Part 39: Hurry
November 2nd, 2011 - New York

1 : Max

Air rushed in his lungs as Max finally untangled himself from Zan's gripping memories. Pain hit him right in the middle of his chest as his head felt heavy enough to tilt him downward.

Hands grabbed him—to steady him, to guide him, to hold him, he really couldn't tell for what—while absurdly loud voices mixed up with beeping sounds and the floor looked like the ceiling at the same time.

Overhead, the lights started to shine brighter as his powers were making a run for it. He closed his eyes tightly—he was going to be sick.

"Let's give him some room," someone said, making all the hands go away except for two that were holding his shoulders down. "Max, just breathe, okay?"

Jake. It was Jake's voice. "You're hyperventilating. Slow down."

He was? He had no idea what his body was feeling, much less how to slow down if he couldn't even tell he was breathing at all.

"You've just survived Khivar's assassination attempt," Jake said, "your brain is in overload right now."

"I—I've just—I've just died," he managed to get out between erratic intakes of air.

"Yes, I'm pretty sure we lost you for a moment there," Jake said, his voice sounding strangely amused. Max shook his head.

"Zan—I finally—I remember—how he died…" and it was that thought that anchored Max's present to reality. He wasn't Zan anymore, he wasn't living trapped inside Zan's life, trapped in a dream that all but guaranteed they were both going to die.

"Max…" Liz said, finally coming into his view. In a world where he wasn't sure if he was real or dreaming, feeling her connection was all the reassurance he needed.

"Liz…"

She came to him, holding his hand and then embracing him over the narrow bed. He held her for dear life, not taking for granted the luxury of having her in his arms.

"I hate to say this, Your Majesty, but we need to move," someone said, a shifter by the sound of it. Liz untangled herself from him then. The world looked steady enough.

Bits and pieces of their earthly predicament started flowing through Max's mind. "How long was I out?" he asked as Jake shone a light in his eyes.

"A little over an hour," Liz said. A sense of urgency filled their connection as well as the air around them.

"How are you feeling?" Jake asked him, following the lines of various monitors.

"I'm…fine…" he said, convincing no one. He realized that Isabel was sitting right beside him, looking pale and spent. "Iz?"

"I'm…fine," she said with half a smile. "You took your time coming back," she said, passing a hand over her face to disappear all signs of exhaustion. "We do need to move, though. Jake?"

All eyes turned to look at the doctor. "If you can walk on your own, then I'll let you go," he said, looking stern. Max didn't wait for an invitation. He sat up with some effort as Isabel and Liz helped with detaching the various electrodes. The world moved in a peculiar way for a moment. Rose looked at him with narrowing eyes, as if she thought he was hiding Zan somewhere in there.

Maybe he was.

"Where are we going?" he asked as he stood up, his sense of balance taking a second before he felt confident about stepping forward.

"Well," Liz said right beside him, "the current plan is that we're going to Antar."

2 : Ray

"How long till the wormhole opens?" Ray asked as three different strategies were spinning at the back of his mind. He needed to get eleven people and eight shifters out of this place. They weren't going out together, and probably not all of them would even go out on the same route. They just had to get out.

"In about ten minutes. The coordinates must be precise since we're underground. We cannot have it opening in the middle of the compound and sucking out a metric ton of soil and concrete," Luke explained.

"Okay, the first group to go needs to make sure we're not arriving at an ambush," Ray said. "You know far better than I how this thing works, including security checks."

"We'll go by pairs at different intervals," Luke said, "I'll organize us, and once it's all clear, then Van and Zan should follow."

"We still need to split up to hurry the process of going and coming," Ray said. "As I see it, we have three entries," Ray said, pointing them out in the holographic blueprint in front of them. "The Unit is currently positioned here, and we most likely won't want to come out here, since it's too close to the road they're coming from. If some of us stay, our best bet is to go out this way, straight into New York City, and disappear."

"The compound has one Land Rover and three bikes," Luke explained, the hologram changing to a basement camera feed, where their escape vehicles were parked.

"The question is, who is going that route?" Michael said, narrowing his eyes.

"All shifters will be going to Antar," Luke said, "We'll be needed to protect Van as we cross between worlds. Zan, Vilandra, and yourself, General, have powers of your own that will be appreciated as well. Besides, I'd feel better knowing you're on Antar grounds rather than here on Earth, escaping bullets."

"You and I both," Michael said. Ray nodded.

"I'll take the old guard," Ray said. "Dave, Jake, Daniel, and me. Dave and Jake will take the car. Daniel and I will take the bikes. We'll separate in three different directions once we cross the bridge. If one of us is captured, at least it won't be all of us at once."

"I'll ask Maria, Liz, Kyle, and Jesse if they want to go with you," Michael said. "There's a chance we won't be able to come back to Earth as soon as we want."

"An ambush is unlikely but not unheard of," Luke agreed.

The door suddenly opened, and all three of them stood straight at once. It was Kyle, looking as if he wanted to punch someone.

"Dave wants you to know he can create a diversion to get us out in about half an hour… or twenty minutes with how long it took me to find this place," he muttered the last part.

"That's our timeframe, then," Michael said. "Select who's going to Antar first and get them going as soon as possible. We also need to—"

Michael stopped midsentence, his eyes unfocused for a moment. "Max…" he whispered, a sigh of relief following that word. "He's awake."

I'll never get tired of seeing their powers in action, Ray thought, amused.

"Wait, Antar?" Kyle said, confused. "As in your planet?"

"We're using a wormhole," Michael said by way of explanation.

"I'm not leaving this planet," Kyle said with all seriousness. "Daniel sold out Sybelle's location to the Unit. Dave is doing everything he can to find her in England."

"He what?" Michael and Ray asked at the same time.

"Max threw him into prison like an hour ago."

There were like ten questions wanting to get out of Ray's mouth at that moment, but all he said was, "If you're not going to Antar, then you're going with me."

"Gather everyone to their parting points," Michael said, "one way or another, we're leaving now."

3 : Maria

Antarian sounded like Portuguese, the Brazilian variety that was mellow and flowery. She had no idea what she would do if Michael suddenly started speaking like that. Van, on the other hand, was nailing it.

"We don't have time for a third recording," he said in perfect English. "We'll send the second one and hope for the best."

She wished they had the time to record this ten times over and edit it to perfection. Alas, she would have to trust him in this one. "You looked quite kingly delivering it," she asserted, while he turned to the communications console. The ship—the same one that had brought her husband here and gave her town its fame—loomed dark and cold behind it.

"With a little luck, everyone will think the same," Van said as lights switched on the board. He was transmitting it to the rebels on the other side. She hoped they were as impressed as Van had been with her hastily written speech. It was heartfelt and courageous—a cry for freedom born out of years of living in fear and persecution.

Besides, she had her stakes in this thing going viral, too. The sooner the Rebellion won, the sooner her husband would be free from this planet.

"It's done," Van said, for a moment frozen in place as if he, too, were considering the implications of his own words. After all, he had just declared to his entire solar system that he had royal blood, was a perfectly viable candidate for the throne, and that Zan had died for the second time not an hour ago.

Behind them, the wormhole machine was stirring to life. Soon, she will walk into the very place that ship had come from.

4: Langley

People were moving. Cars drove away while the police line grew thinner. Resources were being diverted, Langley thought, wondering if Dave had anything to do with that.

Beside him, explosives were being moved inside the narrow passage inside the warehouse. The SWAT team had already breached the first of the three doors, and they were aiming to destroy the second.

He was running out of time.

Behind his SWAT mask, Langley moved towards McKay's location. If he cut the head of this operation, chaos would erupt, giving them an opening. He knew without a doubt that Luke and the shifters were looking for a way out, and he intended to give them a clear signal that it was time to leave.

He reached the van that was the makeshift headquarters—to find no one there. Frowning, Langley turned around just to catch the last Special Unit agent getting into a car.

They're leaving, too? That didn't make sense.

Moving in their direction, he barely heard someone shouting before the force of an explosion threw him sideways and slammed him into a car. By the time the warehouse room collapsed under the fire a second later, Langley was no longer part of the game.

5 : Kyle

By the time Kyle traced back his steps to go get Dave, things had changed in that room. He'd never seen Dave frantic before. Not even slightly afraid, and that was something when he'd interacted with Michael every other month. But seeing Dave furiously typing on his computer as he searched for Sybelle only brought home that Kyle was not the greatest danger around her—Dave was.

Well, that's a depressing thought. Both men in her life are nothing but bad news for her…

Kyle closed his eyes for a moment to look for his inner center. He was going to propose to that woman and have his happily ever after. He was going to make her happy in the same way she brought peace to his turbulent life. She loved him for him the same way he loved her for herself. No aliens, no godfathers, nothing but themselves mattered in this equation.

If he had to survive the Royal House of Antar along with the FBI's Special Unit, so be it. It had never been easy for him, why would this be any different?

"Hey, we're leaving," Kyle said. "Ray just sent me to fetch you and help you out with any equipment."

Dave didn't slow down for a second.

"I've sent a thousand distractions up there so we can leave, I just need a minute to find her…" he trailed off for a moment, his eyes moving side to side at a vertiginous pace. "She was supposed to come to New York early and surprise you," Dave said in a flat tone as he typed. "She bought tickets to arrive first thing tomorrow. I thought—all this goddamn day long I thought she was safe, away from here, away from you, and certainly away from everybody else."

Kyle wanted, really, really wanted to point out that the list should also include Dave himself, but the man looked like hell to do that right now.

"Where did you lose her?" he asked instead.

Dave passed both hands over his head in an uncharacteristic look of desperation. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

"McKay doesn't have her yet," Dave said suddenly, opening his eyes with stone-hard certainty. He resumed typing again, not frantically but with absolute concentration.

"What can I do?" Kyle asked.

"Right now, shut up for a minute."

Easy for you to say, Kyle thought, as Dave's own thoughts started to intrude into Kyle's. It had been relatively easy to ignore Dave's mostly white-noise brain when he'd been looking for Sybelle a minute ago. Now, though, every neuron in Dave's mind screamed the name McKay in big, bold red letters.

Then an avalanche of coding commands and hacking almost drown Kyle's own mind. If the pod squad's minds were crystal clear, Dave's was the next best thing. Organized, straightforward, and flowing in one single direction. He wasn't looking for McKay, he was looking for what the Unit had been doing outside New York City for the past eight hours.

"They don't have her yet?" Kyle asked, placing a hand against the wall so he wouldn't fall. The speed Dave's mind worked was dizzying, to say the least.

"No. Think about it. Everything happened today. Daniel stole information about Antar and knew about Van coming today. He lets that slip to McKay, either consciously or by ineptitude, so McKay knows today is a big day for our alien friends. They're all going to be here today, in US ground, waiting for him to get them."

In retrospect, it probably had been a stupid idea to come to the US. They had been with Dave for so long now, without a whiff of the Unit behind them, that they had gotten complacent. Dave had gotten complacent, too. The guilt was just waiting to sprout from the back of his mind to his conscious thoughts.

"He didn't know about Sybelle until today, though," Dave continued while he typed, "He didn't taunt me with her when I was his prisoner earlier."

"He didn't have her earlier," Kyle said, frowning, "But he still might have her now."

"Maybe, but it's not a sure thing. In any case, I only need to sort through what the Unit was doing in the last few hours."

"We still need to leave—"

The explosion rocked the entire underground before Kyle could finish that sentence. They froze for a second as the light flickered above them but held. Dave closed his laptop and grabbed it. A moment later, they were both running down the hall.