Distance did not make the system quieter.
It made it curious.
Tae-Hyun felt it the moment he stepped into his reassigned sector. The air carried a sharper awareness. Sensors tracked him longer. Doors paused before opening, as if reconsidering.
The building was no longer accommodating him.
It was studying him.
His new assignment placed him near one of the internal transit rings, where biological materials and personnel were routed between sealed zones. The work was simple. Monitoring flow. Clearing minor faults. Standing inside a part of the structure most people never noticed.
Which made it perfect.
And dangerous.
Without Eun-chae near him, the hum no longer settled easily. It spread wider through his perception, brushing against things he had previously ignored.
The heartbeat of the facility.
The electrical whisper inside the walls.
The slow, layered breathing of hundreds of contained lives.
He could feel the inner wing even from here.
And something beneath it.
Something deeper.
Something old.
He exhaled slowly and focused inward, trying to pull the hum back into a tighter configuration.
It resisted.
Instead, it sharpened.
A thin, precise awareness extended outward.
And for the first time since W-03, he felt a biological presence react to him before he approached it.
A sealed transport unit rolled past on its automated track.
The moment it drew near, the internal signature inside it shifted.
Not violently.
Alertly.
Tae-Hyun stopped.
The unit paused too.
That had not been programmed.
A soft chime sounded from his wrist band.
Unscheduled bio-response detected.
He stared at the unit.
Then, quietly, he stepped back.
The unit resumed its path.
The band dimmed.
Around him, the corridor returned to its neutral stillness.
But the sensation remained.
Distance was doing something to him.
Not weakening.
Reorganizing.
Across the facility, Eun-chae discovered that distance did something different to her.
They had moved her to an upper research wing built closer to the surface. The walls were lighter. The corridors wider. And the people…
More attentive.
Too attentive.
Her new room overlooked a controlled marine inlet through a reinforced viewing wall. Pale water moved constantly beyond it, reflecting slow patterns across the ceiling at night.
Beautiful.
And deeply unsettling.
Her work sessions here focused less on alignment and more on stimulation. Sensory exercises. Pattern response tests. Long periods of observation where she was asked to describe what she felt rather than what she measured.
"Your responsiveness has increased," one of the doctors told her during an evaluation. "Your perception range has widened."
Eun-chae sat on the examination table, swinging one foot slightly above the floor.
"That sounds like a compliment," she said.
The man smiled thinly. "It is. Mostly."
She arched a brow. "Mostly is never comforting."
One of the assistants hid a small smile.
The doctor cleared his throat and returned to his tablet.
Despite everything, despite where she was, a quiet humor still lived in her.
It surprised even her.
What unsettled her more was what happened when the sessions ended.
When the rooms emptied.
When the systems dimmed.
When no one was instructing her nervous system what to do.
That was when she felt it.
The space.
The absence.
And inside that absence, something new.
Her internal field no longer waited.
It moved.
Sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she sensed faint biological echoes far beyond her room.
Transit corridors.
Storage rings.
Even regions she had never been taken to.
And always, threaded through it…
him.
Not as a presence.
As a pull.
She pressed two fingers to her temple and exhaled.
"Great," she muttered. "Now I'm haunted by a biotech ghost."
A technician passing the doorway glanced in. "Did you say something, Subject E—"
"Nothing," she replied quickly. "Just appreciating the decor."
The technician hesitated, confused by the dry tone.
Then walked on.
Eun-chae lay back on the table and stared at the ceiling.
"If this is what separation is supposed to do," she whispered, "they miscalculated."
The first real warning came twelve hours later.
Tae-Hyun was recalibrating a junction console when the hum inside him surged without external trigger.
Not broadly.
Directionally.
He froze.
The sensation sharpened, threading inward like a pulled wire.
And then he felt it.
Pain.
Not his.
Distant.
Compressed.
Familiar.
His breath stilled.
Eun-chae.
He didn't think.
He moved.
The hum aligned instantly, narrowing his awareness along the faint biological signature he now recognized as hers.
It pulled him toward the transit ring.
The band at his wrist flickered.
Yellow.
Amber.
He broke into a measured walk, then faster, passing through a corridor he wasn't assigned to, then another.
"Han Jae-Min," a voice called behind him. "You're outside your—"
He didn't stop.
The hum responded.
Somewhere in the system, doors hesitated.
One slid open before its light changed.
Another delayed its lock cycle by half a second too long.
Enough.
He followed the pull.
Up.
Toward the upper research wing.
By the time he reached the outer perimeter of her sector, his breathing was steady, but the internal lattice had tightened into something he had never felt before.
Focus.
Edge.
Readiness.
He reached a sealed partition.
Beyond it, voices carried.
Urgent.
Controlled.
"Her readings are spiking again."
"Neural harmonics are destabilizing."
"She wasn't like this yesterday."
Tae-Hyun placed his palm flat against the glass.
Inside him, the hum surged.
And far beyond the wall, something answered.
In the chamber beyond, Eun-chae gripped the edge of the table as another wave moved through her system. Her vision blurred briefly, not from pain, but from too much information arriving at once.
"I can't shut it out," she said, forcing her voice steady. "Whatever you're stimulating… it's not staying contained."
"That's exactly what we're testing," the doctor replied.
"That's not what scares me," she said.
A sharp inhale.
Then, suddenly—
Stillness.
The pressure eased.
The noise inside her field thinned.
Her breath slowed.
She lifted her head.
And felt him.
Close.
Closer than he should have been allowed to be.
Her eyes turned to the partition.
"Tae-Hyun," she whispered.
On the other side of reinforced glass, he stood with his hand against the surface, his expression controlled, his eyes anything but.
The system chimed.
Alerts rippled.
But for the space of one suspended second, nothing moved.
And in that second, both of them understood something with absolute clarity.
Distance had not weakened what existed between them.
It had sharpened it.
And whatever was waking inside them…
was no longer waiting for permission.