Once again, I don't own SAW or Code Lyoko. Also, I'm skipping ahead, unlike what I did in the first "Code: SAW," where we built up to the action. And this chapter is set in Odd's POV. This also takes place about a year after the first "Code: SAW." (Seriously, you might want to read that first because this will contain spoilers that will confuse you.) Also, if some characters seem Out of Character, it's because of maturity.

I felt leather around my neck before I could be aware of anything else. What happened last night? I wondered. Did one of my exes have a fetish that I wasn't aware of? Then I realized that none of my exes would have any clue what a fetish was, and even if they did, they couldn't do anything about it. Jim was so strict about the girls staying on their level and boys on theirs.

Faintly, I heard a voice. "Oh, God! Oh, God! Not again! I thought I wouldn't… Fuck! Just… Fuck!" the female tone had an edge of panic. The voice started to pant and then gasp. "William's here, too?! No! I can't…! This—" She started muttering and screaming. "Odd! Odd! It's me, Cassidy! Oh, God! I didn't want this! I wanted to relax last night…" She whimpered. "Yumi! ULRICH! Come on, please, wake up!"

My eyes started to open as I rose to a sitting position. My head throbbed. The room had muted lighting. A few feet in front of me stood five glass boxes on black metal pedestals. My hands went to my neck. I realized there was a collar around it. "Are we being kept as pets?" I asked.

"No, ODD!"

I looked to my left. "Cassidy?"

Her hands were trembling as she pushed the collar above her neck but only getting to that point. She couldn't push it around her chin. I saw a padlock in front of it and wondered if the others and I had it, too. "I didn't want to do another test! I—already survived the last one…" Her brown hair stuck up in places from a haircut she had recently. She panted again, tears pricking at her eyes. "Please—I wanna go home… I am not an apprentice. I didn't want this to happen…" Her shoulders quivered, her gasp coming out in a ragged, sharp breath.

I couldn't say I blamed Cassidy for the way she felt at the moment. She had been in a perilous situation like this before. She watched a SAW marathon, stopping at a certain moment—she finished the movie after the situation, but that wasn't the point—fell asleep, tried to fight off two spectres and failed, ending up in the Spike Trap with William on Lyoko. Cassidy recalled she pulled the spikes out, fainting near the last spike. Her ex-boyfriend Peter pulled it out, saving them. After a while, her triggers became too much for him and he left without a word. Rumors flew that he made it home, but we figured he was living somewhere away from us. Jim gradually lost faith in finding his "nephew."

I reached out to her hand, grasping it gently. "Easy, Cat-Girl. We're going to get through this together."

"B-But…"

"As long as we work together, we'll survive, but you just gotta trust me. You are hyperventilating right now. You're doing fine right now, relax." It was a stretch, but if she was to calm down, she had to trust me. I slowly cupped my hands over her mouth and nose. Her eyes widened, either from the smell of my hands—her lotion solution also seeped into my hands—or from the surprise that I had my hands over her mouth and nose. In our current fix, I couldn't tell.

"You're doing fine right now, relax," I repeated, thanking Jim and Yolanda for teaching us about First Aid and hyperventilation. I knew her mind was in hyper-drive. "Just breathe into my hands. We don't have a brown paper bag."

She took in one deep breath, her body quaking. However, as she kept breathing, and I kept the reassurances, her hands gently fell to her sides. As I removed my hands, she looked at me. "Odd…I don't want to be in this room."

"I know, Cat-Girl… I know…" I reassured. "I don't want to be here either." However, I couldn't shake the feeling there was something different around Cassidy, aside from the leather collar with cables leading somewhere I couldn't see.

She looked at me strangely. "What is it, Odd?"

"Why do you have a bag near you?"

"A bag?" she tilted her head to one side, wincing in discomfort about the leather.

"It's by your left side," I replied. "You'll see it."

She looked down and to the left. "Huh, how strange. It's almost like that Hunger Games pack—too bright orange, might alert the enemy." She brought up her fingers to her neck, frowning as she couldn't scratch at a spot. "This collar has got to go!" she growled, annoyed.

I heard stirring from my right. "Alright, who's the dork who thought my neck would make a good pincushion?" a voice asked.

"Ulrich!" Cassidy would've leapt at him and hugged him if she had been free. She would've done it to me, too, if she hadn't been panicking.

I turned in time to see Ulrich cringe. I swear the guy had cringed when Jeremie yelled into his ears before the event of Yumi falling into the Digital Sea. He should've been able to handle Cassidy's screams of joy. However, he felt at his neck, about to flip out.

My hands flew to his. "Before you freak out, Cassidy had beaten you to it."

His voice started to rise. "How did she—?"

I shook my head. "Drop it, good buddy." There, a faint unzipping sound rang through the muted atmosphere. Looking behind me, I saw that Cassidy had unzipped the bag. "What are you doing, Cat-Girl? That could be a bomb or something."

"You watch too many action films. I'm just looking inside the bag. Maybe XANA left clues for us to work with." She reached inside, my heart clenching as she did. She pulled out what looked to be a high heel. "None of us wear high heels."

I shrugged, saying, "I only wear platform shoes when I want to look taller."

Cassidy nodded, reaching in again and pulling out a piece of paper. "It has a pattern on it." She handed it to me, and I looked at it. It had a grid pattern, as on math paper, but it had a few X's in three random squares. I furrowed my brow and passed it on to Ulrich.

"I'll keep this with me," he grinned. "Maybe I can figure it out."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cassidy nod, finding an iPod. "It only has one song. XANA must've preprogrammed it."

My eyes widened. "W-What's the song?" I hoped it wasn't "Glad When you're Bad." Ulrich told me when we had a test after a return trip I didn't even knew we had that the song sent several people—Einstein, Ulrich, Yolanda (Dorothy), and Sissi among them—and me into a coma. Hearing that XANA had preprogrammed music made me cringe.

"It says 'Bathtub Hokey-Pokey.' 'Bathtub Hokey-Pokey?' That's a weird name for a song."

"Please tell me you didn't just say that the song was 'Bath Time, Hiroki Pokey…'" I whirled to see Yumi starting to come around. The palm of her hand was on her forehead. Her teeth were gritted and her eyes were clenched tightly. "That'd be grounds for me to urge Jeremie…"

"Uh…Einstein isn't with us, Yumi," I interjected. "We have no idea where we are ourselves."

"And I said 'Bathtub Hokey-Pokey,' Yumi." Cassidy passed the iPod to me, to which I passed to Ulrich, and then he passed it to Yumi. My black-clad friend rubbed her eyes before she read the title. She looked a bit out of it, but that was because we all woke up that way.

"Ah. I'd be mad if I found out my brother was involved in an iTunes title," she yawned, placing a hand to her neck. She rarely yawned in front of us. She grunted when she realized that her hand hadn't hit flesh. She tried to look down at the anomaly. "What's going on? Did William slip a roofie in my drink last night or what?"

There was an old rumor that at one point William had slipped Yumi something, although (and the two friends knew) in reality, she had an off day and he hung around her to fend off attackers of her state. Delmas ordered Milly and Tamiya to scrap the drug-slip scoop posted in the paper the very next day. I still held a copy, but only to use when Kiwi needed to use the toilet and it was too risky to take him outside to pee, before Vortex Day made Delmas change the rule about no pets being allowed at Kadic. It worked when Ulrich read his Blaze comics.

"William had nothing to do with it," Cassidy chattered, her laugh coming out in nervous titters. "Slipping a Mickey on the other hand…"

"Oh, God! Am I pregnant?!" Yumi asked, putting pressure on her usually-bare midriff.

My gaze switched from her to the girl who just nervously tittered her into panic. "Way to go, Cat-Girl. You just had to say it."

"I only said that someone drugged us. I don't feel pregnant either, ya know!" she retorted, reaching into the pack once again. This time, she winced and her hand flinched back. A syringe—for the moment only filled with saline—had embedded itself into it. "Ow!" She started screaming and shaking her hand rapidly…

…that was…until I grabbed her wrist and pulled the needle out with gentle ease. "It's okay. It's just saline." I showed her the side. "See?"

She gave it a strange look. "Wait. How do you know about saline? You slept through most, if not all, of Mrs. Hertz's biology lessons—I'm amazed you stayed up through all of Mr. Schaeffer's."

"I had surgery to get something embarrassing out of my throat when I was very little. The nurses had to keep me hydrated somehow, and I couldn't drink things down."

"Was it a food item?" Ulrich cracked.

"No, believe it or not. I had a pearl the size of a quarter stuck down there. To this day, I don't even know how the thing ended up down there," I shuddered. "It wasn't even attached to an earring."

Cassidy sighed, her eyes relaxed. "Well, at least it wasn't poison."

I noticed that her hand was bleeding a little. Knowing my roommate was a chicken when seeing other people's blood—other than Yumi's that one time—in real life, I quickly ripped off a strip of my purple hoodie. "Cassidy, give me your hand. You don't want Ulrich to pass out, now, do you?"

She shook her head. "That would suck…" Cassidy gave me her hand. She trusted me. And I trusted her. I started to wrap the cloth around it when I heard Yumi whisper, "William, you've got to wake up!"

"Cassidy, hand me the bag," I ordered.

She handed me the orange backpack. "Here. I don't want to end up with push pins in my hand next."

It felt pretty light in my hands. "We must've emptied most of it, Cassidy."

She nodded as I tied the knot. "We've found a high heel without its mate, an iPod with a preprogrammed song, a paper with a grid pattern and a few X's, and one syringe."

I looked into the pack. "Um…Cat-Girl? You made a mistake. There isn't one syringe. There are a few more in here."

"More?" She looked at me as if I grew corn in the room.

I looked at one of the syringes. It had three Z's etched on its side. One was a solid bold Z, the second was a Z with dotted lines, and the third one looked vanished in a cloud. A message was attached to it. I carefully picked it up and read the little card:

FOR ONE STRAGGLER

"'For one straggler…?'" I raised a brow. Then I looked in Yumi's general direction. William lay face down on the floor, his brown jacket his clone "bequeathed" to him going over his bluish-black hair, concealing his eyes. Either he could sleep through anything or XANA had used a larger dose on him.

"Pass this to Yumi and tell her to inject it into William. I think he's straggling," I told Ulrich. "It's a sedative inverse. I saw it being used in Burn Notice one time."

He nodded and passed the needle to Yumi, taking special care that neither he or she accidentally stuck themselves doing so. He then told her what I told him.

She gasped, but injected the solution into him. Where on his body, I assumed she used the back. I didn't have the courage to ask. She would kill me.

Within moments, I heard a gasp. He was awake. "Who spiked my drink?"

"No one, William." Cassidy's tone went as deadpanned as Ulrich's when he was having a bad day. "We're back in another test…" she spat the last word as if she was Amanda Young. Come to think of it, Cassidy's hair almost looked like the Jigsaw apprentice in the sequel SAW II. When she was with William the first test, she had long hair, but donated to the Locks of Love foundation after the trap. She cut her hair a little more than usual, her long hair leaving a triggering memory of what happened with her and the clone of Jigsaw.

"What?!" William rose to his feet, wobbling more than usual, despite Yumi and Ulrich trying to talk him to sit down. Yumi might have injected him with the sedative-inverse, but he would still feel the effects. Finally, he slumped to his butt.

"Okay, now that we've awoken, aside from Groggy Pants here," I added affectionately for William, but felt a soft hand sharply whack me in the neck from my left, "Ow…, we can finally figure out what the items we've been given are good for."

"I've got a high heel." Cassidy showed the black heel.

"I don't wear high heels." Yumi stretched her toned legs out, showing us her black combat boots. She had plenty of track and martial arts training, easily strengthening her. "But I think we could break something if needed."

"I've got a pattern with three X's." Ulrich waved the paper around as if it was a flag.

"I don't think that would work here," Cassidy said. "However, I think we'll need it somewhere."

"I've got an iPod with a strange song on it." Yumi held it out for us to see.

"Hm… 'Bathtub…'" Cassidy shut her eyes in concentration. "If the first word is anything to go by…we will have three more parts after this."

"I have a backpack with needles in it." I scoffed. "What does XANA take me for, a drug dealer?"

"Um…unless XANA has the Needle Pit—my…um…favorite trap—ready, I'd be careful around my words if I were you." Cassidy blushed. "And I think we're being watched for obedience."

A sudden, but soft, crackle filled the air, causing us to hop to our feet, tense and ready to fight, even though we couldn't exactly move without pulling the others back. An old-school TV screen I didn't notice before had come alive. After some static, the red eye of our old foe, XANA, appeared. The Eye of XANA had one eyelash on the top, and three on the bottom of the outer circle. However, the center "pupil/dot" and "irises" were swirled in a bloody spiral. Blood dripped from the three eyelashes on the bottom. Ominous sensations raced down my spine. I had learned to laugh away this feeling while on Lyoko or battling spectres, but the danger of the current situation was too real. I didn't know if this was a simulation bubble or not. I guess XANA wants to dress up for the occasion, I thought to myself.

"Hello and welcome."

From my left ear, I heard Cassidy whimper. I imagine that in the last trap, she and William didn't have a Jigsaw recording to listen to and had to rely on their instincts. I turned to her and gently placed my hands over her mouth and nose again. "You're doing fine right now, relax. Breathe into my hands."

"Over the years, I have given you many opportunities to relinquish this fight and allow my grasp to take hold, but you fought me. You were fine adversaries often enough, fighting as one to hold back my assault on your world. You are all connected. A cable runs through your collar devices. It can be pulled so tight that you will be decapitated on the mounted razors. The only way to remove the collar is with the keys from the glass boxes on the pedestals before you. In choosing how to react to the situation, your life-long instincts will tell you to do one thing, but I implore you to do the opposite. The others are not here to help you this time. Let the Games begin." The symbol flashed and vanished into a blank screen. Above the door, a black timer counted red numbers down.

"Let's look at what XANA gave us once again," Cassidy breathed, now calm enough for me to remove my hands again. She's going to have bad triggers after this.

"Maybe the heel could do us some good," I suggested.

Then her eyes widened. "Guys, the keys—they are all the same shape and size. One of us needs to go near one of the boxes, smash it open, grab the key, unlock the collar, and then pass it around."

"Cassidy, what are the chances of that ever working?" Ulrich scolded.

"Don't taunt her. She's seen this film before! We need to work together or we all lose," Yumi explained.

"I am not going to be decapitated," William chastised.

"Stay put, then. I'm the one with the heel," Cassidy protested.

I looked at her. "Was this the way you tried to solve the last puzzle?"

She rolled her eyes, taking a step. "At first, it was, but then I went ahead and did it the Morgan way. I had no other choice, Odd."

"I don't want to end up like Ashley," William growled.

"Hey, William, you are on the end, there. You are in Brit's position, not in Ashley's. I'm in Ashley's position," Cassidy sighed. "Odd's in Mallick's; Ulrich's in Luba's position; and Yumi's in Charles's position."

"So that makes me a girl?" Ulrich quipped as I looked in his general direction.

"NO!" She raced forward, heel in hand.

"Cassidy!" I saw Yumi's body jerk back as we felt ours fly almost onto the razors. "Get back here!" Her voice raised in panic. We heard a sharp click, and ticking.

"She's going to kill us!" Ulrich pulled on his collar.

Cassidy started to be pulled backward, but her mind had been set. I knew it had. She walked with effort to the box and raised the heel above her head. In one fell swoop, she smashed the glass. Her hand fumbled for the key, and when she finally grasped it, used it to unlock her collar. She raced back and unlocked my collar. She had to work quickly.

My eyes went to the sixty-second counter. It showed we had 45 seconds left. "Hurry, Cat-Girl!" I hastened under my breath.

She raced to Ulrich next and turned the key in the lock. 35 seconds were left on the clock. She gave the key to Yumi. 30 seconds now.

Yumi unlocked her collar and helped unlock William's collar. I looked at the clock. 25 seconds. We made it through the first task. XANA had failed to kill us the first round.

Cassidy itched at her neck. "Aha! He injected me in the neck again." I noted that there was something red on her neck. It looked like an eyelash from our foe. However, I wasn't sure if I was seeing things or if it was something else, like a concentrated irritant in the air.

"That's his preferred spot, isn't it," Yumi asked.

She nodded. "Jigsaw did it to me before. I'm surprised that William wasn't injected."

William shrugged. "I became a heavy sleeper after what XANA did to me when I was only 14 or 15 years old."

Cassidy winced. "I do not want to know." As William looked up at the timer, she shuddered. "I have the feeling that my theory that Mr. Schaeffer made an anti-rape program so XANA couldn't touch Aelita is flawed."

He looked at her. "No. He didn't rape me. I still have my virginity. He may have had me prisoner, but at the same time, he couldn't touch me down there."

Cassidy looked at him. "So it isn't flawed?"

Behind us, we heard clicks, which meant the collars we wore just flew to the mounted razors. Cassidy was right. We all survived the first trap.

"Even XANA said it himself. 'My former father wrote up a program that prevents me from taking one important thing from you. Unfortunately, I can't overwrite it as I can with other programs or the Supercomputer.'"

She whimpered as William imitated his former master's voice. She had been through hell before going through the Spike Trap from SAW IV. When we initiated William into our little group of six, he got caught like a rookie. Before XANA took him as a minion, he kissed her, causing her to freeze. When we freed him at last, he revealed that he kissed her out of love.

XANA had used him as a formidable opponent against us, making him stronger and unable to resist him. However, he used his pawn more against Cassidy than he did against us. She started to ask Jeremie before specific Skid missions if she could go to the location of the Replikas' Supercomputers instead of staying on the Replikas themselves. Seeing her distress, he agreed. While her previously-powerful psychic powers started to weaken, she relaxed more when she was near the locations than on the sector Replikas.

William flirted with her under XANA's control off-Replika, which made her easy to devirtualize. She started crying herself to sleep every time he had been successful. If he was unsuccessful, she would still cry, but she was happy. Even Kiwi couldn't help her.

"William!" Yumi scolded, her hand squeezing around the iPod only slightly. She didn't want to break something in her hands ever since XANA launched an attack with sonogram-like frequencies. The frequencies made a glass shatter in her hand as she threatened Sissi—the school brat. "She's been through enough unko without you imitating XANA!"

I shouldered the pack as the door to our left opened. "Hey! If we don't want to get killed by those explosives, we must go to the next room."