The scream climbed the stairwells, hit the vents, and came apart in the walls.
Not close.
Close enough.
Mina moved first.
"Blankets," she snapped at the nurse. Then at Isaac: "Get her up. Keep her hands open. Do not let her grab rails."
Jadah looked like she wanted to tell her exactly where to go. The next sound from deeper in the hospital stole the time.
A crash.
Then the flat stutter of rifle fire somewhere east in the building.
Ren was already at the door with the case. "Route."
"Pediatric imaging back hall," Mina said. "No main corridor. No elevator."
The nurse dumped two folded blankets into Isaac's arms and shoved a rubber-soled pair of hospital socks at Jadah like this was somehow still an admission process.
"Put those on."
Jadah stared at them. "Be serious."
"I am serious. Bare feet and tile are not a love story tonight."
That got her moving.
She sat just long enough to strip off her shoes and pull the socks on with one hand and a level of hatred that suggested she was storing the humiliation for later use. Isaac stood there with the blankets and tried not to look like he was hovering.
She noticed anyway.
"Don't loom."
"I'm holding blankets."
"Attentively."
Mina swung the door open.
The corridor outside had gone from hospital-bad to battlefield-bad in the three breaths they'd spent inside the room.
A security guard was being dragged backward by two orderlies, his boots leaving dark half-moons on the tile. He was alive, barely, clutching at his own throat with both hands like something invisible had forgotten to let go all the way. His eyes were wide enough to show white all around.
One of the orderlies saw Mina and shouted, "East team's folding!"
"How many."
"Enough!"
Useful.
Mina didn't ask again.
She shoved a folded blanket into Jadah's good arm. "Wrap your hands."
Jadah frowned. "Why."
"Because fear plus steel keeps embarrassing us."
That answer hit everybody in the hall and nobody had time to be offended by it.
Isaac wrapped one blanket around Jadah's forearms himself, pulling it over her sleeves and around her hands so the cloth bunched thick between skin and the world. She looked down at it, then up at him.
"This is ugly."
"It's fabric."
"It's ugly fabric."
"Keep it on."
Her mouth twitched in a way that almost qualified as a smile and then didn't.
Good enough.
They moved.
Not running. The kind of fast that belonged to people trying not to become a stampede in a place full of corners and injured strangers.
Mina in front.
Ren behind her with the case.
The nurse at Jadah's shoulder.
Isaac on Jadah's other side.
The hospital itself coming apart one floor over and trying not to show it.
They cut through a staff-only doorway, down a side hall lined with child-height murals of whales and planets and smiling nurses that now looked like somebody had spray-painted the end of the world over a daycare. A blood-spattered volunteer was ripping the metal clips off privacy curtains and tossing them into a plastic hamper as they passed.
Everywhere Isaac looked, the hospital was learning in real time.
Scissors replaced with plastic shears.
Crash carts stripped.
Security pulling off belts and radios before entering certain halls.
People shouting soft gear only like they'd been saying it their whole lives.
A radio at the nurses' station burst alive just as they passed.
"—east barricade breached, repeat, east interior breach. One hostile. Human male. No visible weapon. Do not cluster. Do not—"
Feedback screamed through the speaker and cut the rest.
Jadah's shoulders came up around her ears.
Isaac saw it and leaned slightly into her path so she had to look at him instead of the walls.
"Keep walking."
"I am walking."
"You're also doing that thing."
"What thing."
"The leaving one."
She shot him a look. "That's your move."
"Then don't steal it."
That landed just enough to keep her from vanishing all the way into herself.
Ahead, two nurses in plastic aprons shoved a rolling laundry bin sideways to block a cross corridor. Something metallic hit the far wall on the other side and kept skittering.
Not random.
Not close enough to identify.
Too close for comfort anyway.
Ren slowed for half a second at an intersection, listening.
Isaac saw the calculation in her face.
Routes.
Angles.
If the man from the landing was really here, then where he would choose to be and why.
Mina didn't slow. "Move."
Ren moved.
Good.
No argument.
Bad sign.
They passed an open doorway where Tara sat on the floor of a supply room wrapped in three blankets, knees up, plastic cup in both hands. A psych nurse in scrubs and no jewelry sat across from her with a box of crayons like this was a kindergarten timeout instead of the aftermath of a corridor getting folded around her panic.
Tara looked up as they passed.
Her eyes landed on Jadah.
Everything in her face caved in around recognition.
Not of a person.
Of a category.
Jadah looked away so fast it was almost violence.
The nurse with the crayons saw that and shut the door with her foot before either girl could drown in the mirror of the other.
The farther they got into pediatric imaging, the quieter it became.
No trauma shout here.
No crash carts.
No steel gurneys.
Mostly plastic bench seating, painted walls, soft-floor play zones, and taped-over doors marked XRAY 2, ULTRASOUND, FLUORO.
Mina stopped at a heavy double door with a paper sign taped crooked over the old lettering:
FAMILY WAIT / ISOLATED HOLD
She keyed in a code by touch memory, shoved it open with her shoulder, and waved them through.
The room beyond looked like a family waiting lounge someone had stripped for prison and then tried to soften at the last second.
Rubber flooring.
Plastic chairs bolted down.
A low foam play table with no metal legs.
Wall-mounted aquarium decal peeling at one corner.
Vending machine gone.
TV removed, bracket hacked off and wrapped in tape.
No windows, just a thick inset glass panel in the door with a sheet draped over it.
There were already two people in the room.
A girl maybe twelve curled on one end of a plastic bench with a blanket over her knees and a white wristband so tight it looked painful. Awake. Hollow-eyed. Her mother, maybe, sat beside her with both hands wrapped in socks and plastic tape and stared at the floor like if she looked at anything else it might answer back.
Not alone, then.
The mother looked up when they entered and immediately clocked Jadah's wrapped hands.
The look on her face was not friendly.
It wasn't cruelty either.
Worse.
Recognition sharpened by fear.
Mina caught it and spoke before it could become language.
"Temporary."
The woman nodded once and looked back down at the floor. Her daughter didn't move.
The nurse ushered Jadah to the far side of the room and guided her into one of the chairs like she was moving a skittish horse past traffic.
"Sit."
Jadah sat.
Blanket-wrapped hands in her lap.
Shoulder rigid.
Eyes moving over the room and not liking any of it.
Isaac stayed standing until Mina pointed at the chair beside Jadah.
"You too."
He sat.
Ren didn't.
She set the black case on the foam play table and kept one hand on it.
Mina turned to her. "No."
Ren's face didn't change. "No what."
"No case in a room with unstable awakenings."
The mother on the other bench flinched at the word awakenings like it was something alive and crawling.
Ren's hand stayed on the case.
"It doesn't leave my sight."
"That was not my concern."
The room tensed.
Isaac watched Mina and understood two things at once: she was too tired to bluff, and too competent to speak twice unless she had to.
Mina pointed to the floor under the play table. "Put it there."
Ren didn't move.
Mina's voice got flatter. "If either of these girls loses control, I need one less hard edge in the room. Put it there."
The little girl on the bench made a small sound and tucked further under her blanket.
Ren finally crouched and slid the case under the table.
Didn't take her eyes off it.
Mina nodded once.
Then the radio clipped at the nurse's hip spat static and a voice.
"—second east team down. He's not carrying. Repeat, he's not carrying—"
Another voice cut over it.
"Don't say what he's doing, just move!"
Then a choking sound.
Then silence.
Nobody in the waiting room breathed right for a second after that.
Jadah whispered, "That's him."
Mina looked at her.
Not denying it.
Not confirming it.
Ren answered instead. "Probably."
The probably landed like a confirmed diagnosis anyway.
Mina knelt in front of Jadah before the fear in the room could spread and start touching metal.
"Listen to me," she said.
Jadah looked at her.
Then at the radio.
Then back.
"Your fear is not the only thing in this building anymore. So from now on you do not assume every movement is you. You watch first. Then decide."
Jadah laughed once under her breath. "That feels like a hard skill to learn in one night."
"It is."
Mina stood and turned to Isaac.
"And you."
He frowned. "What."
"You tell me the second that pull under your ribs changes."
The room held.
Jadah looked at him.
Ren looked at him.
Even the mother on the other bench looked up again because now there was one more bad category in the room than before.
Isaac hated all of it instantly.
"How do you know about that."
Mina's face did not move.
"Because you keep going still two seconds before other people start screaming."
No one had anything useful to do with that.
The nurse cleared her throat softly, like she was trying not to become part of the conversation and failing.
"Mina."
Mina didn't look away from Isaac. "What."
The nurse's voice dropped even lower.
"They found east gate."
That got Ren's head up.
"Found what's left of it," the nurse corrected.
Mina closed her eyes once.
Opened them.
Became all angles again.
"To me," she said to Ren.
Ren didn't move.
"To me," Mina repeated, and this time she meant the radio, not the case.
The nurse unclipped the radio and handed it over. Mina listened for three seconds, expression hardening one notch at a time.
Then she spoke into it.
"This is Cooper. Where."
A burst of static.
Then: "Loading tunnel. Sublevel one."
Another voice, farther back and almost breaking: "He asked for the woman with the case."
The waiting room changed shape.
Ren went still.
Isaac felt every hair on the back of his neck rise.
Mina's eyes slid to Ren.
Then to the case under the play table.
Then to Isaac and Jadah.
Not good.
Not good at all.
Ren spoke first.
"He shouldn't know we made campus."
Mina looked at her like that sentence belonged in a different emergency.
"He lifted six people off my east gate. I don't care what he should know."
Fair.
Hated it.
Fair.
On the bench opposite, the mother pulled her daughter closer.
The little girl finally spoke for the first time, voice tiny and raw.
"Is he coming here."
No one answered her fast enough.
Mina keyed the radio off and handed it back to the nurse.
Then she looked at Isaac.
Really looked.
At Jadah after that.
At the room.
At the case.
At all the ways this could go wrong.
When she spoke again, her voice had gone very calm.
"That man came into this building for one of three things. The case. The woman carrying it. Or the two of you."
The hospital hummed around them.
The room breathed too loud.
Somewhere beyond the thick walls, something hit a rolling metal shutter hard enough to make the light fixture buzz.
Jadah said, "That is an evil list."
Mina nodded once. "Yes."
Isaac felt the thread under his sternum return.
Not strong.
Not useful.
Back.
A tiny pull.
Downward.
Beneath them.
Sublevel.
He was on his feet before he knew it.
"Don't."
Everyone looked at him.
He didn't know if he meant them or himself.
The pull sharpened one degree and then went still again, like something below the building had turned its head and noticed he'd noticed.
Isaac looked at Mina.
"Sublevel one," he said. "He's not staying there."
The room went dead quiet.
Ren's hand disappeared under the play table and came back out with the case.
Mina swore once under her breath.
Then the lights in the waiting room dimmed green, pulsed, and from somewhere directly below them came a deep metal groan like the hospital itself had just had a door forced open from the wrong side.