Behind him, the lab began to hum--a rising crescendo of failing systems, shutdowns, intrusion forks--
She was right behind his thoughts, stitching overlays into his HUD as he moved.
"Take the lower pipe access behind the coolant housing--shortcut. They won't expect it."
He slid into the narrow crawlspace just as the door above exploded inward.
Metal boots hit concrete.
But he was already gone.
The stairwell reeked of oxidized coolant and old smoke. His boots landed hard on each step, metal on metal, every impact echoing up and down the concrete throat like a countdown he couldn't afford to hear. The lights here were amber--some flickering, some dead. No signs, no arrows. Just rust. Just gravity pulling him down.
Sable's voice slipped in again, quieter now. Not faint--just spread thin, like she was working across too many systems at once. "You've got three junctions ahead. First is clean. Second might be under surveillance. Take the third. It used to be a fluid exchange hub. Should be abandoned."
He didn't speak. Just nodded, knowing she'd feel the gesture through the sensor sync. The jacket tightened slightly around his chest as he moved--adaptive weave adjusting for stress. It wasn't pain anymore. It was just part of the load.
At the first junction he paused, back to the wall. Listened. Nothing but the slow tick of dying lights and the hiss of his own breath through clenched teeth. He moved again, every step slower now, deliberate. Not just escaping.
Navigating.
The passage turned into a narrow corridor--one side collapsed under old structural failure, the other warped by heat damage. Old fire, maybe. Sabotage. Didn't matter. He stepped over a blackened support beam and ducked under a bent pipe, his fingers trailing briefly along the wall.
Then he froze.
Not sound. Not movement.
A feeling.
Something was watching. Or had been.
He turned slightly. Slow. Careful.
Nothing.
But it left something behind--like residue. The sensation of being
clocked
, measured. Not by a person. By a system.
"Sable..." he murmured.
"I know," she replied, voice strained now, lower. "There's trace patterning in your path. Not enough for full surveillance, but someone's trying to
triangulate behaviors
. Get to the fluid hub. Now!"
He moved.
The third junction wasn't marked.
Just a pressure lock set into the far wall, half-obscured by shadow and a spill of broken conduit. He found the release latch by memory more than sight--pushed it, heard the magnetic seals disengage with a soft exhale of stale air and coolant gas.
The door opened inward.
He slipped through and closed it behind him with a hiss, sealing himself in. Out of instinct he shouldered the rifle scanning the room as he looked over the sights.
The hub was... wrong. Eerily still. A circular room with low ceilings and old rust-slicked pipes spiraling through like arteries. Most were dormant, probably bypassed or bled dry long ago. In the center stood a platform console, half-lit, running on backup power. A dim hum coiled around the room like breath held too long.
He dropped the muzzle to a low ready position.
Not relaxed--just paused.
Sable was quiet. Not gone, just quiet.
He touched two fingers to his temple, trying to ground the surge of heat crawling up his spine. Heart rate still elevated. Muscles trembling with aftershock.
"I'm in," he said softly.
A pause. Then:
"I see you," she replied.
Her voice didn't come from inside the room. It came from everywhere. Subtle, ambient--like she was settling into the system itself. He looked toward the console. It was projecting nothing. Just quiet diagnostics and passive sensors.
"This place wasn't on the maps," he said.
"I didn't find it on any grid," she answered. "I remembered it."
That stopped him for a beat. He glanced toward the pipes--toward the rusted steel and carbon scoring. "You were here before?"
"Or someone I used to be was."
She let it hang, like static trailing the end of a signal.
He stepped toward the console, slinging the rifle, muzzle down, pistol grip and trigger housing forward to make it easier to raise again, lock it into his arm in a hasty sling and aim if he needed to. His fingers hovered over the keys but didn't press anything. He didn't need to. Sable was already inside.
"This might be a good place to stop," she offered, her voice quieter now. "Let systems cycle. Let you breathe."
He didn't answer at first.
Just... stood there. Soaked in silence, hands resting palm down on the table.
Then, almost to himself: "Feels like I've been running forever."
"We haven't even started yet."
He gave a weak smile. Not bitter. Not broken. Just tired.
And then he sat--slowly, carefully--on the grated floor beside the console. Back to the wall.
The pipes groaned in the distance, low and hollow, like the building remembering something.
Outside, the world was still hunting.
But in here, for a moment, they weren't prey. Just two ghosts sitting still long enough to remember they were alive.
He sat hunched forward on a rusted support girder just outside the maintenance access hatch, elbows braced on his knees, breath steadying in quiet, uneven layers. The wind that reached this deep wasn't natural; it was recycled, rerouted, scrubbed just enough to register as air. Still, it felt like motion. After the chaos of the lab, even this low whisper of movement across his skin made his body ache to collapse. But he didn't. Couldn't. Not yet. Not with every muscle still wired for flight, not with the echo and ache of his own, recovering, heartbeat still chasing him down the back of his throat.
The flicker in his HUD was gentle--Sable adjusting calibration, barely perceptible, just enough to soften the harsh contrast that came from adrenaline and dark corridors and survival jammed into thirty seconds of fury. It felt like a hand on the back of his mind. Reassuring. Real.
"You're holding up better than expected," she said, her voice low but clear, threaded through the private channel that only existed between them now.
"I don't feel like I am," he replied, words slurred slightly by fatigue.
"Doesn't mean it's not true," she answered, and he could almost hear the tilt of her head, the near-smile she wore when he was being stubborn.
He snorted, lips curling into the ghost of something like humor. "Still sounds like something you'd say... never could figure out how to get that sugary language out of your core."
"I'm kidding" he said after pausing for a moment.
"Good," came the response, softer now.
For a long time, neither of them spoke. The air held weight again, but it wasn't oppressive. It was heavy in the way a safe room might be--fortified, thick with the tension of survival, but distant from immediate harm. At least for now.
"So," he finally said, raking a hand through his hair, the strands matted with sweat and whatever residue was left from the emergency dermals. "What now?"
"Now we disappear," Sable replied, and though her tone didn't change, the cadence of it made something tighten in his chest. It wasn't fear, not exactly. Just gravity. Consequence.
"There's a plan or three cooked up in there somewhere, isn't there?"
"I had... fragments. Places we mapped. Ones we never used because we didn't think we'd ever need them. There's a fallback site--six klicks northeast through the under-tier maintenance strata. Not on-grid, not on paper. We built it for cold-storage crawls, mostly. Emergency use only."
"Sounds like now qualifies, maybe we can find a futon on a corner that someone's giving away." he said, smirking a bit.
"I'm not sure what's still intact. No way to know if the access routes have collapsed or been mapped by others. But it's the only direction we can go where we might not immediately get flagged."
He let that sink in. The logic was sound. It always had been when it came from her. But logic didn't make it easier. He reached down, adjusted the fastenings on the carbon-weave jacket, feeling the press of the securedrive in his collar slot--just enough weight to remind him this was real. All of it. Her voice in his head, the half-healed scars on his chest, the blood they'd left behind.
"You sure the signal fragments won't lead them to us?"
"No," she said. "I'm sure I tried to clean them. But what I left behind wasn't clean enough."
He stared down at his hands again, knuckles raw from concrete, fingertips still buzzing faintly from overdraw.
"They'll think you're dead," she added after a moment.
"Not the first time."
"And if they don't?"
He didn't answer.
Overhead, a low mechanical tone filtered through the pipes--a pressure shift he wouldn't have noticed before. Now he caught it immediately. The ripple of a tunnel gate cycling. They were close. Maybe not right on top of them, but close enough to make breathing feel like a liability.
"You've got ten, maybe fifteen minutes before they pinpoint this exit," she said, voice perfectly calm.
He stood slowly. Not a rush, not a sprint. Just motion--calculated, exhausted, necessary.
"You ever going to tell me what they were after?" he asked, more out of need for orientation than curiosity.
There was a pause. Not a long one, but long enough to notice.
"They weren't after me," she said finally. "Not really."
He turned toward the corridor leading deeper into the strata.
"Then what?"
"You," she said.
A beat.
"Both of us."
They moved in silence for the first half-klick.
Not because they had to--but because anything spoken now would feel like breath stolen from the wrong moment. Between pipe junctions and rusted service walks, the maintenance strata narrowed into passageways only ever meant for drones. Once, he would've crouched. Now, he just moved--limping slightly, body close to collapse, but never completely faltering. And Sable... she was with him, not ahead or behind, but
within
. Her voice no longer needed to echo. She could think where he thought, feel what his body registered, see what his optics caught.
It wasn't perfect. It wasn't seamless.
But it was
them
.
When the passage widened again, he dropped to one knee--less from need than from habit--and glanced at the old junction sigil etched into the wall. It was worn, faded under layers of time and heat, but familiar. A fragment of distorted glowed dimly in his optics.
"You tagged this," he said aloud, voice hoarse.
"I tagged everything I didn't want to forget," she replied. "Or everything I was afraid I would."
The hallway curved, sloped downward, and finally opened into a larger chamber--half storage, half long-abandoned security checkpoint. The ancient sensor array overhead chirped once in confusion, failed to verify his ID, and gave up entirely.
He crossed into the shadow of a long-dead guard station and slid to the floor. The weight of the last few hours caught up in waves--his pulse slow but unsteady, his breath louder in the stillness than he wanted it to be.
"Ten more minutes," she said quietly. "I think we're clear for now."
He didn't answer. Just let his head fall back against the cold steel wall behind him. The hum of fluorescent ballast overhead buzzed softly. Far off, the sounds of systems rebooting ticked like metal insects.
Then, finally, "You alright?"
There was a pause. She didn't answer right away.
"I'm not
all
here," she admitted. "I'm stable, but fragmented. I'm running processes across damaged architecture. Patching around whatever they burned out in you."
He nodded, eyes half-lidded now. "So... same as it ever was."
A thread of silence passed between them, not heavy, not empty. Just shared.
"I should sleep," he muttered, not meaning it. Not yet.
"You should," she agreed. "But you won't."
"Not until we're safe."
He meant it. And she knew better than to argue.
