Kazuki looked at the gold disc in Aeva's palm.
"Ask the suit," Darius said again, softer this time, like the words cost him something to repeat. "It already knows."
Kazuki closed his eyes. He didn't need the visor for this anymore the suit had stopped needing the visor days ago.
What does it do?
The Core answered the way it always did now. Not words exactly. A shape forming behind his eyes.
[DESIGNATION: CONVERGENCE KEY.]
[FUNCTION: PARTIALLY CLASSIFIED.]
Classified by who?
A pause. Longer than usual. Long enough that Kazuki almost opened his eyes before the answer came.
[BY HER.]
Kazuki opened his eyes and looked at Aeva.
She was still staring at the disc, unaware or pretending to be unaware that he'd just asked his own chest a question about her.
"What did it say?" she asked, without looking up.
"That it's classified." He paused. "By you."
Her thumb stopped moving over the groove.
"I don't know what that means," she said. Her voice was very careful. The voice of someone deciding, in real time, whether a sentence was true.
Kazuki didn't push. He'd learned that from her you didn't dig at the thing she was holding back. You just let her know you'd noticed there was something to hold.
Across the corridor, Darius made a sound that wasn't quite a cough.
The black lightning that had been tracing lazy arcs across his collarbone all night suddenly forked — down his arm, over his knuckles, bright enough that Kenji flinched back half a step.
"Darius." Rina was already moving.
"I'm fine." He wasn't. His voice had dropped an octave, gone rough at the edges. "Giving away the disc cost more than I told you it would."
"How much more?" Elena asked, two fingers already against his throat, counting something.
"Enough that you should leave in the next ninety seconds." His head tipped back against the concrete. His eyes had gone glassy, unfocused, the way they had the first night — except this time he didn't blink it away. "I'm not being dramatic. I can feel the window closing. Go."
"We're not leaving you like this," Kazuki said.
"You're not leaving me at all." His mouth twisted into something that wasn't quite a smile. "I move locations every night. I'll still be breathing tomorrow. Probably." He looked at Elena's hand on his throat. "Doctor. Let go of me and go count something that matters more."
Elena held his gaze a second longer, then withdrew her hand.
That was when the tunnel behind them lit up orange.
Not an explosion worse. The low, patient hum of active thermal scanners, sweeping the maintenance level in slow arcs. Kazuki knew that sound. He'd heard it from inside a warehouse a lifetime ago, before he understood what it meant to be hunted by something that didn't get tired.
"Glitchborn," Aeva said, already at the mouth of the corridor. "Patrol unit. Not here for us routine sweep." A beat. "Forty meters out and closing."
"They'll walk right past," Kenji said, reaching for his mask. "Unless something in this corridor is generating a signature they weren't scanning for an hour ago."
Everyone looked, without meaning to, at the disc still glowing in Aeva's hand.
"Kill the light," Kazuki said.
"I don't know how."
The orange sweep crept closer, painting the walls in slow, searching stripes.
Kazuki made the decision the way he'd learned to make them lately fast, without asking permission from the part of him that wanted more time to think.
He folded her hand shut around the disc.
The light didn't die. It went from a glow to a glow behind something which was almost worse, like watching a flashlight get swallowed instead of switched off.
"That's not fixing it," she said.
"It's buying us a few seconds." He looked at Darius, then at Rina. "Get him up. We move now, quiet, or we move in ten seconds, loud."
They got exactly six of those seconds.
Then a Glitchborn unit rounded the corner into the wrong stretch of tunnel at the wrong moment, and its optical array found five heat signatures where its patrol route said there should be zero.
It didn't hesitate. That was the thing about the Glitchborn the sleek Season 1 soldiers never had — no protocol, no warning shouted down the corridor. Just a rifle already rising.
Kazuki was already moving.
He didn't reach for the suit case on his belt. There wasn't time, and some distant, calculating part of him — the part that scared him a little lately, with how calm it had gotten — understood there didn't need to be.
He crossed the distance in a blur that cracked the air, caught the rifle barrel a half-second before it fired, and bent it sideways with his bare hand. Metal shrieked. The drone's head swiveled toward him, too slow, always too slow, and he drove his shoulder into its chest hard enough to fold it backward into the wall.
It didn't go down clean. The impact tore a support strut loose from the ceiling, and for one ugly second the whole corridor groaned like it was reconsidering whether it wanted to keep existing.
"Move!" Aeva shouted, already hauling Darius's arm over her shoulder.
Kenji had his mask on. Rina had a knife out that hadn't been there a second ago. Elena grabbed the strap of Darius's ruined suit and pulled.
They ran.
Behind them, the drone twitched once against the wall, sparked, and went still — not destroyed, Kazuki registered distantly, just disabled, its chassis too damaged to relay a location before it lost power. That was something. That bought them the one thing Victor Vane's whole strategy depended on them never having.
Time nobody was watching.
They didn't stop until they were three blocks east, in the stairwell of a parking structure that smelled like rust and old rain, and even then nobody spoke for almost a full minute.
Darius slid down against the wall, breathing hard, the lightning finally settling back into slow, tired arcs.
"That," he said, "was not on my calendar."
"You're welcome," Kazuki said.
Darius almost laughed. It turned into a cough instead.
Aeva opened her hand. The disc had gone dark fully dark, not the patient dim glow it had before, like something in it had switched off rather than merely hidden.
"It reacted to the drone," she said quietly. "Not to being seen. To being a threat to me specifically." She looked up at him. "The suit called it a convergence key. Convergence of what?"
Kazuki didn't have an answer. Not one he was ready to say out loud, standing in a stairwell at one in the morning with Elena three feet away and a bug still sitting behind a monitor bank two blocks from here, waiting to hear whatever they said next.
"Not here," he said instead.
Aeva held his eyes a second, then nodded and closed her hand around the disc again.
Somewhere behind them, deep in the tunnels of District 3, a second patrol unit found the wreckage of the first and did the one thing the first drone never got the chance to do.
It sent a signal.
[To Be Continued...]