Chapter 100| Exit Complicated

Chapter 100: Chapter 100| Exit Complicated

Elena glanced at her.

"Fourteen months?" she said. Barely above a breath.

"Fourteen," Mara confirmed. Same register.

"I had eight," Elena said.

"I think I know," Mara said. "Facility Seven. The archive breach was clean. Whoever pulled the Level Five files knew the architecture."

Elena glanced at Sable’s absent position. "She did."

Mara nodded once. Filed it. Kept moving.

Kira was watching this exchange from two steps back with the expression of someone noting that the group had just acquired a second Elena and was deciding how she felt about that.

The maintenance stairwell took them back to the lower level.

The eastern corridor stretched ahead. The way they’d come in, the way out. Forty meters of it between the maintenance exit and the facility entrance. Then the open ground. Then the tree line.

Damian looked at his Flux.

[Flux: 8%]

No Ember Shell. The sensor array was down but the standard monitoring was still running and eight percent minus twelve for Ember Shell activation was negative four which was not a number that produced outcomes he was interested in experiencing again.

He looked at the twin.

"The sensor array," he said quietly. "Elena disabled the relay. It should still be down."

"It is," the twin said. "The monitoring system would have escalated if it had restored. I know what that escalation sounds like."

Damian looked at him.

"You’ve heard it before," he said.

"Three times," the twin said. "In twenty two years. It produces a very specific change in the facility’s ambient noise pattern." He looked at the corridor ahead. "The ambient noise pattern is currently normal."

Kira was already at the maintenance exit door. She looked back at the group — at the six people assembled in a lower level corridor of a facility that was going to figure out what had happened in the suppressed designation wing within the next ten to fifteen minutes.

"Open ground," she said. "Same angle as entry. No running. Move."

She pushed the door open.

The afternoon light hit them like a statement.

Not dramatic. Just present, the flat honest light of a 2:30 PM that had been doing its thing while they’d been inside and had no particular opinion about what they’d been doing in there. The open ground stretched ahead. Forty meters. The tree line at the far end running dense and patient.

They moved.

Elena moved first, with the same angle as the entry, the southwestern approach that kept them outside the fixed camera’s field of view. The twin second. He’d never crossed open ground outside a facility before but he moved across it with the specific economy of someone whose body had learned efficiency inside four walls and was applying it to a larger space without adjustment. Mara third. Damian. Kira at the rear.

[Flux: 7%]

The forty meters felt longer than they had on the way in.

Not because anything was wrong, because eight percent going in had felt like capacity and seven percent going out felt like the specific awareness of a body that was very close to the edge of what it could sustain without intervention. He kept moving. The tree line was thirty meters away. Twenty. Ten.

The trees received them.

He kept walking until the facility was invisible behind the density of the canopy and then he stopped and turned and counted.

Elena. Twin. Mara. Kira.

Four.

Sable appeared from the extraction point position. She’d been holding ten meters into the tree line, the operational file open on her tablet, the timeline running. She looked at the group coming toward her with the focused attention of someone managing a picture and integrating new information into it simultaneously.

She counted.

She looked at Damian.

"Six," she said.

"Six," he confirmed.

She looked at the twin. At Mara. Back at Damian.

She made a note on her tablet without saying anything else which was the most Sable possible response to the situation and which somehow made it feel like the situation was under control even though several things about it definitely weren’t.

"The cars are three kilometers back," she said. "We move before the facility figures out what happened in the suppressed designation wing."

"How long do we have," Kira said.

Sable looked at her tablet. "The shift change ended at 2:20 PM. Standard post-change sweep of the suppressed designation wing runs at 2:45 PM." She looked at the time. "Seventeen minutes."

"Then we have seventeen minutes," Kira said.

She turned toward the forestry track.

The twin looked at the tree line behind them. At the facility visible through the gap in the canopy. The building he’d spent twenty two years inside, its eastern face, the frosted window of the service junction where Elena had stood with a laminated notebook cover in the afternoon light.

He looked at it for exactly three seconds.

Then he turned and walked into the trees.

Damian walked beside him.

The tree line closed around them and the facility disappeared behind the canopy and somewhere inside it a sweep was running toward a suppressed designation wing that was going to find an empty room with drawings on the wall and books with broken spines and a lamp still on at the desk.

[Flux: 6%]

"You need to eat something," the twin said. Without looking at him.

Damian looked at him.

"You’re running low," his twin said. "I can feel it. Voltis reads heat output and yours has been dropping since the research wing." He glanced at Damian briefly. "It’s what I use to navigate in the dark."

Damian looked at him for a moment.

’Twenty two years,’ he thought. ’And he’s already more useful than half the operational briefings I’ve sat through.’

"I need to refuel," Damian said. "Not eat."

"I don’t know what that means yet," his twin said.

"I’ll explain in the car," Damian said.

His twin nodded. Kept walking.

The forestry track appeared ahead through the trees and the cars sat where they’d left them and seventeen minutes had become fourteen and six people had become something that didn’t have a clean operational category yet but that was moving in the right direction at the right pace toward whatever came next.