Randal O'Lane sat in a hard plastic chair across from the hospital bed. He looked over at the woman who lay partially propped up by the mechanical bed with curiosity. It wasn't just anyone who could take a bullet to the stomach and survive.

Mrs. Thompson smoothed the rough hospital blanket that covered her, making sure to keep the pressure light as her hands ran over the bandages that still swathed her midsection. She was tired, but refused to let it show on her face.

They were entering the third hour of their interview, and she had about had it with repeating herself. If this agent asked her one more goddam time if she remembered anything else about the attackers, he was going to regret it.

Instead he sat back, looking down at his notes in contemplation. To her immense relief, he flipped the notebook closed. He laced his fingers together, leaned his elbows on his knees, and smiled.

"That is about all I need from you right now," he said. "I'll be in touch if anything comes up—"

"Just a minute, please" Mrs. Thompson said, lifting a finger. O'Lane raised his eyebrows.

"I think after answering all those questions I deserve to ask a few of my own," she said evenly.

One side of his smile quirked higher than the other, and O'Lane sat back in his chair. He motioned that she should continue.

Mrs. Thompson let out a breath that she hadn't even realized she had been holding. "I'm sure that there is a lot that you can't tell me, but please...What are you planning to do about the people behind these attacks?" Her hands fisted in the blankets as she spoke. "They took my Emma, and now they want my Rebecca, too. I need to know that we're safe with you." 

Randal nodded, but released a deep sigh. "Mrs. Thompson--"

"Lynne is fine."

"Lynne. My team is doing everything we can to track this group down, and your cooperation has been an immense help," he began, and Mrs. Thompson resisted the urge to roll her eyes at the platitudes.

She was surprised, however, as he continued. 

"All the same, I don't believe in lying to my witnesses. We've been on this hunt for years, and we have lost more in team members than we've gained in leads," he admitted without batting an eye. 

Mrs. Thompson swallowed, taken aback by his honesty. She tried again, her voice even more tentative. "And Emma? Have they ever—Has anyone come back from them?"

O'Lane's expression flickered for a brief second, and he pressed his lips together. Mrs. Thompson's hands clenched even harder as he started to shake his head. 

"Never," he said.

The door to the hospital room flew open, and the rest of the Thompson family burst in with Trent at the lead. One of the agents in suits followed behind, disbelief splashed across her face. 

"What is it, hon? What's the matter?" Lynne asked as her family crowded around her bed. Rebecca was audibly sobbing, and Lynne reached out to cradle her head as best she could.

Trent extended a shaking hand forward, the phone in his palm still in the middle of a call.

"Mom, we---Sumil, he...thinks he's found Emma."

~Part II~

"You two have been such a disappointment."

Larry blinked his eyes open, head spinning as fuzzy shapes slowly consolidated themselves into concrete objects. He felt clammy, his skin sticky against the stale air.

Did he have a fever? he wondered as he turned his head, trying to make sense of his surroundings. His head and body felt heavy, bloated, like he had been scraped clean and stuffed with cotton.

The motel room, he realized, recognizing the overstuffed armchair and the brownish stains on the ceiling. He was on his bed in his motel room.

A muffled noise to his right drew his attention, and Larry turn his head to find Gary lying across the second full bed with arms outstretched and a white gag tied across his mouth.

Heart suddenly pounding, Larry struggled to sit up as he took in the details—they were both stripped down to boxers, tied with arms outstretched across the width of each of the two beds in the cheap room. 

Larry scrambled to gain purchase against the itchy duvet cover, discovering that he could only bend his legs a few inches before the sharp bite of rope dug into his ankles. He tried to lift his head, could barely get it off the pillow against the pressure on his chest, which was stretched taught by the ropes attached to his wrists. 

His panic escaped him in a hoarse, incoherent moan.

"Not only," the voice continued, picking up smoothly, "were you two responsible for that eyesore of a loose end, but you were also the ones who took down the team I so kindly sent to clean up your mess."

The muscles in Larry's abdomen began to spasm as fear coursed through him. He knew that voice. 

Swallowing hard despite the saturated cloth stuffed between his jaws, Larry tried again to raise his head, digging his chin into his chest as he strained to look across the room. There, with his back turned to them in the sickly yellow light, stood a silhouette Larry could recognize anywhere.

Gabriel.

The blood in Larry's veins slowed, his chest constricting in panic--or had he simply forgotten to breathe? He sucked in air through his unblocked nose and looked back over at Gary to find that his teammate had clamped his eyes shut. 

Gabriel was impeccably dressed in a grey suit, his broad shoulders all that Larry could see as he fiddled with something at the desk. 

"I lost quite a bit of face with Rose over your antics," he continued, as smooth as ever. He turned to the side, an oversized shadow stretching out from his body and projecting every motion against the far wall as he snapped on a pair of latex gloves.

He turned to face them, finally, his pale blue tie reflecting softly in the dim light of the room. He rested back against the edge of the desk, letting one long leg cross over the other as he studied them.

His face was creased with his customary soft smile. 

"Now, I know that it is far beneath my station to leave the Facility just to track down a pair of failures," he continued, his tone conversational, "but you two really upset me."

Warmth suddenly flooded Larry's bed, turning cold before the acrid smell of urine even reached his nostrils.

"Now, now," Gabriel pushed off of the desk. He strolled in between the beds, tilting his head as he looked at them. "You needn't be so afraid. I told you before did I not?" His smile deepened and a single dimple dented his left cheek, a dissymmetry that he had always hated. "The Facility always has opportunities to relocate team members who don't meet expectations."

He held up a vial then, flipping it upside down in the light, letting the two small brown spheres inside tumble against the glass.

Deep, muffled sobs punctured the air, and at this point Larry couldn't tell if they were his or Gary's.

Gabriel ignored them, turning back to the desk. "You should be honored. You are the first recipients of the Facility's latest product, sought after around the world."

Larry heaved as nausea rose in his throat, whether from fear or whatever drug or gas they'd used to knock him out he couldn't tell.

Gabriel returned with a medical intubator in his hands. He went to Gary first, gripping his jaw firmly and pressing the intubator past the cloth gag. Deep, guttural retching noises echoed in the room as Gary fought the hard insertion tube that had been intentionally misapplied, bypassing his trachea and instead opening his throat to his gullet.

Cool as ever despite the lock of hair that escaped its carefully applied gel in the struggle, Gabriel uncorked the vial and dropped one of the spheres down the path he'd made through Gary's esophagus. He waited, holding the intubator in for long enough that Gary couldn't cough back up whatever had just gone down.

He ripped the intubator out, tossing it carelessly into the trash bin between the beds. He returned to the desk as Gary hacked and gagged, trying to force himself to vomit. The sound of plastic ripping followed as Gabriel opened a second sanitation pack and grabbed a new intubator.

Larry closed his eyes, warm tears leaking out the sides as a strong hand gripped his jaws, forcing them apart even wider than the gag already held them. He tasted the plastic as it scraped across his tongue, gagged as it pushed its way down his throat. He tried to toss his head, panicking as his airway was partially closed by the space taken up by the tube as it went deeper inside of him. 

His chest spasming as he tried to cough against the invasion, Larry barely felt it at all as the little sphere slipped down his esophagus, launching itself straight into his stomach.

Larry almost vomited into the gag as the intubator was yanked out, but couldn't quite manage to dredge anything up.

"There we are," Gabriel said, removing his gloves and smoothing his hair back into place. "That wasn't so bad, was it?" he asked, one hand coming up so he could check his watch.

Gary and Larry's ragged breathing was his only response as the two tried to come to terms with what had just happened.

"Congratulations," Gabriel said as he settled down onto the ottoman. His smile remained in place. "You are now officially relocated. What you just received was a proto-subtype of the T3. It has some unusual properties. Unlike most of our symbionts, the T3 was designed to replace organs," he pursed his lips, "but unfortunately, this version seems to rather like residing in organs instead. Particularly the stomach lining, where it can take first pick of the nutrients you bring into your bodies." Gabriel looked at his watch again. He sighed.

"It's no use worrying about it now," he said as Gary began to shout into the gag, the sounds wordless but the meaning clear enough. "It's rather quick to insert itself in a host. Although, like I said, this particular prototype does have a few..." he paused, twisting both hands palms-up and fluttering his fingers, "flaws."

He checked his watch one more time and stood. "See, by now it should already be a part of you," he said as he walked back to the desk. "But from the stomach," latex snapped as he applied a new pair of gloves, "it can penetrate through the body, even expelling parts of itself to find new hosts. Isn't that amazing?" he turned around, light reflecting from the tray in his hands. He walked back to the beds, the muffled cries from the pair picking up again as they were able to see the array of scalpels and knives that lined the tray.

"Now," Gabriel said, setting the tray on the nightstand between the beds. "The only way for me to test if the implantation was a success," he picked up a blade about four inches long, "is to see if it responds to your pain stimulus."

Before he could even register the movement, Larry felt a sharp pain blossom through his gut as Gabriel sliced, opening a deep wound across his abdomen. Larry bit into the soft gag and grunted against the pain, body trying to curl up defensively around his vulnerable belly by instinct despite the restraints that kept him spread wide open.

Then something moved inside of Larry's stomach and his brow furrowed, the rest of his body freezing as he tried to identify this new sensation. It started as a weird queasy rumble, like that time he had food poisoning, before pain erupted through the lower half of his torso.

He eyes flew wide as he began to scream against the gag, body contorting into a backwards U as he arched in pain.

"That's fine now, you can scream all you want," Gabriel said in that same soft voice, watching the wound slowly close as the two edges were pulled together from the inside. 

His smile tightened ever so slightly as the man continued to thrash.

"You see," he said, fastidiously wiping the blood from the blade. "It still has some nasty tendencies that need to get bred out. Like its inclination to rip straight through all the internal organs that are in the way of its access to the external wounds." 

He leaned forward, peering at Larry as the man slowly collapsed the arch in his spine, body shaking with the deep, ragged breaths he tried to suck in through his flared nostrils. 

"But don't worry," he continued, measuring Larry's condition. "It usually heals those too."

He turned to Gary and performed the same test, nodding in satisfaction as the second man's wound closed and his complexion eventually settled to indicate there was no internal bleeding.

The two paramedics lay panting, slick with sweat, blood, and urine as Gabriel looked on. His smile grew.

"Of course, now that you are newly outfitted, we have a mission for you. One I suspect you'll like." He patted Larry on the knee, before turning back to the tray.

"But before that" he said, exchanging his short knife for a longer one. "We need to address the issue of the damages you've caused me."

The two men watched him, eyes wide and unblinking, as he grew closer, his smile taking over their vision.

"Don't worry," he said, almost a whisper, "as I said, you can scream and bleed all you want--I've already bought out the motel."