Born to devour

Chapter 4: Seven Minutes

The assessment room is three doors down from the ward.

Small, functional, the kind of room that exists in every GRA facility without being on any public floor plan. A chair, a table, a wall-mounted scanner unit, overhead lighting that is slightly too bright. The official whose name I still do not know gestures me toward the chair with the practiced ease of someone who has done this enough times that it stopped feeling like anything.

I sit.

He runs the scanner.

It breaks faster than the ones in the ward. Not four seconds this time. Not even two. The moment the scanner head passes within range of my forearm the display spikes, a hard white line across the screen, and then the unit makes a sound like something structural giving way and the display goes black. Not blank. Black. The same black as my interface.

The official stares at it.

I watch him stare at it.

He tries a manual restart. The unit does not respond. He tries again. Nothing. He takes a step back from the equipment and looks at me with the expression of a man who arrived this morning expecting a routine anomaly flag and has found something that is not routine and is now recalculating what his morning looks like.

I give him the same expression I gave the technician. Mildly confused. Mildly apologetic.

He says: "Wait here."

He steps out of the room.

---

He does not close the door completely. A three inch gap, which is either an oversight or an assumption that I will stay where I was put. I stay where I was put and I listen to him make a phone call in the corridor.

I cannot hear the words. I can hear the shape of them. Short sentences, the rhythm of someone delivering information rather than having a conversation. A pause while the other end responds. Then more short sentences, slightly slower this time, the rhythm of someone receiving instructions they were not expecting and are writing down carefully.

Another pause.

He says something that has the cadence of a question. The answer he receives is longer than his question. He says something shorter. He disconnects.

His footsteps move back toward the assessment room door.

I am looking at the broken scanner when he comes back in. I have been looking at it the whole time. I look up when he enters.

He says: "We are going to need to bring in different equipment for the rescan. It may take some time to source." He says it with professional smoothness, the tone of someone managing a situation rather than explaining one. "If you would like to return to the ward while we arrange that, someone will come for you when we are ready."

I say: "Of course."

I stand. I walk back to the ward. He does not follow me immediately. Behind me I hear him make a second call.

---

Reina looks up the moment I come through the ward door.

I cross to her bed. I do not sit down. I keep my voice low and even and I tell her exactly what happened in the order it happened. The scanner breaking faster. The phone call I could not hear but could read. The second call starting before I cleared the doorway.

She listens without interrupting.

When I finish she says: "How long did the first call take."

"Approximately ninety seconds."

"And he came back with instructions."

"The rhythm suggested it."

She nods. She is already moving, swinging her legs off the bed with a controlled wince, reaching under the mattress for the tablet I now realize she put there when she got up earlier. She pulls out a bag from the same location, compact, already packed, because of course it is already packed, because she assessed this facility and its exits and her situation and the variables the moment she woke up and decided that a packed bag was the logical thing to have.

I say: "We need to leave today."

She says: "I know." She looks at herself and then at me. "I need ten minutes."

I say: "The official is making a second call."

She says: "Ten minutes."

She walks toward the bathroom at the far end of the ward. She walks steadily, no hurry in her pace, nothing that reads as urgency to anyone watching. The technicians on the floor have their attention on a patient three beds down who is asking loud questions about his discharge paperwork. Nobody is watching Reina.

I go back to my bed. I sit. I pick up my jacket and check the pockets the way someone checks pockets before discharge. Phone. Keys. Support license card. Everything I came in with.

I watch the ward door.

The official does not come back through it.

I watch the clock.

---

Seven minutes and forty seconds after she walked away, Reina comes back through the ward in different clothes, hair repinned, bag over one shoulder, tablet under her arm. She has changed the dressing on her left side, a fresh one, cleaner than the facility-applied version, which means she had supplies in that bag along with everything else.

She stops at my bed. She does not ask if I am ready. She looks at me and I stand up and that is sufficient.

We walk toward the ward door together.

Not fast. Facility-appropriate pace, the speed of people whose morning is proceeding normally. She nods once at the technician near the exit who looks up and opens his mouth and she says: "Discharge was processed during the night shift. We are just heading out." She says it with the specific certainty of someone who is not explaining themselves, just providing information that happens to answer a question.

The technician checks his tablet. His intake system is backed up from the night. He has eleven things flagged for review. He says: "Have a good morning."

We go through the door.

---

The corridor outside the ward is empty. We walk toward the main exit, past the administrative offices where I can see through the interior window a man in a gray uniform on a phone call. Not the official from the assessment room. Someone else. Someone with a different posture, standing rather than sitting, which means whoever the official called, they called someone who was not already in the building.

Reina glances at the window as we pass. Her pace does not change.

We go through the main doors.

---

Outside is a city going about its morning. The Pelham district is three zones east of here. From this distance you cannot see the clearance barriers or the GRA response vehicles. You can see a skyline that looks mostly normal except for the two spots where the horizon sits slightly wrong, a heaviness in the air above the incident coordinates that has not dissipated yet.

I walk and the city moves around me and the interface pulses quietly at the edge of my vision and I breathe air that is not disinfectant and I let myself have thirty seconds of simply being outside before I start thinking about the next problem.

Reina is beside me, matching pace, not talking. She is reading something on her tablet with her peripheral vision, the particular skill of someone who learned to do two things at once a long time ago.

We pass a hunter team on the corner of the first intersection.

Four of them, fresh off a clearance operation, still in field gear, the specific exhaustion on them that comes from a long night rather than a short intense one. They are talking among themselves in the way people talk when they are too tired to modulate their volume.

I hear most of it without trying.

One of them, a woman with a close-cropped system scar along her jawline, is saying: "I am telling you it was not standard behavior. Standard behavior is they push until you establish perimeter and then they look for a soft point. These ones did not look for soft points. They held the line they had."

The hunter beside her says: "They hold ground sometimes."

"Not like this. Not coordinated. I have been running clearance for four years and I have never seen F-ranks hold a formation." She shakes her head. "It was like someone told them where to be."

"You are overthinking it."

"Someone told them where to be," she says again, like saying it twice makes him take it seriously. "Something was directing them. I could feel it in the way they moved. They were not thinking. They were following."

Her partner says: "Write it in the debrief report and let the analysts figure it out."

"The analysts are going to say I am overthinking it."

"Then you are in good company."

They move on. Their voices drop below range.

I keep walking.

Beside me Reina has stopped reading her tablet. She is looking at the middle distance with an expression I have not seen on her before. Something between calculation and recognition, like something she already suspected just got one data point more real.

She does not say anything.

I do not ask.

We walk another half block before she opens her tablet again and starts a new page in whatever framework she is building. I see her write two words at the top before the angle shifts and I lose the screen.

I do not ask about those either.

Some data points need time before they become information. I learned that from three years of carrying equipment for people who knew what they were doing and watching what they noticed and what they let sit.

The interface pulses.

I close my hand around the strap of my bag and keep walking.

---

My apartment is forty minutes from the facility on foot. We walk most of it without talking, which is not uncomfortable the way silence usually needs something done about it. It is the silence of two people who have enough to think about that the thinking fills the space words would otherwise occupy.

At the twenty minute mark Reina says: "Your system has nine unopened notifications."

"Ten now."

"What was the new one."

I look at it. I read it out loud. *[Integration function: locked. Unlock condition: first consume event. Note: integration stability is critical to host survivability. Recommend: do not exceed integration capacity.]*

She types something. She says: "Survivability. It is using that word specifically."

"Yes."

"That is a warning built into the base layer. Not a feature description. Someone was concerned enough about you dying from your own system that they made the first thing you see after consume is a warning about not dying from your system."

I think about my father writing that line into the system before I was born. What he must have known about what the system could do to a person who used it wrong. What he decided was worth including in the first layer of notifications and what was worth saving for later.

I say: "Thoughtful of him."

Reina makes a sound that is not quite a laugh but is in the same neighborhood. It is the first time I have heard anything like that from her. She goes back to typing almost immediately.

I file it anyway.