— international reaction continues to mount. Helix Vanguard, one of the most recognised cognitive regulation agencies in the world, remains under hostile occupation for the third hour. Opposition figures are calling for an emergency review of the agency's operational capacity. Civil protection units have been deployed to manage unregulated Breakthrough incidents in three districts previously covered exclusively by Helix personnel. The question being asked on every network tonight: if the people responsible for managing human evolution cannot protect their own building, who is—
Clover was not watching the news.
He was watching Voss.
· · ·
Voss stood near the far wall, hands in his pockets, looking at nothing in particular. The negotiator had been moved to the side. The room had settled into the quiet of people who had stopped expecting rescue and were now simply waiting to find out what came next.
Clover looked at him for a long moment.
Then:
"Are you happy?"
Voss did not look at him.
He did not react at all. The way you do not react to a sound you have categorised as irrelevant.
Aryn put a hand on his arm.
He did not move.
A few seconds passed.
Then Voss, without turning his head:
"Are you normal?"
Clover blinked.
"Yes."
Now Voss turned. Slowly. He looked at Clover the way you look at an unexpected variable — not with interest exactly, but with the attention you give something that has produced an unplanned result.
"Then you will never know it," Voss said. Not unkindly. "The freedom of a Breakthrough. The freedom of power. You will spend your whole life watching other people understand things you cannot reach. And you will call that happiness."
Clover held his gaze.
"I am happy. Are you?"
Something shifted in Voss's expression.
"I do not need to be happy."
"Yes, you do," Clover said. "Everyone does."
The room had gone very quiet. Forty-three people, twenty armed guards, one negotiator, and one man at Phase Three who was now looking at a seventeen-year-old with the expression of someone who had been genuinely, specifically, personally annoyed.
Voss crouched.
Not aggressively. Deliberately. He brought himself to Clover's eye level and looked at him from three feet away, and there was nothing warm in it at all.
"You think you are the smartest one in this room," he said quietly. "You are trying to play hero. I know that look. I wore it for a long time."
He glanced at the body on the atrium floor.
Then back at Clover.
"You see the hero?"
Clover did not look at the body.
"Do you know the cost of freedom, Clover?"
The use of his name landed differently than he expected. Familiar. Which was worse than threatening.
"Shut your mouth," Voss said, and the warmth left his voice completely, replaced by something flat and final. "Or I will put a round through your skull. I watched you grow up. I do not care."
Aryn's hand tightened on his arm.
"Clover." Her voice was precise and controlled in the way that meant she was using everything she had to keep it that way. "Look at where we are. Assess the situation. Stop."
He looked at her. Then at the mezzanine. The twenty figures. The body. The floor.
He leaned back.
"I was trying to find an escape," he said quietly.
"Find one that does not get you killed."
· · ·
Voss's phone went.
He stood, turned away, and answered.
His voice dropped to something conversational. The tone of someone reporting to someone.
"Hello."
A pause.
"Yes. Yes, it is possible. Sir — I did what I could. I believe at this moment I am the most capable person in this building."
Another pause.
"My reading is at forty-two right now. It fluctuates, but it has not dropped below forty since the beginning. Not once."
A pause.
"Yes. We can run the test. We will find who you need and we will run it."
He ended the call.
Stood still for a moment.
Then crossed to Cole and spoke to him in less than ten seconds.
Cole listened. Nodded once.
Turned toward the hostages.
His eyes moved across the rows. Slowly. The way you scan a room when you have a rough description and need to find the match.
And stopped.
· · ·
Every other person in the atrium had collapsed inward. Arms around knees, eyes low, making themselves small.
Clover was sitting straight.
Still watching. Still thinking. Eyes still moving across the room looking for something he had not yet found.
Cole walked over and looked down at him.
"You. Come."
Aryn was up before the sentence finished.
"Where are you taking him?"
Cole looked at her.
"Dr. Bale. Your son will not be harmed. We need to speak with him. I am telling you this because I mean it, not because it is what you want to hear."
Aryn looked at Clover.
Clover looked back.
"It is okay," he said. He said it because she needed to hear something and that was the thing closest to true. "I will be back."
Aryn sat down slowly.
She watched Cole walk her son toward the stairwell.
Her hands were folded in her lap and her jaw was set and she did not look at anything else.
· · ·
The room was clinical. Patient bed, restraint straps, monitoring equipment running on backup power. Clean and quiet and wrong in the way rooms are wrong when their purpose has been redirected.
Clover walked in.
Took one look at the bed.
Turned around.
"No."
Cole hit him on the side of the neck. Precise. Enough to drop him and nothing more.
The floor came up and then there was nothing.
When it came back, it came back in pieces.
Ceiling first. White. Then the sound of restraints being tightened around his wrists. His shirt was gone. His shoes were gone. The room was cool against his back and the monitor beside the bed was running, and he could see his own pulse on the display before he fully understood that the display was his.
He pulled against the straps.
They held.
He turned his head and found Cole standing at the door — looking back at him once, something unreadable in his face, and then he was gone. The door pulled shut.
Clover pulled against the straps again.
Still held.
He looked at the ceiling.
At the walls.
At the monitor showing his pulse going up and not coming back down.
"Help."
His own voice, strange in the quiet room.
"Help!"
Louder.
"Help!"
The door opened.
Someone pressed a strap across his mouth and the sound stopped.
He breathed through his nose and looked at the ceiling and thought:
What are they going to do to me.
Not the question with a question mark. The kind you just keep repeating because your brain has not produced an answer and is not going to, and yet it cannot stop asking.
What are they going to do.
What is going to happen to me.
What is this?.
His heartbeat on the monitor kept climbing.
The door opened again.
Voss walked in.
He did not look at Clover's face. He crossed directly to the counter and began preparing something — glass, a sealed vial, a needle. His movements were calm and exact. A surgeon's movements. Which made sense, Clover thought, because he had spent years in a medical building and understood what precision looked like.
Clover pulled against the straps again.
They held.
They were always going to hold.
· · ·
She heard it through the ceiling.
Not words. The cries of her son's voice pushed through floors and walls, stripped down to its most basic signal.
Three times.
Then silence.
Aryn was on her feet.
Verne caught her arm.
"Carefull Dr Bale."
"Let go of me."
"If you move they will—"
"Let go of me."
Verne let go.
Aryn walked straight to Cole.
"I need to speak with Voss. Now."
"He is occupied."
"What is he doing with my son?."
"Your son is fine, Dr. Bale."
"Then why was he screaming for help?"
Cole did not answer.
Which was its own answer.
Aryn stepped forward.
"If anything happens to my son," she said, and her voice was completely level, which was the most frightening version of her voice, "I will take this building down."
Cole looked at her.
"The only reason you are still standing," he said, "is because your name protects you. Do not test my limits."
"And the only reason you are still in one piece," Aryn said, "is because you have my son."
They looked at each other.
On the mezzanine, one of the guards shifted to look at something on the far side of the building. A half-second of attention pulled in the wrong direction.
Aryn grabbed Cole by the collar.
She threw him.
Threw — with the full force of someone who is a dominant with the power of double normal human efficiency. Cole went through the window beside them — glass exploding outward, frame giving way — and dropped metres into the exterior ledge below, landing hard, rolling, alive but out of the equation.
Aryn was already through the stairwell door.
Up.
Behind her the atrium broke into noise — guards moving, commands cutting across each other.
Aryn did not slow down.
One floor. Two. Three.
· · ·
Voss turned from the counter.
The needle was ready.
He walked toward the bed.
Clover watched him come.
He could not move his arms. Could not move his legs. Could not make a sound through the strap across his mouth. The monitor beside him was a record of exactly how afraid he was, displayed in numbers, updating every second.
Voss looked at him.
For just a moment — one second, maybe less — something moved across his face that was not scientific. Something that looked almost like regret.
Then it was gone.
He raised the needle.
Down the corridor, a door hit a wall.
Running footsteps.
— END OF CHAPTER 9 —