'What?' Lester demanded in an air of disbelief.

'It isn't armed yet,' Nick continued, 'but we should get everyone out, now.' Jensen and Lester immediately turned and started shepherding the other scientists and staff towards the back exit of the hub. Just as I was about to pass him, Nick held out his arms and stopped me. 'No,' he said. 'You need to go Anna.'

I looked up at him with a frown. 'Are you joking?'

'Of course I'm not joking, that's a bomb.'

'You just said it wasn't armed.'

'That doesn't mean it won't start counting down any second.'

'I'm the best chance you've got.'

'I'm not taking that risk.' He reached out to grab my arm like he thought he'd be able to drag me away if he needed to, but he never moved he just held on, just for a second, as he looked down into my eyes. 'If we can't–'

'You stay I stay,' I returned, 'there's no point in being safe otherwise. Look.' I held up my hand. 'Steady as a rock. So, stay calm, and don't panic.' I slipped my arm out his grip and dropped down to the floor in front of the van before I slid underneath to take a look.

'Should we call bomb disposal or something?' Connor called across to us.

I took a moment to stare at the bomb stuck to the underside of the van. 'There isn't time. It'd be hours before we'd be allowed back in, we need to find Leek now.'

'Unlocking the file must arm it,' Nick said.

'When I said trap I'll admit I didn't see this coming.' I put a gentle hand against the casing and started to slide it open.

'So much for him being predictable,' Nick said.

'To be honest, this is the most predictable he's been so far. Explosives are imprecise and unreliable and downright lazy, this has got Leek written all over it. It's the predators that don't add up.'

'You think someone's using him?'

'One guess.' The casing came free and I dropped it onto the ground beside me. Okay. So, this was going to be a little bit more difficult than I thought.

'Um… so… why are we still here?' Connor asked.

'Because if that bomb goes off, we lose the A.R.C and everything in it. The detector, the research, everything. We've gotta stop it,' Nick replied.

'But it's not going to go off, is it?' Connor asked.

I saw Nick crouch down by my feet, lying flat against the ground before he pushed himself across the floor, sliding up beside me beneath the vehicle.

'No,' I replied, 'we're not going to let that happen.'

Nick side eyed me.

'Do think he'll know that we've triggered the bomb?' Connor called back.

I immediately lowered my hands. That was a good point. What if he had some sort of alert when it was or wasn't triggered. 'We trigger this detonator, he'll think we're dead. It'll give us a serious advantage.'

'That's if he doesn't have any more spies here to tell him otherwise before we get anywhere near him,' Nick counter argued.

'What difference does it make, I can diffuse it whether its armed or not.'

Nick's eyes bugged at the idea. 'You want to set that thing off on purpose?'

But I was already calling out again so his voice was drowned out. 'Connor?'

'Yeah?'

'What do we know about C4 bombs?'

Nick turned his head sharply to me, as though he wanted to question why we would know anything about bombs at all, but there was literally no time to get into it. 'C4 isn't remote detonation,' he said.

I nodded. 'Right, completely stable, insensitive to shocks, can't detonate from a gunshot, or fire, or microwaves. Requires a shockwave from when the detonator is fired.'

'The detonators on the inside,' Connor said.

'So, it's all run off a timer.'

'Timer needs to count down somehow for the detonator to fire.'

'Which means…'

'It isn't a pressure pad and it's not a phone detonated IED so he isn't arming it himself. So it must be triggered when we unlock that file and the timer has its own external power source. It's getting power from somewhere but the power source can't just be nearby it has to be on the van. Put the password in, Connor.'

'No, wait! Wait! Just hold on a second!' Nick interrupted. 'What if opening that file detonates the bomb straight away.'

I shook my head. 'No. They'll be a countdown. It's a safeguard in case of accidental triggering in the assembly process to give enough time to retreat to a safe distance.'

'How long?'

'Explosives that size with the known added catalyst of the diesel... 40 seconds maybe,' I conjected. 'Could be more like 30?'

'30 seconds to find the power source to the detonator and turn it off?'

'Sounds pretty reasonable, don't you think?'

'No!'

'The only way to know if we've properly diffused it is to arm it before we try. We don't get it this time we might not get another chance.'

I could tell Nick hated the idea. His jaw was set so tightly I could hear his teeth grinding as he stared across at me. But still I knew he knew this was the only choice we had.

He exhaled a long, drawn-out sigh before he gave a reluctant nod.

'Do it Connor.'

I heard the keyboard rattle as Connor typed in the password.

The device whirred– a number popped up on the digital display in bright red blinking figures.

00:15

'Shit!'

I scrambled out from beneath the van and jumped up to my feet.

Power source.

Instinctively I ran to the rear of the van and looked through the open rear doors but there was nothing inside and I could clearly see all the way to the cab. Unless it was hidden beneath the boards it wasn't in there.

I immediately rounded the vehicle, yanking the drivers side door open as I passed and whipped the keys out the ignition before I stopped in front of the bonnet, flicked the lock open and hauled the bonnet up.

'Give me a time!' I called.

'9,' Nick replied, '…8,'

I started pulling all the wires and cables from the battery.

'7, 6.'

I finished with the wires and tugged, expecting the battery to just pop out, but it was wedged to tightly in the housing. I frowned.

I pulled again, harder, but the thing didn't shift.

'5.'

I climbed up into the open bonnet.

'4'

And grabbed both sides of the battery again.

'3.'

Come on.

'2!'

I ducked, fingers straining from the tightness of my grip and trying to remain balanced on an uneven surface I pulled with all the strength I had, straightening my legs and hauling the battery out its place in the mechanics of the van.

I waited, trying to catch my breath from the exertion, and we all stayed just completely still for a moment, trying to work out if we'd done it or we were just waiting for the fall out.

Nothing happened.

The silence fell, the sound of nothing but my own breath ringing in my ears before slowly, Connor shuffled over to the vehicle.

Nick climbed out from underneath, brushing himself down before he then got up off the ground.

Finally releasing the battery from my grip, I threw it onto the floor, the whole room was filled with the echo and I looked down at them both from atop the open bonnet.

'He was using the battery as a power source,' Nick finally repeated in realisation.

I dusted off my hands. 'No battery, no bomb.'

'You,' he said, as he reached up and offered a hand to help me down, 'are going to give me a goddamn heart attack.' I put my hand in his and jumped to the floor.

'Never a dull moment.' We walked back over to the detector. 'What's in the file?'

I looked up to one of the screens but there was nothing but an empty white box. 'Sorry,' Connor said knowingly. The tone of his voice was enough to explain, and I sighed. 'It looks like it's been wiped.'

Nick groaned in frustration. 'We can't get it back?'

'We can,' I countered.

'But it's going to take a while,' Connor added.

'Even if he's deleted it we can trawl through the code and recover the information from back-ups and etherweb.'

'I'll have to write a code to find the right information and piece it back together correctly,' Connor sighed. 'So much for an advantage.'

I shrugged. 'At least we're not dead.'

Perhaps we should have been a little more shaken by the experience. Everyone started returning to their jobs with that same air of caution, because there was a definite buzz following the strangeness of an atypical day at the office. But we put the kettle on and sat in the kitchenette and had a cup of tea because it seemed like the only logical thing to do as we watched everyone come back inside,.

After half an hour or so, someone came to find me. They put a file down on the kitchen table and explained that Lester had requested I do a postmortem on the future predator. Connor took the opportunity to get started on the recovery code. I headed up to my medical lab.

Right on time Connor knocked on my door– the first to arrive– and not a minute later Nick turned up.

'I got your message,' Jensen said, as he came through the door a couple of minutes after that. 'And sorry I'm late; I've never been up here before and I thought it would be easy to find but– what is that?'

He gestured down the thing in my hands: the reason I'd collected everyone here. I had to look down to remind myself what I was holding before I responded. 'Oh, right, yes, this … my best guess is that it's some kind of um… neural clamp,' I explained, even though I was aware that technically that wasn't a thing.

Connor's head snapped up. 'Bad Eggs!'

I hummed. 'Less organic; this was surgically implanted in the brain of the predator, it must have been how Leek was controlling it. The clamp was linked to the central nervous system and it's operated by remote radio signals.'

'I've never seen anything this advanced before,' Connor said.

'I have,' I admitted, 'just the once, but there's no way Leek's smart enough to have found a way to build it, so someone else is involved.'

'Helen?' Connor asked.

'I think that's a reasonable assumption,' Nick grumbled in response.

'So,' Jensen said, like he was talking out loud to himself in an effort to try and understand it, 'you're saying Leek hot-wired that things brain like remote control?'

Genius. I looked up to the window, where a few floors down the A.D.D was standing in the centre of the hub. My mouth opened before the sentence I wanted to say had come together. 'Fucked up,' I said.

'Sorry?' Jensen asked.

'No, I mean, Leek's fucked up. Any incoming radio signals are picked up by the detector, right?' I looked to Connor and he nodded.

'Yeah.'

'So all we have to do is track where this signal was transmitted from.'

'And that's where we'll find Leek,' Jensen finished.

'It'll take a fraction of the time than waiting for the recovery file.'

Connor was already halfway out the door. 'I'm on it!' he called. Jensen followed after him, and I dropped the clamp down onto the desk in front of the window before I turned.

I was about to walk out after them when I stopped myself. 'Stephen…' I said simply. '...We should call him, right?'

'Stephen's made his bed, let him lie in it.'

He spun around, about to head for the door when I took a step forward and caught his wrist. 'Nick…' he brought him back to face me. 'He said something to me,' I explained, 'after I punched him.'

'Sorry?' Nick replied in suggestion.

I shook my head. 'Not that…' Though it would have been nice. I took a deep breath. 'He said he never slept with Helen.'

Nick frowned. 'And you believe that?'

'I don't know,' I replied quickly. Because it was true. I had no idea what I believed because I'd only been told certain things and I was never quite sure I always got the full story. Something seemed off with Stephen, ever since I'd got back he seemed unconjunctive. 'I wasn't there when Helen first said about her affair, I didn't see him.' And the mention of it made him drop his gaze so I squeezed his wrist. 'Do you think it's possible,' I continued, 'that the world we left… this world, before it changed… in her timeline Helen did sleep with Stephen… but here, to him, it never happened.'

Nick's brow furrowed in a mixture of confusion and cognitive comprehension. 'Why wouldn't he say that before, if that were true?'

'She had a picture...' I shrugged, 'it was evidence. Why would you believe him if he denied it, when to her nothing else has changed? What if she's only believable because she believes she's telling the truth? Her version of it.'

Slowly Nick straightened his shoulders. 'It doesn't matter,' he said.

I frowned. 'What?' I asked. 'How– how can that not matter?'

'Because he chose her again over this: what's happening here now. He picked a side knowing her and knowing what she's capable of so… it doesn't matter. Let's let him go.'

I let go of his hand, and he turned around once more and walked out the door.

'Okay,' Connor said, as we all crowded round him in his chair to look at the detector, 'I've got a visual trace on the signal Leek was transmitting to the future predator.'

'That's it?' Lester returned cautiously, 'there's no chance you're making a mistake?'

Connor huffed. 'I don't do mistakes…' he answered. Lester turned to frown at him over his shoulder, and Connor winced, 'often,' he clarified, 'and Anna checked it…'

'No I didn't Connor,' I replied, not to get him in any sort of trouble for lying but to instil some sort of confidence in him that he might eventually translate to his reputation, 'I don't need to because I trust you. And you can do this no trouble.'

He nodded back at me. 'Is that case,' he responded, standing taller, 'that's definitely the location.'

'Come on then,' Nick said.

Just as he moved to walk away, Lester tutted, 'where do you think you're going?'

'Where do you think?'

'This operation's no place for a civilian,' Lester returned. 'The military will handle it.'

We shared a look. 'What?' Nick clarified.

'Under my supervision,' Lester finished. He turned, walked away across the hub, his shoes echoing of the sparkly floor.

'So now what?'