I could hear him yelling from three flights of stairs away. The voice yelling back was a little harder to recognise. My immediate assumption was that it must have been Stephen –and he'd probably done something reckless that had pissed Nick off– but as we got closer I realised it wasn't Stephens voice.

We rounded on the final flight, my gaze found Ryan– Jensen – I corrected, standing opposite him.

Hearing our footsteps, Nick looked down to us. 'Oh, you two took your time,' he retorted.

I bit down on my tongue, knowing snapping back at him probably wasn't the best thing for anyone, so instead I just frowned coldly. We reached the landing and paused to catch our breath.

'Have you ever been to a garden centre on a Thursday afternoon?' Connor replied, breathless but unoffended, 'it's pandemonium… And,' he continued, 'that's 12 flights of stairs we just ran up,' he puffed, 'these things…'

'Fucking heavy,' I said grumpily, throwing mine towards Nick.

He staggered back as he caught it, obviously not expecting the weight. He brought his gaze sheepishly up from it and back to me. 'Sorry.'

I let the tension fall from my forehead and quickly leaned up to press a chaste kiss to his lips before I stepped back. 'Okay?' I asked.

'Yeah,' he replied frankly. 'Leaf blowers, that's a good idea.'

'Hmm,' Connor hummed, before he pointed down the katana in Nick's hand. 'I wanna know where you got that from.'

'Where's Stephen?' Jensen asked.

Nick glanced at him before he responded. 'We got separated.'

The people trapped in the office looked more than relieved to see us.

The door to their office had been forced open and as we rounded the corner we found a woman standing in the doorway, a laptop in her hands and a dead creature laid at her feet.

'Follow me,' Nick instructed, as he prized the device from her hands and threw it to the ground. 'Whatever you do, stay out of the fog.'

'What are those things?'

'They're worms. They're just a little less friendly than the ones in your garden, alright? Come on.'

We turned to leave but the fog began to close back in around us so we had to quickly clear a path back the stairwell the same way we came.

We were halfway down the staircase to the floor below and the fog easing up when from the back of the group, behind me, Connor turned his leaf blower off.

'You know,' he said cheerily, throwing the machine over one shoulder, 'I think we're alright now.'

Someone screamed.

That was the first indication that something was wrong. My head whipped around to source the location and quickly snapped onto the woman. I followed her line of focus, turning back only to find Connor had half vanished inside the mouth of a worm.

My immediate reaction was to scream too but for some reason the noise never made it out my throat because my own voice swallowed it as I held out a hand, instinctively, and demanded 'sword!'

Nick threw it up to me, my hand wrapped around the handle as I jumped and swung for the neck of the worm. The blade cut right through it.

Connor collapsed. The worm, now decapitated, slugged down behind him on the staircase, and reaching for the lip of the severed mouth resting around Connor's shoulders I lifted the remains off him.

'Connor!' Slime oozed down from the top of his head over his neck and shoulders right down his arms to his fingertips, but undeterred I dropped the katana to the flour and grabbed his face in both hands. I shook him until his gaze snapped up to mine. I exhaled a sigh of relief. 'Okay?'

He was out of breath again and I could tell he was dazed by the way his eyes started flittering around in confusion. Then he nodded. 'Yeah,' he said.

A sigh of relief tore out of me. My hands slipped down, fisting into his waistcoat I then leant against them, shutting my eyes.

'Fuck!'

'Never been swallowed by a giant worm before,' he continued, 'but I suppose it's all a learning experience isn't it.'

I pulled back and turned to glance at Nick. His eyes, still wide with this strange combination of bewilderment and respect, met mine, and I raised an eyebrow as if to agree. It could have been worse, we both knew it. It could have been a lot worse.

I lifted my hands back up to Connor's face, using my sleeves to help to wipe the worms' saliva from his eyes. 'Hiro Nakamura, eat your heart out,' I said.

Laughing, he reached up semi-consciously with one of his own hands to grab my wrist and squeezed it. 'Thanks.'

I smiled. 'Course. Definitely in the lead now.'

We escorted the civilians and Jensen back down to the lobby. Connor took the opportunity to stop by the toilets to clean himself up whilst we were down there.

I waited with Nick in the reception.

I could tell something wasn't right just from his body language. He put both hands down against the top of the main desk and leant back. His head dropped.

'What's up?' I asked. I could see the tension in his shoulders and came up behind him.

'Oh nothing,' he replied unconvincingly. I stepped up to lean against his back, pressing my face into his jacket. As my arms wrapped around his chest I felt him exhale a breath of laughter and lift one hand to gently cover my own.

'Bullshit.'

He exhaled again like he was trying to force the aggravation to leave his body. 'Had to rescue Jensen from the killer worms,' he said. 'I told him to take the stairs. He didn't listen.' He shook his head. 'He's no Captain Ryan I tell you.'

I shifted so that I could press my cheek against his back. 'Right,' I returned. 'He isn't.'

Nick huffed. 'Yeah, alright, okay,' he grumbled. 'But it's such a shame.' I hummed in agreement. 'The captain was a good man, you know. He really cared. He was… something, wasn't he? But this guy…'

'Give him a chance. As Jensen,' I clarified.

'He saved me,' Nick responded, his voice a little quieter than before. 'Back at that camp. The predator was coming right for me but he fired, drew it away. It could have just as easily been my body we found the first time we went there.' He knocked his fingers against the desk, fidgeting again in a way to try and ease the frustration out his body. 'I just wish I could have done something to help him, you know.'

Of course I knew. Out of everyone I understood the most. I gave him one last squeeze and reluctantly pulled away; we still had a job to do and I moved to lean against the desk beside him.

'You came home, because of him. If I'd found your body I don't think I'd have made it back either.'

The panic squirreled through my limbs. The last grave. My hands stopped scooping and instead started pawing at the ground, propelling dirt up into my lap and my face but I didn't care.

The face of the last soldier came into view.

It didn't matter to me who it was and I felt only a twinge of sadness then at the recognition of my friend because everything was suddenly overpowered by the relief.

A sob broke past my lips. Tears sprung from my eyes as emotion after emotion crashed down on me like a wave.

He wasn't buried here… which means… he's not dead.

I shook my head. I didn't want to think about it.

I heard the bathroom door squeaking open from somewhere across the foyer and Connor came lolloping out. 'Alright,' he called with a sense of urgency, 'what's the plan?' He joined us at the desk.

'We've gotta find Stephen and get him out.'

'Right,' Connor returned cheerily, before he then paused for a second, '… how we gonna do that?'

'The fog's coming from an anomaly on the fifteenth floor,' Nick explained.

'Right,' Connor repeated, '… how we gonna get up there?'

'Well,' Nick returned, 'we know the worms can't breathe outside of the fog. So we need a way to get rid of it.'

'Can we just open the windows?' Connor suggested.

Nick shook his head. 'None of the windows will open because the entire building is temperature controlled.'

'Progress,' Connor groaned, 'what's the point?'

'Temperature,' I repeated. 'Air-con?'

'Yeah,' Nick confirmed.

'Just need to heat the air,' I explained, 'it'll expand. Push the fog out through the ventilation system.'

'Absolutely,' Nick agreed, 'Unfortunately, the temperature is controlled from the server room–'

'–on the 15th floor,' we both said together. 'Of course it is,' I finished.

'It's going to get seriously hot in here,' Connor said. 'We're going to go up there, aren't we?'

'No,' Nick corrected, 'you two are going up there. I'm going to look for Stephen.'