Aiden had forgotten how bright Orion's main atrium was.
Not interrogation-room glare. Not the engineered absence of Lysa's white room. A high, open space of glass and shielded steel where light came down in controlled sheets from a ceiling three stories up, designed by someone who understood that space and light could be weaponized without anyone needing to hold a weapon.
It was meant to make you feel small and safe simultaneously.
It did neither, today.
What it did was make him feel visible in a way that was difficult to distinguish from being seen. He had walked out of this building as a defector and was walking back in as something the official paperwork called a *subject*, which was the word they used when they didn't want to write *fugitive* on a scheduled debrief form.
He had spent months in the Network's compressed spaces, its borrowed rooms and maintenance corridors and a laundromat's back room. He had forgotten the scale of what he'd left.
