Jazz did not feel prepared for any of this, but she'd felt prepared for precious little since she'd discovered Danny's secret.

She couldn't pretend to be a ghost or otherwise pretend she was anywhere she was supposed to be right now, so she didn't even try. If she caught a glimpse of something from the corner of her eye, she willed herself to pass through a wall instead of thinking twice about it.

Jazz didn't recognize the ghosts through whose cells she passed, though to be fair, she didn't exactly stop long enough to get a good look at them. It was a while before any of them tried to stop her, either; most were too startled to do more than stare before she was gone again.

Naturally, her luck didn't hold, and it felt like her search had barely begun before some giant, green-skinned ghost who might as well have been the Hulk swiped at her, failed to nab her, and started yelling for the guards.

She had a fleeting thought that she wouldn't be much leverage if the ghost were trying to broker a deal by exposing what she was doing, but now everything was going to be harder, and that was the last thing she needed.

Even if a tiny bit of her good luck held and the prisoner wasn't instantly believed about what he'd seen, the fuss would surely find its way to the others, and—

She'd just blown this for them, hadn't she?

Jazz stopped to catch her breath when she found herself in a room without lights. No alarms yet. That was promising. That meant she had a little bit of time. Not a lot, but a bit. Enough that she could figure this out. Hopefully. She hadn't seen Danny, but maybe she'd started on the wrong floor. This place wasn't exactly small.

And, okay, fine, so she didn't know what she'd do once she found Danny, but he'd have prepared for this possibility before they'd executed this plan. Surely he had. It would be sheer idiocy not to when it was such a likely outcome.

Then again, it was Danny.

He was a lot more comfortable with figuring things out on the fly than she was, and rightfully a lot more confident about pulling it off successfully, too.

"Okay," Jazz whispered to herself, since she hoped saying the words aloud would make this whole thing seem more feasible, "I'll find Danny. I'll grab him and we'll keep running. We can circle back, grab the others…."

And leave Vlad to go free because they'd all run off without doing more than dropping him off without enough evidence to do anything.

Maybe she should stick with just getting Danny somewhere safe for now. Danielle hadn't exactly seemed to be afraid of Walker. She knew what she was getting into. She knew his system. Like she'd said, she'd be the one to actually press the charges against Vlad, so Danny didn't technically have to be part of that. His testimony as a witness might help, but if it got him into more trouble than it did Vlad, it wasn't worth it. He should be able to cut and run with little consequence to the case against Vlad.

Except Jazz doubted Walker would see it that way.

He didn't strike her as the most accommodating type of ghost.

He'd probably see Danny's running as a conviction of his own guilt for whatever crime Danny had hanging over his head, but Walker was already convinced of that, so it was a moot point. As far as Vlad's case was concerned…. He might suspect Danny of giving false testimony. Was perjury a thing with ghosts? If Walker had the sole power—incredibly biased as he was—could he simply decide that something was untrue even if it wasn't? This was his domain. Ghosts were more powerful within their own domains. She didn't—

She could get Danny out first and deal with the consequences after.

Danny could fly her somewhere safe. They could leave a cryptic note back on the Fenton Blimp if they had to, and then they could go…wherever. She hadn't been in here enough times to guess where might be safe—or at least safer. Danielle could handle herself.

Of course, Jazz wasn't wild about having Dani also take care of Alicia and Maddie, especially when she hadn't even asked her to do that.

Then again, this was Dani's plan, as much as it was a plan. She wouldn't be assuming that Jazz and Danny would find a way to come back for them if she wanted to prioritize getting Danny away from Walker, would she?

Jazz swallowed.

Danielle knew that Danny wasn't going to remain protected, not with Walker in charge.

Jazz had made enough wrong assumptions to last her a lifetime in the last year alone, but she was willing to gamble that Dani trying to protect both Alicia and Maddie in Danny's absence wouldn't be one of them.

If Danny were in Danielle's place, he'd try to protect them, even considering what had happened. That would be something to unpack later, once they weren't in immediate danger. He wouldn't leave them—wouldn't leave Maddie—to the wolves.

Or to the warden, rather.

And the rest of his ghost goons.

Right.

Okay.

Find Danny.

Get out.

Figure things out from there.

Jazz could do that.

Couldn't she?

Maddie slipped past more than one floor, sliding through another interrogation room (empty) and cell blocks (less empty; she hadn't recognized the ghost in the first cell she'd fallen through, a giant green troll-like creature with onyx horns longer than her arms, but the second one had contained a genie-like ghost that looked vaguely familiar) alike before figuring out how to will herself to stop. Once she managed it, she collided none-too-gently with the Ghost Zone equivalent of vinyl tile. Granted, it felt like concrete and was, for all she knew, a manipulation of one of the various rocks that were so plentiful in this area, but—

There wasn't time for that now.

She needed to keep moving.

She needed to—

Maddie blinked, finally allowing herself to process what she was seeing.

She was not in some sort of interrogation room, cell, or even office space.

She was in a laboratory.

The lights above were a purer white than she would have expected from somewhere within the Ghost Zone. If it was powered by ectoplasm, it was filtered. The sort of tinge she'd expect of light given off by unfiltered ectoplasm—green, usually, though through experimentation she and Jack had turned some pink, and they'd gotten a flash of blue out of it once—was conspicuously absent. If she didn't know better, she'd think she'd fallen straight through a portal and into the human realm again.

She stood slowly, holding the edge of the nearest lab bench to steady herself, the black countertop smooth beneath her fingers. There were few chairs and no anti-fatigue mats that she could see, but the space was far larger than she'd have expected. Not that she'd expected to find a laboratory within a prison, but this was larger than their basement lab. It was tidier, too, for all that none of the drawers in her sight were labelled; the same was not true of the books and binders on the shelving to her left, nor of the graduated glass storage bottles to her right.

Maddie picked up the jar nearest her and traced her thumb over the black sharpie scrawled on the clear surface less than an inch from the 2 L marking.

95% ETOH.

It shouldn't be enough for her to feel the sense of familiarity that she did.

She replaced the jar, careful to keep the handwritten label facing out, just as she'd found it, and pulled open the drawer nearest her. Pens, pencils, sharpies, sticky notes, lab tape, ruler—

Notebook.

More specifically, lab book.

Unlabelled, true; there was nothing on the hard black cover to even indicate that it had been used.

But it didn't sit as perfectly flat as an unused book would, and it had been where she'd looked for it.

She had a sinking feeling that there would be spare scalpels and forceps and pipette tips and replacement o-ring seals and such in the drawer below it. There might even be a repeating pipette, as she didn't see one on the stand next to the vortex mixer with the others. Below that would be the test tubes and centrifuge tubes, both glass, both neatly organized by boxes into their specific size; the plastic microfuge tubes were in their own containers on the shelving in front of her, along with screw caps and bottles and mixing beads and too many other bits and bobs that she recognized. The cupboard on the other side of the opening where a chair should be would hold the test tube racks and the drawer above it would have all the lids and stoppers, similarly sorted.

She turned around and was entirely unsurprised to see the glassware—graduated cylinders, Erlenmeyer flasks, beakers, volumetric flasks—neatly shelved by size, with everything from Bunsen burners to mortar and pestles to burettes to rubber gloves in their own places nearby. There was a whole host of sterilized tools and sharpened blades for dissection equipment, and when she moved closer, she saw that some shelves were marked treated in the same neat hand. She picked up a scalpel, the weight terribly familiar in her hand. Both handle and blade—#60, the same tool she'd used on Danielle—gave off a faint green sheen when tilted under the lights.

Phase-proof.

It was further confirmation that she didn't need, just as she didn't need to open the doors of the equipment to know which were refrigerators and which were freezers. She didn't need to look to know where the centrifuges and water baths would be, which wall would host the fume hood and the biosafety cabinet, which storage cabinet would contain the flammable chemicals and which shelves held all the chemicals safe and stable at room temperature….

She should not know the organization of a lab she'd never been in, but Vlad was a creature of habit.

Her recent stint in his lab at his home, however brief, had told her he hadn't changed as much as he might have in the years since she'd worked so closely with him. It had been easy for her to fall back into the rhythm of working with him because so little had changed. Whenever she'd asked where to find something, his answer had invariably been the one she'd expected, and in the end, she'd realized she hadn't needed to ask to know where to find something.

This was merely more proof.

Maddie carefully slipped the scalpel into her pocket as she walked to the part of the lab that had machinery she didn't immediately recognize. Past the pH meters and the gel baths set up near one of the sinks was a steel table not unlike the one on which she'd had Danielle only days ago, but beyond that….

The human-sized capsule wouldn't have been out of place in a sci-fi movie, and from what she could make out of the controls without turning it on?

It was some sort of growth chamber.

A kind of pyrex glass hatch fit tightly into smooth metal, rubber stripping along the edges to ensure a complete seal when the chamber within was filled with liquid. She could see tubing inside—thick enough to be durable yet, when she moved it, flexible enough to be bent as needed—and guess the path of what would, in an active chamber, be the circulating liquid within.

The chamber was clean now, completely dry, but she couldn't shake the knowledge that it had likely held something akin to amniotic fluid, meaning it had also—

She'd done her fair share of cell culture and tissue culture, but that had all been on a small scale; she'd worked mostly with microfuge tubes and petri dishes. This?

This was beyond her.

It shouldn't bother her. Her lack of knowledge, that is. Vlad had had twenty years to develop his knowledge, and since he'd amassed his fortune, he'd had more opportunity to pursue avenues that would have been closed off to her and Jack. Machinery aside, even this lab itself was a commendable feat. Getting electricity—or its equivalent, more likely; ecto-energy was incredibly versatile—to work in the Ghost Zone shouldn't surprise her. Vlad had always been capable of incredible feats of ingenuity.

But seeing all of this, somehow….

She hadn't doubted his involvement, not really, especially not since she'd met Madeline, but….

The confirmation hurt more than it should for something she'd thought she'd already accepted.

Or, maybe, that dread and fear that had her skin crawling came from the fact that the lab being here meant either it had been sanctioned by Walker or he had much less control over his domain than even he realized.

She wasn't even sure if a corrupt warden was worse than an arrogant fool of one.

Neither would particularly help their case.

Then again, he'd told her creating a ghost wasn't against the rules.

He might not see anything wrong with this.

It wasn't as if she'd read his rulebook.

From the sounds of it, Danielle knew it best. She'd known about Section M, whatever that was, and it must contain something that had afforded them protection, but Maddie didn't know if it would still offer them that protection now that their circumstances had changed. She'd hardly gotten that impression from Walker.

Then again, maybe Section M didn't truly protect them at all. If some subsection or clause clarified a loophole Danielle had meant to exploit, and Walker had somehow found the time to read over his own rules more carefully—

It might have been a bluff or a mistake on Danielle's part. The rulebook hadn't been small, and memorizing it was hardly something Maddie would expect of a child.

Of course, if this Ghost Writer did have a copy of it in his library, which he must have if that's where Danielle had found it, Maddie rather imagined that Danielle had done more than flip through it. She'd have had ample reason for looking.

If she'd feared her very existence might be seen as against the rules, preparing arguments to the contrary would only have been wise.

Granted, that begged the question of what arguments they could make that would condemn Vlad's use of Madeline when Danielle was right there. Maddie might not know her whole story, exactly, but the ghost guards had addressed both her and Danny as Phantoms. They might know Danielle's story—or at least enough of it to make a difference. They might be able to use it to argue against whatever Maddie tried to say.

Maddie's hands tightened on the ridge of cool metal along the opened hatch of the machine and squeezed her eyes shut against the tears that threatened to spill.

She didn't have time to break down.

She had to get through this.

She had to find the others. Get out. Regroup. If Walker truly did have Jack somewhere as she suspected, she had to—

"Oh, Maddie."

The soft words sent ice down her spine. She shouldn't have expected that she'd remain alone or assumed that she'd hear anyone else coming when so few here needed to even touch the ground as she did.

She should have questioned the fact that the lights had been on when the lab itself was otherwise unoccupied.

And she should have expected Walker to lie to her when he had little reason to tell her the truth.

"I wish you hadn't seen this."

The next time Jazz stopped running, it wasn't by choice.

She was some two floors above where she'd started, and the wall she'd meant to dash through had looked the same as the others aside from the absence of doors, but her bleeding, throbbing nose—and everything else that had collided with the stupid wall—begged to differ. She shoved tissues into her nostrils and leaned on the wall, waiting for the world to stop spinning.

The sudden pulsing in her head was not helped by the continuous alarms. She wished someone would shut them off. She wished—

Wait.

Was that yelling?

This floor didn't seem to have cells; most of what she'd passed through seemed to be storage or office space, not to mention some archives or records room which she would have assumed would've made more sense being in the basement, the weight of paper being what it was, but it wasn't like this place made logical sense to her. If it did, she wouldn't be having so much trouble finding Danny, and Walker's office wouldn't be where it was, separated from any equivalent that she could see.

Still.

Most of this floor had been empty, probably because of the lockdown. Anyone who was supposed to be working here had likely moved to a different floor when the alarms had started—or moved to a different room on this floor that she hadn't passed through yet—so that had made hiding from the patrolling guards easier; when she ducked through a wall into another room, it was typically empty.

Until now, when she couldn't ghost through this wall like she had everywhere else.

It might be in her head, but Jazz put her ear to the wall and pounded on it with the heel of her hand. She didn't want to risk yelling herself, not yet. If she was wrong….

If she was wrong, she'd probably find herself in one of the interrogation rooms she'd passed through. The ones which had suspiciously not contained Danny. Or Walker, at least. She could be thankful for small mercies.

Jazz pounded again and nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard the responding banging from the other side, strong enough that she imagined it was shaking the walls.

Or maybe that was due to her recent run-in with said wall.

She slammed the heel of her hand into the wall again, this time in a particular rhythm. Shave and a haircut. If it was Danny, he wouldn't be able to resist the response. Leaving it unfinished always drove him nuts, so—

The response wasn't two answering thumps.

It was an achingly familiar threat, slightly muffled but still very much distinct.

"Let me out of here, you putrid piece of ghost scum! I'm going to tear you apart molecule by molecule if you don't!"

"Dad!" She didn't care about not yelling anymore. "Dad! It's me! Where's the door?" She hadn't seen it. It had to exist, obviously, she had no doubt about that, but—

"If you're impersonating my Jazzy-pants," growled Jack, "I'll rip you apart atom by atom!"

"No, it's me!" That wouldn't convince him. "I'll explain later!" That wouldn't, either. "Where's the door?" No response. He wasn't sure if he could believe her. What had they done to him? Whatever it was, it hadn't been too taxing physically, not if the strength of his pounding was any indication, and he was too angry, too much himself, to have undergone anything too worrisome mentally. "I'm going to look for the door!"

He was here. She'd found him. He was—okay, maybe he wasn't safe, but he wasn't dead and didn't sound grievously injured, so she'd take it.

Jazz followed the hallway, turning when it turned. There was another stretch with no doors on her left, and then she hit what she was pretty sure was the outside wall. She tested that theory with her hand before she tried her head, and she confirmed that easily enough—albeit carefully; she hadn't noticed any shouts or spotlights or other indications that she'd been seen. She wasn't wild about trying her luck getting into this place from the outside, though. She worked out more than Danny did, but she did not have upper body strength or free climbing skills to the point that she could cling to a wall and not fall to her death instead. She would be spotted before she managed that.

Which meant heading back the way she'd come and then going the other way. Going right and then left hadn't helped her; when she got back to her starting point, she'd head left. The door had to be that way.

Jazz nearly ran into a patrol, but a quick dodge through a wall that was permeable to her saved her. She crouched down in the archives room she'd run through earlier and held her breath, but no one came for her.

Were these patrols not looking for her? The others had at least checked rooms. Phasing through a wall at the last moment had been the only thing to save her more than once. Maybe they weren't used to dealing with humans so forgot that she could get into locked rooms here as easily as they could in her realm?

Or maybe they were thinking every room on this floor was as solid as the one which held her father.

Jazz forced herself to wait longer than she ever had before. Her head appreciated the reprieve, and she was probably lucky she hadn't straight up broken her nose, but she was antsy. Waiting was hard. Before, moving had been essential. Now that she'd found something? Not getting caught was even more important.

If the guards had seen her and were merely waiting for her outside of the wall where she'd ran in….

A different exit it was. She'd peek out at floor level first to make sure the coast was clear, then roll out, get to her feet, and creep back until she found the windowless hallways again.

Until she found Jack again.

And then she'd find the door and hug him and promise him she'd explain later. Getting out was more important. She'd come back for Danny. He'd understand. All she needed to do was—

There wasn't a third hallway.

The fourth wall with the door she had expected to find was another outside wall.

How had she not realized she was in one corner of the building? She'd forgotten that part of it had been higher than the rest, forgotten that she'd hit the outside here faster than she had on other floors because of that, forgotten—

Jazz took a breath, held it, and let it out slowly.

Two outside walls.

Two windowless hallways.

The stupid door wasn't a door at all.

It had to be a hatch of some sort.

This was the Ghost Zone. Accessing a room only from the rooftop would be distinctly less inconvenient for them, and dropping a human into a phase-proof room with the only entrance or exit being on the ceiling would be an effective prison.

Crud.

Why hadn't she kept some Fenton Fisher line on her? She could have used it as a rope. It would have been strong enough to hold her weight and Jack's. It wouldn't have been convenient, but she could've rigged up some kind of pulley system or something to make up for the fact that it wasn't a climbable rope.

Granted, that didn't matter when she didn't have some line with her in the first place.

She was forever nagging Danny for being ill-prepared, but apparently she couldn't talk.

Rooftop access. There had to be rooftop access somewhere. A locked door wouldn't stop her. At least, nothing else had, so she doubted it would. Creating a single room humans couldn't break into—or rather, out of—had to be a lot easier than giving the same treatment to the entire facility, especially retroactively.

"I'm coming, Dad," whispered Jazz. "Just hold on a little longer."