Fifteen Minutes The plan was simple. Get in, pour the drink, get out. Simple.
'Nothing is ever simple.'
Wrench moved like she'd been born in the walls. Not dramatically, not like the heroes in the stories I used to read, where they'd flip over cameras and slide under laser grids. She just... walked. Confident, unhurried, like she belonged in every corridor she stepped into. The kind of walk that made security cameras look the other way out of sheer social pressure.
Koshva and Riko trailed behind her dressed in janitorial grey. Koshva looked exactly like what he was: a man who had never mopped a floor in his life. Riko, to his credit, looked completely at home. The kid had probably worn worse.
"Stop walking like a cop," Wrench muttered without turning around.
"I am a cop," Koshva muttered back.
"Then stop walking like one."
The Medical Wing of the Central Authority was the kind of place that made you feel guilty for being alive. Everything was white. Aggressively, philosophically white. The kind of white that said: 'something terrible has happened here, but we've cleaned it very thoroughly.' The air smelled of recycled oxygen and whatever they used to stop bodies from rotting.
Riko stayed close to Koshva's elbow. He hadn't said a word since they'd left Wrench's den. That was fine. Neither had Koshva, mostly because every word he wanted to say was some variation of 'I can't believe I'm doing this.'
They rounded a corner into the morgue antechamber, and that's when Riko stopped walking.
Just stopped. Feet planted. Like he'd walked into an invisible wall.
Koshva almost tripped over him. "Kid, what—"
"Who's that?" Riko said quietly.
There was a man at the far end of the antechamber. He was cleaning instruments. Slow, methodical movements. Each tool lifted, examined, set down. He was slight, unremarkable, with the kind of forgettable face that your eyes wanted to slide past. The only thing that wasn't forgettable were his eyes.
White. Completely, totally white. No iris. No pupil. Just two points of soft, ambient light.
An orderly passed him, clapping him on the shoulder. "Another late one, Vance? You know the bodies aren't going anywhere, right?"
The man, Vance, looked up. He gave a small, shy smile. "Just keeping things in order. It feels... disrespectful to leave them untended."
The orderly laughed, already walking away. "Disrespectful. That's rich. They're evidence, pal, not guests."
Vance watched him go. The smile stayed on his face a second too long after the orderly was gone. Then it was just gone, like someone had switched it off. He went back to cleaning.
Riko hadn't moved. "I don't like him."
Koshva looked at the unassuming man in the plain white coat. He looked like the kind of person who apologized to furniture he bumped into. "He's a morgue cleaner, kid."
"I don't care." Riko's voice was flat. Not dramatic. Not scared. Just certain, the way a street kid gets certain about things when the alternative to being wrong is getting hurt. "Something's off."
Wrench materialized at their shoulder from absolutely nowhere, which was starting to feel like her personality. "That's Elias Vance. Class 4 healer. He's been on a maintenance contract here for three years. Background's clean, record's clean, the man is practically furniture." She glanced at Riko. "Relax."
"I am relaxed," Riko said. He didn't look relaxed.
Wrench had already moved on, checking her wrist display. "Twelve minutes. We move now."
The coolant failure hit exactly on schedule. No alarms, no flashing lights. Just a soft, clinical chime and a recorded voice saying 'Localized containment protocol initiated. Please vacate Bio-Storage Unit 7 for manual diagnostic.' Clean, precise, exactly what Wrench had promised.
The corridor emptied. Two technicians filed out with the mild irritation of people whose break had been interrupted. The door sealed itself.
Wrench had it open in forty seconds. Koshva had watched her do it and still didn't fully understand what she'd done. Her fingers had moved across the biometric panel like she was having a private conversation with it.
Inside, it was cold. The kind of cold that sat in your back teeth. The stasis pods lined the walls in two rows, each one a smooth white capsule with a small display panel showing a flatline and a name.
Koshva found Pod 7 first. JAX. A young man with a crooked grin frozen in the small photograph on the display panel.
He found Pod 12 second. The display read: ANOMALY 734. No name. Of course not. Just a number.
Wrench was already at Jax's pod, her hand on the access panel. She wasn't looking at the display. She was looking at his face through the frosted glass. Just for a second. Then her professional mask slammed back down and she popped the seal.
Koshva uncorked the Another Star. Up close, the liquid moved like it was alive. The silver specks drifted against the current as he tilted the bottle, like they were trying to swim upstream. He split it by eye, half into Jax's IV port, half reserved for the bottle.
The liquid hit the port and disappeared. Nothing happened.
"Now yours," Wrench said.
Koshva moved to Pod 12. He looked at the face behind the glass for the first time since the plaza. The same white hair. The same sharp jawline. The body the system had given him. His eyes were closed, which was somehow worse than when they'd been open and empty.
'You absolute idiot,' Koshva thought. 'Getting yourself killed on day one. Scared of ghosts.'
He poured the rest of the Another Star into the port.
Again, nothing.
"Now we leave," Wrench said.
"Shouldn't something be—"
"It's a Class 4 catalyst on two anomalous signatures. It's not going to be instant. Now we leave before the diagnostic team arrives, or everything we just did is completely pointless."
They were halfway to the door when Riko, who had been keeping watch at the entrance, took a sharp step back. He pressed himself against the wall, yanking Koshva by the sleeve.
Elias Vance was standing in the doorway.
He hadn't knocked. He hadn't announced himself. He was just there, the way a thought you hadn't wanted is suddenly just there. His white coat was pristine. His white eyes moved across the room, not with surprise, but with the slow, cataloguing interest of a man reading a very familiar book.
His gaze settled on Pod 12.
"You brought a god's corpse back to life with a child's potion," he said. His voice was quiet. No longer timid. "And you expected it to be simple."
Koshva's hand went to the empty space on his hip where his weapon would've been, if he weren't dressed as a janitor. "Who are you?"
Vance's eyes moved to him. That soft, ambient white light. Up close it was less celestial and more like looking at something that had simply replaced what eyes were supposed to be.
"I'm the man who maintains the evidence," he said pleasantly. "And you've just introduced a rather significant contaminant into two of my exhibits." He tilted his head. "I'm curious what you expect to happen next."
Riko had not moved from the wall. He wasn't looking at Vance's face. He was watching his hands.
Koshva opened his mouth.
The flatline on Pod 12's display panel spiked. Once. Sharp and violent, like a crack of thunder in a quiet room.
Then it spiked again.
Then it didn't stop.