Before Wrench could finish saying "three minutes," Riko was gone.
Not ran. Gone. One second he was sitting against the wall, knees pulled up, face unreadable. The next the space where he'd been was just cold air and the faint sound of sneakers on maintenance corridor flooring, already too far away to catch.
"Oh you've got to be—" Wrench was on her feet.
"Leave him," Koshva said.
"He's going to get us all caught."
"He's twelve and he just watched someone he met three days ago die in front of him." Koshva was already moving. "Leave him."
Wrench said something under her breath that the recycled air of the service tunnel was probably better off not repeating, and followed.
Riko didn't think about the cameras. Didn't think about the diagnostic team, the shift change, the three walls and a sealed door. He just ran, the way you run when your legs have already made the decision and your brain is still catching up.
The maintenance access behind Pod 12 wasn't locked. Wrench had seen to that earlier without mentioning it, because Wrench did things like that.
He hit the door at full speed, stumbled through, and nearly collided with a medical technician who was backing away from Pod 12 with the careful, deliberate movement of a man trying not to make any sudden gestures near something he didn't understand.
The pod was cracked down the middle. Not broken, not shattered. Cracked, like something inside had pressed outward with steady, patient force until the material gave up arguing. Frost was melting off the edges in thin streams.
And sitting on the edge of the pod, one hand braced on the cracked casing, wearing the same sterile white patient's gown that made him look simultaneously dignified and completely ridiculous, was Dokja.
He looked terrible. He looked alive. Both at once, which was the best possible combination given the last six hours.
His white hair was matted. His eyes were open but not quite focused, like a man trying to read in a moving vehicle. He was holding the remains of the IV port in his free hand, examining it with the expression of someone who had woken up in bad situations often enough to have developed a rating system.
He looked up when Riko came through the door.
For a moment neither of them said anything.
Then Riko crossed the remaining distance in four steps and grabbed the front of the stupid white gown with both hands, and Dokja, to his credit, didn't flinch. Just looked down at the kid with those sharp, not-quite-focused eyes.
"You died," Riko said. His voice came out smaller than he intended.
"Apparently," Dokja said.
"You died and it was stupid and you scared the hell out of me."
"Language."
"THAT'S A DOLLAR IN THE SWEAR JAR," Riko said, which was exactly what Dokja had said to him in the alley on day one, and something about the symmetry of it made Dokja's expression do something complicated.
He put a hand on top of Riko's head. Briefly. The way you do when words are the wrong shape for what you mean.
"I'm here," he said. Simple. No strategy behind it.
Riko let go of the gown. Stepped back. Reassembled himself with the efficiency of a kid who had learned young that falling apart was a luxury.
"You look terrible," Riko said.
"I feel terrible." Dokja looked around the morgue with slow, methodical attention. His eyes landed on the medical technician still frozen in the corner. Then on the cracked pod. Then on the second pod across the room, Pod 7, which was also cracked, also open, and also empty.
"Where's the other one," he said.
The other one was sitting on the floor against the far wall. He was young, maybe mid-twenties, with a crooked grin that looked like it had been there so long it had become structural. Covered in melting frost, currently eating a nutrition bar he had apparently located, acquired, and unwrapped in the thirty seconds since waking up from permanent biological termination.
He looked up at Koshva and Wrench with the easy, untroubled expression of a man who had decided whatever was happening was probably fine.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," Koshva said, because what else do you say.
"Jax," Wrench said. Her voice had lost its professional edge. Just for a second. Just enough.
Jax looked at her. The crooked grin got wider. "You look older."
"You've been dead for eight months."
"I was in stasis."
"Po-tay-to, po-tah-to." But she crossed the room and grabbed his arm, checking his pulse, his eyes, running her own diagnostic the way she'd probably run it a thousand times in eight months of planning.
He let her. Ate his nutrition bar. "How bad is it out there?"
"Bad."
"Scale of one to ten."
"Eleven," Koshva said. "We have about ninety seconds before this wing goes into full lockdown."
Jax finished the bar. Looked around. His eyes landed on Dokja. "Is that one a god?"
"Allegedly," Koshva said.
"Cool," Jax said, with complete sincerity.
Then the morgue door buckled. Not opened. Buckled. The magnetic locks engaging from the outside, which meant someone had realized what was in this room and decided containment came first.
Wrench was already moving. "The maintenance tunnel. Now. Me, Riko, Koshva. Single file, don't stop, don't talk."
She looked at Dokja and Jax. The look said everything. The tunnel was planned for three. Three specific people with three specific clearance signatures. Two extra bodies, one of whom was officially dead and the other officially more dead, would collapse the whole route the second the system flagged the discrepancy.
"The tunnel's out for you two," she said flatly. "I'm sorry. Figure something out."
Jax looked at her. Then at the room. Then at the ceiling, the walls, the single reinforced window on the far side of the morgue that looked out over the station's lower plaza, thirty feet below.
Dokja had already looked at the window. He'd looked at it approximately four seconds after waking up, catalogued it, and filed it under 'last resort' while he was still sitting on the cracked pod. The window was reinforced polymesh. Probably rated for vacuum exposure. Definitely not rated for whatever he currently was.
'Last resort just became first resort,' he thought. 'Story of my life.'
"Go," he said to Wrench.
She hesitated for exactly one second, which from her was practically a emotional breakdown. Then she grabbed Riko by the collar and pulled him toward the maintenance access. Koshva followed, throwing one look back over his shoulder.
"Don't do anything stupid," Koshva said.
"I died six hours ago," Dokja said. "My threshold for stupid has significantly shifted."
The maintenance door sealed behind them.
Silence. Just Dokja, Jax, the frozen medical technician still pressed against the wall, and thirty feet of open air between a polymesh window and the lower plaza.
Jax finished his nutrition bar. "So," he said, looking at the window. "You got a plan?"
"I've got an observation," Dokja said, walking toward it. His legs were steadier now. The Another Star was doing something to his system, burning through the fog of six hours dead with the efficiency of something that had no interest in being subtle. "That window opens inward. Emergency ventilation override. There's a manual release on the left side of the frame."
Jax looked at the window. Then at him. "We're thirty feet up."
"I know."
"In patient gowns."
"I know."
"And you want to go out the window."
"I want to go out the window," Dokja confirmed.
Jax was quiet for a moment. Then the crooked grin came back, wider than before, the grin of a man who had been dead for eight months and had apparently come back with absolutely nothing left to lose.
"I've made worse calls," he said.
Dokja hit the manual release. The window swung inward with a pressurized hiss, and the noise of the lower plaza flooded in. Voices, transit hum, the distant mechanical rhythm of a functioning station that had no idea two men in hospital gowns were about to drop into its afternoon.
Dokja looked down. Thirty feet. A wide decorative ledge at the fifteen foot mark, then a maintenance awning, then the plaza floor.
'Survivable,' he thought. 'Probably.'
He looked at the medical technician, who had not moved, spoken, or apparently breathed in the last four minutes.
"You didn't see anything," Dokja said.
The technician nodded with the enthusiasm of a man who had fully committed to that position and intended to maintain it for the rest of his career.
"Good."
He climbed out the window.
The fall was exactly as undignified as thirty feet in a patient's gown suggested it would be. He hit the ledge, absorbed it badly, bounced off the maintenance awning with a sound like a drum, and landed in the plaza in a crouch that he immediately ruined by falling sideways onto one knee.
He stayed there for a second. People stared.
'Fine,' he thought. 'Everything is fine. I've had worse mornings. I've had this morning.'
Jax landed next to him two seconds later, significantly more gracefully, which was irritating.
"Not bad," Jax said, dusting frost off his gown.
"Don't," Dokja said.
Above them, three floors up, a lockdown alarm finally started to wail.
Dokja straightened up. Looked at the crowd staring at two men in hospital gowns in the middle of the lower plaza. Looked at the station exits. Looked at the direction Wrench's tunnel would let out, three blocks east.
'One thing at a time,' he thought. 'First, clothes. Second, not getting caught. Third, a very long conversation with Koshva about the concept of adequate planning.'
He started walking.
"Where are we going?" Jax asked, falling into step beside him with the easy adaptability of someone who had decided Dokja was the most interesting thing in the room and intended to follow him until proven otherwise.
"East," Dokja said. "And we need to find a vending machine."
"...Why a vending machine?"
Dokja thought about the Another Star. About what Wrench had said. About a Class 4 catalyst dissolving on contact with divine essence and feeding it instead of restarting it, like a match thrown into a fuel tank.
'Something changed when I died,' he thought. 'Something came back different. I can feel it, sitting at the back of my skull like a word I can't quite remember.'
"I'm hungry," he said.
Jax accepted this completely. "Fair enough."