Chapter 29 Dimitri
DIMITRI
The stairwell felt longer than usual.
Dimitri descended one step at a time, listening to the muffled sounds of movement below—the subtle creak of plastic chairs adjusting under the weight of eight bodies, the quiet hum of the lab's air conditioning, and the complete absence of conversation.
Dave's eight bodies didn't talk among themselves.
There was no need. The merged consciousness communicated in a way that didn't require words, and the silence the Eight created when they were together had a quality that was unsettling.
It was the silence of something thinking with sixteen brain hemispheres, processing reality through sixteen eyes, and waiting with the patience of a predator that knew it was powerful.
He paused at the bottom of the stairs and took a breath.
Be smart. Be careful. Don't say anything you can't take back.
He walked into the main lab.
They were arranged in their usual formation against the far wall, seated in the plastic chairs that the lab had been furnished with. Their bodies were different, but their postures were identical, relaxed but alert, hands resting on their thighs, backs straight, heads slightly inclined.
Sixteen eyes tracked Dimitri as he entered. One organism observing him through eight bodies.
He was never going to get used to that.
Petrov was at his station, hunched over his work with the exaggerated concentration of a man who was very much not concentrating on what he was doing.
His eyes flicked to Dimitri for a fraction of a second, a glance loaded with questions and warnings, before returning to the printout he was pretending to read.
Dimitri's stomach tightened.
"Good morning." He crossed to his workstation and picked up his lab coat from the back of his chair, shrugging into it with more deliberation than necessary.
The routine of putting on the coat, checking the equipment, preparing the syringes, and assuming the role of the scientist helped. The role was armor, and he needed it right now.
"Good morning, Dimitri." Number One spoke. His voice was calm, neutral, the tone he always used when initiating a conversation, which was the same tone he used for everything. "How is Mattie doing?"
The question surprised him.
Not because Dave was asking about Mattie, the Eight had shown an unusual interest in her well-being since her injury, but because of the way the question was asked.
It wasn't a segue, a pleasantry tossed out before the real conversation began.
Number One leaned forward as he asked, and the other seven bodies mirrored the movement, a subtle but unmistakable shift of attention that suggested the answer actually mattered to them.
"She's in pain," Dimitri said. "The doctor said her hand will heal, but it'll take weeks, maybe longer."
"Her fingers were broken," Number One said.
"Yes. There were multiple fractures." Dimitri opened the refrigeration unit and began pulling out the vials he needed for the shots. "The doctor set them and splinted them. He seemed satisfied with the alignment."
"Will she regain full use of the hand?"
Dimitri paused with a vial in each hand. It was a remarkably specific question. Not “Will she be okay?” which would have been the polite, surface-level inquiry, but a targeted question about long-term functionality.
"The doctor believes so. With physical therapy and time." He set the vials on his prep tray and began selecting syringes. "Thank you for asking."
All eight bodies regarded him with identical expressions that could have been concern or could have been clinical interest. With Dave, it was difficult to tell the difference.
"We are glad that the damage is not permanent," Number One said.
We. Not I. Number One always referred to Dave as we, even when said through the mouth of a single body. Because Dave wasn't a person. Dave was a collective.
And yet something about the way those eight pairs of eyes rested on him felt personal.
"I'll let her know that you asked after her well-being," Dimitri said. He pulled on examination gloves and began preparing the first syringe.
The administration of the enhancement drugs was a ritual that Dimitri had performed dozens of times.
Each body received a carefully calibrated dose, injected into the deltoid muscle, the needle sliding through skin that was denser and more resistant than human or even immortal tissue.
He'd learned early on that he needed sharp, high-gauge needles and more force than he would use on a normal patient.
He started with Number One, as always. Swab, inject, withdraw.
Number One didn't flinch, didn't react, didn't even blink.
None of them ever did. Whether the injection was painless to their enhanced physiology or whether they simply didn't register pain the way others would, Dimitri did not know and did not ask.
He moved to Number Two. Swab, inject, withdraw. The routine was meditative, which was good because it gave his hands something to do while his mind worked.
The cameras were watching. Two in the lab's main room, positioned to cover the workstations, the drug storage, and the injection area. Everything that happened down here was recorded and reviewed.
Which meant that whatever Dimitri said to Dave right now would be seen and heard by whoever monitored the feeds.
He moved to Number Three.
"Dimitri."
He paused with the needle poised over Three's deltoid. Number One had spoken, but all eight bodies were watching him in that unnerving synchronized manner.
"We observed you fighting in the harbor yesterday."
Here it was.
"You displayed strength and speed far beyond what a human should possess." Number One's tone was conversational, almost casual. "You held your own against four trained immortal warriors. How was that possible?"
Dimitri slid the needle into Number Three's arm and depressed the plunger. He took his time withdrawing it, capping the needle, and setting the used syringe in the disposal tray. Each movement was deliberate and unhurried. He was buying himself seconds to think.
The cameras. Always the cameras.
He couldn't tell the truth here. If Losham was informed of what transpired in the lab and learned that Dimitri had admitted to being immortal, the consequences would be catastrophic.
Losham would see him as either a weapon to be exploited or a threat to be eliminated, and neither of those outcomes was good.
But he couldn't lie to Dave, either. Not directly. Dave had compulsion abilities, and while Dimitri wasn't sure whether those abilities would work on him now that he was immortal, he didn't want to find out.
He needed a third option. The truth for Dave's ears, disguised as something innocent for the cameras.
Dimitri laughed.
It came out natural enough. A short, self-deprecating chuckle that he paired with a glance upward toward the nearest camera.
Just a flick of the eyes, barely perceptible if someone wasn't watching for it, but deliberate enough that a consciousness distributed across eight bodies would catch the signal.
"I think the surveillance footage might tell a different story than what you saw in person.
" He moved to Number Four, preparing the next syringe.
"Those four weren't trying to kill me. Not right away.
They wanted to prolong things. Toy with me.
Make a spectacle of it." He shrugged, keeping his voice light, casual.
"That's why it looked like I was keeping them at bay.
I wasn't. They were playing cat and mouse, and I was the mouse.
If you hadn't arrived when you did, I'd be dead. "
The Eight said nothing. Sixteen eyes watched him work.
Dimitri swabbed Number Four's arm and slid the needle in. "I got lucky, that's all. Lucky and desperate. A desperate man can do surprising things."
The silence stretched.
He moved to Number Five, acutely aware that Dave was processing his words through his hive brain, comparing what he'd just said with what they had actually witnessed, analyzing the discrepancy, measuring the gap between his explanation and reality.
Dave would know he was lying. The question was whether Dave would understand why he was lying.
He glanced at the camera again. A longer look this time. Then back to Dave.
Number One's expression didn't change, but something shifted in the quality of his gaze, a fractional narrowing, a slight tilt of the head, that told Dimitri the message had been received.
Not here. Not with the cameras watching.
"Perhaps you are correct," Number One said. "Desperate men can do surprising things."
The words were an acknowledgment, not an agreement. Dave was accepting his explanation for the cameras while making it clear that the conversation wasn't over.
Dimitri continued the injections. Number Six. Number Seven. The rhythm steadied him—swab, inject, withdraw, cap, dispose. By the time he reached Number Eight, his pulse had almost returned to normal.
"Would you like to see Mattie?" he asked as he administered the final shot.
The words came out of nowhere, surprising even himself, but the instinct behind them was sound.
If Dave wanted a real conversation, they needed to be somewhere without cameras.
The hallway upstairs had no surveillance.
It was a residential space, outside the lab's monitored zone.
"We would like that very much," Number One said.
"Let me go up first and check if she's okay with a visit."
"Of course," Number One said. "We will wait."
Dimitri pulled off his gloves, dropped them in the biohazard bin, and crossed the lab toward the stairwell.
He took the stairs two at a time. He found Mattie exactly where he'd left her, sitting at the dresser, her bandaged hand cradled against her chest. She looked up as he appeared at the end of the hallway.
"What happened? Are you okay?"