He came to underwater.

Even though his whole body tingled with numbness, he could still feel the discomforting cold that had sunken into his core. It was dark, and someone had taped a mask over his mouth and nose, the kind he recalled being used in a hospital. Crying out, Kai kicked, paddled, flapped hard with his wings, but something about his ankles held him down, even when he thought he could sense the barest lack of resistance when his wings rose high above him. The surface was close.

He knew this pain. This cold. He screamed, thrashing, drowning despite the clear air pumped about his nose and mouth. Bubbles and water churned about him, turning and twisting his legs about each other till he was forced to stop or risk breaking them. Still, he screamed at how fragile he had become.

At lengths, his strength ran out, leaving him hanging there, suspended in some unknown dark water, panting and freezing. Not even his own eyes could stand the touch of the water anymore and he had to clench them shut.

Deep within him, the heat of his gut all but vanished. He knew he was dying. What else could this be?

Then the bounds on his ankles went slack.

It was just a sign of how far he had gone that he barely moved to speed his float to the surface. When his head broke through, the water surface tension nearly kept him face down.

Hard, claw like hands clamped under his arms and lifted him into the air. Even as his lower legs dangled in the water, warm fingers pried at the mask. He didn't even feel the pain of the tape being torn off. Blackness encroached on his vision.

"Blood pressure dropping," said a neutral female voice. "Heart rate at fifty and going."

Other voices responded, and Kai was dimly aware of the hands lifting him the rest of the way out of the water and laying him out onto something hard. Through the blackness, though, he was drifting. The noises came from a distance. He would feel sad, maybe lonely, in such an abyss, but he had been here before on those dark nights in the abbey when he couldn't sleep for days on end. He knew this. And for some reason, that gave him comfort. He could move through this as he had moved through that. At least he wasn't cold anymore.

The water couldn't reached him here. Boris couldn't reach him here. No one could. At last, he was safe.

"His hatching date must have been guessed wrong," said a reedy sounding woman.

"Blood pressure still dropping," said a thinner, more tense voice.

"Get the blowtorch. Hurry!"

He couldn't quite get a sense of his arms or legs. They had gone tingling and fell asleep, or something like unto it. The darkness didn't seem to be as thick near the end—the end of what? But the blurring light was growing closer—black to navy, navy to blue, blue to light, brilliant light. He couldn't hear the voices. He didn't even care.

In the midst of the light came a long haired figure. At first he thought it was Ayah, and urged himself faster with a silent cry of his soul. But in that same moment, her features cleared and it was red feathers that he saw, not white, and white golden hair swathed about her like a lion's mane. Long tail feathers, though not as long as his, twisted about her legs.

"There's a reason we chose to inhabit sports tops rather than weapons, like we had in centuries past," she said, and Kai thought he could see a quirk of her thin, pink mouth in the feature bleaching white.

Sudden heat hooked about his naval like a hook about his spine and pulled. Her figure dimmed, darkened, sank away.

"The future has always been in the hands of our youth."

Pain came back into his world, like pins and needles on steroids. Through that pain he became aware of his limbs again, along with a nasty, sour tasting flame. He half expected his frozen face as his upper lip curled back in distaste.

"Heart rate stabilizing."

"Body temperature as well."

"Good," said the reedy woman. "Do we have another one somewhere? Probably not. I'm surprised enough that we had the tank."

He could smell his shirt burning away. As the pins and needles faded, he found himself curling towards the fire, desperate for its touch. The cold was still there, deep, deep within him—too deep to shiver out. He knew, because his body didn't even bother.

"Stop when his blood pressure hits 60. We'll see if it stays there before trying more."

"Ma'am, his torso..."

"Yes. Definitely not the fitness of a champion beyblader. Hatching must have been rather near indeed, or an especially low quality fire. Wouldn't have known with how he was spitting."

"Pity about Donovan, Ma'am."

"Yes. Pity."

Just as he thought some semblance of his ability to get warm again had returned, the fire vanished, and cold clamped around him. He couldn't keep back the strangled whimper of protest. His muscles were cramping, seizing up on him. His inner fire remained a glowing coal.

"That should be good," said the reedy woman after a moment. "Henry, Jessica, samples. I'm inputting the information we have so far."

As fingers tapped and prodded at him, not only did the usual creepy crawlies shoot up his spine, but he wondered for the first time what language these people were speaking. It wasn't Japanese. English. A clean, crisp kind of English that betrayed little accent, and therefore made it difficult for him to place from where. But, then, they could have been from anywhere. English was as close as one got to a universal language, nowadays. Even the doctor's at the Abbey sometimes broke into long stretches of English.

He tried to ignore the pain he was in by listening to the quiet murmurings of what must have been Henry and Jessica as they poked him with needles, swabbed his mouth, and snipped a bit of his hair. He found he hadn't the strength to care, though the memories swarming up to him of the Abbey tables and needles were quickly returning that.

Just as he felt the sharp pain of a feather being popped out of place, a high, warbling siren blared.

"For the love of God!" cried the reedy woman. "Strap him down good and let's go. Henry, make sure that blowtorch is far away from him."

"Yes, ma'am."

He jerked and made a half-hearted attempt to roll before he was pushed back onto the table and secured with straps as wide as his stretched hand. He could hardly wriggle his fingers by the time the probing hands left and their footsteps pattered out of the room. Bracing himself, he wrenched his eyelids apart and stared through the blur at the dark, high industrial ceiling. Simple metal lamps hung not too far from it. Fortunately, the one above him wasn't straight above his face, but somewhere at his navel, though it didn't stop his eyes from watering.

He made to move his head, but they had strapped that down too. Good thinking, in part, though even if he had the strength to move his mouth towards his chest, he hadn't the fire to burn away the straps.

So he lay there, blinking away the blurriness, trying to keep his breathing under control. He had been through this sort of thing before. He'd get through it. They wouldn't be injecting burning stuff into his muscles, they wouldn't be forcing him to eat or drink...yet. No, he had to stop. He couldn't let himself be afraid of the unknown, else it would never end.

Something moved out of the corner of his eye and loud footsteps pounded in.

"Holy—Kai!"

All his attempts to fill his lungs fled him in a rush of relief. Tyson's voice had never been so welcome.

Tyson caught himself on the side of the table. His dark eyes were wide beneath his messy fringe of dark hair. His trademark cap had vanished, probably taken.

"Don't worry, bud, I'll have you out in a jiffy."

Kai tried to oil and work his voice as Tyson set to work.

"Holy crap, did the Hulk do these fasteners? Can you even breathe?"

"Tyson..."

"Yeah."

"Blowtorch...should be around here."

"It's cool, I can do these myself." The strap around Kai's forehead vanished. As his fingers brushed against Kai's arms on the way to the strap on his chest, Tyson swore. "You're like ice!"

"That's why I need th-the blowtorch."

"Seems a little extreme, don't you think?" The strap around his chest vanished. "Wait...why is the top of your pants burnt?"

"Blowtorch," said Kai again, growing impatient. He could only take this cold so long, forget about the overwhelming weakness.

"Okay, okay, once I get these..." the belt around his hips and knees went off at once. Then Tyson hurried off, wondering to himself just what a blowtorch looked at.

Lucky for Kai, Tyson found it before he had to demonstrate his inability to even sit up.

"This is it, right?" He showed the arm sized metal contraption to him.

"Yes, now flame me."

Tyson grinned. "That almost sounds like a dirty joke."

At Kai's angry glare, which wasn't nearly as ferocious as Kai needed it to be (damn face muscles), Tyson said "Okay, okay," pointed the nozzle end at Kai, hesitated for one long second, then turned it on.

Tyson didn't push it down all the way, at first, so the heat was minimal. But once it became apparent to the other blader that Kai's flesh didn't blister away into blackness, he turned it on full blast and Kai had to hold back a moan of relief. Before long, Kai was strong enough to sit up and take the blowtorch from Tyson and heat up himself.

"Ayah?" he asked above the subtle roar of burning gasses. This fire still tasted absolutely nasty.

"She's okay," said Tyson, with a thumbs up. "Since I'm not a weirdo like you and her, they totally underestimated me and just put me into a locked room. Busted out, found Ayah, like, two doors down from me in this freaky foam room, listened for you and then told me where to go, and then she set off the alarm and hid up there somewhere. Metal's really good for conducting sound, apparently, did you know? Oh, speaking of which," Tyson pulled a familiar belt from underneath the examination table. "Found your blade! Didn't take it far, did they?

Kai took the belt and let the blow torch snip off. He could have bathed in the heat for days, but the sour stench was starting to hurt the back of his throat. Besides, he was strong enough. "Where is she?"

"Just down the hall and behind the stairs. Said she'd be keeping an 'ear' out. Dang, I wish we had her all those times we tried breaking in to top secret labs and stuff."

He dropped the blowtorch onto the table and slid to his feet, notching his utility belt as he did so. His feathers still had an uncomfortable dampness to them that he tried to shake off as Tyson led him to the door. He got his first look at the room he had been imprisoned it, which was taken up by the deep, wide tank at one end and with computer machinery on the other. He wondered if this was what a real oceanic research vessel kept on board.

The hallway outside was smaller than the ones on the freight, and so was the short staircase at the other end, which promised a smaller ship. He didn't see Ayah's whiteness until she was practically next to him, having tucked herself in a niche he was surprised she fit into.

"They're all on deck, now," she whispered to the others. "They've figured out already that we've escaped. I managed to find a fire escape map, and it says the life boats are on the other end of the ship."

"Which way is under the deck?" Kai asked.

But Ayah shook her head. "It doesn't go straight through. It's over or not at all."

"Poorly designed boat," said Tyson with a sneer. "Okay, we'll plug our ears and Ayah will shriek 'em down, right?"

Ayah winced. "Um, that won't exactly work."

"Then you go first—"

"No," cut in Kai. "I'll go first—"

"And what, be a meat shield?" said Ayah blandly, looking unimpressed. "I'm going up first. Plug your ears and close the door. Once you hear me, or what you can hear of me, then you can run up and take out as many as you can."

"Cool and practical is the new sexy," said Tyson, nodding even as he readied his own blade. "Oh, did this, they didn't even try to take this from me. Morons."

Too moronic. "Never overestimate your opponent, Tyson."

"Yeah yeah, Captain."

Once they both had their blades loaded and their fingers in their ears, Ayah nodded and moved up to the door. She took a deep breath before slipping through and snapping it closed behind her.