My mouth opens?—
“Asset is febrile,” Alexei says, tone bored. “Sedation protocols. Standard delirium presentation.”
The guard’s interest dies immediately. Disposal bay assets are treated as biohazard—guards don’t touch, don’t inspect, don’t ask questions. Fever means contamination risk. Contamination risk means someone else’s problem.
The scanner beeps. Green light.
“Disposal bay three,” the guard says, already losing interest. “Incinerator’s been running hot, so watch your timing.”
“Noted.”
Alexei moves us past the station without hurrying. His arm around my waist feels casual now, just a handler managing a compliant asset.
The dock cameras will log his face, our direction, and the timestamp. We aren’t invisible—we’re just early. Dock logs batch-upload every four hours unless an anomaly flag is tripped. By the time anyone reviews this footage, we need to be gone.
My legs are shaking so badly I’m surprised I don’t fall, but fear has given me a strange strength. Fear and his grip on my body.
We are past the checkpoint. We are on the loading floor. The massive doors are twenty meters ahead.
“Almost there,” Alexei says. His voice is different now—lower, urgent. The Accountant's mask is slipping. “The side exit. There’s a gap in external surveillance.”
We move faster. My legs protest, muscles seizing with every step, but I force them to obey. The side exit is a personnel door set into the wall beside the main cargo bay.
Alexei pauses. His eyes scan the dock floor, landing on a maintenance cart near the wall. He steers us toward it, reaches down, and yanks a heavy rag from the cart’s lower shelf. Without explanation, he crouches and wraps it around my feet, knotting the fabric tight.
“Better than skin,” he says.
The rag is oil-stained and rough, but it’s something between my soles and the world outside. I nod, unable to speak past the lump in my throat.
He punches a code into the keypad. The door opens. The world rushes in.
Wind.
Actual wind, not the processed recycled air of the Tower’s ventilation system. It hits my face like a slap, cold and damp and carrying the thousand overlapping textures of a city. I gasp, and my lungs rebel, unprepared for air that hasn’t been filtered and sterilized.
This should feel like freedom. It doesn’t. It feels like an assault.
The cold is violent. It cuts through my thin smock like the fabric doesn’t exist. My skin contracts, raising goosebumps across every inch of exposed flesh. I start to shiver immediately, uncontrollably, my teeth chattering before we’ve taken three steps.
The wrapped rag takes the worst of it as my feet hit wet pavement, but the cold still shoots up through my ankles, into bones that have forgotten what temperature variation feels like. Every nerve ending is firing at once, overwhelmed by stimuli that the Processing Room had carefully excluded.
“Keep moving.” Alexei’s arm pulls me forward into an alleyway. “The cold will pass.”
It doesn’t pass. It settles into my bones like it belongs there. But we’re outside. We’re outside the Tower. The sky above us is gray and heavy with clouds I haven’t seen in weeks, and the walls ofthe alley are brick instead of concrete, and somewhere in the distance I can hear the sounds of traffic.
The sounds are too loud. A car horn blares and I flinch, pressing closer to Alexei’s side. Voices carry from the street beyond the alley—people talking, laughing, living their lives while I shiver in a smock.
I am in the world again. The world doesn’t know what to do with me. I don’t know what to do with it.
I watch Alexei work as we navigate the alley. This is a different man than the one who knelt beside my cot. This is the soldier the Kennel created. His eyes never stop moving—scanning corners, checking shadows, tracking every potential threat. His right hand stays close to his hip, where I now notice the outline of a weapon beneath his sweater.
He moves like violence made efficient. When we reach the alley’s mouth, he presses me against the wall and leans past the corner, surveying the street beyond with an intensity that makes my breath catch.
This is what he was made to be. A predator wearing human skin, constantly calculating angles of attack and avenues of escape. I've seen him as the Monster, as the Accountant, as the man who touched my face with bare hands. Now I’m seeing the weapon underneath all of it.
The weapon is beautiful. The weapon is terrifying. The weapon is the only reason I’m still alive.
“Clear,” he says. “Thirty seconds to the vehicle. Can you run?”
