Chapter 46 Little Displays Of Failure and Poor Decision Making
LITTLE DISPLAYS OF FAILURE AND POOR DECISION MAKING
Perfection / Wonderland - Natalia Kills
Kookaburra
The doctor’s keycard is warm in my pocket when I step out of the corridor, leaving her to bleed on her little throne after another little visit.
The building feels different now – lighter, almost relieved – as if it’s grateful someone finally told the truth with their hands.
The hum in the walls has changed pitch; the generator coughs, resets, and the emergency lights flicker, throwing the aftermath into soft, flattering shadows.
I walk through the mess like it’s nothing more than spilled laundry. The bodies are arranged neatly where I left them, little displays of failure and poor decision-making. A few of them twitch as nerves fire postmortem. Even dead, they try so hard to be noticed.
“Good boys,” I murmur as I step over one. “You learned your lesson.”
The not-so-secret office is on the top floor, behind a door that pretends not to exist. I know because I’ve watched Callaway glance in that direction every time she thought I wasn’t paying attention.
She never walked there, never even approached the corridor, which is how you know something powerful hides at the end of it. Power is allergic to proximity.
The lift is still operational. Cute. They must not have predicted a scenario where I took control of the building. I press the button and ride up past blackout floors and locked wards, the numbers ticking up like a countdown.
When the doors open, I’m greeted by a hallway too quiet to be accidental. Carpet instead of tile. Art on the walls. The illusion of importance. The kind of space built to soothe the consciences of people who sign terrible things into motion.
This feels like a space the elusive Director inhabits. When he bothers to show up, I expect.
I swipe the keycard. The door clicks open. Of course it does. There’s no system in the world that expects the person holding the master credentials to be bleeding from someone else’s thigh.
The office is immaculate. Not in the sterile way downstairs rooms are – this is curated. A museum of authority. Dark wood. Leather chair. A wall of screens showing patient vitals, corridor feeds, the greenhouse, the kitchen, even the view from the chair where the doctor currently sits dying.
I pause just inside the threshold. The lights flick on with motion sensors, flooding the room in warm gold. They expect visitors to feel welcomed here. Disarmed. That alone is insulting.
I cross to the desk. The computer wakes with a hum, blinking politely. No name is on the screen. Just a departmental login panel asking for Callaway’s details. I enter them, slower than necessary, testing the responsiveness of the machine. It purrs like a cat. Obedient.
Then the next prompt appears.
ENTER SECONDARY PASSPHRASE
I type Ark Doesn’t Sink. The system unlocks.
The desktop loads in a soft, elegant fade. No clutter. No chaos. Only a series of folders named with clinical precision. One labelled CONTAINMENT / PRIORITY ASSET: KAYLA KINGFISHER. Another labelled LIGATURE PROJECT. A third simply titled THE DIRECTORY.
The last one makes something cold push under my ribs.
I open it first.
I don’t open all of it. There’s too much, and my brain isn’t a sieve anymore – it’s a blade. I skim. I let phrases catch the light like fish flashing under water.
And what surfaces…
What surfaces changes everything.
My lungs forget their job. The room tilts slightly, as if the building just took a single, bracing breath. I scroll again, slower this time, just to confirm I didn’t misread. I didn’t.
Of course it was him. It was always going to be him. I was just the last one to admit it.
My pulse stays steady. My hands don’t shake. But something old and sharp wakes up behind my ribs…
I close the folder before the urge to break the computer grows teeth.
A soft, steady ache pulses low in my stomach. Not pain. Not warning. Awareness. The parasite shifts – small, deliberate, like a reminder that I’m not just reading for myself now. Or maybe it doesn’t and I just have gas.
Whatever.
Across the room, a framed photograph sits half-hidden behind a stack of files.
I pull it free. A group of suited men stand outside an unfamiliar building.
Two of their faces are blurred like someone scrubbed them with solvent.
One has a hand on his colleague’s shoulder, casual, confident, almost affectionate.
I flip it over.
There’s handwriting on the back. Neat. Masculine. A date. A signature.
I feel something inside me go incandescent.
“Oh,” I whisper, smiling even though there’s no one here to see it. “Of course you are.”
It makes perfect sense. Too much sense. The kind of sense that has weight behind it – years, infrastructure, secrecy, investment. The kind of sense that has been circling me like a wolf since long before I arrived.
He didn’t want Kayla the patient. He wanted Kayla the variable. Kayla the anomaly. Kayla the mother. He wanted the baby.
My baby.
My hand tightens around the photograph until the glass cracks.
I take what I need. Files. Notes. The Director’s private communications. A handful of printed reports stamped with the symbol I saw in one of the locked corridors weeks ago – three interlocking rings, no words, just geometry pretending it isn’t a threat.
I don’t let myself read further. Not yet. Later, when there’s room to be furious without distraction.
As I turn to leave, something on the monitor catches my eye. A live feed. Grainy. Angled from a camera high in a tree line. The timestamp is real-time.
Night. Wind moving through branches. Movement at the lower right corner – vehicles. Headlights cutting through dark.
My heart lifts, sharp and unexpected.
“My boys,” I murmur, the smile widening. “Right on schedule.”
They must have cracked something open. Or Nightshade followed the scent of blood I left behind. He’ll smell me the moment he steps out of the car. He’ll smell what I’ve done. What I’ve become. What I’ve learned.
I glance at the computer screen one last time. At the blurred faces. At the folder name glowing back at me like a dare. Downstairs, the doctor is still breathing in shallow, frightened little sips. Outside, headlights slice toward the facility like knives.
No. I won’t tell them. Not yet.
Some truths need to be delivered in person.
I step out of the office, the files under my arm, the keycard still warm between my fingers.
And inside my belly, the baby shifts again – small, stubborn, inevitable.
“Don’t worry,” I whisper to the walls, to the surveillance system, to the entire rotten institution. “They’ll come for us. They’ll get their answers. And so will I.”
The lift doors close around me.
The descent feels like the beginning of something enormous.