Kazuki didn't move for three seconds.
Three seconds was a long time for someone whose perception could stretch a single moment into a minute when the suit was active. He chose not to activate it. He sat with the message on the screen and let the three seconds be three seconds.
The disc responds to her because she was built to.
He put the device face-down on the table. Slowly. Casually. The way you put something down when you don't want the person across from you to read your face before you've decided what your face should say.
"Kazuki." Aeva was watching him. She had been watching him since the device buzzed. "What does it say?"
"Victor Vane." He kept his voice level. "He can hear us."
Aeva went completely still.
Then she stood up. Her eyes moved across the room in a single, systematic sweep every corner, every shadow, every vent cover and monitor cable and gap between equipment. The sweep of someone who had been trained to find what wasn't supposed to be there.
"Sweep," she said.
They moved.
It took eleven minutes to go through the entire garage. Every surface, every device, every piece of equipment Kazuki had brought back from any location in the last two months. Aeva ran her gravity sense across every wall , she could feel the weight differential of anything that didn't belong in the structure.
She found it behind the secondary monitor bank. A device so small it could have been a piece of solder that fell during a repair job. Flat, hexagonal, magnetic-backed.
She pulled it off the wall.
It was warm. Recently active.
She placed it on the table and looked at it.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"He was here," Kazuki said. "Or someone who works for him was here. While we were out."
"While you were with Darius and I was watching the door," Aeva said. Her voice had a specific quality to it the quality of someone recalculating a timeline and not liking what they find. "Elena came back in between. She was alone in here for forty minutes while I went to check the perimeter."
Kazuki looked at the device. At the Helix stamp on Elena's mug across the room.
"She's not working for Victor," he said. "She's working for someone who is giving information to Victor."
"Or Victor has multiple channels and she's one of them without fully understanding what she's feeding into." Aeva sat back down. Her expression was controlled but he could see the anger underneath it cold and precise, not hot. "We can't confront her. If she knows we found it, the channel closes and we lose the intelligence."
Kazuki nodded.
He picked up the listening device.
He thought about Victor Vane's hands on the table. The controlled thumb tap during the broadcast. The forty minutes of thinking in every real second. The files on six timelines. The three-word message to an unknown contact.
Victor Vane was not reactive. He did not respond to situations. He built them. Every move was structural a load-bearing piece of something larger that wouldn't be visible until it was already finished.
The broadcast had not been to turn the city against Kazuki. That was the visible layer. The real purpose was to create a condition where Kazuki had no official allies. No government protection. No public support. So that when Victor made his real offer the one that came after the listening and the files and the disc Kazuki would be standing in a room with only his team and a city full of people who had been given reason to doubt him.
Isolated. Dependent. Receivable.
Kazuki placed the device back behind the monitor bank.
Exactly where they found it.
Aeva looked at him.
"We leave it," Kazuki said quietly. "And we feed it what we want him to hear."
Her eyes held his for a moment. Then she nodded.
That night Kazuki sat alone on the roof of the garage.
No suit. Just the jacket and the cold air and the city spread out beneath him in every direction, neon and noise and the particular loneliness of a place that held millions of people who did not know his name.
He held the black disc in his palm.
He thought about Darius in the maintenance corridor. The black lightning. The worn voice. The thing he had said that Kazuki had not been able to let go of since the corridor.
He stopped the world because it kept ending. And he was tired of watching.
He thought about the amber groove lighting up when Aeva touched the disc. The warmth she described. The Core's pulse when he first held it.
He thought about what Victor's message said.
She was built to.
He turned the disc over in his fingers.
Built by who. For what. In response to which problem, identified at which point in the timeline, by which version of which person who had already seen how things went and decided to reach backward into the past and place a piece on the board before the game began.
He already knew the answer.
He just hadn't said it out loud yet.
The Core pulsed against his sternum. Once. Patient.
Above the city, a single light moved across the sky a drone, or a star, or something that was neither. Moving at a speed that looked slow from down here and was probably not slow at all from where it was.
Kazuki watched it until it disappeared.
He put the disc in his pocket.
He went back inside.
Aeva was asleep on the cot in the back room. Her breathing was steady, slow. The gold scars on her neck caught the faint blue light from the Core through the wall a thin, warm line of light that shouldn't have been reaching that far.
He stood in the doorway for a moment.
He thought: if the outcome is different in this timeline, I need to understand what that means before the suit does.
He turned off the light.
He went to work.
[To Be Continued...]