"It doesn't matter. You'll all be dead in five minutes anyway."

Tseng lifted his free hand into the air and made a short, quick signal. Reno and Elena appeared from the crowd like smoke, dragging the injured attacker away with astonishing efficiency. A smear of blood marred the carpet in her wake.

"Barret! Cid!" Yuffie barked. "Clear the building, now!"

The silence broke like a wave on the sand. As Yuffie struggled to move closer to Tseng's side, whispers built to a dull roar, and people began to move to the exit. Yuffie was sure the panic was soon to follow, though. She hadn't said the word "bomb," but she could think of no other explanation for the assailant's threat.

As she reached Tseng, Rude appeared to his left, and Reeve surfaced to her right.

"Good shot, Rude," Tseng said. The larger man smiled in reply.

Yuffie looked to the two of them, deciding she might as well put Rude to good use if the Turks were going to be constantly in Wutai anyway. "Rude, Reeve. I'm ninety-nine percent sure there's a bomb in this building. I need you to find it and disarm it."

Reeve patted her shoulder before setting off with Rude, speaking rapidly as the larger man replied in a low, terse voice. Yuffie turned from them to find herself facing Cloud, Tifa, Nanaki, and Tseng.

"My Empress," Tseng said, looking at her with steely eyes. When he addressed her that way, she knew whatever problems they'd had would be at least temporarily on the backburner. He was ready for her command. "Do you think you can help Reno and Elena get some information out of that woman?"

With a nod, he turned smartly on his heel and vanished into the fray.

She turned to AVALANCHE. She didn't have time to dwell on how easily they looked to her. "Nanaki, maybe you can help Reeve and Rude. Put that sniffer to good use."

He bowed to her and raced off after the other two, flame-tail bobbing behind him.

"Tifa, Cloud, secure the perimeter. Once all the civilians are clear, make sure no one who isn't a guard or one of us gets in."

"We're on it," Tifa said, slipping her heels off and pulling gloves onto her hands as she spoke. Cloud had procured his sword from someplace, and Yuffie made a mental note to ask him later how the hell he managed to hide that thing.

As Cloud and Tifa departed, she flexed her hands, feeling suddenly alone, and decided to go after Reeve and Rude.

Yuffie knew from experience that the Jade Dragon had a small wing for offices. She took the stairs two at a time, praying fervently that she wouldn't twist an ankle in her ridiculous shoes, and sprinted past the auction area toward the inconspicuous door she knew was in the back left corner of the room. Half-hidden by strategically placed plants and curtains, it had been left ajar after Reeve, Rude, and Nanaki entered.

For some reason, as she ran, she thought about Tseng and what he would be doing. A rather large part of her, she was surprised to note, hoped that he was safe. She rounded a corner, barely managing to pass the wall without smacking or skidding into them, and finally came upon an open door. Light spilled onto the carpet in the otherwise dark wing.

When she stepped into the open doorway, she stopped short at the sight that greeted her. Rude, Nanaki, and Reeve bent over the only desk in the room, which housed a veritable rat's nest of wires attached to a machine and a counter. The clock read 7:38. It ticked toward zero faster than Yuffie thought possible. Surely seconds couldn't go by that fast.

"Is there anything I can do?" she gasped, laboring for breath and keyed up on adrenaline.

"I feel like I can work this out," Reeve replied through gritted teeth. A bead of sweat crawled down his cheekbone and into his collar, leaving a glistening trail. He reached for one cord, threading it through his fingers as he searched for the source. His hand stopped as Rude murmured a quiet warning, and Yuffie felt sick just watching them.

Nanaki pinned her with his one gleaming eye. "You must leave, Yuffie. If you fall, Wutai falls."

"No, what can I do to help?" she insisted stubbornly. "What can I do, Reeve?"

Rude faced her, and she struggled to remember a time she had seen him so tense. "Find Tseng."

He was right. She needed to protect her most valuable assets, and as much as she hated to admit it, Tseng was her most valuable asset at this time. She nodded and made a move to run, then halted to make a split-second decision. The shoes had to go. Once her toes sank into the carpet, she felt somehow surer.

It took her less than a minute to clear the hallways and the large banquet hall. At the front door, Cloud and Tifa waited, and she skidded to a stop.

"Where did Tseng go?"

Cloud pointed to a van across the parking lot, and Yuffie took off for it.

The back doors were open, sending a deceptively warm glow into the cold night. Sirens wailed in the distance. Heedless to the temperature and her bare feet smacking the concrete, Yuffie almost ran into the van in her haste to reach it.

"Tseng!"

"Here," she heard him say.

The woman strapped to the table looked barely alive, her dark green dress now stained and leaking unrecognizable fluids. Her skin was stretched taut and sallow in the lightbulbs' glow, and Yuffie almost didn't want to know what they had been doing to her.

"They found the bomb," Yuffie said. "They're trying to disarm it now."

"We can't get any information out of her." Elena's mouth made a pale slash in her face.

Seized by a sudden determination, Yuffie hopped into the van despite Elena's and Reno's protests and leaned in close to the woman's face. Despite her recent blockage, she felt Leviathan stir, filling her to her extremities like a liquid.

"Tell me who sent you," she growled. Even though there was no wind to speak of, her hair lifted from her head as if blown by some unfelt breeze.

The woman's eyes widened. Yuffie could see red staining the corner of her mouth. The next word was difficult for her to say, but the satisfaction in her eyes was easy to read. "No."

"Leviathan commands it," Yuffie intoned, her voice brimming with power. "Disobey me, and you disobey Him." Her voice sounded like several voices layered over one another, and the power of her presence blew back the woman's hair and vibrated the floor of the van.

"I... can't," she said through gritted teeth. She squirmed in her restraints, struggling to clutch at her wounded back and to move away from Yuffie.

Before the woman could answer, her eyes rolled back into her head and she bucked, foam spilling from her mouth. Reno and Elena grabbed her by the shoulders and attempted to hold her down, having trouble despite their combined weight.

"She's seizing," Tseng murmured.

After a few long seconds, the terrible, guttural noises from her throat ceased and she fell limp. Reno and Elena relaxed at some signal from Tseng

Yuffie turned her attention back toward the building and saw a familiar figure running full tilt toward her. Despite her high geta and restrictive kimono layers, she cut across the parking lot with astonishing speed and grace that spoke of years of practice.

"Daiyu!" Yuffie called and waved. In moments, the older woman had skidded to a stop, heaving for air. Before Yuffie could speak again, Daiyu shoved a clipboard into her hands. Close behind her was a man Yuffie suddenly recognized as the polite, gentle Uryuu from her suitors' luncheon, and she filed this information away for a more appropriate time.

"The guest list," she gasped.

"Thank you, Daiyu. " She began to turn for Tseng, but then she saw it, flickering out of sight beyond the dark perimeter of the parking lot. A shadow that didn't belong.

Yuffie didn't think, she just dropped the clipboard and ran, heedless of Daiyu calling her name.

She followed the figure into the dark streets and down the labyrinthine alleyways of the capital, listening the entire time for the tell-tale sounds of the explosion occurring. Would Reeve get out all right? Would they disarm the bomb? What would the press say about this? They'd have a field day. A million thoughts rushed through her head at once, revolving around each other like dogs chasing tails.

She lost sight of her target at a three-way-split. Bent double and clutching her waist, she wondered if they had gotten the bomb under control. Surely an explosion would have occurred by now?

Footsteps echoed behind her, and she whirled, kunai at the ready.

Tseng held up his hands, one empty and the other clutching a handgun. "Hold your fire."

"Tseng." She knew she must look disheveled and desperate, but she had abandoned all sense of poise. "I fucking lost him."

"Then pick a direction and hope we get lucky," he said.

She closed her eyes for just a moment, prayed to Da Chao to guide her, and picked the rightmost path. They ran. Even in his dress shoes, Tseng was silent as a ghost. No sound emanated from Yuffie's practiced feet hitting the ground.

Yuffie wasn't entirely sure how she knew they had chosen the right path. She could swear she heard the sound of soft footfalls ahead of them, as well as the skitter and scratch of recently disturbed rodents running for cover. It felt impossible that she could hear their target over the sounds of her own heavy breathing and her heartbeat thundering in her ears, but there was no mistaking it.

She felt aware of her surroundings in way she never had before, almost as if she were perceiving things on an entirely new level. The smell of garbage was no longer a jumble of odors but rather a subtle mixture of rot, rainwater, and living creatures. The air seemed almost alive, electric as it slid across her bare skin. Leviathan simmered in her mind, faint but present, and Yuffie thought this most likely had to do with the god.

Upon reaching one fork in the path, she paused and listened. She could swear she heard just the faintest trace of Tseng's heartbeat. The more pressing sound of their target escaping intruded though, and she chose the right path.

They'd been running for at least a minute-and-a-half. She wondered how much time was left on the bomb; with some struggle, she set the thought aside as Tseng's hand made gentle contact with her shoulder. He put a finger to his lips, leaned very close to her ear, and said in a threadbare whisper, "Ten feet, then rush."

They closed the gap quickly, and then Yuffie put the jets on, tossing knives in directions she hoped would be mostly non-fatal. They needed answers, not another corpse.

She felt it the instant something went wrong. Something in the atmosphere snagged, and so she put her foot on the nearby wall, and time seemed to slow. The pores of the bricks were stark against the ball of her foot, and she felt every scrape as she pivoted. Her body weight and momentum launched her a few feet into the air, just the advantage she needed. She heard the air part as a kunai whistled through the space where she'd just been standing. Tseng had taken a cue from Yuffie's evasive maneuver, tucking and rolling.

I'm lucky he's so nimble, Yuffie thought. In her haste to move out of the way, she'd almost forgotten him. She would have to pay more attention to her Leviathan-enhanced reflexes.

Things were moving fast once more. She impacted with the opposite wall and slid down painfully, scraping an exposed knee on the bricks. Holding back a hiss, Yuffie fell to the other knee, thankful she'd discarded the heels by this point.

Their shadowy target had wall-bounced his way to a clothesline above them and used it to swing over their heads and run in the other direction, letting loose a deadly spray of kunai. She winced as the wound stretched but rose anyway, fueled by adrenaline and the need to do something to fix the utter mess her life had become. If she could just find one lead, one solid lead, maybe she could begin to set things right.

Scrabbling noises came from around the corner where the figure had disappeared. Dimly, she registered Tseng recovering from his second kunai-dodge. He turned to lock eyes with her, a question on his features. He was waiting for her signal.

They went as a unit, and Yuffie—with a combination of her sensitized ears and a dash of guesswork—assumed their assailant had scaled a wall in order to slip away. She ran, jumped, and grabbed the ledge of a fire escape, then swung her body up to a stable position.

With some careful maneuvering, she managed to creep onto the third story windowsill above her, precariously balanced on the balls of her feet. One wrong move, and she knew—

She teetered as one foot slipped and hung in open space. Arms pinwheeling, ribs squeezing with the half-hitch dread that comes before a fall into thin air, Yuffie struggled to regain her balance. Just as her center of gravity shifted decisively in the wrong direction, she felt a sharp push on the bottom of her still-half-cocked foot, which set her balance to rights. She looked down, and Tseng's dark eyes, luminous in the moonlight, met hers. "Thanks."

Yuffie braced herself as best she could on the tiny ledge and coiled her legs, leaping like a well-oiled spring onto the opposite roof. With some serious effort, she heaved herself over the edge, grinding her exposed elbows across the pebbly stone in the process. She rolled over and reached into open space just in time to help catch Tseng, who gripped her forearms hard. His handprints would most likely be engraved in lurid bruises on her arms come morning.

She hauled him up, putting some serious back into it. "You all right?" she asked, checking him for damages. She hadn't seen how he'd fared with the rapid-fire attacks of their target.

"Fine. Let's move."

He didn't have to tell her twice: she took off like a shot, a running leap sending her flying over the gap to the next building. She tried not to wince as her soft insteps scraped against the gravel rooftops. The pain went out of her mind when her right foot caught on something and sent her rolling across concrete, grunting with pain as her already bruised body took more abuse.

In an effort to salvage her mistake, Yuffie maneuvered into a roll and ended up behind the hulking frame of a climate control unit. Three sharp kunai clangs alerted her of their target's presence and also of her close shave. She put her back to the unit, spotting the trip wire that had caught her. Tseng crouched on the other side of it, concealed by a huddle of metal chimneys with a brick base. With dismay, Yuffie saw he had a hand clutching his lower left arm.

Meeting her gaze, he nodded once as if to say all was well. She mentally chided herself for her worry. Tseng's not gonna go down from one little hit to the arm, stupid.

Movement had her eyes snapping to the left. There, in the shadows out of reach of the moon and the streetlights, something shifted. Yuffie was sure she'd been spotted, but she needed to either find a better vantage point or possibly move closer to Tseng. She tried to crawl in his direction, only to half-fall out of the path of a projectile.

She wasn't quick enough. Pain burst across the left side of her skull. Warm, sticky blood streamed down her neck, and her ear felt like it was on fire. Before she could be struck again, she scrambled back behind the metal unit. It was up to Tseng until she could figure something else out.

The chimneys did not offer enough cover for Tseng's larger frame. Light sparked off three kunai, and Tseng lifted his gun and fired, diving to one side. He landed hard on one hip, and she could tell from the way his body convulsed that he'd caused himself some pain.

Cover was sparse on the roof, and they were both tired from the chase and the events of the night. A stab of panic ripped through her belly when she saw what was about to happen next. Tseng scrambled ungracefully in an attempt to guard himself, but he wouldn't be fast enough, and he was moving in the wrong direction.

Yuffie tracked the upswing of the assailant's arms, the gleam of the kunai in the streetlamps, and she opened her mouth to scream, sprang forward to do something, anything, to protect Tseng. Pure instinct had flooded her, guided her, but she wouldn't make it. She wouldn't make it. She was the fastest goddamn person she knew, and even with the crackle and spark of Leviathan's tenuous, pockmarked link fueling the energy in her feet, her legs, her screaming heart, she wasn't going to be able to help him.

Before she could even call out a warning or move more than a few feet from her original position, before the kunai could be loosed from the assassin's skilled fingers, before Tseng could even change facial expressions, a tremendous boom rent the air. The roof shook and sent Yuffie tumbling, her bare hands going to stop her fall, rolling on her elbows to redistribute her weight.

The rumbling that accompanied the sound stopped, but an orange glow lit the distance, and Yuffie's stomach bottomed out. Reeve. Nanaki. Rude. They had failed to disarm the bomb.

Another crack tore through the air, shattering Yuffie's dismay to pieces. She jerked from her sprawl and looked toward Tseng. He had also hit the roof at the explosion, but in the confusion, while she and the attacker had been too stunned to recover immediately, he had lifted his gun and fired.

She dragged herself toward him, knees too weak to lift her yet. Dimly, she registered the scrape of her dress across the roof but ignored it in favor of moving toward the Emperor.

"Tseng," she said again, this time louder. He had been lying in place, watching their target to see if he or she would make any more moves. When none seemed forthcoming, he swiveled to meet her gaze.

"Are you all right?" he asked immediately, his dark eyes sweeping her for injuries. He looked concerned for a moment.

"I'm okay." She blurted what was really on her mind, unable to stop herself. "Are you?"

"I'm fine," Tseng said, his face drawn tense as he stared at the light on the horizon, the faint impression of black smoke curling from a source just beyond their line of sight.

Yuffie looked with him, torn. She wanted so desperately to sprint back as fast as she could and find Reeve, find Nanaki, hell, even find Rude and make sure they were all right, touch them with her own hands, kiss them on their furry (well, not in Rude's case) faces. She hoped, violently, that they were all right.

She tucked her fear deep inside and rose, offering Tseng her hand. He took it, and the press of his slightly sweaty hand almost made her feel better.

"Your arm..."

He shrugged with his good shoulder. "A few stitches, maybe. Let's take a look at what we got."

"I think you killed him," Yuffie said as they approached the body. A huge, dark pool had spread around the body, and she saw up close that it was a man this time, the chest flat and unmoving under the espionage get-up. She poked him in the side with her bare toe, grimacing. He moved, but not of his own accord, body lolling and then settling in the sticky puddle. "Oh, grossness. You definitely killed him."

Tseng cursed as well, under his breath. "I should have been more careful."

She raised her eyebrows. "Did better than me anyway." She nodded toward the corpse. "Let's search him."

Some rifling through his clothes produced what she had expected: nothing. She lifted her eyebrows when Tseng began stripping the shirt from his body. He raised the right arm, then looked under the left and paused.

At first glance, she thought there was nothing, but then her eyes traced the path of an old scar across his chest. It started around his sternum and traced its gnarled way to the armpit, and finally, she saw the object of Tseng's attention. A black teardrop tattoo was partially concealed by the knotted tissue. She could tell there was more to the image, but the old wound had obscured it somewhat.

"Interesting," Tseng murmured.

"Have you seen it before?" She crouched in order to get a closer look.

His mouth drew down. "I'm not sure." After a short ruffle through his pockets and shoes which revealed nothing, he stood and brushed himself off. "We'd better head back." He must've seen her expression, the way her muscles tensed for flight, because he reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. "They have plenty of help even without us, so save your strength."

Struggling deeply with the idea of actually taking her time to get back when her friends could be dead, Yuffie's eyes slipped closed, her hands fisted, and she nodded, reluctantly. Tseng was right, as much as she hated to admit that.

With one long, last look at another dead lead, they turned and began the slow trip back toward the night's disaster.