As soon as the brown-haired girl unlocked her apartment door, Cal and Zach burst in with Owen almost passed out between them.

"Put him on that couch!" Cal directed, stumbling towards a long brown couch that sat in the middle of the room. A coffee table about the same length sat in front of it, which Blitz quickly shoved across the rug and out of the way so Cal and Zach could drape Owen on the couch.

James and Cal got down on their knees in front of him and started to rip their backpacks off.

Owen kept his head thrust back and tried to steady his gasping but it kept giving way to torrential groans.

"He's lost so much blood, shouldn't he have passed out by now?" Lautaro asked anxiously.

"Why hasn't he then?" Lucky also asked.

Cal started to shake off his sweater. "It must be the gas."

"If it was a corrosive gas bomb then it can cause chemical burns to the skin," Blitz offered.

"Good to know," Quinn looked queasy.

"They knew just how it worked, that's why they cut him and then set the bomb on him," Cal hurried to say, "if gases are absorbed from the inside of the body it can cause burns on the lungs, which can cause them to fill up with liquid."

James breathed in deeply and rolled up his sleeves. "What do we do?"

"About the poison, I don't know yet," Cal said, "for now, stop the bleeding. Later we might have to old-school it and burn it shut. The cut I can stitch up, since it's not too wide. But it is deep, and if it punctured one of his internal organs I don't care if Flagg doesn't allow it, we are taking him to a hospital."

"The hospital just blew up," Harrison muttered.

Zach swung his elbow back and hit the younger agent in the ribs.

Cal rolled up his sleeves and pulled latex gloves from his bag. "And with no extreme antibiotics, we'll have to sacrifice the fever and maybe even burn the stitches later."

"Du wirst mich verbrennen?!" Owen's blue eyes went wide.

Cal tossed a pair of the gloves to James as well. "This is a manufactured gas. I have no idea what its chemical makeup is yet. Maybe we can figure it out if he quits squirming but it's obviously a mixture. I really don't know. Maybe make him throw it up. Either way if we don't stop the bleeding soon it won't matter and he'll die anyways."

"Өө, миний," Lucky scrunched up his nose as Cal and James ripped the rest of Owen's dark and blood-soaked shirt and peeled it off of his chest.

"Oh hell nah," Quinn looked away.

"Tie him down," Cal directed next. "He's aggressive on his own even without what the gas is doing to him. Someone get a bandana, the ankle locks and the handcuffs."

None of us moved.

"Now damnit!" Cal yelled.

Lautaro sprung forward to grab what he requested from the only other backpack we'd brought with us from the hotel. Cal had his medical one thank god, James had all his tech shoved in another one, and then Lautaro had the third with his tools for disabling bombs and a couple other nifty devices.

The Honduran tugged the supplies out his bag as quick as he could and gave the bandana and cuffs to James.

Owen's eyes started to roll back. "Jay..." he groaned.

"Do not call me that," James snapped, accepting the materials from Lautaro.

"Zach, wrap the bandana around his head and in his mouth," Cal told him. "Axel, get his hands above his head and cuff them. Harrison and Blitz, get those anklets on him and then hold his feet down."

The boys he told scurried into their positions.

Owen started to wiggle away as Zach approached him with the bandana. "Komm nicht näher Patterson, I will fucking bite you, don't you fuc—"

His words were muffled when Zach shoved the cloth in his mouth and tied it around the back of his head. Axel snatched his wrists and muscled them together with the handcuffs.

"Why are you tying him down?" I asked.

"That is the last question I'm answering," Cal growled. "It's because I'm gonna give him adrenaline. He's starting to lose consciousness, and if he does he might not wake up again. We have to keep him awake." He yanked the cap off the adrenaline tube. "And this is gonna hurt like a motherfucker."

Owen started to whimper. Down by his legs Blitz was trying to fix the magnetic ankle locks over Owen's ankles while Harrison held his kicking feet down. "Hoffmann if you knock out a tooth I swear to god." Finally the two boys got them on and Cal approached Owen's neck with the injection.

"The rest of you get back, you're all crowding. And James hold his shoulders down."

We all did what he said. Lautaro, Lucky, Quinn and I backed off and stood where the coffee table had been shoved away. James pushed his palms down on Owen's broad shoulders and tried to avoid his panicked blue eyes. The German continued to breathe heavily, sending ripples down where his abs were now diagonally split in half.

"Do you need anything else?" The girl, who I had actually forgotten about, piped up. She was being surprisingly calm considering the ten strangers dealing with a bloody German in her living room.

"A bowl of hot water and some towels."

She quickly rushed away to a door in the far back wall that must have lead to the bathroom and came out with various colored towels. She tossed them to Harrison and he passed them down to Cal. Next she went to the kitchen that was just a few feet from where we were in the living room and ran water until she felt it was hot, filled a bowl with it, then came back over and gently handed it down to Cal. The Irishman shoved the towels under Owen's back and set the bowl of water by his own side.

Then he plunged the needle into Owen's neck and injected the hormone.

Almost immediately Owen started screaming under his gag and Harrison, Blitz, Zach, James and Axel had to throw their entire weight onto his limbs. Cal dipped the cloth he had in his hands into the bowl of hot water and started to dab away at the blood and yellow peeling skin that surrounded the cut.

"Are we gonna stitch him up while he's still conscious?" James asked, still pressing down on Owen's shoulders with all his might.

"That was the only adrenaline I had," Cal shook his head and dipped the cloth back into the hot water, "I don't want to risk putting him under and then not having any guaranteed way of waking him up."

"You hear that Hoffmann?" James said down to him.

"It's gonna make it worse if you tell him that!" Cal yelled.

"He already heard you!"

Cal groaned under his breath.

"Relax, I got this," James told him hurriedly.

"Relax?!" Cal glared at him. "Seriously?" He splashed the cloth into the bowl, causing some of the diluted blood to splatter across the carpet under his knees.

James turned back to Owen. "Alright Owen, listen to me carefully," he began.

Owen tried to say something under his gag that sounded suspiciously like what James really didn't like to be called. James relaxed his facial features and calmed his own breathing.

"Moving is making the pain worse. Wriggling like this is draining your energy, and the adrenaline will only last so long. I know that it's making your muscles feel like they are on fire, but focus all that power on biting down on that bandana and just breathe. I know this is an awful position and an awful situation for you, but please work with us here, because we need you to get through the pain now so it doesn't hurt you in the future. You keep resisting like this, and you will die. So take one last big breath, and then start to filter it into smaller ones. Can you do that?"

Owen's breathing slowed and I could see him swallow.

James raised his eyebrows. "Nod for me."

Owen did and his arms and legs came to a still. His chest stopped heaving so bad and it gave Cal a flat, save from the curves of his muscles, surface to continue to sterilize the edges around the cut without getting his blood everywhere and stopping him from accidentally digging the tip of the cloth into the wound itself. The agents who were holding back Owen's limbs slowly took their arms off and let Owen's quivering come to a stop.

James smiled a little. "Not so hard, right?"

Owen whimpered under his gag. He let his head plop backwards and dragged his cuffed wrists behind his neck and raised his elbows up to his ears. He did what James said, and slowly his deep gasps of air turned to smaller forced breaths.

"James get the ointment," Cal asked the redhead softly.

James took his hands off Owen and grabbed the tube of paste from one of the tins Cal had laid out.

"Start putting it on him," Cal directed. "I'll sterilize the needles for the stitching." He pulled out a needle and a lighter.

While the two medics continued their work, Zach beckoned the rest of us towards the girl who was just as in shock as the rest of us.

"Can we talk somewhere?" Zach asked her.

She nodded and pointed to the other door in the far wall. James and Cal stayed working on Owen and the rest of us filed in.

-

Once we were all inside and Zach shut the door, the young girl adjusted the large-framed black glasses that sat on her nose and magnified her intensely green eyes.

She had a beautiful olive skin tone that made her look at least half Native American. Her long mocha-brown hair was swept into a scrappy bun at the back of her neck, save for a few dark strands that had crept out and hung by her ears to framed her face. A red bandana speckled with white wrapped around the back of her head and was tied at the top along her hairline. She had three copper and bronze colored rings pierced at the tops of each of her ears, and then simple black studs varying in size tracing all the way down to her ear lobe. Her wrists was clad with bracelets of all colors, mostly ones made of chord and string. She had on light blue jeans, a pair of black, beat up, rain-stained converse threaded with red laces, and a long-sleeved black shirt on that was pushed up to her elbows. On her tan forearm was a dark tattoo of an arrow, most likely a tribute to her heritage with the stone-looking arrowhead and feather at the end. The beautiful work stretched from her wrist to the bend in her arm. She was short, around 5'4, and had a medium-sized frame.

And her room was incredible.

I could barely see the orange walls, there was so much paper stuck over them. Posters, maps, pages of books, flags, pictures, newspaper articles, album covers, drawings, notecards, and hundreds of sticky notes. Hundreds. They all had little scribbles of words on them, maybe two sentences at most on each colored page, and were scattered about in no particular order.

Lautaro approached the back wall where the headboard of the twin bed was. His brown eyes strayed to a decrepit yellow sticky note with furled ends. "Ella vuela con sus propias alas," he read in his native language while running his fingers over the words. "Spanish," he said, turning on his heel to face the girl. "'She flies with her own wings.'"

The girl scratched behind her ear. "Yeah, it's a saying that I like."

"It's the Oregon state motto," I murmured.

"And this one," Lucky ran his thumb over another sticky note, a blue one. "Lupus intus."

"Latin," she said. "'The wolf within.'"

"'Huh. 'Sometimes to stay alive you gotta kill your mind.'" Harrison had found one too.

The girl fidgeted, rubbing the back of her calf with her opposite foot and avoiding everyone's eyes.

"'I know my value. Anyone else's opinion doesn't really matter,'" Quinn tapped a green sticky note that was taped above a wooden desk. "Oh that's good."

"Peggy Carter," came Zach's voice. We all looked at him. "Comic book character," he explained. We all continued to stare. "She was in the Captain America films?" More silence. "Contrary to popular belief, I don't actually live under a rock," the Canadian said hotly.

"'Shine until tomorrow.'"

'"Some see a pen I see a harpoon.'"

"'Oh my darling it's true, beautiful things have dents and scratches too.'"

"'Well behaved women rarely make history.'"

"'Remember life and then your life becomes a better one.'"

"'If you're not going to terrify anyone along the way then what's the point?'"

"'Success is the best revenge.'"

"'One day you'll leave this world behind, so live a life you will remember.'"

"'Creativity is the highest form of intelligence.'"

"'It is the time that you have waited for your rose that makes your rose so important.'"

'"Darling, just fucking own it.'"

"'I was not made to be subtle.'"

"'Don't let anyone scare you out of your full potential.'"

"Okay!" The girl interrupted us. "Now that we've established that you all can read, can one of you explain to me what the fuck?" She crossed her arms across her chest.

Harrison cleared his throat. "Do you mean, what the fuck is going on? Who the fuck are we? What the fuck are we doing?"

She rolled her eyes and then swept them around eight of us. "No, I legit mean what the honest, actual, everloving fuck?"

Zach sighed. "I know this is hard to believe—"

"Try me bitch," she tilted her head at him and pushed her glasses up.

"Excuse me?" Zach raised his eyebrows while Quinn snickered.

"Never mind, keep going."

Zach sighed. He was leaning up against the white door of her room. The rest of us sat back against various structures —a dresser, two desks, a closet door and some shelves while Lucky had naturally found a window nook and was sitting there. She sort of stood in the middle of all of us near her twin bed. "We're spies," he said, "we work for the US government and were sent here to investigate a missing person."

"Okay," she squinted one eye. "That sounds fake but okay."

"We were on a mission—"

"Oh my god you call them missions?" She grinned.

He glared at her. "Do you want to know why or not? We could just kill you, you know that right?"

She shrugged. "Sort of like to see you try to be honest. I'm sort of like this fungus you can't get rid of when it comes to pesky questions and sarcasm but whatever. And come on," she gave him an amused look. "Like every person who's been kidnapped for collateral says: If you were gonna kill me, you would have done it by now."

Zach stared at her. "I—okay." He shook his head almost in disbelief. "I presume you know the Bellevue just blew up?"

"No, repetitive explosions are just a daily thing here in NYC, and I'm a sheltered little home schooler and so not a teenager who has access to the internet —yeah, I know it fucking blew up."

"I simple yes would suffice next time."

"Please tell me you weren't the ones who did that."

"We knew it was going to happen," Lautaro clenched his jaw.

"Are you guys like time travelers then? Cause I personally would love to meet FDR if that's possible."

Axel ruffled his cinnamon-brown hair. "We were there to try and stop it."

"Well you did a fantastic job."

There was a sudden cry from the other room followed by what I presumed was German swearing and then an American and an Irish accent yelling at Owen to be still and various medical terms to each other.

"Your friend won't be moving for a while will he?" The girl noted quietly.

Zach ran a hand through his black hair as more yells were heard through the door. "Apparently not."

The teenager bit her lip and looked around the pleading eyes of seven boys, plus me, covered in dust, cement chippings, ripped clothing, scrapes and bruises. "He.. or all of you guys, can stay here? If—if you want, only if you want. Only if you need to. If you don't then I won't ever tell anyone you were here."

There was a collective sigh of relief from everyone but Zach. He stared the girl down, who was a few centimeters above being an entire foot shorter than he was.

Blitz turned to him. "Come on, what harm is she gonna do? We're here already, and Hoffmanns' clearly in pain, and there's still a bomb to go off—"

"Shut up," Zach told him.

"Fuck you," Blitz's tone turned hostile. "Hoffmann isn't dead yet, which means you aren't mission leader."

Zach ignored him. "How old are you?" He asked the girl.

"18."

"Are you in school?"

"I just finished my associates of arts at the Borough of Manhattan. I'm going to Emerson in the fall."

"I thought you said you were 18?" Lucky asked her.

"Almost 19, if it matters." She shifted and raised her shoulders up to her ears. "And I graduated high school when I was 16."

"Do you work?" Zach asked her.

"I waitress on weekend evenings, I work at a movie theater on Tuesdays and Thursdays, in this coffee shop on Mondays and Wednesdays, Friday I go to this newspaper I write for to hand my assignments in and get new ones. And I intern at NPR every weekday."

We all stared at her.

Her cheeks blossomed pink. "Kinda sorta don't wanna be in debt until I'm 50."

Zach cleared his throat. "Who else comes here?"

"No one."

"No one?" He quirked an eyebrow up.

"I don't have a lot of friends," she said, raising her shoulders up to her ears again.

"What about family?"

"They live in Idaho."

"So nobody? No boyfriends or whatever?"

She went even redder.

"Patterson," Blitz groaned. Zach again ignored him.

"Boys aren't usually my type," she said. "You won't have to... worry, I guess, about that."

"Well, can't say I don't love a challenge," Harrison winked at her.

She scrunched up her nose at him. "God, you're one of those guys, aren't you?"

"I don't know. I'm a bundle of contradictions," he pointed to the sticky note that had that very phrase written on it.

She pushed her glasses farther up her nose and then crossed her arms. "One of the cocky, rugged player-types, who's always cracking jokes and never takes anything seriously."

Harrison tripped over his words and Axel choked back a laugh.

"You don't know shit about me—"

"Oh I'm not done," she interrupted him smoothly. "You think your good looks justify shameless flirting and by this point people just assume it's ingrained into your personality to be a douchebag so nobody tells you to shut up anymore. You're one of those stereotypical American playboys, who thinks calling out a girl's features will make her fall on her knees for you. You don't call girls by their names, you call them "sweetheart" and "princess" and "doll face" or "darling." You've probably never slept with a girl you had legit feelings for, and all those jokes and friends you have are just a cover for how empty to feel inside."

Blitz burst out laughing after she'd finished. "Damn, Sherlock got it spot on."

Zach looked like he was about to crack up too, which I didn't think was possible.

Harrison closed his open jaw. "You don't know what you're talking about," he dismissed.

"So no one has ever been honest with you?" She asked him. "Well," she crossed one ankle behind the other. "I'm happy I get to be the first to give you the experience Hot Head."

"It's Harrison, smartass."

Blitz snorted. "Yeah no, pretty sure it's Hot Head now."