Chapter 99| Was Wondering When You’d Get Here

Chapter 99: Chapter 99| Was Wondering When You’d Get Here

Elena led with her white jacket, notebook, the body language of someone who belonged here. Behind her the twin walked with the specific ease of someone who had walked these corridors before and knew exactly which face to make in which section of the building to produce the response of nobody paying attention. Behind him Damian. Kira at the rear.

A researcher looked up from a workstation as they passed an open door.

Elena nodded at him with the crisp acknowledgment of a colleague in transit.

He looked back at his screen.

Another door. Another researcher. A staff member coming out of a side room with a folder, the twin adjusted his angle automatically, giving the staff member space, the adjustment so natural it looked like courtesy rather than evasion.

Third door.

Damian was already past it when the system moved.

He stopped.

Ding!

[Grade Scan: Active.]

[New Subject detected.]

[Grade: S]

He turned.

The door he’d just passed was open. A researcher at a workstation inside — mid-thirties, natural hair pulled back, a research coat over dark clothes, a tablet open beside her keyboard with something on it that wasn’t standard Nexarion documentation format.

She was already looking at him.

Not with the casual non-assessment of a colleague registering passing traffic. With the specific focused attention of someone who had been waiting for a particular person to walk past a particular door and had just watched it happen.

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

The S-grade notification sat at the edge of his vision. Patient, certain, glowing with the specific quality it always had when it flagged something significant.

The researcher’s eyes moved to the twin standing beside Damian. Something shifted in her expression. Recognition, he thought, of what he couldn’t tell yet.

Then she looked back at Damian.

"I was wondering when you’d get here," she said.

The corridor held its quiet around them.

Kira had stopped moving. Elena had stopped moving. The twin was looking at the researcher with an expression that told Damian the recognition went both ways.

He looked at the S-grade notification.

Then at her.

"You know who I am," he said.

"Subject 07," she said. "Pyros class. Escaped Facility One approximately six weeks ago." She glanced at the twin. "And SB-002. Though I suspect you’re going by something else now."

The twin said nothing.

She looked back at Damian.

"My name is Mara Hale," she said. "I’ve been waiting eighteen months for this hallway." She stood up from her workstation. "I’m coming with you."

Mara Hale was already standing when she said it.

Not scrambling. Not surprised by her own decision. Standing with the specific deliberateness of someone who had made this decision eighteen months ago and had been waiting for the moment to implement it.

Kira looked at her.

The operational assessment ran in under two seconds. The specific blink-fast read of someone who had been evaluating variables under time pressure for two years. Height. Build. No visible weapon. Research coat. Tablet in her left hand with documentation on it that wasn’t standard Nexarion format. Eyes that were reading the corridor the way trained eyes read corridors rather than the way civilian researchers read corridors.

"You have thirty seconds to give me a reason," Kira said.

Mara looked at her. Then at the twin.

"Ask him," she said.

Everyone looked at the twin.

He looked at Mara with the expression of someone who had been expecting this moment and had opinions about it that the current timeline didn’t allow him to fully express.

"She brought me books," he said. "For eight years." A pause. "She also brought me Prior Collective documentation fragments she found in the archive three months ago and told me what they meant." He looked at Damian. "She knew about you before you got here."

Damian looked at Mara.

She held his gaze without flinching. "AL-001’s research protocol cross-references SB-002 extensively," she said. "I manage the research wing documentation. I found the cross-reference fourteen months ago and spent the next two months understanding what it meant." She glanced at the corridor. "I’ve been building a file on the Prior Collective since then. Everything I could access without triggering a security flag." She held up the tablet. "It’s on here."

Kira looked at Damian.

He looked at the twin.

The twin looked at Mara with the expression of someone who had been receiving contraband books and research fragments for eight years and had apparently decided that counted as a reference.

"She’s not Nexarion," he said simply.

Kira looked at the corridor. At the time. At the six people currently standing in a research wing that was going to notice their presence in approximately three minutes if they kept standing in it.

"Move," she said. "We talk outside."

Mara grabbed her personal drive from the desk drawer, in one motion, practiced the specific efficiency of someone who had planned for exactly this moment and fell into step.

Six people now.

The twin’s route through the research wing took them past four more open doors and two occupied corridors and one junction where a security guard was doing his rounds at exactly the wrong time.

The twin didn’t slow down.

He angled right. A micro-adjustment, half a step, the kind of positional change that looked like someone accommodating foot traffic rather than avoiding it. The guard’s sightline ran northeast. They came from the southwest. The angle kept them in the guard’s peripheral vision long enough to register as people moving with purpose and out of his direct line long enough that his brain filed them as colleagues rather than anomalies.

The guard kept walking.

Damian watched the twin make the adjustment and thought about twenty two years of moving through a building that was simultaneously his home and his prison and what that produced in a person.

Something considerable, apparently.

[Flux: 9%]

The number had been dropping steadily since the Shell deactivation. He noted it and noted that nine percent was the number he’d been at when he’d walked into the second backup location after the safe house fight and that Sable had read it from his face before he’d said a word and had fixed it immediately.

Sable was at the extraction point.

Four minutes.

Mara was moving beside Elena. The two of them had apparently found each other’s pace within thirty seconds of starting to walk together, the specific gravitational pull of two researchers in a corridor producing a natural adjacency that looked completely institutional from the outside.