Dinah was awakened early the next morning by loud, insistent banging noises on her door. She buried her head in the pillow and threw the covers over her head. "Go away!" she moaned.

"Nope!" the familiar tenor voice called back cheerfully. "Rise and shine!"

Dinah raised her head blearily to look at the clock by the bedside. "It’s five o’clock in the fuckin' morning, Lynley!"

"Quit being so lazy!" he threw back.

Dinah barked a short, irritated laugh. "That’s rich coming from you."

"Sure, sure, whatever. Just get up! It’s time to be on the move. That is, unless you wanna miss the flight…"

"The what?" Dinah raised her head to look at the door.

"The flight that we’ve gotta catch to get to our final destination, of course. Now are you getting up or not?" was the answer.

He heard the shower start in reply. Reno--decked out in the same pair of jeans and the same black t-shirt as the day before--allowed himself a triumphant grin as he walked down the corridor and took the elevator downstairs. He stopped in the front lobby and leaned on a doorframe just out of view of the front desk. Palmer bounced in, humming to himself and clutching a cup of tea. He sat at his desk, sitting up high, aided by the pile of books on his chair.

Reno bit his lip to keep himself from laughing as he stared intently at Palmer’s cup.

C’mon, drink it… he willed. He laughed softly to himself as he remembered his early morning trip to the local chocobo stable, which was just outside of the city.

Palmer put his feet up on his desk, smiling happily. He was about to take a sip of his tea when the phone rang.

Palmer talked into the phone for quite some time, saying things like, "Well, we have vacancies on the 17th, but not the weekend of the twenty-ninth."

Reno was swiftly getting bored, but he managed to keep his attention on the scene in front of him by imagining Palmer’s reaction to what was in his tea. What seemed like an eternity later, Palmer hung up the phone and returned to staring happily at his tea. He slowly raised the cup to his fat lips, and the mischievous redhead tensed.

Palmer drank deeply from it, almost finishing the entire cup in one large gulp. He set the cup down hard on the desk, scalding liquid sloshing over the edge and onto the desk and his pudgy fingers. But he didn’t seem to even notice. His eyes bulged, and his hands flew to his throat. Palmer fell out of the chair, taking his stack of books with him. He writhed around on the floor as his roly-poly little body jerked, gasping, his face beet red. Finally, after spitting out what bit of the tea he hadn’t swallowed, he looked around wildly for the source of the laughter he was hearing. Palmer felt sweat break out as he recognized the voice.

Reno stepped out from behind the doorframe, roaring with laughter. "You…you should have seen your…face!" he wheezed.

"I…you…argh!" was all that Palmer managed to say.

The ex-Turk managed to get himself slightly under control, until he began chuckling uncontrollably again. "That was…better than I had hoped for!"

"But…but you said you wouldn’t play pranks on me! I paid for your rooms!" Palmer stuttered.

"No, no," Reno corrected him after brining himself under control. "I said I wouldn’t harass you, and I haven’t. Have I made a single fat joke or confronted you in any way?"

Palmer shook his head silently.

"See? There ya go! Pranks and harassment are very different, Palmer," Reno said, his tone that of a lecturing professor.

"What was it?" Palmer asked the question he had been dreading.

"I knew how much you love animal products, like lard, so I--"

Palmer felt sick to his fat little stomach.

"--paid a visit to the local chocobo farm this morning and picked up some nice, fresh chocobo shit. From there, it was simple to drop it into your tea." Reno looked pleased with himself. Palmer was turning green.

"I came here to escape from you!" Palmer wailed. "I settled down happily with my hotel and family--"

He looked surprised. "You have a family?"

"…No, it just sounds better. All right, all right. I settled down happily in my hotel and I’ve never been so content in my life as I have these past three years! And just when my shrink said I was gaining progress, you show up and ruin everything again!" Palmer looked ready to burst into tears.

Reno watched impassively. "The guilt trip ain’t gonna work, Palmer."

"It’s not a guilt trip! It’s the honest to God truth!" Palmer insisted.

"Sure. Whatever. And I haven’t ruined everything, have I?" Reno left the ‘yet’ unspoken. But Palmer knew it was there.

"Oh no. What else are you going to do to torture me?!" Palmer looked around like a caged animal.

"Nothing. Jeez, don’t be so paranoid. I’ve gotta leave. In fact, I’m leaving as soon as Dinah’s ready."

"And Dinah would be the young lady you arrived with?" Palmer asked with curiosity.

Reno nodded.

"Y’know, she looks too good for you," Palmer began.

"You’ve got it the wrong way around. I’m too good for her," the lanky man answered arrogantly.

"Nice to know you think that," Dinah’s voice broke in. Both men turned to look at her. She was leaning against the doorframe with her arms crossed over her chest, looking on amusedly. Her wet hair had been thrown into a messy bun. "Now if I’m not mistaken, we’ve got to get going if we’re gonna catch that flight."

"Yeah," Reno answered. Dinah detached herself from the wall and moved toward the door. "Wait; I’ve gotta get my shit from my room." He made as if he was going to lazily saunter his way toward the elevator, but Dinah held up his black leather jacket.

"This, and the stuff in its pockets, is the only thing you had, right?" she asked.

"Yeah. How’d you get that?" Reno asked suspiciously, striding across the room and snatching it from her grasp.

She smiled with no real cheer. "You’re not the only one who can pick locks, dearie."

"Y’know, that’s one nickname I don’t think I like…" he muttered, slinging the jacket over his shoulder.

Dinah tossed Palmer the key to her room, and Reno did the same, with a considerable amount of force behind his throw. One key landed on the edge of the little man's desk and skidded up to halt under his nose, while the other--guess who it belonged to--twacked him in the forehead.

"Bye Palmer!" Reno said, waving cheerily.

Palmer groaned softly, rubbing at his rapidly reddening forehead. "Just get out of here!"

Reno and Dinah walked out the door, already arguing. Palmer raced to the window and watched them stroll down the street. The second they were out of view, he dashed back to his desk and dialed a number on his telephone.

"This is Palmer. They just left, and it was definitely who you’re looking for. The woman called herself Dinah…Right. Blonde hair, blue-gray eyes, tall, thin. With Reno Lynley. They’re on their way to the airport………You’re very welcome. Will I be getting the usual compensation for this?…Excellent. It was a pleasure doing business with you."

Palmer slammed down the phone with a vengeance, and allowed himself an evil smirk a la Reno. "Heh heh. I’m sure you’ll have fun with these friends of mine, Reno."

Suddenly, his phone rang again. He picked it up. "Turks’ Pride Hotel…Yes, this is Ernest Palmer…WHAT?! You can’t close me down!…Because of health issues?! You had a complaint from a Reno Lynley of chocobo excrement being in the food?! I don’t know what you’re talking about!…… You have someone across the street watching me so I can’t discard any evidence? Well good, because if he’s been there for more than five minutes he’d have seen…He’s only been there for a few seconds?! But-"

No matter what, Reno Lynley always had the last laugh.

*** It was still dark, damp, and cold in Junon Harbor as the two long figures hurried through the empty, dank streets and corridors on their way to the airport.

"Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?!" Dinah snapped for what seemed like the hundredth time that morning.

"Haven’t we had this conversation before?" Reno asked, exasperated. "I’m not telling you because if you did you’d just ditch me, though that’s starting to seem like a good idea…"

"Why don’t you do it, then?" Dinah’s gaze and face held a challenge as her eyes burned defiantly. "And come to think of it, why the fuck are you even here, anyway?!"

The world will never know what Reno was about to respond, because as he opened his mouth to retort, he caught sight of someone moving out of the corner of his eye. He spun swiftly, feeling sure that he saw a flurry of activity as someone ducked behind a building.

"What was that?" Dinah had apparently seen it too.

"Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been good," Reno replied, one long hand casually resting near his hip, where his nightstick hung from his belt.

"What time does that flight leave?" Dinah asked, glancing at her watch.

"Why the fuck are you asking about that when we’ve got more important things to worry about?" he questioned of her with a trace of bark to his voice, emerald eyes searching the half-gloom for movement. "There's someone following us."

"I noticed, Lynley; I'm not braindead. I’m asking because if the flight leaves at six, then we’ve got about two minutes to get there."

He whirled back to face the woman, messy, fiery tail of hair flipping over his shoulder in the process. "That’s the last flight there for days. If we don’t make it, we're in deep shit," he told her solemnly.

"Let’s go!" She jogged off, throwing a quick glance over her shoulder, obviously watching for their pursuer.

Her companion caught up to her easily and pulled her aside seconds before she would have entered a widely traveled corridor. "This way," he said, pulling her with him as he sprinted down a darker alleyway.

"What’s this?!" Dinah asked of the man running directly ahead of her, blinking to get used to the absence of light as the defaced, crumbling sides of a building flashed past on either side.

"A shortcut. Hurry your ass up!"

Reno led her to the end of the alley, where there was a large wooden fence and a short stack of wooden crates pushed up against it. With a jump, he was onto the stack of crates. He threw a hand down on the top of the fence and used his momentum to vault over the top, landing in a crouch on the runway on the other side.

A half a second later, Dinah sailed over the fence to join him. Looking around, she quickly recognized that they were at the airport. A small cargo plane’s engines were starting up.

"Fuck. Is that our ride?"

"’Fraid so," Reno answered grimly.

Suddenly, he heard a clattering noise. He and Dinah spun simultaneously to find that the person that had been following them had followed them over the fence as well.

She was tall and compact, with unbound straight white hair that fell down her back to her waist. She looked to be too young for the hair, even though a viewer could not pinpoint her age exactly. Her body was lithe and muscled and exceedingly pale, and she had creepy silver eyes that looked like dark storm clouds. Her face was delicate and fragile-looking, with inhumanly high cheekbones and small pale pink lips. Long, flowing pristine white robes were anchored at one shoulder, and cascaded from there to her bare feet. She stood with a grace that Dinah had never seen the like of before; she almost swayed while standing still, and was clearly quite a threat.

But her appearance was not the most shocking thing about her. No, the most shocking thing was that Dinah recognized her.

"You are mine, child," the ageless woman purred in a dangerous, husky tone. She slowly drew a long, thin sword from a sheath that had been hidden by her robes and pointed it directly at Dinah. A smile split those demure lips into a demonic tooth-baring grin.

"You! You were the human I could see from my tube when Hojo was experimenting on me!" Dinah exploded vehemently, taking an unconscious step toward the other woman. "Why would you want to take me back to them? You have just as much of a right to hate them as I do!"

"Poor misguided little lamb." Despite the implied kindness of the words, the tone in which they were delivered was venemously angry, and that playful, awful smile dropped from her face. The gigantic blade--which, during the encounter so far, had not wavered or moved a millimeter--now spun in a terrifyingly quick, graceful, deadly spin; a bit of showing off on the part of the swordswoman who held it.

Dinah came to her senses and took several steps back. No matter how badly this woman had been treated, it was time to bolt. "I think we should run like hell; what about you?" Dinah muttered to Reno out of the side of her mouth.

That was when she first realized that Reno was gone. She spun her head to look about quickly, but all she saw was the plane still powering up and the woman still advancing.

Damn you, Lynley. I should have known. You only watch out for number one, she thought bitterly.

She didn't have time now for lingering on a certain Midgarian scumbag, though, and she quickly turned her attention to her fellow ex-research specimen.

"You really don’t want to do this!" Dinah pleaded with the woman.

The only reaction from the white-clothed figure was to begin stepping forward toward the blonde woman, sword held at the ready and the ghost of a smirk hovering about those lips.

Dinah quickly wised up and started to back away, the other woman accordingly adjusting her pace to follow.

Watching the other person advance--and seeing the power and speed evident in her well-formed limbs--Dinah made a snap judgment. "Please, don’t hurt me!" she whimpered, and cowered backward, projecting a sense of tears into her voice.

There was a snort from her attacker, and an expression of pure, unadultered hatred and fury passed across her face as she drew a syringe from her voluminous robes with the hand that was not supporting the blade. "Shivankul, how I wish I might cut your throat!" That voice wasn't a soft purr any longer; no, it was hard, cutting, and choked with rage. Those inhuman silver eyes were glittering with an intense light as she jabbed toward the smaller woman's neck.

Dinah’s hand shot up and knocked the syringe flying to splinter into tiny shards of glass on the tarmac. Her foot moved at the same time, catching the woman in the kneecap. Unready for the sudden attack, she staggered back and almost fell. Dinah pressed her advantage, both fists flying out; one to catch her adversary in her right eye, and the other to double the woman over with a punch in the gut. The blonde woman swiftly kicked the sword out of the woman’s hand to sail across the pavement and land too far for her to reach.

Then the woman recovered from the gut punch much faster than she should have been able to. She straightened up, and her fist struck Dinah in the side of her head with the force of a mack truck.

Dinah was dimly aware of a roaring in her ears, and a falling sensation. Then nothing.

The white-clad attacker, lips pressed into a thin, angry line, bent over, grabbed the unconscious woman under the armpits, and hoisted her up over her shoulder in a fireman's carry. That was when she finally became aware of the loud roar in her ears from right behind her, and she sensed a huge presence.

A voice chirped from behind her ear, "Thanks, but I'll take that from here."

Dinah’s weight was suddenly wrenched from her and gone, and the white-haired woman spun.

A battered little cargo plane was taxiing along the runway directly beside her, and a redheaded man was crouched in the open hatch of the plane, grinning broadly at her. Directly beside him was Dinah’s prone form. The man gave her one last impertinent wave, then slammed the door shut as the little plane lifted off.

The woman gave an animalistic howl of fury and rage, and glared after the plane that was rapidly climbing into the early morning air.

"You will return eventually; you cannot hide forever, child!"