Two

In silent mode, Kitt pulled the TransAm up to the side of the quiet road, several hundred yards from Grey’s house.
“How about you take the wet grass this time?” Michael muttered, checking the Comlink.
“I would willingly….”
“I know, I know.”  He threw a smile at the voice modulator, stroking his hand over the sensor in the steering column.  “No sneaking off to catch a movie.”
He opened the car door and left Kitt wondering how he’d known.

*

“Nicholas?”
Karr and Nick were sitting outside a suspected weapons factory doing some surveillance of their own.  “Karr?”
“I have an alias for you Anton Sachias.”  Nick smiled, he’d only asked twenty-four hours before.  Karr grumbled in his mind.  “A source came up with a name.”
They each had their own ways and means.  “Give.”
“Stephen Grey.”
Nick frowned.  “Now why does that name ring a bell?”

*

Michael shifted to the other foot.  Through the powerful binoculars he could see Grey getting ready to go out.  Tonight looked like it might be more interesting.
“Kitt.”  There was no reply.  “Don’t go to sleep on me, Partner.”
A pause.  And then, “Sorry, Michael.  I thought….”
Michael waited, and when Kitt didn’t continue, he started to get worried.  “Kitt?”  //Kitt?//  When he touched the implant he knew there was something wrong.  His partner’s presence was distracted.  //What’s wrong?//
//I don’t know.//
//Can you deal with it?//
//Of course//  Michael smiled at his partner’s confident tone.  He went back to watching the house.

A second later, the bullet tore through the air, driving into Michael’s back.  A moment later Kitt’s scream joined his driver’s in the quiet night air.

The pain was liquid fire inside Kitt’s electronic mind.  Desperate to reach his partner, he fired the engine and slammed the car into drive.

Michael fell forward, shards of agony lancing through him, shock silencing him for a moment before he grasped at the lifeline in his head.  //kitt//

//Michael!!!//  The name was transmitted over the link, Kitt’s frantic call to his beloved driver.  Suddenly, the AI lost control of the car.  The TransAm slid sideways, smashing in to a silver Lexus parked up on the sidewalk.

//KITT!//  But Michael’s call went unanswered.  Nothing.  Static.  And then the black hole that was opening in his mind consumed him and everything went dark.
 
 

“Nick,” there was a panic in Karr’s voice that immediately got his partner’s attention.  “I’ve picked up a call on the police band.  There’s been a shooting and a simultaneous car accident.  A black TransAm has gone into a parked car.  The driver appears to have disappeared from the scene.”
Nicholas gunned the engine.  “Get us over there.  And contact Kitt.”  Karr didn’t respond verbally.  His mental reply was unrepeatable.
 
 

In the chilling silence after the momentary chaos, two men stood to the side of the dark TransAm.
“Are you sure it’s safe?”
“Of course it is.  Now get on with it.”
Nervously, the first man lifted the long gadget and switched it on.  It hummed, quietly at first, gradually getting louder.  Closing in on the car, he wiped the gadget back and forth over the left side of the hood, his movements slow.  “How long for?” he rasped to his partner.
“Two minutes to be sure.”
As he did as he’d been instructed, the TransAm remained silent and dark.
 
 

<_Kitt   Kitt?
Karr broadcast his brother’s name over the private channel, knowing the distance between them wasn’t great enough to render it useless.  But there was no answer, no reply to his transmissions.  He continued to broadcast, and when they got close enough to the address the police band had reported, he tried the link between them, dropping his own automatic block that he tended to put in place whenever he and Nick were working.

The instant he dropped the block he knew there was something terribly wrong.  Instead of there being any emotions or sensations to greet him or a static block over Kitt’s end of the link, there was blackness, a darkness that chilled the AI to the core.  Nick felt the echo of that chill.  “Karr?”
“I….”  Suddenly frightened, he reached a small part of himself through to Kitt’s CPU.  And looked around.  The Stealth slid to a halt.  <Nick!>

The mental cry from his partner sent a cold shiver down Nick’s spine.
<What’s wrong?  What happened?>  Silence.  <Karr?!>
<He’s….  There’s nothing>
“Karr, we have to get to that address before the police do.”  He took control of the car, slamming it into drive, fighting down the ever-increasing distress flowing through the implant.

They were the first on the scene, although sirens were audible in the distance.  Nicholas found Michael in the garden of the house, lying sprawled on his front between the flower-bed and the lawn.  Even in the dark, Nick could see the circle of blood slowly soaking through the thick material of Michael’s coat.  Stepping over the form of his friend, Nick crouched down to press two fingers to the cold neck.  He found a pulse but it was weak.  Michael was barely breathing.  A minute of so more and the ambulance would be with them.  Maybe a minute was all he had left.

Reaching carefully under Michael’s right side, Nick gingerly felt for an exit wound.  There wasn’t one.  “Jesus….”  He muttered under his breath, tearing his jacket off and uselessly covering Michael’s upper body in the expensive leather.  “Hold on.”

Despite finding his friend bleeding to death, Nick’s own anxiety was nothing in comparison to the intense build up in his mind from his partner.  <Karr… please!>
But Karr was once again inside his brother’s CPU, hunting, desperately searching for something, anything that might remain of his brother.

It was cold and dark.  Usually Kitt’s presence would be everywhere, reaching for interfaces and COM ports, servicing interrupts, monitoring processes.  Even when the AI was resting, off-lining, he would be all around.  Now there was nothing.  No functions running, no interrupts, no poling.  It was silent.  Dead.

And yet there were no signs of damage.  A scan of the car had revealed a resonance of a high magnetic field around the hood above the CPU casing.  Could that possibly have done so much?  Could it have… wiped the disks?  What the hell had caused Kitt to allow it?

Slowly backing out, Karr’s anxiety turned to horror and then to rage.  Nick faltered as he stood.  The ambulance had pulled up at the scene and without a word he took the crew to Michael’s side.
<Karr?>  His reply was almost a wail, a desperate, devastated sound.  One that didn’t translate and didn’t make any sense as it was.

Unable to communicate, barely able to think through the noise in his mind, Nick was torn between returning to Karr and slamming a block in place to allow him to stay with Michael.  One of the ambulance crew was telling him that it was all right, that they’d take it from here.  And he had to think of Kitt.  He got the name of the hospital they would be taking him to and once he was happy they were doing all they could, he left his friend in their capable hands.

As he walked around to the front of the house he saw Kitt properly for the first time since they’d arrived on the scene.  The black car was smashed into the side of a Lexus Nick presumed had been parked up on the sidewalk as Karr had reported.  There wasn’t a scratch on the TransAm but the back of the car was still pressed into the twisted bodywork of the wreck.  Kitt hadn’t even tried to extract himself.  Nick ached for the AI.
“Kitt?”  He touched the prow gently.  “Kitt, talk to me?  You must be in agony, I know, but…”
“He.  Isn’t.  There.”
Karr’s words were stated, one by one, clear and defined as if that was the only way to get his partner to listen.  Nick looked up.  “What do you mean, he isn’t there?”
“He’s gone, Nick.  The CPU is empty.”
The struggle to say those words was clear in the sensations pulsing in Nicholas’ head.  Emotions were rushing through his partner’s electronic mind, one chasing the other, round and round, not letting up.  “Karr… where the hell could he have gone?”

When Nick moved it was toward the front of the TransAm.  He reached under the hood, surprised when it lifted easily. Whatever had happened must have unlocked the car or disabled the security system.  He looked around inside the engine compartment.  The CPU was still there.  He’d imagined that whoever had planned this had been after the CPU.  He was evidently wrong.

“Karr….”  ‘Are you sure?’ seemed like such a stupid question.  Of course he was sure.  If there’d been any doubt he would still be searching for his brother not filling Nick’s mind with terror and rage.  He didn’t know what else to say.  “I need you to stay with me, Partner.”  He walked around to the TransAm’s driver’s door and tried the handle.  To his surprise it opened.  The dash, like the outside of the car, was eerily black and silent.  Like Karr, there were no keys.  The circular black button to start the engine was on the side of the steering column.  It was coded to Michael’s fingerprint, as the door handle and hood, but despite all security functions seemingly being off line, Nick couldn’t fire up the engine.

“Karr, can you start the engine?”  He hoped the answer was yes.  With the chaos of Karr in his mind he wasn’t certain the AI had control of the Stealth never mind asking him to drive the TransAm too.  But thirty seconds later – and that felt like a lifetime – the engine hummed into life.
<Nick….>  It was a plea.  Nicholas reached through the emotions and found the presence of his partner, offering support and comfort as best he could.  He didn’t understand what had happened here and he needed to before they could start to make sense of it all.  “I need to get Kitt back to the warehouse and get over to the hospital.”
He climbed out of the TransAm and closed the door, dropping into Stealth, glancing at the voice modulator as Karr said, “We have to take the car with us.”
Not willing to argue with his traumatised partner, Nick nodded.  “I’ll drive our car, you drive theirs.”

*

Leaning against the whitewashed walls, Nick sipped the filthy black liquid the hospital drinks machine had declared was coffee.  It was late, quiet.  So when there was activity further along the corridor, he glanced up.  Bonnie and Devon were running toward him.  He looked dishevelled, like he’d thrown on the sweater and trousers without really waking.  She looked ashen.
“Nick?”

He’d called Bonnie.  If he hadn’t, and Michael died here tonight, she would never have forgiven him.  He dropped the half-empty polystyrene cup into a nearby trash bin and approached them, hands grasping Bonnie’s arms gently.  “He’s still in surgery.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.  I just know that they were watching that jewel thief for the Foundation.”
Devon nodded.  “That’s right.  Claris.”
Nick frowned.  “Claris?”
“Michael had found out his real name, I believe, but he didn’t get around to reporting in.”  Devon paused.  “How bad is it?”
“He took a bullet.  I don’t know any more than that.”  Nick shook his head, almost apologetic.

“Mr MacKenzie….”  They all turned as a doctor stepped from the double doors that lead through to the operating theatres.  “The nurse said that you were a close, personal friend of Mr Knight?”
Nick nodded, imagining he could feel the blood draining from his face.  He felt Karr, albeit distracted and in the very back of his mind, and reached for his partner for support he hadn’t realised he would need.
“He’s a very lucky man.”

Nick caught his breath, catching a prayer in his mind.  He felt Bonnie’s hand on his arm.  “What’s his condition?” Devon managed after a moment.  The doctor regarded them both, Nick had been very insistent and very persuasive in his message to the nurse regarding Michael and giving out any information pertaining to his condition or whereabouts.
Nicholas reassured him almost coldly.  “They’re family.”
The doctor nodded.  “By some miracle the bullet missed his heart and his lungs and embedded itself in his chest bone.  We’ve removed the slug and repaired the damage and he will make it.  He’ll be in a lot of pain when he comes around but he’ll live.”  Glancing at each of them, he nodded and returned to his patient.

Nick backed up from his partner slightly.  <Michael’s alive>
<Kitt’s dead>  It took a moment for Karr’s words to sink in.  He wasn’t really sure that he’d understood them.
<What?>
<He’s dead, Nick.  There’s nothing left anymore>
Closing his eyes, Nicholas reached out to press his palm flat against the cold wall.  God, no….  <How?>
<They wiped it clean.  A powerful directional magnetic field, I think>
Nick felt physically sick.  He reached for Karr, but for now his partner wouldn’t accept.  He would go on hunting until he’d ensured he had done all he could, found everything there was to find.  The emotion though, the swamping sadness in Nick’s mind, was impossible to ignore.  He felt the tears in his eyes and swiped at them viciously with his fingers.
<He deserves tears>  The gentle words were spoken directly in to his mind.
<There will be many tears>

Looking up, Nick glanced from Devon to Bonnie.  “I have some bad news.”
Devon raised his eyebrows.  What could be worse than the news that had brought them here?  “More?”
Nicholas hesitated.  But there was no easy way to say this.  “Kitt didn’t make it.”  He glanced from one to the other and ploughed on before the words had a chance to sink in.  “Karr thinks he was hit with a massive magnetic field.  We lost him.”
Devon looked shell-shocked, but Bonnie was staring at him, expression hard and disbelieving.  “No.”  She shook her head.  “No!  He’ll be… somewhere.  I can help him!”

Nick reached out, touched her shoulder gently.  “There’s nothing left to help.  It would have been fast.  Karr’s been inside the CPU, there’s just nothing, no data, no memories… he’s gone.”
Bonnie couldn’t prevent the tears from falling, didn’t want to prevent them.  She couldn’t believe it.  It wasn’t possible, Kitt had to be alive, he couldn’t… die.  It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Pulling away from Nick she glared at him.  “Where is he?”
“The car’s in parking lot, Karr drove it here, he wanted to carry on searching.”  He didn’t stop her leaving.  There was little point in keeping her here.  <Bonnie’s on her way.  She’s upset.  Let her do whatever she needs to>  He received an affirmative but no words.
When he looked back at Devon, the older man had taken a seat in the corridor.  He looked like his world had crashed in upon him.  In his mind he was thinking back to the day Kitt and Michael had come to see him, Kitt in the android body, hugging him, finally letting him apologise for the pain he’d caused.

He glanced toward the double doors from which the doctor had come to tell them about Michael’s condition.  “What happened, Nick?”
Nicholas rubbed his eyes tiredly.  “I don’t know.  I’m not sure how powerful a magnetic field it would have to have been to get through the shell.  And I have no idea why Kitt would have just… stood there and let it happen.  The shooter was an amateur, they never meant to kill Michael.”  He thought it through.  Something wasn’t right but he couldn’t put his finger on what.  “There are some things I need to take care of.  I’ll come back in a couple of hours.”

Nick walked away before either of them could say more.  There was too much emotion here, too much damage done for one night.
 

An odd sight met him in the parking lot.  Bonnie was sitting sideways in the driver’s seat of the TransAm, the door open, feet on the ground outside the car, her face in her hands.  There was no sound but her shoulders were shaking.  Karr’s nose was pressed tentatively into her leg.  For him to go so close to anyone else was a bad sign, one Nick couldn’t ever remembering seeing before.

He went to stand in front of her and for a while he just left his hand on her shoulder, offering what little comfort he could.  Finally, after a long time, she straightened up and both he and his partner backed up as she stood.  “You’ll… take it back to the warehouse?”
He nodded.  “I’ll be back in a couple of hours with the wrist cuff.”  She looked up at him, eyes wide.  “If we tell him, if he finds out like this, he won’t make it either.”
She took in his words.  “What if… he doesn’t want to live… without….”
Nick spoke calmly.  “That’s Michael’s decision.”
Without responding, without looking at him again, she turned, walking a straight, unwavering path toward the main hospital building.  Nick dropped into the Stealth’s driver’s seat and watched her until she was out of sight.  Leaning back, he closed his eyes and reached for Karr.  Without warning, although totally expectedly, he was suddenly swamped with desolation.   He held on, to himself and to Karr, letting his emotions mix with those of his partner.  For now it was grief.  Soon, it would turn to anger and a hunger for revenge.

*

Yanking down on the top left-hand corner of the tarpaulin, Nick ensured the jet black TransAm was completely covered.
“What will they do with it?” Karr asked, his voice low.
His partner shook his head.  “It’s Michael’s.  I doubt he’ll ever want to see it again once he’s said goodbye.”
“And the CPU?”
Nick considered that.  “We’ll… disable it for good and bury it.”  He still couldn’t grasp the reality of what they were talking about.  It was only two years ago that they’d fought for Michael’s right to claim the car as his own, to keep Kitt with him for the rest of his life.  And then Kitt had chosen Karr and Nick as his guardians if for some reason he wished to outlive his partner.

Nick stared at the covered body of the car.  “Something isn’t right!” he shouted in to the silence of the warehouse.  Karr just watched him.  “This was never supposed to happen!”  He turned on his partner.  “How in the hell did this happen?!”
“Nick….”
“No!  Karr… no….”  Bunching his fist he slammed it down hard onto the hood of the TransAm.  He felt Karr wince in his mind, not for him but for Kitt.  But there was no Kitt any longer.  “He was better than this!”  Starting to pace, Nicholas moved out around the shell.  “He wouldn’t have let this happen.  He would have seen something, anything!”

There was nothing Karr could say.  He remained silent, watching Nick vent his anger as it grew within his mind.  “Would an magnetic field do this?  Could it really… kill him?  Wouldn’t the shell protect him against that?  And how in hell did they persuade him to stand still?”
“Maybe it was directional.”
“And how powerful a force would that have had to be?!  How large a generator?!”
Karr grudgingly accepted that.  “So they would have had to have been close.  Maybe they threatened Michael.”
“Maybe.  But I found him in the garden and he was shot from behind.”

They could discuss and guess forever.  Nothing changed the fact that Kitt was no longer residing in the CPU.  It was true that he’d been out before, into Karr’s CPU, in to Michael’s mind, in to the android.  But each time Kitt’s electronic signature had accompanied him, and each time a part of him at least had remained connected to the disks and memory that completed him.  This time, they’d been wiped clean.  There was no denying or getting away from that.  Kitt was gone from them.  No amount of ‘looking at it from all angles’ was going to bring him back.

“You should get back to the hospital.”
Nick heard the defeated tone in his partner’s voice.  “We’ll find out who did this.”
“I know we will.  And they will pay.  But I do not want to be revenging Michael Knight’s death too.”
Nick sighed softly, dropping his hand to Karr’s warm skin.  “Would you go on without me?”
Karr hesitated.  “I do not want to wish to consider that.”

*

Michael opened his eyes slowly.  The light in his room was thankfully dim.  Breathing was painful but at least he was still doing it.  He remembered the bullet driving into him, remembered the white-hot pain.  He remembered something else too.  A black hole forming in his mind.  Reaching back, he touched the implant.

There was a block in place.  There wasn’t the darkness, just the silence of a link cut.  It made a kind of sense.  He’d been shot, he was badly injured and in pain.  Nick wouldn’t have allowed Kitt to suffer that.  And Michael found that now he thought about it, he could feel something around his wrist.

Turning his head carefully, he saw Nicholas sitting next to him.  “Hi….”  He could barely hear his own voice.  He managed to lift his right arm and saw the cuff that was blocking him.
“It was for your own good, Michael,” Nick murmured softly.  The medication was dragging him back toward sleep and Michael missed the exact meaning of the words.
“How is he?”
Nick hesitated.  “As well as can be expected, under the circumstances.”  He hated himself for lying to his friend.  Michael would hate him later.  But if he told him he would just give up, and Nick couldn’t let that happen.  “What happened?”
“I… I just felt the shot.  It all went black.”
“Where was Kitt?”
Michael hesitated.  “Kitt… he was… distracted.”  He dozed off for a moment before his eyes opened.  “He… wasn’t there.  I remember him….”
Nick touched his friend’s hand.  “Just rest.”  He watched as Michael was pulled back under by the drugs.  It wouldn’t be long before the man remembered losing Kitt from his mind.  Then he’d tear the cuff off just to reassure himself that his partner was okay.  And he’d find the silence he remembered.  Only this time it would be forever.

*

He came to slowly.  It was dark, cold.  The silence around him was deafening.  He couldn’t remember what had happened.  Cautiously, he started to look around him.  He had no idea how he’d come to be here.  He reached toward the link but it wasn’t where it should have been.  Panic threatened to overwhelm him and he started to reassure himself.  Something had happened.  They’d moved him again, maybe into a temporary CPU.  They would be trying to contact him.  He had to find the communications port.

But as he moved carefully through the CPU, he found no COM ports, no interfaces, no outputs of any kind.  There were signals coming in but they were being serviced automatically by processes he had no control over.  Fear started to creep in to his mind.  Where was he?

Passing around the disk stacks, he suddenly saw a link chip.  Excitedly he dove toward it, touching it, activating it.  Instantly he shied away.  What came through from the other side was chilling.  It was dark, crimson, metallic, like he’d always imagined blood to be.  It seeped through, trickling into him, making a first connection.  It wasn’t right!
//Michael?!//
But there was no answer, just the cold unnerving feeling that something other than his driver was on the other side.  //Michael?//  His plea once again went unanswered.  A dreaded thought stole over him.  Was this what it was like… to be linked to a dead man?

*

When Michael woke again he felt a lot better.  The drugs they’d given him were wearing off and although he knew he wouldn’t be able to cope with the pain for too long, he liked having a clear head for a few minutes.  He guessed it was the early hours of the morning.  Nick had been with him earlier but he’d gone now.  Michael hoped he’d taken Kitt with him.  Instinctively he touched the implant.  When all he was met with was static, he recalled the cuff on his wrist.  For the best, definitely, however painful it was not to have his partner with him.

Thinking back, he tried to remember what had happened.  The shot had come from nowhere, Kitt hadn’t warned him, hadn’t detected anything wrong.  But he had, hadn’t he?  Michael thought he recalled his partner telling him something was wrong, but that he could handle it.  And in the next second his chest had exploded.  He’d called for Kitt, reaching for his partner as he’d spiralled downwards in to unconsciousness.

There was something else though, something lurking that he couldn’t grasp.  Between the sudden jarring of the bullet through his back and the bliss of unconsciousness he remembered… Kitt hadn’t been there.  He’d reached for his partner, desperately in need of help, and been greeted by an unwelcoming darkness, a black hole dragging him in.

Michael lifted his right wrist and pulling the IV lines with him he pushed his fingers between his skin and the cuff, worrying it loose.  For an age it wouldn’t shift, but slowly he managed to turn it so that the fastenings were facing him.  Using his nails he unclipped the tiny connections one by one.  Finally the gadget fell to the bed and he again touched the implant.

The engulfing darkness almost drowned him.  His heart rate leapt, setting off the alarms on the EKG next to him.  He started to shake, terrified of what this meant.  What hadn’t Nick told him?!
//KITT!// he yelled into the blackness but he knew instinctively that there would be no answer.  Kitt wasn’t there any longer.  His warm, beautifully soft presence was gone, replaced by harsh shards of nothingness, of loss and loneliness the likes of which he’d never known.  When the link had been blocked before, even when Kitt had been inside the android, there’d been the whisper of something, an echo of what was usually between them.

Now… now it was as if Kitt had never been there.  Except that he knew what it was like to have his partner in his mind, he knew exactly what he was missing.  He clawed his fingers into his hair, his movements pulling at the skin where they’d stitched him back together.  The physical pain of his injury was nothing compared to the gaping wound in his mind.  Slowly, he crumpled, tears starting down his face, his body beginning to tremble.

By the time the nurses arrived, alerted by the alarms on both the EKG and the EEG, Michael was curled into a foetal ball on his side, hands over his face, low, deep sobs wracking his body.

They sedated him, waiting until he’d calmed before taking the wrist cuff from the sheets and reapplying it to his wrist.  Mr MacKenzie had been very strict in his instruction that removing the small piece of electronic wizardry would do more damage than the bullet had.  Seeing their devastated patient, they realised what he’d meant and decided they should call him.

*

As they tooled into the hospital parking lot for the third time in under twelve hours, Nick glanced out of the window at the sunrise.  Life went on.
“Why did he remove the wrist cuff?” Karr asked quietly, the first time one of them had spoken since leaving the garage.
Nick sighed.  “Maybe something happened before he was shot, or before he lost consciousness.  Maybe Kitt tried to tell him, to warn him.”  He pulled the Stealth into a space and killed the engine.

“Your pulse rate is abnormally high.”  Karr’s words surprised him.
“Something you should be used to.”
“You think he’ll blame you.”
Nick scowled.  But perhaps his partner hadn’t needed to read his mind to know what he was thinking.  “I should have told him.”  He climbed out of the car before Karr could attempt to contradict him.
 

Michael was still under the sedatives, but the signs of his rapid breakdown were visible; his eyes ringed with red, his body still curled on its side despite his stitches.  Nicholas sat next to the bed, eyes wandering over the creased face, the waves of black hair against the pillow.  Reaching out, he turned Michael’s wrist gently and checked the connections on the blocking cuff.  They’d reapplied it correctly.  With it, the static would be bearable.  Without it, the silence would slowly drive him insane.  It would be something he would have to get used to if he wanted to live.  If.

It was over an hour before Michael came to from under the sedatives’ influence.  Nick was the first thing he saw, and immediately he remembered.  He reached for the implant once again, and found only the static.  They’d put the cuff back!  Furious, he reached for it.  But Nick grabbed his left wrist lightly.  “Don’t.”
Eyes flashing, Michael glared at him.  “Where is he?” he whispered roughly.
Nick tried to keep the emotion from his face.  “He’s dead.”

The anger vanished as quickly as it had come.  For now.

It took a while to sink in.  It wasn’t something that was easy to comprehend.
“No.”  Painfully, and with no little difficulty, Michael pushed himself up onto one elbow.  “No….”  He couldn’t understand why Nick was saying that.  Dropping back to the hard metal headboard, Michael went for the wrist cuff again, and again Nick stopped him, his grip harder this time.  “Let me go to him!”
“He isn’t there.  Michael, I know it’s difficult.”
His friend’s face crumpled.  “Difficult?!  You’re telling me Kitt’s… gone, dead… that’s not difficult, Nick, that’s impossible!”  The strength of his outburst surprised Nicholas.  He must have been in agony from the raw bullet wound in his back and the disruption in his chest.

“He was hit with a massive magnetic field.”
“The shell…”
“…didn’t help.  I don’t know everything yet, Karr’s… investigating.”  He bit off the word.  Michael was silent for a time, his mind blanking, unable to even touch on what Nick was telling him.
“How do you know?” he asked quietly, finally.
“Karr went into his CPU.  There was nothing there.  Not even data.”
Michael closed his eyes.  There was no way that this was happening.

The silence stretched between them for a while.  “I want to be alone,” Michael told his friend eventually.
Nick nodded.  He considered asking if he should call Bonnie.  But decided against it.  “I’ll be around.”
Michael didn’t respond.  He waited.  Only when he was sure Nick had left did he reached down and remove the cuff.

The darkness touched him and he let it.  Delving into the frightening void, he went in search of Kitt.

*

He sealed a block in place over the chillingly silent link and set himself the task of finding a communications port.  There must be one.  He was still convinced that Bonnie had moved him, but as he tried to recall what had happened he could only remember a sudden, agonising pain and then nothing.  Had Michael been hurt?  Killed?  Was he here in this… prison because he’d failed to protect his partner?

He whimpered softly, hearing the sound echo around him.  He tried to push the thought from his mind but it caught a hold of him and started to fester.  Was he to blame for whatever had happened?  Was Michael dead because of him?  Where had he gone wrong?

Reaching a part of himself toward the block he’d sealed, he thought about Karr.  Would his brother have allowed them to do this?  Karr needed him as much as much as they each needed their drivers.  He brushed the tendril of his white presence over his own block.  //Michael…//

He was confused.  He was scared.  He’d spread out through the CPU, looking for answers, looking for exits.  Now he drew himself together again, feeling too vulnerable.  Usually he’d be happy like that, with his core exposed.  He brought a memory to the forefront of his mind; Michael coming closer than he’d ever been before, touching that core.  The sensations had overwhelmed him, in turn when he echoed the feelings back to Michael they’d both gone under.  The pleasure, the ecstasy was more than he’d ever known.

He stored the memory again, hoping it would be safe.

* * *

Part Three ~ Main ~ mail author