Michelle groaned in frustration for the umpteenth time today. So many things were happening, and nobody seemed to be dealing with them fast enough. She cursed whatever deities she could think of for deciding to bless her with an uncooperative CTU and her ex-husband's presence on the same day as a national security crisis. Coming back to CTU Los Angeles had not been something she'd wanted to do. There were far too many memories, some good, but also plenty bad, and it didn't help that she could see the creator of some of those memories from her desk. She didn't have a problem running things, but CTU had changed a lot since she'd left. For one, the only person she recognised in the bullpen was Chloe. It made it difficult to try to coordinate everyone when she barely knew people's names, let alone what they were qualified in. Everything had been rearranged and renovated, too, so she felt disoriented trying to look for cupboards and rooms that were no longer there. She may as well be a stranger here, which didn't help her feel in control at all.

She typed something into the computer again but still received the same error message.

"I asked someone to go to Tech 3 to see what was wrong with that server over twenty minutes ago. Why hasn't anybody done it yet?"

"Wait, did you say Tech 3?" Chloe asked.

"Yeah, why?"

Chloe rolled her eyes. "That's why. Ever since Nina Myers was killed down there, people have been really weird about it. Well, the people who weren't there on the day it happened, Driscoll's new hires."

"What do you mean 'weird about it'?"

"People are saying it's haunted, that they hear things or feel strange when they're down there. It's a load of bullshit. I don't know what they're talking about."

Michelle's mouth opened with astonishment. "You're kidding me."

Chloe shook her head. "Most of the time, I'm the only one who actually goes down there, which means, one, interrupting my work and, two, my legs are killing me from the stairs since the elevator is too slow to be worth it."

She huffed. "For God's sake, a nuclear missile might get launched today, and instead of doing everything in our power to stop it, people are sitting here making up crap."

"I can go if you want-"

"It's fine, Chloe, I'll do it myself. Just keep working."

The walk would help to clear her head, at least. As she proceeded down the flight of stairs to the basement, the clicking of her heels against the linoleum was the only thing she could hear. There were a couple of security guards stationed down there. Unsurprisingly, both of them were the same guards who had been there when she still worked at CTU, so obviously, there were some sane people left. Still, it did feel a little too quiet, or at least compared to the chaos upstairs. When she entered the room, the sound of her breathing was barely louder than the droning hum of the servers. There was another guard standing there silently. He looked a little pale; she wondered how much sun he saw if he was always stuck on basement duty.

Michelle turned to face the server, looking for the buttons to reboot the connection. At this proximity, the thrum from the computer was much louder; it made it nearly impossible to hear anything else, which meant she didn't notice the security guard slowly coming behind her. It also meant that she couldn't defend herself from the reddened knife he was brandishing until it was too late. In one swift motion, he lifted the hem of her blazer and drove it into her back, right to the hilt. Michelle gasped, feeling white-hot pain radiate from the small of her back out to every part of her body. She tried to turn around and look at her attacker, but her efforts were futile. It felt like she had been drugged, all of her energy draining in an instant. She collapsed to the floor, so unable to move that she questioned whether she had been paralysed.

As darkness crept into the corner of her vision, she realised with a pathetic laugh that if nobody wanted to come down here, then nobody would find her, at least, not for a very long time.