Chapter 24| Controlled Burn

Chapter 24: Chapter 24| Controlled Burn

They drove in silence for the first forty minutes.

Not uncomfortable silence. The kind that had weight to it, the kind that two people sat in when something had been said that was still finding its level. The farmhouse had disappeared behind them before the sky finished deciding on its color and the access road had given way to the main road and the main road had given way to the highway and now the city was behind them and the world outside the windows was the particular flatness of predawn countryside that hadn’t been told yet what kind of day it was going to be.

Sable drove. She’d driven every time because she had a license and Damian didn’t. Another gap in the documentation of a person who had spent his formative years inside a facility that had no interest in preparing him for the administrative requirements of civilian life. He sat in the passenger seat with his bag between his feet and watched the road ahead and thought about a name in the margin of a thirty year old document.

[Flux: 61%]

Passive dissipation running steady. No refuel opportunity on the road. No training, no conservation work, just the baseline drain of existing and the particular additional cost of a mind that wouldn’t stop processing.

’She listed me as next of kin,’ he thought. ’From inside whatever they put her in. She found a way to attach my name to my own file and leave the one instruction that kept me alive.’

’Do not terminate under any circumstances.’

’She knew they’d find me eventually. She knew what I was before I did. And she spent however many years she’s been in there making sure that when they found me they couldn’t just dispose of me the way they dispose of everything that doesn’t produce the results they want.’

He looked at the road.

’She’s been in there the whole time.’

He let that sit for another ten minutes before he spoke.

"Just for how long," he said directly in space.

Sable didn’t ask what he meant. She’d been waiting for the question the same way he’d been building toward it.

"The timeline in the Prior Collective records puts her intake at thirty years ago," she said. "Which means she was already inside whatever Nexarion was in its early form when you were born. Possibly before." She kept her eyes on the road. "The suppressed designation she was filed under. I found the reference but not the full record. It exists somewhere in the archive at a depth I couldn’t access with Level Three clearance. The Directorate keeps certain Subject files behind a classification that requires Level Five or above."

"Which means the Warden has access," he said.

"The Warden and above," she said. "Yes."

He looked at the road ahead. The sky was lightening at the eastern edge. Not sunrise yet, just the first suggestion that sunrise was coming, the darkness thinning from black to the particular dark blue that preceded everything else.

"Are we certain she’s in one of the eleven facilities?." he asked.

"Almost certainly," Sable said. "A Subject with her pathway complexity would be too valuable to terminate and too dangerous to leave unmonitored. They would have kept her active under the suppressed designation. Running whatever research protocol they designed around her abilities while the rest of the organization had no record she existed." She paused. "Which also explains why your file never connected you to her. Your intake came through the standard Subject acquisition channel. A group home with no family documentation. Nobody in the standard research division would have known to look for a connection because nobody in the standard research division knew she existed."

"Except you," he said.

"Except me," she said. "And only because I went deep enough in the archive to find what shouldn’t have been findable." She glanced at him briefly. "Eren Jaeger hid the trail carefully. But he hid it where a Level Three researcher with enough patience and the right theoretical framework would eventually find it." She looked back at the road. "He knew someone like me would be in that system eventually. He built the trail for a specific kind of person."

Damian thought about that.

An old man building a trail thirty years ago for a researcher he didn’t know yet, working from a theoretical framework that predicted the kind of person Nexarion would eventually hire and give deep archive access to. Patient enough to wait three decades for the right person to follow it.

’The same patience that built the system,’ he thought. ’The same patience that put the notation in my file. Everything he did was built for a timeline longer than most people plan for.’

"The system," he said. "He might’ve built it."

"I believe so," Sable said. "The construction methodology in the Flux Origin System matches the theoretical framework in the Prior Collective’s original research documents. The same principles, the same underlying architecture. Eren Jaeger was the founder. The theoretical framework was his before it was anyone else’s." She paused. "He built the system to find you. He built the trail to find me. He’s been running two parallel operations for thirty years and both of them arrived at the same farmhouse within three weeks of each other."

Damian looked at the road and thought about parallel operations and thirty year timelines and a man sitting at an address six hours away who had apparently spent three decades orchestrating the conditions for this specific morning.

"He knew about my mother," he said.

"He was probably there when they took her," Sable said quietly. "He’s the one who wrote her name in the margin. He documented everything. Her pathway, her abilities, the sequence of events that led to Nexarion finding the Prior Collective and absorbing their work. He survived because he was the most careful of the seven and because he understood early enough what Nexarion was going to do to the ones who weren’t." She paused. "He’s been carrying this for thirty years, Damian. Whatever he knows about your mother, about where she is, what they’ve done with her, whether she’s still..."