“The disposal order was not the difficult part.” He takes a breath. “The difficult part was realizing I would rather destroy my entire existence than execute it.”
I don’t know what to say to that.
So I reach across the center console and rest my hand on his thigh. Not sexual. Not demanding. Just contact. Just the reminder that he’s not alone in whatever this is.
His muscle tenses under my palm. Then, slowly, it relaxes.
We drive in silence. The Tower disappears behind the curve of the road. The city opens up around us, gray and indifferent, not caring that two broken people are fleeing through its streets.
I don’t know where we’re going. I don’t know what comes next. I don’t know if we’ll survive the week.
But his leg is warm under my hand. His profile is sharp against the gray. And for the first time in three weeks, I am not in a room with no windows.
It isn’t freedom. Freedom would require knowing what to do with it.
It’s something smaller. Something more fragile.
It’s the beginning of running.
Chapter Eighteen
ALEXEI
The garage doorcloses behind us with a grinding shriek of rusted metal, a sound that vibrates through the frame of the sedan and settles in my teeth.
I cut the engine. The silence that follows is immediate and heavy, broken only by the rhythmictink-tink-tinkof the cooling manifold. I sit for a moment, hands still gripped at ten and two, listening. I am scanning for the sounds of pursuit that my logic tells me aren't there: the whine of high-performance engines, the screech of tires on damp pavement, the crackle of tactical radios.
Nothing.
The drive took forty-five minutes. I selected the route using a series of secondary and tertiary roads, prioritizing areas where the city’s surveillance grid is known to be fractured. Industrial zones with non-functional cameras. Back streets where the lighting is insufficient for facial recognition software. I moved the vehicle through the city like a needle through a shroud, avoiding the main arteries where the Baranov organization’s eyes are most vigilant.
By now, Ivan will be expecting my confirmation. Standard protocol for a high-value asset disposal requires transmission within two hundred and forty minutes of the order being issued. I have been silent for nearly double that window.
He will not receive a report. He will receive only the absence of one, and in our world, silence is the loudest confession possible.
Ivan knows my baseline. We were conditioned together in the Kennel’s final years. He understands that I do not miss deadlines. I do not experience technical malfunctions that I cannot bypass. I do not fail to report unless the failure is a choice. My silence is a declaration of treason—the only kind of poetry I was ever taught to write.
By this hour, he is already reviewing the checkpoint logs. He is pulling the high-resolution footage from the loading dock and seeing me lead Nikolai away, disguised as a biohazard disposal. He is realizing that his most reliable instrument has developed a defect.
The hunt has been initiated. I can feel the change in the atmosphere, even here in the gut of this derelict structure. Ivan is coming. Not out of malice—Ivan does not possess the capacity for such a messy emotion—but because a defection is a systemic error that must be corrected. A leak that must be plugged with blood.
I exit the vehicle. The air in the garage is stagnant, smelling of old oil, oxidized iron, and the pervasive damp of a Chicago winter. I circle to the passenger side and open the door.
Nikolai is slumped against the window. His breath comes in shallow, visible puffs that fog the glass. He is wracked withshivers—rapid, involuntary muscle contractions that indicate his core temperature is slipping toward the danger zone.
"We're here," I say.
He tries to stand. I watch the attempt with clinical interest: the way his brain sends the signal, the way the atrophied muscles of his thighs fail to respond, the way his knees buckle as if the joints have been removed.
I catch him before his face hits the concrete.
I slide my arms beneath him, lifting him with the efficiency I have practiced on dozens of subjects. He weighs significantly less than his intake baseline. The Processing Room’s caloric restrictions, combined with the stress of the mapping sessions, have stripped the mass from his frame. As I hoist him against my chest, I feel the sharp, skeletal architecture of his ribs pressing against my forearms through the thin cotton smock.
The clinical part of my mind categorizes this as asset depletion. Suboptimal maintenance resulting in decreased structural resilience. But the part of my mind that has no access to data, the part that has been malfunctioning since I touched his face without gloves, feels a sharp, hot pressure behind my sternum.
I did this to him.
Every gram of muscle he lost was a data point I entered into a ledger. Every visible bone was a result of a protocol I designed with the intent of producing total dependency. I was thorough. I was perfect. I unmade him by inches, and I took professional pride in the neatness of the result.
