Chapter 30| The Original Black Site

Chapter 30: Chapter 30| The Original Black Site

Whoosh!!

The fire moved in the hearth.

"Nexarion found the Collective when Aria was eighteen," Eren said. "We knew they were coming. We had been watching the organization form for two years, watching them absorb other research groups, watching the pattern of what happened to the people inside those groups who cooperated and the people who didn’t. We had a plan. We had been building exit routes and contingencies for eighteen months." He paused. "The plan assumed we would have more time than we did. We had four hours from the moment we knew they were moving on us." He looked at his cup. "Three of the seven didn’t make it out of the building. Two made it out and were recovered within six months. I made it out and stayed out because I had spent eighteen months specifically preparing for the possibility that I would be the only one who did."

"And Aria," Damian said.

"Aria made it out," Eren said. "She was faster than any of us. The Dual Axiom pathway at full expression, unimpeded, is something that doesn’t translate well into words. She was through the building and clear of the perimeter before the rest of us reached the stairwell." He paused. "She came back."

The cottage was very quiet.

"She came back for the research," Eren said. "The physical documents, the original pathway maps, the thirty years of theoretical work that existed only in the Collective’s archive and nowhere else. She went back into a building that Nexarion was actively moving through because she decided the work was worth more than the risk." He looked at Damian. "They took her in the archive room. She had the documents in her hands. They took her and they took the documents and they absorbed everything the Collective had built and classified her under a Level Five suppressed designation and she has been inside their system ever since."

Damian looked at the table.

’She went back,’ he thought. ’She was clear. She went back.’

He didn’t say anything. He just sat with it the way he sat with things that were too large to process quickly and let Eren continue.

"I spent the first five years trying to get her out," Eren said. "Every approach I could construct from the outside. Every contact, every resource, every angle the remaining Prior Collective framework gave me access to." He shook his head slightly. "Nexarion is very good at keeping what they take. I couldn’t get close enough to be useful without being recovered myself and a recovered me was no use to anyone." He looked at his cup. "So I changed the approach. If I couldn’t get her out from the outside I would build something that could get to her from the inside. Something that traveled through a channel Nexarion couldn’t monitor or intercept." He looked at Damian. "A system attached to a person. A person they already had."

Damian looked up.

"You built the system before I was born," he said.

"I built the framework before you were born," Eren said. "The system itself required a host. A Subject with the right pathway complexity to carry it without the architecture collapsing under the Flux load. A naturally occurring Dual Axiom pathway. The same profile as your mother." He paused. "I spent fifteen years looking for one. Naturally occurring Dual Axiom awakenings are. As you might imagine, not common. And the ones that occurred in that period were found by Nexarion before I could reach them." He looked at Damian steadily. "And then your mother found a way to get a message out. The first and only communication she managed to send in thirty years of captivity. Four words through a channel I won’t explain because the explanation would take longer than we have."

"What four words," Damian said.

Eren reached into the pocket of his jacket and produced a folded piece of paper. It was worn and old, the kind of old that came from being carried for years rather than stored. He unfolded it and set it on the table and turned it toward Damian.

Four words in handwriting he didn’t recognize but that felt immediately familiar in a way he couldn’t account for.

He’s here. Find him.

He looked at them for a long time.

"She knew where he was," Sable said quietly from beside him. Not to Damian to Eren. "From inside a Level Five suppressed designation she tracked her own son through a Nexarion facility and found a way to access his file. That shouldn’t have been possible."

"No," Eren said. "It shouldn’t have been. Which tells you something about what thirty years of uninterrupted Dual Axiom development produces in a person. Even under the conditions they’ve been keeping her in." He looked at his cup. "Nexarion has spent three decades studying her and they still don’t fully understand what they have."

Damian looked at the four words.

’He’s here. Find him.’

’She sent this from inside,’ he thought. ’From inside whatever they put her in. And Eren spent the next however many years building a system and hiding a trail and waiting for the right person to follow it.’

’For me.’

"Where is she," he said.

Eren reached into his jacket again. This time he produced a small encrypted drive. An old hardware, the kind that had been manufactured before Nexarion’s current security architecture made certain storage formats obsolete. He set it on the table beside the folded paper.

"Everything I know about her current location is on that drive," he said. "Facility designation as best I can determine, classification level, the suppressed Subject identifier she’s been filed under for thirty years." He looked at Damian. "Based on everything I’ve been able to piece together from the outside over thirty years. The archive fragments, the operational patterns, the specific classification level her designation carries. I believe she’s in Facility Four. The oldest active installation in the Nexarion network. The one that predates the organization’s current name and structure. The original black site that everything else was built around." He paused. "I can’t confirm it with certainty. I’ve never been able to get close enough for that. But every thread I’ve followed for thirty years points there." He looked at Damian steadily. "It is also the most heavily secured facility in their network. Not because of what they’re afraid of getting in. Because they’re afraid of getting out."