The distinctly distracting sound of gun-fire broke up Brad and Hugh's conversation. The guard swore before he even turned, he thought they had shot her. The psychiatrist's blank stare should have told him otherwise. He watched wide-eyed caught somewhere between shock and another feeling he could not name. A feeling of dreadful naivety being heartlessly shattered. He had still thought of her as just another broken child, just another anorexic. Seeing her with a gun grasped in her hand was like seeing her come to life. He understood now how people could say someone looked like a killer, in those last glimpses before the bullets hit the cameras and their view of her faded into static Sephy Rease looked like a killer. As if she wasn't really human after all but some strange foreign animal, a predator, designed like a shark to destroy. Like a dark voice-less siren luring men to their deaths, not because she wanted to, or knew no better, but because she needed it.

The fantasy of bringing her back, of somehow making it all right again, of fixing someone so perfectly broken died inside him. Sephy could not be fixed, perhaps she was too far gone for help to reach her, or perhaps she was a born killer and would be damned from the day she came into the world until the day she passed out of it. Perhaps for some evils there could be no redemption.

Hugh Palen stared at the wavering static on the screens in front of him. He didn't seem to notice that Brad had got up and raced out of the room. He didn't seem to hear the shouts, half panic, half orders from the next room. He didn't notice as people rushed in and out around him, taking out the last tapes, trying in vain to re-boot cameras that were no longer there, just in case. And they didn't seem to notice him.

He didn't know how long it had been when Brad came back in, with a sigh and a mug of something that was probably much stronger then coffee. Hugh looked up when the lanky man sat down beside him. He didn't know how long it had been since the gun-shots but it felt like a life-time.

"Well," Brad began carefully. "She hasn't killed him yet, and they managed to persuade her to give the gun back. She shot him in the crotch and in the knee. She's propped the body up in a corner so we can't see much of him but he's definitely alive. She gave the gun back when she worked out she'd used the entire clip, and….."

The guard paused to take a generous swallow from the mug that should have contained coffee. "She says she wants the Director to draw up a contract and promise he's not going to try and move her or drug her, and she wants her lawyer to come and tell her if it's authentic and binding."

Something that might on a happier day have been a smile found its way to Brad's face. "At least she's vaguely realistic, hasn't asked for a helicopter or her own Caribbean island yet."

"The Director," Hugh started and found himself trailing off almost instantly. His mouth felt dry, and a nicotine craving was itching its way through his body. He needed to sit somewhere quietly for a while and smoke his way through several plantations worth of cigarettes. He swallowed.

"The Director won't sign anything?"

Brad snorted. "Course not. He wants to move her, preferably to another institute but failing that a modern cell where we can actually get in at her with out something like this."

"So what are they..?"

"They've called the police in; a hostage negotiator is trying to talk to her. All he's got out of her so far is the empty gun. He doesn't hold high hopes for getting the man out, but we're hoping someone can dig up the girl's lawyer. If they get hold of him and he's a half-decent actor there's a chance we'll get our guy out alive. I'm not placing any bets though."

A half chance. And a thousand things that could go wrong. The negotiator would never get anything out of Sephy, Hugh knew that. The lawyer and the Director, perhaps together they could fool her but that would only make it worse when it actually came to moving her. Any way he looked someone seemed to get hurt, or die and the man in the cell with Sephy may as well have nailed himself in his coffin.

"Brad?"

"Hmmm?" The guard replied through another swallow of the near-lethal substance in his coffee mug.

"Can we still talk to her? From here?"

Brad shook his head. "Nah. They rewired the system so that the hostage negotiator….Matt-Something, can talk to her from down in the other room. The connecting one. Why? You got a sudden urge to start discussing the merits of Bob Marley with her?"

"I have an idea." Hugh admitted as if it were a crime.

"Well? Spit it out."

The man was moaning again. He wouldn't stop and it was starting to get on her nerves. Sephy stood sullenly glaring at the former guard. She'd propped him up in the corner nearest the corridor; so that they could see his feet sticking out and seeing him moving them know he was still alive. Well, one of them anyway. They couldn't see the blood that had pooled and congealed around him, and they couldn't see her in the opposite corner staring at him.

She'd tried some of the blood. Dabbed a finger in the splatter on the floor and licked it, but she'd soon wished she hadn't. It was the sort of thing that Daddy would have advised and not the kind of thing Max would do, even if he was so starving that even the raw-meat smell of blood made his stomach rumble.

She was trying not to sway, or yawn, or lean against the wall or do any of the other thousand little natural things that would have showed her prisoner that she was tired and hungry and so so thirsty. Sephy had to be strong, and may be if she was strong enough for long enough they would agree not to drug her anymore.

A police man had come; they must have called him in a while ago because he'd been talking to her through the guard's inter-com link trying to persuade her to give up. But why should she give up? Sephy chuckled to herself as she looked down at the blood-stained floor of her cell; it wasn't as if she had much more to lose. After all she'd lost before did they really think that one little police man could talk her into giving up.

All the blood, all the pain, the chance to see the night sky again, the weather, the seasons, the smells of the outside, being able to walk almost forever anywhere she wanted with no walls and plastic doors and big pale men with guns to stop her. And Max of course, she had lost Max as well.

Sephy sighed; her dark blood shot eyes going back to the man who was moaning in a corner of her cell. It brought back memories that made her smile, that little pain-sound he made, it was different from the noises they made when they felt good only subtly but it was difference enough for her to smile instead of grimace.

There was a cackle of static, and she looked up without thinking. Her grin widened, or course she did not have to look up now, there were no more cameras.

She had been expecting the steady voice of the police man, or perhaps the Director who could never keep anger out of his voice. At first she didn't recognise the voice, but then there was something new in Hugh Palen, some broken-bitterness that hadn't been there the last time they spoke.

"Who is Max, Sephy?"