Chapter 21 #2
“Because those three were here first,” I say.
“Your blood filtration research. It threatens someone powerful. Someone who’s built a monopoly on clean blood by capitalizing on the same contamination crisis you’ve been trying to solve.
Your work makes his monopoly worthless. He sent a team to make sure it never leaves this lab. ”
Carson’s jaw tightens. His hands close at his sides. He looks at the bodies on the floor for a long time. When he looks back at me, his eyes are steady.
“My wife died because the blood supply was contaminated,” he says. “I’ve spent five years trying to fix that.”
“You can’t stay here,” Sullivan says. “They’ll send more. We have a secure facility with a lab. We can protect you and your research.”
Carson looks at the hallway. Three bodies. A buckled door. He pulls the reading glasses down from his forehead. Puts them on.
“The man who built this monopoly,” Carson says. “He’s the reason the contamination got worse?”
“He made it worse deliberately. To increase demand for his supply.”
Carson’s expression hardens.
“Then I’m not just fixing the blood supply. I’m dismantling his business model.” He turns toward the lab. “Give me two minutes to pack my drives.”
He packs one bag. Laptop. Three external drives. A framed photograph he lifts from the shelf beside his workstation and places face-down in the bag without looking at.
He stops at the filtration prototype on the far bench. Runs his hand along the housing.
“The methodology is on the drives,” he says. “I can rebuild the system if I can source the right components.”
He leaves it. Takes the bag.
I carry him. Across campus, through the dark, at a speed his body wasn’t designed for. He grips the collar of my coat, keeps his eyes closed and his breathing controlled. When I set him down at the compound’s south entrance, he straightens his coat and looks at the building.
“How far is the lab from here?”
“You’re standing in it.”
I brief Elena. She clears a workspace in the lower level within the hour, separated from the survivor intake by a hallway and a security door. Whatever medical equipment the compound has goes into the room.
Before Carson touches a cabinet, I take him to the medical wing. He needs to see what his work means.
He stands in the doorway. Forty-seven people in beds. IV marks on every arm. Children who have never lived outside a building.
“The man who sent those operatives tonight,” I say.
“This is what he does. He captures humans and holds them in facilities. Drains their blood on a schedule and sells it as the only clean supply available. We rescued these people last night. There are hundreds more in facilities we haven’t reached yet. ”
I let that settle.
“Your filtration technology makes his entire operation obsolete. If contaminated blood can be purified, no one needs to hold a human being in a cage to get a clean supply.”
Carson doesn’t speak. He walks the length of the wing. He looks at every bed.
When he comes back, his face is different.
“Show me the lab,” he says.
He walks into the workspace and begins inventorying the equipment. Opens cabinets, checks what’s inside, reads labels. He doesn’t sit down.
“This will do to start,” he says. “I’ll need a mass spectrometer within the week. And samples of contaminated human blood. As many sources as you can get.”
Elena takes over from there.
I leave them.
The medical wing corridor is quieter than it was an hour ago.
Through the glass, Simone is sitting with the same woman from earlier.
They’ve shifted. The woman is lying down now, turned toward Simone, and Simone’s hand is resting on the mattress between them.
Close enough that the woman could reach for it if she wanted.
I watch for ten seconds. Then I walk.
Celeste is in the hallway outside our room. Leaning against the wall. Arms crossed. She’s been waiting.
She has the report. Where I went, that I went alone, that I came back with a human scientist whose research could end the farm monopoly.
“You went alone.”
“I did.”
“To fight an assassination team.”
“Three operatives.”
“Without telling me.” Her voice is even. Controlled. “Without a camera. Without a feed. Without giving me anything you made me promise to give you last night.”
The words land and I hold still under them because they’re precise and they’re earned.
I stood in this corridor and told her I wouldn’t survive being blind to her inside one of Konstantin’s buildings. I put cameras on her shoulders and watched every step she took through rooms full of cots. I made her carry my fear as equipment.
And the first time the positions reversed, I gave her nothing. No feed. No audio. No way to know if I was alive or dead until someone walked down to the medical wing and told her.
“The window was minutes,” I say. “If I’d pulled you out, briefed you, assembled a team, Carson would be dead.”
“And if you’d taken thirty seconds to tell me you were going?”
I don’t answer. Because thirty seconds existed. I chose not to spend them.
“I was with a survivor,” she says. Quieter now. “Marcellus walked into the wing and told me you’d left the compound alone to intercept an assassination team. That’s how I found out. From Marcellus. In front of the survivors.”
“I told Julian to wait until you came up from the wing.”
“Marcellus didn’t wait.”
Silence.
“You sat in a chair for four hours watching me on a screen,” she says. “I didn’t even get a screen.”
Silence. The corridor holds us.
She pushes off the wall. Crosses the distance between us. Her hands come up to my face. Her thumbs on my cheekbones. Her fingers along my jaw. The calluses on her palms from years in the ring. The pressure of someone who isn’t being gentle.
I close my eyes. The relief arrives so completely that my breathing changes before I can stop it.
The bond floods with what she’s sending, and underneath the anger it’s the same thing I sent her when she walked through the compound door after the farm.
The thing that doesn’t have a name because the name would make it smaller.
Her palms against my skin. Warm. A degree warmer than before the strike. I register it the way I register every shift in her. Filed. Not yet understood.
“Next time,” she says, “you tell me. Even if the window is closing. Even if I’m needed somewhere else. Thirty seconds, Maximus. You give me thirty seconds.”
“I will.”
“And you wear the cameras.”
I open my eyes. She’s looking at me. The anger is still there but it’s sharing space with something else. The look of someone holding the person who came home.
“I’ll wear them,” I say.
Her thumbs trace my cheekbones once. She holds my face for three more seconds. Then she drops her hands.
“Go finish the messages,” she says. “I’ll check on Carson.”
She turns toward the lower level. I turn toward the study.
The messages to the lords are still on the screen in the study. I sit at my desk.
The power that launched that canister is still in my chest. Quiet. Waiting. Accelerating on a timeline I don’t control.
Carson is in the lab. Celeste is with him. The messages are ready.
I press send.