Vi’s room is empty.
The door is closed and when I knock, once, twice, nothing comes back. I try the handle. Open. Inside, the bed is made, papers gone from under the mattress where she thinks I don’t know she hides them, and Mara’s blanket is folded at the foot of the bed. Two jackets gone from the hooks on the back of the door.
Two jackets gone. Not one.
My brain does what it does, fast, clean, with no wasted steps. Vi is gone. Mara is gone. Both jackets missing probably means they left together. The papers are gone too, which means this isn’t a casual outing. They’re carrying evidence they don’t want left behind, or they’re going to add to it.
I check the work hub. Mara’s station is unmanned. The Runt beside it says she left an hour ago, maybe more. Didn’t say where.
An hour.
The fragments I heard through Vi’s door reassemble themselves. East wing. Past the service corridors. Maintenance hatch.And if someone’s there?
They went. The two of them, alone, to the most dangerous section of the Rot, with no protection and no backup and no one who even knows where they are.
Except me. Because I heard them planning it and I didn’t stop it. Because I stood in a corridor and made the decision to keep walking and now, the two are somewhere in contested territory where anything can happen to anyone and no one answers for it.
I move.
I don’t run. Running draws attention, and attention creates problems. But I walk at a pace that people step out of the way of, because something in my posture is communicating a message I’m not bothering to soften. I find Rogue in the neutral zone, eating something out of a can.
“Vi and Mara are in No Man’s Land,” I tell him. “The contested section. They went for the documents.”
Rogue sets the can down without question. That’s the thing about Rogue. For all his careless charm and half grins, when the situation demands it, he’s got your back.
He’s on his feet and moving beside me in under three seconds. “How long?” he asks.
“Hour. Maybe more.”
He doesn’t say what we’re both thinking. An hour is a long time in that part of the Rot. An hour is enough time to find what you’re looking for, or for something to find you. Something you weren’t counting on.
We head past work hubs and residential sections into a thinning territory where the storefronts are empty and the population drops to people who prefer not to be found. The tree at the atrium junction still has someone’s jacket hanging fromits branch. Nobody’s claimed it. Nobody’s cut it down. Nobody gives a shit here.
I’m running scenarios. I can’t help it. It’s what my brain does under stress, and the scenarios are not good. Two women, no combat training, in a section of the Rot where the informal rule is that you keep what you can and you lose what you can’t. My mind races to worst-case scenarios, all theifsI torment myself with.
Did someone see them enter? Did someone follow them? Did they find the documents, but before they could get out, someone else decided they were valuable? Did theynotfind the documents and got lost in a sealed-off section with compromised infrastructure?
What if Vi is hurt?
That thought arrives and doesn’t leave. It sits in the center of everything else in my brain, loud and insistent, overriding my typical logic. Is Vi lying on a concrete floor somewhere with a head wound or broken arm or worse? Is the last thing I did was stand at a railing and watch Armen carry a folder to her room and feelrelievedthat someone else was making the hard choices I wouldn’t?
This is my fault.
I knew they were planning this. I heard them through the door and chose not to intervene because intervening meant looking at Vi directly, and every time I do, something happens that I can’t control. So I prioritized my own emotional bullshit over her physical safety and now, she’s been in contested territory for an hour and I don’t know if she’s fucking alive.
Rogue and I push past the service corridor into the deeper section, our footsteps echoing differently because the acoustics change where the structure has been compromised, the sound bouncing off walls that aren’t where they used to be.
“There,” Rogue says.
I see them.
Two figures coming toward us down the corridor, moving fast but not running. Close together, one slightly ahead of the other, the trailing one keeping a hand on the leading one’s back.
Vi’s in front. She’s walking and upright. She’s carrying a bag pressed against her chest with both arms.
She’s also bleeding.
Goddammit.
