Who: Gunnar Richards, Evelyn Foster, Thea Peeters & Charlie Archer What: An unintentional rescue mission (2/2) Where: A reincarnate “treatment” facility in Pittsburgh, PA When: Saturday, January 23rd 2016 Warnings: Violence, torture, and language
Below. Gunnar inclined his head, indicating only that he’d heard what Evelyn had said. It made sense that they would keep the reincarnates down below; it lessened the chance of escape, even if they were to get out of their cells. Fewer ways out, if someone was kept below ground, than there were on a ground floor, or even an upper floor—desperate people would be willing to risk death, or serious injury, jumping out of a window to escape. There were no windows below ground, and far fewer reincarnates that came to Gunnar’s mind, at least, that could tunnel through the earth somehow than there were those who could fly. Not only that, but earth on all sides of them would muffle the sound of any screams. He had speculated that it was the most likely location for any reincarnates that had been imprisoned there. It was always nice to be proven correct; if the man wasn’t lying, they’d know the likeliest location to search first the next time they located a facility that was still operational. It would save time, and time was precious.
“Well done,” he told Evelyn, a hint of warmth to his voice. “Getting to the reincarnates is our first priority. We will destroy anything else on our way out of the building.” Whether there were any surviving reincarnates would determine the fate of this man, and of those that Gunnar had incapacitated upon his entrance. If there were none left alive, those responsible for their deaths would share their fate. If there was someone left… there was likely far more blood on their hands than Gunnar and Evelyn would ever know about. Whether Gunnar would consider leaving them alive was really up to how urgent it was to remove the reincarnates from the building.
All warmth had fled, however, when he ordered the man to “go.” It wasn’t as though he’d needed any extra incentive than Evelyn’s push, more than likely, but he had stumbled and hesitated, likely frozen in his fear. It was, Gunnar imagined, his worst nightmare, being at the mercy of reincarnates. That was why they captured them, tortured them, killed them, wasn’t it? It was all because they feared them, as they ought to. Gunnar would show the man what a real nightmare looked like. If Gunnar was his nightmare, this was Gunnar’s.
The man stumbled again toward the stairs, pulling out some sort of key card with shaking fingers. Gunnar’s lips twisted into a smirk as he fumbled with the door, over and over, running the card through the electronic lock with no success. “It’s… it’s broken.” There was an edge of fresh panic in his voice, trapped between two angry reincarnates and a door he couldn’t flee through.
With a wave of his hand, Gunnar pulled the door off its hinges and dropped it to the side. As entertaining is it might have been to have kept toying with him, they had someone to save.
Thea wasn’t really sure what the second part of her plan was following the feat with the cell door. She didn’t have the energy in her for another huge strength display, especially the one that it would take to pull the mechanized door open to escape. The two guards hit by the door were knocked out, but there were several others now advancing on her with their guns raised, and they didn’t look too hesitant about using them. Thea backed up with her hands raised in surrender; this had been a bad idea. She was one kid, and she definitely wasn’t bullet-proof.
Everybody in the room froze when they heard the groaning noise of metal against metal, punctuated with cracking as the metallic door ripped away from the wall to reveal the two people behind it. People was possibly a misnomer considering the one lady was blue and scaly, so probably a mutant, but still. They were definitely not with the soldier guys whose attentions were now diverted from her and on the bigger threats now facing them.
Thea stared at the two with wide-eyed astonishment as it slowly clicked who she was looking at. She didn’t know the lady, but she could easily put together that she had to be the reincarnate of Mystique. That much she knew. But the man, the man she recognized from the boards, and for a second she thought the universe was playing a cruel trick on her. Of all the people to storm into here with powers, she’d been expecting Captain America, or The Hulk, or even Jay with her Uncle Bishop and the Young Avengers. But.
“Stinky Magneto?!” She clamped her mouth shut too late. It probably wasn’t best to insult those who were her only chance of getting out of there.
She’d nodded at Gunnar to show she understood the change of plans. Normally, they would get right to work on the demolition portion of their routine, because they always arrived to a facility too late to actually save anyone, and every other placed they’d happened upon had always been completely deserted. Not even men with guns left behind for them to deal with. Now, they had to rearrange their priorities a little to accommodate the unexpected prisoner factor, but Eve had no complaints. Getting to whoever was left in this place to be liberated was temporarily more important than the message they always left behind, but they would be no less efficient in destroying from the inside on their way out. They would have to be quicker about getting out, to ensure the safety of their precious cargo, but they would make do. Eve didn’t know what kind of state whoever they found would be in, so they would have to improvise accordingly. It was just as important now to get them to safety as it was to continue spreading their messages of fear and intimidation to those who would try and continue to oppress reincarnates.
As soon as Gunnar wrenched the door from its hinges, Eve was pushing the man down the stairs in front of her, like a shield. She had no sympathy or concern for his safety, and it soon became apparent as they descended the short flight of steps and down into what looked to be a lab that she would need the cover. The place was already in some sort of disarray, from what Eve could tell, with the make-shift cell across the room that was curiously missing a door. There were more men with guns, though some of them were on the floor, appearing to be unconscious with the missing cell door pinning them down. There was a small girl with her hands raised, guns pointed at her, and it didn’t take much to figure out that she was who they were here for.
“Cover me,” Eve spoke behind her to Gunnar, not hesitating before making her way into the room, still holding the man in front of her as a precaution. One of the armed men warned her to let him go and to move away from him with her hands up. Obviously, Eve was only planning to do one of those things. Abruptly, she shoved him forward into one of his cohorts, surprising the other man enough that when his gun went off, it was pointed wildly at the ceiling. Eve used that to her advantage and in a burst of impressive speed, ducked and slid along the floor as two more men pointed their guns at her, sweeping their legs clean out from under them. She sprang to her feet and spun around on the spot, delivering a swift kick to the face of another near her to clear her path before launching herself forward in a mad dash to get to the girl. She couldn’t worry about the guns, Gunnar would just have to make sure she didn’t get shot in the back.
Eve didn’t recognize the kid, though she seemed to recognize at least one of Gunnar’s personas. Maybe she was a mutant, but either way, she was obviously a reincarnate. They needed to get her out of there. Entering the cell, Eve extended her hand to the girl, consciously trying to look as harmless as possible. She wasn’t harmless, but Eve wouldn’t hurt her. She would only hurt the men who had. “Come with me. We’re going to get you out of here now.”
It was far quicker getting through the building when they weren’t trying to destroy everything in their path on the way; common sense, but nothing that Gunnar had considered, before, when the main point of their trek through the facilities had been destruction of the things inside, so that they could never be used on another reincarnate again. It was a different mission altogether, rescuing someone, one that they were far less prepared for than they were creating a path of destruction. Gunnar had never carried out a rescue. He wasn’t certain if Evelyn had, in her work for the Resistance, but he was improvising. It wasn’t a situation he was comfortable with, improvising, but their first destruction of a facility had been entirely improvised, as well. They would, he hoped, meet with enough success in locating these places before they were shut down that they would develop the same sort of easy routine when it came to a rescue, in time.
The lab they entered looked much like the ones they had seen emptied, but the reality of it was far worse than Gunnar had imagined. Here was where they had experimented on those like himself and Evelyn, and here was where they had died, reincarnates whose names he wouldn’t know until they liberated the files. There had been no chance to erase anything on the computers, or even attempt to erase. If they were able to take out the people in the room and rescue the reincarnate, they might be able to acquire even more information, so long as they were quick about it. The first priority, of course, was the reincarnate… the child, standing in the cell with far too many guns pointed at her. His brow furrowed in confusion at her exclamation (stinky?), but he ignored it as men with guns reacted to his and Evelyn’s intrusion, instead. One child was not as threatening as two adults, after all, no matter what her powers might have been.
He didn’t need Evelyn’s instruction in order to cover her. It was instinct, when she moved, to stop any bullets that erupted from the guns in midair, to drop them to the floor as useless pieces of metal, never again to be fired, and never to find their mark. The cell door, lying free, was the best aid that the child they were there to rescue could have given Gunnar. He scooped it up, swatting at armed men with it to bat them away from Evelyn, and away from the child. If he knocked them out in the process, all the better, but the most important issue at hand was keeping them from getting in Evelyn’s way. It was the only sort of cover that she needed.
One of them had the brilliant idea to come after Gunnar, physically. Brilliant, if they were assuming that he was brains without brawn, someone incapable of surviving a physical fight because he preferred to hang back and use his less mundane talents, instead of brawling, or if they assumed that he wouldn’t risk injuring himself with flying metal. His control was fine enough that he was able to bring up the door that he’d ripped off the hinges itself behind him, swing it around until he could block. It was done swiftly enough that the oncoming man couldn’t dodge it, and ran into it face first. Gunnar dropped the door on top of him, stopped another barrage of bullets before it could hit Evelyn and the child. There were fewer, this time, more men down. He smacked another of them with the cell door.
Thea only had a moment to gape at Gunnar before all hell broke loose, and she lost her moment to dwell. There were still men in there, armed men, who were pretty hell bent on preventing her escape--and hurt the two people trying to perpetuate it. Thea’s bring brown eyes narrowed in anger at the scene before her; when she’d gotten Molly, when she’d become a reincarnate, she had greeted the experience with the naivety of a teenager. She saw the whole thing as an awesome adventure, and often invited danger because she wanted to be a kick-ass superhero like in the comics. She’d never thought about the dark side of being a hero. One even Molly had to deal with. The heroes didn’t always win.
It was that harsh reality that caused her to lash out and kick one of the men in the face, a man who was already down on the floor and--while not unconscious--probably not getting up for a while. The impact on his nose made a sickening crunching noise, and blood gushed from the afflicted appendix. Thea didn’t feel guilty for a moment, especially when she remembered that at one point she hadn’t been the only reincarnate in here. It probably wasn’t the most mature reaction, but she didn’t care. It made her feel better.
And then she nodded at Eve, and grabbed the woman’s hand. Magneto and Mystique though they were, they were her only way out of there, and they hadn’t seemed so bad in the five minutes since they’d burst through the door. She would at least follow them out of the facility, and if she had to break free from there and somehow make her way home, she would. But they were her best chance at escape, and she was no longer hesitating to follow Eve.
“So you’re Mystique?” She asked curiously, starting to babble nervously. “I’m Thea. I’m a mutant, too. There used to be other reincarnates, but they died. Are you going to kill these guys? Are you going to destroy this place? You should.” She paused. “Do you always work with Magneto?”
Eve was maybe a little unprepared for the sudden onslaught of questions, though perhaps she should have expected them. She wasn’t exactly experienced with… children. Eve wasn’t immediately sure how old this girl was, but she couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen. To Eve, that still qualified as a child. Thea spoke as young as she looked, and that was maybe what struck the older woman most. She still possessed the air of a young girl, but she already talked of killing as if she was missing that spark of innocence that told you when you were young that it was wrong. She’d lost some of that innocence in here. Well, that was to be expected. Who knows what had happened to her in this place. Eve was no protector of the innocent and she had a fairly creative imagination, but she didn’t want to dwell on the sort of inhumane treatment and torture that Thea most likely endured during her time held here. It just made her more angry.
And Thea was a mutant.
Not that it would have made a real difference if she was another kind of reincarnate, but the fact that Thea was also a fellow mutant just made Eve and Mystique that much more invested in this cause. The way reincarnates were treated in this world, they might as well all be labeled mutants, and the way the girl proclaimed herself to be one… it pulled hard at something deep within them, impossible to ignore. Eve was not what you’d call a very sentimental woman, but she wasn’t without any feeling at all. She felt quite a bit, actually, even if she kept most of it closer to the chest. There was something of an unspoken softness to Eve under layers of ice that didn’t often show itself, except perhaps in this instance. While she might come off every bit the cold, hard woman that she often painted herself as, it was her passions that drove her. And in this case, her passion to help reincarnates, and mutants, escape their oppressors.
“We’re going to destroy it,” Eve assured her, carefully not addressing the first part of that question. She didn’t feel right, telling a child that they planned to kill the men in here, regardless of whether or not they would, but oh, did Eve want to. That couldn’t be her first priority now, however, first they would have to make sure Thea got to safety. “But not before we get you out.” She squeezed the small hand in hers reassuringly, a flicker of a smile on her face at the mention of Gunnar. Eve understood. Magneto had a reputation. “Don’t worry. He won’t hurt you either.”
Gunnar had been making quick work of putting all the guards in the room out of commission, so that when Eve turned with the girl in hand, they had a relatively clear path (apart from the unconscious bodies on the floor) to make a break for the stairs. Even so, she still stayed a little bit in front of Thea, just in case any more bullets came flying at them. “We should go.”
At the very least, Gunnar was more accustomed to dealing with children than Evelyn. He did have nieces and nephews, after all. Perhaps he hadn’t been around as often as he should have, while they were growing up, and perhaps he had let expensive presents for Christmas and birthday take the place of any displays of affection, but there had been family holidays where Uncle Gunnar hadn’t been entirely unpopular. It hadn’t made him necessarily good at dealing with teenagers, but he’d learned how to tolerate his encounters with them, even find some measure of enjoyment when it was teenagers that he happened to be related to.
This girl didn’t fit into that category, but Gunnar directed a level look at her anyway and, deadpan, asked, “If I promise I’ve bathed, will you feel better about accompanying me?” A young girl calling him ‘stinky’ felt nigglingly familiar, but Gunnar pushed it aside. It was unimportant, at the moment, when all of his attention ought to be focused on getting them out of there so that they could get the young reincarnate to safety. Gunnar hadn’t considered yet, what they would do with her once they had gotten her out. He was certain there was a family looking for her, and she was more than old enough to be able to tell them how to get her back to them. One last smack of the cell door against the head of one of the men who had been guarding the girl, and Gunnar gestured for Evelyn to take the girl ahead.
Their path to the exit ought to be clear, unless anyone who had been trapped in any rooms Gunnar had locked down had broken down the doors. Having doors that could be broken down, however, did seem counterintuitive in a building meant to keep reincarnates in. Still, he made certain that he and Evelyn kept the girl between them as they exited, and remained alert. The doors, as far as he could tell, were still closed. Whether anyone was inside… there was no way to tell, unless they were carrying guns.
Thea wasn’t keen to make enemies out of the people who were helping her escape this hell hole. There was a point in time where she probably would have been self-righteous about the whole thing; it was a particularly sore spot with Molly when it came to villains. But after being experimented on and held captive, she’d come to the harrowing conclusion that there was worse evil in the world than Magneto and Mystique. Sure, they were going to leave a body count behind. From what Molly remembered and what she’d read in her comics, neither of them were particularly hesitant to sacrifice life for the greater good. But their shade of gray was far better than this place’s shade of black.
“It’s not the bathing that’s got me worried,”Thea grumbled under her breath, following behind Eve and in front of Gunnar. Occasionally she would take a glance behind her, nearly tripping over herself in the process a couple of times when she wasn’t paying attention to where she was walking. Lesser evil or no, she wasn’t going to be comfortable with a stranger behind her out of her line of vision for a while. It only mildly had to do with the fact that he was Magneto; as much as she was putting on the brave front for the adults she was with, Thea was still scared, and they weren’t out of the woods yet.
It took a bit of walking past locked doors--many of which had people banging uselessly against them--before they reached the doors that led outside. Despite assuming the worst, that they’d run into more soldiers and she’d be thrown back into the horrible cell or killed, Gunnar’s magnetic switch-up had managed to keep the doors firmly locked and reinforcements at bay. Before she knew it they were stepping outside into the fresh air, and Thea was exhaling a breath she’d been holding during the majority of their walk.
“Oh thank god!” She pushed past Eve to move a little further from the building before she fell to her knees. If she could hug the ground, she totally would right then. God she wished she still had her phone on her. A second later she was looking over her shoulder at the woman, frowning in thought. “Now what?”
Charlie Archer had been looking for Thea Peeters for a little over a month now. It was frustrating, as he was usually very quick to close in on his chosen target, given his powerful sense of smell. Bigby had always had a talent for finding people, including the ones that didn't necessarily want to be found, but even the big bad wolf could get stumped once in awhile. The problem was that when you relied heavily on your sense of smell, and that failed you, you had to make do with anything else you had left in your arsenal. Luckily, even without his sense of smell, Bigby and Charlie were both more than decent detectives. Bigby had been Sheriff of Fabletown for long enough to have a heavy background in detective work, at any rate, and Charlie was the head of Camelot’s reconnaissance department, among other things. Not to mention his ten years spent working for the CIA. One way or another, he and Bigby were going to find her.
The worst part about the search was that her scent kept changing and disappearing. At some point it became obvious to Charlie that she was moving around, or more accurately, she was being moved around, and most likely being kept underground where her scent would be a little weaker. No one thought she hadn’t been kidnapped, and considering what had been happening with reincarnates lately, all the disappearances and reappearances in those torture chambers masquerading as medical facilities, it didn’t take a detective to figure out what most likely happened to the girl after no one had heard from her within days of her disappearing.
He’d started with the huge list of known facilities that had been broadcasted to the community, checking each one off as he went, and enlisting the help of some of his agents to pick up the slack. Once Charlie had caught the girl’s scent at one of them, days old and fading, but still there, he knew he was on the right track. The place had been cleared out so it was obvious that she and any other reincarnates being held there had simply been moved, so he followed the trail, and kept following it diligently even when her scent disappeared altogether. He always found it again eventually, and Charlie was convinced he would find her in one of these places. Dead or alive, though he would prefer the latter. Having a dead kid on his hands to bring back to Camelot was going to put him in a permanently bad mood. Charlie was never in a particularly good mood, most days, but people who hurt kids were at the top of his list of things that pissed him off.
Arriving outside of another one of these ‘treatment centers’ in Pittsburgh, the girl’s scent was already stronger here than it had been anywhere else. That meant she was most likely still inside, but before Charlie could do anything like break in to investigate, three figures were emerging from the front of the building. Two full grown adults and one smaller, looking to be the age of a teenager. Upon closer inspection, and sniffing a little more deliberately into the air, Charlie knew without a doubt that this was Thea Peeters. He didn’t recognize the scents of the other two, though there was something about the blue woman’s that tugged at his sense memory. But Charlie couldn’t focus on that right now, they had Thea in their hands, and he had yet to ascertain if they were friend or foe. Either way, Thea was leaving with him.
He may not have been in his arguably more intimidating wolf form, but Charlie still stood almost impossibly tall as he moved towards them, his eyes trained on the young girl. “Thea Peeters? My name is Charlie Archer, I’m friends with your uncle Bishop. I promised him I’d bring you home if I found you.” He looked between the man and the woman on either side of Thea, his whole body tensing instinctively as he waited for either one of them to protest. Charlie was prepared to fight himself bloody if he had to, but he wasn’t leaving this place without her.
The blue woman regarded Charlie with a wary look. “Yes, because trusting a young girl who has been through a trauma to a complete stranger at his word is exactly the sort of thing an intelligent person would do.” She glanced down at Thea, her voice softening. “Do you know this man?”
It would be a neat solution, if this man were to be someone that the girl knew and trusted. A little too neat, him showing up right as they emerged from the building. Gunnar didn’t believe in fortunate coincidence, and it would be all too easy for this to be some sort of trap, a way to get the girl back in custody before anyone was the wiser of it, Gunnar and Eve walking away thinking that their part of the rescue was entirely complete while the child went right back into danger. He stepped forward, shoulder to shoulder with Evelyn instead of lurking behind the two. He spared Thea a glance, but kept his eyes fixed on the large, intimidating man in front of them. Tall as he was, he still only had about an inch, and perhaps ten pounds of pure muscle, on Gunnar, when he pulled himself up to his full height, shoulders back to make himself as large as possible.
He didn’t know this child, and so far their sole interaction had involved her commenting on his personal hygiene, but pulling someone from their own hell gave you a strange sense of responsibility for them, whether you liked one another or not. He didn’t dislike the girl… Thea, he hadn’t quite caught it when she gave her name to Evelyn, and it seemed as strangely familiar as the phrase ‘stinky Magneto’. “We’ll require some proof, before we release the child to your care.” Even if he wore the face of someone that Thea knew, it didn’t guarantee that he was that person, in truth. There were more shapeshifters in the world of reincarnates than Evelyn, he was certain. It was a paranoid assumption, but paranoia could keep you alive.
Lips twisting into a smile that had nothing to do with happiness, Gunnar prodded further. “If you truly care about her fate, I’m certain that you’ll respect that we only wish to make certain that we aren’t sending her right back into danger.” He wasn’t about to get into some kind of contest about who was the alpha male in this situation. Purely physically, if this man was bad news, Gunnar could likely hold him off long enough for Evelyn to get Thea out of there, if they needed an escape. He was certain that he wouldn’t last long past that, against him, but it would be enough, and that was without his powers, his first line of defense.
If this man was someone that Thea knew, and if he could prove it, Gunnar would be more than happy to send her off with him, rather than trying to deal with an emotional family getting their child back. That sort of display sounded like something entirely too uncomfortable to be in the middle of, and he’d prefer to avoid it. He did hope the man was being honest.
Thea’s head had snapped up as soon as her name was spoken, hackles raised in a panic. She didn’t want to go back in that cell to be poked and prodded at by those people, and she was at a point where she would fight to the death rather than deal with that. The man approaching them didn’t look familiar, which was actually a good thing. It meant she hadn’t seen him in any of the facilities she’d been moved to.
While Gunnar and Eve were skeptical, all Thea had needed to hear was that Charlie knew her uncle. Thea stepped out from behind the two mutants so that she could look at him better, trying to place if she’d seen him somewhere before, or how he’d know Uncle Bishop. He didn’t look like the type that her uncle usually hung out with, and he definitely hadn’t ever come to Sunday night dinners, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t know him. Her uncle had told her recently that she’d started working with Camelot, and from what she’d heard on the boards, there were a lot of people in Camelot.
“You know my uncle?” She asked carefully, looking him up and down for a moment. “You’re really tall.” And kind’ve gorgeous, but that wasn’t something she was going to announce to him right there when things were already awkward and he knew her uncle. But he was definitely good-looking and--right. Not the time for crushes. It was time to figure out how she was getting home, and if this guy was actually going to bring her there. Eve asked her if she knew him, and she didn’t, but she didn’t want to outright say that in case Gunnar and Eve refused to let her go with him over that.
Charlie wasn’t the most patient person in the world, and while one might have appreciated the thoroughness of Eve and Gunnar’s paranoia, he was almost visibly too impatient to go through the motions of the proper channels when it came to guardianship. These two were no more responsible for Thea than he was, but all Charlie knew was that he’d been given a job. It was his mission to find her and bring her home, and he was going to see that through. Whatever these two were doing here, he highly doubted it was because of this girl, or if it was, Charlie couldn’t trust that their intentions were then pure. His first instinct was to call their bluff and shift into wolf form to see how fast they turned tail and ran, but in the interest of not scaring off the girl he was supposed to be bringing back home to her family, Charlie bit back the impulse.
For now.
“I know him. I know his friends from the Arena, too. We all work together.” Charlie was smart enough not to mention Camelot by name, in case the two people with her weren’t people who would respond well to it. There were as many sympathizers as there were people who would genuinely like to see Camelot and everyone who lent them their support, burn to ash. Thea was not a member of Camelot, but she had blood ties to people who were, and Charlie didn’t want to put her in any more danger than she’d already been in. Hopefully Thea would understand his meaning, she seemed like a pretty bright girl. Charlie briefly turned his attention to the two strangers protesting his claims, speaking in a voice that was very nearly on the cusp of a growl, before he forced himself to sound more human. “With all due respect, I care more about her fate than either of you put together. Your efforts in getting her to safety are appreciated, but I can take her from here. Her family has been waiting to hear news of her.”
Eve looked between Gunnar and the man in front of them, trying to gage from his body language how Gunnar would likely respond to this, but with another glance at Thea, Eve spoke up sharply instead. “After what she’s been through, do you really think-”
Charlie cut her off, very nearly snarling. The urge to bare his teeth was still there, even as a human. “Spare me the lecture on how our kind is treated, I’m well aware of where she and other reincarnates have been. Now if you’ll let me, I’d like to take Thea home to her family. Which is more than I can say for the reincarnates unlucky enough to never leave those walls.” Charlie assumed that if Thea was the only one they’d come out those doors with, then it meant she had been the only one left. Looking away from the blue woman and fixing his gaze back on Thea, he held out a hand to her. “But it’s your choice, Thea. If you don’t feel comfortable enough to come with me, I won’t try and force you. You can come with me, or go with them, or do neither. It’s up to you.”
After that, Eve went silent, tightening her lips together in a thin, disapproving line, but she nodded down at Thea to let the girl know that she wouldn’t be stopping her either. If she wanted to go with this man, she was free to. Eve was the last mutant to ever try and force another against their will. When Thea accepted the man’s offer and they turned to leave, Eve turned back to Gunnar with a heavy sigh. She could only hope Thea would be in good hands, but she couldn’t ignore the fact that she and Gunnar still had some pressing, unfinished business. There were men in those facilities that still needed to be dealt with, security feed to erase, and a building to destroy. “I suppose now we might as well finish what we started.”