Immediately after the destruction of the 314 facility at Sunnydale, Giles and the rest of the gang board their aircraft to return to Council headquarters.  As they speed away in their ships, they don’t notice the semi-charred hand thrusting its way up from the debris.

 

Back in Cleveland, Giles submits his preliminary report on the previous days’ events and secures an emergency meeting of the Command Council to present his evidence of Project 314 and the High Command’s role in its creation and implementation.  Knowing he’ll need solid proof to support his claims, Giles assigns Jocasta the task of accumulating the evidence.  She in turn recruits Katherine to assist.  Meanwhile, Tyrell is confronted by his fellow High Commanders about the failure of the 314 Project and the impending emergency meeting.  Tyrell assures his comrades that he has everything under control.  When she and Katherine are having no luck searching the Council’s message network, Jocasta heads directly to the Council’s Computer Center, where she finds James playing virtual chess with the AnyaBot.  When Jocasta hits him up for help finding evidence, he suggests that she search the High Command’s encrypted files.  But when she asks him to help her get access to the encrypted files, he refuses, fearing that he will lose his job.  While Lex visits his girlfriend, Antonia, in the Council Hangar, Giles tracks down Livia there.  Giles orders Livia and Antonia to take a contingent of Slayers back to Sunnydale to find physical evidence of what happened there.

 

Back in the Computer Center, Jocasta convinces James to give her access to the computer files so that she can do her own snooping with him conveniently gone.  Despite Anya’s objections to the contrary, he reluctantly agrees.  As Livia heads to Sunnydale on Antonia’s ship, the Commander and several of her Slayers discuss a little-known historical fact about the Council: that it used to be organized into three branches, each with equal say and power.  The young Slayers are familiar with the Watchers and the Slayers, but they are skeptical when Livia tells them that the third branch was the Witches—until  Mira tells them privately that Livia’s mother was a Slayer during the Coven rebellion which resulted in the outlawing of magic.  Once Livia and her Slayers arrive in Sunnydale, Livia discovers suspicious landing marks, suggesting that someone beat them to the site.  Antonia is able to identify the make and model of the aircraft that made the marks and begins a search of all recent flights passing over or near Sunnydale.  In her examination of the encrypted files, Jocasta finds tenuous hints at Tyrell’s involvement in 314, but can find no evidence that any other High Commander assisted him in the endeavor.  Katherine begins an investigation of her own when she visits the heavily-burned Sean Rayne in the Council Infirmary.

 

In the Council Chambers, both Giles and Veronica are frustrated when Chairman Tyrell allows the proceedings to degenerate into petty arguments.  Veronica finally pressures Tyrell into calling for a vote on Giles’s motion for a special hearing into the 314 Project.  By a narrow margin, Giles’s motion passes; however, Tyrell gives Giles only twenty-four hours to gather his evidence and prepare his case.  Rayne tells Katherine that Tyrell—and only Tyrell—was the mastermind behind 314; he even says that he himself discovered the plot only after the cyber-vampire was captured in Cleveland and that he cooperated only because Tyrell forced him to.  Katherine isn’t convinced.  Before she leaves, Rayne warns his former Slayer to choose her side carefully since the High Command is powerful enemy to have.  Livia breaks the bad news to the group that they’ve come up empty in Sunnydale.  All agree that they will keep looking, both in Sunnydale and in Cleveland.  Late that night, Antonia discovers that the most likely suspect in the recent flights over Sunnydale was an aircraft owned by none other than Hubris, Inc., the Council’s largest competitor.  Giles says that he’ll follow up on the Hubris connection, but due to the late hour, he orders both Jocasta and Katherine to leave and get some rest.  Jocasta reluctantly abandons her work and accompanies Katherine to her quarters.  The next morning, while Jocasta’s second-in-command, Colonel John West, updates her on current projects in Gray Sector, Jocasta receives a news report so disturbing that she rushes out to speak with Giles.  Meanwhile, back in Sunnydale, Livia and her Slayers continue sifting through the debris, hoping for any scrap of evidence.  What they find instead is a surprise explosion, which unearths one of 314’s surviving cyber-vamps.

 

Livia orders her Slayers to take the cyber-vamp alive, so they attack it with their stun-gloves rather than with stakes.  The vamp is unaffected by their blows and brings several of them down.  When Livia takes him on, he fells her with a cinder block to the head.  Livia falls to the ground and doesn’t move.  When Jocasta arrives at Giles’s office, she finds Veronica checking on him.  When it becomes clear that Jocasta has important business, Veronica excuses herself.  After Giles’s ‘friend’ has left, Jocasta teases her mentor a bit before showing him the news report which upset her so.  It tells of an attack at a night club which resulted in the death of one patron and in the serious injury of another.  The surviving victim described her attacker as ‘partially robotic.’  Giles and Jocasta suspect that something has survived Sunnydale, and they know they have to catch it first.  Jocasta heads for the Progenitor Room to consult with Willow , the holographic personality construct of the Progenitor File whom she has befriended.  Before she can get far with Willow , Anya arrives, saying that James needs to see her.  In the Computer Center , James shares what he’s found: a surveillance video showing Tyrell renting warehouse space from Hubris, Inc.  When Jocasta shares the discovery with Giles, he tells her that the video doesn’t prove anything and that the flight data which might have placed a Hubris vehicle in the Sunnydale area is conveniently missing. Giles grimly admits that they are back at square one.

 

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