2. Theon
THEON
By six in the morning, I’m in the lab with the partition sealed and music playing through the bone-conduction clip behind my ear. Something instrumental. Strings. Nothing with words, because words demand attention.
The fume hood breathes on a steady cycle.
I’m drawing off a clear amber liquid into vials, each one labeled by hand with a felt-tip pen because machine-printed labels have made me suspicious since I was twelve.
The compound is for Raphael, a refinement of a sedative he asked for last week. Fast onset. Soft landing.
The intercom chimes.
“Bench warning,” I say into the air.
“You’re not on the bench, you absolute liar,” Darius says through the speaker. “I can see you on the camera.”
“Did you want something?” I ask.
A pause. I can imagine him smiling at the speaker.
“Nikolai wants everyone in the living room. Twenty minutes.”
I cap the vial in my hand. Set it in the rack.
“Everyone?” I ask.
“Everyone,” he confirms.
“Define everyone.”
“All ten of us. Nine, until you walk your moody chemist self out of that glass box and join the rest of the family.”
“I’m not moody.”
“You’re deeply, profoundly moody, and I love you for it. Twenty minutes,” he finishes.
The speaker clicks off.
I take a slow breath. The fume hood breathes with me. I cap the next three vials, log them in the book—the actual paper book, because paper does not get hacked—and pull off my gloves one finger at a time. The mask waits on its stand by the door. I leave it there. Not for this. Not for my brothers.
I unseal the partition. Step through. The air on the living side smells of the chamomile from last night and the faint trace of something burnt, which means Raphael has been in the kitchen again.
I pull on a hoodie because the corridor between the personal quarters and the common areas runs cooler than the rest of the level, and I hate being cold. I’ve been cold enough for one lifetime.
Darius is leaning against the wall outside my door, scrolling through something on his tablet. He looks up. Grins. He’s wearing a henley with the sleeves shoved up to his elbows, the storm-cloud ink across his forearms catching the corridor light.
“There he is,” he says. “The hermit emerges.”
“I’ve been awake since three. You’re just slow.”
“I’m not slow,” he says, falling into step beside me. “I’m relaxed. There’s a difference.”
“Mm.”
He always walks too close. It used to bother me. It doesn’t anymore.
“Did Nik say what it’s about?” I ask.
“He didn’t have to. Marcus was already pulling files when I walked past the Archive. The set of his shoulders had that I’ve been awake since two and I have opinions energy.”
“That’s every morning for Marcus,” I say.
“True. But this morning he also had the coffee, which means we’re hunting.”
“There’s a coffee for that?”
“Black. No sugar. Made in the small pot. Reserved exclusively for grim resolve,” Darius deadpans.
I almost laugh. He notices. He always notices. He doesn’t comment, which is the closest Darius Voss gets to mercy.
The living room is already half full when we walk in.
Ezra has claimed the corner of the long couch nearest the planning table and has three tablets open in front of him, arranged at angles.
He doesn’t look up when we enter. He raises one hand, two fingers extended, which is his version of good morning.
“Morning, Ez,” Darius says.
“Two fingers means I’m thinking, don’t speak,” Ezra replies, not lifting his eyes.
“Two fingers means good morning. We agreed.”
“We did not agree. You decided, and I tolerated it,” Ezra states.
Darius shakes his head. “Same thing.”
Raphael is in the kitchen on the other side of the open partition, sleeves pushed up, hands moving over a board of something green. He’s making breakfast for whoever wants it, which is most of us, because Raphael’s breakfasts are the one thing in this household nobody complains about.
“Theon,” he calls without turning. “The amber stuff. Is it ready?”
I run a hand across the back of my neck. “By nine. I just have to titrate the second batch.”
“You’re a saint,” Raph states.
“I’m a chemist.”
Lucien is on the floor in front of the couch, sitting cross-legged, doing nothing in particular except existing in that quiet way of his that makes the room feel calmer when he’s in it. He nods at me. I nod back. We’ve never needed many words.
Marcus comes in from the corridor that leads to the Archive, tablet under one arm, mug in the other hand. Black coffee. Small pot. Darius gives me a look that says I told you, and I refuse to acknowledge it.
“Mercer,” I say.
“Kova?,” he replies. His voice is rough at the edges.
Dominic is already at the planning table.
He’s wearing someone else’s face this morning—his own features, but the set of them borrowed from somewhere else.
He’s been working on a deep-cover identity for weeks.
The shape of his mouth isn’t his. I know better than to comment on it.
You don’t poke at Dom on mornings like this. You let him surface in his own time.
“Dom,” I say.
He glances up. His eyes settle. Something flickers, and the mouth shifts, just slightly, closer to his own. “Theon. You look tired.”
I shrug. “I look thirty.”
“You look thirty and tired.”
I narrow my eyes. “Thank you for the diagnosis.”
Nikolai stands at the head of the planning table, because Nikolai is always already wherever the room is about to gather, arms folded, watching the schematic cycle on the wall display.
Jenna is folded into the armchair at his right hand, feet tucked under her, a mug of tea balanced on the curve of her belly.
“Morning, Theon,” she says. “You look like a man who slept in the centrifuge.”
“The centrifuge is more comfortable than it looks.”
Damon walks in last, because Damon is always last on principle.
Nikolai waits until the door seals behind him, and then he sweeps the room—a flick of those pale eyes across each of us, an inventory I’ve watched him take a thousand times.
Lucien, floor. Ezra, couch corner. Raphael, kitchen.
Marcus, doorway. Dominic, table. Damon, by the wall.
Darius, beside me. Jenna, at his right hand. Me, present.
“Sit down,” Nikolai says.
We sit. Or we lean. Raphael wipes his hands on a towel and brings a board of sliced fruit to the table, sets it down between Ezra’s tablets, and Ezra inclines his head a fraction of a degree, which from him is effusive gratitude.
“Ashford,” Nikolai says. “Rural Pennsylvania.”
The room goes quiet.
“Confirmed?” Marcus asks.
“Confirmed. Forty-one subjects. Ages four to eleven. The facility went hot eight weeks ago. They’re already into Phase Two with the older ones.”
My hand closes around the edge of the table. I don’t look down at it.
Phase Two. Predator imprinting. Children hunting children.
“Layout?” Damon says.
Ezra rotates one of his tablets. A schematic spreads across the wall display behind him, all clean lines and projected probabilities in the margins.
“Three buildings. Central admin and barracks. Eastern wing for conditioning. Western wing for medical and pharmaceutical. Subterranean level beneath the east wing, which I’m modeling as the live-conditioning chambers based on power draw and water usage. ”
“Staff?” Nikolai asks.
“Eighty-seven on rotation. Sixty-three armed. Two of the original Project Architect specialists on site. Dr. Vasiliev. Dr. Korte.”
Korte.
The name lands behind my sternum like a struck bell.
Korte was Reines’s protégée. Korte ran the chemistry side of two of my early sessions.
Korte put a needle in my arm when I was nine and told me to count backward from a hundred in Croatian to see if the language center stayed online while my motor control failed.
I keep my face still, even so Darius’s hand finds the back of my neck and squeezes once. He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t say anything. He just holds on for a second and then lets go.
“Theon,” Nikolai says. He’s watching me. He sees everything. He always has.
“I’m fine,” I tell him.
“You have Korte.”
“I know.”
“Do you want her?” he asks.
I take a breath. The air in the living room smells like the herbs Raphael was chopping, the coffee Marcus is finishing and the underlying chemical edge that follows me out of the lab no matter how thoroughly I scrub.
“Yes.”
“Then she’s yours.”
Marcus pulls up another window on the wall display. Photographs. Korte at a café near Ashford. Korte at the facility entrance. Korte buying flowers from a roadside stand like she’s a human being.
“I want a sample set of whatever they’re using on the kids,” I say. “Reines’s protocols evolved past what I have on file. If Korte’s running chemistry, she’ll have inventory.”
“Noted,” Ezra says, typing something one-handed.
“Resources,” Nikolai says. “Damon, Raphael, you’re with me on the east wing. Lucien, west wing extraction. Forty-one kids. Some will fight us. Some won’t move at all. You know the patterns.”
“I know,” Lucien says quietly.
“Marcus, Darius, you’re the communications and crowd. I want their staff turning on each other before we set foot on the property. Dominic, you’re in already. Three weeks of cover.”
“Two and a half,” Dom says, “but who’s counting?”
“Ezra, Theon, you’re on the ground for the chemistry pull and the financial trace. I want every dollar that funded Ashford tracked back to its source before we leave the perimeter.”
Ezra nods once. I nod once.
“Extraction for the children?” Raphael asks.
“Three convoys. We’ve placed forty-one slots through the network. Spread across four states. No two children to the same destination. Standard protocol.”
“Forty-one,” Raphael repeats.
The room goes quiet again. Forty-one is a number. It’s also forty-one small bodies with forty-one small histories, and every one of us at this table knows exactly what it feels like to be one of those numbers in a different facility, in a different decade.
“Forty-one out,” Nikolai says. “All of them. No exceptions. No casualties on our side. We will move in eleven days.”
“Eleven days is tight,” Ezra says, “but the probability curve is favorable. Vasiliev travels to Washington, D.C., on day twelve. We want him on site.”
“We want him on site,” Nikolai agrees.
Damon hasn’t said much. He’s been watching Darius’s hand, which is back on the table now, fingers tapping a slow pattern against the wood. He reaches across, without looking, and laces his fingers through Darius’s to still them. Darius exhales. The tapping stops.
“Eleven days,” Damon says. “Workable.”
“Workable,” Marcus echoes.
“Workable,” I say, wanting it to be true.
Nikolai looks at each of us. The count again. The inventory.
“Briefings continue at twenty hundred. Eat. Rest. Prepare. Theon, I need your full pharmaceutical workup on the conditioning compounds by tomorrow. Marcus, I want Korte and Vasiliev’s full movement patterns by Thursday. Ezra, financial trace by Friday.”
A round of nods. The meeting breaks the way our meetings always break, not with dismissal but with people slowly remembering they have hands and bodies and breakfasts cooling on the counter.
Raphael goes back to the kitchen. Lucien rises from the floor in one fluid motion that still, after all these years, makes me wonder how someone who has died as many times as he has moves like that.
Ezra collapses his tablets in a sequence.
Dominic stays at the table, looking at the schematic, already beginning to inhabit whoever he’ll need to be in Ashford.
Darius bumps his shoulder against mine. “You good?”
“I have eleven days to map a chemistry protocol I haven’t seen in fifteen years and prepare a delivery system for a woman who used to make me count backward in Croatian. So yes. I’m great.”
He grins. “That’s the spirit.”
“Shut up, Voss.”
“Love you too, Kova?.”
He drifts off toward Damon. I stay where I am for a moment, hands flat on the table, looking at the schematic on the wall. Forty-one children. Eleven days. One name I’ve been waiting fifteen years to write a final formula for.
Korte.
I push off the table and head back toward the lab. There’s titration to finish, and now there’s a great deal more.