Chapter 97| Two Might Solve The Complete Picture

Chapter 97: Chapter 97| Two Might Solve The Complete Picture

"You know what the secondary element is," Damian said.

His sibling looked at him.

"Do you?" he replied, throwing back his exact question with an ambiguous expression.

"No," Damian said. "The seal makes it unclassifiable from outside."

His sibling was quiet for a moment. "Then we have something to talk about," he said. "When there’s time."

Kira appeared in the doorway.

"Five minutes," she said.

His sibling looked at her. Then at Damian.

"You said there were reasons to move quickly," he said. "What reasons."

"A termination authorization," Damian said. "Active across the full Nexarion network. They’ve decided I’m too dangerous to recover and too significant to leave outside their control." He paused. "When they finish drawing the connections between my escape and Facility Seven and now this. They’ll extend it."

"To me," his sibling said.

"Yes," Damian said. "Probably."

His sibling looked at the room. At the books. At the drawings. At the lamp on the desk that had been the light he’d read by for twenty two years.

"I have people here," he said. Not defensively. Just as a fact that needed to be on the table. "A researcher on the third floor who has been bringing me books for eight years. A maintenance worker who taught me to play chess three years ago. A staff member in the medical wing who.." He stopped. Looked at his hands. "They’re not Nexarion assets to me. They’re more than people."

"I know," Damian said.

"Leaving means leaving them," his sibling said.

"Yes," Damian said.

His sibling looked at the wall. At the pathway maps. At eleven years of work in pencil and ink.

"The seal on my secondary element," he said. "Your system... you said it was built to remove the seal on yours."

"Yes," Damian replied.

"Same architecture," his sibling said. "Same origin." He looked at the drawings. "Which means whoever built your system built it knowing about mine."

"Yes," Damian said. "Our mother. She’s been contributing to my seal degradation from inside Facility Four for fifteen years. The research protocol she’s been running, it’s built around both of us. She’s been working toward both seals from the inside."

His sibling was very still.

"She built a research program around seals she can’t access," he said slowly. "For children she’s never met. From inside a facility that doesn’t know what she’s actually doing." He looked at the drawings on the wall. At the pathway maps he’d built alone over eleven years. "She’s been doing the same thing I’ve been doing."

"Yes," Damian said.

"From the inside," his sibling said.

"Yes."

His sibling looked at the lamp. At the books. At the frosted window.

Kira appeared.

"Three minutes," she said. Her voice was even. Her eyes were on Damian. Reading the room the way she read everything, assessing whether the conversation was going where it needed to go in the time that remained.

His sibling looked at her. Then at Elena in the corridor beyond. Then at Damian.

"If I leave," he said. "The people here.... The researcher, the maintenance worker, the medical staff.. what happens to them when Nexarion realizes what happened in this wing."

Damian held his gaze.

He didn’t have a clean answer. The honest answer was that Nexarion’s response to a suppressed designation extraction would produce consequences for the people who had been in proximity to the Subject and he couldn’t fully predict what those consequences looked like. The honest answer was uncomfortable.

He gave it anyway.

"I don’t know exactly," he said. "What I know is that staying doesn’t protect them. If Nexarion extends the termination authorization to you the people in proximity to you become variables in that authorization regardless of whether you’re here or not." He held his sibling’s gaze. "Leaving doesn’t put them in danger. The authorization does. And the authorization is coming whether you walk out this door or not."

His sibling looked at him for a long moment.

Then he looked at the pathway maps on the wall.

At eleven years of work.

At the incomplete picture. The secondary element architecture mapped from the inside as far as the seal allowed, stopping at the boundary of what the seal permitted him to observe, the lines ending at a specific point on every diagram where the pathway simply became unreadable.

"She mapped the same boundary," he said quietly. More to himself than to Damian. "In her research protocol. The seal boundary." He looked at the drawings. "I saw her documentation once. A fragment, in a file I wasn’t supposed to access. The notation style was different from Nexarion’s standard format." He looked at Damian. "I thought it was a legacy document. Old research from before my time."

"It wasn’t," Damian said.

"No," his sibling added. "It wasn’t."

Kira appeared one final time.

"One minute," she said.

His sibling stood up.

Not quickly. Not dramatically. With the specific deliberateness of someone who had made a decision and was implementing it with the same methodical attention he applied to everything else.

He looked at the drawings on the wall one last time.

At the pathway maps. At eleven years of work in pencil and ink that ended at the same boundary on every diagram — the seal, the limit, the thing that had been placed there by the same hand that had placed it in Damian and that their mother had been working to remove from both of them for fifteen years from inside a facility four hundred kilometers away.

He looked at Damian.

"She mapped the boundary from the outside," he said. "I mapped it from the inside." A brief pause. "Between us we might have the complete picture."

Damian looked at the drawings.

Then at his sibling.

"Yes," he said. "We might."

His sibling picked up nothing from the room. Not the books. Not the notebook on the desk. Not any of the twenty two years of accumulated small decisions that had made the space livable.

Just himself.

He walked to the door.

Damian walked beside him.