A/N: This chapter caused a lot of uproar the first time it was posted, so be warned that this is a very graphic chapter.

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When Lisa looked up from the ground, Marie was directly in her vision, groaning before pushing herself up the wall and onto her feet. It was then that Lisa could feel the heat of fire and her core filled with terror. Before she could get up, Nate was running gung-ho past her holding the fire extinguisher from the other end of the car, Hediyeh close on his heels. They crunched over broken glass as Matthew came over to help his brother help their mother up, and by the time Marie and Lisa were steadying each other, Nate was spraying the fire with the extinguisher. After barely waiting for the flames to die down, Hediyeh ran through the halon, oblivious to the burn as the chemical splashed onto her legs. Ignoring her father, she pushed out the remaining glass in the door and scrambled over it.

The initial shock left Lisa and Marie and they moved down the car, Lisa heading directly for her husband as Marie and Nate began checking in the compartments near the oxygen tank that had been hit. Jackson was sprawled by the door, badly cut and slightly singed, but by the time she'd reached him, he had raised his hand to his head and was moaning softly.

'Jackson,' said Lisa, dropping down next to him. 'Who was that?'

He blinked slowly, watching Marie and the boys take care of injured passengers.

Lisa grabbed him by the jaw and turned his face to her. 'Who was--'

She was unable to finished when Hediyeh suddenly screamed. 'Addy!'

Jackson, all at once completely lucid, shoved Lisa unceremoniously away from him as he got to his feet and followed Hediyeh's lead into the next car. Lisa was halfway over it when he spoke calmly, but with a wavering quality hidden under his words.

'Don't move her,' he said to Hediyeh, and Lisa landed on the other side of the door and was able to move around to see Hediyeh in the hall, her eyes wide as she looked in, a bloody hand covering her mouth. 'Go get an oxygen tank.'

Hediyeh ran off uncomfortably to the other end of the car and Lisa watched her before turning and gasping at the scene in front of her. Jackson was bent over Adalia, who was sprawled on the floor, her hand holding a fistful of the blanket Lisa had used to cover her. Her face was planted on the floor as though she'd fallen off of the couch, but under her, the carpet was stained red. He carefully turned her over, lifting her onto the couch as blood poured freely from her neck--his entire front was covered in their daughter's blood. Turning and looking at her with noticeable anger and fear in his eyes, he swallowed harshly.

'Leese,' he said as best he could, but she could see his resolve faltering. 'I need you to find someone with a cell phone and call 911 immediately.'

She heard him, but looking at the huge pool of blood that her husband was kneeling in and her daughter's once rubicund but now pallid skin, she couldn't will herself to move. There, on her daughter's neck, was a long, deep gash running from her one side to the other. Her hair was matted and sticking to the sides of her face--the pink sun-dress that she was wearing was untied on one shoulder and absolutely coated with cruor. Adalia stared straight up at the ceiling, her eyes unfocused and her mouth hanging open as she took horribly rattling breaths; she didn't even seem to notice that her father was next to her, looking at her hand as he squeezed over her fingernails. Setting her hand by her side, Jackson stood and wet a towel, not looking at Lisa as he ran the cold water over the cloth.

'I need you to make that call,' he said again, squeezing the excess water out; his movement brought both the coppery smell of blood and a horrible turpentine scent rolling into the hallway.

Hediyeh came up and shoved her way past Lisa, already holding the mask from the oxygen tank out in front of her. She squeezed behind Jackson and over to her sister, pressing the mask to her bloodied face before carefully opening the valve on the tank with tears running freely down her cheeks.

'No,' Jackson said as he leaned down and pressed the cloth to Adalia's neck. 'You need to go find someone with a cell phone and call emergency services, okay? Lisa, get in here and hold the mask.'

Jackson put his hand over the mask as Hediyeh stood and pulled Lisa into the room, her hands sticky with blood. 'Mamani, please...'

Lisa snapped back to reality and took her place next to Jackson, slipping her hand under his as he blotted carefully at the wound. Folding the cloth in half, he pressed the clean side firmly to her neck. Hediyeh came back with Nate's cellphone in hand and was speaking nervously to the dispatcher before handing off the phone to Jackson and taking over the task of stopping her sister's bleeding.

'Yes, she's been cut down to the windpipe,' Jackson said, walking towards the wall. 'All the way across her neck... the right internal carotid artery has been severed, and that's what's causing most of the bleeding... yes, yes, she's in haemorrhagic shock already. Now? We were about twenty minutes by train from La Junta, so we're somewhere between Trinidad and La Junta, probably running relatively close to the 350.'

As Jackson droned on with the dispatcher, Hediyeh lifted the cloth off Adalia's neck and was disheartened to see blood gush forth almost immediately. The little girl's lips were blue and as Hediyeh pressed her fingers to the other side of her sister's neck, she could feel her pulse increasing dramatically as the blood soaked through the towel. The younger girl's eyes were looking all over the room without focusing on anything, and when she started shivering uncontrollably, Hediyeh immediately began sobbing loudly.

'Hediyeh, calm down, and don't lift the towel,' said Jackson sternly. 'Go down into your room and get as many blankets as you can find.'

Wiping at her face with her sanguine hands, Hediyeh let go of the towel and Lisa pressed down hard on it. She went down the ladder to the lower room, her hands leaving long streaks of red on the metal bars. In a few seconds, blankets started shooting out of the hole.

'Scupper!' exclaimed Hediyeh and Jackson looked down the hole, expecting the worse, but rather, Hediyeh was on her knees with the dog licking her face happily. 'I think he bit the person who attacked Adalia... his face is all covered in blood and he has fabric in his mouth.'

The cell phone pressed to his shoulder, Jackson began carefully covering his shaking daughter with the blankets. The dispatcher hung up and Jackson just let the cell phone drop to the ground as he looked Adalia in the eyes and Lisa spoke. 'Come on, Addy. Don't close your eyes. Concentrate on Mommy, okay?'

Jackson looked at his wife sadly, but didn't make any move at explanation. Hediyeh came back up from the first floor with Adalia's ragged bunny and reached under the blankets to wrap her arms around the stuffed animal, inwardly cringing at how cold her sister's hands were. Jackson finished swaddling her and grabbed another towel, pressing it atop the completely soaked rag.

'Go get that lady from the other car,' Lisa said, looking at their older daughter. 'She's a nurse and has a first-aid kit.'

'Leese, there's not much else she can do that we're not already doing,' Jackson replied sadly. 'Go get your brothers; I want all of you to be where I can see you.'

Once Hediyeh left, Jackson reached awkwardly out and placed his hand on the small of Lisa's back.

'She doesn't feel it,' he said softly, and Lisa brought a hand up to wipe her eyes.

'How could she not feel it?' she asked with a choked-up voice.

'That turpentine smell,' he explained. 'I know you can smell it. It's ether. That's why she didn't scream, why she's not crying and why she can't focus on you.'

Her hand fell to cover her mouth and tears fell silently down her face as she readjusted the oxygen mask. 'Who was it? Who did this?'

'A woman I've worked with in the past,' he said vaguely. 'Only for one assignment, but she knows her chemicals well; she decided that Adalia deserved a painless--'

She turned her head sharply. 'No... no, Jackson...'

His response was to pull her closer to himself, cradling her waist under his hand, as they looked at their daughter. Taking his hand, Lisa pressed it onto the oxygen mask before descending the ladder and pushing Scupper up towards Adalia. The dog whined, his tail tucked between his back legs, as he walked over to her, laying his head down next to hers and licking the side of her face. Lisa sat beside the dog and watched a mere flicker of recognition float daintily across Adalia's green eyes; under the blankets, her arm moved and Jackson helped her place a hand on the dog's face. Reaching out, Lisa pushed some curls out of Adalia's wan face, touching her as tenderly as possible. She leaned down and pressed her forehead to the top of her daughter's head, watching carefully Jackson's actions and the arrhythmic rise and fall of Adalia's chest. Hediyeh led the boys in, encouraging them to ignore what was going on, and they sadly went down the ladder to the lower room.

Adalia furrowed her brow and tears started gathering at the edges of her eyes, so Jackson pointed to a discarded towel in the corner. 'Lisa, get that and pour some of the liquid from the bottle inside of it onto it, and then press it to her nose.'

'You want me to ether our daughter?'

He only nodded, so she reached awkwardly for the towel and a small bottle rolled out of it; the label was written completely in French. She poured the contents onto the towel, filling the room with the horrid scent again, but before she could get it to Adalia's nose, Adalia sobbed loudly, tightening her grip on her bunny. Frenzied, Lisa ripped off the mask and shoved the ether-filled cloth onto her daughter's face as Adalia looked up at her with pain and confusion. Not thirty seconds later, her head had gone lax, and when she began going into cardiac arrest, she only acted numb. His hand still on the towels, Jackson put his other arm across his daughter's legs to hold her still as her body responded to the stopping of her heart. Lisa, however, scrambled to do chest compression, squaring her arms over her daughter's chest and pushing before Jackson let the towels fall. At that moment, she noticed that there was no longer blood pumping out to the rhythm of a heartbeat and she fell to the floor, pulling her daughter into her arms.

'She didn't feel anything,' Jackson said, and his voice finally cracked. 'I promise you, she didn't feel any of it.'

But Lisa had her face buried against their daughter's chest, now unmoving and growing progressively colder, her sobs so deep that the sound couldn't even escape her being. As she pulled Adalia closer, the bunny fell on the floor, bouncing onto Jackson's legs as he watched his wife cradle their lifeless daughter and heard the sounds of emergency services approaching in the distance.

---

A mile or so away, Hélène Lacroix sat staring out the window of the rental car. She was moderately aware of her partner opening the door, slipping in and starting the car, but she couldn't bring herself to look at the man. They drove away, the billowing dust the only remnant of their time there. In the back seat, their manager picked up the phone and made a call to Marek Osikowicz.

'Osikowicz,' she said softly, and at that moment, Hélène realised that she wasn't the only one feeling regret over the assignment. 'This is Solveig. Adalia Rippner has been dealt with.'

There was a short conversation between the two before the car fell completely silent. It wasn't long, however, before Hélène started sniffling quietly. Nils Jensson looked over at her from the driver's seat, reaching out to rub her arm with a bitten and bloody hand. As he looked in the rear-view mirror, he could see his wife bent over, her head in her hands. Suddenly, Hélène leaned forward and threw up all over her feet, and when she sat up again, her face was blotchy and red, and she was sobbing.

'She was six years old!' screamed Hélène, looking over at Nils with an accusative stare. 'Six years old... she still had baby fat on her! She... she was...'

Hélène brought her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them, her blonde hair covering her face.

'You did what you could, Hélène,' Nils replied as they turned on to a faster thoroughfare. 'She had no idea what was happening to her.'

'I can't understand why we have to kill them,' Hélène responded breathlessly. 'Jackson has no interest in returning to become the head of the organisation; he just wanted to live a quiet life with his family. Why does Pedram insist on eradicating them?'

The Norwegians had no answer for her, so they both just remained silent.

'What if it were your daughter?' Hélène asked delicately, looking with bloodshot eyes at Nils.

'We don't have a daughter,' he responded tersely, but Hélène could tell that he understood where she was coming from.

'Well, I do,' Hélène replied in a choked whisper, her thick French accent muddling her words. 'And even then, I cannot imagine what Lisa Rippner is going through right now. You become so intimately attached to the child, carrying it as part of you for months, and though it is ripped from you, you still feel an undying connection; the child is still part of you. To have her... it must have been like a part of her died.'

Solveig let out a loud sob and the clipboard on her knees thumped on the carpeted floor of the car. Nils gripped the steering wheel, grinding his teeth together.

'We already feel horrible enough about this job, Hélène... you needn't remind us of our transgressions,' he said in a harsh whisper. 'We did what we could to make it easier for her.'

'But what about her parents?' begged Hélène, her eyes wide. 'Her siblings?'

'Jackson knew what he was getting into--'

'His daughter had nothing to do with that!' she screamed, her fists quivering at her chest. 'She was an innocent, and Monsieur Poulain--'

She stopped as Nils back-handed her across the face. 'We do not work under Poulain anymore.'

'At this point, it's about self-preservation,' murmured Solveig. 'Kill or be killed.'

'We all die,' replied Hélène, caressing the side of her face. 'What is unknown is when or where, and how. I fear that by this point, we're caught between two fates that are rapidly converging on one another: Pedram and her New World Society, and the innocent man whose child we just killed.'

There was a long silence before Solveig finally spoke. 'I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.'