Some taxi-rides away, Stefan and the others were fending off the copious soldiers who had swarmed into that miniscule office.

"You just had to be smug," Valerie respired, while helping Dominick fight off the four men who climbed upon them at once.

"I'm sorry!" uttered Stefan, for what could very well have been the sixth time.

The men were AIM America soldiers, they figured, camouflaged in their pharmacy garbs. For a moment, while blocking a punch with the hind of his forearm, Stefan wondered whether these men really knew what they were a part of. If their base was all the way in America, what role did they play in Abba's plans? Were they going to be taken out along with the rest of America? After all, Abba did not seem like the type to bother with forming a rescue team, even for her own men.

Stefan knocked out the guy whose fist he had deflected, and then threw a punch to the jaw of a brute who was charging at Finn.

"Thanks bud," Finn smiled, sighed tiredly. "Now for the other," – he kicked the brute in the stomach, and then drove their head into his knee – "hundred and one!"

As the brute's body fell to the ground, another emerged from behind him and struck Finn's cheek. Stefan motioned to help him, but before he could, two men rammed him into a wall conjointly. Dominick equipped the grappling hook from his belt and it soon delved into one of the men's backs. His feet in position, his muscular arms bulging, he hauled the man away from Stefan, and reminded himself to ignore the man's agonising cries. Stefan shoved the second body off of him and fought the man vigorously.

Once he had knocked him out, Stefan looked to his friends. He could not decide who needed help most: swiftly after coming to Stefan's aid, Dominick was tackled by multiple heavies, and Finn's speed served him well, but he was surrounded, it was only a matter of time before someone managed to knock him off his quick feet. What Stefan hadn't seen was that four men were charging towards him. Valerie saw it all, saw that they were outnumbered and losing, saw Dominick on the ground piled underneath men as enormous as he was. Suddenly, she ran, and punched and tripped and bicycle kicked anyone in her way. She had to get away from the crowd.

Finn waited for someone to charge at him, to break the manmade coop he had been stuck in, before he made his escape. One man aimed to tackle him at the waist, but Finn used him as a ramp, jumping on his back and off again. One way or another, he brought each of them to their knees where they were, in their circle, like it was some children's' game.

"Look out!" Valerie called suddenly, tossing something into the air.

It was a grenade of some sort. As it detonated, an emerald green light engulfed the room before darkness fought back again. Altogether, the men dropped to the ground, paralysed by the pulse sent out by the grenade. Valerie, Finn, Dominick and Stefan were unaffected, thanks to the deflective soles of their fancy GINM boots. Finn and Stefan tiptoed over the bodies, towards Val.

"Take all the fun out of it, why don't you," Finn said to her.

"I don't find wrestling large men very fun," she dusted off her hands and the rest of herself. "Unless there's something you're not telling me, Finn..." she joked.

"Oh, very funny!" he said, through Dominick's uncontained amusement. "Like you should laugh."

There were three bodies upon him, practically sleeping, but Dominick hardly cared. He shoved them off and stood up promptly, and then joined his friends on the other side of the room. They started searching for the documents they had come for. Valerie moseyed to the most obvious place, the filing cabinet, but when she got there, she realised the drawers were locked.

"Let me help you with that," Dominick offered – of course he was better at picking locks than she was.

With the first lock, he showed her his way of doing it, which was in two seconds flat, and flaunted his talent with the next few. Meanwhile, Finn checked the content of a massive trunk in the corner of the room, and Stefan sat at the desk beside him, searching through the paper-work on the cluttered desktop. Finn complained about the amount of stuff stored in that chest, unnecessary stuff, and enunciated how he wished the ornamental night goggles on his head could filter through important documents, too.

"Honestly, the scientists at GINM have no creativity," he added. "If I had that much brains and that much money –"

"Then you would be in Hawaii with girls in coconut bras," remarked Dominick, a smile across his face.

"You know it!" Finn chuckled, and then went quiet.

He found something, an AIM uniform. His eyes scanned over it attentively, with a slur of admiration, appeal and distaste. Then, he tossed the suit into his rucksack – the GINM one that he always carried with him on his missions – and turned to everyone. They were all watching Stefan, nearing him with eager eyes as he mutedly observed the papers in his hands.

"Is that it?" whispered Val.

Stefan skimmed and flipped through the pages to check, and one thing was for sure: they were the right papers. But he discovered something else, something colossal, and the others soon joined him in this discovery. Stefan's eyes darted around the page like hummingbirds, making sure that they were not being deceived.

"I have to call Aimee."

Aimee ambled around Gavin's bedroom for no reason other than that the doors to the laundry and the bathroom, which made up the entire flat, were locked. Gavin probably thought that whatever lied behind those doors was either too shambolic or too private – the latter contradicting the fact that his bedroom, his haven of privacy, remained unlocked, but she had quit trying to make sense of it.

Aimee glanced at his bed, orange linen sheets, and tidy side tables. On the tables' built-in shelves were stacks of magazines about cars and jets, those kinds of things. His walls were grey-blue and his white blinds were still unopened. Narrow rays of sunlight slipped under them, into the room and onto the floor. It was tranquil, so tranquil that, for a moment, Aimee felt jovially normal within it. She dreamed of her apartment looking something like that, when she moved away from home and started university, not that she was sure where she would go. But it was just a dream within a dream.

Aimee suddenly found herself drawn to the wardrobe, pulled by a familiar curiosity, a curiosity that had been sewn into her when Stefan told her about Gavin's past as an AIM soldier. She thought about it more frequently than she'd admit. She soon had her proof; the infamous uniform was tucked away in his closet. She pulled out the hanger and ogled the uniform, which was sealed, protected by a see-through plastic bag, as if it had just come back from the dry-cleaners. She trailed her fingers over the logo by the left epaulette of the old suit, so fixated by it that she failed to hear Gavin come in. He halted at the bedroom door, looking wide-eyed at Aimee, at the uniform.

"Aimee, I –"

Aimee jolted, faintly startled by his speech, his sudden presence. He swiftly came closer and took the clothes from her hands, then shoved them back into his cupboard.

"You don't have to explain," uttered Aimee. "I know. I mean, Stefan told me you used to work for them."

He looked at her, confused and then just shocked, "He told you, when?"

Aimee's phone rang before she could respond. Slowly retrieving it from her pocket, she watched Gavin, as if she was waiting for permission.

"It's him, isn't it?" he asked, Aimee nodded.

She answered her phone and Stefan's voice, his perplexing words, poured through it: "Abba's not gonna blow up America."

"What?" Aimee beamed. That's good, isn't it? she thought, but she realised that there was more to this phenomenon, and it could not possibly be good.

Gavin took the phone, "Then why do you sound distressed?"

"Because," he answered, "she still plans on destroying it. We found some documents, proof."

"I'll send you a picture now," said Valerie, and the shuffling of papers followed the sound of her voice.

When the picture came through, Stefan continued, "She's going to detonate micro bombs that'll disturb the earth's tectonic plates. Earthquakes and tsunamis are gonna consume the entire continent!"

"No – that doesn't make sense!" tested Gavin. "If she disrupts the ocean, won't France, Asia, West Africa, be impacted, too?"

Images rushed through Aimee's mind, memories of being in Abba's office, looking out into the sea.

"The wall," she whispered. "When I was with Abba, that first time in AIM, she was building a wall in the ocean. I doubt it could stop a tsunami, but maybe it's strong enough to slow it down or even redirect it."

"But if she had built a wall in the ocean, surely our satellites would've picked something up," said Stefan.

"Unless she built it in such a way that it could retract into the sea – I would," supposed Aimee.

And Dominick insinuated, glancing at Stefan, "Or – and I am saying this as your friend – your dad and GINM have been keeping secrets from us."

The possibility sunk in. Stefan hanged his head in melancholy, and the others shared a similarly downhearted glance.

"Okay, we don't know that. She could just have paid someone very talented to cover it all up," said Gavin. "Or even paid someone to plant those documents there as a diversion, think about it. Just get out of there."

Meanwhile, as Stefan and the others continued to think like thoughts in silence, the heavies started recovering from their paralysis. In seconds, two gunshots were fired, and Dominick groaned in unfamiliar pain. Stefan and Finn cried his name, trauma in their eyes, and instantly ran to his side.

"No!" screamed Valerie, taking her own gun and promptly shooting the suspect in the head, the way she had trained.

Dom gripped his ankle, pressuring his wound as Finn and Stefan held him up by an arm.

"It's nothing, I'm okay," he insisted.

Aimee and Gavin struggled to stay calm, waiting on the line for someone to tell them what the heck was going on. Val's eyes were wide and her body taut with dread. She had just killed someone; she had just shot a man between the eyes. That man must have had a family, friends – a life away from this – he could have been a good man. Valerie could not help but believe she murdered a good man.

Valerie coerced herself out of her daze, "You get the files," she told Stefan, relieving Dom from his grasp. "We have to get out of here. Dominick was just shot," she said loudly so Aimee and Gavin would hear.

Stefan grabbed the documents and his phone from the desk. "It's not too bad. He's okay," he muttered that last part like it was a gesture of faith, not certainty, before tucking the phone under his chin and the files under his arm.

Swiftly, he closed the office doors and drove a metal bar, which he found beside the fire extinguisher on the wall, through the handles of the double doors.

"That's not going to hold them for long," enunciated Valerie.

"It's something."

By the time he was done securing the door, the others had made their way down one flight of stairs. Stefan put the phone to his mouth and surfed down the railing of that flight, landing gracefully and stalwartly.

"We need something quicker than a car," he said into his cell.

Gavin was already grabbing his keys from the kitchen counter, "I'm on my way."

He rushed outside with Aimee tailing him, and soon, the garage door rose to display a glimmering metallic chopper – a different version to the one Aimee had familiarised herself with. It was definitely an upgrade. Simultaneously, the roof gave way and invited them into the sky. Their destination was the pharmacy in the middle of a dusty and eerie suburb, and from there, the nearest hospital.