There's no time to make an accurate count but Ava guesses there could be two dozen or more in their party now. With so many of them traveling together in the dark tunnels, surely they must finally be safe.

'There is safety in numbers,' they always say.

But whoever says that has obviously never witnessed the math behind the mayhem. They've never seen numbers do the sort of damage Ava has:

Numbers can fuck you right up. Numbers can cut off your leg. Numbers kill – all the time.

Despite their numbers being so great, they move through the tunnel in eerie quiet. No one talks. The recently-escaped prisoners are too traumatized for chit chat. Too traumatized to walk on anything but their tippy-toes. And the Slaps march along without words simply because they are obedient to Bach. They're good little child soldiers and he's their warlord.

Finally it is Ava who disturbs the silence:

“How are we getting out of here?” she asks Bach, “are we just going back the way we came?”

“That's the plan – unless you've got another.”

“Nope, just seems like HR might have built up a stronger presence in those places where we've already been killing their people.”

“Could be, but we're stronger, too.” He raises his hand so she can see him make a tight, robotic fist.

They arrive back at the door she first picked with the [Omega Key] to gain their access to the tunnels. It's closed and locked once more.

“Ava,” Bach says, “if you'd do the honors for us again.”

But as she draws the stiletto and approaches the door something flashes on the edge of her peripheral vision. She hears the now all-too-familiar thud of a limb sloughing off. She whirls around and intensifies the light from her hand to the greatest degree she's capable so that the tunnel is suddenly well-lit:

What she sees are Lepers. Three of the slender stacks of animated rags, to be exact. They must have been hiding in the dark. And Ava also sees a man—one of the slaves she's in the process of rescuing—lying on the floor. His right leg is missing.

This must be their strategy of loss prevention. Re-acquisition. They take the escapees' legs so they can't run away anymore.

They can always just fabricate new limbs like we did with Ostby. Or they could have before we wrecked their lab.

The recently-escaped slaves start to panic and with good cause: they're being cut down first. The Lepers flick out their razor-whips and a slave loses a foot. The whips hiss through the air and a woman collapses, cut apart at the knee-joint.

Any of them could be hiding Ellie's baby, thinks Ava.

“Get them through that door,” Bach barks orders to his squad of child cyborgs, “Slaps! Protect the civilians!”

Ava hurries to insert the [Omega Key]. It festers in between the door's atoms. It wiggles and twists and the password is brute forced. The locking mechanism buzzes and grinds and the door opens. Ava ushers the terrified refugees through, not fully knowing how safe it is on the other side.

At the same time, Bach and his squad of child soldiers engage the Lepers. Ava has a front-row seat. While the panicked slaves file past she keeps her hand held high and beaming bright. She watches the Slaps slide around in formation to surround the trio of Lepers in a tactical half-circle.

Bach is more direct. He doesn't require tactics – not anymore. He stomps right up and executes [Sanguine Extraction]. His blood-sucking tubes slither out and fester into the flesh of the center Leper. The other two strike with manacle-tipped tentacles—shackles attaching to Bach's wrists—but they can't get a grip.

Bach is empowered the same as they are, now:

[Desquamation] triggers – seemingly out of nowhere. And Bach's skin simply turns to goo and slips off where the shackles struck, freeing him from the Lepers' attempted clench. He laughs into the void behind the Lepers' rags where their faces ought be.

Ava's mind races, questions presenting themselves without answers:

Did that ability just execute automatically? Is Bach simply immune to having his movements restricted now? Is this due to [Sanguine Extraction] being an epic ability—does it somehow suck out strange powers along with the blood?—or could it be that by summoning the parts for his new hand I've somehow imbued him with my ability to learn abilities simply by observing them?

In the end these distinctions are meaningless. Bach is incredibly strong now. That's all that really matters. A measly three of Human Resources' genetically-modified strike-force Lepers are no match for him and his cadre of killer children.

The Slaps attack like famished piranhas. They cluster around the Lepers, hacking and zapping and cackling. Uri aims his gun at the Lepers but then he doesn't pull the trigger.

“Guess they've got this under control,” he says to Ava as he ducks through the door with the last of the slaves.

Bach and the Slaps finish their overkill and stand over the corpses. Further down the tunnel—from the direction they've just come—they see flashlights bobbing. More Body-Snatchers in pursuit.

“Round two,” says Oscar, cracking his knuckles, “coming right up.”

“Nope,” says Bach, “this action is complete. On to the mission's next stage.”

He leads them out of the tunnel, pausing to wink at Ava. She steals one last glance out at the unlucky slaves who had their limbs sliced off. There's nothing to be done for them so they're left to perish on the floor of the tunnel or be re-captured by the Body-Snatchers.

Go on, the voice in Ava's head commands her, tell yourself they're not real.

Finally she comes along last and swings the door shut behind her. And now the survivors all stand crushed together in the tight maintenance hallway beneath the flickering and buzzing fluorescent lights.

Before they flee even a single step further, Darby says, “wait.”

He gestures and sparks begin to rain from the edges of the door. It's sealing itself shut, somehow. Darby executed some sort of ability and now the door is being welded all at once along its entire perimeter by invisible hands.

What class is he? she wonders – and evidently that's all it takes to activate [Scan]:

He's an Engineer, too! But a different path. A Technomancer.

And as the invisible force finishes up the welding job Darby executes another ability:

The air around the door crackles the same way it did when he repelled the Leper's first strike back in the lab. His nanobots have formed a short-term force field to protect the door from being blasted open.

His new powers are impressive.

But what about mine? Ava wonders

Isn't that what you're always asking? answers a voice that could be hers. Or it could be Sara's.

The party proceeds along the hallway, a veritable stampede. The passage is clogged with their escape. Then they come around a corner and suddenly at the end of the hall a guard is set up with a chaingun on a tripod. He starts blasting and they retreat.

“Where to now?” asks Ava.

“I don't know, but we're the fish in his shooting barrel,” says Bach, “we'll have to find another way.”

“I know a way,” says one of the slaves, “maybe a place we can hide out and think, at least.”

“Lead on.”

They turn and follow back toward the train tunnels. When they reach the door which Darby welded shut, the slave's shoulders slump.

“Oh shit,” he groans, “aw fuck. We have to reach a hatch back in the tunnels.”

“No problem,” says Bach. He turns to Ava and tells her, “use the Omega Key again.”

“But it's welded shut—“

“Trust me.”

She draws the stiletto and touches it to the door – not expecting anything to happen. But the tip whittles its way inside again and then the entire perimeter of the door where it's been sealed shut flickers—becomes unfocused and pixelated—and then the locking mechanism buzzes and scrapes and the door clicks open.

“Impossible,” says Uri, who often performs miracles by entangling his mind with others.

And he's right, of course. It is impossible. And yet it has happened. The [Omega Key] opens up passages which simply should not be accessible.

But there's no time to discuss it. The slave leads them back into the train tunnels. They don't see any sign of the Body-Snatchers from only minute before. The pursuit must have been abandoned when they found the door welded shut.

Suddenly the slave kneels down and pulls open a hatch on the floor.

“I didn't know this was here,” says Bach.

They all climb single-file down a ladder and as they descend they enter an enormous cavern-like chamber. The massive structure upstairs could likely be fit inside this cavern many times over.

Perched on a high ledge at the bottom of the ladder, Ava squints down into the dark.

“What is this?”

“I don't know,” says Bach, “some kind of underground city.”

“We can't keep going on blindly,” says Ava, “maybe I can get us a map.”

She uses [Scan] directly on the floor which she stands upon. She doesn't need to see her reflection anymore. The training wheels have come off.

It scans as:

The 'Notable NPC's' catch her eye:

Benjamin Danusk? Who could that be?

But then she realizes. Benjamin was the name of Ellie's older child. That's the name she would sometimes accidentally call Uri.

Ellie assumed he was dead, killed by Scums – but really he's been here, enslaved.

And Ava sighs, relieved:

Easier to escort out of here than some baby would've been.