Chapter 3: The Live Feed
"Don't reach for it," I said, my voice dropping into a lower register, steadier than it had been a moment ago when I was gasping for air against the cold marble. The artificial adrenaline was settling into a cold, functional focus, sharp and clear in my veins.
The man in the black suit froze, his hand arrested halfway inside his jacket pocket. His dark eyes narrowed as he assessed me, calculating whether I had enough physical strength left to pose a genuine threat after what should have been a twelve-hour chemical shutdown. "You think you can just walk out of here after what happened on this floor?" he asked, his tone laced with quiet menace. "That compound in the injector was specifically designed to keep you under for a full shift. The fact that you're standing up and talking right now is an absolute anomaly. A variable we simply didn't account for."
"Clearly," I said, shifting my weight and stepping firmly between him and the young girl. She stayed close behind me, her small frame tucked against my back, her breathing shallow and audible in the quiet, expansive room. I looked up at the white bookshelf across the polished floor. The small security camera mounted neatly beneath the top shelf blinked with a steady, rhythmic red light. It wasn't just recording locally for later review; the faint, high-pitched hum of a hidden transmitter confirmed what the man had just admitted. Every second we stayed in this room, our faces, our micro-expressions, and our desperate choices were being cataloged by whoever sat at the other end of that live feed.
"Check the camera yourself if you don't believe me," the man muttered, giving a sharp nod toward the bookshelf. "The feed is heavily encrypted, but the override code is stored on the console in the private study down the hall. If we don't clear the local logs before the primary extraction team arrives, we're all going to be treated as liabilities."
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"I don't give a damn about your logs," I said, my eyes locked directly on his, refusing to blink. "I care about how she managed to get that pen into her backpack, and why you had me unconscious on a marble floor in the first place."
The man let out a short, bitter breath, his shoulders dropping slightly as he withdrew his hand from his jacket. "She took it because she knew you'd die without it. As for the rest—you signed the non-disclosure agreement the moment you stepped through those front doors this morning. Sudden memory loss is a known side effect of the initial integration phase. You just happened to react worse than expected."
