28. Isla
ISLA
By the second night, the spreadsheet has fourteen tabs and none of them agree.
I name it Cassandra because she sees disaster coming and cannot make anyone understand, including me.
Column A: facility designation. Column B: protocol adopted. Column C: implementation date. Column D: population estimate, where an estimate exists. I build formulas to cross-reference subject codes against transfer records. Each time I run them, the total changes.
The data was never built to count children. It was built to manage inventory.
I slept for four hours after Theon held me on the floor. Since then, perhaps forty minutes with my cheek against his shoulder. Time has become unreliable around the edges.
Theon sets a plate of toast beside my keyboard.
“Eat.”
“The ninth facility recycled subject codes in year three.”
“The ninth facility will still have done that after breakfast.”
“If I don’t account for it, I’m counting children twice.”
He crouches beside my chair and puts two fingers against my wrist. His expression darkens.
“When did you last drink anything?”
I look at the glass beside the monitor. It is empty. I cannot remember emptying it.
Theon fills it and returns it to the same place. “Eight rows. Then you eat, drink and sleep.”
“You cannot order me to sleep.”
“No.” He pulls a chair beside mine. “But I can make it very difficult for you to pretend this is work instead of punishment.”
I glare at him.
He picks up one piece of toast and holds it within reach. “Eight rows.”
I complete six before taking it from him.
At some point after that, my head finds his shoulder and the spreadsheet blurs into white light.
I wake at three in the morning and find Raphael in the kitchen.
He is sitting at the long table with two mugs of tea. No knife, no cutting board, no pan heating on the stove. Raphael without a task for his hands looks wrong.
He pushes one mug toward the empty chair opposite him.
“Theon asked you to speak to me?” I ask.
“No. He asked me to make sure you were medically intact. The speaking is my idea.”
I sit.
For a while, neither of us says anything.
“They trained me to hurt other subjects,” he says at last. “Directly. They wanted precision, so they taught me where pain becomes damage and punished every miscalculation.”
My fingers tighten around the mug.
“I was good at it,” he continues. “Praise was safer than failure. I know what that does to a child.”
“Our histories aren’t the same.”
“No. I don’t need them to be.” His eyes stay on mine. “I’m telling you I understand what it is to survive by becoming excellent at the thing they demand, then discover that excellence came with victims.”
The tea smells faintly of anise. I do not drink it.
“There were choices,” I say. “Even inside the program. Small ones, but they existed.”
“Yes.”
The agreement unsettles me more than an argument would have.
“You expected me to tell you none of it belonged to you,” he says. “I’m not going to. Some of it does. So does what was done to you. Those truths do not cancel each other.”
“Then what am I supposed to do with them?”
“Stop treating suffering as repayment.”
I look down at the tea.
“You can stay awake until Cassandra has a perfect number. You can stop eating. You can make yourself hurt in every way that doesn’t leave an obvious wound.” His voice remains calm. “None of that helps one child in those files.”
“Neither does tea.”
The corner of his mouth moves. “The tea keeps you hydrated. Modest objective, measurable outcome.”
I take a sip despite myself.
“What helps?” I ask.
“Honest records. Medical plans. Getting the next group out alive. Living long enough to keep doing it.”
“That doesn’t undo the first direction.”
“Nothing does.” Raphael lifts his own mug. “I stopped asking my later choices to erase my earlier ones. They can’t. They can only be later choices.”
The weight in my chest does not move.
But I finish the tea.
Jenna finds me on Henrietta the next afternoon.
I slept another five hours. Cassandra still has fourteen tabs. I closed all of them before leaving our quarters, which feels less like progress than it should.
Jenna lowers herself onto the couch with one hand beneath her belly and shifts until the cushion supports her back.
“How are you?” she asks.
“I don’t have a good answer.”
“Good answers would worry me right now.”
She watches the silent television for a moment.
“Raphael told me he spoke to you,” she says. “Not what you discussed.”
“He told me pain isn’t repayment.”
“He’s right.”
“That does not make it easier.”
“No. Usually the true things are the least convenient.”
I look at her. “You stayed with Nikolai after he held you prisoner.”
Jenna’s expression does not change. “I did.”
“Did you forgive him?”
“No.” The answer comes without hesitation. “I love him. I chose the life we built afterward. I also know what he did to me, and I don’t rename it because I love the man he became.”
“How do you keep those things separate?”
“Some days I don’t.” She adjusts the cushion again. “Some days I’m furious. Some days what we have now feels bigger than what came before. Both are mine.”
I press the heel of my hand against my sternum.
“I keep thinking accountability should feel different from self-destruction.”
“It does from the outside.” Jenna’s gaze drops to my hand. “Accountability changes your behavior. Self-destruction just hurts you. The problem is that hurting can feel like proof you’re taking it seriously.”
I think of Cassandra multiplying the same children into different totals. I think of the untouched toast.
“Phoenix does not balance Site Nine,” I say.
“No. Those sixty-three children are not weights on your side of a scale.” Her voice sharpens. “They are alive. Medically supported. Away from the people who were dosing them. You don’t use them to purchase forgiveness, but you don’t get to declare their rescue meaningless either.”
The distinction settles somewhere I cannot reach yet.
Jenna takes my hand and presses it to the curve of her belly. A small movement meets my palm, then another.
“The past doesn’t become smaller,” she says. “Your life becomes larger. If you let it.”
We sit without speaking until the baby stops moving.
That evening, I find Nikolai alone in the Chamber.
Cascade’s live traffic fills the central display. The dormant access made its first connection without triggering an alarm. Dominic is still testing the path, and the Seattle gate remains closed until the full review tomorrow.
“I want to be considered for Seattle,” I say.
Nikolai turns from the display. “You are already part of the planning team.”
“I mean inside. With the medical and records group.”
“Why?”
The question is not a refusal. It is worse: room to answer badly.
“The pharmacy specifications from Cascade use Site Nine notation. I can reconcile them faster on site than anyone else. I know the cold-chain exceptions and the likely storage aliases. If a child’s records don’t match the stock, I can identify which discrepancy matters.”
“That is your operational case. What is your personal one?”
I look at Cassandra’s summary on the side display.
“I want to do something with what I know.”
“Action is not penance.”
“Raphael has already made that point.”
“Then hear it twice.” Nikolai comes around the table.
“You do not enter Seattle to punish yourself. If Damon clears you and the intelligence gate opens, you enter because your defined role improves the children’s chance of surviving extraction.
You follow the abort conditions. You leave when ordered.
Phoenix does not grant standing field status. ”
It is not the sweeping approval I might once have mistaken for trust.
It is better.
“Understood.”
“Final assessment tomorrow,” he says. “Until then, sleep.”
“Is that an order?”
“Yes.”
I leave before he can ask whether I intend to follow it.
At three in the morning, I am in the Archive looking for Seattle’s supplementary pharmacy files.
This is technically compatible with sleeping. It is not compatible with the spirit of Nikolai’s order.
Ezra is alone at his station.
Six screens surround him. His hands move between them while he speaks in a low, clipped rhythm.
“Contact creates an exploitation path. Distance gives her time and initiative. Every branch returns to the same problem.”
“Ezra.”
He startles hard enough to strike the edge of the desk.
Three windows vanish before I can read them. The fourth remains open long enough for me to recognize the Wager Protocol header.
“I didn’t hear you,” he says.
“I noticed.”
“Seattle projections.”
It is a poor lie by his standards.
“Is Raphael reviewing this model with you?”
His hands go still. “Not this part.”
Nikolai and Raphael told him about C-11 the night we returned from Texas. The restricted files were supposed to be reviewed with support, not absorbed alone at three in the morning until the program’s language replaced his own.
“You don’t have to tell me what contact means,” I say. “But I won’t pretend I didn’t find you running Wager scenarios by yourself.”
His expression closes.
“Is that a threat to report me?”
“No. It is a refusal to leave you alone with it.”
“I didn’t ask you to stay.”
“You have choices. Message Raphael, close the file and sit with me until morning, or let me message him. I won’t ask what you’re calculating while we wait.”
“Those are not the full set of choices.”
“They’re the set that doesn’t require me to decide this is harmless.”
For several seconds, neither of us moves.
Then Ezra picks up his phone.
I’m awake. Wager loop. Not immediate danger. Need company.
He shows me the message before sending it to Raphael.
“Accurate?” he asks.
“Accurate.”
He sends it.
The answer comes less than a minute later.
On my way. Close the file.
Ezra closes it.
“If Marchant is alive,” he says, looking at the blank screen, “she built a contingency around attachment. I can’t determine whether contact activates it or distance allows her to choose the conditions.”
“Do you need to determine that tonight?”
“No.” His throat moves. “That is what terrifies me.”
Not the absence of an answer. The act of stopping before he has one.
I take the chair beside him.
“The bad math happens at night,” I say.
Something flickers across his face. “Apparently.”
We wait without speaking until Raphael arrives.
Theon is asleep when I return to our quarters.
I undress in the dark and slide into bed. His arm comes around me before he wakes, pulling me against his chest with enough force to steal half a breath.
“Where?” he murmurs.
“Archive.”
His hold tightens.
“Ezra?”
Of course he knows.
“Raphael is with him.”
Theon presses his mouth to the back of my neck and settles.
Cassandra still has fourteen tabs. Marchant is still somewhere beyond the reach of Ezra’s models. Seattle still contains forty-two confirmed children and perhaps six more.
None of those facts will improve because I ruin myself before morning.
I close my eyes.
Theon’s arm stays locked around me.
Cassandra can wait until morning.