POV: Nova
The medic who checked me over was Powerless.
I noticed that first. She had no eye glow, no ability hum, no faint static in the air around her. Just a woman in her forties with steady hands and a no-nonsense manner who cleaned the scrapes on my palms and asked me to follow her finger with my eyes and told me I was dehydrated and needed to eat something real.
I noticed it because in the world I grew up in, Powerless people did not get the skilled jobs. They got the dangerous ones. The dirty ones. The ones nobody powered wanted.
Here she was the medic.
I filed that away and kept looking around.
The compound was enormous. That was the only word for it. Hidden under an industrial complex that looked abandoned from outside, the inside was something else entirely levels connected by staircases and walkways, rooms branching off in every direction, the hum of generators and equipment running underneath everything like a heartbeat. Powered operatives moved through the main corridors with purpose. But so did people without that eye glow. Mechanics. Cooks. A man carrying a sleeping toddler down a hallway at what had to be close to three in the morning, rubbing the child's back, not looking at anyone.
Nobody looked at the Powerless staff the way people looked at them outside.
Like they were less.
Nobody looked at them like that at all.
I did not know what to do with that. I had lived my whole life being looked at like I was less, and I had built a version of myself that could take that look and not show what it did to me. Standing somewhere that did not have that look felt strange. Like taking off shoes I had forgotten I was wearing.
Mira sharp-faced, quick-eyed, clearly the second most important person in this building showed Sera to a room first. Sera was barely awake, operating on pure autopilot. She stopped at the door and turned back and found me in the corridor and said, very quietly, "Thank you." Just that. Then she went inside.
I stood there for a moment.
Then Zane was beside me.
Not close. He kept a careful distance, which I had already noticed he always did like he had a personal boundary of about three feet and maintained it with everyone. He had changed into a clean shirt at some point in the last hour. His eyes were still doing that faint gray glow but quieter now, like a screen on low power.
He showed me to a room at the end of the corridor. Small but clean. A bed, a lamp, a door that locked from the inside. My own lock. That detail hit me somewhere unexpected.
"You can stay until it is safe to move," he said from the doorway. "Mira will get you what you need in the morning."
"I do not need a keeper," I said.
"I know."
"Then we understand each other."
"Not entirely." He leaned against the door frame, arms crossed, unhurried. "The collectors you ran from tonight you saw their operation. Their routes. Their faces. You can identify at least four of their people."
I opened my mouth.
He kept going.
"They will know that. And they will want to make sure you cannot repeat any of it to anyone who matters." He watched my face. "You are not a prisoner here. But if you walk out of this compound tonight, you will not last forty-eight hours before they find you."
I hated that he was right.
I hated it with a specific and focused hatred.
"Fine," I said.
"Fine you will stay?"
"Fine you made a valid point." I met his eyes. "Do not mistake that for trust."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth again that almost-thing that was not quite a smile. "I would not dream of it," he said.
He left.
I closed the door and locked it and stood in the middle of the room and breathed.
Then I did what I always did in a new space. I mapped it. Door one entrance, one exit. Walls solid. Vent upper left corner, same size as the one in the holding room, too small for a body. Ceiling no panels. Window one, small, ground level based on the angle of what little I could see outside. Probably openable from inside.
Three possible exits. Door, window, vent the last one useless but noted anyway.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
The compound was quiet now in the way large places got quiet in the middle of the night not silent, just lower. The hum of equipment. Distant voices somewhere above. The sound of this place continuing to run even when most of it was asleep.
I thought about Reo.
I thought about him running down the street.
I thought about him waking up tomorrow in the neighbor's apartment or wherever he had ended up, and turning on the news or checking his phone, and not knowing where I was or if I was alive or what had happened after the van pulled away.
I would find a way to reach him tomorrow. I would figure it out.
I lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling and told myself to sleep because sleep was fuel and I needed fuel and falling apart was still not an option.
I was almost there that blurry edge where thinking starts to dissolve when I heard it.
A sound.
Small. Quiet. From the direction of the door.
I was upright before I finished processing what it was. On my feet, facing the door, heart going fast.
On the floor, just inside the gap at the bottom of the door, was a piece of paper. Folded once. White.
I stared at it for a full five seconds.
Then I crossed the room and picked it up and unfolded it.
The handwriting was small and careful. Like someone had taken their time. Like they had wanted to be sure every word was legible.
Four lines.
Leave the compound. You are not safe here. You are not safe anywhere near him. They are already watching you.
I read it three times.
Then I looked at the door. Then the window. Then back at the note.
Mira had walked these corridors. The operatives slept here. The compound was locked down Zane had said it himself, his location was his most protected secret.
Someone inside had written this.
Someone who knew who I was, who knew which room I was in, who knew enough to warn me or who wanted me scared enough to run.
I could not tell which.
I folded the note and pressed it flat in my palm and sat back down on the bed and looked at it.
They are already watching you.
I did not sleep after that.
I sat with my back against the headboard and my eyes on the door and the note in my hand and I thought about the two things that scared me most right now.
The first was whoever had written this.
The second was the reason I was not leaving.
And I was not entirely sure the second one was only about the collectors.