I stopped outside the heavy steel door of 904.
Behind the two-inch-thick observation window, Chloe was sitting upright on the edge of the examination bed.
She wasn’t hooked to a ventilator.The endotracheal tube had been removed, leaving only a faint red mark along the side of her mouth.
The terrible purple-black swelling that had distorted her face at the bus stop was still there—the raw, swollen flesh of a vicious physical beating—but her posture was wrong.
A girl whose world had just collapsed does not sit with her shoulders squared, her chin level with the horizon, and her breathing measured at twelve slow cycles per minute.
She was watching the door.Waiting for me.
“Leave us,” I told Vance.
“Samantha, the debrief team from Directorate—”
“Leave the corridor, Jonathan,” I repeated, not raising my voice.
Vance looked at my profile for two seconds, dipped his chin once, and signaled the two guards.The three of them retreated toward the elevator bank, their footfalls fading into the quiet hum of the ventilation shafts.
