By the time the first alarm sounded, the institute had already begun to feel wrong.
Ren noticed it before he heard it, a faint pressure change in the corridor outside the south laboratory wing, as though the building had inhaled and forgotten how to exhale. The fluorescent lights above his desk flickered once, then steadied, but the steadiness was deceptive. Something beneath the floorboards had shifted. He looked up from the transit map he had been annotating with pencil lines and counted three seconds of silence before the alarm finally cut through the air, a short, brutal pulse that made the glass on the shelving units vibrate.
Fang was already on his feet.
"That is not a drill," Fang said, setting down the marker he had been holding a fraction too tightly. His face had gone pale in an instant, the colour draining from his cheeks as he listened to the second alarm, then the third, each one more urgent than the last.
