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Chapter 90: Ceiling
"You run the scanners," Ethan said."The Division built them. I've run them for fifteen years." Cain didn't look away. "You sat in one. Years ago.""Six seconds. A slip of paper.""'No ability detected.'" Cain said it quietly, like a line from a ledger. "Your sample's still in the archive. I pulled it the night your system woke. It told me nothing then either. I want you to know I looked."Ethan's hands had curled on his knees. He made them open. "I kept that slip. In a drawer. For years.""I'm sorry.""Don't." It came out harder than he meant. "Tell me what the scanners are for.""Not measuring. Any decent sensor can measure." Cain leaned back. "They're for finding. Someone wakes up near a school screening, a blood draw, a recruitment office. I made sure those were everywhere, and I made sure they were free.""So you find them first.""Before anything else does.""And then?""Then I keep them under the line." He said it without pride. "Registry, rank, deployment. Anyone who climbs to
Chapter 89: The Last Page
Ethan waited for the rest of the sentence. It never came.He sat with half a warning hanging in the dark behind his eyes, and the quiet it left was worse than the noise had been. The system had never stopped mid-word before. Either something had cut it off, or it had decided it didn't want to be heard."It went quiet," he said."Good." Cain took the third binder from the end out of the cabinet and set it on the desk without opening it. "Then it's listening, and it's afraid, and I won't have to say this twice.""What's on the last page?""You saw the header. 'What the Gate asks of the bearer.'" Cain rested two fingers on the binder's spine. "Your friend's copy stopped at ninety-eight percent. That page was in the last two."Ethan's stomach dropped. "You watched it copy.""I watched all of it. I let it run as long as I could stand to." His voice stayed even. "Better you hear it from me than from a stranger's translation. It's short. I know it by heart.""Then say it."Cain closed his ey
Chapter 88: The Third Day
The warnings fell apart before Ethan could read them. A word at a time, then a letter, then a gap where the screaming had been.[HOST: STOP.][HOST: STOP.][HOST—]"I said no," Ethan told Cain. His voice came out steadier than he felt. "Out loud, to its face, the way she did. It did to me what you just described. My organs went one at a time. I thought that was it.""And you didn't die.""Something pushed back." He turned the water glass in his fingers and didn't drink. "A researcher named Mira calls it System Resistance. It isn't one of the system's abilities. It's mine, or my body's. I can't tell where one stops and the other starts."Cain said nothing for a while. His eyes had drifted somewhere past the desk."She never had that," he said. "Ninety-six percent. It could have all of her." A dry laugh, nothing behind it. "I read your number and wrote 'defective' under it. The Division taught us a low reading was a flaw. None of us ever asked if it might be a door."Ethan wanted to say
Chapter 87: Lena
"Her name was Lena," Cain said.He slid the photograph across the desk with two fingers, as if it might break. A young woman laughing at whoever held the camera, dark hair pulled back, a paper cup in her hand. Nothing in the picture said she was special. That was what hurt first."She was twenty-two when it chose her," Cain said. "Twenty-three when it finished."Ethan didn't touch it. "A host.""The best the Division ever recorded. Ninety-six percent on activation." Cain's mouth twisted. "I thought that number was a blessing. I told her so."Ninety-six. Ethan thought of his own thirty-seven, and for the first time it didn't feel like a flaw. "Mine was thirty-seven.""I know. I've had it on a legal pad for two months." Cain kept his eyes on the photograph. "Hers meant the system could have all of her. She never fought it. She wasn't built to. She could mend things, glass, bone, a torn sleeve, just by remembering them whole. She used to fix the neighbors' dishes and hide the evidence."
Chapter 86: Since the Night It Started
The medic was quick and didn't say a word. Two clamps, one injection, a pad of gauze taped over the hole in Ethan's back. She left without looking at either man, and the oak door shut behind her with a soft click.Cain poured water into two glasses. He set one on the edge of the desk nearest Ethan and didn't mention it again."You went quiet outside," he said. "Back in the corridor. Something spoke to you."Ethan stayed on his feet as long as his legs allowed, which wasn't long. He sat. "It said do not engage. Then refuse. Then it stopped in the middle of a sentence.""It does that when it hasn't decided." Cain nodded slowly, like someone confirming a figure on a page. "It doesn't like surprises. I imagine I'm one.""You know it talks.""I know a great deal about what it does." Cain sat across from him, hands folded on the desk. "I've known about your system since the night it started."The room was very quiet. Ethan's hand had gone to the glass without his noticing. He put it back in
Chapter 85: One Word
"Enough."Cain said it quietly. He didn't raise his voice or look at anyone in particular. The word went down the corridor like a hand laid flat on a table, and every rifle in the building dropped an inch.The lead hunter's finger came off the trigger. His mouth opened, shut again, and stayed shut.Ethan stayed on his hands and knees because he couldn't do anything else. Blood ran from his shoulder, his hip, and a hole in his back he'd stopped trying to count. Regeneration was working on it all at once and charging him for every stitch. His arms shook.Cain stopped three paces away. Up close he looked older than the man Noah had described. Fifty, maybe more. Silver hair, pale eyes, a coat so clean it looked like it belonged to someone who'd never bled on anything.His right hand went into his coat.*There it is,* Ethan thought. He tensed, though he didn't have much left to tense with. He'd braced for a gun, then for a blade, and in the end he just braced for the end. It was a tired fe
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