Damian found his own file on Wednesday morning.
He'd been working through the institutional records systematically — category by category, document by document, the methodical approach he used for everything that mattered. Tuesday had covered the founding board, the family connections, the clinical research framework.
Wednesday he started on the individual subject files.
There were thirty-seven of them.
Not all active. Some dated back fifteen years. Some were marked *closed* — a word that, in this context, Damian had learned to read with the specific dread of someone who understood what it might mean for a prime omega's file to be marked *closed* in a database run by an institution that routed people to claiming families.
He worked through them in order.
File one. File two. File three.
He found his own at file nineteen.
