Nobody moved for a full three seconds. Then Aeva picked up the tablet like it might bite her and turned the camera to face herself instead of the room at large.
"Who is this."
"You know exactly who this is, Ms. Petrova. I reviewed your intake file personally, three years before you'd have called yourself an engineer." A pause, unhurried the pause of a man who had never once in his life felt rushed. "Though I'll admit the disc changes my projections in an interesting direction. May I see it?"
Nobody answered. Nobody moved to show him anything.
"No matter. I'll have better data soon regardless." Something shifted in his tone not warmer, just more specific, the way a lecturer's voice changes when he reaches the part of the talk he actually wanted to give. "Mr. Tanaka. I've reviewed telemetry on Velocity Core hosts for eleven years, across six divergent timelines, and in every one of them the host's biological signature follows an identical curve toward the same terminal state. I don't say this to frighten you. I say it because you deserve to know that what's happening to your collarbone right now isn't a symptom. It's a schedule."
Kazuki's hand moved to his collarbone before he could stop it. He caught Aeva noticing.
"You don't know anything about my collarbone," he said.
"I designed the vein pattern, Mr. Tanaka. Not this iteration of you an earlier one, in a timeline that no longer exists in any form worth mourning. I've watched this exact conversation happen four times before tonight, with four different young men who were, by every meaningful metric, you." A soft, almost apologetic exhale. "I'm not your enemy. I am, if anything, the only person in this war with any real interest in you surviving long enough to finish becoming what you're going to become. Vane wants your loyalty. Malvorn wants your corpse. Kaelen wanted your suit. I am the only one who has ever wanted your data intact and your heart still beating in the same sentence."
"That's not comforting," Aeva said.
"It wasn't meant to be comforting. It was meant to be true." A faint sound in the background something mechanical, a door, a restraint releasing. "I apologize for what comes next. I promise it isn't personal. I simply can't finish the equation without a live sample under genuine stress, and Titus Kaine, for all his enthusiasm, generates the wrong kind of data. Kinetic feedback contaminates the readings."
"What did you send," Kazuki said.
"Something patient," Vaunt said. "Which is more than I can say for most of what your world has thrown at you tonight."
The call ended on its own, mid-breath, like a door closing somewhere very far away.
For four seconds the print shop was silent enough that Kazuki could hear Darius's ragged breathing across the room, and the low electric hum of the ancient wiring Aeva had tapped, and nothing else at all.
Then the lights went out.
Not the power Kazuki felt that a half-second later, the grid failing breaker by breaker, in a wave moving toward them from the east wall. Before the dark even finished arriving, something in the far corner of the shop moved, and didn't move, at the same time there and not there, a shape flickering between two positions eight feet apart without ever occupying the space between them.
"Rina." Kenji's voice had lost every trace of its usual calm. "Tell me you see that too."
"I see it twice," Rina said. "In two different places. At the same time."
The shape resolved, for exactly one frame, into the outline of a person hunched, restrained-looking, arms wrapped in something that might have been cable and might have been scar tissue and then it wasn't there, and then it was three feet closer, and the room understood, all at once and without anyone saying it out loud, that whatever Vaunt had sent didn't experience the next five seconds in the same order they did.
[To Be Continued...]