MAIZE

As Maize launched herself off the cliff, she felt the air around her surge forward and her eyes shut against the blinding pressure as plummeted down into the icy submerge below.

She plunged into the chilling water, her boots pitching in first before the rest of her followed.

The cold hit her with a shock, and in an instant, she was forcing her sodden shoes to kick forward against the drag of her weighted clothes and push herself to the surface. When her head finally broke through, she took in gasping breathes of air into her lungs to make up for the breath that had escaped her throughout the fall before she hit the water.

It was a struggle to keep her above the surface with the weight of her clothes fighting to drag her down with each kick, but she maintained her treading water until she heard the next two came up for air.

Alec and Ryder's head broke through the surface at the same time, water sopping their hair and each breath coming in as rough pants.

Together they all began swimming towards the edge, where Kota was already waiting on land and shaking out matted wet fur. They let the flow of water carry them until they were close enough that the sides of the ravine to latched onto the rocks, and then they pulled themselves up enough to catch their breaths on the sturdy strip of hard earth.

"That was...we're never doing that again," Alec breathed, still reeling with shock.

"You're welcome," Maize replied dryly as she began to pull herself fully out of the water.

"I'm not a religious man by any means...but hallelujah...we didn't die instantly," Ryder said.

"I'm glad you two have so much trust in me," Maize replied with a touch of distilled sarcasm at each of their dramatics. It hadn't been so bad, right?

"You just told us to jump off a cliff, you're lucky I'm not calling you crazy!" Ryder dissented.

She shot him a look. "I just saved our lives. And if I don't recall, you jumped too." Neither of them had anything to say to that, and she smiled wryly. "Looks like we're all crazy."

"Crazy stupid," Ryder muttered.

"Great," Alec replied with an exasperated roll of his eyes.

"Ryder, how long do we have before the gang can catch up to us from here?" Maize asked quickly.

He pulled his lower half out of the water, shaking out a drenched pant leg begrudgingly as he considered it. "If I had to guess I'd say a good while. If they chose to go around, which they probably did since we didn't see them come splashing in after us, we have some time to get a head start before they even make it down here."

She nodded at the confirmation. "We'll be gone by then." They and a bit of time to catch their breaths.

There was a beat of silence where the air around them grew still.

"How did they find us?" Alec questioned, his voice staggeringly low as he glared up from under the lids of his eyes. "I thought that was impossible."

"It should have been," Maize murmured.

Ryder was quiet.

"What's wrong?" she asked slowly, reading the tension in his shoulders that hadn't been there a moment ago.

Without answering, Ryder stood abruptly and began fumbling with his jacket, eyes growing more furious as he dug around and finally pulled something out from the inside of a coat pocket. The small device seemed to be buzzing in his fingers.

Alec frowned, "Is that...?"

"A tracker," Ryder confirmed, his eyes never leaving the device as he glared down at his palm with steely anger before he threw it to the ground and crushed the water-ruined device under his boot. "Dammit! I fell for the oldest trick in the book! I was too busy focusing on the other guy that I didn't even see it..." he rambled.

"What? Ryder what guy?" Maize cut in. What was he talking about?

Ryder raked a hand through his hair in increasing aggravation, looking as if ready to tear it from his head as he growled. "I was followed this morning," he started furiously. "Some guy spent the better half of the morning stalking me to see wherever I went, I lost him, but not before his partner in disguise planted this thing on me without me even noticing...Only on my way coming back I saw the warning signs that they were incoming. I got here as fast as I could when I realized that everything was about to blow to shit," he explained.

"We should find the others," Alec said seriously as he got to his feet and surveyed the area. "Then we've got the get the hell out of here."

Maize agreed.

"Where are they?" She asked Ryder.

He rolled his eyes and contemplated, his own irritation at himself still shining through. "Hm, let's see, I sent them out about 12:30 and they've had a little while to themselves to run so I'm guessing they're somewhere around Ottawa by now," he snapped, temper still reeling.

"If you didn't know, then you could have just said so," Maize rebuked impatiently.

"We don't have time for this," Alec said to the both of them, somehow managing to be the level headed one out of the three. He looked at Ryder, "Now do you know where they are or not?"

"Kota knows the fastest way to the caves..." Ryder answered in a mutter.

Alec gave a curt nod, eyeing both the canine owner and his dog. "Then by all means, lead the way Fluffy."

Finding the entrance of Ryder's series of connected hidden ways would have been an impossibility without Kota and Ryder leading the way, that just had to be said now.

They made it in record-breaking time. Without a moment of hesitance from either Kota or Ryder as they navigated through the woods based on memory, tracking, and instinct alone.

Maize was eager to find the others—she and Alec both, as she could tell. He looked like he had his mind on the same thing she did; locating Kishan and Maria so that they could get out of there as soon as possible.

The threat of gang members appearing in their path out of nowhere was with them the whole time, never leaving them since they had been inches away from getting shot down, if it hadn't been for Ryder. To say that Maize was merely on edge would have been an understatement. She was the string of an archer's drawn bow, the tension only growing the longer it was held back. For Maize, her release would be when they confirmed both agents were alright, and then find somewhere where she didn't feel so hidden and exposed at the same time. The cover that the woods provided went both ways, the forest didn't take to sides, only to those that knew how to harness it. That could put either side at a major advantage or disadvantage—more likely to the latter in their case, they were the hunted.

Her mind began reeling but Maize did not allow herself to get distracted by the spurt of urgent questions suddenly running through her mind; how the gang knew to track Ryder? How they knew to follow them to Canada? How they had been found, yet again? What mistakes had she made along the way that might explain such an occurrence to befall them in the one place she had been certain was safe from the world?

She didn't allow her mind to think about the guilt biting at her, for Ryder, for forcing him to get involved. If she did, her head would have been lost and her mind not in the game.

From her experience, that could mean the difference between life or death.

Her blood was still pumping, the familiar feel of her heart hammering in her chest from both physical exertion and the adrenaline coursing through her veins at the present. The surge of pounding exhilaration and shock she had received from diving the face of a cliff without much thought was still present with her even then, but was gradually calming.

They were at the cliff face now. Jagged rock walls towering over them as they jutted from the earth in vertical shapes. They followed Ryder's lead as they acceded up the narrow path along the side of the rocks.

Every step Maize took squashed soggily against the solid stone beneath her feet due to the current sodden state of her footwear. Her weighed down clothes caused a drag in her movements, more than she liked. And droplets of water from her damp hair still flicked into her eyes every once and a while, but she did her best to ignore all of it. There wasn't time to dwell on such minor discomforts, as neither did the other two—considering how any one of them could have been suffering from much worse. Had things gone differently at the waterfall.

She stopped her pace when Ryder—without any warning whatsoever—suddenly slipped his body horizontally through a slitted opening between the rock faces that she hadn't even noticed before.

She heard the echo of his boots touch down on solid floor on the other side of the dark space with such minimal light shining through. She shared a quick look with Alec, and he motion for her to go first while he checked behind them once more to make sure they weren't being followed. Then he slid in after her.

The space of the cave wasn't large, but there was more than enough room for the three of them, and Kota, to stand around comfortably without cramping together. At least now they were not exposed.

The rest of the cave seemed to continue and led down into a tunnelled path, just like Ryder had said.

Speaking of, the dog owner was quick to act, never diminishing the hasty purpose in his actions as he pulled a rock free and exposed the dug out hole it had been covering, quickly tossing it to the side and pulling out the box inside. He snapped off the lid and dug into it, without a word, without a moment's loss of focus.

Inside appeared to be an emergency kit; first aid, bandages, flare, water, anything you might need to grab on the run, including a box of sorted rounds.

He tossed things out, even going so far as to throw a heavily weighted flashlight behind his back which Alec managed to catch just in time before it came sailing towards him without warning. Never slowing—or apologizing for what he threw, Ryder seemed to find what he had been searching for and tugged a smaller black case from within the box of stuff, unzipped it, and began purposefully pulling out the pieces and

Alec opened his mouth to say something, probably to ask when he was doing, but Ryder sensed it and held one finger up without turning around as he carried on his task of putting the thing together. I don't want to hear it.

"This is the entrance to your tunnels?" Maize asked with astonishment, looking down the open way leading deeper into the rock side. How long would even one of these have taken to build?

Ryder muttered some sort of barely coherent confirmation as he busied himself, paying minimal attention to her question.

"How many are there?" she asked.

"Over thirty, more or less," Ryder muttered blankly. "Depending on which way you want to go."

"Great," Alec replied sarcastically. "How are we supposed to find Kishan and Maria then?"

"I'm working on it," Ryder responded with annoyance as he screwed the last piece of an antenna to the device in his hand. He stood and tossed it to Maize, where she caught it and turned it over in her hands. A radio device. She looked at Ryder and he nodded to it. "I handed one off to the agent that doesn't stop talking."

"Kishan," Alec said.

Ryder shot the detective a quick look. "You have no right to be correcting me about anyone's names—but anyway, use that thing to call them and tell them that you're on your way. Just tune it to frequency 0047."

"Thanks." Maize worked on doing what he said as Alec looked at Ryder.

"Smart thinking," he said.

"Do you expect me to say thank-you?" Ryder questioned in return, but at least there was no malice behind it, and he did seemed a little appeased by the compliment.

Maize turned the side nob to the frequency Ryder had instructed, but when she tried to use it the only thing she was met with was rattling static. She frowned, cursed, and then tried again. Same result.

Both men were staring at her, and she looked up to meet their expressions. "There's some sort of interference," she muttered, slapping the side of the radio but receiving no results.

"Shouldn't be..." Ryder muttered with a frown as he quickly took the device from her hands and began to tinker with it, trying to get it to respond.

While Ryder struggled with it, Alec took the chance to turn to her and keeping his voice low, so as not to distract Ryder, leaned closer to her ear.

"You know what this means right?" he said as he murmured quietly. "As soon as we meet up with Kishan and Maria, we need to get out of here, find another place, again."

Maize closed her eyes and sighed tersely, opening them back up to look right up at him with conjecture in her gaze. "You know," she began purposefully, "I'm starting to get tired of the cat and mouse hunt we seem to be trapped in..."

"Believe me, I don't find it any more appealing than you," he replied earnestly. "We'll have to figure it out later."

She was about to say something else when she was cut off by Ryder drawing both of their attentions away.

"We might have a problem," he started.

They stilled.

"What kind of problem?" Alec asked slowly.

Ryder sighed held forward the hand the held the radio pointedly. "I can't get a signal through to the other side."

"What does that mean?" Maize questioned, already feeling a pang of unease drop into her stomach.

Ryder hesitated. "It means, for whatever reason, neither of your friends are answering the damn radio."

"Yeah...starting to see how that may be a problem," Alec muttered.

Maize said, "We've got to find them. Fast. Ryder, show us which way you showed them first. Kota, come." She tapped her leg twice in command and Kota was up and alert by her side in an instant.

"Sure, take my dog..." Ryder muttered, but his displeasure was frowned out by their combined overwhelming anxiousness.

They took off towards the other end of the tunnel, following Ryder.

For Maize, there was no warning when they were supposed to stop, no indicator that separated any designated area from the rest they may or may not have passed. So it was sudden when Ryder suddenly halted in front of them, in the middle of the tunnel, seemingly no where in particular.

Maize was about to question why they had stopped, when she looked past Alec's shoulder to see that Kota was sniffing something on the floor and growling, while Ryder had one hand moving slowly posed on the strap of his rifle, as if ready to draw it at any second.

Alec used the flashlight that Ryder had thrown at him and shone the illuminating device ahead of them, giving light to reveal what Kota could smell but they couldn't see.

Ryder moved forward and bent down next to his canine, his steel gaze focused intensely on the floor. Or rather, the dark stain left on it, illuminated by the shine of Alec's flashlight.

Maize didn't have a doubt in her mind about what it was. She knew instantly; blood.

Not a lot, not enough that hinted at any sort of fatal injury—whether that was meant to be seen as a good sign or not, they didn't know yet. For the blood could have belonged to anyone.

That's what she convinced the gnawing claw in her stomach to believe anyway.

"This was the tunnel. If they followed to path I told them, they should have ended up through here and we would have already met with them by now," Ryder said quietly, not rising from his crouched position and not taking his eyes off the patch of crimson left behind, quite recently enough from the looks of it. "The blood is fresh..." he murmured out loud to himself.

Maize had a bad feeling. A really bad feeling.

She didn't like the implication the patch of blood had left, nor the tone of which Ryder voice took as he spoke.

"Hold on," Alec cut in suddenly, frowning. But it wasn't at Ryder that had his attention, it was past him. Without a word the detective walked past the man and his dog, a few paces ahead of them and stopped in the dark, his light reflecting shadows off the enclosed walls as he bent down and took the mangled piece in his hand, turning and lifting it for them both to see.

His face was cast by shadow but Maize felt a chill go through her at the darkly wavering look between concern and hope for a different outcome as he flashed a quick glance particularly at her and then directed to Ryder, who now stood.

"Please don't tell me this was the radio you gave them," Alec said quietly, but his voice was strained with an inexpressible edge of something that he seemed to be keeping back—something akin to a sinking reality as he raised the smashed remains of a radio twin to the one they had.

There was no way the damage done to it was accidental, it looked as if someone had taken it and crumpled it under the bottom of their shoe. Maize felt her stomach lurch.

Now they knew why the two agents weren't answering.

They had their answer to Alec's question as soon as Ryder clenched his fists and stared at the broken device with a look of silent unease at its implications.

"Oh shit..." he murmured.

And Maize's stomach plummeted.