Chapter 8: A.S.

I didn’t wait for the elevator sound to fully die before I moved. The drive went into my laptop the second the street below showed no black car, no shadow that didn’t belong, my hands steady even though every instinct told me that once I opened these files there was no going back to the smaller, safer version of the truth I’d been living with since I woke.

Six documents. Three still locked. I didn’t have time to fight the encryption — I skimmed the three that opened, fast, my eyes cataloguing instead of absorbing: a medical summary dated four years ago, a subject listed only as A.S., a regenerative compound that mutated faster than predicted, seizures, a total blackout, and researchers who called the outcome a failure because they couldn’t control what they’d made.

The second file stopped my breathing entirely. Internal correspondence. A decision to declare the subject dead and scrub her from every database — not because she’d died, but because a living result they couldn’t reproduce was too dangerous to leave loose and too valuable to destroy. One line near the bottom:

If the primary strain ever reaches open release, the original host remains the only known biological constant capable of limiting total systemic collapse.

A floorboard creaked in the hallway outside my door.

I killed the laptop screen on instinct, plunging the room into dark, and sat frozen with my pulse slamming while I listened. Another creak. Slower this time, deliberate, someone testing their weight against old wood. I eased out of the chair, grabbed the kitchen knife from the block without a sound, and moved toward the door on bare feet.

The handle turned. Just slightly — a quarter inch, then stopped, like someone testing whether I’d locked it.

I stood two feet away, knife low at my side, breath held so hard my chest ached, until a voice came muffled through the wood.

“Ava. I know you’re in there.”

Ethan.

Relief and fury hit me in the same breath. I didn’t answer. The handle turned again, harder this time, and when it didn’t give he hit the door once with the flat of his hand, not quite a punch, but close enough that the frame rattled.

“Open the door or I’m coming up a different way. I mean it.”

“Go home, Ethan.” My voice came out steadier than I expected, knife still in my hand. “There’s nothing here for you.”

A long pause. Then his footsteps retreated, hard and uneven, and I didn’t move from the door until I heard the stairwell door bang shut three floors down. I checked the street from the edge of the curtain a full ten minutes later. His car was gone. The anger he’d left behind wasn’t.

I copied what I’d salvaged from the drive onto an encrypted folder, hid the drive itself behind the false wall, and forced myself back to the notebook — secondary routes into the hospital, materials to reinforce the lower exits, how much I could move in a single night if I timed it right. I worked until my hands cramped and the numbers stopped making sense, then slept in short, ugly stretches with the notebook still open beside the bed.

At 3:17 a.m. my phone buzzed once.

The hospital is no longer an option. They placed watchers on the eastern approach two hours ago. Find another location before the end of the week. — D

I was upright before I’d finished reading it, heart going hard, phone gripped so tight the edges bit into my palm. Damian was still watching Vallis’s people closely enough to know this within hours of it happening — which meant the forty-eight hours he’d promised me were already burning faster than either of us wanted.

I deleted the message and crossed to the window without turning on a single light.

A figure stood across the street, in the exact spot where Ethan’s car had been parked hours earlier. Not sitting. Not waiting in a vehicle. Standing still, facing my building, in the dark where no one should have been able to see anything at all.

And somehow, I knew he was looking straight at my window.