The new safehouse was a defunct print shop three districts over Kenji's choice, and a good one: heavy structural steel, no windows above ground level, enough leftover paper dust in the air that infrared read the whole building as ambient noise.
Darius went down onto a stack of shrink-wrapped newsprint like his legs had simply stopped being consulted on the decision. Elena was beside him before anyone else moved, two fingers at his throat again, her mouth set in a line Kazuki was starting to recognize as her version of afraid.
"How bad," Kazuki said. Not a question anymore. A status check.
"Worse than an hour ago." Elena didn't look up. "The exertion cost him more than the run should have."
"I'm aware," Darius said, from somewhere very far away inside his own body. "Rude of you both to discuss me like I'm not renting the space."
Aeva had already pulled her tablet out, hooking into whatever remained of the print shop's ancient wiring, scrolling through footage she'd pulled off her own gear during the fight.
"There." She turned the screen. Grainy, but clear — a fixed lens bolted to the underside of the parking structure's ceiling, angled directly at the spot where Titus had gone down. "That's not Obsidian Circle hardware. Wrong housing, wrong compression. Four more like it, just in the last ninety seconds before the vehicles arrived."
"Somebody wired the location before they attacked it," Kazuki said.
"Somebody wired the location and waited for something worth filming." Aeva zoomed the timestamp. "These went active six minutes before the cars showed up. Whoever placed them knew we'd be there before Titus did."
The room went quiet in the specific way a room goes quiet when everyone in it is doing the same math and none of them like the answer.
"Vaunt," Elena said. It wasn't a question either.
Kazuki looked at her. "You know the name."
"I know the person." She finally looked up from Darius. "I worked under him for two years before I understood what the Chimera Project actually was. He didn't run the muscle division. He ran measurement. Every soldier the Helix ever fielded, every serum Renji ever stole a formula from Vaunt reviewed the data before anyone above him signed off." Her jaw tightened. "He's not a strategist like Vane. He doesn't care if you win or lose a fight. He cares whether the numbers from the fight match the numbers already in his head."
"And if they don't?"
"Then he adjusts the experiment." Her voice had gone flat the specific flatness of someone reciting something they'd spent years trying to forget. "That's what he called us. Not soldiers. Not assets. Experiments in progress."
Darius laughed a short, wet sound that turned into a cough before it finished.
"She's not wrong," he managed, once the coughing let him talk again. "In my timeline he had a name for people like me too. Recoverable data." He looked at Kazuki, an expression trying hard to be amused and mostly failing. "Whatever he's measuring, kid, he already has forty years of prior results. You're not his first attempt at counting this. You're just the one he's most interested in."
Rina, who'd said almost nothing since the parking structure, finally spoke from her post by the door. "If he's watching this closely, he already knows we're here."
"No." Aeva was still looking at her screen. "I don't think he does. I think he wants us to know he was watching. There's a difference." She turned the tablet again, and this time there was a sixth camera in frame that hadn't been active during the fight at all pointed, very precisely, at the door of the print shop.
It blinked once, deliberately, like something clearing its throat.
Then a voice came through Aeva's speaker that none of them had connected to anything.
"Good evening," it said, mild as weather. "I've been looking forward to this conversation for quite some time, Mr. Tanaka. Shall we skip the part where you ask how I found you? I assure you the answer will disappoint you less than the one you're imagining."
[To Be Continued...]