The new place turned out to be a decommissioned subway maintenance depot, three stories under the street, reached through a service hatch Kenji had apparently known about for longer than he was willing to explain. It smelled like oil and standing water and forty years of nobody caring enough to fix the ventilation.
It was, by every metric that mattered tonight, perfect.
Elena laid Marcus out on a workbench cleared of everything but dust and got to work without being asked. Rina eased Darius down against the opposite wall, and for a few minutes it looked almost like safety. Everyone was breathing and accounted for, and the thick concrete swallowed sound in a way the print shop never had.
Then Darius made a noise Kazuki had never heard from him.
Not a cough. Not the wet, familiar rattle that had become the soundtrack of the last six hours. Something sharper, a single involuntary gasp, like his body had just discovered it had forgotten how to do something automatic.
"Darius." Rina was already at his side.
He didn't answer. His eyes had gone wide and unfocused, fixed on nothing. The black lightning that had spent the whole night tracing slow, tired arcs across his collarbone suddenly stopped being slow. It spread up his throat and along his jaw, a network of dark cracks lighting from underneath, like something beneath his skin had finally run out of patience.
"Elena!" Kazuki was across the room before he'd decided to move.
She was already there, two fingers at Darius's throat, and her face was doing something he hadn't seen it do all night. It wasn't the careful professional stillness she wore like armor. It was closer to real fear.
"He's not breathing right," she said. "His pulse just tripled and his temperature's dropping at the same time. That's not something a body is supposed to do." She looked up, and for once she had no clean answer ready. "I've never seen his condition do this."
"I have," Darius managed, through teeth that had started to chatter despite the fever burning off him in visible waves. "Once. In my timeline." His hand found Kazuki's wrist and gripped it with a strength that matched nothing else about him. "This is the part where it ends, kid. I know exactly what it looks like, because I watched someone else go through it, and all I did was stand there and take notes."
"You're not doing that again," Kazuki said. "Tell me what to do."
Darius laughed, and it turned into something that wasn't a laugh. "There's nothing to do. That's the whole"
"There's the disc," Aeva said.
Everyone turned.
She was already crossing the room, gold light spilling between her fingers. Her face held the calm Kazuki had learned, over four months, meant she'd already decided something and was daring anyone to argue before she finished explaining.
"It's a convergence key," she said. "Maybe it doesn't just protect whoever's holding it. Marcus said the whole point was what breaks first, the suit or the people. Maybe that's not a threat. Maybe that's an instruction manual." She knelt beside Darius, and the disc brightened with every inch she closed. "I don't know what this does to me. I don't know what it does to him. But I know what happens if I do nothing, and I'm done watching people I care about die because I was too careful to try something that scared me."
"Aeva"
"Kazuki." She looked at him, and for one unguarded second everything she usually kept behind competence and dry sarcasm was right there on her face, plain as the disc's light. "Let me."
[To Be Continued...]