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DATE:29th of August, the 70th year after the Coronation
LOCATION: Concord Metropolis
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Waking up was a process of inventory.
Hands; present, unresponsive. Arms; heavy, distant. Legs; there, technically. Everything attached, everything nonfunctional in the pleasant temporary way rather than the permanent one. Kind of my fault really. I went overboard yesterday.
I didn't overthink it. The body did what it did. It would catch up.
Pamela was sitting close. Too close, by the angle of her; the posture of someone who had been watching something for a long time and hadn't moved because moving felt like abandoning a post. A guard really. Her expression was somewhere I hadn't seen it for a while. Not the venom of last night, not the analytical patience she used when she was constructing an argument.
Scared.
Genuinely, quietly scared.
She didn't seem courageous enough to say what was on her mind.
We're we going full circle? Likely not. If I were to guess it was probably the spirits. Can't live without ear muffs.
I looked at her for a moment. Then I pushed myself upright, arms shaking with the effort of overriding the numbness, and sat on the edge of the couch until the room stopped being tilted.
"I'm going to infiltrate the lab today," I said.
She blinked. The fear reorganized into confusion. "What lab?"
"You know, the one I said I would go to? Where the leader of the Wondrous was…?"
I stopped.
She hadn't been there. Any of it. I certainly didn't feel like going into so much detail.
"It doesn't matter," I said. "It's a past commitment. Something I agreed to before you were involved. That's all you need."
"I'm coming with you."
"You're not."
"William—"
"Swallow it," I said, standing. My legs held. Good enough. "I'm not a dog nanny. I don't take people with me because they've decided they want to follow."
She stood as well.
"Are you serious?" Her voice had an edge to it that was different from her usual sharpness, rawer. "After last night, after everything this week, you're just going to walk out like—"
"Yes."
"You took handfuls of aspirin and passed out on the couch and I sat there for—"
"The barking," I said, finding my kevlar suit, "is getting a little loud." Like are we family or what?
Silence.
I went over to the equipment Mundi sent me earlier and took out that cream, then I went over to the mirror and started applying it over the scars. The man really knew what he was doing. It had my exact skin tone and even leveled the texture. He got so much of my data, I wouldn't be surprised if he could clone me. It was almost scary. Almost.
Pamela went to my side, leaning against the wall.
"Are you really ignoring me? You could die out there. Let me come."
"And what? Two new researchers will come to the lab from nowhere? Do you even hear yourself?"
"Wait… are you kidding? That's what you're going to do? Do you even have a plan?"
I checked the suit. Pills, phone.
"You're really going to repeat the fiasco at the gala?"
"Do you really think I care enough to listen?"
"You-" blah blah, he words started to blur.
I placed the blade mechanism under my right arm. Checked the holster on my back.
Behind me she said something — short, specific, the kind of insult that arrived fully formed rather than assembled in the moment. Then something else about this week, about my behavior, about what kind of person did what I'd done and then acted like none of it had happened.
I listened to it the way you listened to weather. Wow! The whole nagging wife experience.
"I'll be back later," I said, and went to the door.
I called Mundi from the stairwell.
It rang four times. He picked up on the fifth, which meant he'd considered not picking up and decided against it, which meant he was either curious or bored or both.
His breathing was audible immediately. Not exertion, the labored quality of something ongoing. Every inhale slightly more effortful than it should have been.
I filed it and moved on.
"I need the address for Matthew D.A.'s research facility," I said. "The private lab. Not the registered one."
A pause filled with that breathing.
"I'm not your secretary, Carter."
"You picked up the call," I said. "You might as well answer."
A sound that might have been a laugh in better health. "An assistant of mine will message you the address."
"I don't have his contact."
"I'll have him reach out to you." Well…
"I'm working on the infiltration," I said. "As you're aware, there have been complications."
"As I'm aware," he repeated, as if what I was doing was some sort of banality to him.
Then he coughed. Not briefly, a sustained thing, the kind that came from somewhere deep and took its time concluding. When it stopped the breathing was worse than before.
His health was genuinely bad these days. Hopefully he doesn't croak until I deal with UltraMan nouveau.
"Actually," I said. "The facility will require identification."
"Obviously."
"I'll need something in the name of a researcher. Someone credible enough to pass an administrative check but obscure enough that no one at the door has a face to match to the name."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"There is a Dr. Renaud Blois," Mundi said. "Retired. Former materials science consultant, worked adjacently with Matthew D.A.'s research circles about fifteen years ago. Old enough that the overlap would be plausible, obscure enough that no one currently active would know him on sight." A breath. "He exists on paper. He has credentials. He hasn't been seen publicly in some time."
Wow, Blois? That's like that time in Pamela's mind. Is it a common name? Guess I'll walk in his skin again.
"Fine," I said.
"My assistant will have the documentation ready with the address." His tone had shifted very slightly. Not warmer, just more deliberate. "Don't lose the card. That identity has other uses and fabricating it a second time is not something I'll do on short notice."
"Understood."
"Contact my assistant if you need resources," he said, when he'd recovered enough. "Stop calling me directly."
Again with the assistant. Wow! Can't believe I was downgraded by this much.
Well, if we weren't going to talk for a while, then I might as well confirm some things.
"One more thing."
A long exhale.
"Even with the chaos going on this day, you must be up to date. What do you think of the martial law?"
Silence. Then, with the specific boredom of someone answering a question beneath them: "What would even change? The government's attention is on the heroes. It always is. The rest of us are furniture."
"That's a strange way of saying you're in bed with the army."
"Who do you think," he said, with the patience of someone explaining arithmetic, "buys the weapons? The government has been a client for thirty years. The same weapons I supplied to you, incidentally." A pause. "You're welcome for those."
"Mm."
"I'm tired," he said.
The call ended.
I stood in the stairwell for a moment, phone in hand, listening to the building's ambient silence. Somewhere below, a door opened and closed.
Mundi supplying the army wasn't surprising. Mundi supplying everyone was the business model. What was mildly interesting was that he'd said it, volunteered it, almost, in that offhand way of his that was never quite as offhand as it seemed.
Either he was too worn out to be careful, or he wanted me to know.
I went downstairs.
A drone arrived twelve minutes later. A small model like the one from two days ago landed on the pavement beside me with a faint whir and a click as the undercarriage compartment opened. An envelope inside.
It contained an identification card. Dr. Renaud Blois, materials science consultant. A faculty affiliation number. A research credentials code printed in the font of official documentation.
My phone buzzed.
"This is ARIA; Automated Research and Intelligence Assistant, prototype designation. Professor Mundi asked me to provide support for your current operation. I have forwarded the facility's internal directory, visitor processing protocols, and current security rotation to your device. Please let me know if you require anything further. — ARIA*
No shame about it whatsoever. Just a prototype AI introducing itself like it was the most natural thing in the administrative world. Guess spying over Emily was paying off.
I put the phone away and flagged a taxi.
________
The southeastern district was the city's business quarter; dense, vertical, the kind of area that had been built in successive waves of investment and now existed as a permanent argument between architectural decades. Glass and steel in every direction, towers pressed close enough that the streets between them felt like corridors rather than roads.
The facility didn't announce itself. That was the first thing I noticed. In a district full of buildings trying to communicate importance through scale and signage, this one had made a different choice. The glass was a shade darker than the towers on either side of it, not black, just deep enough to absorb light rather than reflect it. The geometry was slightly irregular- not obviously, just enough that the eye moved off it without finding a clean line to follow. It was the architectural equivalent of a person who stood very still in a crowd.
Forty, maybe forty-two floors. The kind of height that was significant without being the tallest thing visible.
Above the entrance, in clean restrained lettering: *Formal Medicine.*
Matthew D.A.'s, almost certainly. The name had the quality of a subsidiary, something that existed on paper as its own entity while functioning as a division of something larger. A research operation that didn't need to advertise because it didn't want visitors it hadn't already approved.
The lobby was exactly what lobbies were.
Marble floor; pale, practical. A reception desk in the center staffed by two people in identical corporate presentation. Seating along one wall that existed to make waiting feel like a choice. A security barrier beyond the desk, card readers, two guards in the uniform of a private firm. Plants that were real but looked artificial because they had been placed rather than grown. The particular refrigerated air of buildings that processed large numbers of people efficiently and had no interest in making that process pleasant.
I crossed to the desk and set the identification card down.
"Dr. Blois," I said. "I have a consultation scheduled with the materials division."
The card reader beeped once.
Red light. Fuck.
I looked at it. The guard beside the barrier looked at me with that specific apathy reserved for monotonous tasks. I don't really blame him.
"Sir, could you step over to reception please."
Of course, I'm a gentleman so I stepped over to the reception.
The woman behind the desk was young- mid-twenties, the kind of composed that came from training rather than experience, with a lanyard and a headset she wasn't currently using. She took the card, turned it over, ran it through a secondary reader built into the desk, and looked at the result with the mild professional sympathy of someone delivering minor bad news.
"Your chip is outdated," she said. "We migrated to the new access system about eight months ago. The old format doesn't register."
"I see."
"It's not an issue, it happens fairly often with external consultants who aren't in the building regularly." She was already reaching below the desk. "I can issue you a new card on the spot. I'll just need to take a photo for the updated credential."
She produced a small tablet with a camera function already open, angled it toward me with a smile that was genuine in the mechanical way of someone who had learned to make it genuine through repetition.
I looked at the tablet.
Then at her.
"I'm in a rush," I said.
She sighed and raised the tablet herself, angling it to capture my face without requiring my cooperation.
The camera clicked.
She turned back to the desk screen and began transferring the data. Her eyes moved between the original card details and whatever the new system was populating. Then she paused.
"Dr. Blois." She looked up. "It says here you're forty-eight."
"That's correct."
She studied my face with the frank assessment of someone who hadn't yet learned to disguise curiosity as politeness. "You look…. considerably younger than that."
I straightened slightly. "I wouldn't be in pharmaceuticals if I didn't take care of myself." I let a small measure of the conspiratorial into my tone, the suggestion of someone sharing a professional secret. "The advantage of working adjacent to the research is knowing what actually works before it reaches the market."
She started grinning. The professional composure developed a crack and something genuinely entertained came through it.
"Is that so?"
"It has its benefits."
She was still smiling when she looked back at the screen. A moment of typing. The small printer beside the desk produced a card with a quiet mechanical certainty.
"Will you be coming in regularly?" she asked, almost giddy.
"Just looking into a few things," I said. "Probably not."
Something shifted in her expression. Small. She covered it quickly and slid the card across the desk in a folded piece of paper.
"There you go, Dr. Blois. Third floor will direct you to the materials division."
I took it and walked toward the security gates.
Away from the desk I unfolded the paper.
A phone number. Below it, in handwriting that belonged on a note passed in a secondary school classroom: *xoxo.*
I looked at it for one moment.
Childish.
I didn't turn around. I fed the new card into the gate reader, green light, clean beep, and walked through.
The elevator opened on the third floor and I walked out into a corridor that looked like every other research corridor in every other corporate building. Pale walls. Overhead lighting that was bright without being warm. Doors with keycard readers and small plaques. The faint background hum of ventilation doing its job.
I stopped the first person I found; a man in a white coat carrying a tablet. He appeared quite busy.
"Dr. Karl," I said. "Do you have any idea in which office I can find him?"
He slowed fractionally. "Karl Meyer?"
"Yes."
He glanced at my badge, then back up. "I'm not sure he has an office on this floor actually. He mostly works down in the labs." He was already moving again. "You'd have to ask someone in his division."
His division, apparently, was not on the third floor.
I took the stairs.
Fourth floor was administration. Open plan, desks, the background noise of keyboards and low conversation. A woman near the stairwell door looked up when I came through.
"Dr. Karl," I said. "Where."
She frowned. "He doesn't sit up here. He's usually in his lab." She gestured vaguely downward. "Sub-level two, I think. You'd need clearance for that floor."
Sub-level two.
I thanked her with a nod and kept moving.
Fifth floor. A younger researcher coming out of a meeting room, still holding a coffee.
"Meyer?" I asked.
He shook his head immediately. "Haven't seen him today. He'll be in his lab. He's always in his lab." He paused. "Sub-levels. You'll need to go back down past reception and request access separately; they don't let you take the main elevator below ground without a secondary clearance."
"Is there another way down?"
He looked at me for a moment. "The service lift at the north end of the building goes to all floors. But you'd still need—"
"Thank you," I said, and turned back toward the stairs.
The sub-level clearance question was a matter of badge color.
I'd noticed it going up; the staff on the upper floors wore white lanyards, standard access. But the researcher who'd mentioned sub-level two had a lanyard with a dark blue stripe running through it. Not a different badge entirely. Just a stripe. Which meant the distinction was baked into the existing system rather than a separate credential class.
Someone on this floor would have one. The question was finding them before lunch ended. Why does lunch matter for this? Obviously, it's easier to steal a card when someone is busy eating.
The mesh hall was on the second floor. I found it by following the smell of hot food down a corridor that widened toward a set of double doors. Through them: a large open room, round tables, strip lighting overhead, the noise of a few dozen people eating and talking at the volume of people who felt professionally safe. Trays, plastic cups, the particular cafeteria smell of starch and industrial seasoning that was the same in every institution in every city.
Every table occupied. Researchers, assistants, administrative staff. The blue-striped lanyards were visible at three tables near the far wall — sub-level personnel eating together, the gravitational clustering of people who shared the same clearance and probably the same work hours.
I took some food at random and picked an empty seat at a table with a partial sightline to the room.
A tray landed across from me.
I looked up. A man settling into the seat uninvited, the movement comfortable, like he'd decided the table was his before he'd reached it. White hair, not aged white, the bright artificial kind with red undertones bleeding through at the roots where the dye had grown out. Mid-thirties, probably. Clean-shaven. A lanyard with a blue stripe.
"Don't think I've seen you before," he said, already opening his cutlery wrapper. "Blois, right? Caught the name on your badge."
"That's right."
"Fenner." He said it like a reflex, the automatic name exchange of someone who'd done it many times. "Materials consultation?"
"Adjacent to it."
He nodded, cutting into something on his tray. "How long have you been with Formal Medicine?"
"I'm not with them directly. External."
"Ah." He nodded again. "They bring in a fair few of those. Especially for the lower floor work." He said it casually, the way you mentioned something unremarkable.
I looked at him.
"You're in the sub-levels?" I asked.
"Fourth year," he said, with the ease of someone citing a credential. "Pressure dynamics division."
I picked up my fork and said nothing, letting the silence invite him to continue.
"It's good work," he offered. "Niche, obviously. Most people up here don't really know what goes on below three. Management prefers it that way." He smiled — briefly, the smile of someone who found institutional secrecy mildly amusing. "You know how it is."
"Mm."
He ate for a moment. Then: "What brings you in today specifically? If you don't mind."
"Review consultation. Old project overlap."
"Right." He turned his cup in his hand. "Which division?"
"Materials science. Pre-reorganization work."
He nodded slowly. "That would be before my time." He glanced at my badge again. "Renaud Blois — are you in the directory? I feel like I should recognize the name."
"Probably not current directory. It's been a few years."
"Right, right."
He went back to eating.
I watched him from the edge of my attention. The answers were smooth enough. The blue stripe on his lanyard was real, or well-replicated. But something was off in the accumulation of small things — the way he'd chosen this table specifically, the way his questions had moved in a particular direction without appearing to. The interest in what floor I was working on. The casual mention of the sub-levels as if gauging whether I'd respond to it.
He wasn't reading the building the way someone who'd worked in it for four years read it. He was reading it the way someone who'd arrived recently was trying not to appear to.
I'd done it myself, twenty minutes ago.
He looked up and caught me looking. Smiled again. "Sorry, it's a force of habit. Lot of external consultants come through and never talk to anyone. Gets a bit insular down there."
"I imagine," I said.
He gestured at my untouched tray. "Not hungry?"
"Not particularly."
He shrugged and went back to his food.
I stayed where I was and said nothing further and let him decide what to do with the silence.
He filled it again himself, which was its own kind of answer.
"Matthew D.A. is in the building today," Fenner said. Still looking at his tray. "Unusual. He doesn't come in often."
"Is that so."
"Mhm." He turned his cup again. "Big day for some people, I suppose. Depending on what you're here for."
I ate something off the tray. It was bland. I ate it anyway.
"You follow his work?" Fenner asked.
"Not closely."
"Most external consultants do. Given his output." He paused. "Pressure dynamics, materials science — there's a lot of overlap if you go back far enough."
"I wouldn't know."
He looked up. "You're not curious about him at all?"
"Should I be?"
He set his fork down. "Most people in this building are, one way or another. He tends to attract a certain kind of attention."
"I'm here for a review consultation," I said. "Old project overlap. I've said that already."
"Right." He nodded slowly. "Right." He seems a bit anxious huh.
He picked up his fork again. Put it back down.
"It's just interesting," he said, "that you came in today. When he's here." Brother…
I looked at him directly. "You're not very subtle."
His watch beeped.
He went still.
"The questions about which floor, which division, whether I knew the directory, whether I cared about Matthew." I picked up my cup. "It was a decent approach. But you've been reading the room since you sat down, not talking to it."
He held my gaze for a moment. Then he glanced down at his watch and read something off it. After that his posture shifted — the specific deflation of someone who has decided the performance is no longer worth the energy.
He stood, picking up his tray.
"Enjoy your consultation," he said. Looks like something scared him away. Me? Probably not.
"You as well."
He left without looking back. I watched him pretend to be unbothered. To me at least it was obvious.
A few seconds later the double doors opened again. The boogieman was in the hallway?
Fenner came back through them at speed — not running, but the fast walk of someone who had made a decision quickly and was acting on it before they reconsidered. He reached the table, sat down, picked up his abandoned cup, and looked at it like he'd come back specifically for it.
I watched this.
"Forget something?" I asked.
"Just the cup." He took a sip. His jaw was tight.
"You left the cup on purpose." What a dumbass. Is he even trying?
"I didn't."
"You did." I looked at him. "You saw something in the corridor and came back." Like come on.
He said nothing. He kept his eyes on the cup.
I looked up.
The doors opened again and through them entered someone I didn't expect. The owner. Huh!
That person came in without an entourage, which was the first thing that was wrong. Everything about Matthew D.A.,the scale of his corporations, the breadth of what he controlled, suggested a man who moved with staff around him. He didn't. He walked into the mesh hall alone, collected a tray from the service counter without appearing to register the way the room adjusted around him, and moved toward a table near the windows.
He didn't look right. I'd seen him on news broadcasts, through a screen, and that had been unsettling enough. In person, in a room, the wrongness was more specific.
His skin really had that quality, translucent at the edges, catching the overhead lighting differently than the people around him, the faint luminescence beneath the surface that you could almost convince yourself was a trick of the fluorescents until he moved and it moved with him. Not a glow exactly. More like the difference between something that absorbed light and something that held it briefly before letting go.
The neon aura the broadcasts mentioned was subdued indoors; present, but compressed, sitting close to his body rather than radiating outward. It gave his silhouette a faint corona, blue-white, barely visible against the bright ceiling lights.
He was tall. Not unusually, but enough. His clothes were corporate and unremarkable — dark trousers, a pale shirt, no tie. The deliberate mundanity of someone who had decided to perform normalcy and had researched what it looked like.
His face was the most difficult part. Proportionally correct, symmetrical in a way that went slightly past what faces usually managed. His eyes, when they moved across the room, briefly, the scan of someone confirming the space, had no whites visible. Just iris, dark and complete, edge to edge.
He sat.
He ate, or made the gestures of eating, with the calm precision of everything else he did.
I watched him for a moment.
"Why are you scared of him?" I asked Fenner, quietly. I mean being a threat to UltraMan was one thing, but that is vague. What actually made this guy special?
Fenner's cup came down. "I'm not."
"You ran back in here the moment he appeared in the corridor."
"I told you, I forgot—"
"And you haven't looked at him once since you sat down, which takes effort given where he's sitting." I kept my voice level. "So. Why stay? If you're scared, leave." After putting so much pressure on how I wasn't interested in Matthew and then not even glancing at him, it was a bit evident.
Did he just run away from Matthew or did Matthew follow him? That was the question.
Fenner wouldn't have a reason to run away if his obviously fake identity was intact. This means he had been compromised or was close to it. But then why did he come to me? Was the possibility of getting my information that juicy he risked it? Idiot.
A thin line of sweat had appeared at his temple. He didn't wipe it.
"I can't just leave," he said, very quietly.
"Why not."
He looked at me with something between disbelief and alarm. "Because of the guards."
I glanced around the room. Staff eating. Researchers talking. No uniforms, no visible security beyond the standard desk personnel downstairs.
"What guards," I said.
He stared at me. "The invisible ones." His voice dropped further. "How are you this sloppy?"
I looked back at him.
"What? How are you this sloppy," I said. "That whole performance just now, rushing back in, pretending you forgot the cup, that wasn't exactly difficult to read."
His mouth tightened. "If you keep talking I'll—"
"You'll what?" I asked.
He stopped.
I smiled at him. Unhurried. The kind that arrived without warmth. Baiting him could prove funnier than letting go.
He exhaled slowly through his nose and looked at the ceiling briefly, with the expression of someone performing a private audit of their recent decisions.
"I should have left an hour ago," he muttered.
"Probably," I agreed. "But you have nothing to worry about." I leaned forward slightly and covered my mouth with one hand, voice dropping to something mock-conspiratorial. "Unless, of course, you're some kind of spy."
He closed his eyes.
Something sharp was at my neck.
Thin edge, no temperature. I hadn't seen Fenner move. His hands were both visible on the table, cup in one, the other flat on the surface. He hadn't moved at all.
An invisible blade? Wouldn't be the first time.
"Are these the seemingly famous Invisible guards?" I said, giggling.
"Me," he said. His voice had lost the careful social texture entirely. Flat now. Direct. "I can kill you right now. You understand that?" Oh nooo! I'm so scared…
Is he serious?
I considered the blade at my neck. The pressure was steady, not increasing. A warning rather than a commitment.
"Why do you think I can't do the same?" I asked.
He looked at me. "What's stopping you?"
"Wanting to keep the job," I said.
Something shifted in his expression. "You don't have anything to gain from being here. You're not from this building. You're not a researcher. Whatever cover Blois is supposed to give you, it's thin." His eyes moved across my face. "So what is it? Who sent you?" Now this was interesting!
Even fearing being found out he thought it was more important to confirm my identity.
I'm just surprised that he out of all people doesn't recognize me. These days even lowly clerks know my secret identity….
"Money doesn't grow on trees," I said.
He slammed his hand on the table.
The sound cut through the ambient noise of the mesh hall. Several heads turned. Matthew D.A., near the windows, did not look up.
"Why," Fenner said, voice low and furious now, "are you still in that bullshit?"
I looked at his hand on the table. Then at him.
"What bullshit specifically."
"Running errands for whoever's paying. Taking jobs in buildings like this for money." He said the last word with the specific contempt like this was something personal. And what? Money isn't a viable reason? Moral authority much… "You're good enough to read me in three minutes and you're here on a contract."
I think he is reading too much into it. Sadly I'm doing this for free.
The blade at my neck hadn't moved.
I hadn't moved either.
"Having a job isn't bullshit," I said. "But do feel free to keep making noise about it."
I glanced toward the tables that had turned at the sound of his hand. A few people still watching. One researcher had stopped eating entirely.
Fenner followed my gaze. His jaw tightened.
His watch beeped.
He didn't look at it.
"You're not that impressive," I said. "The whole performance, the blade." I tilted my head slightly, carefully, given what was still at my neck. "It's funny. But only up to a point. You know, even clowns lose their touch."
Like what? A supposed professional like me will spill everything just because he was threatened? In a situation he could get out of so easily?
He said nothing.
"Why do you even bother?" I asked. "Interrogating a consultant. Running a full approach on someone who clocked you in the first five minutes." I looked at him steadily. "You're a joke, Fenner." That last one is quite true. Too emotional.
The watch beeped again.
The vein at his temple surfaced visibly. His eyes moved across my face with the specific quality of someone running the calculation, the weight of it, the cost, what came after, and I could see the moment he decided it wasn't worth it. His mouth opened. A word started and stopped behind his teeth. Something ugly. He swallowed it.
The blade disappeared.
He sat very still for a moment, breathing. Not exactly heavily, but he wasn't relaxed either.
"I'll remember someone like you," he said.
What? He gave up because there were too many people? Pussy.
"I'll forget you by evening." Did this idiot think this was some kind of rivalry?
The watch beeped a third time.
"You should probably get that," I said. But the message must have been some kind of warning. Otherwise why so insistent?
He didn't look at it. He stood, smoothing the front of his jacket with both hands, the motion of someone reclaiming a composure they hadn't fully lost in public.
"I wasted too much time already," he said.
He looked at me one last time. The expression on his face was not complicated, just clean, direct hatred, the kind that doesn't perform itself. Then he turned, and walked toward the entrance without hurrying, trying to blend in.
Fenner was halfway past Matthew's table when he stopped.
Not the stop of someone who'd thought of something. He simply ceased forward motion, mid-stride. His foot came down and stayed there. He didn't slow into it. There was no transition.
I watched. No one had touched him. He hadn't run into anything visible. His body registered it before the rest of him did, the shoulder dropping slightly, the neck stiffening, the forward lean of a man whose legs had stopped receiving instructions he'd sent.
He tried again. Nothing moved.
Matthew stood up.
He set his utensils down quietly and turned toward the room. His eyes moved across it once, without hurry, and the room responded. Conversations that had resumed after Fenner's earlier outburst went quiet again, this time more completely.
"We have a special guest with us today," he said.
His voice didn't rise. It didn't have to. The room was already listening.
He raised one hand and pointed.
At the white-haired man.
Fenner's hands came up halfway, the instinct of someone reaching, and stopped. Not his decision. The pressure had changed. It wasn't directional anymore. It had closed around him from every side simultaneously, even and total. His arms locked mid-reach. His coat pressed against him. His chest moved in short, visible increments.
"There are people," Matthew said, still addressing the room, unhurried, "who enter spaces like this one believing the work done here is something they can observe, carry out through a door, and deliver to someone waiting."
He paused.
"They are mistaken about several things. Most importantly about what this building notices."
Fenner's teeth showed. Not a smile. A thin sound came out of him, pressured air, the shape of a word that hadn't cleared his throat.
"I don't—" He stopped. Tried again. "I don't know what you're talking about." His voice came out uneven, the cadence wrong. "I work in procurement. Sub-level four. You can verify that, there's a—"
Matthew closed his hand into a fist.
Fenner gasped. Short, sharp, involuntary. His shoulders drove inward. His knees bent slightly under the new weight of it and he fought them straight again, which cost him something visible.
"Procurement," Matthew said, as though the word were mildly interesting. He turned back to the room. The researchers sat very still. No one had moved toward an exit. No one had reached for a device. They watched with the attentiveness of people who understood, on some level, that watching carefully was the correct response.
"This is worth understanding," Matthew said to them, his tone making it seem like this was rehearsed. I wouldn't be surprised if he was building this little speech while pretending to not pay attention to Fenner earlier. Like an oligarch just taking a seat and eating between the researchers? No chance.
"Institutions accumulate sensitive work. That work attracts interest. And that interest produces people like this; trained, patient, placed inside the building with cover that holds for weeks or months or, occasionally, longer."
He glanced back at Fenner briefly, then returned to the room.
"The error they make is consistent. They assume the threat is detection by procedure. Cameras. Logs. Access records." He paused. "Procedure is not what finds them."
Fenner made a sound. Low, effortful, something trying to be a word.
"I don't tolerate it," Matthew continued, simply, without heat. "Not because of what they take. Because of what it requires me to demonstrate, repeatedly, to people who should not need the demonstration." He looked around the room. "You shouldn't need it either. But here we are."
Fenner's hands erupted in light. Fluorescent, sharp-edged, the specific cold brightness of something discharged in desperation rather than aim — projectiles, or what had been intended as projectiles, bursting outward from his palms in several directions. They traveled perhaps two meters. Then they went out. Not deflected. Not absorbed. They simply ceased to exist in the air between him and Matthew, extinguished with the indifference of something that had not registered them as relevant. He found his little lecture more important.
"Consider this a single lesson," Matthew said. "Retained, I hope, by everyone present."
He opened his fist.
The sound Fenner made was not a scream. It was something that preceded screaming — the total-body exhale of a person hit by something that outpaced their nervous system's ability to categorize it. The force didn't release. It inverted. What had been containment became compression, sudden and absolute, applied from every vector at once with a pressure that had no interest in gradual escalation.
His coat split first, at the seams, then across the back. His body did not cooperate with what was being asked of it. The compression found his ribs and they went in sequence, not all at once, a sound like green wood, three times, close together, and Fenner folded around the damage, unable to do otherwise. His spine curved in a direction it had not been designed for. His arms, still partially raised from the failed discharge, were driven inward and down. The sounds that came out of him in this phase were brief and increasingly structural rather than vocal.
The pressure continued to apply itself with the same flat consistency throughout.
What remained at the end of it was on the floor and did not resemble the man who had sat across from me forty minutes earlier. The outline was gone. The mass was there, compressed into something dense and wrong, with no useful boundary between what had been separate systems. The floor around it was dark and spreading slowly.
The room was completely silent.
Matthew was looking towards me. I'm not all that sure if I was on his mind or whether it was someone else, but judging by how long he lingered I figured the first option was more likely.
I think it was something like 'Look what I'm capable of', but this was kind of childish wasn't it? Should I feel threatened?
He didn't attack me, so that was another message in and of itself.
"Hopefully," Matthew said, adjusting the cuff of his sleeve, "this has been educational."
He walked toward the entrance. The double doors swung open before he reached them, both at once, smooth and unhurried, and he passed through without breaking stride. They closed behind him.
I wonder who opened them. The invisible guards? And by that question, what even happened? Does Matthew have telekinesis? Was the gesture a hand sign for someone else? A device perhaps? I don't really get it.
No one in the room spoke. They just stayed there with a pile of flesh painting the floor.
I looked down at the table.
The tray in front of me was still there. The cup. The unremarkable food.
I picked up the cup and finished what was in it.-*-*-*-*-*-*-*