elias pops out of the darkness
"why in such a hurry you guys just came here, sit, welcome your new base of operations"
Koshva had his hand on the doorframe when the darkness in the far corner of the room, the part of the ceiling the light hadn't fully committed to reaching, produced Elias Vance.
He didn't step out of it dramatically. He didn't materialize or descend. He was simply not there and then he was, the way a thought you'd been avoiding is suddenly just there, standing with his hands folded in front of him and his white coat pristine and his white eyes catching the light from Wrench's emitter in a way that made them glow very softly in the dark.
"Why in such a hurry?" he said pleasantly. "You just got here. Sit. Welcome to your new base of operations."
Nobody sat.
Nobody moved, actually, except Riko, who took one very small, very deliberate step backward until his back was against the doorframe. He didn't look surprised. He looked like a person who had been waiting for a specific thing to happen and was now watching it happen and finding no satisfaction in being right.
Dokja didn't move at all. He stood between Vance and the surgical corner with the particular stillness of a man recalculating everything he thought he knew about the last twelve hours.
'He was already here,' Dokja thought. 'He was here when we arrived. He watched us walk in. He watched us look at the room. He watched me pick up the instrument and read the notification and put it back down.'
'He let us reach the conclusion ourselves.'
"The extraction equipment," Dokja said. His voice came out level. He was proud of that. "That's yours."
"The room is yours," Vance said, with the mild correction of a man who finds imprecision mildly bothersome. "The equipment is for you. There's a difference." He tilted his head slightly, those white eyes moving across the group with their quiet, cataloguing attention. "I built this space for whoever was going to be carrying what you're carrying. I didn't know it would be you specifically until the plaza."
"And the bed," Koshva said, from somewhere behind Dokja. His voice had the tone of a man who was very tired and had just found a new reason to be more tired. "The freshly made bed."
"You died this morning," Vance said, looking at Dokja. "You needed somewhere to recover that wasn't a hospital or a service tunnel." He said it with complete reasonableness, the way you explain something to someone who is being unnecessarily suspicious of a perfectly logical series of decisions. "The sheets are clean. The pillow is a good one. I was quite particular about the pillow."
"You were particular about the pillow," Jax repeated.
"Yes."
Jax looked at Wrench. Wrench looked at the ceiling. The ceiling offered nothing.
"The instrument I picked up," Dokja said. "Divine Essence Extraction Tool. Prototype. Unused." He kept his eyes on Vance. "You built it to take out whatever the Another Star put into me."
"I built it to safely remove what was placed inside you by someone who used you as a courier without your knowledge or consent," Vance said. The pleasantness in his voice didn't change but something underneath it did, briefly, like a light shifting behind frosted glass. "There's a difference there as well."
"You keep saying that."
"Because precision matters." He unfolded his hands and gestured at the room, a calm, encompassing gesture. "You have nowhere safe to go. The Authority has your biometric signature flagged as a Class 2 Deviation. You're officially deceased, which creates its own complications. The Lower Sectors offer limited protection for a group of your size and visibility." He looked around at all of them. "This room exists outside the Authority's grid. It has been outside their grid for fourteen months. Nobody knows it's here except the people currently standing in it."
"And you," Riko said from the door.
Vance looked at him. That full, careful look. "And me," he agreed.
Riko held his gaze for three seconds. Then looked at Dokja.
Dokja looked at the room. The bed. The equipment. The ceiling that swallowed the light. He looked at his team, Koshva exhausted and suspicious, Wrench already running calculations behind her eyes, Jax reading the situation with that easy untroubled attention that was starting to feel like its own kind of unsettling, Riko with his back against the door and his instincts quietly screaming.
Then he looked at Vance.
"What do you want," Dokja said. Not the first time he'd asked. The first time Vance had been in a position where the question had teeth.
Vance considered him for a moment with those white eyes.
"To see what happens next," he said. Same answer as the plaza. Completely, infuriatingly consistent.
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only honest one I have at the moment." He tilted his head the other way. "I've been watching systems operate and fail for a very long time, Dokja Choi. I've seen gods and I've seen machines and I've seen the places where they intersect badly. What you are is something I haven't seen before." The pleasant expression didn't waver. "I find that I'm not willing to let it resolve without understanding it first."
The room was quiet for a long moment.
Dokja looked at the bed. The good pillow.
"If anyone in this room disappears," he said quietly, "or gets handed to the Authority, or ends up on one of those trays." He didn't finish the sentence. He just looked at Vance.
Vance nodded once. Serious, for the first time. "Understood."
Dokja turned to the room. "We're staying."
Koshva made a sound that wasn't quite a word.
"Objections," Dokja said, "can be filed with Koshva, who will not be accepting them either."
"That's not—" Koshva started.
"Thank you Koshva."
Koshva put his face in his hands. For what Dokja was fairly certain was a personal record.