Chapter 48| All Roads Lead to Seven

Chapter 48: Chapter 48| All Roads Lead to Seven

Damian looked at her.

"Out of the ten remaining facilities it’s the smallest," sable said. "No combat designation, minimal staff, runs primarily as a data and research hub rather than an active Subject deployment site." She wrapped both hands around her cup. "Which means it’s the most realistic target at your current level." She paused. "But that’s not the main reason."

"What’s the main reason," he said.

"The archive," she said. "Kira mentioned yesterday that Facility Seven holds the suppressed designation records — the classified files that don’t appear anywhere in the standard Nexarion system. The same classification your mother has been filed under for thirty years." She looked at him directly. "If we get inside that archive we stop guessing. We get her current record. Where she actually is right now, what condition she’s in, exactly what they’ve been doing with her. Not Eren’s best estimate from thirty years of watching from the outside. Current confirmed data."

He looked at the table.

"And once we have that," he said.

"We know exactly what we’re walking into when Facility Four becomes viable," she said. "No more assumptions. No more thirty year old intelligence. Just the picture as it actually is."

Damian looked at the window.

[Flux: 87%]

The passive dissipation had already started pulling from the 90% but the Milk Memory bonus was holding the floor and the compounding was doing its work and he felt the difference between sitting at the window at 25% and sitting on the edge of Sable’s bed at 87% in the specific way he felt everything that had a Flux number attached to it. Clearly, precisely, his body’s most honest language.

"We talk to Kira in the morning," he said.

Sable nodded. "She’ll have operational data on it," she said. "She ran a retrieval out of Facility Seven eight months ago."

He looked at a coffee cup in the shelve for a moment. "Then we tell her in the morning," he said."See what she knows."

He stood. Looked at her in the dark.

"Get some sleep," he said.

"You too," she said. The tone of someone who knew he probably wouldn’t but was saying it anyway.

He stood and looked at her in the dark for a moment. Then he went to the door and pulled it gently shut behind him.

Bam!

He crossed back to the main room and dropped onto the couch that had become his by default — Kira had claimed the first bedroom without discussion, Sable had taken the second with the same quiet efficiency she applied to everything, and Damian had looked at the living room couch and the window beside it and decided it suited him anyway. Better sightlines to the door. Better angle on the street below. He’d slept in worse places than a couch with a view.

He sat at the window where he’d been before and watched the city finish its late night character and transition into pre-dawn. The clock kept running. The ring stayed warm on his finger. The Facility Four picture was still spread across the table behind him and somewhere four hundred kilometers away in a facility that predated Nexarion’s current name a woman had been fighting from inside a box for thirty years and was still fighting.

[Flux: 81%]

_ _

Damian stayed at the window until the sky started suggesting morning. Sleep had come in intervals — twenty minutes here, forty there, the specific fragmented rest of someone whose mind kept pulling itself back to the surface before it could go under properly. The couch had seen better decades and his back had opinions about it by the time the grey light started coming through the window.

He stood and stretched and went to the kitchen and made coffee.

[Flux: 72%]

Passive dissipation had been running through the broken night. He noted the number and moved on.

Sable came out first.

She found him at the table with two empty coffee cups and the floor plan open beside the operational file and the archive data cross-referenced on her tablet. She looked at the table and then at him and then at the cups and sat down across from him without saying what the cups told her about how long he’d been there.

[Flux: 76%]

"Sixteen hours," he said.

"I know," she said. She reached for the coffee and found the pot still warm and poured a cup and wrapped both hands around it and looked at the picture on the table. "Talk me through it."

He walked her through the logic the same way he’d assembled it at the window — running, hiding, the extraction team, the search profile escalation, the safe house’s finite security window. She listened without interrupting and when he finished she nodded once with the expression of someone confirming a conclusion they’d already reached independently.

She wrapped both hands around her cup and looked at the picture on the table. "So all roads lead to Facility Seven first," she said.

"I guess so," he replied.

She nodded slowly — not the crisp decisive nod of someone who had reached a conclusion, the quieter nod of someone who had reached an inevitability. "Then that’s where we start," she said.

Kira appeared in the kitchen doorway before either of them had said anything further — dressed, coffee in hand, with the specific quality of someone who had been awake long enough to have already run their own accounting of the morning.

She looked at the table.

"I heard," she said. She moved to the counter and leaned against it and looked at Damian over her cup. "I ran a retrieval out of Facility Seven eight months ago. I know the staff rotation, the security architecture, the approach routes." She paused. "I also know something you don’t."

He looked at her.

"The suppressed designation archive at Facility Seven," she said. "It doesn’t just hold current Subject records. It holds the complete research history of every Subject ever held under suppressed designation." She held his gaze. "Thirty years of data. Including everything they’ve been doing to your mother since they took her."

The kitchen was quiet.

[Flux: 72%]

He looked at Kira. At Sable. At the ring on his finger. At the picture assembled from four sources across forty five years of combined effort sitting on the table between them.

We have Sixteen hours on the clock.

Eleven facilities remaining.

One woman in Facility Four who had spent thirty years making sure her son survived long enough to reach her.

"How long will it take to plan Facility Seven plan properly," he said.

Kira looked at her operational data. "Three days," she said. "Two if we compress."

"We compress," he said.

She nodded. "Nexarion doesn’t know about this location," she said. "I built it specifically so they couldn’t find it. But sixteen hours from now when the extraction team activates and they realize I’ve gone dark they’ll start pulling every thread available to them." She paused. "This place is clean but clean has limits. I built two backup locations just in case. It’s a survival habit more than anything else." She looked at him. "We’re fine here for now. But it’s good to know we have options."

Sable was already pulling up a new file.

Damian looked at Kira.

"Sounds like a good habit," he said.

The corner of her mouth moved. Not quite a smile. Close enough.

"Kept me alive so far," she replied.

"So first we work with Facility Seven," he said. "Then we work our way to Four."

Sable made a note.

Kira looked at the operational file.

And somewhere in the city the extraction team clock kept counting down toward a deadline that had just stopped being the most important number on the board.