Micheal dropped the synth-caff in the nearest recycler.
"Tonight," he said. "We go tonight."
He didn't mean late. He meant now, while the location was fresh and the variables were contained and whatever was happening behind that door hadn't had time to change shape. Ivan understood this without needing it explained. He was already moving.
Sub-level 11. Eastern corridor. The water reclamation unit. The door with the physical handle.
Micheal put his hand on it.
"Let me talk first," he said.
Ivan said nothing. Which meant yes.
Micheal opened the door.
The door opened without a knock.
Dokja registered it before he registered anything else — not the sound of it, but the quality of attention that shifted in the room the moment it did. Wrench's hand moved to her side. Koshva's chair scraped back two inches. Jax, who had been leaning against the far wall in the easy posture of someone who had nowhere to be, went very still.
Not tense. Still. The specific stillness of someone whose body had just received information his face hadn't decided what to do with yet.
Dokja noted that. Filed it. Kept his expression neutral.
Two men came through the door.
The first was mid-height, unremarkable clothes that were slightly too considered in their unremarkableness. Brown eyes. The kind of face your eyes wanted to move past and then didn't, quite, if you were paying attention. He looked at the room the way someone looks at something they've been building in their head for a long time and are now checking against the original. Unhurried. The patience of a man who had already decided how the next several minutes went and was simply waiting for everyone else to arrive at the same conclusion.
The second was large. Not performatively large — the kind that made the doorframe a conscious consideration. He moved carefully because of it. He also had a scorched line across his left forearm and another across his shoulder and an expression that suggested he had very recently revised his estimate of someone in this room significantly upward.
Jax looked at the scorched lines.
The almost-grin arrived on his face, small and specific, the expression of a man recognizing his own work.
Nobody said anything.
The first man's gaze moved across the room. Vance, against the wall with that pleasant expression that never shifted. Wrench, hand still at her side, assessing. Riko, who had gone to the particular stillness of a street kid whose instincts had just said something his eyes hadn't confirmed yet. Koshva, who had stood up from his chair with the automatic habit of a man who had been doing this since before the building had its current name, and was now standing with no clear plan for what to do next. Then Dokja.
He held there for a moment. The equation in his expression didn't resolve. It just waited.
Then he looked past Dokja. At the wall. At Jax.
"Seven," he said.
One word. Placed in the room with the precision of a man who understood exactly what words were for.
Dokja's mind went somewhere else entirely for exactly one second.
Not here. Not Sub-level 11 with its bad lighting and its one long ventilation note. Somewhere older. A briefing room on a planet that didn't have a name yet in any Authority registry because the Authority hadn't gotten there yet. Fluorescent light. Cheap folding chairs. A commanding officer who never once used a name when a number would do, because names were personal and personal was a liability when the thing next to you might not come back tomorrow.
Fourteen, on my left. Seven, you're on point.
Not cruelty. Efficiency. The specific institutional logic of an organization that had decided the work was more important than the worker and had built its language accordingly.
He looked at Jax.
Jax, who had woken up from eight months of stasis and found a nutrition bar and declared the situation probably fine. Jax, who broke every silence. Jax, who had been in this room since the morgue with that easy unbothered grin and that slightly-off quality that nobody had named yet.
'Seven,' Dokja thought. 'Not a nickname. Not a callsign. An index. There's a list. He's the seventh entry on it. And the man who just walked through my door knows that list well enough to use it instead of a name without thinking twice.'
He kept his face still. The face that had held in front of the Prime Warden. The face that had held in Valentina's corridor. The face built over a life lived before godhood, back when holding a line was the difference between surviving a briefing room and not.
The silence that followed was the specific kind that wasn't about people who hadn't heard. It was the silence of people who had heard completely and were now doing very rapid arithmetic about what it meant.
Except Dokja, who had already finished.
"Sit down," he said.
Micheal looked at him for a moment. The equation in his expression shifted — that small fractional adjustment of a man whose estimate of something had just moved.
He sat.
Koshva put his face in his hands.
"I have questions," Koshva said, from behind his hands. His voice had the quality of a man who had run out of the specific kind of patience that gets you through the first twenty items on a list and had just discovered there was a twenty-first. "I have so many questions."
"You'll get answers," Micheal said. He produced a notepad from his jacket pocket. Cheap. The kind you buy when you go through them fast. He set it on the table without opening it. "But first—" He looked at Dokja. "You've had the payload for approximately sixty hours. What have you been able to access?"
The room went quiet again. Different quality this time.
Dokja looked at the notepad. At the man who had brought it. At Ivan behind him, standing with the stillness of a large man who had decided stillness was more useful than movement and was waiting for instructions that hadn't come yet.
Against the far wall, Jax pushed off and took a seat at the table. Completely unbothered. The ease of a man arriving somewhere he'd always been heading.
He caught Dokja's eye as he sat.
The grin was smaller than usual. Something underneath it that wasn't the usual easy warmth. An apology that wasn't quite an apology. The acknowledgment of a man who had kept a shape for as long as the shape was necessary and was now, for the first time in this room, standing at his actual size.
Dokja looked at him for one long moment.
'I've been in rooms with gods,' he thought. 'I've been in rooms with the Prime Warden. I have been dead twice and came back both times carrying things that weren't mine.'
'And somehow this is the room that requires the most careful thinking.'
He looked back at Micheal.
"Sixty hours," Dokja said. "And I know what it cost to get it to me. So before I tell you anything—" He leaned forward slightly. "Tell me who built it. And tell me why they chose me specifically. Not the god. The man I was before."
In the corner, Riko watched Vance's hands.
Vance's hands were perfectly, completely still.
The pleasantness on his face did not waver.
It never wavered.