Chapter 14 My mom is dead

The staff member who met him at the door knew his name without being told.

That was the first thing Ethan noted. Not the building. Not the décor. The fact that a woman he had never seen before opened the door before he knocked and said good evening, Mr Cole, and walked him through the ground floor and up the stairs without asking who he was or why he was there.

Someone had told her exactly who was coming and exactly when.

Second floor. End of the corridor. A room with one table. Two chairs. A large screen on the wall is already on.

The masked figure was already there. Sitting in a chair in a room that looked different from the last time. New location. Different light angles. She had moved since the private members' club. She was not in this city. He had been trying to place her for two weeks, and every time he got close, the details shifted.

She tilted her head when he walked in.

He sat down.

"Breakfast this morning," she said. "Sung. The account froze. The three supplier terminations. The journalist's story." A brief pause. "You move fast."

"You already knew that," he said.

She laughed. Small. The genuine version he had heard before. Not performed.

"I did," she said. "Your father told me. He said you were the kind of person who spent a long time deciding and then moved faster than anyone expected once the decision was made." Another pause. "He was right."

Ethan said nothing. He let her talk. He had learned in the last two weeks that the most useful position with any source of information was silence. People filled with silence. They filled it with what they had been deciding whether to say and what they defaulted to when they stopped deciding and started talking.

She talked.

She told him about Elena's timeline. Six weeks to completion of the second purpose. The selective enhancement process. The ability to decide who evolved and who didn't. She delivered it with the precision of someone reading from a report they had already written in their head. Clean. Specific. No theater.

He listened and watched her face behind the mask and gave her nothing back.

Three minutes in, she told him Elena was in the city.

He watched the moment she chose to say it. The slight adjustment in her posture that preceded it. She had been holding it and had decided three minutes was long enough to hold it before releasing it. He gave her a controlled reaction. Not large. A stillness that suggested the information had landed somewhere significant. Enough to confirm for her that he was receiving rather than already knowing.

She was managing him.

He was managing her.

Both of them understood this on some level that neither of them named out loud.

"She has been here for three weeks," the woman said. "She arrived four days before you did."

"She knew I was coming," Ethan said.

"She has known for longer than that." A pause. "She has been four days ahead of you since before you left the facility. Everything you have walked into since you arrived has been shaped by someone who knew your moves before you made them."

Ethan looked at the mask.

"Not all my moves," he said.

She tilted her head again. The gesture meant she was recalibrating. "No. Not all of them. You have surprised her twice. The Sung meeting was one. She did not model for that speed." A pause. "She is adjusting."

"So am I," Ethan said.

He leaned forward slightly in the chair. "Tell me about the final component. The piece Elena acquired after Diana refused to give it."

A stillness on the screen. Brief. The stillness of someone deciding how much to give.

"She didn't find another research route," the woman said. "She went inside."

"Inside the facility," Ethan said.

"Inside a subject." The mask tilted down slightly, then back up. "The data from the enhancement process. Biological responses. Neurological markers. The ongoing physiological data that a living enhanced subject generates continuously. That data is the final component. Not a document. Not a formula. Living data from a living subject."

Ethan looked at the screen.

"Kane," he said.

She was quiet for a moment.

"Elena has had access to Kane for two years," she said. "Not through the same channels that run Kane's operational programming. Separately. A parallel access point that Kane's programming does not register as external interference. He does not know. He cannot know. The way he was built does not allow for that level of self-awareness about his own systems."

Ethan sat back.

Kane in the room at the private members club. Kane is on one knee. Kane's face when Ethan said you are a person who was turned into a weapon without being asked. The one second of hesitation when the collection team arrived.

Kane had been Elena's data source for two years without knowing it.

"Without his ongoing data," the woman said, "the final component becomes incomplete. The process cannot be completed from existing records alone. It requires continuous physiological input from a living subject responding to active conditions."

"If we get Kane away from Elena's access," Ethan said.

"She loses the component. Yes." A pause. "It does not stop her permanently. She will find another route eventually. But it buys time. Weeks. Possibly months. Enough time to get to her directly."

Ethan looked at the mask.

"You can get me to Kane," he said. Not a question.

"Yes."

"Why would you do that?"

The screen was quiet.

Not the managed quiet of someone constructing an answer. Something different. The quiet of someone who had arrived at a question they had been carrying for a long time and had not yet fully answered for themselves.

"Because Kane deserves better than what has been done to him," she said.

Her voice had changed. Something underneath the control. Personal. Old. The specific weight of something that had been sitting with a person for longer than was comfortable.

"And I have owed him that for a long time," she said.

Ethan looked at the mask on the screen.

He filed it. The voice changed. The weight behind those words. The specific way she said owed rather than wanted or intended.

Owed.

That was not a strategy. That was not management. That was something that lived in the body rather than the mind. Guilt had a specific texture when it came out in words, and he had just heard it.

Whoever was behind that mask had a history with Kane that went beyond running him as an asset.

Something had been done to Kane that she had been part of. And she had been sitting with that for a long time.

He stood up.

"Set it up," he said. "Kane. As soon as possible."

She nodded. The first time, she nodded. A real gesture.

"One more thing," she said as he moved toward the door.

He stopped.

"Your mother knows about tonight. She knows you met with me. She will move against you before morning." The mask was very still on the screen. "Be somewhere she cannot predict."

He looked at the screen one more time.

“My mom is dead.”

Then he walked out.