Chapter Text
The Intelligence Unit had been on a case for months now. It had been laborious and time-consuming, but they finally got an address for what they thought would be a gang’s drugs stash house. They had kept a satellite surveillance on the building to confirm the suspect movements, but could never trace whoever was leaving the warehouse. They systematically disappeared without explanation.
Without any names, clues and even less evidence, Voight made the call to raid the place. Once the building was left as empty, they planned to clear it, get information and evidence, and if it wasn’t enough, to leave micro’s behind and the place untouched. They were ready for all scenarios, until they weren’t.
Sure that the place is empty, they all split up to cover more ground. Jay is clearing the east side of the warehouse when he finds a closed door. He listens, but doesn’t hear a sound. Calling it in any way, he breaks the door open with a loud crash, before bursting inside, gun ahead. His eyes scan expertly the room before his eyes dart back to the center of the room, his whole body stilling.
His eyes widen in shock and he has to try twice before he manages to get his breath. In the middle of that room lies a young woman, clothes dirty and ripped, barely still hanging together, barely still covering her. She’s laying on the cold floor, inside a heavily protected cage. Near the cage is a little table, where a couple of syringes are aligned, three of them empty.
The woman doesn’t react to his intrusion and he assumes she has been heavily drugged. That’s what he shares with his team, that answer there are on their way to his position. But he doesn’t wait and approaches her slowly, “Ma’am, do you hear me?”
Like she was waiting for that, she calmly opens her eyes and gets up, making it obvious she hadn’t been unconscious. Either way, there is still a slump in her movements, perhaps grogginess from staying unmoving, or a rest of the product on the table. “Ma’am, are you okay? I’m Detective Halstead, from the Chicago PD. You’re fine now.” He says soothingly as he comes closer to the cage. “What’s your name?”
No answer. He doesn’t push.
She doesn’t make a move to come closer herself, just fixing him like she’s able to read his mind. “Do you know where you are?” He asks her, worried about her state. He doesn’t see any wounds, but by the looks of her clothes, there must have been torture, or a fight. A heavy one.
Finally, she shakes her head and he nods in understanding. “You’re on the South side of Chicago, in an abandoned warehouse. Can you tell me if you’re injured?” He asks while he looks at the lock, trying to force it without success. His team has surely called an ambulance by now.
Warming up to him, she answers immediately this time: “I’m fine.” And as to prove it, she stands up in her cell. Jay sees that she hides a little loss of balance but he doesn’t confront her. Medics are on their way, they will check on her. He will have to ask for toxic reports too.
“What about the drugs? How do you feel?” He encourages her, but she joins him at the lock, her steps now perfectly balanced and confident. He notes that with surprise, she does seem perfectly fine, not even afraid or traumatized. “You won’t be able to pick that.” She gestures to the door with a knowing look. “You’ll have to blow it up.”
The assurance with which she says it, and the cold indifference confuses him. He can’t get a hold on her emotional state, and that worries him. He hears his team coming in behind him, their pace stopping at the door as they look around in confusion. The young woman steps back at their entrance, staying out of reach and partially covered in shadows.
“What do we have here, Jay?” Alvin asks, his face ever unchanging. “Non-injured woman, she wouldn’t tell me her name but she said…” His eyes linger on her perfectly still form, “She said we’ll have to blow the lock.” Voight comes closer to the cage, standing right next to Jay. “Is that so?” He directs the question to the victim, trying to get a better look at her.
There is no movement, no sound, which makes the whole team sweat cold. They have seen a lot during their career, but nothing that made them feel like this, like prey. She was in a cage, and yet, she was diffusing a terrifying aura. Later they will all swear having seen her clothes move in a wind no-one had felt.
Jay swallowed hard and even Vought hesitated before asking: “What’s your name lady?” A cold voice answered without missing a beat, sounding almost automatic: “My designation is 742.”
It’s all they got, and it confused them even more. “Don’t you have a name?” Jay asks with more pity than he intends. They were all trying to assimilate what her giving a designation instead of a name meant.
There was a hesitation on the other side of the bars, a smallest movement. “My designation is 742, sir.” She repeated, voice only more confident, like she was trying to sound convincing.
Although they all see the agitation it caused, they couldn’t agree to call her that. “Okay… 742, but we’re not gonna call you a number.” Jay shook his head, like it was inconceivable to even think about, “How can we call you?”
There was a silence that lingered. She made a step forward, her face coming out of the shadow. Her eyes were locked on Jay, she was trying to read his attentions. There was a good masked confusion in her features, but the agents were trained to see those micro-expressions.
“I don’t know, sir.” The loud silence that followed pushed to propose something anyway. “Sev?”
“Sev?” Jay repeated, observing her face as she nodded. It was a weird choice, but none of them said a word about it. “Okay Sev, we’re gonna get you out of here, alright?” He inspected the lock again, coming to the same conclusion as her. They will have to blow it. He made a sign to Ruzek, who disappeared after that Voight nodded in agreement. “Do you know who did this to you?” Voight asked.
Her eyes turned to him, her whole body naturally straightening. Jay recognized the posture. Military. She knows instinctively that she’s talking to a higher-up. He could respect that, if it wasn’t that painful to think she was trained like that at such a young age. She looked like 20, 25 maybe. He could not be sure, with how dirty and untreated she was.
“Yes, sir.”
They wait, but nothing else comes. Jay wants to ask further, but Ruzek comes in with a small explosive, getting everyone’s attention. He and Alvin pose the explosive while Jay explains Sev what and how it’s going to happen, although it didn’t seem to faze her.
Sev doesn’t even flinch when the charge goes off, she just steps away when the team asks her to. But once the door is open and they gesture her to join them, she stays put. Although it’s evident in her posture and her gaze that she’s dying to walk out of that cage, she still doesn’t make a move to do so.
While Lindsay calls the medics inside, Jay tries to get her out. “Sev, it’s okay, you can come out now.” He calls her with a soothing voice. When there is no reaction, he exchanges glares with his partners, nodding, and carefully reaches inside. “I’m gonna come inside, okay? Make sure you’re alright.”
As soon as he take a step inside, she pulls back into the shadows. “I can’t go out yet.” She warms them, firm. “You don’t have to stay in that cage, Sev. The men are gone. They won’t hurt you anymore.” Jay tries, but Sev shakes her head.
As Jay comes slowly closer, he can see the hesitation on her features. “I can’t because I’ll die.” She finally explains, careful not to reveal too much. That makes everyone still for a second before the medics finally arrive.
Sev immediately turns to them, barely giving any attention to Jay anymore. But he knows better, she’s on guard and keeps him in the corner of her eyes. She does so, even though she doesn’t seem to see him like a menace. He can read that in her military posture.
“What do you mean, you’ll die?” He asks her. When she answers, it’s directed to the duo paramedics and it’s with a technical voice. A soldier giving a report. “There is a device lodged in my spine, an inch up from my barcode. It will explode if the kidnappers know I’m escaping or if I go out of the perimeter of my cage without their formal authorization. I need you to extract it.”
The medics and the team exchanged loaded looks before the medics nod and slipped inside the dark space. Discussion arises between the Intelligence members that stayed outside. What does all this mean? They had just expected drugs, sex trafficking at worst. But this? They didn’t even know what to think about this.
Jay stays in place, covering the medics just in case. When his eyes cross those of Sev, it’s like she knows what he’s doing, but doesn’t care. Because a second later she turns her back to them and sits down, clearing her neck from her hair. Others are too far to see it, but there is a perfectly neat tattoo, in the form of a barcode, just at the start of her neck.
The medics turn to Jay with a frons, confused, but he doesn’t know more than them. Sev calmly points to where the device should be, and the medics note that there is no scar. This means she probably has that device for months now. It’s an awful thought. Worst, is the emplacement of the small bomb: at the base of the skull, right where it connects with the spine. Even the smallest explosion would kill someone on the spot. The location had clearly not been chosen at random. It’s professional work.
They will have to explain that to the detectives once this is done.
They reach in their bag for a syringe, with the intent to sedate her: they don’t know how deep they will have to dig and because of the particular position, they can’t make a false move. But before they can grab the needed materials, she moves as fast as lightning and grabs their wrists.
Jay immediately reacts by pulling his gun out: “Let them go.” He warns as the rest of the teams mimics him. “No sedatives.” Are the only words she offers them before letting her grip go and turning back to them again, seeming perfectly calm.
It makes the medics highly uncomfortable. “Ma’am, it’s a dangerous area to operate, one wrong move and you could end paraplegic… Since it’s also a bomb, we really can’t do this without sedating you.” They try to explain.
“I won’t move.” She assures them, very sure of herself. “Removing it won’t make it explode either.” She claims, without enlightening them with how she knows that for sure. Only increasingly confused by the situation, Voight swears to himself he’s gonna get some answers after this.
The immediate menace being over, they lower their gun, but don’t put it away. No-one had seen this coming, they had obviously been too at ease. They don’t know a first thing about this woman, this place and her kidnapping. She’s clearly not just anybody.
“Alright… here we go,” mutters the medic with the scalpel, taking a deep breath. With a sure yet careful hand she incises while her partner gets the other instruments ready. Like promised, Sev doesn’t move an inch, which is very unsettling for everyone. Is she even human?
The first medic signals her partner that she’s ready, and everyone holds their breath as the second one spreads the skin open. They work quickly and carefully, searching for the little piece of tech. The air around them thickens with the second as they prob inside Sev’s neck. It’s… surreal, seeing this young woman remain completely unfazed, completely still, expression unchanging even as her life was hanging by a thread.
Although Sev doesn’t have sight of what’s happening, it’s evident to her when the device is pulled out: there is a shared gasp filling the room. They had still hoped it was a disillusion, grown out of whatever paranoia torture could cause. They had still hoped humans wouldn’t do that to other humans.
Little did they know, Sev cannot completely be called ‘human’, neither can her captors. They are all so focused on the medics’ hands, that they are carefully putting the device away in a little box for further examination, that no one saw it coming: in a glimpse of a second Sev grabbed the piece of technology and threw it between the cages bars, followed by a small yet loud explosion.
The explosion surprised everyone, making them flinch while the sound echoed through the room. The force was small, and hadn’t done any damage, but had been loud enough to make their hearts race, pointing their gun back in Sev’s direction.
No-one had seen her act, and Sev, who was standing back up, covered her neck again. Still, the medics would later swear that only seconds after the operation, there was no trace of the incision, but that would be explained by their rush of stress and adrenaline that had surely confused them.
For now, they just make themselves small and try to stay out of the way. Out of the line of fire, leaving their bags next to the strange woman. “Why did you do that?” Voight asks, as he holsters his gun. Without waiting an answer that wouldn’t come, he steps inside the cage: “That was evidence.”
A lot more relaxed, Sev smirked. “Thank you for your help, but y’all better forget all this. It’s way too big for you, palls.” It’s like suddenly, the powers in control had changed, and they had: not wasting a second Sev blurred first to Jay, slamming him into the cage bars. As Jay plummeted to the ground, unconscious, his whole team started to fire, Erin screaming for him.
But they couldn’t follow the woman’s movement and in a split of a second she’s on Voight, that flied out of the way. Once out of the cage, she punches every one of them, knocking the air out of their lungs before disappearing into the building. They need a minute to recover, and as the medics rush to Jay and Voight, the team warns the patrol officers outside.
By then, she’s all long gone, leaving no trail.