The lockdown alarm was still wailing three floors up when Dokja noticed him.
Not because he stood out. That was the thing. He didn't stand out at all, which in the middle of a plaza full of people craning their necks at a blaring alarm and two men in hospital gowns, was its own kind of impossible.
Elias Vance was standing at the edge of the plaza near a synth-caff vendor, white coat, slight frame, hands folded in front of him. Not watching the alarm. Not watching the crowd. Watching Dokja.
Dokja stopped walking.
'He was in the morgue,' he thought. 'He saw the pods. He saw Riko come through the maintenance door. He should be giving a statement to a security team right now.'
He wasn't.
He was buying a synth-caff, accepting it from the vendor with a quiet thank you, and watching Dokja with those white eyes the way you watch something you've been waiting a long time to see.
Jax followed Dokja's gaze. "Who's that?"
"Morgue staff," Dokja said. "Apparently."
"He's staring at you."
"I noticed."
"Is that normal?"
'Nothing about him is normal,' Dokja thought. He'd catalogued Vance in the morgue the same way he catalogued everything, automatic, instinctive, the habit of a man who'd spent a lifetime reading rooms. And something about Vance had refused to be catalogued. Every detail was too clean. Too considered. The timid posture, the plain coat, the careful smallness of every movement. It was the performance of someone who had practiced being forgettable until it became reflex.
Dokja knew that performance. He'd worn versions of it himself.
Jax was still looking. "He's coming over."
"I know."
"We're in hospital gowns."
"I know."
"Should we run?"
Dokja watched Vance cross the plaza toward them. Unhurried. Synth-caff in hand. The crowd parted for him without seeming to notice they were doing it.
"No," Dokja said.
Vance stopped three feet away. Up close his eyes were worse. Not threatening, exactly. Just deeply, fundamentally wrong in the way of something that had replaced what eyes were supposed to be with something that served the same function but had different priorities. They moved across Dokja's face with a quiet, thorough attention.
"You look better than I expected," Vance said pleasantly. "Given the circumstances."
"The circumstances being that I was dead."
"The circumstances being that you were dead and someone used a Class 4 catalyst to restart you." He tilted his head slightly. "How does it feel?"
"Like a question I'm not going to answer."
The small smile. "Fair." He glanced at Jax. "And you. Stasis for eight months. Any cognitive drift? Memory fragmentation?"
Jax blinked. "...I'm fine?"
"Good. The Another Star metabolizes differently in a standard reboot. Cleaner. Less risk of cascade." He looked back at Dokja. "Yours was not a standard reboot."
"So I've been told."
"You've been told the surface of it," Vance said, still pleasant, still quiet. "What you haven't been told is that the catalyst didn't just restart you. When a Class 4 substrate contacts a Class 2 divine signature it dissolves. You know this. What you don't know is what it dissolves into." He sipped his synth-caff. "It doesn't disappear. It converts. The catalyst breaks down into raw essence and your body absorbs it. All of it. You didn't just come back, Dokja Choi. You came back with everything the Another Star was carrying."
The plaza noise felt very far away suddenly.
'That's what's sitting at the back of my skull,' Dokja thought. 'That's the word I couldn't remember.'
"What was it carrying," he said. Not a question. A demand dressed as one.
Vance considered him for a moment with those white eyes. The careful, thorough consideration of a man reading something much smaller than a person, down to the grain.
"The Another Star isn't a revival catalyst," he said finally. "It's a vessel. Someone put something inside it before it went into that machine. Something they needed to move without the Authority noticing." He paused. "You absorbed it when you came back. Whatever it was, it's yours now. Permanently."
Dokja stared at him.
Jax raised his hand slightly. "I had half the bottle."
"You had the carrier fluid," Vance said. "Clean. Whatever was stored inside it had already settled into the denser half. His half." He nodded at Dokja. "Someone planned this very carefully. I'm just not certain they planned for him to die first."
The alarm above them shifted pitch. A second tone joining the first, which meant they'd escalated from lockdown to active search.
Vance glanced upward with mild interest, then back at Dokja. "You should go. They'll have facial recognition on the plaza feeds within four minutes." He reached into his coat pocket and produced a small, flat data chip, holding it out. "There's an address on this. A place the Authority's grid doesn't reach. I imagine your friends are already looking for somewhere to regroup."
Dokja didn't take it yet. "Why are you helping us."
"I'm not helping you," Vance said. The pleasant smile didn't change. "I'm curious about you. There's a difference." His white eyes held Dokja's for a moment, that quiet, cataloguing attention running its full depth. "You're the first Class 2 Deviation I've encountered who came back from biological termination carrying foreign essence with no visible degradation. That's not something I've seen before. I would like to see what happens next."
He held the chip out another inch.
Riko's voice from somewhere behind Dokja, from the direction of the maintenance exit three blocks east, Wrench and Koshva and Riko emerging right on schedule.
"Dokja." Riko's voice. Flat. That certain street-kid certainty. "Don't."
Dokja heard him. Filed it. Looked at Vance's hand, the chip, those white eyes watching him with the patient interest of someone who had already seen how this moment ended and found it satisfying.
He took the chip.
"Don't follow us," Dokja said.
"I won't need to," Vance said simply.
He turned and walked back toward the synth-caff vendor, unhurried, forgettable, already dissolving back into the texture of the plaza crowd.
Dokja closed his fingers around the chip.
'Someone planned this very carefully,' he thought. 'Someone put something in that bottle and put that bottle in that machine and waited.'
'The question is whether they were waiting for me specifically.'
'The worse question is how long.'