Chapter 102| Devian contact

Chapter 102: Chapter 102| Devian contact

The highway received them at 3:14 PM.

Six people in two cars moving north to south at ten kilometers above the limit with the specific atmosphere of people who had just done something significant and were processing it through the function of covering distance. Kira ran counter-surveillance from the lead car. Sable worked in the second. Elena and Mara had apparently found each other’s wavelength within the first twenty minutes of sharing a back seat. He could see them through the rearview mirror, both leaning slightly toward each other, the body language of two people discovering they’d been thinking about the same problems from different angles for approximately the same amount of time.

The twin watched the highway.

Not the way passengers watched highways. The way he’d watched the research wing corridor and the open ground and the gap between the two cars. Completely. Methodically. The outside world arriving at speed through a window and being absorbed and filed with the focused attention of someone for whom everything was new and nothing was going to be missed because of it.

A service station appeared on the left. Gone.

A bridge over a river. Gone.

A town visible in the distance — lights beginning to show in the early evening grey. Gone.

His twin watched all of it without comment.

[Flux: 64%]

Passive dissipation running. He noted it and noted the highway ahead and the six hours between them and wherever they were going and thought about a contact the twin had mentioned — someone in the city, outside Nexarion’s awareness, cultivated over twenty two years of facility deliveries and civilian staff.

"The contact," he said. "In the city."

His twin looked at him. "A maintenance contractor," he said. "Independent. He’s serviced Facility Nine’s HVAC system for eleven years. He knows what the facility is. He figured it out around year four and kept the contract anyway because the money was good and he has a practical relationship with his own conscience." A pause. "I’ve been passing him notes through the HVAC access panels for six years. He passes things back. Books mostly. Sometimes information."

Damian looked at him. "You’ve been running a dead drop through an HVAC contractor for six years."

"I had time," his twin said. The same delivery as in the room. Dry. Exact.

Damian almost smiled.

Then Kira’s horn sounded.

Two taps. Then two more. The arrangement they’d established meant something specific — not copy, not abort. Something they hadn’t assigned.

He looked at the lead car.

Kira’s hand came out of the window briefly. A gesture, pointing at her jacket pocket where she kept the passive channel device.

He understood.

Something on the channel.

He watched the lead car and waited and three minutes later Kira’s voice came through the window gap at a junction where both cars had briefly aligned.

"Alert went out," she said. "Facility Nine. Suppressed designation wing. SB-002 designation flagged as absent." A pause. "They know."

The highway ran ahead of them.

His twin was looking at the road with the expression of someone who had just heard confirmation of something they’d already understood was coming and had decided how they felt about it before it arrived.

"How long until they move on the contact," his twin said.

"If they connect him to you," Damian said. "Hours. Maybe less."

His twin was quiet for a moment.

"Then we need to warn him before we use him," he said.

"Yes," Damian said.

His twin looked at the road.

"I have a way to reach him," he said. "That doesn’t go through any channel Nexarion knows about."

Damian looked at him.

"Of course you do," he replied.

His twin looked at the highway moving past the window — the fields, the distance, the specific enormity of a world that had been theoretical for twenty two years and was now arriving through a car window at highway speed.

"It’s large," he said quietly.

Damian looked at him.

"The outside," his twin said. "I knew it was large. Conceptually." He looked at the horizon. "Knowing and seeing are different."

Damian looked at the road ahead.

"Yes," he said. "They are."

The highway ran south. Six people in two cars. The facility alert was active behind them. A contact to warn. A world arriving through a window for the first time.

[Flux: 58%]

Six hours.

_ _

The contractor’s workshop sat on the eastern edge of the city where industrial became residential without either side committing to the transition.

A single-storey building. Corrugated roof. A yard with HVAC units in various states of assembly stacked along the fence line. A van with the contractor’s name on the side in letters that had been reapplying themselves to the paintwork for approximately a decade. The kind of place that existed in the gap between things and attracted no particular attention from either side of the gap.

Devian(The twin) directed them to it from the passenger seat with the specific confidence of someone navigating from memory rather than from a map. Turn here, second left, the yard with the blue gate. No hesitation. Six years of HVAC panel correspondence apparently included enough logistical detail to produce a precise mental address.

Kira pulled in through the blue gate without cutting the engine immediately. She looked at the workshop. At the van. At the single light visible through the workshop window.

"Someone’s inside," she said.

"He works late," Devian said. "He always has."

She cut the engine.

The contractor’s name was Aldous.

Fifty three years old. Built like someone who had been carrying heavy equipment up ladders for thirty years and had the shoulders to show for it. Grey at the temples. The kind of face that had formed its opinions about the world around year thirty and hadn’t found significant reason to revise them since. He was at his workbench when they came through the workshop door — six people arriving in a space that had been built for one — and he looked up from the HVAC component he’d been working on and looked at Devian and put his tools down.

He didn’t say anything for a moment.

Just looked at Devian standing in his workshop in a facility uniform with the outside world visible through the door behind him for the first time in twenty two years.