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He doesn't try anything for hours, too exhausted and sick to come up with a plan. He thinks he might have dozed off again, never quite coming to until the smell of smoke rouses him. It doesn't quite register for a moment, but once it does, he jumps to his feet, heart pounding in panic.

They set the building on fire. They've set the building on fire and locked him in. Their plan is for him to just burn to death, destroying evidence of their activities and their botched kidnapping in one go.

He chokes on something like a sob in his throat as he makes his way to the window. Already, the floor's getting hot under his feet as smoke filters in through the cracks in the door. They took away his shoes - he's not looking forward to when the heat starts breaking through the floor - but left him the thin protection of his shirt, which he wraps over his nose and mouth, trying to keep out the smoke somewhat.

He'd thought, at first, that there wasn't a difference between this room and the one he'd woken up in before. Upon a less muzzy look around, he notices that they've left a chair in there. He briefly considers trying to break the window with it, but his gaze happens to go upward for a moment, and he realizes that the room has a dropped ceiling, the sort with easily-removed panels for maintenance workers and such to get at the light fixtures. If he stands on the chair, he can just hit one of the panels hard enough to punch a hole in it, and from there tear it until it's large enough to get through. Pulling himself up through the empty space is harder than it should be, while he's still dizzy from the way his head hurts, but he manages it and crawls over where the door is, dropping down on the other side.

Of course, all this is useless if he can't find a way out. He finds the stairs and works his way down as best he can, but they must have started the fire on one of the lower floors, because the air gets hotter and the smoke thicker while he moves down. Still, he can't think of any other way to go. By the time he hits what he thinks might be the third floor, he can barely breathe for the heat and the smoke. It's completely impossible to see anymore; he lets his fingers barely touch the rail to help guide him, ignoring the sharp pain from the amount of heat it's already absorbed.

Somehow, through the smoke and his streaming eyes, he sees a flash of daylight, which is quickly obscured by a shadow he thinks is one of the kidnappers. He knows it's one of them when he hears the unmistakable sound of a gun going off, and throws himself to the side to avoid being hit. The smoke, at least, is obscuring the gunman's vision as well, but there's absolutely no way he can fight like this. His only option is to run up again, stumbling his way over the steps as fast as he can, only just fast enough to avoid being caught when the ceiling over the second floor entrance collapsed, blocking the way down.

He just runs. Doesn't let himself think about what he's running to, that there's no way off the building once he reaches the top. It's all he can do to keep moving and not pass out. He loses track of time quickly, stops register much of anything but the heat in the air, the smoke in his lungs, and the pounding of his bare feet against the burning stairs. Finally, finally, he comes up on a metal door that must lead to the roof, and he pushes against it with the force of all his remaining strength and momentum. For a moment, he thinks it's locked and he's just going to die here, but then it gives and -

He wakes up to an empty room, wooden floors and no furniture. For a moment, he just dry heaves, his head pounding and swirling with dizziness, but he staggers to his feet to have a look around the room.

Aside from the locked door, all he finds is a window that's of no use to him, since he's at least a good seven stories above street level. The only thing he can do is sit down and rest until someone comes for him.

He thinks it's been a few hours before the door opens to reveal the man he'd taken out with an oxygen tank, pure hatred burning in his eyes. He's followed quickly by the one he knocked out with the medicine ball, who points a gun at him with a little too much satisfaction. They lead him through a completely worn-down old building with pipes exposed in the walls and trash on the floor to meet their boss.

The sight that greets him is enough to make him wonder if maybe he's hallucinating. He barely notices anything else about his kidnapper, because he has the world tattooed on his face. The world. Tattooed. On his face. His head is an actual globe, all the oceans and continents replicated in astonishing detail. He thinks about what it would take to sit through the process of tattooing that on and feels sick.

The rest of the conversation is almost mundane in comparison to that astonishing fact. Paul Drevin's father is involved heavily in oil. Kasper intends to send a message to Mr. Drevin by sending pieces of his son in a box until he gives Kasper what he wants. And when Kasper produces a knife and rests it an inch above Alex's right little finger, he gives up all pretense of being Paul Drevin.

They toss him back in another room while they consider what to do.

It was almost shocking, how easily it came back to him. It only takes him a moment to switch the plates on his and Paul Drevin's rooms. They're close enough in height and body shape that he can pass as the other boy in bad light, as long as he doesn't give them too much time to wonder why the room numbers are out of order or get a good look at him.

He doesn't.

The first man goes down with the help of the electric shock from a defibrillator. The second, from the force of a ten-kilogram oxygen tank slamming into his face. For the third, he rigs up a sort of rudimentary catapult using supplies from the physio department and a five kilogram medicine ball.

The last one is trickiest. He heads for radiology, slips into one of the MRI rooms. The minute the last man comes close enough, his gun is torn out of his hand by the magnet. Then his arm is all but torn out of its socket when his steel watch follows suit.

He just forgets one thing: four men entered the hospital. But one man waited outside in the car, and when no one came out from what was supposed to be a simple grab job, he came inside to check on them.

He barely feels it - just a flash of white pain on the back of his head - before falling unconscious.

Leaving your world entirely isn't as easy at it sounds. He tries, he really does, to convince himself that he's okay with it, that he can keep going without ever seeing Jack or Tom or his home ever again. And for a while, he can. Every time he thinks longingly of going home, he presses his hand against where the bullet exited, just under his arm, and remembers that he left so he wouldn't get killed.

But. It's not so easy. He stops feeling the physical pain so acutely and starts thinking about how much he misses going home. MI6 would be waiting for him, but so would Jack. Maybe he could convince her to go with him. Maybe they'd back off after he was shot. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

So finally, he slips through the door back to his world. It doesn't take long to gather up the few things he left behind in his room into a bag and head downstairs. It's the middle of the night, but that just means the night receptionist he used to talk to when he was restless and unable to sleep will be on. At the very least, he might help Alex call home and talk to Jack.

He arrives on the bottom floor just in time to see four men holding a gun to the receptionist's head. He can't breathe. We want the room number of Paul Drevin. If you don't give it to me in the next three seconds, I will pull the trigger and the only part of this hospital you'lt ever need again will be the morgue, one of them says. He wants to rush in, do something, but he's frozen to the floor, caught in some nightmare. The receptionist gives them Paul's room number in a panic, but it doesn't do him any good. He's dead less than a few seconds later.

"I told you he was in room eight," one of the men says.

"Then why did you ask?"

"I just wanted to be sure."

And just like that, Alex is back.

Alex has always had nightmares.

Prior to MI6, they were the usual thing you’d expect, nameless monsters that faded away with dawn’s light and slipped from his memory. After Ian died, his dreams became... unpleasant, shadowy and painful and filled with figures just past his peripheral vision, but he wouldn’t have called them nightmares. It wasn’t until Point Blanc that he really understood the meaning of the word. For the first few weeks, she seemed to know when he was up and when he needed company, but after that – it wasn’t that he stopped having them, just that he’d learned to be quiet. Jack never really knew the extent of what he was going through, how every time he went to bed he was back in that school, running and terrified and being pulled apart by scalpels while he screamed out his pain, unable to move. She never knew that he’d seen himself die, literally and painfully, in Julius Grief, and that the image was forever burned into his memory, like the scorch marks a fire left even after it had gone out.

After a while, they had come less and less frequently. And he thought maybe they would go away for good.

Then John Crawley offered him tickets to Wimbledon, and it started all over again. Only now, it’s not just Point Blanc waiting for him in his mind. When he’s awake, he feels hollowed-out and exhausted and dead. When he’s asleep, his mind becomes a playground for every terrifying thing he’s felt, every feeling of panic and pain and painful resignation that he was facing the end of his future and the best he could do was try to stop more people from dying with him. And he hears that one last gunshot, over and over, in a thousand reiterations. Sometimes, all he can do is watch in horror while Alexei Sarov puts a bullet through his own skull. And sometimes, the gun turns to him at the last minute; he’s been shot in as many places he can think of as many times as he can remember.

Once, Sarov’s face twisted into a grotesque caricature of John Rider as he held the gun to his head. He’d sneered at Alex that he had no right to even still be alive, that he had no place in the world anymore because he was supposed to have died at the hand of Sarov – it was only a massive cosmic mistake that he was even still breathing. He woke up from that one tangled in his sheets, hardly able to breathe, and had had to stand in the shower just letting the hot water run over him for almost twenty minutes before he felt like he could even face himself in the mirror.

At one point, he considered going back home to Jack, but the thought of being somewhere with so many happy memories of his childhood – and just that, the realization that he thought of being a child as something that has already come and gone knocks all the breath out of him and leaves him curled up against his bed, exhausted by the revelation. That’s it, really: Milliways may not be home and it may not have Jack, but somehow it’s easier to go through this non-existence he’s leading without constant reminders of how, just a short time ago, he was a boy who lived his life without these scarred reminders of what he’s been through. And it’s unfair, and it hurts, and sometimes it makes him angry – and he tries to hold onto that, because it’s one of the few non-deadened emotions he has left, but it always slips out of his grasp eventually and leaves him empty again.

So he sleeps when being awake is too painful, and he stays awake when sleeping is too terrifying, and he eats what he can when he can bring himself to it, but it would take deeper resolve than he currently has in him to call what he’s doing living.

The next few days are defined by a deep, drowning exhaustion that hollows out his feelings, leaving no room for anything but sadness and anger. He barely remembers anything about leaving Sarov, just waking up a day later in a hospital with five stitches in his wrist and bruises on his throat. He answers questions put to him, but doesn’t start any conversations on his own. A doctor talks to him, updating on the extent of his injuries (not good, but not more than a few weeks of healing could cure); later, another doctor talks to him, asking questions about how he feels as delicately as if he were navigating a minefield.

Jack doesn’t even bother asking questions, this time. She just sighs deeply like she’s in pain, too, and tucks him in bed for another couple days. He eats, sort of, and when he goes to sleep he has a new selection of ways to die in his dreams. When he wakes, he’s not entirely certain if he didn’t actually die, after all, and is just haunting his life, unable to let go.

He’s tired. He’s not sure if he’ll ever not be tired.

The next he's awake and aware, he's in a deep, comfortable four-poster bed, and General Alexei Sarov is sitting by with water, awaiting his return to consciousness. He apologizes, most sincerely, for Alex’s treatment, and informs him kindly that he is to think of himself as a guest at the Casa de Oro (a guest of, course, who cannot leave). He makes vague mentions of how he intends to restore Russia to its status as a world power, but refuses to elaborate, and then, quietly, he exits the room to allow Alex to rest longer, leaving a promise to explain everything in due time and a thoroughly locked room.

It’s not a very good start.

__

The next morning, he is politely but firmly invited to breakfast with Sarov before a morning ride. He doesn’t learn much more, except that the General is having very important guests over (that, naturally, he is not to interfere with, on threat of whipping).

Then it gets weird.

(I wish to tell you something about myself.)

“His name was Vladimir, and from the moment he drew his first breath, he was the best thing in my life,” Sarov says.

“This is the truth: there is nothing more terrible in this world than a father to lose his son,” he says.

“You will be my son, Alex.

“And you will continue where Vladimir left off.”

__

Naturally, he tries to escape.

They haul him out of the back of the car before they’ve even left the compound. They used a sensor to check inside and caught the sound of his heart. Conrad is all too happy to have Alex’s life in his hands again.

(“And when you hear silence – it may just be a few seconds from now – that is when you will know you have died.”)

He hears silence.

As Sarov and Conrad walk away from him, fallen to the ground in his shock but otherwise unharmed, he’s not sure if that means he’s dead or alive.

__

The order of events blur in memory. A few things stand out, clarity in the fog. Sarov drugging the president of Russia with Alex right there at the dinner table. Being bundled into the General’s private jet. “You will be home for an hour or two tomorrow, but please don’t get any ideas. You will not be permitted to leave the plane.” Setting off the flash grenade, escaping the plane only to be hauled back by a security guard. The sting of metal from the handcuffs slicing into his wrist as the lock shatters, Conrad’s hands around his throat.

General Sarov, standing in front of him with a gun as the land around them goes under siege, looking for all the world like a pained father disappointed by his son for the last time. The detonator in Alex’s hand.

“Give me the card or I’ll shoot you.”

It falls away in a graceful arc, slipping beneath the surface of the water with the briefest of splashes.

“Why?”

“I’d rather be dead than have a father like you.”

Sarov’s finger on the trigger.

“Good-bye, Alex.”

As the Russian forces drag him away from Alexei Sarov’s lifeless body, Alex feels nothing.

He’s not sure if that means he’s dead or alive.

He wakes - he's not sure if he wakes. He's not sure if he was ever asleep. There's a bag over his head (it smells bad, stale, and he'd like to throw up but he doesn't dare), so there's practically no difference between consciousness and unconsciousness.

(His head is clear, mostly, and he thinks that might be an advantage; might, anyway, except that whatever drugs he's been given have made it impossible to move. So, really, all he is is aware: aware that he's helpless, that he's somewhere he can't see and there's nothing he can do, just listen to the thrum of panic in his mind that's all he has to occupy himself with.)

Eventually, though, someone does take the bag off his head, and he almost wishes they hadn't. The light is too-bright and painful on his eyes, and it just starts the questions. Who are you. Who sent you. Why are you here. Wrong answer.

"This place where you are now, is a sugar mill. The machinery used to be steam-powered, but now it is electric. The sugarcane was delivered here by the colonos, the farmers. It was shredded and then placed on a belt to be crushed. You, Alex, are at the beginning of that process."

(It moves so slowly, barely a crawl.)

"I ask you to imagine the pain that lies ahead of you."

(At this rate, it will take him minutes just to reach the grindstones. And then - he doesn't want to think about what then.)

"How much of you will pass through before you are allowed the comfort of death?"

(He can't even lift his head.)

"Please, do not waste any more time. You have so little of it left."

(So little of it left.

He's fourteen. He wants to cry.)

"A nuclear bomb," Alex says. "They know Sarov bought uranium from the Salesman."

It's almost easy, after that. The words slip out. He may be giving away secrets, but there aren't many left to give away - and he never wanted them in the first place. What he wants, first and foremost, is to keep living.

"Now stop the machine and let me go."

No.

He's not even sure the word was spoken aloud, at first, just that he's still moving and the man interrogating him says No, I don't think so and he's still moving. He barely remembers anything after that, isn't even sure if he's capable of memory, just a rising sense of sheer panic at the rising certainty that he's going to die. He barely registers words after that, the new voice speaking in soft Russian over the sounds of the grindstones drawing closer. He's honestly not sure there's anything but that noise, and wishes desperately that it wasn't going to be the last thing he'd hear.

And then it stops.

And the voice says, in gentle, Russian-accented English, "My dear Alex, I'm so sorry. Are you all right?"

Gratefully, blissfully, thankfully, he passes out with the words how the fuck do you think I am? still unspoken on his tongue.

It takes a bit of snooping into the Belinda and Tom's business, but Alex manages to work out what the agents are searching for: bombs. Rather than a simple recon mission as he'd been told they were doing, the two CIA agents are actually searching for nuclear weaponry with a Geiger counter they'd smuggled onto the island in his luggage in the form of a Game Boy.

Rather than sit around and wait for them to uncover - or not uncover - what they're searching for, Alex decides to do a little searching of his own. And that searching leads him back to Belinda and Tom, who (after some convincing) consent to taking him along on a scuba-diving mission that, if all goes well, should give them an in through a weak spot in General Sarov's defenses: an underwater cave featuring an old, forgotten ladder to the compound.

("But just," Belinda reminds him, "as a passenger. You're not going under with us."

"Right," Alex says.)

The two agents go under for the first, exploratory dive, just to get a feel for what the space is like. He's left to wait with the driver, an unpleasantly silent man called Garcia.

They wait.

They wait.

They wait too long, so Alex talks Garcia into giving him another suit and goes under on his own. It breaks one of the cardinal rules of scuba-diving (never dive alone), but under the circumstances, he doesn't think he can help it. He doesn't find them. He doesn't find anyone.

He finds a shark. A great white shark, circling the area. There's nothing much he can do. It must have gotten Belinda and Tom (under other circumstances, he would spare a moment for them, but - no. Not now), and he knows with almost absolute certainty that he's going to be next. Then the weird thing happens. The cave... closes. Just as the shark is turning to attack him, the stalagmites and stalactites drop together and crush it alive, and even though it means he's still alive, Alex knows for certain that this mission had gone bad from the beginning. Belinda and Tom were never going to get into General Sarov's compound, because there wasn't a way in.

It's a cheery thought to swim back to the boat on. Cheerier still is finding Garcia already dead and a set of guards waiting patiently for him with a nice little cocktail of drugs in a hypodermic syringe.

It's over fast.

There's irony in it, really. Alex has always wanted parents, proper ones, ever since he was a kid and he realized that other boys had adult family who stayed home all the time and didn't miss important things like losing their first teeth and learning to write letters and their third, fourth, and sixth birthdays. But then Jack Starbright came along, and the feeling of want became less urgent.

Now, he - or, at least, 'Alex Gardiner' - has two, Belinda and Tom, and he'd much rather have never met them. Neither of them are happy to have him along, and they begin picking at his faults at hour one, convinced that he'll slip up and get the lot of them killed. They spend a couple days in California getting acclimated to acting like a family (though privately, Alex thinks that anyone who could honestly believe Belinda and Tom are loving parents would also believe his second cousin is a turnip, and therefore his role in this mission could be just as easily played by a piece of broccolli), during which they tell him nothing about their assignment despite his repeated attempts to point out that he should at least know what he's risking his life for. They maintain that his only job will be to hang about and legitimize their cover as a family on vacation, and therefore he doesn't need to know anything.

And then Tom nearly gets killed while wrapping up another cover with a black market dealer, and despite the fact that he would have been killed in cold blood if Alex hadn't stepped in and saved him (and all right, maybe setting the Salesman's boat on fire was a bit risky, but it worked and it was all he had on hand at the time), they still refuse to see him as nothing more than some kid they've been saddled with.

He can tell already that it's going to be a brilliant two weeks.

Jack takes over quickly upon her arrival. After one more day to recover at the Pleasures', she bundles him off to Chelsea, where they find an MI6 agent waiting for them. Although he claims he was dispatched to sweep their house for bugs or explosives, it's obvious he was sent round to ensure that Alex came to headquarters as soon as he arrived in London.

Jack, in fine form, responds to the intrusion by lecturing the agent on how low Alex is feeling at the moment, and how he nearly died out there and it never would have happened if they hadn't sent Alex to Wimbledon in the first place, and what was the man doing, standing around when he could be getting Alex some juice and another pillow? Go! Now!

Alex responds by sinking into his bed and looking as pathetic as he possibly can (although, actually, aside from some lingering tiredness, he's feeling much better) until the agent leaves the room. Then Jack leans over his bed and ruffles his hair with a mischievous, "You have to work this, kid. We play out cards right, and we've got a twenty-four hour nurse to wait on you hand and foot."

(He refrains from telling her that, honestly, he'd rather do everything himself than have a reminder of the agency that keeps ruining his life around. She just looks so childishly gleeful at the thought of getting back at MI6 like this that he hasn't the heart.)

Two days later, though, MI6 ups the stakes by sending a small contingent at eight in the night to inform him that his house is no longer safe, and he's being moved to a more secure location. He spends the rest of the night in a cell - room isn't the word for it - staring at a privacy screen separating his bed from the toilet. Jack, he's told, was moved to a different place, and the next morning he's bundled into a car with black-tinted bulletproof windows and driven to the Royal & General Bank.

He is told in no uncertain terms that he has two options: go underground to a safe house until MI6 manages to deal with the Chinese triad after his blood, or go on loan to the CIA to complete the cover of two agents trying to sneak into Cayo Esquilato for some sort of reconneissance mission.

He chooses the CIA.

After the fiasco at Wimbledon, Alex is relieved beyond belief to meet Sabina's parents - her very kind, welcoming parents who have absolutely no problem with their daughter inviting a boy she'd only just met on holiday with them. Jack gives him the go-ahead with stern instructions to stay out of trouble and check in at least once a day before deciding to take the opportunity to head to America to visit her parents.

It's one of the better holidays he's had. The Pleasures treat him as one of their own, letting him into their family as easily as if he'd always been there. He'd never really had the chance to experience that; he and Jack are as close as two people can be without actually being related by blood, of course, but there's just something... different about this. Relaxing.

(And, all right, there are a few awkward moments, like when Mrs. Pleasure came upon him unexpectedly when he was out swimming and asked why he had so many bruises and cuts. He'd felt far worse than he thought he would lying to her, but she seemed to accept the story that he was bullied easily enough. Mr. Pleasure talked to him about not being embarrassed to bring in a teacher if necessary, and then they dropped the subject.

Sabina, of course, would have none of it, but she also didn't feel the same responsibility her parents did to pursue the subject, so that was all right.)

All seemed well and excellent, then, and it looked as if he finally had his summer back. That is, until he and Sabina went surfing and a member of the Chinese triad tried to run him down in a speedboat.

He wakes up several hours later in the Pleasures' summer home feeling like he's been hammered repeatedly with an anvil. He owes his continued survival to Sabina, who saw him go under and managed to pull him out before he drowned. Jack is on her way already.

He spends the next day confined to the bed, half-heartedly attempting to stop the Pleasures from fussing over him as if he were an invalid. Sabina in particular decides to make his bedroom her new center of operations and chatters at him cheerfully about how they'd have to meet up again to make up for all the things they were missing.

("You have no idea what it was like," she'd told him once, quiet and scared. "You weren't even breathing, I thought - I thought you were gone.")

Two hours after Jack arrives, he receives a call from MI6 politely requesting that he drop in on the Royal & General when he feels up to it. And that, officially, is the end of holidays.

June came; and with June, Wimbledon. In the days before, excitement about seeing the games firsthand mingled with his few doubts about accepting a trip from someone involved with MI6 – no matter how many times he told himself that nothing bad was likely to happen at Wimbledon. Whether or not he believed himself, well. Sometimes it’s just easiest to lie to yourself.

And for a while, it seemed like nothing would happen. The ‘ticket’ Crawley had offered turned out to be getting slotted in as a last-minute ball boy, and he would have been lying to say that didn’t excite him. And (thankfully), in addition to just generally being interesting, the other kids working this year were friendly, which was a nice change from the increasingly weird reputation he was getting at Brookland. There were plenty of candidates for friendship, especially (if he was being honest) Sabina Pleasure, who had approached him at lunch on his second day, when he was still trying to work out how to handle the issue of not having been in training with the rest of them.

(“I already did a survey of the cutest boys here,” she’d informed him, clearly utterly unashamed of discussing the subject of cuteness with a strange boy. “But I don’t remember you. And you have a lot of potential.”

In the moment it took him to work out how to react, she had already set her food down at his table and was unconcernedly sipping her soda. “Um,” he’d said.

“I’m Sabina,” she’d said, cheerfully. “We’ll be seeing a lot of each other. At least if I have anything to do with it.”

“I’m Alex,” he managed to get out through the haze of shock clouding his mind.

She had smiled, dazzlingly bright and unselfconscious and patted his hand. “See? We’re getting along already.”)

They spent a lot of time together after that, enough to become good friends (even if she did seem to have a sort of natural immunity to embarrassment and a tendency to remark in perfectly ordinary tones about the aesthetic features of some other boy in the middle of a conversation about something completely unrelated, like what music they liked). She even invited him to go on holiday with her family in Cornwall. It was almost like he was a regular kid. At least, up until he spotted one of the guards using one of the public telephones with a mobile in his pocket.

Sometimes, he cursed the same instincts that made him so useful to MI6. Because it seemed like no sooner than he’d begun some subtle investigation that he found himself cornered in the Buggy Route of the All England Tennis Club dodging attacks from a forklift.

Oh, yes, he thought, in some strange, far-off corner of his mind, this was why I promised myself I’d never work with MI6 again.

He was no stranger to improvising his way through fights, and he had the advantage of greater manoeuvrability over the forklift. The first time, he traded in the certainty of being crushed for a backful of splinters. The second, a last-minute dive to safety caused the lift to crash into the wall, and he allowed himself one moment to hope it had taken its driver with it.

No such luck. The man climbed out, immediately adopting a stance familiar to Alex as the basic beginning pose of someone trained in martial arts. There went his hope of having the advantage in hand-to-hand combat. Alex mostly concentrated on defence, dodging and blocking the blows headed his way; the other man, unfortunately, had the advantage of size and experience. One hit landed against the back of his head, dizzying him. He stumbled into the door of a refrigeration unit, and only just rallied enough to avoid being knocked out for good.

That’s when he realized their fight had taken them to a section that housed large cylinders of compressed gas (what for, he didn’t know, but any port in a storm). He managed to get one of them open and aim it, blinding his opponent, then lifted the thing to use as a weapon. It wasn’t his best improvised weapon ever (he could practically hear his muscles screaming), but he had adrenaline and sheer panic on his side. The second blow he managed to land knocked the guard into one of the refrigerator units. Rather than risk him waking up early, Alex took a moment to lower the temperature of the unit before he limped off.

At least, he thought, it was over. He just had to ring MI6 for clean-up. And – he paused at one of the doors on his way – with a little bit of lucky, maybe he could manage a bit of cleaning up first.