Page 206 of Immune

Mercer looks up. He hears it, and so do I, but I pretend I don’t.

“I’m checking something before I say it,” Mercer explains.

“Not a great way to start that,” Ewan says.

Mercer glances at him. “Yeah. I know.”

A scientist close to the glass wall clears her throat. “Doctor.”

Mercer doesn’t bother to look over at her, simply muttering, “Not now, Anika.”

She shuts up, and I find that interesting, because it means Mercer has authority here. Not Hale’s kind, with fewer boots and more gravity. But it’s authority all the same.

He reaches for a page he wants and then he stops. The room seems to morph around the silence and my pulse doesthat gross thing where it slows too much, each beat heavy and separate.

“What?” I ask.

Mercer’s eyes lift to mine and I see the hesitation in them.

Wrong choice, because every bit of softness within me turns as sharp as the edge of a blade, and I ask again, “What?”

He exhales before finally telling me, “There’s a name in our field records.”

A name.

No.

No, no, no.

No names. Names are worse than files, because names have faces. Names have hands. Names know the places inside you that never really scarred as they should have.

Hale warns, “Mercer.”

The doctor ignores him, which is good. Or bad. I can’t actually tell. “A man has been working with one of our outside research teams. Not based inside Haven Ridge. Not permanently. He moves between field sites.”

My mouth has gone dry. “Good for him.”

“He came in about eighteen months ago with a group out of the northern route,” Mercer explains.

Northern. That means nothing and too much at the very same time. I mean, hell, everything in the damned world is north if you’re lost enough.

“He gave a name,” Mercer adds.

The room is completely gone now. The walls, the glass, the guards. All of it blurs at the edges, leaving only Mercer, the folder, and the horrible care he’s using to speak each word.

My hands grow cold despite my fingerless gloves. Not a scared kind of cold, but a grave cold. Then I say, “Don’t.”

Mercer stops and the whole world stops with him. I hear Ewan inhale and Kaito shift. I hear Fletcher’s boot scrape half an inch closer to the door, mapping a path because he already knows my body has started choosing one. I hear Xeon say nothing, which somehow makes space.

Mercer’s voice lowers. “Kota.”

No.

Kota.

Not Dakota.

Careful man. Too careful.