Chapter 6 #2
I look up at the smoke-filtered sky, "the fact that there is an outside." I pause.
"In the lab, they had a window in one of the observation rooms. Not to the outside, but to another interior space. The angle of the light was different in there, and sometimes I could tell roughly what time of day it was from how it moved." I watch the distant fires.
"That was the closest I had to a horizon."
A moment goes by. He doesn't offer anything hollow. Doesn't say I'm sorry or that's terrible or any of the things people say when they want to acknowledge something without sitting with it. He just lets the information exist without rushing to cover it.
I find I appreciate that more than reassurance would have been.
"The facility ran trials on schedule," I say, the words coming out steadier than I expect.
"Same times every day. After long enough you start building your sense of time around the trials. When they were late, it was-" I stop, recalibrate.
"You calibrate to what's available."
"Yeah," he says.
Just that. The word of someone who understands the specific skill of calibrating to what's available because they've done it somewhere, in some version of a small room of their own.
I don't push it. That's a thread for later, if later exists, which requires surviving the current situation. Speaking of which.
"The thing in the facility," I say, "the one making the roars. What was it?" His jaw tightens fractionally.
"I don't know exactly."
"But you know something. You have to know something about it, right?"
A pause where he's deciding how much that pause communicates.
"The program ran more than one kind of trial," he says, "what they were doing to the omegas was one track. There were others."
I process that.
"How many others?"
"More than I was briefed on."
Something cold settles in my stomach that isn't the pavement temperature.
I've been in that facility for three years, and I've built a comprehensive picture of my environment.
I missed entire tracks of what was happening there.
That's either a testament to how effectively they compartmentalized information or to the limits of what you can learn through vents and behavioral observation. Probably both.
"The claw marks were consistent," I say, thinking out loud now, the way I used to in my cell when I needed to organize something and the ceiling rabbit wasn't sufficient for the task.
"Depth suggested significant force, not a tool. Height suggested two-footed movement at approximately seven feet or more. The spacing between marks suggests a hand shape rather than an animal paw. Scaled up."
Colt is quiet for a moment.
"You got all that from looking at wall damage for three seconds."
"I told you. Small room. Very developed observation skills."
"You weren't scared," he says. Not an accusation. More like he's still building his model of what I am, and this is another data point.
"I was scared," I correct him, "I was scared, and I was also doing math, because doing math is what I use instead of freezing. The two aren't mutually exclusive."
He looks at me sideways. That look he does… the assessment that isn't hostile but is thorough.
"What else did you calculate in there," he asks.
"About you or about the facility?"
A pause.
"Both," he says, which surprises me enough that I glance up at him.
"About you," I say, "I calculated that you were more than contracted security, that you hadn't been in that facility long.
Also, that whatever you knew about the program going in was significantly less than what was actually happening, and that when you looked at me through the observation glass before they opened my cell, you were already deciding something. "
The muscle in his jaw moves.
"About the facility," I continue, "I calculated that whoever designed the containment architecture had experienced breaches before, that the experiment tracks were kept separate enough that most staff only understood their own section, and that whatever was in those tanks in the third corridor wasn't on any protocol I'd ever heard through the vents. "
Silence.
"Also," I add, "there's a shape tracking us from the left. It's been following for about half a block. Moving parallel, not closing in. Either curious or waiting for something."
Colt doesn't look left. His eyes stay forward, but his whole body shifts in a way that says he's registered it and is now holding it in peripheral attention.
"I know," he says quietly.
"Just checking."
We keep moving. The shape keeps its distance. Whatever it's waiting for, we don't give it.
The street opens into a wider intersection ahead, four ways, clear sightlines, and better ground for making decisions. Colt reads it as we approach, and I watch him read it, the systematic sweep, the things he looks at, and the order he looks at them in. He's good at this.
The kind of good that means he was trained for it and then did it long enough that the training became instinct. Then did it longer than that until even the instinct became something quieter and more constant. Something he carries the way I carry the habit of talking to ceilings and counting steps.
We are, I think, two people who learned to live inside impossible situations by developing very specific skills. It makes me wonder what he’s been through, or maybe it’s just the training that’s been conditioned into him. The thought arrives with a warmth I don't entirely account for.
Another distant roar.
Different direction than before.
Colt's arm does the thing again. The automatic half-shield thing, bringing me slightly into his space. His jaw sets.
"We need to get off the street," he says.
"Agreed," I mumble, my eyes darting around the area as if waiting for something to jump out at me.
I scan the intersection, "the building on the northwest corner has intact upper floors. The ground-level entry looks compromised, but there's a secondary access on the side. You can see the fire escape from here."
He follows my eyeline. Checks it and nods once.
We move toward it. I'm matching his pace now without being pulled, my feet having negotiated a workable path through the debris by feel.
My stride is adjusting to the terrain with the automatic competence of something that has become a habit in the last ten minutes.
His hand is still in mine. The grip has evolved from maintaining control of a subject into something that doesn't have a tactical label. Fingers adjusted. Contact that knows what it's doing.
He hasn't mentioned it.
I haven't mentioned it.
The fire escape is intact. He goes first, then holds a hand down for me.
I take it.
We climb.
The city spreads below us as we rise, expanding with each floor into something I don't have the emotional capacity to fully receive right now.
The scale of it. The damage. The miles of a world that has been going on without me while I was in a twelve-step room, memorizing ceiling cracks. Later for that.
We reach the third-floor landing, and he finds the window access. It’s already broken, already open, the glass gone long enough ago that the edges have dulled. He goes through first, checks the interior, and signals. I follow.
Inside, it’s dim, dusty, and structurally intact. A building that’s emptied and has been sitting quietly ever since. Furniture still in place. A life interrupted mid-arrangement and then abandoned.
I stand in the middle of it and breathe.
Just breathe.
The outside air follows us in through the window, smoke-touched, carrying everything the city is currently made of. And underneath it.
Still.
His scent.
Present and consistent and becoming, against my better judgment and previous objections, something that I am starting to use as a reference point, the way I used to use the direction of light through an interior window.
I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about this.
It’s become a thing that tells me where I am.
I don't say this out loud. I save it for the part of me that keeps the honest inventory.
Colt moves through the room, checking it with the systematic attention he applies to all spaces. I watch him do it and think about three years in twelve steps and the screaming rabbit on the ceiling and the way the floor felt when I first pressed my bare feet to the cracked asphalt outside.
"Hey," I say. He looks at me.
"We made it out," I say. Not we survived, or that worked, or any of the operational framings. Just the bare fact of it.
His expression doesn't change exactly, but something behind it does.
"Yeah," he says. We stand in the quiet of an abandoned room in a broken city with the roars of something enormous still carrying through the air outside, and for one breath, it's almost okay.
Then he turns back to the window, scanning the street below, and we both return to the work of figuring out what comes next.