Parker had to stop Angelo's surgery.

That was her next move, unquestionably. Tomorrow, Mr. Parker had said. He hadn't specified a time. Time was short, too short. Her feet carried her to Cox's office.

A woman sat opposite Cox, twisting the hem of her cardigan between her fingers. Parker didn't recognize her.

"It's my esophagus," the woman was saying. "I think it's inflamed, because—"

"Come back in ten minutes," said Parker. "No — twenty."

"What? I—"

"Twenty minutes."

Parker shooed the bewildered woman with the inflamed esophagus out the open door. Without pausing for greetings, small talk, or even to close the door, Parker seized Cox by the tie.

"Miss Parker, this cannot—"

"This meeting is going to go down a lot easier for both of us if you can convince me you didn't know about my father's plan concerning the glands."

Cox made a strangled, quizzical sound. Parker twitched the tie towards her by an inch, making him stumble forward. In her peripheral vision, a queue started to form at the door, someone waiting to see the doc. She ignored them.

"Waugh — I don't know what this — what plan? Which plan?"

"Dear old Daddy told me you want to stick them in new agents. Starting with Angelo's gland. Which is funny, because you just made a big show down in the sim lab of telling the team how Jarod will be in the best hands, that you will be working hard to find him a better option—"

"Angelo has a quicksilver gland?"

Jarod stood in the doorway to Cox's office. Parker stared at him, her heart plummeting through her guts. Jarod couldn't know any of this. He'd run. He'd lose hope. When exactly it had become so important to her to preserve Jarod's hope, she had no idea.

"Jarod—" she started.

"How long have you known this?"

His voice was cold and so, so angry.

"Since right after Spokane," she said quietly. Cox dissolved into the background. All that existed was the two of them.

Jarod's eyes widened. "Spo — that long? Why the hell didn't you tell me?"

"What use would it have been if I had?" She came back with just as much heat, though all she felt inside was a curdling frustration. With Jarod, with herself, with this whole situation.

"I could have helped!"

"How?" She was shouting now. "How could you help him when you can't help yourself?"

It was absurd to be angry at Jarod for this, but there it was. He was supposed to be able to do anything, be anyone. Why couldn't he save himself? Why must it be up to her, when she couldn't handle it either?

"I could have tried. You had no right to decide that I couldn't know." The anger on his brow softened into outraged hurt. "Why hide this? I don't understand what or who that benefits. Tell me this, does Angelo still respond to counteragent?"

"No," said Cox and Parker at once. Parker shot Cox a silencing glare.

"Even when I first found him in the Renewal Wing, he wasn't responding. He's been completely resistant to counteragent for months."

"You — so, what, you wanted it to be a surprise when it happened to me, too?"

"There was no reason to think it would affect you, Jarod," said Cox. To his credit, the glare had not been enough to silence him completely. "Angelo's resistance to counteragent started from day one. We made sure you responded fully to counteragent before you were sewed back up. The first gland developed by the fellas in San Jose didn't start developing resistance for over a year, well after your surgery. Everything pointed to Angelo being the outlier."

"I won't debate you on the the ethics of experimenting on people without their consent, Cox," Jarod snapped. "Angelo's on the Renewal Wing?"

"Yes — Jarod, don't…!"

Parker saw the idea form in Jarod's mind, but wasn't fast enough to stop him. He darted away without a word.

She caught up with him in room two, the first door on the left once inside the Renewal Wing, after a lengthy negotiation with the guard at the main doors. Jarod didn't look up as she came through the viewing area into Angelo's padded living space. He knelt at Angelo's side.

"Angelo," said Jarod in a broken whisper. "I'm so sorry I didn't find you sooner, buddy. I didn't know. I should have known."

Angelo's eyelids fluttered.

"Jar…" he said, then fell silent.

"He's sedated?" said Jarod, still without looking around.

"Yes. How did you get in?"

He ignored her question. "… All the time? All the time, he's sedated?"

"Yes."

"For months."

"Yes."

Jarod sat down hard. Finally, he looked up at her. At this angle, he looked young, like a lost little boy. "And you're okay with that?"

Parker sat down next to him.

"No! Of course not! I put Sydney on it as soon as I knew. I confronted Cox about it immediately; that's when I got confirmation about there being no safe way to remove the gland."

Jarod let out a sad little half-laugh and shook his head. "Sydney knew, too."

"It was my call not to tell you. Don't blame Sydney."

His face hardened again. "I'm not. I don't understand, Miss Parker. Whatever we are now, we don't lie to each other."

"Wasn't a lie," said Parker stubbornly.

"We don't keep secrets, either. Not anymore."

On impulse, she reached out to him, stopping just short of his arm. Her fingers skated a fraction of an inch above his skin, then pulled away. She examined the scuffed cotton under her knees like it could bear an answer for her if she looked hard enough.

"I didn't want to scare you," she said. "First, because I didn't think there was reason for you to be scared by what the gland did to Angelo. Later, because I knew there was a reason for you to be scared, but I still didn't want you to be. I wanted you to hang on as long as possible."

"While you knew I was headed for…" He turned back to Angelo, who had regained a kind of dazed consciousness and was watching them with blood-stained eyes from under drooping eyelids. "… this."

"I didn't know it for certain. But I knew it was a possibility."

Something sharpened in Jarod's eye. "Is that why we…?"

"Jarod!" said Angelo, who had recognized his new visitor for the second time since his arrival. He'd forgotten the first time.

Jarod's face split into a grin and he clasped one of Angelo's hands in his.

"Angelo, hi! Hey, buddy. How're you doing?"

Angelo didn't answer. His focus drifted to the door behind his visitors, and his face slowly shifted into a kind of weary rage. He began bucking against his restraints, too weak to make them budge an inch. He clawed at Jarod's outstretched hand. The grin slid off Jarod's face.

He turned to Parker. "You got any doses?"

It wasn't a real question, he knew she did. She kept counteragent and clean syringes on her person at all times these days. Just in case of another incident like the one on the train to Brampton.

"For Angelo? He won't thank you for it. I gave him a dose when I first found him." She remembered another secret. "That… was why they kept you in room six for a week after the mission at the cruise ship port in Puerto Rico. They were unexpectedly down a dose, because I gave one to Angelo."

Jarod shrugged off the non-apology.

"And what happened when you gave him a dose?"

She explained the change a single dose had provoked in Angelo. Or rather, the lack of one.

"It was painful for him, and it did almost nothing. He gets headaches when he hits the threshold again, and then they go away when he's in full QSM mode."

"Yeah, me too," Jarod mused. His eyes roved over Angelo's untidy form. "We're gonna give him a shot."

She wanted to shake him. "Did you hear me? He won't thank you for it, and it could leave you short. There's no point."

"I heard what you said to Cox. They want to give Angelo's gland to someone else. If we can't get him out, the Centre will kill him for the thing they put in his brain. I need him functioning long enough to at least tell him what we're doing and get him moving."

So Jarod planned to break Angelo out. Unless there was more to this plan than what she could see, it was one of his flimsier efforts. She knew, though, that she wouldn't be able to talk him out of it, when the alternative was a dead Angelo.

Parker pulled out the zip-up case where she kept counteragent doses. By now, the synthetic leather was well worn and flaking at the seams. She hesitated a moment, then handed over a dose and a clean syringe. Jarod took the dose without a word and figuratively flushed it down the toilet, right into Angelo's arm. The two of them watched his eyes. The bags under his eyes paled a little, and the colour of his sclera lightened from dark red to a brighter hue. From there, the changes stopped. Jarod whistled.

"You weren't kidding," he said.

"It was a little better before. He got all the way from red to pink."

Angelo groaned and pressed the heels of his palms to his head.

"Hurts," he whimpered.

"I know, Angelo, I'm sorry," said Jarod. "We want to help you. The Centre—"

"Heard… you." His breathing was loud and laboured. In the dampened room, it was all they could hear. Not even an echo as company. "Don't want to leave. Hurting people… makes me sad. Very sad."

"I understand, Angelo. Me too," said Jarod. "We need to take you away, though, or you'll die. They'll take out the gland that's making you like this, and give it to someone else, and you'll die. The operation would kill you."

Jarod could easily be talking to his future self. Parker's heart clenched painfully.

Angelo's red eyes widened. "Go… to another person? Another person feeling like… this?"

"That's right," said Parker. "But we're worried about the surgery. It's very dangerous and will kill you if you don't run away. And we have to do it soon, the surgery is tomorrow."

Angelo shook his head frantically. Jarod shot Parker a look of alarm — she hadn't told him the surgery was so soon.

"Can't leave," said Angelo. "Hurt people."

At the news of the looming deadline, Jarod began dismantling the sedative drip and winding the tubes carefully around the crook of his elbow.

"Not if we keep you sedated, like they've been doing here," he said. "You won't hurt anyone." He hesitated. "I can't keep you at my place, there's too much surveillance there."

"My house, then," Parker cut in. "I can set up a cot in my mom's old art studio. But, Jarod — how will we get out without Angelo being seen? Your back door through SL-27 is long since blocked off."

Jarod smiled tiredly. "You think that was my only way in and out of the Centre?"

Angelo's attention bounced between the two of them, the hue of his eyes slowly darkening.

"Alright, how, then? It better be good. Security has really ramped up since your run on counteragent storage and the Tower bombing. Especially on the night shift."

"That's why we can't go at night. We're going now."

"Now? Jarod — we aren't ready."

"It's that or leave Angelo here. Would you rather leave him here?" His words bit out harshly; he hadn't yet forgiven her for the deception.

She turned to Angelo.

"This isn't my choice. Angelo, are you ready to go?"

Angelo swallowed. "Your house… safe?"

"Yes, of course, you'll be safe."

"No, you."

A wave of affection washed over Parker.

"Yes, I'll be safe, too." She paused. "I won't let you hurt me," she said, since she knew what he meant.

Angelo laboured over the decision, then: "Okay. We'll try."

On cue, Jarod pulled a bit of scrap paper and a pen from his pocket and sketched out a few hasty lines.

"This is the west exterior wall. There's an alcove right here, with an unguarded exit. The cafeteria staff use it for smoke breaks during mealtimes, but nobody should be around for another few hours. Lunch clean-up is over and dinner prep hasn't started yet. Miss Parker, can you meet us here in fifteen minutes with some coats? If you can get your hands on a tranq gun on the way, that would also be good to have on hand."

He outlined the rest of the plan in rough detail: they would get Angelo to the road on foot, then Jarod would get his car from the parking lot and meet them at the roadside.

"Not your car, my car," Parker corrected him. "If you leave the Centre in the middle of the day, and then Angelo's found missing, they'll know it's you. I'll drive him home."

"If you leave the Centre in the middle of the day, they'll know it's you, too."

"I'm doing this, Jarod. I have to."

Jarod held her gaze for a long moment, then jerked his head in a resigned nod.

"I wish we didn't have to move you," he said to Angelo. "If the surgery wasn't so soon, I wouldn't. I may have my issues with Cox, but he's right. The Renewal Wing is the safest place to be while under QSM." His top lip curled. "I hate this. There's so much that could go wrong, and no time to plan properly. But we have to try."

True to the plan, Parker showed up to the alcove in the west exterior wall wearing a big, puffy parka. True to the plan, a tranq gun sat nestled in her pocket, and two sets of winter wear were crammed under her armpits. True to the plan, Jarod eased open the door a mere five minutes after her arrival, bearing Angelo in a fireman's carry. Angelo's eyes were closed.

"He's out?"

Jarod opened his mouth, then nodded mutely, a look of exhaustion passing across his brow. Another nod, this time in the direction of the highway, and they set off.

They made it as far as the west vineyard. Parker had done her best to keep to even ground as much as possible, but her leg shrieked at her all the same. Over the last hundred yards, Angelo had emerged slowly from sedation. Rather than trying to claw his way into Jarod's throat, however, he'd started breathing heavily, a strident, shallow wheeze. His face had gone white.

"Shock," Jarod grunted. "He's going into shock."

"Put him down for a second, catch your breath."

Jarod obeyed, laying Angelo's senseless weight in a snowy thicket along the base of a row of grapevines.

"He's been on a near-constant drip of a brutal benzodiazepine for months. This is…" He let out a harsh sigh. "Benzos are highly addictive. They got him addicted to a hardcore tranquilizer. Miss Parker, I… I don't even know if he'll make it to your place."

"Shut up," Parker snapped, brittle and ragged from the pain. "Yes, he will. We need to—"

Her phone rang. On automatic, she unearthed it from her inside pocket.

"Miss Parker, we don't have time for this."

"It's Sydney," she said, reading the caller ID. She flipped the phone open. "What?"

"Miss Parker! Tell me you and Jarod are… well, I don't know. Tell me you're okay. Are you okay?"

She'd rarely heard him so anxious.

"What? What are you talking about, why would you think we're not okay?"

"So you are? You're okay? That's a, oh. A tremendous relief. There's some sort of site-wide search going on. Where are you?"

Dread overtook her, a rolling undertow pulling her beneath the waves.

"A search?" she repeated.

"Someone triggered a silent alarm at one of the west exterior entrances. The sweepers think it's one of Raines's people, making another attack on the Tower before his sentencing hearing. Your father has gone to his panic room on SL-20, and all the sweepers are mobilized."

"What's going on?" Jarod hissed.

"You set off an alarm. They're searching the building," she hissed back, though not quietly enough.

"What? You set off the alarm? Miss Parker, where are you?"

"Do you know where the sweepers are looking? Are they outside?"

"Mostly inside, but I saw a few squads headed for the major exits. Miss Parker—"

She hung up. Kneeling in the snow, she scanned the horizon to the east, looking for signs of activity around the parking lot. For a few seconds, all she could hear was her pounding heart and Angelo's quiet groans.

Parker saw them before she heard them: sweepers, jogging down the steps to the parking lot. Sweepers, coordinating a roadblock at the exit to the highway. And, worst of all, sweepers moving in a slow, neat line across the field on a direct path to the west vineyard, peering around for signs of movement.

"They're coming," she whispered. Her knees were sore and wet and so cold. "Move."

Move, yes — across open field, nothing to break line of sight, no long grasses to lose themselves in. It was a miracle they hadn't been seen already. She knew it was too late. By the look on Jarod's face, he knew it, too. He slung Angelo's body over his shoulder once more, all the same.

The second time they stopped, they had made it as far as the trees. A thin line of naked red maples and black gums separated the field from the highway, up a short scramble to the gravel-strewn shoulder.

Voices drifted on the breeze, along with the spit and crackle of radios. There were sweepers on the highway; the second Parker, Jarod, and Angelo broke the tree line, they'd be seen. Jarod made a harsh, strangled noise of frustration at the back of his throat and set Angelo down. They were surrounded.

For the first time since they'd set off, Angelo spoke. "They can't have it."

Parker clung to the nearest maple. She was sure if she put her left leg down again, she'd sob from the pain.

"The… gland?" she panted.

A frantic nod from Angelo.

"They can't have the gland. They can't have me. Jarod." He reached for Jarod, who took his hands again with a pained smile. "I don't want this. I don't want to be like this."

"I know, buddy. Me neither," said Jarod. "We're almost there."

"No," said Angelo. "No, no. Sweepers… find you. We can't leave. You must leave."

"We can't, Angelo," said Parker. "You need help. You can't get away from the Centre on your own."

Angelo shook his head. "You don't understand. I see choices. Live like this, in pain, hiding. Or die and pass it on. Both… very bad. I want a third thing."

"Third thing?" said Parker. "What third thing?"

Jarod was quiet. Angelo smiled sadly.

"Want to save the next person." He cleared his throat and straightened up, like he was posing for a photo. "I will be a hero. And — I will die as me."

"Die? No, you don't have to die," said Parker hurriedly. She glanced at Jarod; his eyes had gone filmy with unshed tears. "Even if we're caught, I have blackmail against the Centre. My father knows that if he tries the surgery, I can ruin him, I can destroy this place. There's a good chance the transplant won't happen, not unless—"

"Daddy thinks it's a lie," Angelo finished calmly. "Miss Parker — sad, scared. I know. But I'm not scared. I don't like this. Living hurts. I want to rest."

"Angelo, no," said Jarod, his voice cracking. "You're only saying that because you think you don't have any other option. We can make it. Believe in us, please."

Angelo's big hands pulled Jarod toward him into a clumsy hug, then pulled Parker into the fray with one arm.

"I do," he said. "I believe in you. But the sweepers are coming. And… tired. So tired. Dying… is worth it." He swallowed with effort. When he spoke again, he sounded like he was reading off a teleprompter. "I want to kill this thing in my brain. It should die. So should I. I want it. Please listen and help me."

"No," said Parker. Once she started shaking her head, it was difficult to stop. There were tears dampening her cheeks, frosting them over, and she wasn't sure when they'd begun to fall. "No, no. We're not doing this. No. No, Angelo. You have to give us more time."

"No time. The sweepers are coming. I don't want to go back," he said. "My friends are here now. It should be now. Please? I want to say goodbye."

Twenty-odd years ago, the three of them sharing handfuls of Cracker Jacks in the crawl spaces of the Centre… could they ever have foreseen that this is how they'd end up? Maybe Angelo could have. He'd had his mind stolen by the Centre once already.

It wasn't fair. From the beginning, Angelo had borne the brunt of the Centre's worst evils. He'd become a fixture of its inner workings, so ingrained with the building, it was like he was a part of it. One day he'd been a boy, one in hundreds of millions of little boys; the next, Raines had picked his folder out of a stack and sculpted him into an input-output machine. Input mystery, output answer. No thought to the person behind the function. It was fitting that his humanity, rather than his function, should be the thing to end his life. The choice to save one hypothetical person he'd never even met.

A selfish thought lurked at the back of Parker's mind, out of reach of conscious observation: if Angelo died before the Centre got its paws on his gland, what would that mean for Jarod? The odds of Jarod's survival on the operating table were slim enough already. Those odds wouldn't get any better unless Cox… well, brutal as it was, unless Cox practiced on Angelo first. She wanted Angelo alive for his own sake, yes, but the most self-serving corners of her being wanted Angelo alive for the same reasons the Centre had kept him around all these years: because he was useful.

Self-disgust ate away at her insides.

"A day," she pleaded, her teeth chattering. "Give us a day. An hour. So they catch us, that doesn't mean it's over. Please, Angelo. You're making this decision too quickly."

"Miss Parker…" said Jarod quietly.

"What?" She turned on him. "Why are you so ready to let him? Would you let yourself do this?"

Here was another aspect of her fear — if Jarod could accept Angelo's reasons for wanting to die, how soon would it be before Jarod, too, gave up and twisted a death wish into some noble gesture for a stranger?

Jarod's tears had dried up. Whether his grief was really that finite, or whether he'd simply become numb to the idea, she doubted even he knew.

"This isn't me," said Jarod, delivered with infuriating calm. "This is Angelo. It's his choice. We can't ask him to be in pain, to be something other than himself. This escape attempt was a vain hope, anyway; even if we'd got away, the shock of going off the benzos might kill him within the week. We won't get another chance to break him out, either, not after this. The kindest thing is to let Angelo choose how he wants to go."

Parker watched the last of the doors close in their faces. She leaned forward, pressing her forehead against the rough bark of a maple, and sobbed.

In the end, the practical details of Angelo's death were trivial. The sedatives that had kept Angelo docile were not meant to be taken in large doses; in fact, an effective dose and a lethal dose were a hair's breadth apart. It would look like Angelo succumbed to the elements. Best of all, for Angelo it would be like going to sleep. The dependable headache that accompanied all transitions into QSM would mercifully fade in his last moments.

All this was little consolation to Angelo's two best friends in the world. They held Angelo's hands, one friend per hand, as he drifted off. They whispered reminiscences of their shared childhood into his ear as his hearing faded and his vision grew dim. Even when he was gone, they held on.

Parker pressed a kiss to Angelo's cooling forehead.

"Miss Pa — Miss Parker," said Jarod, with a great, steadying breath. "We have to get out of here. If we're found with him…"

"They'll know it was us regardless," she muttered into Angelo's hair. "You asked where Angelo was being kept right before you left Cox's office. I argued with my father about his plans for Angelo… barely more than two hours ago."

How could this have happened so fast? A stab of regret — she should have been able to convince Angelo to wait, to give them more time. A day! What harm could a day have done?

As this day showed, quite a bit. A lot can happen in a day.

"We have no motive," said Jarod. "We both wanted to keep him alive."

"Motive." Parker exhaled sharply. "With means, opportunity, and witnesses, I don't know what that's going to do." She couldn't pry her gaze away from Angelo. Under his eyelids, a sliver of red was still visible. That was another unfairness to add to the pile. If there'd been any justice in Angelo's death, his eyes should have cleared at the last. "Will… will they still be able to take…?"

He knew what she meant.

"Depends on when they find him. If they can put the gland on ice fast, then… maybe."

"I'm not convinced it would be a bad thing," she said, though she reached for her cane where it had fallen in the snow. "For them to recover the gland. It might do some good if they could study it."

"Maybe in someone else's hands. The Centre wouldn't know how to do any good with it. Better that it dies with Angelo. It's what he wanted."

Jarod offered her his hand. She took it, and with his help, got to her feet. She squeezed, he squeezed back. They both stood a moment in the snow. With businesslike practicality, Jarod arranged Angelo's body so that his back leaned against a tree, not quite visible to a casual observer, neither from the road nor from the field. They couldn't carry his body back with them; better that he was found later, when it was too late to turn him into an input-output machine one last time.

Angelo looked as if he'd sat down for a rest and simply never got back up again. With the knowledge that he was dead, however, he looked discarded and abandoned. Like they'd thrown him away.

She squeezed her eyes shut to flush the thought from her mind. It didn't work.

As they walked back to the visitors' parking lot by way of the highway's shoulder, they ran into a couple of sweepers checking the lot for unregistered vehicles and signs of intruders. The sweepers nodded deferentially at Miss Parker. She issued a few cursory orders, pretending to be the spearhead for the search. They were to look out for Raines's people, she maintained.

"Keep an eye out for Willie, that bastard can run," she called over her shoulder as she limped up the steps to the main entrance.

Jarod had been quiet all the while, content to fade into the background.

"So," he said, when they were out of earshot of any sweepers. "They weren't only planning on taking out Angelo's gland, were they? You said your father wants to stick them in new agents. Both of them."

She looked over at him. He didn't look scared. Maybe the loss of Angelo was too big for any other emotion to fight past.

"They want both of them," she confirmed quietly. Then: "Will you run?"

Jarod stopped short at the top of the steps and looked up at the grotesque face of Centre headquarters.

"How much time do you think I have?" he said, still staring up at his enemy.

"If I had to guess, about as much time as before," Parker said slowly. She couldn't be sure, but she had to hope the Centre saw enough utility in Jarod to keep him around as long as possible. "Until you have twenty-four hours between shot and first symptoms."

Jarod nodded.

"Okay. I have time. I won't run."

… Yet? Parker finished, unspoken. She reached over and squeezed his fingers.

"Okay."