Floor 15 | 4:47 PM
The lift doors closed.
The hum of the descent was the only sound mechanical, indifferent, the sound of a building doing its job while the people inside it did theirs. Aveline stood in the centre of the lift with the green vial in her gloved hand and the earpiece producing nothing but static and fifteen floors of distance between her and whatever that static meant.
She pressed 9.
Didn't look at the vial again. Didn't need to. What she'd needed to know she already knew had known the moment the colour registered, had confirmed it in the second she'd turned it in the light, had filed it in the place where she kept things that were problems and moved on to the next problem.
"Adrian."
Static.
She stood with her hands loose at her sides and her eyes on the floor counter and thought three steps ahead of where she was, the way she always did, the way she'd been doing since she was old enough to understand that two steps ahead wasn't enough.
Floor 13.
Floor 12.
Floor 11.
The static in her earpiece didn't resolve.
Floor 10.
Floor 9
The doors opened.
She was already moving.
Floor 10 | 4:49 PM
The corridor was empty in the specific way of a floor that had been cleared in a hurry — doors left open, a chair knocked over, the distant sound of boots on staircases above and below. Emergency lighting doing its red, low, committed work. The building had been in lockdown for the better part of the day now and it showed the specific exhausted quality of a space that had been on high alert for hours and was running on institutional stubbornness.
She found the window at the end of the east corridor in under twenty seconds.
Looked down.
Floor 8 was one level below. The electricals window was visible smaller than standard, utility glass, the kind that opened inward on a lever mechanism. Below that, the outside wall of the building dropped to the street and the extraction point two blocks out where Garrick was sitting in a helicopter that had been sitting there since this morning.
She took one step back.
One clean kick.
The glass went outward in a single piece not shattered, displaced, the frame giving before the glass did and cold air came through immediately. Evening air now, different from the morning's sharp cold, carrying the specific quality of a city that had spent a full day going about its business and was now thinking about dinner.
She gripped the frame with both hands, the wounded one filing its complaint for the hundredth time today, and looked down at the floor 9 window below.
Approximately four metres.
She hung from the frame.
Looked down one more time.
Let go.
The drop was clean. She caught the floor 9 window ledge with both hands on the way past the wounded hand past complaining now, operating on something beyond complaint, something more like resignation levered the utility window open on its mechanism, and was inside in under six seconds.
Floor 8 Electricals | 4:51 PM
The room smelled like dust and live current and the specific electrical warmth of systems that had been restored hours ago and had been humming steadily ever since. Rows of panels, indicator lights blinking green and amber in the dark, cables running in organised bundles along the walls.
Adrian was standing at the door.
Back against the wall beside it. Gun up. The posture of someone who had barricaded what could be barricaded and had been listening to the sound of boots getting closer and further and closer again for the better part of the last hour and had done the mathematics several times and hadn't liked the results any of the times.
He looked exhausted.
He looked like someone who had been in a building all day and had not eaten since before five in the morning and had witnessed several things that were going to require significant processing time and had been standing in an electricals room in the dark listening to guards for the last however long it had been.
He was staring at the door.
He did not hear her land.
He did not hear her cross the room.
What he felt was a tap on his shoulder one, precise, from directly behind him, and then before he could process that, before he could turn, before he could do anything at all, a hand came over his mouth from behind. Cold. Specific. Structural.
He went completely still.
Aveline, his brain said, before his body had finished reacting. Obviously. Who else. Who else has hands like that. Who else in this building has hands exactly like that.
She didn't speak. The hand over his mouth was information enough don't make a sound, don't move, follow me and she was already moving, already pulling him backward by the shoulder with the efficient grip of someone relocating a piece of furniture that needed to be somewhere else immediately.
A door. Storage. She found it without looking for it, the way she found things like she'd already mapped the room before she entered it, like the floor plan had been filed somewhere in her head the moment she'd come through the window.
She pulled him in.
Closed the door behind them.
Not a sound. The latch caught with the specific silence of someone who understood that the difference between a click and silence was the difference between found and not found.
Complete darkness.
The boots arrived.
They were thorough.
That was the thing after a full day of this, after every alarm and every floor and every cleared corridor, they were still thorough. The methodical room-by-room, corner-by-corner search of a team that had been looking for two people since six twenty-two this morning and had not found them yet and was not prepared to stop.
Flashlight beams moved under the door in thin lines. Voices clipped, tired now, the tiredness of people who had been doing this all day and were also not prepared to stop.
"Clear."
"Nothing here."
"Check the panels."
The sound of equipment panels being opened. The sound of someone checking behind the cable bundles along the wall. The sound of boots moving in a grid pattern across a floor that two people were not on because they were in a storage closet that was technically locked.
Then.. the closet handle.
It moved once.
Adrian stopped breathing entirely.
Beside him in the complete darkness Aveline was already not breathing. Had not been breathing since they'd entered. The specific stillness of something that had learned a very long time ago how to take up no space, make no sound, leave no impression on a room it was standing in.
The handle moved.
Held.
"Locked."
A beat. The flashlight beam swept under the door left, right and withdrew.
"They're not on this floor. Must've made it out through the east corridor."
"After nine hours they could be anywhere."
"Split, upper and lower. Final sweep."
"Copy."
Boots. Receding. The organised sound of a team that had been at this since morning redistributing for what sounded like a final attempt.
Then silence.
Aveline counted it out.
Adrian stood in the complete darkness of a storage closet and registered jasmine and gunpowder and something cold. The cold that wasn't weather. The cold that started from somewhere inside and radiated outward and didn't go away by the fire or in the training room or ever.
He didn't mention it.
He wasn't going to mention it.
He filed it with everything else and didn't mention it and waited for her count to finish.
At forty-five seconds she moved.
The Escape | 5:03 PM
She pushed him out of the closet the moment the count was done.
No preamble. Back to the east corridor window, the utility frame still open, evening air coming through, the city below doing its early evening things in complete ignorance of what had been happening in this building all day.
She looked up.
Adrian followed her eyeline to the topmost rightmost structural beam exterior, connecting this building to the adjacent one across the alley, the kind of beam that existed for architectural reasons and had never once anticipated being used for this specific purpose.
She raised the grappling hook.
CLANK.
The hook caught. She tested it once with both hands the wounded one answering the call with the grim reliability of something that had stopped complaining and started simply enduring and it held.
She turned to Adrian.
No warning.
No countdown.
No this might be uncomfortable or you should brace yourself or any of the preambles that a reasonable person in a reasonable situation might offer.
She grabbed him by the waist.
And they went.
The first swing was the worst.
The sudden absence of floor. The evening air hitting everything at once, colder now than it had been this morning, the city opening up below them with the cheerful absolute indifference of a city that had been going about its day while they'd been inside that building going about theirs. His stomach went somewhere behind him and stayed there.
His hands found her tactical suit and held on with the grip of someone who had made a decision and was not reconsidering it.
Aveline swung them in a clean arc calculated, the trajectory of someone who had done the geometry before leaving the window, who had looked at the beam and looked at the distance and arrived at the answer before he'd finished understanding the question and at the apex she fired the grappling hook again.
CLANK.
New anchor. New trajectory. The next building's exterior wall arriving and passing as she redirected mid-swing, the hook finding steel and concrete and holding, always holding.
CLANK.
CLANK.
Building to building. The gap between them crossed and then the next gap and then the next, the city moving below them in its evening amber light, the sun sitting low and heavy on the horizon doing that thing it had no business doing on a day like this orange and deep and completely unbothered.
Adrian stopped thinking about what was below them.
Started thinking about the physics of what was above them the injured hand on the mechanism, the weight she was managing, his weight specifically, the calculations happening in real time behind her eyes with every swing and every anchor and every redirected arc. She hadn't mentioned the hand once. Had been not mentioning it since floor four this morning. Had carried them both across three buildings and was not going to mention it.
What is she, he thought, with the specific wonder of someone who had stopped being surprised and arrived somewhere past surprise on the other side.
And underneath that, quieter, the thought he was going to file very deep and not examine:
I am holding on to her. We are moving between buildings in the evening light. I have been in that building for ten hours and I am somehow, inexplicably, the most alive I have felt all day.
He filed it.
Very deep.
CLANK.
The last anchor. The arc descending. The extraction point coming up below the open ground two blocks from the building, Garrick's helicopter sitting where they'd left it this morning, Garrick visible through the cockpit glass, head down on his instruments, the posture of someone who had been waiting all day and had developed a system for it.
Aveline brought them down clean.
They landed.
Extraction Point | 5:19 PM
Garrick looked up from his instruments.
Looked at them.
Looked at the building two blocks away.
Looked back at them.
"How the hell—" he started, and then stopped, and then looked at the building again as if it might offer some explanation for how two people had appeared at his extraction point when the last thing he'd heard through the comms was a door giving way and then static for the better part of an hour.
Aveline held up the grappling hook.
Garrick stared at it.
Stared at her.
Looked at the gap between the buildings.
Looked at her again.
"You swung," he said.
She put the grappling hook away.
"Between buildings," Garrick said.
She walked past him toward the helicopter.
"In the dark," Garrick said. "At the end of a ten hour mission. With him." He pointed at Adrian. "On an injured hand."
"Get in," Aveline said.
Garrick got in.
With the expression of a man who had been impressed before today and had just discovered that everything he'd previously considered impressive needed to be completely recalibrated against a new baseline.
Adrian climbed in after her and sat down and looked at his hands and thought about several things in the specific silence of someone who has too many things to think about and nowhere near enough processing capacity left to think about all of them.
"Elias left word before comms went down," Garrick said, running through the startup sequence. "Freezer unit in the back. Said you'd know what it's for."
Aveline was already moving to the back of the helicopter.
The freezer unit was compact, purpose-built, the kind of storage designed specifically for things that needed to remain exactly as they were until someone who knew what to do with them could do it properly. She opened it.
Reached into her tactical suit.
Removed the green vial.
Held it for a moment just a moment, the same moment she'd given it in the laboratory on floor fifteen, the same expression and placed it carefully in the centre display case. The glass lid went on. She checked the seal. Checked it again. The cooler closed with a sound that was final and specific.
She stood.
"Fly," she said.
Garrick was already starting the engine.
Mid-Flight | 5:28 PM
They were a minute out when Garrick noticed the hand.
He'd glanced back to check the sample case and caught it in the peripheral the way she was holding the wounded hand slightly away from the rest of herself, the makeshift wrap from the guard's jacket dark and stiff with a full day's worth of dried blood, the specific careful management of something she wasn't going to discuss unless it discussed itself.
He'd been quiet for the better part of an hour. Which was, Adrian had noted somewhere around the forty minute mark, genuinely impressive restraint from Garrick.
"Does that hurt?" Garrick said.
The helicopter hummed.
The city moved below them in the last of the evening light, amber and indifferent.
A beat.
"...Just a little bit," Aveline said.
Adrian looked at her.
Just a little bit from Aveline. Filed immediately. Translated in his head into whatever the actual register was significantly, considerably, in a way that would have had a normal person in an emergency room approximately nine hours ago and filed.
She removed the glove.
Garrick looked.
Adrian looked.
The wound itself was deep almost a full day old now, wrapped in a strip of a dead man's jacket, the kind of cut that had been making itself known in the background of everything she'd done since floor four this morning. That wasn't what stopped Adrian's eyes.
From the wound, branching outward across her palm and up toward her wrist, purple.
Violet.
The specific deep colour of something under the skin that had no business being under the skin, branching in thin deliberate lines like tree roots growing in the wrong direction. Like frost forming on the inside of glass. Like something that had been introduced to her system a very long time ago and had made itself completely at home in the architecture of her and was visible now only because the wound had given it a door.
Not bruising.
Not vascular damage from the cut.
Something else. Something that branched with too much intention, too much pattern, too much deliberate geometry to be anything that belonged to the standard category of things that happen to human hands.
It reached from the wound up to her wrist. The branching lines split there some continuing up the inside of her forearm in faint traces, fading into the skin like they'd decided to stop for today and might continue some other time.
Garrick stared at it.
Said nothing.
Which was the second impressive thing he'd done in the last hour.
Adrian stared at it.
Said nothing.
Filed it.
Cold hands. The jaw on floor five. The oil burn. The bed frame at midnight. The speed. The strength. The 2.1 seconds. Semi-mutant. Brain intact. And now this , violet tree roots growing under skin from a wound that had been not slowing her down since seven thirty this morning.
I'm building a file. I have been building a file since the mansion and I have not said a single word about it and I'm not going to say a single word about it until I know what I'm going to do with it.
I don't know what I'm going to do with it.
He looked out the window.
The silence held for another fifteen minutes before Adrian spoke.
"Why is it green," he said. "It was supposed to be amber."
Aveline didn't look up from the window.
The city below had its lights on now the specific moment of a city shifting from day to evening, the streetlights coming on, the windows of buildings going warm, the whole thing looking from up here like something that didn't know what had happened inside one of its buildings today and wasn't going to find out tonight.
"Well," Aveline said.
A pause.
"Are you surprised?"
Adrian thought about the briefing documents. The manifest. The advertisement. Every piece of paper. Amber. All of it had said amber.
He thought about her face in the laboratory. Why am I not surprised.
"...No," he said.
"Exactly," Aveline said.
End of conversation.
Sunset | 6:14 PM
They'd been in that building for just over ten hours.
It felt like significantly more than that.
The sun had finished what it was doing on the horizon and the sky was doing the thing it does after deep blue at the top, the last orange clinging to the edges of the city below, the specific beauty of an ending that didn't consult anyone about whether it was convenient.
It came through the helicopter windows in long flat bands of fading light, catching the dust on the glass, catching Garrick's instruments, catching the dried blood on Aveline's rewrapped hand and the lightning detailing on her suit and the red ribbons in her hair and the violet traces on her wrist that she hadn't covered back up.
Garrick was quiet.
Aveline was watching something out the window that wasn't the city or was watching the city in the way she watched things, the way that wasn't really watching, that was assessing and cataloguing and filing and thinking three steps ahead of wherever she appeared to be.
The green vial sat in its sealed case in the freezer.
Wrong colour. Full day mission. One knife wound through the palm. One jaw on floor five. One ethanol explosion. One closet in the dark with jasmine and gunpowder and something cold. One grappling hook escape in the evening light.
Why am I not surprised?
Adrian looked at her profile in the last of the light.
Thought about all of it.
Thought about Yuki at the mansion who had been told we won't be long at five forty-seven this morning and had been alone all day and had no way of knowing whether we won't be long had been true.
Thought about what was waiting when they landed.
Thought about violet tree roots growing under skin from a wound that had been filed and managed and not mentioned for ten hours.
Thought about what else was growing in there that he couldn't see yet.
He looked out the window.
Watched the city get closer in the dark.
Waited for whatever came next.