Twenty minutes was not rest.
It was a bureaucratic apology for exhaustion.
Department Seven placed Aiden and Lucas in a small break room with no windows, no screens, no wall art, and a vending machine that had been unplugged under visual-safety protocol because one of its animated advertisements had contained a rotating crisp packet. Someone had covered the glass front with brown paper and written FOOD AVAILABLE BY REQUEST in black marker, as if crisps had become a controlled substance.
On the table were two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, two bottles of water, an apple, a protein bar, and a paper cup of coffee whose colour suggested administrative intent rather than kindness.
Lucas looked at the food.
“Do they know what humans eat?”
“They know what consultants tolerate,” Aiden said.
“That is a narrower category.”
Aiden took the coffee and sat down. He did not drink it.
Lucas sat opposite him with the carefulness of someone pretending not to be careful. The protective glasses had left faint marks along the bridge of his nose. His hair, usually controlled by either discipline or neglect, had begun to fail in both directions.
“You should sleep,” Aiden said.
“We have twenty minutes.”
“That was not an invitation to make it worse.”
Lucas unwrapped the sandwich and inspected it. “If I die, tell them it was from this.”
“If you die, I will have many competing explanations.”
“Please choose the least embarrassing.”
Aiden almost smiled.
The relay handset sat on the table between them. Department Seven’s approved family device was thick, grey, and aggressively joyless. It could receive cleared text, transmit approved audio calls, and do nothing that might accidentally show a sky, an image, or a world. It had the personality of a hospital discharge summary.
Lucas took a bite of the sandwich, suffered privately, and said, “Call them.”
Aiden looked at him.
“You have been staring at that thing as if neurological inference will become family communication if you concentrate hard enough.”
“I am prioritising.”
“You are avoiding.”
“I am doing both efficiently.”
Lucas leaned back. “Your mother will know.”
Aiden disliked that this was true.
The relay handset offered him one approved option:
APPROVED FAMILY RELAY — AUDIO ONLY
He pressed call.
The connection took eight seconds.
Eight seconds had once been too short to matter. Now it was long enough for Aiden to imagine every possible deterioration and hate himself for imagining it clinically.
Then Alec answered.
“Hello?”
The room became smaller.
“Alec.”
A breath. Not relief exactly. Something close enough to hurt.
“Aiden?”
“Yes.”
A muffled shift followed, the sound of the phone being moved.
“I’m putting you on speaker,” Alec said. “Everyone’s here.”
The word everyone did something to him that no government briefing had managed.
“Aiden, are you safe?” Alec asked.
“No one’s really safe.”
“Good. Honest answer. Hate it.”
“Is Elisa worse?”
There it was. No greeting left. No softness first. His fear had reached for the most urgent fact and found it by habit.
Alec understood. That was one of the mercies of family: they knew the shape of your damage before you explained it.
“Mild pressure,” Alec said. His voice had changed at once, less brother, more analyst. “Stable over the last hour. No persistent visual symptoms, no vomiting, no confusion, no weakness, no seizure activity. Pupils equal and reactive. Flora is checking every thirty minutes. Mum is pretending not to be terrified by reorganising canned food.”
From somewhere behind him, their mother said, “I am not pretending.”
Aiden closed his eyes briefly.
“Hi, Mum.”
“You have not eaten.”
Lucas mouthed, told you.
Aiden turned slightly away from him. “I have food.”
“That is not the same thing.”
“I know.”
“Eat while talking.”
“Mum, I am in a secure facility.”
“Are you in a secure facility where people cannot chew?”
Alec made a small sound that might have been laughter trying to survive.
Aiden picked up the apple, mostly to avoid further defeat.
“I’m eating.”
“You are lying.”
“I am holding food.”
“Progress,” she said.
For a moment, absurdly, the catastrophe contracted to the size of a family call: his mother treating hunger as the more immediate emergency, Alec trying not to laugh, the faint domestic rustle of the basement behind them, and Lucas across the table pretending the sandwich required his full moral attention. It was not safety. It was not even peace. But it was close enough for his body to recognise.
Then Elisa’s voice came through, quieter.
“Aiden?”
Everything in him reoriented.
“I’m here.”
“I’m fine.”
“That is not a clinical description.”
“I knew you were going to say that.”
“I am comfortingly predictable.”
“You’re really not.”
Flora spoke now, close to the phone. “She is stable. Annoying, but stable.”
“That is her baseline,” Aiden said.
“Excuse you,” Elisa said.
The small warmth came and went so quickly it almost hurt.
“Elisa,” he said. “Alec told me about the parser.”
Silence.
Then: “I told him not to.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t want you to worry.”
“That strategy has failed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No.” It came out too quickly. He corrected his voice before it could frighten her. “No. You did not do anything wrong.”
“I looked.”
“You were frightened. Everyone looked.”
“You told us not to.”
“I told you after.”
Another silence.
Then Elisa said, very softly, “I didn’t see the wheel on Alec’s screen.”
“I know.”
“It was just words. Numbers. Lines. I just suddenly knew it was there. Like my head recognised something before I did.”
Aiden heard Lucas stop moving.
Alec said, “That’s exactly what she told us after. I closed the laptop. She looked away quickly. Symptoms didn’t spike afterwards.”
Aiden looked across the table.
Lucas had taken out his notebook.
“Did the text preserve any spatial symmetry?” Aiden asked.
Alec exhaled. “Text-only structural map from Maya. No image rendering. Coordinates, nested relationships, centre-distance estimates, curvature vectors, density gradients, boundary descriptors. I stripped the visual output completely.”
Flora said, “He means it looked like the world’s most boring tax return.”
“Thank you,” Alec said. “Accurate but cruel.”
“Was there hierarchy in the text?” Aiden asked. “Indentation, clustering, repeated structure?”
“Possibly. The indentation may have preserved hierarchy. Repeated coordinate clusters. Some nesting. Maybe enough for a primed brain to infer structure.”
“Or complete it,” Lucas said quietly.
Alec paused. “Lucas?”
“Yes.”
“You sound awful.”
Lucas leaned towards the relay handset. “Thank you. It has been a competitive day.”
“If Elisa reacted and Flora and I didn’t,” Alec said, “that suggests first exposure changed her threshold.”
“Yes,” Lucas said. “That is now our working concern.”
Their mother said, “Speak human.”
Aiden took over before Lucas could make it worse.
“The first exposure may have left a kind of imprint,” he said. “Not just a memory of what she saw. More like the brain learned part of the structure. When Elisa saw Alec’s data, it may have given her brain enough pieces to build the rest again.”
Their mother was silent.
Then she said, “So she should not look at Alec’s work.”
“No,” Aiden said. “She should not.”
“Alec.”
“I know,” Alec replied.
“No, you knew before and still showed it.”
“I didn’t show her. It was on my screen and she was behind me.”
“That is showing.”
“Mum—”
“That is showing.”
Flora said, “She’s right.”
Alec sighed. “Fine.”
That’s usually how it ended when he tried to argue with his Mum.
Elisa whispered, “It was my fault.”
Four voices answered at once.
“No,” Aiden said.
“No,” Flora said.
“No,” Alec said.
Their mother said, “Don’t be stupid.”
It would have sounded cruel from anyone else. From her, it was almost tenderness.
Lucas, listening from the table, looked down at his sandwich as if moved despite himself.
Aiden softened his voice.
“Elisa. Listen to me. Symptoms are not blame. Exposure is not blame. If anything changes, you tell Alec, Flora, Mum, or Iris immediately. No waiting. No promises. No protecting me.”
“I just didn’t want to make things harder.”
“You are my sister. That is already your lifelong project.”
A tiny laugh. Wet at the edges.
“Rude.”
“Accurate.”
Flora said, “He does love you.”
“I know,” Elisa said.
That was worse than if she had doubted it.
Aiden looked at the wall because looking at nothing was sometimes the only way to remain composed.
Alec spoke again. “Aiden, Maya needs the pathology samples if they’re cleared. She thinks the parser can compare the retinal and optic nerve data against the mineral plate structures without rendering them.”
“Department Seven knows.”
“Of course they do.”
“They are monitoring relevant data pathways.”
“That phrase makes me want to commit several crimes.”
“Please don’t. I am low on energy for bail.”
Flora said, “He sounds tired.”
Aiden did not answer.
Their mother did. “He always sounds tired.”
“That is also true,” Alec said.
Aiden took one bite of the apple.
It was too loud in his own head.
“Mum,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Are you all staying in the basement?”
“Yes. I have blankets, water, food, medicine, documents, batteries.”
“And the kettle,” Alec said.
Their mother did not miss a beat. “Obviously.”
“And the rice cooker.”
Flora, despite herself, said, “Please tell me that came after the first-aid kit.”
“Nonsense,” their mother said. “The first-aid kit was already there.”
Alec said, “That is technically true.”
“The rice cooker needs a socket,” their mother said, as if this were the missing principle in emergency medicine.
Aiden closed his eyes for one second.
For reasons he could not have explained to anyone in Department Seven, that helped.
“Good,” he said. “That is good.”
“It is not funny,” their mother said.
“No,” Aiden said. “It is extremely sensible.”
Alec said, “He means funny.”
“I heard him.”
The laughter that followed was small, uneven, and gone almost immediately.
But it had existed.
Aiden held on to that.
“Listen,” he said, quieter now. “You are all doing the right things. I know you are. Keep the lights low, but not dark. Keep things ordinary if you can. No screens near Elisa unless there is a reason. No diagrams, no data, no maps from Maya, no feeds. Ordinary text is probably fine, but voice is better for now.”
“We know,” Flora said.
“I know.”
“You are doing it anyway.”
“Yes,” Aiden said. “Because I am still me.”
Their mother made a small sound that might have been approval.
“If anything changes,” he continued, “visual symptoms, vomiting, confusion, seizure activity, weakness, chest pain, fainting, severe agitation, or if the pressure gets worse, call the emergency relay and call an ambulance. Don’t wait for me to answer first.”
“We won’t,” Flora said.
“And Flora?”
“Yes?”
“Sit down sometimes.”
“I am sitting.”
“For more than thirty seconds.”
“That is unreasonable.”
“It runs in the family.”
Alec said, “What about me?”
“You,” Aiden said, “stop pretending the laptop is your central nervous system. If you feel pressure, visual disturbance, dizziness, nausea, anything strange, you stop immediately. No finishing the line. No one-last-test. Stop.”
Alec was quiet for half a second.
Then he said, “Understood.”
This time he meant it.
“And Mum?”
“Yes?”
“You are allowed to be scared.”
The line went still.
Flora’s voice softened. “What about Iris?”
“I saw her at Saint Bartholomew’s,” Aiden said.
The silence changed.
“She is safe?” Flora asked.
“She is working. Those are not always the same thing.”
“No,” Flora said. “They are not.”
Aiden remembered Iris in the hospital light: tired, precise, unsentimental, doing three things at once and tolerating none of the wrong ones.
“She knows what she is doing,” he said. “More than most people in that building. She was calm. Useful. Terrifyingly competent.”
Alec said, “So, Iris.”
“Yes,” Aiden said. “So, Iris.”
That seemed to comfort them.
It comforted him too, though he did not say it.
Their mother said, “You worry about everyone.”
“I am trying to be efficient.”
“You are not efficient. You are eldest.”
Aiden did not answer.
“Good,” she said. “Then you are still yourself.”
That undid him more than kindness would have.
Cross appeared at the break-room door.
She did not enter. She held up five fingers.
Five minutes.
Aiden nodded once.
“Alec,” he said. “Send Maya the parser logs, but strip anything with visible hierarchy. Flatten the text if possible. No indentation. No repeated spatial layout. Randomise order if that doesn’t destroy analysis. Use labels that do not preserve geometry.”
Alec was already typing. “Flatten structure, preserve relational table separately, randomised sequence, no visual hierarchy. Got it.”
Lucas added, “And create an exposure-safe version for review by non-exposed analysts. No centre-based sorting.”
“Understood.”
Aiden said, “Do not let Elisa see any of it.”
“No.”
“Alec.”
“I know.”
This time he did.
Elisa said, “Aiden?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to come home?”
The question entered the room like something alive.
Aiden looked at Cross in the doorway. At Lucas across the table. At the relay handset. At the apple in his hand. At the twenty minutes shrinking around him.
“Not yet,” he said.
Elisa did not answer immediately.
Then: “Okay.”
It was not okay.
They all knew that.
“I will call again when I can.”
“You better,” Flora said.
“Eat,” their mother said.
“Sleep,” Alec said.
“Don’t look,” Elisa said.
Aiden closed his eyes.
“I love you,” he said.
Nobody made a joke.
That frightened him more than anything.
Then their mother said, “We love you too. Now hang up before you become sentimental and useless.”
The call ended.
For several seconds, Aiden did not move.
Lucas slid the sandwich across the table towards him.
“Eat.”
“I had apple.”
“That was symbolism.”
Aiden looked at the sandwich.
“What is it?”
“Allegedly turkey.”
“Allegedly?”
“Department Seven has a flexible relationship with truth.”
Aiden took it.
Cross came in properly now.
“We need you.”
“That continues to be the problem,” Lucas said.
Cross looked at him. “Dr Han, your symptoms?”
“Stable.”
“Aiden?”
Aiden swallowed the first bite badly.
“He is pale, tired, irritable, and neurologically intact by conversation. So, stable.”
Lucas said, “That was almost affectionate.”
“Do not grow dependent on it.”
Cross placed a printed sheet on the table.
“New incident reports. Recurrent symptoms in previously exposed patients in Seoul, Melbourne, São Paulo, and Toronto. Several triggered after non-anomaly stimuli: hospital scanner, geometric emergency signage, a child’s drawing, one audio alert. We cannot confirm causality.”
Aiden reached for the sheet.
Cross pulled it back.
“Eat first.”
Aiden stared at her.
Lucas smiled.
Aiden took another bite.
The turkey was indeed theoretical.
ns216.73.216.152da2
and then Add to home screen.