09-11-2355 | 10:26
Northside Medical Exchange - Blood Services Wing.
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The blood bank hums cold and tidy. Holo wayfinding hangs in clean blue over the lobby. Smart glass keeps the vault chill in and everyone else out. Donor chairs sit in a neat row, screens looping beaches that don't exist here.
Security Guard Ramon Ortiz walks the service corridor with a pocket warmer in one hand and a decaf bulb in the other. The lights keep dimming like the building is breathing funny. The vent at the far end flexes once. Metal complains.
"Facilities," he says to nobody. "Pick up the damn phone."
The panel snaps. A silver-black mass drops and stands like liquid trying to remember bone. A dull blue pulse glows under chest skin. The head tilt isn't human. It's trying to be.
Ramon grabs for his sidearm. The thing is faster. A wet palm covers his mouth. Cold hits like a chemical and a winter river at once. The decaf bulb rolls. His gun clears leather and his knees quit. Color drains out of his face in three ugly seconds. The palm lifts. Ramon drops without breaking anything, which should be kind and isn't.
Down the hall, a cooler door pops a seal like a curious cat. The rendling cants its head at the promise.
The staff vestibule door opens. Silas Gavin shoulders in with a crate of scrub packs. Janitor blues. Work gloves. Company cap low. He stops half a second, takes in the shape over Ramon, and moves.
"Not tonight," Silas says.
He doesn't go for a tool. He plants his boots wide on the smart tile, drops his center, and throws both hands forward like he's shoving an invisible pallet. The air in front of him collapses, then snaps out. The cone hits the solvent rack first. Canisters tumble and burst a clear mist. The shockwave rides the spray and slams the rendling into the wall.
The thing's up on the rebound. Silas doesn't give it room. He rips another pulse, tighter and hotter. Heat blooms white in the mist with a sound like a giant match. Fire walks the corridor. The rendling hunches, chest pulse stuttering for the first time. Suppression kicks, shaving oxygen just enough to keep the walls from going. It doesn't do much to a monster that breathes wrong. It screams without a mouth and runs up the wall like the floor was optional. It punches through a vent three meters up and is gone.
Silas drops the crate, grabs Ramon by the collar, and drags him backward toward the lobby. "Stay with me," he says. "Hey. Eyes. Come on."
People flood the corridor because alarms mean curiosity first and survival second. They see smoke, the blown panel, the burned stripe on the wall, and the man in cheap gloves hauling a body. They step back like he's the problem and not the reason they're still upright.
"It's him," a lab tech yells, voice gone high. "He did that."
"No shit I did," Silas says. "You want it to feed?"
"Don't touch me," a phlebotomist says, skittering around Ramon's boots.
Silas shoulders through anyway. "Move. He needs a patch."
The lobby flips to emergency red. Outside, the street beacons sync a hard-light cordon across the sidewalk. Two HARBOR skiffs bank and thump in at the curb. Ceiling drones pop out of the soffit and light their teal eyes. A ribbon of hard light grows across the vestibule and starts sorting people without asking.
HARBOR enforcement hits the doors in a tight wedge, not the pretty PR kind, the kind that clears offices at three in the morning. Sergeant Rivas takes center, helmet on, visor up, jaw set. Two medics slide to Ramon like they've been waiting for him specifically.
"Back," a medic says. "I've got him."
Silas lets go and steps back with both hands up. "He's cold."
"Everyone's cold," someone at the donor desk snaps. "You set the hallway on fire."
"I set the problem on fire," Silas says. "It ran."
"Hands," an officer barks, coming up on Silas's right. "Show them."
Silas shows palms. Work gloves, scuffed and clean. The officer doesn't relax. The crowd doesn't either. Pointing starts. Words like monster and freak ride the edges.
A kid near the chairs blurts, "He pulled me out of the bathroom," and then her mother squeezes her shoulder and pulls her behind a hard-light post.
Rivas clocks the vent carnage, the soot track, the scorch bloom. "Mark Three," she says to her comm. "Same profile as the North Pier attack. It remembered the route."
"It took the guard," a tech says, voice shaking. "It took him."
Silas lifts his chin. "It did. I tried to stop it."
"Why the gloves," the officer asks. "Why the hat. Take it off."
Silas freezes. "No."
"Take it off," Rivas says. No upshift. No threat. Just policy.
"It's not a good idea."
"Hat," she repeats. "Or I remove it."
He reaches up like the brim weighs a kilo. His fingers hesitate. Somebody bumps him from behind in the crowd and the cap pops free and hits the floor. The room stops pretending to breathe.
His hair isn't hair. The ears taper and knife back. Two short horns sit low on the skull like someone filed them once and they grew anyway. His eyes go wrong in the lobby light, pupils squeezing to slits and then widening like they're trying to pick a shape. Gasps do the wave. A volunteer crosses herself. Someone says the word Rendling like a curse that finally found a mouth.
Silas doesn't move. He doesn't reach. He speaks clear because whispering makes it worse. "I didn't hurt anyone."
"Step away from the body," the officer says, even though he already did.
Rivas holds up a hand before the line surges. "Nobody moves," she says to her own people and the lobby both. "Gavin, right?"
He nods once. "Silas."
"You've been here how long," she asks, eyes never leaving his face.
"Four months," he says. "Nights. I clean. I don't touch donors. I don't... I don't feed."
The word costs him. It lands in the room like a dropped tool.
A man in a courier jacket points hard enough to hurt his shoulder. "He's one of them."
"I'm not," Silas says, heat in it now. "I'm me. I work here. I wear gloves so you don't have to look at my hands while I mop your spill. I wear a hat so you don't think about horns when I take out the bio bins. I saved your asses. Please don't take me."
A second vent down the hall rattles. Drones pivot in unison and paint the seam with teal. Rivas doesn't flinch. She splits her attention like she's got extra.
"Quell, we're detaining you," she says. "You'll answer questions and you'll sit tight while we clear the threat. Don't run."
He takes a step anyway because survival has its own center of gravity. The floor under his shoe flashes a warning glyph and goes tacky. Smart resin grabs his heel. Above him, a kite-net drone drops and spits a web that blooms mid-air. He pivots and the net bites a column instead. He looks back, eyes more reptile than man now, breath coming short.
"Don't," Rivas says. "I don't want to hurt you."
"I didn't hurt anyone," he says. "I didn't."
The officers close, not fast, just inevitable. A portable hard-light yoke grows out of a belt unit and opens like a bright horseshoe. Another drone coughs a ring of adhesive foam that snaps around his ankle and seals to the tile. He throws his hands out on instinct and the air shoves like a punch, but the yoke locks and eats the vector. The field hum climbs and his propulsion fizzles like it hit a sponge.
He looks at the medic working Ramon. He looks at the girl behind the post. He looks at Rivas like maybe there's a route that doesn't end in a cage.
"Please," he says, voice frayed. "Don't take me. I didn't hurt anyone."
Rivas doesn't soften, but she doesn't harden either. "You saved people," she says. "That's logged. Now you come with us. We clear the vents and we figure out the rest."
She nods. The mag-clamps close with soft haptics. The yoke tightens enough to remind him it wins. The adhesive at his ankle dissolves on command and the floor lets him go.
As they turn him toward the skiff, the crowd leans back like the hard-light is a cliff. Someone spits a word he's heard before. Someone else murmurs thank you into their sleeve like a secret.
Silas keeps his head down because up makes it worse. "I'm not a monster," he says, not loud, not to anyone in particular.
"Walk," the officer says.
He walks. The drones track the vent seam. The cordon hums. And in the ceiling, something that remembers being on fire shifts its weight and learns the building new.
09-11-2355 | 11:05
HARBOR HQ - Director's Office.
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Nova Han dismisses the arrivals feed with a flick and lets the bay view collapse to a thin icon. Stormglass frames the harbor beyond her desk; rain turns the water to gray static. Files hover in tidy stacks. Dr. Morrell stands where he always stands, hands lightly clasped, expression polite enough to be mistaken for warmth.
"Initial impressions of Mercer?" Han asks without looking up from the ops board.
"Disciplined vector. Breathing under control. Allergic to euphemism," Morrell says. "He runs on judgment. That is useful. It is also difficult to manage."
"I hired him for the judgment," Han says. She pushes one stack aside. "We need a field lead who writes a plan, adjusts at speed, and does not panic when the floor moves."
Morrell tilts his head toward a muted personnel tile. "The Southline annex will follow him. Staff are already repeating the story. 'He left his team.' The word hero sits on top of gossip like frosting."
"Gossip is lazy," Han says. "The record is not." She throws the after-action into the air. Lines of time and position string between rooms like thread. "Sterilizer armed. Eight-minute clock. The entity adapted to hard-light in two iterations. Mercer split the stack to clear civilians, then carried two officers and a teenage civilian down a stairwell while a slab tried to fold him in half. Officer Tamsin Vey jammed a shutter with her body so the rest could move. He did not abandon anyone."
Morrell reads the highlighted sentences the way some people read weather. "It still cost bodies."
"Disaster work always costs bodies," Han says. "I want the person who pays attention, pays the cost, and keeps moving the living. That is him. Do you disagree?"
"No," Morrell says. "I'm only noting that he bristled when Lian used the phrase 'asset coordination.' He doesn't like the frame."
"Then he can call Ryn a person while he does the work," Han says. "I don't give a shit what noun he picks as long as civilians survive and my team comes back breathing."
Morrell lets that settle, then pivots. "Ryn. I want authorization to escalate the sim deck. Not cruelty. Rigor. Shorter intervals between sets, multi-vector stressors, variable grav with noise in the signal, and a controlled infrasound sweep to map his tolerance windows. I believe he is conserving output. He caps amplitude when he knows he is observed. I want to know if the ceiling is higher than our data suggests."
"No to the tones," Han says at once. "No to shrinking rest since you will keep grav inside the current envelope. You may harden scenarios with terrain and drone behavior. You may not play games with his nervous system."
Morrell keeps his voice even. "He's lived inside this building for fifteen years under our care. We taught him safety, which is admirable, and we taught him fences, which is limiting. I'm not accusing him of deceit. I'm telling you his numbers have slack. If we do not see the ceiling, we cannot build to it."
"If you prove he has room, what is your next move?" Han asks.
"Formalize what he can do without burning him out," Morrell says. "Train for the real threats and stop pretending politeness is a limiter. We make him harder to break."
Han comes around the desk watching as the bay turns into a gray sheet of static beyond the glass. "Here is the policy. Ryn has broad run of HQ. He eats where he likes, trains where he is scheduled, sits in labs when there is a chair free. There are doors he cannot open because clearance exists for everyone. He does not go beyond the gates. That is the only hard boundary. While those terms hold, you will not add new tones to his head or carve rest to fit a theory. If you want more rigor, do it with drones, corridors, and weather."
Morrell inclines his head. "Understood. Then give him sanctioned choices. A class block with human-adjacent recruits. Extended hydro time with a tech on the far bench. A review slot on civilian ops footage. He has been here since he was a child. If we do not widen the corridor, he will notice the corridor."
"He co-leads stabilization clinic with Irie twice a week," Han says. "If incident rates stay clean, he gets extended hydro lab access with a glass-wall supervisor. I will put him on the rota to review footage for the civilian ops brief. That is responsibility that serves the building, not just his mood."
"That will help," Morrell says. "It makes him visible in the right way."
"Visibility is a tool, not a parade," Han says. "I am not dressing him up for the mezzanine."
Morrell allows himself a small smile. "Integration with Mercer?"
"Shadow B-4 on holo now. Drill K-6 at eight. Meet Ryn at nine," Han says. "Irie sits on the first run. We start with cadence alignment, clean handoff protocols, and two routines that do not collide. If Mercer cannot say 'stability' without grinding his teeth, he can call it anchor, cadence, or 'don't blow your circuits.' I care about the behavior, not the label."
"Mercer will push," Morrell says. "According to his dossier, it's his nature."
"Good," Han says. "He can push outside. Inside, he learns the terrain and doesn't pick fights with nouns."
Morrell glances at the suspended report, then back to Han. "The Southline rumor will travel. If he hears it from a lab coat, he will take it personally. Do you want me to manage that conversation?"
"No. Send it to me," Han says. "I will repeat the record and end the gossip. If Mercer throws a punch before the conversation reaches me, I will make him apologize, then I will put him back on shift. He is not here to be liked. He is here to lead."
Morrell nods once. "Pragmatic as always."
"Curious as always," Han replies. "Balance usually holds and you know this."
Her desk pings. She opens a live tile. Biophysics. Unit B-4 has a cage half-set around a slow, angry mass that should not be thinking about door logic and clearly is. She kills the audio and lets the image run.
"Pattern analysis by ten," Han says.
"You will have it," Morrell answers. He takes a step, then pauses at the threshold. "If Ryn asks again about the gates, what do you want said?"
"Tell him the truth," Han says. "He can move in the building. He cannot move in the city because we cannot protect him out there yet, and the city cannot afford a Conductor on an open street without a plan. When he graduates recruits with Irie and runs a quarter without incidents, I will revisit the gate. Not before."
"A policy with a key," Morrell says. "Understood."
He leaves. Han drags Mercer's tile beside Ryn's training slate and lets the two hover close, edges not quite touching. The bay flickers in the glass like a tired heart. She snaps both tiles into the day's plan and gets back to work.
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