The lock on his door was magnetic. He had known that since the second day.
The tell was in the sound — not a click when it sealed but a low, almost imperceptible hum that lasted half a second after the handle was released. Magnetic locks needed current to stay closed. Which meant they needed a circuit. Which meant, if you knew where to press, they could be reasoned with.
He had spent three evenings finding the right point on the doorframe. A small panel, flush with the wall, where the internal wiring ran closest to the surface. Last night he had pressed his thumb to it for long enough to feel the faint heat underneath.
Tonight he pressed harder.
The hum stuttered. The door gave half a centimetre.
He was out in four seconds.
Second hour past midnight. The facility breathed differently at this hour — slower, the daytime hum of occupied machinery replaced by something more skeletal. He moved through it with his weight distributed forward, each step placed rather than taken, keeping to the wall where the overhead lighting was weakest.
He had seven days of maps in his head. Guard rotation every hour.
Third level. Eastern corridor. Seventh door from the stairwell.
He had clocked it on day three — an escorted walk, the lead scientist pausing outside it for three seconds to exchange words with a technician. An involuntary pause. The kind that showed you where someone kept what they considered important. Lucien had noted the door, the lock type, and kept walking without looking back.
The key he'd lifted from a junior technician's coat pocket that morning, during the post-fight confusion, while everyone's attention was on the prisoner being carried off the floor.
The lock opened on the first try.
The room was larger than he'd estimated. Record banks floor to ceiling along the right wall. Specimen storage behind glass on the left, labelled containers in a precise grid, temperature-controlled and quietly humming. The lead scientist's workstation at the centre, organised stacks, and a secondary recording unit switched off beside it.
He went to the workstation first.
Second drawer. The compiled assessments — primary file and three days of supplementary data. He read three pages of it by the light coming under the door. Baseline measurements, Haki sensitivity estimates, reaction timing, projected development curves. Not just what he currently was. What he was likely to become, and how that becoming might be made useful.
He took the primary file and left the rest.
Then he crossed to the specimen storage and found his own samples in under two minutes. Two vials, filed under the date of the Daniel fight. He looked at them. Then at the rows of other names stretching the full length of the wall.
He stepped back to the analytical equipment along the rear wall. A centrifuge at the near end, solid and expensive. He took hold of it with both hands and pulled it sharply away from its housing. The internal coupling broke with a crack and a hard spray of sparks that fell across the base of the storage unit and caught the chemical residue on its casing.
Three seconds to a flame.
He picked up the file and left.
He was one floor down when the alarm went off.
Not the low functional tone he'd anticipated. A full blare, continuous, filling the stairwell and bouncing off concrete and making thinking marginally harder than it had been thirty seconds ago. Above him a door slammed open hard.
"Fire on three, eastern corridor, research section — all response units to three east."
He pressed into the alcove beside the landing door as two soldiers came down the stairs at a run, close enough that he caught their breathing. Neither looked sideways.
Second level corridor already filling — not soldiers, technicians and junior staff in various states of half-dressed urgency. Lucien walked against the flow with his head down and the file held close, moving in the only direction nobody else was. Two people glanced at him. Neither stopped.
A technician grabbed his arm. Young, wide-eyed. "Evacuation point, west corridor ground level, follow the green line."
"Right," Lucien said. "Thanks."
He followed the green line until the technician was out of sight.
The smoke reached him on the ground level — sharper than expected, the particular quality of burning chemical storage. The fire had found something cooperative in the specimen unit. He noted this, adjusted his estimate of how much of the eastern wing would exist by morning, and kept moving.
The garden corridor was ahead. Beyond it, the outer gate.
"Stop."
He stopped.
Two soldiers from the perpendicular corridor, hands on their weapons, eyes on the file under his arm.
"Facility's in emergency protocol. Where are you supposed to be?"
"Evacuation point. West corridor. I got turned around."
"This isn't the west corridor."
"I know. I just said I got turned around."
The taller one looked at the file. "What's that?"
"My research notes." He held it up without releasing it. "I didn't want them to burn."
Above them, something on the third level collapsed — felt through the floor before it was heard. The alarm kept blaring.
A half-second where both of them were looking up.
Lucien moved.
Two strikes, fast and sequential — the shorter one first because he was closer, a precise hit to the side of the neck that dropped him before he'd finished turning back. The taller one reached for his weapon. Lucien was already inside his reach, drove an elbow into his jaw, and caught him before he hit the floor. He lowered both of them quietly against the wall and kept moving.
A single guard at the outer gate, facing the facility, was distracted by the glowing building in the eastern windows. Lucien came up behind him without breaking stride and put him down cleanly — one hand over the mouth, sharp pressure to the right point, and the man's legs folded without a sound. He eased him to the ground, stepped over him, and tried the gate.
Locked.
He checked the guard's belt, found the release key, and opened it himself.
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1 Chapter For Every 50 Power Stones. Please Do Support.