Laine wasn't quite sure where Polly had gone, and for a while just wandered slightly aimlessly in the direction she thought he might have headed. He couldn't have got that far in front that she'd already lost him, surely…? It had only taken a minute or two to get over her shock. Was he really that fast?

Should she call out for him? She tightened her fingers on the strap of her satchel, uneasily.

But the further she wandered, the more she became aware of something rather out of place in London's empty streets – little soft electronic noises, and not from any conventional piece of machinery or faulty alarm. As she got closer to them, they resolved into quiet little sobs, intermixed with flat, dull versions of the chirps she'd grown familiar with. A mix of relief (she hadn't lost him) and guilt (had she actually made him cry?) washed over her.

Just when she was thinking she'd got to know him, too. He'd seemed surprisingly fearless? After that instant of immediate startled alarm, he'd come back and handled the mugger with no problems whatsoever. He'd dealt with Tark with a sort of sarcastic diplomacy. He'd even braved the hated Underground when he'd had no other choice. Frightening his friend was what had finally overcome him. (Her reaction couldn't have helped matters – poor little guy was lost and scared and isolated from his family, and she'd gone and compounded it by looking at him like she thought he was about to explode.)

At least he couldn't be too far away. She squared her shoulders and homed in on the sounds.

Laine finally found Polly tucked away just out of sight in an alleyway between two shops, behind their bins, with the rest of the rubbish. He sounded genuinely crippled by the revelation – and her response to it – and it was only the lack of appropriate anatomy that had stopped him accumulating a puddle.

She edged closer. "Polly…?"

"…go away!"

The sharp tone made her hesitate. What if he genuinely decided he didn't want her anywhere near him, any more?

Well, she knew he wouldn't attack her. He'd just run further away. Which could possibly be worse because he could get into places she knew she couldn't. She crossed her fingers that it was a good sign he'd stopped.

Laine took a deep breath and plucked up enough courage to go and sit back near him. She perched on an old box, tucked her knees up to her chest, and studied him for several long seconds, not sure what to say. (Are you all right when he patently wasn't felt fairly ridiculous.)

"Sucks, to be a gun with a face," Polly wept, quietly, in the silence. He wouldn't look up to meet her gaze. "I was really beginning to hope maybe there was a bit more to me than that."

She reached out a shaking hand and gave him an awkward little pat, but he flinched away – only a millimetre or two, but obvious. She took her hand back and folded it with the other in her lap.

"I'm sorry," she said, faintly. "You just… startled me. I-I wasn't expecting-"

"Bullshit. I saw the way you looked at me." He still didn't look up. "Whatever. I wouldn't want anything else to do with me either. Look what we welcomed into our home. Trusted it, treated it with kindness, accepted it as the innocent little thing it was playing, and the paranoid asshole was right all along. Just some… bossy, obnoxious little war machine."

"You don't surely think-"

"I don't know what I think, any more!" He shifted slightly, as though looking for a way out, and backed further up into the rubbish. "Except that I want a new boss."

Laine bit her lip. "I'm refusing permission."

"Blanket pre-authorisation."

"Revoked."

"You suck."

"Proud of it. I told you, you're stuck with me until we figure this out. I'm not going back on that now."

"…unless you got proof I was a bad person, you said. Well now you got it. You are officially released from your duties. You can go away now."

"Can I still be your friend, even if you don't want me as your boss, any more?"

"…please just go away now."

"Why are you so determined to drive me away?"

"Because I'm ashamed and embarrassed and scared and I don't want to hurt you!"

Laine sat quietly and digested his words for an instant. "I understand that. But why would you?"

"Not intentionally. But what if something happens and I can't control it? Again? I didn't mean to shoot him! It just happened!"

"When he pulled a knife on us, sure! I'm not going to attack you, if that helps. We've quarrelled in the past and you never made me worry you were going to hurt me. It feels more like you might have just saved my life."

"After putting it at risk! He'd never have come after you if he hadn't seen me and thought I was worth stealing. You wouldn't even have been out here at all, if not for me!"

"You think? I don't know. I work night shifts, remember? It's not like I'm never out after dark. Maybe he'd have thought I was an easy target anyway? Without you, I would have been."

"Only because I shot him!" Polly gave a shaky little mew of despair. "I should have gone looking for it! I'm sorry! I should have done you that list you didn't even want! I should have assumed I was a bad person and found it and told you about it, as soon as I ever suspected anything. You were right. Tark was right. Unarmed military technology? What bullshit-"

"Hey, no. We don't know that's what you-"

"I have a gun!"

Laine went silent.

"I have a fucking… space gun, which doesn't even operate with bullets!" he went on, voice destabilising. "Which shouldn't even exist! It's not even like I can throw it away because it's an integral part of me!"

Laine studied where her hands lay in her lap. "You have a gun," she said, quietly. "It doesn't mean you are a gun. If nothing else, I don't think they would make a gun so fluent in Swedish."

"Well what else does it mean? What else could it possibly mean? It's the only significant thing I can actually do for myself! I can't do anything else on my own because I don't have hands! Nothing about me has an innocent purpose!"

"You said you talk to satellites. You monitor things like asteroids and freighters. You can triangulate where stuff is in space-"

"It's targeting software!" he despaired. "It's so I can shoot straight." His words fractured towards the end.

She moved and sat next to him; he sort of made a halfhearted effort to move away but was surrounded by bin bags and couldn't go anywhere. "If you didn't even remember you had it until you were threatened, I'd like to argue it's maybe not a big component of who you are," she said. "Besides. Cops in other countries carry guns. That doesn't mean shooting things is all they do. Although… okay, granted, some haven't made it easy to be their biggest fans, in recent years. But you don't look much like a cop to me."

"I might be. None of us know what I am." His shutters had tightened, almost closed, hiding from the world. "I don't know what to do any more. I don't think I want to go back if I'm just gonna be a smart weapon."

"Aw, love." She finally let her arm drift around him, triggering a new little quiet flurry of electronic tears. "Maybe you should have gone on the run with a psychologist, not a chem-eng student," she half-joked. "As existential crises go, you picked a good one to have, and a good time to have it. I mean it's not like we're running for our lives, or anything."

She felt him lean in. "S-sorry."

"Don't be, when there's nothing to be sorry for. And don't let this overwhelm you, either. It's a blip. Just because you can defend yourself it doesn't mean that was all you were designed to do." She stroked her palm over his casing, hoping to comfort. "I made a promise to look after you and I swear to fuck I am going to do that if it kills me. The fact you have the gun doesn't mean you're not also vulnerable as shit and need a friend."

That finally broke him, and he dissolved into sobs.

"I didn't just come with you because you don't have hands, you know," she soothed, quietly, keeping her palm moving. "I came with you because I like you, and want to help you, and want you to get home safely. You're my friend. Yes, you startled me. I never expected you to be such a fierce little thing under that flamboyant personality! That doesn't mean I like you less. It doesn't mean I'm scared of you. It just means I know a little bit more about you, now, and can work out how to look after you better."

She felt a shift in his weight as he pressed in closer, trying to muffle his misery in her clothing.

"So what if you have a weapon. You're our friend and we love you and trust you. Even Minnie does, which is saying something."

His words were barely intelligible. "You haven't even known me for five days, yet."

"Who cares? Nobody sets a minimum time before you're allowed to like someone. And I'm still happy to find that remote Scottish island, too, if you decide you do want to be kidnapped, after all. Just while you figure out what you want to do. We'll get the sleeper, a whole cabin to ourselves and no-one will even know you're aboard…"

She kept her arm around him, her free hand stroking his top curve, talking softly about nonsense until he finally started to sound like he'd got control of his emotions again. The heartbreaking sobs softened into little electronic sniffly noises, and his fans smoothed out, those hitchy little noises fading until he was almost silent again.

"Sorry." His words were still soft and slightly crackly, like a badly tuned radio heard from a thousand miles away, but instead of that horrible flinchy mess from earlier, he was back to a good solid weight pressed into her side. "I hadn't intended crying on you."

"S'fine. I'd be an even shittier friend if I objected to that, wouldn't I? Especially since I'm the one who should be apologising, for making you cry in the first place."

"Well, not rrr-…" He caught himself before he could correct her. "I mean. Thank you, for staying with me. It means a lot." He shifted slightly, to glance up at her for reassurance. "When you looked at me like that, when you looked scared, I thought-… I thought you might run away from me, as well. I didn't think I could bear to see that. That was why I fled, before I had to watch you go." He dropped his voice to a reluctant whisper. "That gun doesn't make me very brave, does it."

Laine clucked her tongue, gently. "Define brave, under these circumstances."

"I-" A pause. "I should have stayed. I should have waited. I should have given you time to process the new information."

"Or you could have scared me more by staying with me? Who knows. We'd both had a shock. I don't know what would have happened." Laine patted the flat of her palm on his side. "Don't go calling yourself less brave just because you had a perfectly reasonable emotional reaction to being traumatised."

Polly remained silent.

"You've had to deal with a lot, the last few days. Nobody's going to think less of you for finding your break point. Having a weapon doesn't mean you have to be invulnerable, too. We trust our armed forces to look after us but we know they're all human and can't just power on through trauma, either."

He hummed, faintly, quietly appreciating the implication he was human. "Looks like you've been harbouring an amnesiac cop under your roof, after all. Better not tell Mina."

Laine smiled, faintly. "Was that a joke, Polly?"

"Ha ha? I'm actually not sure." A little sigh. "Do you think that guy will go to the police?"

"What would he say? I'd like to report a crime: the robot friend of the girl I was trying to mug shot the knife out of my hand before I could shank her?"

Polly quietly digested the words: it comforted him more than he'd expected that she was still referring to him as friend. "Do people still say 'shanked'?" He intentionally changed the subject.

"...not really my world, Polster." Laine shifted; stretched her shoulders a little. "Ugh. Do you think you're okay to travel again?"

"I think so."

"Good. This floor is hard and my bum is starting to hurt. We need to figure out somewhere better to rest up. I'd been thinking a bench would be fine but I don't want to get caught like that again, and now it looks like it's gonna rain anyway." After a beat, she added; "And I am not letting you stay in the rubbish."

"…yes, ma'am." He was still a bit crackly, but sounded stronger, and more determined.

They emerged from the alleyway. Polly was unsteady and slow, not quite managing his usual tidy straight line, but happily following his friend again. He stuck carefully close to her ankles, just far enough away she wouldn't trip.

"All right." Laine sighed at nothing in particular while they made their way down the street. "Tell me if you see something that looks like it might keep us dry when it rains."

He made a little thoughtful hum noise and she realised she had no idea if he could even see well enough to help. (She reassured herself that he wasn't the sort of person to be too polite tell her, if that was the case.)

They carried on their way along the pavement, passing shuttered shop doorways and gated passages, and Laine began to wonder if they'd end up just… wandering aimlessly, for the entire night. That would leave neither of them fit for anything, the following morning.

"Oh, hey. Would this work?" Polly unexpectedly diverted off to one side and disappeared behind a cluster of big red wheelie bins.

"Ugh. No, Pols. People get killed by sleeping in those things-"

"I meant the cardboard." He re-emerged from between the carts, pushing a bale of broken down boxes made of corrugated card. "It'll keep you a bit insulated off the ground and it's… clean, I guess?"

On a scale of 'bare concrete' to 'cosy bed', this barely nudged the meter away from rock bottom, but his logic felt annoyingly sound. Laine crouched, picked up the bundle and sighed at it. "I guess we're actually doing this, then, huh."

He still had his shutters closed, but perked over onto an angle and chirped, questioningly.

"Sorry." She patted his head. "I think I'm still unconsciously hoping your friends will come along and rescue us. Or I'll find some amazing excuse that means we can go back home."

"You still could," he said, in her ear. "No excuses needed."

Laine just smiled, ambiguously, stood back up, and set off again.

In a quiet narrow street that was barely a step up from an alleyway, they finally found an unoccupied shop doorway big enough to shelter in, with old closing down sale posters yellowing in the windows. It looked like someone else had been using it until recently; a couple of old bottles and a filthy blanket were crammed into a corner (she carefully nudged them away with her toe), and it didn't smell too fresh. It was sheltered enough, though, with the drizzle that had recently started thankfully blowing along the narrow street in the opposite direction, and hopefully they'd only need to be here one night. Laine boosted Polly up the little step, then untied the twine on her corrugated bedding and spread it out over the porch, trying to make it at least a few of sheets thick, with the wetter bits at the bottom.

It was dry, but it wasn't warm and it wasn't remotely comfortable. And the badly-lit street left her feeling nauseatingly vulnerable, a hollow feeling churning in her chest; there was no way she'd have even gone anywhere near it without her little round bodyguard. She tucked herself into the corner, so no-one could sneak up on them, but even having a wall at her back didn't feel that reassuring.

More like she lacked an escape route, really.

"God, this was so badly thought-out," she groaned, resting her head against the heel of her hand, propping her elbow against her knee. "I don't know who I thought I was trying to kid. 'Sleeping rough for one night can't be that hard'." She drew little air quotes around the statement. "It's just sleeping outside! Like camping, just without a tent!" She covered her face with both palms. "What a fucking idiot."

Polly had opened back up and sat watching her from close to her feet. He made a little glum noise. "I don't think I have a frame of reference to comment on that."

At least his scrolling optics were something reassuring and familiar enough to focus on. "Me being an idiot, or all the rest of it?" She snorted a sour laugh. "And this is nothing like an episode of Doctor Who. Not even one of the weird ones."

"Do you have to sleep out here?" he wondered, peering out into the gloom. "We passed a whole bunch of hotels. Some of them weren't too expensive. No bad guys would be able to get to us there."

"I can't afford a hotel," she scoffed. "Not even if we weren't running dark. I can't use my card because they'd be able to track it, and I never drew out enough cash to cover anything like that and food as well." After a beat, she added; "I'm pretty sure they'd be able to track me if I paid in cash, too. I bet even a cheap hotel would still need ID of some kind."

He cocked over to one side. "Who's 'they'?"

"Whoever Tark is working with. I wouldn't be surprised if he hadn't reported me as a missing person, by now, as well, so he can get the authorities helping out."

"Hm." Polly leaned in against her boots. "I should have let you take me to the police, shouldn't I? Right after I first arrived."

"What, and miss out on this adventure?" She forced a tired smile and stroked his top curve. "Not likely. And you'd still be on a shelf somewhere, with a bunch of lost suitcases and broken umbrellas."

"…you think so? Oh."

"All right, maybe not. A little chatterbox like you would never let them get away with forgetting about you." After a beat, she joked; "You'd probably be telling them how to do their jobs, anyway."

"Yeah." He chuckled, guiltily, and glanced away. "Probably."

They sat quietly together for a little while. Laine fished the flattened remains of half a cheese and ham sandwich from her bag and ate it slowly, hoping it would satisfy her growling stomach.

It didn't. But she didn't have anything else, and didn't fancy going back out into the drizzle to find a 24-hour convenience store-

"Hey, lovey," a drunken voice slurred from frighteningly close by, and Laine froze. The speaker appeared out of the drizzle, just beyond the porch. "You look like you could do with some company on a soggy night like this, huh?"

Heart in her mouth, she stared up at the unwelcome newcomer. With a streetlight behind him, it was impossible for her to see any detail – apart from that he was tall, and broad, and swaying slightly. Shit. Could she try and run?

"Plenny of room for one more in there, I reckon," he went on, putting a foot up on the step and leaning closer.

A startled Er-… was all she managed, before a very long, deep, ugly growl came up out of the gloom nearby.

In spite of knowing it was only Polly, and not the enormous vicious dog he was pretending to be, she felt the hair on the back of her neck all stand to attention.

It definitely startled the drunk, as well. Not being able to see the owner of the growl didn't appear to make much difference – he stumbled backwards, away from the invisible hound, and with a hasty never mind! he hurried off into the dark.

Polly waited until the sound of footsteps had disappeared before speaking. "Are they gone?"

"Yeah. He might not have, without that Hound of the Baskervilles impression."

"That wasn't precisely the plot of-… okay. I'm glad it worked."

Polly gave his friend a long critical look. Laine was obviously shivering, even though it wasn't particularly cold.

"Go home," he said, nudging her calf. "Please. You've done more than enough for me. Thank you."

"Still determined to get rid of your boss, huh?" She hugged her knees. "You'll be totally on your own, if I do. You can't carry the laptop, and even if you could, you can't exactly rock on into a café and ask to borrow a power socket."

"Yes, fine. I accept that I'll struggle, but I'm sure I can figure something out. And this sucks worse for you. You've been attacked twice already and it's only the first night! What if I can't protect you, next time?"

"Polly." She waited until he'd gone quiet. "If I go home, I can't come back. That's it. That's the end of this. I won't know where you are, I can't contact you with your broken aerial, and even if I could, Tark will follow me." She pressed the heel of her hand against one eye, feeling sore. "And that's assuming he doesn't try and get me to tell him where I left you."

"Then I'll sneak! I can get in all sorts of places people can't. No-one knows I'm sentient, and if I hide well enough, I won't be reported as a suspicious parcel, either. I'll find other ways to connect to the internet. I'll charge up using the power sockets they put out for market traders. I'll… I don't know, hide up in the daytime, and come out at night like a sneaky, shiny, spherical urban fox."

"You think foxes are sneaky? You've never heard them having sex."

He barked an anxious laugh, eyes brightening. "Oh. Really? Um. Well I don't think I will be doing that?"

Laine dredged up a genuine smile. "All right." She drew a long deep steadying breath. "Compromise time. If you haven't figured it out by this time tomorrow, I'll take you to the police. Then at least I can make sure they actually do help you and don't just stick you on a shelf."

"So you only need to be out here one night? Good. We can go to a hotel instead."

She groaned, playfully. "You're an incorrigible little horror, sometimes. I don't have enough money. But it's fine. It's just one night."

"You're shivering. I don't like that you're scared and hurting on my account."

"Ugh. I'm just cold, all right?" she lied.

Polly considered it for a moment, expression set in a firm line. "Okay, fine," he huffed. "Help me get on there?"

"What? Why?" Laine gave him a long wary look.

"…just…" He caught the sigh before it could escape. "Please?"

Laine put out both hands and manhandled him up onto her pile of cardboard. There wasn't a whole lot of room, and… he seemed intent on getting as close as he could, tucking in between her legs and backing up until he was pressed against her abdomen.

"Uh," she said, not exactly sure what he was doing. She remembered he'd actually looked horrified at the concept of getting so close, when Mina had invited herself to sit with him for cuddles. "Do you… need to be this close?"

"Yep. All will become clear." He closed his shutters to make himself as smooth and round as possible, and gave a little side-to-side wriggle, like a small round bird getting comfortable. "I might suck at everything else but I can try and keep you warm, at least," he said, through her earbud.

His usually-cool exterior was distinctly warm under her palm. "How are you doing that?"

"You never noticed your laptop getting hot? Same principle."

"Yeah, but that's because it's old and shit and I ask it for too much." She thought about it a second. "Maybe I'm asking you for too much."

"If anyone's asking for too much, it's me. Just treat me like a big silver hot water bottle; it's fine." He gave a little chirp of humour. "I'll ignore the implication I'm old and shit."

She hesitantly wrapped her arms around him, feeling awkward. He was very close? (And there was a gun hidden away inside there.) But he was also very nice and warm and all right, fine, perhaps it was a good idea. "You sure this won't hurt you?"

"You're not that strong, girlfriend."

"You know what I meant. Overclocking like this."

"I wouldn't do it if it was gonna damage me."

They both heard the lie underlying his words, but neither had the spirit to get in an argument over it. If he wanted to do it, well. His decision, and all that.

"This okay?" he prompted, in her ear, once she'd stopped shifting around and apparently got comfortable.

"Yeah. Yeah, you're good, actually," she whispered back. She'd just about figured out the best angle that maximised how much she could get in contact with him. "Toasty." A pause. "Thank you."

"Least I could do!"

She rested her chin on her arm and listened to the soft whir of his fans, right below her ears. "When we get you home," she said, softly. "Would you stay in contact with us?"

He remained silent for several seconds. "I'd like that," he said, at last. "Very much. You and your friends are such lovely people and you've been super kind to me. I just don't know if I'd be allowed."

"You could do it secretly. We won't tell." She leaned her head sideways so her cheek was against him. "I mean, who else are you gonna watch shit telly with? We still have the end of that Silent Witness to watch, sometime."

"Secret besties," he mulled, and they both giggled.

"It doesn't have to be regularly. Just every now and then," Laine added. "So we know you're still ticking."

"Hmm." He remained quiet for a very long time, and when he finally spoke, his words were reluctant, as though he himself was only recognising them for the first time. "I might not be allowed to keep these memories. Please don't be sad if I can't keep in touch, even in secret."

"But-… they can't just delete them… can they? They're your experiences! They're not just data."

Except, she realised, they probably were, when you got down to the nitty-gritty of it.

"I don't know? My brain doesn't work the same way as yours, remember? Since we do now know I'm probably a little soldier who belongs to the army, I really don't think they'd let me remember all this. Especially not if it impairs my functioning."

"That's not fair…!"

"Hm."

Laine let it fester for a few moments. "Well that just proves why I need to stick with you," she asserted, firmly. "They can't delete my memories. I'll shout about you from the rooftops, if I have to."

"I hope you won't have to, but… thank you." There was a little subtle shift under her arms. "Now you really gotta get some rest, honey, or we'll both be bad-tempered garbage come tomorrow."

Laine snorted softly at the obvious change in subject, but obediently went quiet.

Polly sat quiet and patient while Laine tried to find that little thread to lead her off into an uncomfortable dreamland. Eventually, he felt her arms drift subtly looser and listened as her breathing deepened, and recognised she was asleep. He allowed his shutters to come open just enough to see out, to keep watch. Her arms were over his gun hatch and he had to hope his automatic processors wouldn't decide he needed it again.

Should he take his chance to slip away? She wouldn't be able to tell Tark anything if she had no idea where he'd gone-

He immediately took himself to task for even thinking it. Abandon your friend – yes, your friend – sleeping rough, on her own, vulnerable, nothing to defend her, in the cold and wet?

No. If there was one thing he was apparently good at, it was scaring dangerous felons away. If he had to be a gun with a face? Well, fine; he'd just have to be the best gun with a face.

oOoOoOo

They might have missed 101 by mere hours, but knowing that he had indeed been at the student flat had been the key to his colleagues finally getting a visual trace of him.

"As soon as we knew where he'd been, and when, we found the first footage of him," 43 explained, from Spacehawk's flight deck, as he played back the scraps of footage the zeroids had filtered out from all the thousands of hours of recordings from London's hundreds of CCTV cameras. "We could then follow him fairly easily, for a while."

Playing simultaneously on the viewscreen on the command console, and on a tablet in a London hotel, their prized footage was distant and grainy, made worse by the dim morning light, but undeniably showed a person walking alongside a familiar large metallic sphere that was somehow rolling itself down the street. 101 didn't look like he was under duress, and his companion didn't appear to be trying to steer him or force him to go anywhere, so Hiro was happy to conclude that the students were being honest when they said they considered the missing zeroid to be their friend, and were genuinely trying (in a… possibly-less-than-helpful way) to help him.

17 and 43 had carefully stitched the footage together into a long single montage. 101 and his new friend passed under one camera, and a new camera across the street picked them up; that followed them until the next camera around the corner spotted them. And so it continued; the video followed them all the way down the quiet Sunday-morning streets until they finally turned off into an underground station and briefly disappeared.

"We still don't actually have TfL's data," 43 apologised. "And they went back on the subway a few times. It's why it's taken us a while to find them each time. It's a big network with almost three hundred stations and we had to start from fresh every time they boarded. Lucky it was a Sunday so we had a clearer view, without all the commuters in the way."

The playback continued in the background, silently. Hiro watched his friend and the stranger make their way around London; the zeroid never once opened his shutters or revealed himself as anything more than a self-propelled ball, and actually – somehow – drew very little attention. Most Londoners didn't seem at all interested in the concept of spheres rolling themselves along. Perhaps they'd all seen far weirder. On those occasions the pair did interact with other humans, they didn't stop moving forwards, and the person they spoke to rarely stayed with them more than a minute.

Hiro wondered what 101's new friend had told people.

At regular intervals, they would disappear into cafés, or shopping outlets; even a library, briefly. Cafés seemed to be their preference; they'd often stay for thirty minutes, an hour maybe. Hiro quickly put two and two together and realised they were navigating by places that had wifi. So 101's antenna was broken.

Occasionally time skipped forwards in big jumps, where the unlikely duo turned off into a station, then jumped abruptly forwards to show them re-emerging from another several kilometres away. The light levels began to drop as evening drew in, and their detours into buildings grew less frequent as places closed for the night.

"And this," 43 said, cautiously, "is where they were attacked."

Hiro jerked his head up, heart jolting into a higher gear. "Attacked?! Are they all right?"

43 just looked back down at the screen.

Their attacker was hard to pick out from the shadows, at first – a wiry little man in dark clothing, skinny and sticking to the spots covered less well by the CCTV. He grabbed the woman's bag and almost made her go over on her backside, and 101 darted away into hiding so fast, it looked as though he'd been fired from a cannon. The woman exchanged a few words with the man, fumbling in her bag – offering him money? Which he didn't seem to want – while he threatened her with a knife… but then 101 returned and sent their attacker packing, casually disarming him with a very neatly-placed shot from his pistol.

Apparently shocked by the revelation that the zeroid was armed, 101's friend had cowered away from him, clutching her bag like a protective shield.

And 101 had fled from her.

Confused and blind (and maybe a little traumatised), he'd tumbled away in a wobbling, jagged roll, colliding with half a dozen things including a wall before finally making it into an alleyway.

After a minute or so, the woman had recovered from the shock, and got up and followed him. Hiro watched her wander, his heart in his mouth, as on several occasions she headed in completely the wrong direction. Eventually she homed in on the alleyway as well, and disappeared.

There was another significant break in the footage, where time hopped forwards and everything suddenly turned shiny from the light rain that hadn't been falling earlier, and the pair re-emerged. She stepped out first, and glanced down at him, holding out her hand. 101 followed her, sticking close to her ankles, much more slowly and drawing a subtly jittery line compared to how he'd previously been rolling strongly along, but moving steadily forwards anyway.

For the first time, Hiro got an inkling that maybe his friend was a lot more sad and scared than he'd been allowing anyone to see. He touched his fingers to the screen. "Stay strong," he said, softly.

"Beg pardon, sir?"

Hiro forced a smile for 43. "I was just thinking out loud, Forty Three. Please, continue playback?"

The video resumed, and the two runaways continued their travels. Hiro wasn't sure where they were going, precisely – and possibly they weren't all that sure, either? – but they continued moving for at least another thirty minutes, until finally turning down another street with no CCTV cover, whereupon they disappeared altogether, and playback stopped.

"We lost them at that point. They didn't come back out, and the other end of the street has no coverage," the zeroid confirmed, when Hiro gave him a questioning look. "We only have footage that goes up to 0300 hours, and we couldn't identify them in any of it. We're still waiting to receive the latest batch."

"What's the delay?" Ninestein challenged, from the hotel room he had shared with Mary.

"It's early Monday morning," 43 explained. "Their own operators are reviewing what's been going on over the weekend. We're low priority – to them, anyway."

"What time is it in London now?" Hiro checked his watch and did a quick calculation. "Approaching nine thirty?" At Ninestein's nod, he sighed. "They might be anywhere, by now."

"Do you think they were out on the street all night?" Mary wondered, distractedly dissecting a croissant.

Ninestein glanced at her and frowned. "Unless they suddenly decided to keep within camera blindspots, when they were never bothered before? Yeah. I imagine they found somewhere to stop for the night. Seems doubtful that it was a hotel."

"Poor woman. I can't imagine how frightening that must have been." She sighed. "But it's a good sign for 101."

"Captain…?" Hiro prompted. "I'm not clear on your reasoning."

"If he's out there with someone willing to sleep rough, after already having been attacked, just to avoid whoever is chasing them? That feels like proof he's found someone who genuinely cares what happens to him. Not just someone with…" She gestured with the corpse of the pastry. "…dollar signs in her eyes."

Ninestein intercepted the piece of croissant and ate it, to Mary's annoyed exclamation. "I couldn't deal with you turning the thing into any more crumbs. My uniform already looks like I slept in it-"

"You did."

"-I don't need to drop bits of mutilated pastry on it, too."

Hiro rested his weight on the console, wanting to urge them to just get out there and look for him. "101 has been out on the street all night. We have had identified no footage of him taken after… eleven o'clock? Earlier? They could have been abducted! Could have got into a vehicle and been taken anywhere, and we would have no idea-"

"Hiro." Ninestein put his hands up. "It's fine. We're heading out in a few minutes. Hudson and Zero are both already appraised and ready to go. We'll consider if 101 has been picked up by anyone else if we literally get nothing else at all on the new footage. But it'll be fine." He smiled, tiredly. "I'd be surprised if we haven't got them by this evening."

"You said that last time, if I recall."

"I know. But we can't possibly be that unlucky twice…"