Chapter 96| The Only World I Know

Chapter 96: Chapter 96| The Only World I Know

Damian felt the number and felt the window and felt the twelve minutes contracting around the conversation he needed to have in them. He looked at the drawings on the wall. At the pathway maps. At twenty two years of self-directed research produced by someone who had been doing alone what his mother had been doing from inside Facility Four.

"There’s something I need to tell you," he said. "About our mother."

His sibling went very still.

Not the operational stillness of someone preparing to respond. Something deeper. The stillness of someone for whom that word had always carried a specific weight and who was suddenly aware that the weight was about to change shape.

"She’s alive," Damian said. "She’s been inside Facility Four for thirty years. And she has been working toward this moment. Toward you and me finding each other, for fifteen of those thirty years."

The stillness held.

Then his sibling looked at the drawings on the wall. At the pathway maps. At the lamp on the desk. At the books with their broken spines. At the frosted window high on the wall that had been the boundary of his world since before he could form a memory of anything else.

Then he looked at Damian.

"You’re a stranger," he said. Not unkindly. Just precisely. The tone of someone stating a fact that had weight behind it. "You came through my door ten minutes ago. You have the same eyes as me and you’re telling me our mother is alive and has been working toward this for fifteen years." He looked at the room. At everything in it. "And you want me to walk out of here with you."

Damian said nothing.

"I’ve been in this room for twenty two years," his sibling said. "This is the only world I know. The people here — the researchers, the staff, even the ones I don’t particularly like. They’re the only people I’ve ever known." A pause. "You’re asking me to leave all of that with someone I met ten minutes ago."

Kira appeared in the doorway.

"Eight minutes left," she said quietly.

His sibling looked at Kira. At Elena. At Damian.

"Eight minutes for what?" he asked.

"Before the window closes," Damian said. "Before we have to leave whether you come or not."

His sibling looked at him for a moment with the dark brown eyes that were Damian’s eyes in someone else’s face. Then he looked at the room. At the drawings. At everything it contained.

Then back at Damian.

"Then you have eight minutes," he said. "To give me a reason."

Eight minutes.

Damian looked at his sibling and his sibling looked at him and the room held the specific quality of a space that had been one person’s entire world for twenty two years and was now being asked to be something else.

He pulled the chair from the desk and sat down across from his sibling who had sat on the edge of the bed with his hands on his knees and the expression of someone who had made a decision to listen and was holding that decision in place with some effort.

"Eight minutes," his sibling said. "Start."

Damian started.

Not with the operational picture. Not with Nexarion or the termination authorization or the extraction team or any of the things that were true and relevant and completely wrong for this conversation. He started where the story actually started — with a woman who had been sixteen years old when the Prior Collective found her and had spent two years being part of something that believed in what it was doing and had spent thirty years inside a box that wasn’t supposed to allow for anything and had spent fifteen of those thirty years doing the thing she’d always done anyway.

Working.

He told his sibling about Aria Laine.

Not everything, eight minutes wasn’t everything. The shape of it. Who she was before Nexarion found the Collective. What she went back for in the archive room and why. What she’d been building inside Facility Four for fifteen years using their resources and their classification system and their complete failure to understand what they were actually funding. The research protocol. The Dual Axiom pathway documentation. The cross-reference between AL-001 and SB-002 that Elena had found in a routine audit eight months ago.

His sibling listened.

He listened the way he’d been listening since Damian came through the door. With the focused total attention of someone who had been alone with questions for a very long time and was now receiving something that might be answers and was not yet certain whether to trust the source.

"She knows about me," his sibling said. When Damian got to the cross-reference.

"She accessed your file six weeks ago," Damian said. "From inside Facility Four. Through a channel that shouldn’t exist." He held his sibling’s gaze. "She’s been watching both of us for as long as she’s had the access to do it."

His sibling looked at the drawings on the wall.

Damian looked at them too. At the pathway maps. At the years of work they represented. The same work his mother had been doing from inside Facility Four, the same work Eren had been doing from outside, rendered here in pencil and ink on a facility wall by someone who had no reference material and no teacher and no knowledge that anyone else was working on the same question from a different position.

"You’ve been mapping the Voltis pathway," Damian said.

"For eleven years," his sibling said. "Since I understood what it was." He looked at the drawings. "The facility researchers know I have an element. They don’t understand it. Their documentation on Voltis-class Subjects is incomplete. There aren’t many of us and the ones they’ve had access to weren’t cooperative about being studied." He paused. "I was cooperative. Up to a point."

"What point," Damian said.

His sibling looked at the ink drawings. The newest ones, the most precise. "The point where I understood that what I was giving them was less than what I was keeping," he said. "The pathway maps I showed them were accurate. The ones on this wall are complete."

Damian looked at the wall.

The ones on the wall were considerably more detailed than anything he’d seen in Nexarion’s research documentation. Not just the Voltis primary pathway. The secondary element architecture too, the sealed portion, mapped from the inside with the specific precision of someone who had been living alongside something for eleven years and had learned its texture.