Chapter 25| A Journey With Theories

Chapter 25: Chapter 25| A Journey With Theories

Sable stopped.

He noticed where she stopped.

"Say it," he said, probing her to talk.

She was quiet for a moment.

"Whether she’s still the person she was when they took her," she said carefully. "Thirty years inside a Nexarion facility under a suppressed designation. We don’t know what that looks like. We don’t know what protocol they’ve been running on her or what that protocol has produced over three decades." She kept her voice even and precise and he recognized it as the specific evenness she used when she was delivering information she didn’t want to soften but didn’t want to weaponize either. "I’m not saying she isn’t. I’m saying Eren Jaeger will know more than we do and we should go into that conversation without assumptions."

Damian looked at the road.

’Thirty years,’ he thought. ’Whatever I went through in six. Multiply it by five and remove the parts where someone might have cared whether you came out functional.’

He didn’t say anything. He just looked at the road and let the anger sit where it lived. In the specific place he’d been storing things he couldn’t act on yet, the place that was getting fuller by the day and would need somewhere to go eventually.

[Flux: 54%]

The highway had given way to a regional road. Narrower,with less traffic, the landscape outside the windows changing from the flat agricultural land of the outer city radius to something with more topography, hills starting to suggest themselves at the horizon. They were two hours out from the farmhouse. Four hours from the address.

Sable slowed the car slightly and looked at the navigation on her tablet propped on the dashboard.

"First urban pass in twelve minutes," she said. "Market town. We go through the center. There’s no viable bypass on the primary route." She glanced at him. "The secondary route adds forty minutes but avoids the center entirely."

He looked at the road ahead. Thought about Kira in the tree line at 0430. About the fact that she’d been on the property for over an hour before they came out and he hadn’t felt it until they were already standing in the open. About the gap between what he could currently do and what that gap had cost him this morning.

"What’s the thermal environment like in the center?" he said.

"Dense," she said. "Market town, morning setup already underway for the day. Multiple heat sources, vehicle traffic, foot traffic. High noise environment for anyone trying to read a specific signature." She paused. "It also has four exit routes from the central junction compared to one on the bypass road."

He thought about Pressure Protocol. About making the world smaller. About an opponent who controlled territory by eliminating options rather than engaging directly.

"Center route," he said. "It has more exits."

Sable nodded and kept driving and the road ran ahead of them toward the first urban pass and the sky continued its slow climb from dark blue toward the grey that preceded color and somewhere behind them on a road they couldn’t see a woman with silver-streaked hair and four days on a deadline was making her own calculations about the same morning.

"Something doesn’t add up," Damian said.

Sable glanced at him.

"They sent her to retrieve me," he said. "If she had a record of seventeen retrievals, with zero failures according to the file of her you just pulled up recently. That’s the record they gave her the assignment on. She had us in the open at 0500 with our bags packed and nowhere to run and she just talked." He looked at the road. "Nexarion doesn’t send their best operative six hundred kilometers to have a conversation and leave. They sent her to bring me back. So why didn’t she?"

Sable was quiet for a moment.

"You think the timeframe is a cover," she said.

"I think she had every operational condition she needed this morning and she chose not to use them," he said. "Which means either she’s running a longer game than the Warden assigned her or she has a reason of her own for wanting four days that has nothing to do with giving me time to make a better decision." He looked at the road ahead. "Either way it’s not straightforward. And anything that isn’t straightforward with Nexarion has something underneath it."

Sable made a note on her tablet without taking her eyes off the road.

"I’ll add it to the list of things to ask Eren Jaeger," she said.

The market town arrived the way small towns arrived on regional roads. Gradually, the density of buildings increasing incrementally until suddenly they were in it without having passed a clear boundary. Morning setup was already underway the way Sable had predicted. Stalls being arranged along the main street, delivery vehicles pulled half onto the pavement, the specific organized chaos of a market preparing to receive a day’s worth of people.

Damian watched the town move around the car as they passed through the center junction and ran the thermal read instinctively. Not with his ability, just his eyes. The exits. The sightlines. The places where someone could sit with a clear view of the junction without being visible from it.

There were three of those places.

All three were empty.

He noted the emptiness and noted that he’d noted it and filed both observations.

[Flux: 49%]

"Junction clear," he said.

"Noted," Sable said. She took the exit that pointed east and the market town fell away behind them the way small towns fell away. Quickly, completely, as if it had never been more than a suggestion of density in the middle of open countryside.

He looked at the road ahead.

Four hours.

His mother was in one of eleven facilities and Eren Jaeger had been waiting thirty years to tell someone which one and the system sat at the edge of his vision patient and present and running its directive on a timeline it still hadn’t chosen to share.

[Seal degradation progress: 0.3%]

The number hadn’t moved since Arc 1.

He looked at it for a moment.

’Not yet,’ he thought. ’Not for a long time yet.’

He looked back at the road.

Four more hours.