"Before we start," Shao said, smacking her palm against the podium before her with more fierceness than she'd intended. "I'd like to thank each and every one of you for choosing to include me in this meeting. I cannot express how honored I am—"

"Make her stop," Taeyong said in an almost-monotonous voice. His eyes were covered behind his hand, elbow sloping at a sharp angle against a similar podium, but he still gave the impression of looking at Baekhyun imploringly. "Please, make her stop."

They were in the Blue Room, having gathered not too long after the mini-party in Taemin's bar. Most of them had gotten home and changed, excepting Taeyong and Kai, who had decided to sleep over. Kai had dealt with hangovers before, but he still felt like he had drymouth. He knew he looked fine, but internally, it felt like the delicate membranes of his brain were screaming in agony.

Shao narrowed her eyes at Taeyong, retracting her hand slowly. "You could've just said you were an ungrateful brat."

"I thought that was in the memo."

Kai frowned. "There was a memo?"

"No, Kai, there wasn't," Baekhyun said with a tight smile, chest rising and falling with a slow, deep breath as he stood up at the head of the table, looking pained and somehow politely angry. "He's pulling your leg. Try not to focus on these two and turn your attention back to the drawing board instead."

"Back to the drawing board," Mark said with a chuckle which faded as he noticed the others looking blankly at him. He shrunk into his seat, looking like a drooping flower. "Sorry."

"No need to apologize, Mark," Taemin said. His voice was calm, but his eyes were reassuring. Kai raised an eyebrow looking at his expression. Something had happened between them while he wasn't looking—the dynamic between the two had changed, he noticed, both pleasant and surprising.

Baekhyun cleared his throat, garnering everyone's attention. His mouth was pursed into a thin line, and he looked mildly annoyed, but didn't say anything to indicate it. Kai wondered if that was Baekhyun's superpower—an infinite supply of patience and serenity.

He drew up a pointer to gesture at a spot in the map of the city unfurled across the drawing board—it wasn't actually a drawing board, of course, just a blue-tinged hologram that hovered in the middle of the otherwise dark room like a beacon. The eight were gathered around it in a circle, facing waist-high podiums with smaller replicas of the same image as the main map. Kai was standing directly opposite Baekhyun, and the other's face looked blue-tinted and slightly hazy through the holograph, though Taemin's tech was cutting-edge, and the resolution was sharp as a knife's blade.

"We have locations on each of the kidnappings, and most of them are concentrated around the fringes," Baekhyun said, waving a hand, and tiny dots like pulse sources appeared on the map. "There's still no clear motive for the disappearances yet, though we have reasons to believe most of those abducted are still alive."

"Sybil and I combed the heat signatures in potential dumping grounds within the city," Taemin supplied, filling in the spot Baekhyun's statement had left. "The bodies aren't out in the desert—the outgoing aircrafts were all registered to recognizable owners, and no flights were frequent enough to get rid of all the bodies over the span of three years."

"And this isn't a serial killing spree, so the most likely explanation for the kidnappings is that the Four need the bodies for something else," Baekhyun said, picking up where he had left off. Kai couldn't help but think that the two made a good team—so good that it couldn't have come to them overnight. He wondered how long Baekhyun and Taemin had known each other, and how well. "Unfortunately, we still don't know what. Mark, the facts."

Mark glanced up at the sound of his name with wide eyes. "What? Uh, right." He frowned, a flash of panic at being referred to being chased across his face by an odd grimness. "All we know is the locations and patterns of the disappearances, and bits of overheard conversation," he said. "From the Cirque casino, we know that they have cryogenically frozen Supers stored someplace, though we don't know where. One possible explanation is that the kidnapped people were all Supers, but that's highly unlikely, because..."

"Because I'm not a Super," Shao finished. There was something odd in her voice, and Kai glanced at her in confusion, but by the time he looked at her, her face had been wiped clean of any emotion. "So the likely option is that most of them were just civilians."

There was a short, stiff silence after she spoke, as if no one had any idea what to say. Then Taeyong straightened, resting his hands on his podium, and glanced away from Shao with an uncomfortable expression—as if he'd been watching.

"You said we had the pattern of disappearances," he said quietly, as if trying to ease into the new topic of discussion with as little friction as possible. Kai had always known his face was angular, but it looked even sharper now, the hollows of Taeyong's cheeks and the softness under his jaw falling into shadow. His hair looked like blue fire in the light. "What's the pattern?"

"No leads, no eyewitnesses, no bodies," Ten said lowly. There was an edge in his voice, so bleak and forbidding that Kai felt a shiver pass through him.

"They're all very...convenient," Baekhyun said, hesitating. His lips were thinned, face dour, as if he didn't know how to say what he wanted to say. "The people who were kidnapped were taken from, well, negligent neighborhoods, and almost all of them had some problem or another." He frowned. "Delinquents, homeless people, people with family problems, orphans."

Kai thought he saw Taeyong's features stiffen.

"People no one would notice," Taeyong said, and there was a dark look in his eyes and a hard set to his mouth.

"Yes," Baekhyun said shortly. "Unfortunately, we have nothing more to go on. Everything else we do from here is not based on leads, but the plans we formulate from them."

"On the bright side, we're closing in on them," Taemin said. It was surprising hearing him say something that conveyed his emotions, since most of his statements seemed mostly made up of facts and figures. "We know we're looking for a big structure, preferably abandoned—unless we're looking at some sort of cult." His voice turned strangely bitter, almost regretful. "Half-built buildings or abandoned subway tunnels."

"There could be any number of those," Lucas said. Another surprise. Lucas usually stuck to the sidelines, blank-faced and waiting for the orders so he could carry them out. Only rarely did he ask questions. "How can we possibly look through all of them?"

Now Taemin smiled, the same serpentine smile without teeth he donned when he was about to unveil something. It turned his eyes hard and razorlike. "The buildings are all registered under an encrypted system," he said. "Catalogued, so they can all be checked easily."

"But the software would be protected."

Mark glanced at Taemin, biting the inside of his cheek, like he was in on a joke the rest of them didn't know. "Thankfully for us," Taemin said, "no protection is immune to being bypassed."

Shao looked delighted. "So we're breaking the law?"

"If push comes to shove."

If possible, Shao looked even more delighted.

"Anyway, I was in the hospital the other day to check on Chan," Ten said, looking anxious to change the topic, "and I talked to Jae. He said he made a tracery of the network of abandoned subway tunnels underground running through the city for an article, and that he has copies of it if we need it."

"Wait, hold up," said Taeyong, looking offended. "You didn't wipe the civilian?"

"He's practically an ally," Ten answered, looking equally stubborn. "Besides, Shao's a civilian, and we didn't wipe her either."

"That's because she's different," Taeyong hissed back. His voice caught at the word 'different', and he stopped, as if he had said more than he wanted. "She had information about the Foursaken we could use."

"Yeah, but we already exhausted her as a resource," Mark said. His eyes were glittering, and there was something close to a grin on his face as he looked at Taeyong, though Kai couldn't quite put his finger on what it was. Knowing? Triumph? "And it's not like you were chill with her at first, either. But now—"

Ten's eyebrow flicked upwards. "Are you guys done?"

"Thank you, Ten," Baekhyun said, inclining his head towards the raven-haired man before turning his attention to the hologram. "As I was saying, everything we do from now on will be based on close planning. We can't afford to make mistakes, and we need the whole team's input on everything before we decide something for sure. That means you'll have to be here constantly for a few days leading up to the infiltration."

"Infiltration," Mark repeated giddily, as if he couldn't help it.

"So we can't go home?" Taeyong asked with a ruffled frown.

"There are no restrictions, but it's better if we're all together for some time," Baekhyun replied. "It's for the best."

Kai saw Taeyong take a deep breath, looking pensive. Baekhyun turned to Mark and gave him half a smile.

"How are things in the lab?" he asked.

Mark grinned. "I thought you'd never ask."