Page 237 of Immune

“I’m not,” I promise.

“Good,” she says, then pauses. “You’re X, so you’d have time to run, but still.”

My mouth almost curves as I turn the corner.

She’s standing at the end of the hallway next to a door with old lettering that has been half-scraped from the glass. GREENHOUSE ACCESS. Most of the letters are long gone, leaving just enough to make a promise the building probably can’t keep.

She’s leaning against the wall, head tipped back, and eyes closed like she’s arguing with her own pulse. She’s too pale and still, but she’s still standing.

“Found you,” I say quietly, even though she wasn’t hard to find. She wasn’t exactly sneaking around and I only gave her a six-second head start, but the words seem to carry something a little more now that she’s lowering her guard a little.

Her eyes open and for a second, she just looks at me. Then her mouth tilts, tired and sharp. “Congratulations. Sorry the prize is shitty.”

“Disagree.”

That makes something in her expression shift. Not soft, and not safe, but less alone.

Dakota huffs before shaking her head, then tries the handle to the greenhouse.

Locked.

She looks at it with an instant personal hatred, so I step next to her and examine the keypad. “May I?”

She glances at me with her face bare, which feels like something I should handle with a great deal of caution. Not because she’s fragile, but because she’s spent years making sure no one was allowed to see it.

“Are you about to commit a crime?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“Then by all means, carry on,” she says with a flourished gesture toward the keypad that almost makes me smile again.

The keypad is older than most of the internal locks. Not quite military-grade. Repurposed before the compound became whatever it is now. I remove the casing with the edge of my knife and cross two wires until the lock gives a pathetic, tired little click.

Dakota stares at the door, and then at me. “That was alarmingly attractive.”

“Was it?”

“No. Shut up.”

I open the door. The greenhouse beyond it isn’t actually a greenhouse anymore. Most of the glass ceiling has been reinforced with plastic panels and mesh. Vines have overgrown one entire wall, their leaves pale from weak winter light and artificial lamps. Rows of planter beds sit under humming bulbs. Some hold herbs, and some hold nothing but soil and stubbornness.

It smells alive in here. Like damp earth, tender leaves, and filtered water. It’s like a quiet refusal to let the world become only metal, blood, and concrete.

Dakota steps inside like she distrusts plants on principle alone. The door closes behind us and the compound noise dulls immediately. There’s no medical monitors beeping. NoHale barking orders and commands. None of Mercer’s guilt. No Maine breathing through pain in the room just down the hall.

There’s just water dripping somewhere and the low hum of grow lights above us.

Dakota stands between two planter beds, shoulders rigid and hair falling around her face like pale moonlight. Her scent is broken now, wild honey and rain tangled tightly with grief, anger, exhaustion, and the weighted chemical edge of old blockers burning away in her system.

It hits the Alpha in me hard enough to make my hands curl, but I force them to relax.

She notices.

“You can leave,” she says.

“I know.”

Her eyes cut to me. “That wasn’t me being polite.”