They moved the listening device.
Not far. Just six inches to the left to the edge of the monitor bank where the audio pickup was slightly worse, where ambient machine noise would bleed into the feed and make certain frequencies harder to isolate. Subtle enough that Victor's team would not register the change. Significant enough that Kazuki and Aeva could now have a full conversation at normal volume on the other side of the room without it being clearly captured.
The six inches were Aeva's idea.
Kazuki handled the device while she confirmed the audio dead zone with her gravity sense she could feel the pickup radius of the microphone the same way she felt the edge of a gravitational field, as a pressure change that her body registered before her mind named it. She moved her hand slowly through the air beside the device until she found the edge of the zone. They marked it with a piece of electrical tape on the floor.
Everything inside the tape was clean. Everything outside it was fed to Victor.
They stood inside the tape.
"He's waiting for us to panic," Aeva said. "The city is hostile. The government is pressuring us. He's taken the comfortable options off the table one by one. His next move will come when he thinks we're desperate enough to make a mistake."
"So we give him a mistake," Kazuki said.
"A controlled one."
"We tell him through the device that we're moving the Core to a secondary location. Something believable. A location that's real enough to check but far enough from here that his team has to physically deploy to confirm it."
"While we're doing something else," Aeva said.
"While we're doing something else."
She looked at the floor. Thinking. He recognized the specific quality of her silence when she was building something it had a texture to it, a density that the room around her took on.
"Darius," she said.
"He's deteriorating."
"Which means he has a window. A short one. If there's anything else he knows anything he hasn't told us yet we need it before the lightning takes him past communicating." She looked up. "That's the real operation. Victor gets the decoy. We get Darius."
Kazuki thought about the maintenance corridor. The worn voice. The genuine smile. The way Darius had said probably not when asked if he would be alright, and meant it without any performance.
He nodded.
Elena came in at 9 AM with coffee and no explanation for where she had been.
Kazuki was sitting at the main console reading a newspaper. Physical paper he had picked it up two blocks away specifically for this moment. The front page headline was about the Vane Broadcast. A quote from a government official calling for the Speedster to submit to independent review.
He looked up when Elena entered. Let her see the newspaper. Let her read the headline on his face as neutrally as possible.
"Morning," he said.
"You look terrible," she said.
"Bad night."
She looked at his left eye. Looked away again quickly the way she did now, every time. Like the blue ring was something she had categorized and needed to not react to in his presence.
She set a coffee down beside him. Then she moved to the back room.
Kazuki waited exactly ninety seconds. Then he stood up, crossed to the monitor bank, and spoke clearly toward the edge of the listening device's pickup zone.
"Aeva." He kept his voice low and slightly urgent. The specific tone of someone having a private conversation that they believe is private. "I've been thinking about what Darius said. About the disc. I don't think we can keep the Core here much longer. If Victor knows we have the disc, he knows the variable is active. He'll come here."
He paused, as if listening to a response from across the room.
"The Nakamura facility. District 8. Renji had a secondary cache there I didn't tell anyone about it because I wasn't sure it was still secure. But if we move the Core there in the next twelve hours, we buy time to understand the disc before Victor makes his real move."
Another pause.
"Tonight. After midnight when the drone pattern resets."
He walked away from the monitor bank and back to the main console.
He picked up the newspaper again.
He did not look at the device.
He did not look at Elena's closed door.
He read the same sentence four times without registering a single word of it and waited for the operation to begin.
At noon Rina arrived through the back entrance. Kenji was with her mask off since the meeting with Victor, which was a small change that meant something Kazuki hadn't fully decoded yet.
Kenji looked at Kazuki. Looked at the floor tape. Looked back at Kazuki.
"Smart," Kenji said.
"Aeva's idea," Kazuki said.
Kenji nodded as if this was exactly what he expected.
"Darius sent a signal an hour ago," Rina said. She held up her scanner. A small blip on the District 3 map the same location as before, but the signature was different. Weaker. The black energy reading had a fragmented quality it hadn't had two days ago.
"He's getting worse," Kazuki said.
"Faster than I anticipated," Rina confirmed. "If cellular deterioration follows the same curve as Renji's Rot, he has three to five days of full cognition remaining. After that, She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.
Kazuki looked at the blip on the scanner.
He thought about the third recording. Renji speaking to the left of the camera. I know you can hear this. I know what you came back to fix.
He thought about Darius in the maintenance corridor saying he had been watching for three weeks. Watching and waiting. For what exactly was a question that had been sitting in a room by itself in the back of Kazuki's mind since the corridor, gathering weight.
"Tonight," Kazuki said. "We visit Darius. All of us. Whatever he knows, we get it before the window closes."
He looked around the room.
"And whatever you say between now and midnight say it inside the tape."
[To Be Continued...]