novelraw Chapter 203: Another Cage
Chapter 203: Another Cage
Zubair returned to himself in layers.
The first thing he noticed was the cold.
Not the good kind—the honest bite of wind off a frozen river—but the sterile kind trapped inside walls scrubbed too clean.
Then the hum that lived in the bones of the place. Not a generator’s growl. Not a home’s breath. Clinical. Controlled.
He did not open his eyes.
He listened.
Air moved through a vent high and right, cycling on a slow metronome.
Footsteps far down a corridor, rubber soles that didn’t trust their own sound. A door sealed somewhere with a gasketed sigh. Two voices traded numbers behind glass. Not close. Not concerned.
He opened his eyes.
Plexiglass, eight by eight, rose around him like a clear coffin.
The ceiling was ten feet tall, crossed with steel lattice so neat even the shadows respected the geometry. The corners were sealed, the seams perfectly flushed.
The door was paneled with thicker poly, two feed slots stacked chest and knee height, keyed from the outside.
He sat up without hurry.
Taking inventory, he breathed slowly through his nose.
Headache, dull. Throat, dry. Hands, steady. Whoever dosed them had weighed muscle mass and erring on the side of alive.
Across the corridor, there were more cubes. The one in his direct line of sight was empty, so too was the one just to the right. Beyond that, a blur of bodies could be seen through the layers of plexiglass.
He let his eyes adjust and sorted the shapes.
Elias was folded on his side with one arm tucked under his ribs the way he always hid the parts he worried over. Lachlan was facedown and sprawled, one boot against the wall like he had tried to stand between breaths. Alexei was half-curled, his mouth tilted in the faint upward line that meant mischief even asleep.
But what screamed at him was that there was no Sera anywhere.
He let the information settle in the order it deserved.
It was good that she was not here.
Bad that she was not with them.
He trusted her to make the world bleed when she chose. He did not trust the world to let her choose.
He worried about just how she was going to survive on her own and how long it would take him to get back to her.
He stood and tested the floor.
It was smooth, a grit worked into the sealant for shoes that would never see weather.
He rolled his weight through the edges of his feet and cataloged bone and tendon.
Nothing sprained.
In fact, everything was fine if you didn’t count the sedative’s heaviness and the faint pull of a bruise along his right shoulder where someone else’s timing had met a doorframe.
He moved to the door and put two fingers to the feed slot’s seam.
There was no subtle give, no slop in the screws. The hinge sat outside, shrouded. He crouched and peered along the lower edge for any tolerance. A straight line looked back at him, uninterested.
He stood again and let his gaze shift up to the camera in the corner. Black eye, red pinprick. Field of view wide enough to keep a man honest.
If the engineers were thorough, a second lens lived behind the smoked panel opposite to catch corners and hands.
He breathed once and let the breath settle.
The thing inside him that purred every time he made breakfast, lifted its head with a spark of heat under his breastbone. Not a flare, not a rush to take control so much as a reminder.
He turned his attention toward it, the way he would turn toward a sentry stepping out of shadow.
’Not yet,’ Zubair pushed out. He wasn’t completely familiar with the thing inside of him. He considered it more of a Sera minder than anything else. It purred when he was doing something for her. It snarled when there was a threat to her.
It basically kept track of the woman Zubair was finding himself more and more fascinated with and pushed for more.
The spark rolled once, amused, then flattened until even his skin forgot it.
Good. He didn’t want anyone to know that there was something inside of him that he couldn’t explain.
He needed every reading to say ordinary.
He needed every thermal camera to see a man cooling down from sleep, not a furnace misfiled as human.
Surprise was a weapon men gave away because they liked the taste of threat. He would not.
He checked the others again.
Elias’s chest rose on a slow count that would scandalize a nurse and please a machine.
Lachlan’s hand twitched like a dog running in a dream. Alexei did not move at all, which never meant what it meant in other men. The man from Country K’s stillness was often the loudest thing in the room.
Zubair stepped back to the far wall and put his palms flat to the plexiglass.
Temperature readouts hid in systems beyond the door.
If they were measuring skin, he would give them boring.
He set his spine to neutral and rolled his shoulders down. He had done this before—in tents with humming AC units, in rooms with mirrors that were not mirrors, in cities where a badge meant a man answered to fewer people than he should.
He closed his eyes and counted the building’s habits.
Vent cycle. Two and a half minutes with air moving; one minute of rest.
Pumps somewhere below shouldering fluid through veins thicker than garden hose.
One heavy draw of power every twelve minutes, deeper than lights, deeper than monitors.
Imaging. Or cold storage. Or one of the machines that took pictures by convincing a body to answer questions it had not agreed to hear.
Luci was not here. If they had sense, they would have him drugged and left him alone back at the penthouse so he could not teach the corridor the taste of teeth.
If they were arrogant, they would keep him where they could point and explain him to men with pens.
He opened his eyes when a keycard grazed plastic down the hall.
Not his door.
Another.