October 7, 2025 · Connections Black-Site, Levels 2 to 4 · 03:27
He came back through the cryo level with Manuela in his arms.
The blue LED strips were unchanged. The bodies were where he had left them. The cryo units hummed on, indifferent. Yuko Suzuki was in the alcove exactly where he had told her to be, the trench coat wrapped around her, the Glock held down in both hands with the safety on. She had done that herself, which told him something.
When she saw Manuela her posture changed—the held-breath quality of someone who had been hoping for a specific outcome and was now getting it. She said nothing.
"Portable cryo chambers," Alen said. "Is there a maintenance unit on this level?"
She nodded and moved immediately—trench coat trailing—to a recessed storage panel in the far wall of the circular chamber. Her fingers went to the access pad without hesitation, muscle memory from years in Umbrella's underground systems taking over before conscious thought could interfere. The panel slid open. Two portable cryo units on wheeled bases, matte-white, battery-powered, twelve-hour capacity.
She moved beside him and they loaded Manuela into the nearer unit together. Yoko worked the neck brace, the IV connections, the temperature calibration with the same quiet efficiency she had used to map the guard rotation in three weeks of captivity. She checked the vitals read-out on the side panel and stepped back.
"Sealed," she said. "Stable. T-Veronica rejection risk is minimal for the next twelve hours."
He closed the lid. The unit pressurised with a soft hiss.
"Stay behind me," he said. "Don't speak unless I ask you something."
She nodded. She kept the Glock pointed down.
∗ ∗ ∗
Level 4 was dimmer than the levels above—amber emergency strips instead of overhead LEDs, the walls wider, the ceiling lower. Heavy reinforced doors every fifteen metres. The air carried ozone and the specific metallic smell of high-voltage systems that had been running for decades. The Power Core's hum was different from the cryo units, deeper and more mechanical, the sound of something that existed at a fundamentally larger scale.
He stopped at the first corner. Reality-Lens: Patrol Team 4 at the Power Core console, seated, both men checking their phones. Twelve minutes into their downtime. The archive room behind them was empty. Fifteen-minute window.
He told Yuko to stay with the cryo unit in the stairwell shadow. Then he went.
The Power Core access door was reinforced steel, hydraulic-bolted, set flush into the corridor wall like a bank vault. The electronic lock was the facility's primary physical security. Under any other circumstances the correct approach would have been Trinity's backdoor protocol, same as every other lock in this building.
He had already decided not to do it that way.
The Uroboros integration came up in a surge—white tentacles erupting from beneath his tactical vest, thick, fast, controlled. One tentacle drove into the centre of the blast door with the full hydraulic force of the organic system behind it. The door buckled. Hydraulic bolts sheared. Hinges tore from the frame in a spray of sparks and twisted steel. The entire reinforced panel flew backward into the Power Core room and hit the far console with a crash that shook the level.
Both guards spun. Rifles rising.
He was through the doorway before they could aim. The bio-organic surge was already running, speed and force at the upper register. Thrust Punch, straight and clinical, into the first man's visor. It shattered. The guard was dead before he finished falling. The second fired three rounds that Alen phased through, emerged inside the guard's reach, and applied a rising axe kick that lifted the man off his feet and drove him into the wall. One follow-through strike ended it.
He dragged both bodies against the ruined doorway and looked at the Power Core.
A massive cylindrical reactor at the room's centre, thick cables running into the floor and ceiling, the whole system humming at the frequency of something that had never been turned off. He removed the compact demolition charge from his utility belt, placed it at the base of the primary coolant junction, and set the timer.
Twelve minutes.
He activated the comms link. "Bomb planted. Timer running. Put the ramp down. I'm leaving with both assets now."
Rebecca said, "Ramp down. Night-Wing is hot. Move."
He went back to the stairwell.
∗ ∗ ∗
They moved up at a measured pace—Alen pulling the cryo chamber, Yuko behind him in the trench coat, both of them silent. Past the dark of Level 3, past the frost of Level 2, through the access tunnel that led back to the surface blast door. The timer in his head counted down. Eleven minutes. Nine. The door hissed open when they reached it and the rain came in immediately, cold and heavy and normal.
Outside: the Black Forest at 03:50. Rain hammering the concrete apron. The Night-Wing on the helipad eight hundred metres east, running lights cutting through the downpour, ramp already extended and lit.
He wheeled the cryo unit up the ramp without slowing. Yuko followed. He secured the unit in the medical bay with two quick straps and confirmed the seal. The ramp closed behind them. He went forward to the controls.
The Night-Wing lifted off the moment the ramp locked.
He watched the hillside through the cockpit glass. The dead woods below, the facility entrance already invisible behind the vines and moss and rain. At exactly 04:02 the charge went.
A deep orange bloom erupted from the hillside—the blast door exploding outward, the entrance collapsing inward, secondary detonations rippling through the levels below as the Power Core failed and the secondary systems followed it. Fire licked up through the pines. The rain beat it down. Within forty seconds the entire hillside was smoke and settling debris, the forest already reclaiming the gap the way the Black Forest reclaimed everything that stopped moving.
Alen set course for the Frozen Lotus Temple. Manuela stable in the medical bay. Yuko in the jump seat, the trench coat still around her shoulders, watching the burning hillside until the Night-Wing banked and the treeline took it from view.
She said, "You're really not him."
"No," Alen said.
"But you're related."
"Yes."
She absorbed this. Outside, Germany at four in the morning was dark and wet and going by fast. She looked at the cryo unit through the medical bay window. At the vitals display showing Manuela's stable readout.
"She's been in their hands for months," Yoko said.
"She won't be in anyone's hands again except ours," Alen said. He made a small adjustment to the heading. "Get some sleep. It's a long flight."
She looked at him for a moment. Then she pulled the trench coat tighter around herself and closed her eyes.
The forest below went dark. The Night-Wing climbed above the weather ceiling and the rain became a grey ceiling below them and then disappeared entirely, and above it the sky was clear and full of stars.
— END OF CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE —