"Now, we're gonna work this out right now, and it's going to go our way."

Like fuck it was. I clenched my teeth and scanned the area near where Maggie and Carol were supposed to be watching the perimeter, but the trees and foliage were too dense to see anyone hiding out there. They had to still be in the woods right? There wasn't much static, so they were close.

Rick looked at Daryl and Glenn who were closest to the man, nodding his head in a gesture, "Get him up!"

Glenn and Daryl leant down to grab him by his arms, lifting the unsteady man to his feet. Glenn hung the machine gun over his shoulder and instead reached for his handgun holstered on his ribs, holding the man at gunpoint, the same as Rick, the same as Daryl.

"You can see we have one of yours," Rick said into the walkie-talkie. "We'll trade."

"I'm listening."

"First I want to talk to Maggie and Carol, make sure they're all right."

"Rick, it's Carol. I'm— I'm fine, but—"

Maggie's voice came next. "Rick, it's Maggie. We're both okay. We'll figure thi—"

"—Shut up," the woman cut her off. "You have your proof. Let's talk."

"This is the deal right here. Let 'em go, you can have your guy back and live."

"Two for one, that's not much of a trade."

I snatched the radio from Rick's hand. "You get to live, that makes it fair. You can see how many of us there are, you can see we're out in the open. If you had the means to kill us, you would have fucking done it, but you know you'd lose. That's why you have hostages."

"Who the hell is this?"

"Doesn't fucking matter."

"Watch your tone, sweetheart." I could hear the smile as she spoke. "I can kill your friends right now."

"Watch your tone, bitch!" I pushed Rick's hand away as he reached for the radio, stepping away from the group. "Kill them and I shoot What's-His-Face here, and then I come after all of you. You heard that explosion last night? That was me. So go ahead, fucking try me."

Nothing. There was nothing to indicate that they had taken me up on my offer, no gunshots, no response, just silence intermingled with the static from the walkie-talkie. They were thinking about the offer, had to be. Everything I said was true. I kept my face serious as I continued scanning the woods, knowing they could probably see me.

Rick stepped up, facing my side. I took a moment before finally facing him, shocked by the genuine lack of anger at my outburst to the remaining Saviours. Instead, he held out his hand to me, curling his fingers to ask for the radio back.

"Give it." When I complied, he raised the radio to his lips. "Look, I know you're talking it over, it's a fair trade. Just come out, we do this, we all walk away."

More silence.

They were smart, I had to give them that. Rick had tested them, checking if they were going to come out to get their man back. We would have killed every single one of them if they had.

"Do we have a deal?" He tried again.

"I'll get back to you."

That's a no then, which meant that the asshole we caught wasn't nearly as valuable to them as Maggie and Carol were to us. I doubted a group as sadistic as the Saviours were going to fold so easily to get one person back.

But they were desperate . . . or they should have been.

"Something isn't right," I shook my head. "There's gotta be just a handful of them left if all the Saviours lived here. Why aren't they more worried about getting him back?"

"If they weren't going to come out after you put the fear of God into them, then they weren't gonna come out at all," Martinez said.

"The fear of God?" The man scoffed. "Please."

I'd had enough, lost my train of thought when he opened his mouth.

I dropped my bag from my bag off my shoulder, reaching inside. Daryl held him still as I marched over with one of the tin cans in my hand, grabbing his shoulder to steady him as I pushed the metal up to his mouth.

"Open up!" The man ducked his head back, clenching his mouth closed. "Open your fucking mouth!"

"Ace, we need him alive!" Rick snapped over

"They're already gone and we didn't make the trade," I snapped. "We can track them down, follow them to wherever they're hiding out and save our people anyway. We don't need this jackass!"

"If they find out he's dead, they kill Carol and Maggie," he argued. "We need him."

"We don't!"

"You do if you want your friends back, pretty girl—" I swung my fist still wrapped around the can forward, hitting him in the mouth, the thin metal crunching under the force.

"We don't let these people walk," I turned to Rick. "We started this, you made us start this. We fucking finish it."

"We will," Rick agreed. "We'll finish it, I promise. But for now, we need him alive."

Fuck this. I threw the can down, back into my bag as I turned away from them. We shouldn't have been there, we should have scouted the area out more and ensured we knew how many people we were dealing with.

"If they are as helpless as we think then we have to get into the woods and find where Maggie was waiting," Martinez stepped in, a hand up to calm the situation down. "Then we track them down." He turned to Daryl, "Right?"

"Right," Daryl agreed. "I'll head out after 'em now. They can't be that far away."

Unless they had a car.

It was another thought that would have left my head without a filter if Daryl hadn't tapped my shoulder as he passed. "Help me."

I nodded. "Yeah."

"We'll bring the cars down to the road, then I'll send people out to help you," Rick called after us. "Keep an eye out for each other."

"We will," I called back at the same time Daryl gave a thumbs up.

We walked in silence, which gave me time to think again. I went back to why the Saviours were so reluctant to save their man when they were so desperate because there had to be fewer of them left than we had figures last night.

The only reason they wouldn't want him back is if they didn't need him, and with as few people as they should have had, bringing him back could help them. Sure, it wasn't just the one woman on the radio, because one woman wouldn't have been able to catch Maggie and Carol.

Maybe they did have more people than we thought.

"Fingers hurt?" He asked after a while, drawing me out of my own head and reminding me of the numb feeling in my fingers. I don't know why, he already knew the answer.

"A little."

"Lucky, coulda broken 'em," he said. "The can prob'ly supported your hand enough, though. Next time, use your free hand."

I rolled my eyes. "I know how to punch someone."

"Show me." He straightened up, holding up his hand and pointing to his palm. "Wanna make sure."

I made a fist, correctly, with my right hand and swung for his palm. As my knuckles impacted, his other hand came up to hold my wrist in pace as he inspected my hand, the slight redness without the swelling he was expecting. Then he checked to make sure my thumb was in the correct position.

"They're fine." He started walking again. "Might wanna get Rosita to show you how to get some power behind it too. Best be safe than sorry with all these psychopaths around."

I made a face. "I can do. But if I give people the chance to fistfight me, I've lost. I know that, you know that. It's one of the reasons I have to make bombs and silencers, sneak around. I can't just tackle people to the ground and beat the shit out of them."

"Then ya got no reason to be punching people."

"Are you going to stand there and tell me I was wrong?"

"Fuck no," he scoffed, waving a hand in dismissal. "Hell, I got no problem with anythin' you did back there."

"Do you think other people did?" I asked.

"Does it matter?" Daryl questioned.

I thought for a second.

It didn't bother me if people knew how badly I wanted Eugene dead. The only reason I kept that a secret was because we wanted Alexandria to like us. Now that we had taken over, there was no point bringing it up with Aaron or anybody because it wasn't going to happen. Not unless he did something stupid.

But this was different, taking the radio and snapping at the people who had captured our own was probably one of my biggest lapses in judgment.

"I could have left it to Rick," I said quietly. "Maybe they would have made the trade."

"Doubt it," Daryl said. After a moment, he looked back over his shoulder and squinted at me, "Martinez said the same thing. Hell, if they're gonna accept that trade today, they're gonna wanna do it somewhere they know, have control of."

I nodded, my teeth clenched. "Guess so."

"Somethin' wrong?" He asked. "We ain't talked in a while, not really anyways."

"Just feel like I keep fucking up," I said. "I didn't have to take the radio back there, but I got so . . ."

"Scared," Daryl finished for me.

I deflated.

Scared . . . yeah, that sounded right.

"It's alright to be scared, kid," he said quietly. "They took our people, threatened their lives. They may not care about their group so much, but we do. We do care, and that's what makes it scary when they're in trouble."

"I know," I said. "It's happened before."

"Look, ya didn' say anythin' to that woman that wasn't true. And threatening 'em, that was just making sure they knew that if it were face-to-face, they weren't the ones making it out of that situation."

"And what do you call hitting him?" I asked.

He shrugged. "What do you call it when I hit him?"

"Interrogating. Making him weaker. Disorienting him so he wouldn't fight back," I guessed. "I just punched him because he was being a dick, but that wasn't going to help Carol or Maggie."

"Shovin' a nail bomb in someone's mouth would be a good way to interrogate 'em," he mused.

I had to swallow the bile that threatened to come up. "You haven't killed anyone with them."

His eyes drifted to me, softening. "No, guess I haven't."

And there it was.

He didn't try to convince me to stop using them, because I couldn't. When I had to fight against grownups, that were bigger and stronger than me, I needed an edge that would keep me alive in a skewed scenario. I needed a way to make it fair; there were very few teen soldiers.

So why did I threaten to do it again? I took a deep breath, clearing my head. Now wasn't the time to wallow in my own guilt over my own actions, especially not ones that I refuse to stop even if the thought of doing it shatters my very being.

My eyes scanned the ground as we walked, looking for any signs that our people had been through this way. It was the closest path to the road from where Maggie was supposed to be hiding, which meant there was a high chance we'd find something to help us find her.

Then I saw it, my eyes doing a double take over something I was just going to walk past. There was a partial footprint in the mud, a smaller size than I would have expected from a man. It wasn't smeared enough to be a walker mark. Carol or Maggie, maybe. I wondered if we should have started keeping track of the shoes our people wear in case something like this ever happened again.

"Daryl," I said.

He knelt by the mud, his eyes scanning the ground. "Looks like they tried to cover some of the tracks, clean 'em up so we couldn't follow 'em. See, here?"

I nodded, seeing what he meant. It was probably why some of the footprint was unrecognisable.

"Can we track them?" I asked.

"Yeah," Daryl said. "Looks like either Maggie or Carol left us a trail, broken plants and prints for us to follow. We can still track 'em with this."

"We should wait for the others to catch up," I said.

Daryl and I went back to standing around in silence, our eyes wandering in the direction we came from. After nearly five minutes of waiting, Martinez and Rosita were the ones on our trail, which probably meant Rick wanted the others with him to bring the cars around and keep an eye on the asshole.

"Hey," Martinez called out. "Got anything?"

"Found some tracks," Daryl explained. "Think it's one of them lettin' us know where they're headed. But I think they were going for a car. Roads a mile down that way."

Martinez turned to me. "Rick said to switch to channel two, let him know where to go if you found anything. You have that talkie of yours, right?"

I nodded, already pulling my bag off my shoulders to rifle around for it. Turning it on, I took a second to remember how to switch channels before asking, "Rick?"

"Yeah?"

"Daryl is going to give you a place to meet us, we think they took a car. He's going to look for tracks on the road, see if we can tell what direction they went," I explained.

We started walking again as I handed the radio to Daryl so he could tell Rick the name of the road where Carol and Maggie were taken. Rick gave a quick got it before the radio snapped silent, giving us around ten minutes to meet them where Daryl said.

The cars pulled up just as we came out of the trees, and Daryl flagged them down to get their attention. There were fewer cars. Jesus had gone, and Rick sent some of the others back to Alexandria before we found out Maggie and Carol had been kidnapped.

"Path leads that way," Daryl only needed a glance to work it out.

"So we follow it, find any landmarks and check them" Rick said, walking over from the car. "We put your bike in the pickup."

"It's fine there till we get this done," he shrugged.

Glenn was standing by me, just staring down at the road with his hands tucked under his arms. I don't know if he'd said a word since Maggie was taken.

Rick clapped a hand down on his shoulder. "We'll get 'em back.

"Yeah." Glenn nodded, straightening back. "We'll get 'em back."

"They could be in there."

We stopped at the first place we found on the road, a farmhouse with a wide field around it. I had tried looking in through the windows with the rifle, but it was far away from our hiding place in the woods and the windows were so grimy that not even a shadow could be seen through on the inside.

Glenn was adamant about searching the place, but going all the way down there and looking for the people who took Maggie and Carol could be a waste of time if they weren't there . . . that sounded wrong. I just meant that they could get further away if we're checking a random building.

But if they were in there and we decided not to check it, then what? How did we find that out?

"Aaron and Gabriel are checking something out down the other way on the crossroads, we should see if they spot anything where they are first," Rick said.

"The longer we spend in the open, the more likely it is we get spotted," Glenn argued.

"That's if they're here," Daryl argued.

"If they are in there, there'd be no static when she talks on the radio, right"

I was making it up as we went on. Before Rick joined the camp, Carl said someone had been talking on the radio but the reception was too bad to hear him. Would that happen on walkie-talkies too? I needed to do some tests and work out the range.

Maybe I could use radios to trigger bombs like I did with the car lock.

Glenn's jaw set, but then his face softened as he agreed. "I guess so."

"Then again, if they have lookouts they may not answer for that reason." I lost my train of thought for a second, before finally picking it back up. "What I'm saying is we shouldn't just barge in."

"Them not answering is more suspicious, we don't know how many people they could have in there" Rick agreed.

"Try it," Daryl said.

Rick nodded, reaching for the radio that was hung over his belt, and pressing the button. "Have you thought about it?" Rick tried. "Talk to me."

"You weren't listening," her voice cut in between the white noise. "I said I'd contact you."

Not the place . . . great.

"This isn't it, you have to keep talking," I told him. "We don't want them to know something is up. They could move from wherever they're hiding."

He nodded, agreeing with me. "Would it make a difference if I said I was sorry about that?" Rick asked.

"What do you think?"

"I think we're gonna make the trade, so tell me where."

"We haven't agreed to that."

"You will."

They didn't have another choice.

"You know what? I'm not so sure," she denied. "We'd be taking most of the risk, not getting much in the way of a reward."

"Poor guy," I glanced back over my shoulder, feigning sympathy. He couldn't hear from where Isaac and Abraham were watching him, standing over him with their rifle and machine gun hung in their arms, ready to fire if they needed.

Isaac met my eyes for a second, nodding as if to say everything was okay.

"The other option won't work out for you," Rick said.

"Why not put the girl on? These threats are so much better coming from her." That's good, at least I'm not a laughingstock. "We'll take our chances."

"They're gone," Glenn was miserable as he spoke, disheartened.

"Switching back to two," Rick said, "gonna wait to see what Aaron sees."

"Should find out what this prick knows while we wait," Daryl stood, looking back over his shoulder.

We stood up from our spot in the bushes and came out onto the road to talk to the Saviour where Abraham and Isaac had the same idea we had. Abraham was already trying to get information out of him, asking again about the bike as Daryl had done in the field.

"Found it."

"You know that's our bike, right?" Isaac sounded fed up with this conversation. "We know what happened to it."

I'd heard Abraham interrogating him before now, asking about the bike, and whether they knew the person that stole it from Daryl. The man gave up no information, and just kept saying the same things over and over again.

The information wasn't important enough, and we didn't have the time to beat him over it. I'd consider it if we thought he knew how many of those people were still alive. When was the last time we even had to interrogate someone? Randall?

"And you don't think we could have found it?" He cocked a brow. "That boy that stole it from ya could've just left it somewhere."

"Could have left it?" I repeated as a question.

He looked bored as he glanced up at me. "What?"

"You said could have," I told him. "Surely you want to go with the must have version of the story. Makes it more believable."

The man grinned, bearing his teeth. "He could have just died. This is why kids don't interrogate people, they're not smart enough."

"Or you're backtracking, either way, I don't give a shit." I clapped my hands together, before reaching for my gun. "We don't need you anymore, your people don't want you back, and we've sent a group to your hideout."

"You're lying," He rolled his eyes. "You don't know where they went, and even if you did I'm not too worried about the priest shooting up my friends."

"Oh, he doesn't have to, don't worry," Rick growled, stepping over him.

"And my people need me," he said. "I can patch 'em up if they've been injured."

"Cocky bastard." I couldn't help the laugh that escaped my lips remembering how the woman said she wasn't so sure about the deal. "If you're so important, why would she say that the trade isn't rewarding enough for her?"

"Because they're biding time to ambush you," he guessed.

"You think that's smart to say?" Abraham asked. "Showing your cards there, pal."

His head tilted to the side. "It's nothing you aren't already expecting, I can see it, you're expecting something to happen. And I don't blame you. You're already going to lose two people today—"

Glenn lunged for him, getting grabbed by Rick before he could make contact. As Glenn continued to struggle, I grabbed his other arm, helping Rick pull him away.

"I thought I wasn't useful anymore?" He mused.

"You're not."

Rick managed to get him far enough away that I pulled Glenn around one of the cars, out of sight of the Saviour.

"I'll kill him," Glenn snapped.

"Not before me," I agreed.

"If they—" he choked off, unable to finish his sentence.

I threw myself forward to hug him, squeezing around him as tight as I could.

"We're getting them back," I said with as much strength as I could muster because it was feeling hopeless. I couldn't tell him that his actions were wrong because he got angry just like I had and no one had reprimanded me in the same way.

"I can't lose her," he said. "I can't. She's been through so much, Hershel, Beth . . ." he trailed off. "I can't lose them."

Them.

Maggie and the baby.

I squeezed his sleeve at his shoulder. "We're going to find them."

"Hey, Rick?" Aaron's voice came through the walkie, Rick nodded for us to walk away from the guy before he could hear what he had to say. Glenn and I pulled back from the hug to follow something. followed him to listen in and find out what Aaron and Gabriel had found. "I think we got something."

"What is it?"

"Some kind of factory warehouse building," Aaron said. "Gravel at the gate has tyre tracks in it, not sure how long they could have been there, though."

"Wait there, we'll make our way over to you. Keep an eye out, but don't engage," Rick ordered. "We'll be there soon."

"Got it."

"Asshole, are you there?"

We didn't even have to contact the woman as we closed in on the building. Aaron explained how they'd come across it, he knew the area well enough to know there was nothing else around where they could have been hiding.

We were planning on talking to her again to test whether this was the building when she contacted us herself. No static, they were here. I gave Rick a nod to signal this was the right place, we'd found them, and all we had to do was get inside. .

"I'm here," he answered, giving a nod back in my direction.

"We've thought about it. We want to make the trade."

"That's good."

"There's a large field with a sign that says 'God is dead' about two miles down I-66," she said. "Good visibility in all directions."

"We'll meet you there," Rick lied effortlessly. "10 minutes?"

"10 minutes."

"They want to make a deal now?" Rosita asked.

"No," Martinez denied. "No way."

"She just said—"

"I know what she said," he cut her off.

"Trade a lot of people back in your day?" She cocked a brow.

"Trade? No. Kidnap? Yes."

Glenn bristled at the nonchalance in his voice. "Yeah, I'm still pissed at you."

"I don't doubt it," Martinez said.

Loud bangs came from inside the warehouse, stopping Martinez from finishing what he wanted to say. I jumped to my feet, looking for reflections or shadows of the Savious who had noticed us, but the noise echoed around the concrete walls of the building.

"Is that shooting?" I asked.

It was definitely from inside, something was happening. Maybe walkers got in, or Maggie and Carol were getting out. Either way, it was our opening to get inside and save them before something worse happened, before we were too late.

"We have to get in there now," Rick pulled the Saviour to his feet. "Move!"

Rosita led the charge, her machine gun raised.

Glenn was just behind her, sprinting toward the building to get his wife back.

We checked the first building, which was blocked off from the other side. As we walked, we listened for any signs of fighting that would lead us to our people, but the only thing there were walkers, so many walkers that I wasn't sure how this was any safer than making a trade with us.

I pulled out my knife and stabbed at the one that came close to grabbing me, pulling my knife out and kicking it backwards so it fell through the door it came out of. Still, there was no gore outside of the corpses, no signs of massacres or slaughters done by either the dead or the living.

"How the hell are we supposed to find them?" Rick started getting frustrated. He shoved his gun against the man's temple. "Where would you keep prisoners here?"

"Rick?" Isaac cut him off.

"Yeah."

He pointed at the building. "Fire."

"That must be them!" Daryl ran off in that direction. "They gotta be in this building over here!"

Black smoke was rising across the sky above the back of the warehouse, creating a dark blanket of smog that started to smell, even from where we were. A signal, it must've been. The Saviours wouldn't have drawn that much attention to themselves when they knew we were looking for them.

"Check every door," Rick demanded. "Don't let any of 'em live. If you see 'em, shoot."

"Got it," Rosita said as she approached the first rolling door. "Guns up."

Abraham and Martinez pulled the door open as Glenn pointed his gun through the opening before he raised his head in disbelief.

"Maggie?" He lowered his gun and rushed to hug her.

I could feel how relieved Isaac was beside me as he looked on, his chest deflating completely as he breathed out a long breath. I gripped his hand, giving it a hard squeeze to see that both Maggie and Carol were here, unarmed.

Daryl went to Carol, "We got your trail, you start a fire?"

"Yeah."

"Hey, you good?" He asked her.

Carol shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes. "No."

"Come here," Daryl pulled Carol, who looked utterly devastated, into a hug. This was probably the most broken I had seen her look in a long time, and I couldn't work out what the Saviours had done to make her act that way.

Unless it wasn't what the Saviours had done . . .

"They're dead," Maggie was telling Glenn beside me. "They're all dead, the ones that took us," Maggie said, her words jumbling as she tried not to cry. "They're all dead."

"Hey, are you okay?" Glenn asked, his hands on her face.

Her chest bobbed with sobs she managed to hold in. "I just . . . I can't anymore."

Glenn pulled her into another bone-crushing hug. "It's okay."

I swallowed as I looked at how broken they were over killing the Saviours that had taken them, however many Saviours had kidnapped Maggie and Carol. If they set the fire and they were this broken up, I doubted they did so we find them.

"Your friends are dead," Rick repeated to the Saviour who looked more shocked than anything. "No one's coming for ya. So you might as well talk."

"Let him burn."

"I'm gonna ask you one last time, how'd you get the bike?" Rick asked.

"We found it."

Of course, he was still lying. "Like hell you did."

"We found it," he repeated.

"Was Negan in that building last night or was he here?" Rick asked.

"Both," The man grinned a creepy smile as he turned to face Rick. "I'm Negan, shithead."

I frowned. Something was wrong, it didn't make any sense. If this person was Negan then why were they so reluctant to trade to get him back? The Saviours committed atrocities for him, in his name, they wouldn't have just let us kill him, would they?

The man continued, "There's a whole world of fun that we can talk about, so let's have a chat—"

"I'm sorry it had to come to this."

Rick took a step back, raised his gun, and shot him in the head.