It was a relief to be topside again, yet Wildwing had no small amount of trepidation in giving the order. Tanya’s quarantine had technically never been lifted. The initial infection that had eventually destroyed three people had taken over a year to propagate to its final conclusion, and three weeks could have potentially meant nothing in its life cycle. But they could not remain underground forever, not with Dragaunus on the outside, using their idle time to enact whatever his plan was. It was a risk, but it seemed a risk that had to be taken.

There was something comforting about falling back into old habits. The specific whine of wind passing by the Migrator’s chassis, and its rumble as it moved over the road. If today’s threat was Dragaunus, Wildwing knew what he was supposed to do, and that, strangely enough, made him feel better.

“How long are we going to spend hatchsitting those two?” Nosedive asked, interrupting his meditations.

“How long?” Wildwing asked, annoyed. “Until we know they aren’t a threat.”

“Is that going to be ever? Like, what are they even going to do?”

Wildwing stared at him for a long moment, before narrowing his eyes, and he did not even have to speak Lucretia’s name for the accusation to be made.

“That was the one time!” Nosedive protested. “One person trying to kill us all doesn’t mean everyone is going to.”

“Not everyone is going to try to kill us, but so far everyone has,” Mallory chimed in.

“What if this mission takes years? Or decades? We going to have to keep Emily and Winterwing on a leash the entire time?”

Wildwing shrugged. “If we have to.”

“That’s insane,” Nosedive said. “I haven’t gotten to spend a day with my friends since you brought them home.”

“You asked for more responsibility,” Wildwing said. “Everyone else is putting in their time, too. We split it evenly, you were there.”

“You can’t just stay on red alert all the time, man, you’re going to break your brain.”

As the Migrator traveled further and further from the city, Wildwing became increasingly less sure of his choice to leave the Pond. There were no more buildings, no more of the large luxury homes that sprinkled the outskirts, and all that was left were the largely barren, scrubby hills that would eventually turn into mountains.

Mallory must have seen his uneasiness. “So, do we have a plan for when this goes sideways?”

The first time they had encountered Dragaunus on the planet, he had been hiding his little ship as a mountain peak, as he attempted to carry out repairs. It was a reasonable assumption, given the state that the Raptor had been in the last time Wildwing had seen it, that the lizards could have been carrying out a similar operation now. The problem was, if Dragaunus was avoiding a conflict, they had no way to flush him out, with the Mask gone. Any of the hills they were passing could have been an enemy stronghold, and they had no way of ever knowing.

“I don’t know why you’re so worried about us,” Duke muttered from his seat up front. “What he’s tryin’ to do isn’t out here with a bunch of dry sticks and rocks. We left it back at the Pond.”

Wildwing was quiet for a moment. With every other problem that they had been facing, he had not had the time to speak to Duke about anything that wasn’t an immediate issue.

He had not asked the obvious questions, about the sister. “Who is she?”

“Why would I know?” Duke scoffed.

“You all have spent the last three weeks tormenting me for my copy, the least you could do is humor me when it’s your turn.”

“Nothin’ to do with me,” Duke insisted. “She looks like ma, maybe. She resented being a mother, but why not have another?”

Nosedive coughed, “Man, that was a whole lot you just said there.”

“Shut up, kid.”

“How terrible it must be for you,” Mallory mused. “Some of your family survived. Devastating.”

“If you knew ‘em, maybe you’d agree,” Duke said sharply, though keeping his eyes firmly on the road. “My family is the folks that I relied on for twenty years, not some chick you found.”

“Would this be the same reliable family that raised Falcone?” she asked.

“Is this about my sister or yours?”

She responded only with fuming silence. Mallory spoke very little of her own family, and most days preferred to stick to mission. Everyone in the resistance knew exactly who General McMallard was, and what had happened to him when central command had fallen.

Less well known was that Mallory had a younger sister. Wildwing had only heard of her many months later, in one of the rare times that Mallory had felt nostalgic and bittersweet, rather than simply angry. He had been cross at Nosedive for some slight of obliviousness that was not, in retrospect, worth being angry about. Her opinion then had been similar to what it was now: that he should have been thankful that he knew where Nosedive even was, to be in a position that he could be upset.

Haley had not joined the rest of the family in their military pursuits. She instead had been somewhere in the DuCaine Metropolis area, perhaps having spent the previous night with a boyfriend. Mallory’s call to her had been one of the very last to successfully connect, right as the communications network began to fail. She had dismissed Mallory's entreaties to get to safety, insisting that the warnings were false alarm or a test, as they ever were, and that she was worrying too much.

Mallory had not been able to convince Haley otherwise by the time the call permanently lost connection.

The rest of the journey to Tanya’s ‘funny’ spot was spent without further conversation. There was no indication of anything strange, either visually or via Drake One’s status pings.

Their destination was the only remarkable landmark for miles in any direction. Nothing about the factory suggested abandoned, as Tanya had proclaimed it. It was an ugly rectangle of a building, but very much occupied. The parking lot that surrounded it was completely full, with every visible space taken. There were two large semitrucks sitting at the loading dock, though it was unclear what exactly they were hauling.

“Wow,” Nosedive remarked as they exited the Migrator, “bankruptcy did really well for these guys.”

This made the act of investigation harder. It was a matter of simple trespassing to walk into an abandoned building. No one was going to care, and usually they were not the first people to go into an empty space, or the last. An occupied building posed a different set of problems. Few factory floor managers were thrilled to have a group of hockey mascots demand an all access tour of their facility.

Assuming it was actually a factory. It had all the appearances of a thriving business, but it had not missed Wildwing’s notice that he hadn’t actually seen any people aside from themselves. No one on a smoke break, no one walking to or from their car. There was no movement whatsoever, even on the loading dock where someone should have been managing inventory. It was strange to be in a spot that apparently contained so many people, yet he could not even remember passing a single vehicleonce they had turned onto the stretch of road that had brought them here.

“What do we do now?” Nosedive asked. “Do we come back later under the cover of night, like the delinquents we are?”

“Too late for that,” Mallory said. “If there is anyone in there, they saw us roll up. We've lost any deniability or stealth.”

For what may have been the thousandth time, Wildwing internally lamented the loss of the Mask. They stood on the side of the road, staring at the walls of the building from afar, and it would have been so simple, so simple to have just looked through the concrete to get his answer. They must have read his thoughts, or perhaps someone had asked a question that he had not heard while contemplating, because they were all looking at him.

He nearly responded, but stopped, and gestured to maintain the quiet. Aside from the metallic sounds of the Migrator’s cooling engine, and the occasional scrape of a boot as someone turned or shifted weight, they stood in the center of dead silence. There was no sound of diesel from the semis, no cars on the road, no aircraft overhead, and not even the indication of birds or insects in the scrub beyond.

Wildwing had never heard such unnatural quiet on Earth before. The sky was still blue and cloudless, and over the hill they would be in full view of the city again, yet he was overwhelmed with the sensation that somehow, the four of them had accidentally traveled to somewhere else entirely. A foolish notion, though in the context of the morning’s conversation of physical laws, and the fact that they had accidentally wandered into somewhere else several times now in the course of their mission, he could not put it out of his mind.

His thoughts were broken by a thud in the parking lot, that could have been a car door slamming shut.

“Did you hear that?” Wildwing asked.

“No?”

He should not have so willingly wandered out into the open. On reflection, he would not have been able to explain it. He felt almost in a dream, as if something other than himself was compelling his feet. He should have been concerned, but felt only the intrigue.

The others fell in behind him, unsure. To their credit, they had more sense than he did, because as they followed, they kept weapons at the ready. His wrist launcher never even crossed his mind, somehow.

Duke, bringing up the rear, stopped, and turned to scan across the lot of parked cars, his face troubled. Wildwing did not notice, though Mallory did.

“Coming?” she asked.

“Somethin’s not right,” Duke responded, taking a few quick steps to catch up with them, “the cars, they-”

There was a second noise, that hollow sound again, like something falling against one of the vehicles. This time they did all hear it, and froze in place. Wildwing finally remembered himself, and readied both the launcher and his shield, the trance that had pulled him forward broken. He directed with hand signals, to sweep between the lines cars and approach the source from several angles. They executed it nearly perfectly, despite the months that he had been lax in drills and protocol.

He had even mindlessly gotten through most of the spoken command “Don’t move” before they all realized exactly what it was they had managed to surround.

Leaning against the fender of a bright red sedan, grimacing, was the previous leader of the Mighty Ducks. The one that they had lost, and given up hope of ever recovering.

“What the hell are you guys doing here?” Canard Thunderbeak grimaced as he tried to steady himself.