The uniform fit well enough.
That was the thing about government issue — it was designed for a range of bodies and Kicks was currently a body that fit most ranges, lean enough that the jacket sat slightly loose at the shoulders which was either a problem or exactly what he needed depending on who was looking.
Nobody was looking.
That was the thing about walking toward people rather than away from them. The brain's threat assessment ran in the wrong direction. A person moving toward the perimeter from the outside was a problem. A person in uniform moving within it was furniture.
He moved like furniture.
He had seventeen years of practice being invisible in a different sense and it turned out the skills transferred.
The cell block was three corridors from the exterior entrance and the government had doubled the rotation since the katanas went missing, which meant there were more people to not look at him as he walked past them.
Lord Ki was at the end of the corridor.
He looked the same as he had looked through the dock robot's face and completely different in the way that real things always looked different from their copies. Older. Stiller. The specific stillness of someone who had been in one room for eighteen years and had made a decision about what stillness meant.
He looked at Kicks through the cell door without surprise.
"You came," he said.
"I'm here," Kicks said. Not the same thing and they both understood that.
Lord Ki looked at him for a moment. At the uniform. At the blood that wasn't on it yet but would be.
"There are people like you in there," he said. Not a speech. Not a manipulation. The specific delivery of someone saying the truest thing they knew in the fewest words it required. "New human. Human. Something in between. The portal doesn't care about the classification." He paused. "What if your parents are there. What if they went in during the invasion and never came out and nobody told you because nobody knew." He looked at Kicks steadily. "How do you live with knowing you could have opened that door and didn't."
Kicks stood at the cell door.
He didn't answer.
He didn't need to.
"I'm not asking you to do this for me," Lord Ki said. "I stopped asking people to do things for me a long time ago. I'm asking you to do it because you already know what it's like in there and you already know what it costs and you are the only person alive who can make it cost less for someone else."
Kicks looked at him.
"The people coming through," he said. "When they come out. What happens to them."
Lord Ki looked at him.
"I'll spend whatever is left of my life making sure they have somewhere to go," he said. "That's the only promise I can make and I'm making it."
Kicks stood there for one more second.
Then he turned and walked back down the corridor.
He found Chang-Ho at the eastern perimeter.
Not difficult. Chang-Ho was the largest person in any area he occupied and he was standing slightly apart from the other personnel with the specific quality of someone doing their job while thinking about something else entirely.
Kicks came up beside him.
Chang-Ho looked at the uniform first.
Then at the face inside it.
Something moved through his expression that he controlled before it became anything specific. The same control he'd had in every room and every camera and every situation for seventeen years, except Kicks had grown up with that face and knew the difference between the control and the thing underneath it.
"You have about thirty seconds before someone notices we're talking," Kicks said quietly.
Chang-Ho said nothing.
"There are people in that portal," Kicks said. "Eighteen years. The same conditions I was in except longer and without the training and without the katanas and without any reason to believe anyone was coming." He paused. "I'm the only person who can open it correctly. If I don't go in the method fails and the portal collapses with everyone still inside it."
Chang-Ho was looking at the middle distance.
"Chang-Ho."
"I heard you," he said.
"Then say something."
Chang-Ho turned and looked at him. Fully. The way he hadn't looked at him since the lab because looking fully required having something to do with what you saw and there hadn't been anything to do with it until now.
"You were gone for seventeen years," he said. His voice was even. "I spent seventeen years not knowing if the next signal update from the satellite was going to be the one that confirmed there was nothing left to find." He paused. "I painted over the mark on the ceiling twice. It kept coming back." Another pause. "I named my son after a word that means to fly because I needed something in my house that believed in coming back."
Kicks went still.
"Don't go back in," Chang-Ho said. Not an order. A brother. "I can't lose you again."
His hand came out and closed around Kicks' arm. Firm. The grip of someone who could hold up a building deciding to hold onto one person instead.
Kicks looked at the hand.
Then at his brother.
"I know," he said.
He reached into the uniform pocket with his other hand.
The smoke bomb hit the ground before Chang-Ho processed the motion.
The cloud went up fast and thick and Kicks was already moving through it and Chang-Ho's grip found empty space where an arm had been and by the time the smoke thinned enough to see through there was nothing to see.
Chang-Ho stood at the eastern perimeter with his hand still out.
He didn't call after him.
He didn't move.
He stood there with the specific stillness of someone who had made a decision by not making one and was going to have to live with the weight of it.
Eun-hui sent the message from inside the communications room using a channel that required three levels of clearance she didn't have and accessed anyway because Winston had spent eleven minutes walking her through exactly which systems to touch and she had listened very carefully.
She did not frame it as a portal rescue operation.
She framed it as a Korean government unilateral action against a dimensional superweapon on Korean soil.
She attached internal communications. Classified assessments. Dr. Yeo's preliminary reports on the katanas, which used language like unprecedented energy output and dimensional interaction potential that read very differently in a military intelligence context than in a scientific one.
She sent it to the US military attaché office in Seoul.
Then she sent it to two other addresses Winston had given her without explaining why he had them.
Then the door opened.
She had been so focused on the sending that she had let herself become slightly visible at the edges, which was what happened when you divided your concentration, and the two soldiers who came through the door saw enough of her outline to know something was there even if they couldn't fully see what it was.
They were professionals.
They acted on the outline.
She was caught before she finished going fully invisible again, which had never happened to her before, and she filed that information away for later under things that were going to require thinking about when she had time to think.
She did not have time to think right now.
She went with them.
The US assets arrived with the specific efficiency of a military that had been maintaining readiness under a treaty for seventy years and had procedures for exactly this kind of intervention that had been updated regularly even when nobody expected to use them.
Three helicopters. Ground personnel moving to establish a presence between the Korean government force and the machine location. The kind of arrival that did not ask permission because it did not need to.
The General received the communication from the attaché office simultaneously with watching American personnel establish positions on Korean soil under the 1953 Mutual Defense Treaty and made the calculation that a strike on a dimensional machine with American observers present and American assets in the field was not a calculation that resolved in his favor regardless of what the machine was or what it did.
He stood down the bombers.
He did not stand down the ground force but the ground force had stopped moving the moment American personnel appeared between them and the objective.
The machine kept running.
Winston watched the American arrival from the operations base with the expression he used when something had gone according to a plan he had not officially made.
Soo-min sat beside him.
"Eun-hui," Soo-min said.
"Yes," Winston said.
"You gave her those addresses."
"I gave her those addresses," Winston said.
Soo-min looked at the display.
"You planned for this," he said.
"I planned for the possibility of this," Winston said. "There is a distinction."
Soo-min looked at him for a moment with the expression he used when Winston was being technically accurate in a way that communicated something larger.
"Is she alright," Soo-min said.
Winston looked at his phone.
"She's been detained," he said. "She's uninjured." A pause. "She's also apparently made an impression on someone inside the facility who is doing his best to be in the same location as her detention, which is creating a minor logistical issue for the personnel trying to keep him elsewhere."
Soo-min looked at him.
"Ace," Winston said.
Soo-min almost smiled.
Spectrum found Kicks at the edge of the machine perimeter still in the government uniform moving with the specific directional commitment of someone who had made a decision and was not reviewing it.
He came down from where he had been, which was everywhere simultaneously in the way that Spectrum was everywhere when he needed to be, and landed beside Kicks without ceremony.
He looked at him.
Kicks looked at him.
"Lord Ki's question," Spectrum said.
"Yes," Kicks said.
Spectrum nodded once.
He didn't ask what the answer was. He already knew that the question was the answer. He had known Kicks long enough to understand that the only thing that moved him past the place where he would have stopped was the specific possibility that stopping had a cost he hadn't fully calculated yet.
"The machine," Kicks said.
"This way," Spectrum said.
The machine was running.
AXILE's perimeter held around it. Winston's people, augmented by the pause in the government assault, maintaining a circle around something that was humming at a frequency you felt before you heard.
Goldsmith was there.
She looked at Kicks when he came through the perimeter and her expression did the thing it had been doing since the elevator in the dock, which was communicate everything while appearing to communicate nothing.
He looked at her.
"Gold," he said.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Government uniform," he said. "Not my choice."
"The blood isn't on it yet," she said. "That's something."
He looked at her for one more second with the specific look of someone filing a person away carefully because you didn't know when you were going to see them next and you wanted to have the image correct.
She received it without looking away.
"Don't be annoying in there," she said.
"I'll try," he said.
He walked to the machine.
The katanas were inside it.
He reached in and took them.
They fit his hands the way they had always fit his hands which was completely, the way things fit when they had been made for exactly one purpose and that purpose was you. He felt the reaction immediately, the specific resonance of the adapted biology Monsus had described, his own body recognizing the material the way you recognized something you had been carrying for a long time and had briefly set down.
He looked at the portal the machine had opened.
It was not the void he remembered.
Through the opening there was something on the other side. Not darkness. Not the specific nothing of the pocket dimension he had occupied for seventeen years. Something with depth to it. Something that moved.
He looked at Spectrum.
Spectrum looked at him.
Kicks said: "Left."
Spectrum almost smiled.
Kicks went in.
First person. His voice. Fully back.
The other side was not what I expected.
I don't know what I expected. The fragment I had spent seventeen years in had given me a specific picture of what this place was. Rock. Void. The particular silence of somewhere that had decided atmosphere was optional.
This was not that.
This was larger. The degradation was visible in the way the environment moved, stuttering at intervals the way a signal moved when it was losing integrity. The walls of the dimension doing something walls shouldn't do, which was consider whether to continue being walls.
I moved.
I didn't have time to describe what I found. I had the time I had and I used it for moving rather than observing which was probably the correct prioritization of resources.
I found them.
I did not look at their faces for long enough to know anything specific. I told myself this was practical. I was not sure that was entirely true. Some things you chose not to know in the moment because the knowing would stop your legs and your legs needed to keep moving.
I said: this way.
In Korean and in the other language, the one I had learned in fragments over seventeen years from a place everyone on the outside thought was empty.
They moved.
I held the bridge.
They crossed.
I did not count them. Counting them required a stillness I did not have. I just held the opening and let them through and felt my own biology doing the thing Monsus said it would do, the stabilizing frequency running through me like a current that had finally found the circuit it had been built for.
Then the last one was through.
Then it was just me and a portal that was beginning to make decisions about whether to remain open.
I went toward it.
Something hit me on the way out.
I don't know what it was. The membrane tearing. The dimensional pressure equalizing. Something that didn't have a name in any language I spoke and left a physical record on my body that nobody would be able to explain and nobody tried to.
I hit the ground.
I stayed on it.
Same sky.
I almost wished it wasn't.
But not quite.
He lay on the ground and looked at the sky and breathed.
Around him the sounds of the situation resolved themselves into something he could categorize. American personnel establishing positions. AXILE holding the perimeter. The specific quality of a standoff that had moved past its crisis point and was now in the administrative phase of deciding what the crisis had actually been.
The portal behind him was closed.
The new humans were on the other side of the perimeter somewhere, in the specific condition of people who had been somewhere very bad for a very long time and had just come out of it, which he understood personally and completely.
He did not get up immediately.
He gave himself the specific amount of time it took to confirm that the ground was real and the sky was the sky and the blood on him was not his, or not entirely his, or was something that had no category and he was going to file under later.
Then he heard the footsteps.
American military. The specific cadence of people moving with authority under orders they had been given before the situation fully developed and had not been updated to account for what the situation actually was.
He looked up at them.
They looked down at him.
He was covered in something they did not have a classification for. He was lying beside a machine that had just done something no military assessment had prepared them for. He was holding two swords that had not been there when the portal opened and were here now.
They had their orders.
"On your feet," the nearest one said.
Kicks looked at him for a moment.
Then he stood up.
His legs cooperated. Reluctantly. He noted this and filed it under things his body was going to have opinions about later when the adrenaline finished making decisions for both of them.
He looked at Spectrum, who had come down from wherever he had been anchoring and was standing at the machine's edge with the expression of someone who had already calculated the geometry of the situation and arrived at the same conclusion Kicks had.
Spectrum looked at him.
"It went well," Kicks said.
"It went," Spectrum said.
"Same thing."
The American personnel moved to Spectrum's position simultaneously with the ones around Kicks. The specific synchronized movement of people acting on a shared order that covered multiple subjects.
Neither of them ran.
Kicks looked across the perimeter.
Chang-Ho was there.
Standing at the government line in the grey pullover he had worn to the lab and to China and apparently to the standoff that had ended his brother's Season 1, because Chang-Ho had come to find Kicks in the same clothes he'd been wearing when the alert came through and had not stopped to change because changing required time he hadn't thought he had.
He was looking at Kicks.
Kicks looked back at him.
The American soldiers were at Kicks' sides now. Not rough. Not gentle. The specific handled quality of someone being processed rather than arrested, the distinction that existed in paperwork rather than in the experience of the person it was happening to.
Chang-Ho did not move.
He could.
He was the number one hero. 1,254 confirmed saves. The person who had held a building up with his bare hands and set it down like a conversation he was ending. The person who had corrected a satellite's orbit from space because the alternative was letting it fall.
He stood at the government perimeter with his hands at his sides and watched his brother be taken.
Kicks did not look away until he had to.
Then he looked forward.
The sky was the same sky.
The ground was real.
He was eighteen years old biologically. He was thirty-five in every way that mattered. He had been to a place that decided to end him and come back out twice.
He did not know what was on the other side of what came next.
He had never known that and had always gone anyway.
The American soldiers walked him toward the helicopter.
He went.
The season ended there.
Not on a resolution.
On a direction.