The corridor was dark except for the emergency lighting — red strips along the floor, casting everything in a dull, tired glow. Somewhere in the building a ventilation unit had been damaged, and it produced a low, continuous hum that had been going on for an hour.
Voss walked without urgency. Cole kept pace behind him, rifle across his back, the scanner still in his hand.
"Read me again."
Cole glanced at the scanner.
"41.4%. Same as before."
Voss kept walking.
"I have been thinking," Cole said, "about what you are saying. That it can be done. That he can be born."
"Not can," Voss said.
"Then what?"
Voss stopped.
He turned and looked at Cole with the quiet patience of a man who had been waiting a very long time to say something true.
"Must be. The mechanism exists. The conditions were set years ago. We are not waiting for the work, Cole. The work is finished."
Cole held the scanner at his side.
"Then what are we waiting for?"
"The result," Voss said simply. And he turned and kept walking.
Cole followed.
"So he can be born," Cole said.
"He can be born."
They walked in silence for a moment. Then Cole spoke again, quieter.
"You know they sent everything they had to this building."
Voss did not slow down.
"Yes," he said. And he sounded almost fond of it.
· · ·
He did not go to the laboratory.
He went up.
The roof was open to the evening sky, ventilation towers and relay units spread across the flat expanse, the city visible in every direction. Airships circling. Personnel units converging below. A news drone somewhere above — small, fast, a replacement for the one that had gone dark.
Voss walked to the edge and looked out.
Cole stayed by the roof access door.
When Voss spoke, he did not raise his voice unnecessarily. He simply let it carry.
"A new era is coming. What you have believed about human limitation ends here. The perfect era is coming. He will stand above every human and every living creature. He will be above every one of us."
The airships had audio capture. The units on the ground had audio capture. The news drone recorded everything and sent it live.
He turned from the edge.
"What fools," he said — just for Cole now, quiet, private. "Look at them. Every unit they had. Every Phase Two and above in this district."
Cole checked his display.
Looked up.
Said nothing.
Because the Helix Vanguard field office — the one they had sent every evolved operative away from — was on his screen, and the signal coming out of it had just changed.
· · ·
Clover's phone went.
He glanced at the screen. Mira. He stepped slightly away from the table and answered quietly, keeping one eye on Forde, who was reading through something on his display and not looking up.
"Where are you right now?"
"Helix field office. With my mother who is being questioned about Dr Voss."
A pause on her end.
"Are you alright?"
"We are fine. Just sitting here."
"Okay." Another pause. "Ethan and I wanted to know if you need anything."
"Tell Ethan I am fine."
"I will tell him you said that."
He almost smiled.
"I will call you later."
He ended the call. Slid his phone back into his pocket. Sat down beside Aryn.
The interrogation continued.
And then, without warning, it did not.
The lights in the room flickered once.
Went out.
Emergency strips activated along the baseboards — the same dull red glow Voss had walked through on the other side of the city. For two seconds the room was just three people and the sound of Forde reaching for his radio.
Then they heard the front of the building.
Not an explosion. Not a single event. A series of sounds — rapid, overlapping, the specific acoustic signature of a building being entered by a large number of people at multiple points simultaneously. Glass. Boots. A voice cutting through: short, sharp, commanding. Then another voice. Then the sound of furniture being moved fast.
Forde was already standing.
"Stay here."
He went to the door, opened it six centimetres, looked through, and closed it again.
His expression had changed in a way that Clover had not seen on a trained Helix officer before.
It had gone very still.
"How many?" Aryn said.
"Too many. We need to move."
· · ·
The Helix Vanguard field office had ten floors, a basement level, hundred of rooms, and thirty personnel when the breach began.
Twenty of those thirty were administrative and support staff. Baseline. No Breakthroughs. Exactly the kind of people who could not do anything in the next four minutes except get low and put their hands where they could be seen.
The remaining ten were Phase Two operatives — Initiated and Controlled level, trained, capable, distributed across the building. Seven of them were overwhelmed at their positions before they could coordinate. Two made it to the stairwell. One held a corridor for ninety seconds alone before the numbers stopped being manageable.
The people coming in wore black. Helmets, masks, no insignia. They moved like a unit that had walked this floor plan before — not guessing, not searching, taking positions that cut off response routes before anyone inside knew the routes needed cutting.
Every single one of them had broken through.
Clover could hear it in the way they moved. Not the frantic, burning motion of someone in early Phase — controlled efficiency, precise, the kind that meant they had been at this level long enough to make it quiet.
Forde moved them through a service access corridor, then through a fire door, then down a half-level that was not on the standard floor plan. Low ceiling. Rough walls. The sounds of the building above them were muffled but continuous — commands, movement, the occasional crash of something being overturned.
At the end of the corridor: a set of reinforced glass doors.
And beyond them, the Mirror Room.
· · ·
Every surface reflected.
Walls, ceiling, floor — mirror panels, angled and layered, built for visual training exercises that required participants to locate targets inside a field of infinite copies. Standing at the centre, you could not say with confidence which version of yourself was the real one. Hundreds of Clovers stood in every direction, some clear, some angled, some stacked inside each other in corridors of reflection that had no visible end.
General Nadia Verne was already inside when they came through the doors.
She stood at the centre with her arms at her sides, assessing the room the way she probably assessed everything — methodically, without wasted motion. She looked at them as they entered, then at Forde.
"Perimeter is gone," Forde said.
"I know. How many did we have when the breach started?"
"Thirty. Twenty deployed to the secondary facility when the Dr Voss alert came in."
Verne absorbed that.
"Ten evolved personnel against however many are upstairs."
"More than ten," Forde said.
From above them — through the ceiling, through the floor above that — the sound of boots. Short commands. The particular tone of personnel being organised, not fought. The building was not being damaged. It was being occupied.
Clover turned slowly in the centre of the room.
Every turn produced a new angle. Versions of himself looking back from impossible distances. He raised his hand and watched forty hands rise in forty directions, none of them quite synchronised, the reflection-lag creating a slight delay between the real motion and the mirrored one.
No thermal scanner could isolate a single target in here.
Not without knowing exactly which reflection to eliminate first.
"If we engage," Verne said, "we lose. Our levels combined do not produce a result against what is upstairs. We wait ."
"For what?" Clover said.
"For headquaters decision."
Aryn sat against the rear wall. Not in defeat — just placing herself where she would be least visible, most useful. She looked at Clover. He looked back.
He was still standing in the centre of the room.
Surrounded by himself in every direction.
· · ·
— breaking: the Helix Vanguard field office in Aethel-City is confirmed to be under hostile occupation. A 500-metre restriction zone has been declared. Sources indicate that a threat of structural detonation has been communicated to emergency services. Government spokesperson has not yet commented on how a facility of this classification was compromised—
Mira lowered the volume.
The three of them were in the Consortium general workspace. The screen showed the Helix building from above — aerial drone feed, the surrounding streets emptied by the restriction zone, government vehicles staged at the perimeter and not moving.
"Clover is in there," Mira said.
Ethan looked at the screen.
"It is a millitary facility, how is that even possible?."
Mira did not answer that.
The point was Clover. Seventeen, no Breakthrough, inside a building that had just been taken by people who had all broken through. And there was a 500-metre restriction zone between him and any help they could offer.
Nobody said it.
Nobody needed to.
· · ·
Clover and the others heard the maintenance corridor door open.
One set of footsteps, clear and unhurried. Then four more, splitting off in different directions — other rooms, other corridors, a systematic sweep of the sub-level.
The single set kept coming.
Through the reinforced glass doors, a figure appeared. Black uniform, helmet sealed, visor down. He stopped outside and looked in.
A corridor full of reflections looked back at him.
He was still for a moment. Reading the room. Counting angles.
Then he pressed his radio and spoke through the glass — calm, completely unhurried, the voice of someone who had decided how this ends.
"General Verne. I know you are in there. Come out and we handle this professionally. Or I come in."
Nobody moved inside the room.
Verne kept her eyes on the figure.
The figure raised his weapon.
And fired.
Not at the door. Into the room — one clean round through the glass, passing between ten versions of Clover and twenty versions of Aryn and thirty reflections of Verne, punching through a mirror panel on the far wall and turning it to fragments.
Another shot.
Another panel gone.
He was not guessing. He was removing the false ones. Methodically eliminating every reflection that was not attached to a real body, working through the angles the way an engineer dismantles a structure — from the outside in, from the edges toward the centre.
Verne moved.
"Behind me. Both of you."
"You said engaging loses—"
"Waiting also loses. I would rather choose when."
She stepped toward the door.
Around her, the room kept breaking — glass falling in bright, sharp pieces, each panel gone reducing the reflections by a hundred, the real people becoming slightly more findable with every shot.
Clover stood behind her and watched the figure through what remained of the mirrors.
And felt, for the first time since any of this began, genuinely, specifically afraid.
Not of the man outside.
Of how little it would take to matter in here.
— END OF CHAPTER 7 —