Nobody spoke for a long moment after Vaunt's voice cut out. The print shop's dead wiring ticked and settled around them, the only sound besides Darius's uneven breathing and, from the center of the room, the slow, wet drag of air through Marcus's ruined throat.
"We can't stay here," Kenji said finally. "He knows this address now. Whatever 'interesting' means to a man like that, it means he's already recalculating."
"Agreed." Kazuki looked down at the unconscious man still cradled against his chest, weight distributed strangely, like a body that had forgotten what its own mass was supposed to feel like. "But he's not walking anywhere, and I'm not sure moving him fast is safe."
"It isn't." Elena had already knelt beside them, hands moving with the particular efficiency of someone who'd done this exact triage a hundred times in rooms she'd rather forget. She peeled back what was left of a sleeve and went still. "These staples aren't surgical. Not proper ones. Someone did this in a hurry, more than once, over years I count at least four different healing generations in the scar tissue alone." Her jaw tightened. "This wasn't maintenance. This was punishment dressed up as procedure."
"Can you help him?"
"I can keep him from dying in the next hour. That's not the same question." She looked up. "Darius. You knew him. What was he, before whatever this is?"
Darius had gone very still, watching Marcus's chest rise and fall in that same wrong, hitching rhythm the rest of him moved in. "In my timeline he wasn't anyone special. A lab tech. Not a host never a host. Vaunt didn't have a Velocity Core to work with in that branch. No Renji, no suit, no you." His eyes flicked to Kazuki. "So he tried to build one instead. Synthesize what a real Core does without a real Core to copy from." A humorless breath. "He used forty people before Marcus. Marcus was the one who lasted long enough to be useful."
"Useful for what."
"For proving it couldn't be built. Only inherited." Darius's hand found the wall, steadying himself against a truth that clearly cost him to say out loud. "Vaunt already knows that, in every timeline where I've watched this happen. He keeps testing it anyway. I don't think it's about the answer anymore. I think he just likes asking a question he already knows will hurt someone."
Marcus's working eye opened.
Nobody had been ready for that. Elena's hand went instinctively to his shoulder, gentle, holding him still without holding him down.
"Easy," she said. "You're safe. Nobody here is going to hurt you."
His mouth worked for a few seconds before anything came out, the words arriving in the same broken rhythm as everything else about him present, then gone, then present again, like a signal fighting through static.
"Not safe," he managed. "Nothing's safe. He's not testing you." His good eye found Kazuki's and held, with an effort that visibly cost him everything he had left to spend. "He's not trying to break you. He's trying to find out what breaks first." A wet, rattling breath. "The suit." Another. "Or the people you won't let go of."
His eye slid shut again before Kazuki could answer, the fragile stillness dissolving back into that same discontinuous flicker at the edges faint now, more suggestion than motion.
"He's stabilizing," Elena said, quiet. "Barely. We need to move him somewhere I can actually work."
Kazuki looked down at Marcus a moment longer, then up at Aeva, who hadn't said anything in almost a minute, one hand pressed flat against the wall like she needed it to remember which way was up.
"You good to move?" he asked her.
"No," she said. "But neither is anyone else in this room, so let's not make it a competition."
Kenji was already at the loading door, testing the seal, scanning the alley beyond it for anything that hummed wrong. "Two blocks north. I know a place that isn't on any grid Vaunt's cameras would recognize." He glanced back. "It won't stay that way forever. Nothing does, with him."
They moved out into the dark in a ragged line Rina supporting Darius, Kazuki carrying Marcus, Elena and Aeva flanking, Kenji ahead and behind them, in the gutted print shop, one last camera Aeva hadn't found yet blinked twice, slowly, and went dark on its own.
[To Be Continued...]