Page 210 of Immune

No one answers.

Pussies. Fucking cowards. Scientists, soldiers, and leaders. All of them love naming things until that very thing asks back.

Mercer closes the folder halfway, but his hand remains on the page.

“I think you’re Conrad’s child,” he eventually says. “I think your scent response matches unstable marker-positive profiles. I think your father hid more than just research. And I think Maine O’Reilly might have been trying to continue work here no one fully understands.”

“Maine hated labs.”

Mercer’s eyes flick up, because it’s there. A piece of him connected to another piece of me.

“He preferred fieldwork,” he answers softly.

My throat closes, because of course he did. Of course that fucking idiot did. Only Maine could survive the apocalypse and still find a way to get close enough to danger just to personally insult it.

I step back from the table and my knee protests. I ignore it.

“You said might have been,” I say instead, words coming out slowly. Mercer’s face stills, and everything in me turns colder. “Why past tense?”

Valeria looks away, but Hale doesn’t.

Mercer says quietly, “His team went dark twelve days ago.”

The floor disappears from under me. Not literally, though I think I would have preferred it if it had. I stay standing because my body has always been really annoyingly loyal in the face of emergencies. But something underneath me falls away.

Twelve days.

Maine survived six years and went dark twelve days ago. Twelve days while I was eating cold beans off a knife. Twelve days while I was pretending the world didn’t have any more ways it could take anything else from me. Twelve days while he was alive enough to go missing again.

A sound scrapes out of me. Not a sob. Not even close, because sobs belong to people who believe softness has somewhere to land. This is something uglier, something coated in a thick layer of rust and grime.

Ewan says, “Kota.”

I don’t look at him. I know if I look at any one of them, I’ll break in a direction I can’t control. So I look at Mercer instead and ask, “Where?”

Hale cuts in sharply. “No.”

I move for the folder, and two guards shift.

Kaito’s growl fills the room then, a low sound. It’s not loud, not dramatic. It’s worse. It’s controlled and lethal. A warning from something patient enough to wait exactly one second before resorting to violence.

Hale’s hand drops to his sidearm but Fletcher speaks before anyone dies. “You put hands on her, and this room gets real small, real fast.”

The second the words leave his mouth, the room notices.

Her.

My blood goes cold, my body turning to stone. Fletcher does, too, but only for a fraction of a second. Then he moves, slow and deliberate, as if he meant the file now tucked under my hand. Like that’s what he meant all along.

“Touch the file,” he says, voice flat, “and I’ll start hurting people.”

It’s not perfect, and it’s certainly not clean, but it’s enough of a shove in the other direction that Hale’s eyes flick down to the folder instead of my face.

Valeria then snaps, “Everyone stop moving.”

It’s surprisingly sensible, but I don’t stop. I leave two fingers on the folder and drag it toward me, and Mercer lets me.

Hale barks, “Mercer.”