THIRTY-THREE
KAITO
The alarm doesn’t screech, and that’s the first thing I notice.
It pulses, low, measured, and disciplined.
Red light slides across the science wing walls in even intervals, painting glass, steel, and scared faces in blood-colored flashes.
No one outright panics, which somehow makes it worse.
Panic would make a whole lot of sense. Panic would at least feel honest.
This place doesn't panic, though.
It organizes.
Guards move to doors, scientists snatch files from tables, and somewhere deeper in the wing, an electronic lock releases with a heavy thunk that vibrates through the floor under my boots.
Dakota goes still.
Not frozen. Loaded. There’s a difference.
Frozen people are trapped inside their fear. Dakota looks like fear learned how to hold a knife and make a plan.
Hale’s radio crackles before he can finish telling any of us what and what not to do. “Commander, we have movement at lower containment access. Medical escort returning through the service corridor. Field team survivors at west gate.”
The room changes suddenly. Not enough for strangers to catch it, but it’s enough for me.
Mercer’s face loses color, and Fletcher catches it too, because his eyes sharpen from the door to the doctor.
Xeon shifts his weight by a fraction, quiet and precise.
Ewan’s hand holds out his headphones toward Dakota again, not touching, just offering.
Dakota doesn’t look at any of us. She’s looking at Mercer. Just one look, like a blade held to the throat of every single secret he still thinks he can keep from her.
“Field team,” she repeats.
Mercer’s jaw clenches once as Hale snaps into his radio, “Confirm identity.”
Only static spits back, and Dakota moves before the answer comes.
She doesn’t run, and that would be way easier to stop.
She simply walks. Straight past Hale. Straight toward the red-lit corridor beyond the glass.
Her bad knee catches slightly on the second step, but she absorbs the pain so thoroughly that I would have completely missed it had I not been watching her so closely.
I don’t miss it, though.
I miss very little about her now, and that should scare me. Hell, it terrifies the shit out of me, but not because I want to look away. It’s because I don’t.
“Kota,” Hale calls after her, but she keeps walking.
Valeria moves toward the door, radio in hand. “You can’t go down there without clearance.”
Dakota finally stops then. Slowly, she turns her head. Her bandana still hides her mouth, but it does absolutely nothing to hide the look in her eyes. Then she says, “I’ve been polite for eight whole seconds. Don’t make me waste the effort.”
Ewan makes a quiet sound behind me and mutters, “That might actually be a personal best. Am I allowed to be proud?”
No one laughs, and Dakota reaches the door.
It’s locked.
For one beautiful, god-awful moment, she simply stares at the keypad like she’s deciding whether or not she has the capability to make technology bleed.
Then Mercer exhales, “Open it.”
Hale turns on him. “Doctor.”
“If that’s M-7 coming in, she has every right to know.”
She.
The word lands way lighter than Fletcher’s slip did, because Hale’s radio is still hissing and half the room is still turned toward the alarm, but I hear it.
So does Fletcher.
So does Xeon.
Dakota doesn’t react, but that’s exactly how I know she heard it, too.
Hale’s eyes cut briefly to her, then to Mercer, then to the file still open on the table. Suspicion starts to gather behind his stare. Not certainty, not yet. But suspicion is merely a seed. And men like Hale water things without even realizing it.
Valeria punches in a code before the argument can turn nuclear, and the door releases with a clean, mechanical click. Dakota is through it before anyone can even decide whether they’re allowing her to go or simply failing to stop her.
I follow after her, because of course I do.
My side pulls hard with the movement, stitches or tape or whatever the hell the red-haired medic used dragging against raw skin. Pain bursts hot under my ribs, but I ignore it, because I am exceptionally talented in the art of making poor decisions look intentional.
Fletcher falls in on Dakota’s left, not in front, though. Never in front, not anymore. Xeon takes the right without crowding her, and Ewan stays half a step behind, close enough to speak into her ear if she needs the world made into a joke she can tolerate.
I take the rear, because someone has to watch what follows. And because I understand something the others might not yet. Not better, not more, just differently.
I know what it is to have a father become a shadow in every single hallway I walk down.
The science wing tightens around us as we move deeper into it. The walls are too bright, the doors are too thick, and labels appear on every glass panel we pass.
ARCHIVE STORAGE.
SERUM STABILITY.
REACTIVE MARKER ANALYSIS.
QUARANTINE OBSERVATION.
Dakota’s shoulders draw in tighter and tighter with every word, but she doesn't ask what they mean, and that might just be the most terrifying thing. Her father’s name is inside these walls.
Her brother’s name is written inside a folder.
Her scent is in the air, wild honey and rain sharpened until every Alpha instinct in me wants to find the closest threat and remove it from the world.
I don’t, because wanting isn’t permission and permission isn’t ownership. The lesson sits under my skin like sutures that are still healing.
Mercer walks quickly for a man who looks like the last full night’s sleep abandoned him during the last years before the collapse of civilization. He catches up on Dakota’s other side, while Valeria keeps pace with him, the pair arguing in low voices while Hale follows with a guard at either side.
“West gate is not where M-7 should come through,” Hale says.
“No,” Mercer agrees.
“Then either the relay failed, or someone has redirected them,” Hale adds.
“Yeah.”
“That doesn’t concern you?”
Mercer gives him a look over his shoulder. “Everything concerns me. I’m having a bit of a varied morning.”
Ewan mutters, “I like him.”
Dakota says nothing.
The corridor curves to the left, and the smell changes gradually.
Less like bleach and more like blood. Old sweat.
Wet fabric. Cold air pumped too fast through the vents that are rattling above us.
And under it all, something chemical and bitter trails through the hallway, similar to the blockers tucked safely under Dakota’s skin and inside her jacket, only harsher. More industrial. Wrong.
My father would know what it is.
That thought slaps my brain without warning.
Not my father as he was when the world fell apart, all quiet disappointment wrapped in old discipline.
But my father before. Standing in the kitchen in Kyoto with papers spread over the counter.
Arguments spoken in Japanese too fast for me to follow at that age.
NOVAC printed in English on the corner of pages.
My mother’s silence so thorough that it became just another person in the room.
I remember his voice, even now.
Careful. Low. Saying people were turning hope into machines, and machinery didn’t care who it swallowed whole.
I didn’t understand back then.
I understand it now.
A little too late, like most useful things.
Dakota stops so abruptly that Fletcher almost collides with her. Ahead, two guards wheel a gurney through an intersecting hallway. The person on it isn’t Maine. They’re too small, too still. A blood-soaked sheet covers half of their body, one arm hanging limp from the side of the gurney.
She watches the hand, though. Just the hand. And her own fingers curl once before releasing again.
“Not him,” Mercer confirms quietly, the kindness in those two words almost worse than cruelty.
Dakota turns her head toward him and says, “If you even consider saying that like it’s something comforting again, I’ll make you regret letting me out of that room back there.”
Mercer’s mouth pulls tight. “Understood.”
We move again, but slower now. Not because Dakota chooses caution, but because dread has a physical weight to it.
I can see it in the line of her back, in the way her head stays slightly lowered under the hat I’ve come to realize belonged to Maine.
That would explain why it’s so important to her, enough to risk her life to retrieve it from Ewan after he took it.
I see it in the way she doesn’t touch the folded paper inside her jacket, even though I know she wants to.
She’s holding herself away from that terrifying hope by sheer force and willpower.
I can understand that, too.
People think fear is finding a body, but sometimes fear is finding breath.
Sometimes the dead are easier because they don’t ask for anything from you.
They don’t need you to forgive them for surviving all wrong.
They don’t look older. They don’t stand in front of you wearing years you weren’t there to witness.
Alive can be a merciless bitch.
We reach a security door with two guards posted outside.
The door itself looks just like every other door in this wing.
Too clean, too heavy, and too convinced of its own importance.
A reinforced window sits at eye level, narrow enough that whoever designed it clearly wanted people to see just enough to suffer and not enough to understand a damned thing.
Wire runs through the glass in a grid shape, and a smear of blood darkens one corner where someone’s hand must have hit it on the way through.
Dakota reaches the window first, because of course she does. There’s not an ounce of hesitation in her. No caution, either, and no room left inside her for anyone else’s rules.
One guard steps slightly into her path and Fletcher’s voice drops behind her. “Don’t.”
Just one word, but the guard freezes anyway. Smart man.