Loki watched the last of them bolt away before he went back to see how Amy was doing.

"Any better?" he asked.

"No." Amy bit her lip and shook her head a little. "It's... easier, when I have someone in thrall. Something to concentrate on, even a little."

"Concentrate on what I taught you," Loki said quietly. "The intricacies and delicacy of it."

Amy hesitated, and then nodded. After a moment, her posture relaxed slightly and she let out the breath she had been holding.

"Good." Loki watched her for a moment more before he led her out of the building and started back towards Stark Tower.

Amy cautiously followed him, trying not to flinch every time someone looked their way. She felt vulnerable without her harem of caretakers, and her programming was trying to convince her that everyone was an enemy.

Loki just stayed next to her, making sure no one got too close to them. He was feeling oddly protective of her, which would be something to ponder. Later. For now, he just wanted to get back and get her comfortable again.

Amy didn't relax any more until she was back in her room at the tower. Of course, then she noticed something amiss.

"Where's my sister?" she asked quietly.

Loki blinked and went back through his conversation with Tony. "I believe she was missing," he said quietly. "Stark left to find her."

"They have her?" Amy asked. She flexed her hands anxiously, trembling a bit. She sat down on the bed. "It's my fault. They wouldn't care about her if it wasn't for me."

"I doubt that. If all they cared about was you, they likely would not have taken her too. They wanted her for another purpose or they would have simply ignored her." Loki shrugged, sitting next to her.

"If it wasn't for me, they wouldn't have looked so closely at her," Amy insisted. "They only looked at her because they wanted to see if she had the x-gene too, but they found something else they wanted instead."

"And had you not been born, had it just been she instead, they still would have looked at her for her parentage," Loki said, his tone firm. "Even had she been alone to hide and run, they would have been interested."

Amy just bit her lip and looked down. It wouldn't be that easy to change her mind; she'd had a long time to convince herself that it was her fault.

Loki didn't try to do it in one sitting; he knew better. He'd just have to take his time and convince her, of that and many other things.

Meanwhile, Tony was working on finding Lea. He'd already heard that she had been taken somewhere else, and he was working on hacking every reasonably well-protected network in the world to try to find out where she was.

It took a good few hours before they stopped moving, and another hour after that for Lea to feel up to going near a computer. But she'd been given a programming assignment, so she sat down in front of a computer, already fighting her programming. She even got the room to herself, telling the other Extremis goony that she worked better when she wasn't being watched.

So, of course, the first thing she did was find out where the hell she was.

Tony was getting supremely frustrated when his searches were turning up nothing. Frustrated to the point that there was a table already flipped over in the lab, and he was eying the next one. He wasn't sure how, but the bastards had hidden themselves and Lea really well.

It took Lea a few hours to figure out where she was and what was going on. And that she definitely had a new version of Extremis; she kept wanting to put her head down and focus on the screen in front of her and code like she was told. By the time she fought her way through virtual land to Tony's private servers, she was sweating and shaking. Hacking in was easier than it had been last time, which she knew shouldn't be possible because she'd helped him beef up his firewalls. But she slipped in like they didn't exist.

Tony was barely paying attention to his private internal servers; he was more focused on tightening his search net and getting it to work. Because damn if he was going to be beaten by them.

When she didn't immediately get pounced on, Lea figured he wasn't paying attention. So she knocked some things around and made some noise to get his attention. Which was getting increasingly difficult.

Tony's muttered swearing got louder and more creative when his programs started to flicker and misbehave. It took a minute or so, but he finally realized that there was a pattern, and he went into the system himself to see what was going on. It took him five seconds after that to realize that the cyber footprints were Lea's.

Lea had just about given up on him and was retreating out of the system again to try again later. She could hear someone coming down the hall and she didn't want to get caught disobeying. She knew that would end poorly.

Lea was gone by the time Tony found her trail, and it had stopped at a seeming dead-end, so all he could do was set a few alarms to go off when her particular signature was detected again. And then he settled back to do one of the things he was worst at: he had to wait.

It took another several hours before Lea had the time and energy to go hacking into his system again. She'd been watched for part of the time, and had spent part of the time placating her programming and being a good little Extremis code-monkey.