Chapter 66: Chapter 66: Together

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Chapter 66: Together

Amara stepped closer, her eyes scanning his face for some sign that he was all right. “You took a long time,” she said. “The others finished ages ago. I was starting to worry.”

“I’ll tell you all about it,” Kairan said. “Let’s go.”

They walked down the corridor together, saying nothing more, and returned to the common room, where the rest of the Two-Ninety were still seated at their table bowls finally full, the chatter of dinnertime filling the air around them.

Kairan sat down. His bowl was in front of him, the steam all but gone, yet he couldn’t bring himself to touch his spoon. He sat motionless, hands in his lap and eyes cast down for a moment, gathering his thoughts on how to share what he had heard.

“What is it?” Peter asked, noticing his stillness. “Aren’t you hungry?”

“I heard something,” Kairan said. “In the extraction room. Or rather, afterwards l⁹kfrom outside.”

Everyone turned to look at him.

“What did you hear?” Gregory asked, his voice instinctively dropping.

Kairan told them. The empty corridor. The wall through which he’d heard a voice no one else could have caught. Grimsdyke replying “I’m coming” to someone asking about the feeding drip. And then that person addressing the doctor by his title, and Grimsdyke replying by using the person’s name.

“Ezra,” Kairan said.

The whole table went rigid.

“What did he say?” Lena asked, her voice already tight, as if she knew she wouldn’t like the answer. Kairan repeated what he had heard, word for word, as best he could recall lmthe blood drawn every day, the entire year without seeing the sun, the plea to be killed just to end it all, and Grimsdyke’s reply, cold and unhesitating: if I kill you and take all the blood at once, then it’s over. This way, however, it keeps going.

Lena went pale. The color drained from her face all at once, as if someone had switched her off from the inside. She stood up abruptly, her chair scraping against the floor.

“I have to go to him,” she said. “Now. Or at least check see where they’re keeping him, do something.”

“Lena,” Amara said, rising too and reaching out a hand toward her. “Wait.”

“I don’t want to wait,” Lena said, her voice trembling, her eyes glistening. “I always said they were hiding something from us. I always said so, and no one believed me enough, and now Kairan has just confirmed that Ezra is alive he’s been in there for a year and no one”

“Lena, listen,” Gregory said, standing up as well and positioning himself almost in front of her without touching her. “If you run over there now, what do you think will happen? They’ll stop you before you even get close to that door.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do,” Peter said, his voice unusually serious. “If something happens to you, it doesn’t help anyone. Not even Ezra.”

Lena stopped, her chest heaving, her eyes darting from one person in the group to another, looking for someone to side with her. No one did, but no one treated her coldly, either Clara placed a gentle hand on her arm, and Samuel stepped closer from the other side, as if they simply wanted to surround her until her fury had calmed a little. “We need to think this through,” Clara said, her voice firm but not harsh. “Calmly. Rushing over there tonight won’t save Ezra. It just risks you meeting the same fate.”

Lena didn’t answer right away. She stood there trembling, then sank back into her chair, burying her face in her hands for a moment before looking up again her eyes still bright, but her composure regained.

“All right,” she said quietly. “But I’m not giving up.”

“No one said anything about giving up,” Amara said, sitting down beside her.

Kairan waited for the tension to ease a little before continuing. “There’s something else,” he said. “That man. Grimsdyke.” He paused, searching for the right words. “He’s dangerous. Not in the way a bully or a harsh judge is dangerous. In a different way. Something deeper. I sensed it the moment I got close to him before he even opened his mouth.”

“Did you feel that way even before hearing what he said to Ezra?” Samuel asked.

“Yes,” Kairan said. “Right from the start.”

Silence fell over the table for a moment as everyone processed this confirmation in light of what had just been said.

“Even if we had all the proof in the world,” Peter said after a while, “we still couldn’t get in there. There are cameras in the sampling room. I saw one once, by accident, when the door had been left ajar: a small black box in the corner of the ceiling with a tiny red light. Grimsdyke would know immediately if anyone entered without his permission.”

“And besides the cameras,” Gregory added, “that door stays locked when he isn’t there. I checked once, a while back, when I still thought there might just be some old equipment inside. Locked. Always.” “So even if I knew exactly where Ezra is,” said Clara, “but it’s impossible to reach him without Grimsdyke noticing right away.”

Kairan listened to every detail, committing them to memory with the same methodical care he applied to everything else: the security cameras, the lock, the lack of windows in that part of the building, the dim light in the corridor leading to it.

“Then we need to find another way,” he said, his voice calm but firm. “Not tonight. But we’ll find a way.”

Lena looked up at him, and for the first time since she had sprung to her feet, her expression softened slightly not quite relief yet, but the feeling of no longer being alone in the battle she had been fighting for months, with no one fully believing her.