling that she shouldn't be awake, never mind calling people, but it was clear that he, too, couldn't contact any of the team. And Artie was scared. She hung up on him, getting out of bed and shuffling to the bathroom. Her head was painful, but she didn't know what had happened, beyond threats from that voice.

She went to the bathroom, relieved when her pee was clear and blood-free. She was worried about internal injuries. When she'd washed her hands, she found her chart on the end of the bed and read through it. She'd had increased intracranial pressure and they'd had to do a procedure to save her from brain damage. They drilled holes in her head. She was a little pissed at that, because her hair was one area she was a little vain about. But she could deal with that later. She twisted what was left of her hair back, tying it out of her way. It looked a little outlandish, with missing patches and with bits of bandage here and there, but it would have to do.

She had to find Helena, and soon, or something bad was going to happen.

For once, she decided not to ignore her gut, and quickly dressed, finding her weapons and cell in the bedside drawer. She checked her pockets for a particular item that she always carried nowadays - neutraliser earplugs. It was surprising how many artefacts were activated by sound. And given that this was a Bell - well, it was plain common sense. She steeled herself and sneaked out of the hospital room, making sure to avoid any staff on her way, and jumped in a cab at the entrance, giving the driver the address of the hotel where she'd last seen her team.

She made her way through the revolving doors into the lobby of the Rittenhouse, the bellhop and concierge exchanging uncomfortable looks. They recognised her, which made Myka feel a bit more at ease, because they should, then, know about everything that had happened earlier.

"Having a rough day?" the concierge asked dryly.

Myka was blocking sarcasm from her communication bands because she had no time to fuck around. Her partner was missing, the rest of her team was AWOL, her boss would have a fit if he knew she was up and about, the woman she loved was in a bad way, oh, and she had fucking holes in her head. So she discreetly pointed the tesla at the concierge as she walked around to his side of the desk and jabbed it between his ribs once she was close enough. "Tell me everything you know," she growled in his ear angrily.

"I don't know what you're talking about..." the little creep said, his face clearly showing that he was lying. She didn't need Steve's talent to know that this guy would take bribes to do anything.

"You know where they took them. Tell me everything, or I will personally ensure that you go through the rest of your life infertile. Do you understand me?"

He understood. In 5 minutes, she was in another cab heading to a different hotel's penthouse suite. Apparently that was where the boss could be found - the man who paid the bribes. It took a little over ten minutes to get to the right place, and a quick flash of her badge got her access to the room, where she found what looked like a scene from Dexter, and a man who looked like he was dying the death of a thousand cuts.

She took a moment to examine the scene. The blood spatter was messy and didn't tell a story other than the guy in the corner must have randomly cut himself – she was guessing the arms, since they were bandaged.

And now that she was looking at them, the bandaging technique looked familiar: there were small knots at the top and bottom of the run of gauze. This was something Pete did. Or so she hoped, anyway, because that was the slightest glimmer of hope that Pete was alive.

She made a slow approach towards the desk on the other side of the room - it was a beastly Mahogany piece that fit right in with the nouveau riche decor of the room. It was also very tidy. Too tidy, almost, given the utter mayhem in the room. There was absolutely nothing on it. Not even a droplet of blood.

Myka walked around it to find a piece of paper scrunched up on the floor. She picked it up and unfurled it to find a part of the formula that Helena and Claudia worked on - long before the business with the trident, back when Helena was getting back in with the Warehouse - only it was incomplete and wrong. Claudia (by the handwriting) got some of her variables mixed up (and Myka remembers the formula, even with holes in her head, which, in itself, is a relief).

"Three Seven Nine..." she heard the groan of death from behind her.

She found the source of the noise - a gagged and bound Claudia Donovan, tied to a heavy wooden chair that was turned to its side. She untied the young woman carefully, her usual dexterity and grace missing, probably due to the repeated head injuries she'd endured, and helped her sit up.

"Myka! We have to find them - Helena has them all under her control, like totally these are not the droids you're looking for. She made Steve tie me up and she took the formula with her, and now I can't remember it anyway, and we totally need it to neutralise the Bell..." she said, all in one breath, and it took Myka a few seconds to decipher it all.

"Did she hurt you, Claud? Did she hurt anyone?" Myka asked anxiously.

"Well. She definitely hurt Douche Mc A-hole over there, but he kind of deserved it. She's still fighting it, Mykes, I can tell," Claudia said, straightening her back gingerly. "She looked at me like she was going to kill me, like she was just going to wipe me out without a thought, but then it was like she was herself again for a second, and she told Steve to tie me up gently. Which is why I didn't end up stabbing myself to death with a pair of scissors or something."

Myka internally giggled at the word scissors, as her mind returned her briefly to the Rittenhouse before everything had gone to shit. Damn, she wished she could go back in time. She hadn't even had time to process what had happened between her and Helena before all of this insanity had started. "And the upside down chair?..." Myka tried to form a question, not doing terribly well with that either.

"I tried to get to the drawers and get myself untied," Claudia muttered under her breath, "I miscalculated how freakin' heavy the chair was…"

Myka tapped her lip with a finger as she turned to look at their prisoner. Who was he and why had he done all of this? What was his endgame? She turned back to Claudia.

"Claud, I know the formula for the goo - the one that you were writing. I'm gonna write it down, and you're gonna do whatever it is you need to do to make the stuff, and in the meantime, I'm going to talk to Senor Psychopath over there and find out what the hell this is all about. With any luck, we can find out where the others are and neutralise the Bell so we can all go home."

Claudia nodded, her face serious, and Myka sat down to write out the formula, her mind whirling as she tried to make sense of what had happened in the last 24 hours.

"So...uhm..." Claudia skirted around the issue while looking over Myka's shoulder as she jotted down the formula effortlessly, "how are you doing?" she asked quietly.

"Humph?" Myka hummed, concentrating, as she recalled the formula from memory.

"How are you doing? Pete said you were in a bad shape at the hospital."

"I'm fine," Myka answered distractedly.

"Dude," Claudia tried to water down her concern with her own brand of lightness. "Pete said you were sedated, and beaten pretty badly, and with... uhm... holes in your head."

"Yeah," Myka continued distractedly, "Helena had just told me she loved me," she etched on the paper furiously, not raising her eyes from the page, "so lots of stuff to keep me confused". She finished, leaned back a bit, narrowed her eyes while examining the paper she was drawing on. She nodded slowly as a smile crept across her face.

"But not confused enough so that I forget this," she stated salubriously and held up the paper for Claudia's inspection.

"Dude, that is like... Mykes, you have holes in your head, and you still got this right. You're like - you have a superpower, dude!" Claudia gushed, running off to make phone calls to arrange whatever chemicals and equipment she needed. If Myka knew Artie and Mrs Frederic, those supplies would be there within the hour.

Myka took a deep breath to compose herself, her back to the unfortunate (but probably deserving) victim of Helena's freaky mind-control whammy, as Pete would undoubtedly be calling it, were he not already under its thrall. It was time to get some answers.

She walked over to the man who, it appeared, had started all of this chaos by ordering them to be kidnapped. She needed to know where everyone was, and she needed to know what the hell he was up to.

"All right," she said, out loud, pulling off the guy's gag and slapping his face lightly to bring him back to consciousness. He looked up at her bloodshot eyes, his arms pulling at his bonds. "Who are you, and what do you know about all of this?" she asked, and he looked at her dully, saying nothing. "If you don't talk to me, I'm afraid there will be consequences," she said, her eyes narrowing.

He smiled smugly.

She took a deep breath and let cold rage fill her. Helena was in trouble because of this asshole. Helena might die because of this smug douchewad. "What? You don't believe me? You know Helena? The woman who you've just sent off to God knows where with the power to take over the world?"

His eyes widened slightly.

"Yeah. She just told me she loves me. And I love her. Which means that this is personal, now. You know what we have in the Warehouse, my friend?"

His eyes widened more, and his mouth opened.

"There are things in there that will make you talk, and then pull your tongue out slowly until it rips from your body. There's a chain in there that will break every bone in your body. Believe me when I say that I will use each and every one of them on you until you talk. Hell hath no fury, my friend, as you might have noticed already..."

She pulled out her notebook as he started talking immediately, words falling over one another to get out.

Claudia walked back into the room and watched this odd sight for a couple of minutes - that dishcloth of a pathetic excuse for a human being was just spilling things left, right and centre to Myka in a way he didn't to Pete (who tried twice as hard), so willingly.

Too willingly. Claudia had witnessed this willingness already today.

Her eyes widened with concern and - quite possibly - horror when a bunch of stuff linked up together in her mind like a set of magnets. HG controlled this man with her mind, with the power of the Bell; HG loved Myka, and told Myka as much (and Claudia knows she needed to get into that with Myka, because there was no way Myka was not explaining what was said in the tiniest of details); Myka loved HG (because - duh) and HG probably knew about it (because Myka, for all her qualities, never mastered the art of subtlety); and now Myka is getting 'Failed Nefarious' here to spill the beans like a broken piñata.

... So something about the connection Myka and HG shared allowed Myka to also control the people that Helena controlled.

Could this be?!

She stepped backwards carefully so that she could still watch Myka interrogating (this wasn't really an interrogation, but more like a guided conversation) the asshole. Once she was far enough away she pulled her Farnsworth out and called Artie.

Myka was writing down everything the idiot in front of her was saying - and she thought vaguely that heads were going to roll pretty soon - possibly Regent heads, if this guy was telling the truth. Another part of her mind, however, had noted Claudia's sudden about-face and was listening to the intense whispered conversation the girl was having with Artie. The guys finished his villainous "no one understands me" monologue and Myka closed her notebook, turning to wait for Claudia to finish her less-than-subtle conversation with Artie. By the time Claudia came back, Myka's foot was tapping impatiently.

"Wanna tell me what that was about?" Myka asked.

"uhhhh..." Claudia stammered, "uh, I was checking in with bossy bear," and blurted out eventually, "you know how tetchy he gets if we don't check in..." she tapered off, looking to see if Myka was buying it, or whether she was about to whammy her into submission.

"...and?" Myka prodded.

"And I was worried that you have some sort of power from the Bell, by extension, because of you and HG, and I thought Artie would know if that was possible, but he doesn't, he doesn't know, please don't hurt me..." she spat out pretty much all at once looking at Myka with fear.

"Claudia," Myka said gently, "I don't know what Helena looked like when she was whammied, but can you answer me this - did she look like this?"

Claudia looked at her with one eye, as if that could turn away the evil somehow.

"Ah... no, not really," Claudia said. "She looked all evil and detached, like she could kill you and not ever think about it again. You look like you're going to kill me, but just like you normally do," Claudia said, "with like your hip out and your eyebrow up and your neck all stretched up like a great big lesbian giraffe..."

"Claudia!" Myka fumed, "I am NOT a lesbian. If anything, I am bisexual. I clearly had a boyfriend for a long time."

"Yeah," Claudia muttered, "and he conveniently 'died' before we could meet him," she said, doing quotation marks over the word 'died'.

"CLAUDIA DONOVAN!" Myka yelled, her temper well and truly gone. That's when she saw Claudia's sly smile.

"Oh, I see. Trying to goad me into a homicidal rage?" Myka asked, more calmly.

"Yeah!" Claudia said gleefully, clapping her hands.

"And if I had been whammied, how do you think that would have gone for you, exactly?" Myka asked coolly. Claudia blanched.

"Okay, maybe I didn't think that through too well," Claudia said. "Anyway, how did you get Sir Stabsalot over there to talk?"

Myka muttered, "I threatened to use artefacts on him."

Claudia stared at her in disbelief. This was a new level of badass for Myka 'by the book' Bering.

In the cab, on their way to a warehouse which location was helpfully divulged by their villain of the day, Myka and Claudia were silent.

Myka was silent because she was exhausted. Yes, she'd been all eidetic memory with the formula, and she'd been all ass-kicky with the idiot on the floor, and she'd been all casual with Claudia, but truth was had used up every bit of energy she had in her, and every bruise she sported was throbbing with pain, and every bone in her body was weak with fatigue. She thought that she could feel her brain aching. Probably because there were holes in her head, or something.

Claudia was silent because a. she still wasn't entirely sure Myka wasn't whammied too. She read somewhere, quite possibly in the manual, that there have been a handful of situations where an artefact bifurcated its effect, splitting its good and bad influences between two people, sort of a Jekyll and Hyde thing.

Then there was b. - they were heading to a warehouse that the ringleader had helpfully given them, without knowing a damn thing. There could be hundreds of goons there. There could be booby traps. There could be a great big ticking bomb for them to walk into. Or, worst of all, there could be a Helena there, with hordes of her newly acquired minions, just waiting to take over the world.

It was game time, so Myka loosened her shoulders and checked that her tesla and service weapon were ready. She knew that she should be in hospital. She felt so shitty that if it was anyone other than Helena involved in this clusterfuck she would have called Artie to get him down here to take over. But this was Helena, and there was literally no-one else alive who could talk her down.

They stepped out of the cab and Myka was adjusting her holster so she didn't see, initially, but then Claudia tapped her on the arm. There were hundreds of people, possibly thousands, possibly unconscious, possibly dead, prone outside this horribly run-down warehouse in the ass-end of nowhere.

"What the..?" she breathed. And that was when they started to stir.

"Uh, I think running might be an idea if we want to get in there without being attacked by the walkers, Mykes," Claudia said, out of the side of her mouth. Myka didn't waste time; she just ran, Claudia following in her wake. By the time they ran in the door, the people nearest them were almost standing up. They were making a weird humming noise and it made the hair on the back of their necks stand on end. They got through the door and Claudia used a conveniently-located piece of wood to bar the door behind them.

"Let's go find lady cuckoo," Myka said, and Claudia fist-bumped her and then blew it up.

They crashed through the front doors of the warehouse, teslas drawn, clearing the foyer as they walk in.

They followed protocol to a tee, covering each other as the cleared the umpteen rooms and cabinets along the longest hallway in the existence of hallways, all along, they approached what looked like The Doors of Doom, a set of massive, shiny metal doors, large enough to fit a semi-trailer through at the very end of it.

"Lady cuckoo?" Claudia whispered incredulously. "Really? I wouldn't have thought that I'd hear that from you."

"From how you described her, she's not the Helena that I..." Myka stopped for a moment to clear another broom closet. "She's not my Helena."

"Mykes... whether she's batshit crazy destroying the world or pretending to be normal and disappearing... she's always your Helena," Claudia said, her eyes on Myka's, sincerity in her every movement.

"Thanks, Claudia," Myka said, and they both counted to three before pushing open the huge metal doors.

Helena was standing with her back to them, a visible aura of glimmering golden energy around her and the Bell, as she stood communing with it.

"Helena?" Myka said softly, gesturing for Claudia to move around and flank them. "It's me, Myka," she added, unnecessarily. She kept her tesla trained on Helena's back.

Helena turned slowly, her head tilted to one side as if listening to something only she could hear. Her eyes were closed.

"Myka?" she whispered, and then her eyes opened. Myka gasped. They were solid, glimmering gold; no iris or sclera visible.

Myka bit the inside of her cheek as she approached Helena slowly, assessing the state of her. Helena looked bigger somehow, broader at her shoulders, a little taller as well. All manners of thoughts as to what the Bell might have done to her insides started racing through her mind and she focused on snippets of Helena she had noticed: the skin that sloped from her neck down to her chest was glistening with a metallic shine, the tendons of her neck taut and rigid. Her jaw was squarely and tightly shut, creating tiny craters in Helena's cheeks and temples, craters that looked deeper with their odd golden hue contrasting natural shading.

From behind Helena, she saw Claudia beginning to set up her gooing mechanism, so it is best she kept Helena focused on her.

She took a step towards Helena, removing her left hand from supporting the hilt of the tesla and reaching it to Helena's Arm.

Helena did not flinch.

"Helena, it's me, Myka," she said, unnecessarily, speaking only to keep Helena's attention on her. Even Helena's skin felt metallic, almost cold. What had the Bell done to her? Myka looked at those golden eyes, noting that Helena was now almost as tall as she was. Her shoulders were definitely broader. The skin on her chest was cracked and metallic-looking, bronze shining through the tiny fissures.

"Myka Bering," Helena said, and this time, it wasn't her voice. It was 'the' voice, the voice of the person who had asked them all the questions earlier, who had ordered his men to almost kill her. Myka had thought that the man they met in the hotel room was the owner of the voice, but now that she thought about it, his voice wasn't the same.

"Who are you?" she asked, quietly, taking a cautious step back. Helena's head swivelled, her golden eyes staring blindly.

"Who I am is of no consequence. What I am going to do is what is relevant, here. Your darling HG Wells is going to finally enact the genocide she so craved, Agent Bering, and you will be her final victim. I will let my control of her waver a little, enough so that she is truly aware of what she is doing, and she will kill you, all the while screaming as she watches you die at her own hand," the voice said, smugly. Myka stepped back a little more.

"Why are you doing this?" Myka asked, her voice trembling a little. She was frightened - for Helena, not for herself.

"Why don't you ask her why she did what she did. Why my brother is a mummy, buried in an unmarked grave in Egypt?" Suddenly the voice sounded young and sad, and Myka remembered the little girl whose brother had been killed discovering Warehouse 2. God.

"We reap what we sow, Agent Bering," the voice said after a moment, and it was back to its previous smooth tone. "We reap what we sow."

Myka felt paralysed. She tried to move a hand, wiggle a toe, twitch a facial muscle - nothing.

Her body ceased responding to her brain's commands.

Then the pain settled in her limbs.

That's what it felt like to lose control, she noted to herself. But this wasn't losing control while willingly relinquishing it - probably a bit like what happened in Helena's hotel room before all of this turned to shit. This wasn't even losing control after having fought for it.

This was having something that was so obviously her own whisked away from her without her even noticing, and the only - the only - thing Myka could do is blink, and then blink more, and harder, to push away the tears that were rushing in, obstructing her field of vision and clouding her judgement at once.

Her body, now under the control of another, followed Helena as she walked slowly, stiffly, to the outside of the building. Myka noted that Claudia was marching alongside her as she removed the bar from the doors to the abandoned warehouse and opened them. They were greeted by a thousand people standing, waiting for instructions.

Myka's eyes were filled with tears. She couldn't move of her own volition. What could she do? She fought, hard, against the binding placed on her by the Bell. Myka Bering had one strength that had carried her through any number of difficult moments. This was just one more. She managed to get control for long enough to spin and fire her tesla at Claudia, who fell to the ground immediately. If nothing else, Claudia might be free of this compulsion when she woke; free enough to try neutralising the artefact. Myka's eyes filled with tears once more as her body was compelled to begin marching alongside Pete and Steve. She knew where they were headed - a super-secret underground bunker nearby that held another copy of the nuclear football – the perfect weapon of mass destruction.

The voice got its revenge for Myka's moment of freedom, making her pause her march in order to punch a nearby wall several times with her bare hand. She distinctly felt bones splinter, but she couldn't cry out or do anything to make it stop. Tears blurred her vision as she continued her forced March.

The single positive upshot of having her body controlled by something else was that she didn't feel the pain of her old injuries. Her hand was sending blinding, shooting pains through her, but her head and jaw and abdomen and legs and back felt just dandy.

She could feel how the Bell was making a bid for her consciousness as well, and she could only think that letting it take over would be such a tremendous relief - not having to be aware. Not having to think.

Because right now, thinking hurt Myka. She was thinking about Pete and Steve and Claudia, and how they didn't deserve to end like this. How they didn't deserve to end their lives as minions, as mindless automatons played by the hands of a madwoman whose unleashing unto the world was Myka's own doing (or at least that how she felt).

At the same time, Myka's mind and soul were breaking because this wasn't Helena. This artefact hijacked her Helena and turned into this homicidal megalomaniac, turned her to Pete's Lady Cuckoo. She blamed the artefact because from what Helena said earlier, it was clear that Helena would be suffering as much as the rest of them, and this artefact knew Helena. It knew how to play on Helena's trauma and emotions so that her suffering was as intense as possible.

It probably played on Helena's grief as well, found the piece of her soul that will always remain fractured because of Christina, because of Warehouse 12, because of the bronze.

And at the back of her mind, Myka was hatching a plan - it was a very bad plan, granted, but a plan nonetheless: if the Bell released Helena just enough for her to feel grief for Myka, it would open the one place Myka knew how to touch in Helena, the same place that stopped her all those years ago in Yellowstone.

So she hoped that in the few minutes before she was sure her life would be tortured out of her, she could reach Helena for long enough to bring her back to fight the Bell.

They reached the secret bunker where the 'secret' nuclear football was stored. Myka knew, from her link with this... collective, she supposed, that one of them was a guard at this particular facility, which was located here because of the historical significance of the Bell. Something which she supposed made sense, in the great scheme of things. Helena, Myka, Pete and Steve walked through the doors of what looked like a plain office building, leaving the remainder of their people outside to guard. They went to the elevator that, when the right sequence of buttons was pressed, would take them below street level and to the bunker. Helena touched the man operating the elevator and he immediately pressed that sequence and took out the gun that was hidden in his waistband, to guard Helena.

They walked down a concrete corridor guarded by soldiers, all of whom stopped in their incessant questioning and brandishing of weapons as soon as they were touched by any of the group. They soon had a small army surrounding them, escorting them to the room holding the nuclear football. Vitally, for this diabolical plan, they also picked up the two soldiers holding the keys and codes to the football.

When they reached the small room, Myka stood still, trying to concentrate so that she could once again take control against this possession, to somehow try to reach Helena.

The soldiers were busy with their codes and keys and the target was set. Cairo. It made sense, in the great scheme of things. If anywhere in the world had hurt the person responsible for this, it was Cairo - the place where the girl's older brother had died.

Myka waited for her moment, concentrating hard on fighting the crushing weight of someone else controlling her.

Helena turned her head and looked at Myka, only it wasn't Helena. It was the thing - the collective, the Bell - that was glowing gold and dangerous from where Helena's dark eyes used to be, and it felt to Myka as though the air pressure in the room had drastically increased and she was being squeezed from the outside in.

It took her three and a half seconds to succumb to the intense pain, and it was only then that she cried out in agony.

Only then did Helena, or the thing, rather, flashed a menacing Cheshire Cat grin and turned to face the soldiers with their system primed and keys at the ready. Then all she did was blink and the soldiers turned the keys in their locks.

And then the whole room fell dark.

Dark, but then damp - when the emergency sprinklers came on, and as the tiny droplets landed - especially anywhere around Helena, purple and orange sparks were flying.

And from beyond her pain, from beyond the sensation of having her muscles pressed too tightly into her bones, Myka let out a breath that to the keen listener would have sounded a lot like "Claudia".

The emergency lighting kicked in, and the room was suddenly filled with shouting. Finding her body suddenly hers to command, Myka stood, taking a full, deep breath into her lungs.

She stepped forward, holding up her shield and her other, empty hand, non-threateningly. She managed to persuade the Military Police to call Mrs Frederic before she and Pete, Steve and Helena and some of the Bell's followers were dragged to a cell with armed guards posted outside.

Helena was unconscious, slumped between the two tall MPs dragging her to the cell, and as they placed her (none too carefully) on a bench inside the cell, her arms flopped to her sides ungracefully. Myka went to her noting that her colouring had returned to normal, but she was still unconscious.