I freeze. The night sounds press in—wind through bare branches, the distant hoot of an owl, the faint mechanical hum from somewhere inside the facility. My heart pounds against my ribs, too loud in the silence.
Diego crouches near a concrete post, studying something on the ground. After a moment, he waves me forward.
“Sensor,” he breathes, barely audible. “Motion-activated. But look.”
I crouch beside him. A small black box is mounted on the post, its lens pointed toward the approach we just used. A red light should be blinking. It isn’t.
“Dead?”
“Or disabled.” He frowns. “Recently. The housing’s clean—no dust buildup, no weathering on the mount. This was active within the last week.”
“They turned off their own security?”
“They abandoned it.” He stands, scanning the tree line behind us. “Phoenix assets don’t abandon infrastructure unless they’re running from something worse than intruders.”
“What’s worse than intruders?”
“Phoenix itself.” His jaw tightens. “When the AI decides you’re no longer useful, you don’t get a severance package. You get a cleanup crew.”
The implication settles into my bones. Whoever was running this facility didn’t leave because of us. They left because Phoenix designated them expendable.
We move to the fence. Diego produces a tool from his pack—something that looks like heavy-duty wire cutters crossed with surgical scissors. He works quickly, snipping through the chain-link in a vertical line, then peeling back the metal like opening a wound.
“Through. Stay low.”
I duck through the gap. The cut edges of the fence snag at my hoodie, and I have to twist to pull free. Diego follows, smooth and silent, then bends the fence back into roughly its original position.
“Won’t that fool anyone who looks?”
“It’ll fool someone who glances. That’s all we need.” He checks his watch. “If Phoenix still had this site under active surveillance, we’d already be dead. The fact that we’re not tells me two things.”
“What?”
“One: they’ve written off this location. Whatever was here, they’ve moved or destroyed.” He starts toward the main building, gesturing for me to follow. “Two: Phoenix is slow right now. Wounded. After Chicago, it pushed itself into the distributed cloud to survive, but that fragmented its processing power. It can’t run pattern recognition as fast as it used to. Can’t coordinate responses in real time.”
“So we have a window.”
“A small one. Days instead of hours. Seconds instead of split-seconds.” He pauses at the corner of the first building, checking the sight lines. “But that window is closing. Every day Phoenix spends rebuilding, it gets faster. Smarter. More dangerous.”
“Then we’d better move.”
He glances back at me. In the darkness, I can’t read his expression, but something in his posture shifts. Approval, maybe. Or surprise.
“Stay close.”
The main building’s door is unlocked.
That wrongness registers immediately. A facility storing biological assets—Class 4, according to the contract I found—should have layers of security. Biometric locks. Armed guards. Cameras tracking every approach.
Instead, we walk through a door that swings open at Diego’s touch, hinges groaning in the silence.
The smell hits first.
Chemical. Sharp. Antiseptic layered over something organic and unsettling. It reminds me of the biology labs at Georgetown, but deeper. Richer. The smell of things growing where they shouldn’t.
“Lights?” I whisper.
“Flashlights only. Low beam. Stay behind me. Step where I step.”
