L stepped down from the pad to stand next to Lana, and slowly scanned the room. There was no need to use his flashlight. The area was already lit--enough.

This was more like what a security station should look like: a wall of screens, places to sit. On the nearest monitor, he recognized a stretch of hallway that they'd passed through earlier in the night.

He felt a surge of cautious optimism. This might be it, or they might be getting close.

They'd encountered very little resistance up to this point, apart from the incident in the laboratories. But all these monitors, all operational... that implied that there might be someone around to watch them, which meant--

His elbow tapped Lana's arm gently, and he gave his head a tiny jerk in the direction of what he'd just noticed.

They weren't alone in the room.

The shout wasn't much of a distraction. L didn't have attention to give to Lana, apart from keeping track of her location in a basic instinctive way. They hadn't worked together long enough to be a fluid machine in a scenario like this... hadn't had the chance to develop a consistent set of procedures... and he still wasn't used to fieldwork.

Apart from everything else, his ears were ringing from the shots they'd fired.

He could see the trajectory of the nurse's blades, and that Lana was trying to sweep the nurse's legs out from under it. This required a split-second decision: if he went the wrong way, and if the nurse fell, the blade would go right through his shoulder, if not his arm or his chest. It would take days to heal, if he even managed to survive the rest of the encounter; it might be hard to keep a hold on the gun, hard to fire it.

The room smelled like gunpowder and blood now--mostly the former.

He ducked to the side and spun away and evaded the blades, but only for the moment. A near miss, no time to savor his luck. It would be hard to shoot at the nurse if it kept attacking at close quarters, but if they could manage to knock it down, they'd have an easier time dispatching it.

The nurse died abruptly. One moment it was slicing at Lana's ankles; the next, the spark of life had dissipated and the body lay still and empty on the floor.

L took a few harsh breaths, trying to compose himself. A jolt had gone through his nerves when the nurse had gone for him, adrenaline to make him move and keep him alive. Now he felt a thin, bright nausea blooming in his gut, and the hand holding the flashlight shook.

The nurse's body might be found in its current state, or she might return to what she had been during the day. He didn't know, and he found that he didn't particularly want to know.

He'd have plenty of time in the morning to think over the implications of what he'd done. He had used people as shields of one kind or another, and he had let people die if the trade-off of saving many others was great enough, and he had contributed directly to the executions of people who had absolutely deserved it, but he had never shot anyone in the head. Not personally. His hand, a gun, a bullet, and nothing.

In any case, it had been self-defense. She might have impaled him or crippled Lana. She would have killed them both if she had been able to.

Never mind. Never mind. Never mind. He took the idea into himself with his breaths and let it take hold. Too much conscience wouldn't do them any good, and he had never allowed his to hamper him too much.

There was probably a station like this for every floor, which meant that someone in another security station might have been watching the brief struggle. He and Lana might not have long to be alone here.

But they were alone now, and it would be smarter to take advantage of it.

Lana tried to move towards the pad. He would be surprised if she wasn't experiencing the same kind of panicky rush that was making him feel like he was on the ceiling, and because she had been injured, it might be worse for her. His instinct to stop her was in conflict with her instinct to leave, but stopping her was a necessity.

"Sit." He gestured to the nearest chair with the beam of the flashlight; holstered his gun. "We have to move with the assumption that we're going to be attacked like this every time we move to a new area. If it doesn't happen--fine. But I want to be prepared." He spoke too loudly, his hearing still affected by the shots.

The beam went down to her bleeding ankle. He wasn't able to hold it completely steady, but the blood was visible enough.

"It would be better to dress your wound now... I have gauze in the bag." He slipped it off his shoulders and dropped it on the floor, well away from the corpse of the nurse. "We can also try to contact the others and check on their progress."

"Something like this was going to happen sooner or later. It's happened to me a few times already. I wanted to be prepared... it would be stupid for someone to die just because I'd left the supplies in my room.

"That said, I don't have much."

As L spoke, he retrieved a pair of latex gloves from the backpack and put them on. Helping Lana in any effective way would require the kind of firm touch that he usually avoided. The barrier was better for both of them.

He also took out a plastic bag containing a few gauze pads, a bandage roll, a roll of tape, and a scalpel, and set it on top of the backpack.

He knelt on the floor in front of her, with the body behind him but still in his peripheral vision, then asked Lana to take her shoe off. She complied. After peeling down her sock gingerly, he peered at her ankle with the aid of the flashlight, then made a face. Several superficial lacerations, bleeding profusely.

"It... hm. It could be worse."

If this were the only medical attention she was going to receive, he'd have been concerned about the fact that he had no way of cleaning the wounds... but the nurses would tend to her in the morning, much more thoroughly than he had the intention of doing or the ability to do. The irony wasn't lost on him. He doubted that she'd need a tetanus shot, but they might give her that, too.

In any case, he could patch her up well enough for the time being that she would probably be able to go on, and if she couldn't, that she wouldn't lose more blood than she needed to.

With no way to clean the blood around the wound, he pressed a pad to one side of Lana's ankle as delicately as he could, held it there, retrieved the roll of gauze, set the other pad into place, and began winding the gauze around and, once, down under her foot. It was done and taped soon enough, and he tossed the supplies back into the bag and zipped it.

He had ignored most signs of discomfort from Lana as he worked, although he'd tried--a little--not to cause unnecessary pain. Even with a light touch, bandaging that kind of wound without making the patient at least mildly uncomfortable was almost impossible. She'd feel better with it covered, and if they were lucky, they'd be able to move on.

Meanwhile, no responses on the radio. Not good. Maybe the others were in areas where they couldn't necessarily respond. Maybe--

He didn't shy away from unpleasant truths, but it was hard to tell whether this was a disaster, or a lack of progress, or only a lack of information. And they had to assess their own situation.

They had been looking for a security room, and they'd found one, but he didn't think this was the right place. He had been directed to look for a "security system of sorts." There would have been no need to qualify this room that way: it was the ordinary sort, and more of a monitoring station than anything else.

More to the point, the other instructions had been to show the system his good side. They had killed the room's guardian, but they hadn't had much choice. She had attacked them on sight. It had taken four shots to stop her, with no time to recite the lyrics from a children's song to her.

Either they had bungled the mission, or this wasn't the place where they needed to be.

He handed Lana her shoe, dangling it by the back of the heel from his thumb and forefinger; he still wore the gloves, which were by now a little bit bloody.

"Better?"

How much of a chance would he have had if he had been on his own? I might have survived, but without injury? It seemed unlikely.

"I don't really know where the room was... probably somewhere on the second floor. I didn't get there on foot. It was--"

The radio cut in before he could go on. Although Marc's voice was faint, it still demanded L's attention. It was the only communication they'd had since they'd left the Records Archive, the ringing in his ears made it even harder to hear than it already was, and it was likely to be important.

As L tried to listen, he stripped off the gloves, inside-out, until they were a ball that he could hold in the palm of his hand. These are covered in Lana's blood... does it matter? Could that incriminate her in some way? No... Landel must already know who killed the nurse. He wouldn't need to analyze it.

L saw no obvious cameras in the room, and nothing he could identify as something more subtle... but the light wasn't good and he didn't have time to check as thoroughly as he otherwise might have. The monitors a few feet away proved that other areas of the Institute in which no cameras were visible, even in bright lighting, were indeed being watched. That meant that he had to assume that this room could also be watched. The fact that the basement was watched in addition to the first floor suggested that there was another room like this one somewhere, one that covered the second and third floors.

Marc's broadcast turned out to have very little to do with them. Disappointing. L filed away the information in it for later and tried to pick up his interrupted conversation with Lana.

"You were saying...? Ah. Your ring." His head tilted and he looked at her with a contemplative expression. If she had to use the ring, he would be left to try to go on alone, unless he went with her. He tried to weigh the amount of danger he might be in against the possibility of losing progress on what they hoped might be the route to their escape.

On one hand... the rebels seemed relatively trustworthy, but how far that went, and how prepared they were for the potential consequences of their actions, was still up in the air.

L's desire for his own freedom, and to see Landel thoroughly crushed if at all possible, had never wavered. Following on that, he'd understood that there would be no chance of progress here without much more personal risk than he would accept under other circumstances... but there was always a difference between doing something hazardous and doing something stupid. Some of Landel's prisoners had been strong enough that solitary night runs might be feasible. Neither he nor Lana was one of them.

Was he willing to die if it would put an end to all of this for everyone else? He was playing his part in someone else's plan that seemed to have a dubious chance of success. Would he fulfill the assignment at any cost, if doing it would mean taking a hit he couldn't recover from?

He hadn't chosen this case or any of its circumstances: someone else had cast him in the role of victim, and Marc and his friends were using him as a mole. Maybe L's answer would change if a point came where he had to make the choice, but from where he stood now... no. Getting out alive was his primary goal. If he couldn't do it this way, there might be another way later.

In any case, there had been no sign that there'd be any point in courting that kind of decision tonight.

"It has to be getting late. We haven't heard anything from the others that suggests that tonight's the night, but we can keep pushing ahead. If nothing else, we have some new information for the map.

"Still, I'm not going anywhere without you. If one of us had been..." Then it might not have been the nurse dead on the floor. He made a vague gesture in the direction of the corpse, but didn't voice the rest of the sentence.

"It would be incredibly stupid for either of us to run around alone. If anything else happens tonight, we're both out... I'd rather go to your room than Doyleton or the basement. Try to take us both if you can. If I wind up using the rings, I'll do the same."

He was still holding the ball of soiled gloves. Before he moved towards the pad that would take them out of the room, he dropped them on the ground near what was left of the nurse, then picked up everything he'd set down to attend to Lana.

When they stepped on the pad together, he kept his hand ready to draw his gun. If they were getting closer, what they'd dealt with here might only be a taste of what was waiting.

[To here.]