Viktor brought Marcus down to the tunnels at 05:30, before the rest of the station woke.
Sable was already up. She sat cross-legged on the maintenance platform with a mug of something that smelled like instant coffee stretched past its natural lifespan, reviewing her tunnel maps by lantern light. One of her people, a heavy-set man Viktor hadn't caught the name of, dozed against the wall with a hunting rifle across his knees.
"Early visit," Sable said. "Should I be worried?"
"Routine." Viktor sat on an overturned cable spool across from her. Marcus leaned against the wall, arms folded, watching with the patient attention of a man who'd sat through a thousand debriefs. "I want to build a defense plan around the tunnel network. Need more detail on your Omega Division intel."
Sable sipped her coffee. "What kind of detail?"
"The authorization documents you saw. Walk me through the specifics. Routing codes, reference numbers, anything I can cross-check."
She studied him for a moment. Not suspicious, exactly. More like a woman measuring whether the question had a second question hiding behind it.
"Division Fourteen routing used a seven-digit alpha-numeric prefix," she said. "The Omega equipment requisitions came through as OMG-7741 series. I handled six separate shipments between OMG-7741-A through F. Each tagged to a receiving facility in the eastern corridor, address coded, no plain-text location."
"Authorization signature?"
"Deputy Director level. Name redacted on my copies, but the clearance tier was consistent with Danner's office."
Viktor kept his face neutral. Danner. The woman he'd knocked unconscious in the command truck at Gannet. If she'd signed off on Omega Division, the timeline question got more complicated.
"And the formation timeline on those documents?"
"Twelve-week deployment window from authorization date. The requisitions I processed were tagged 'Phase One: procurement and facility preparation.' Standard Council bureaucracy. They build the cage before they hire the dogs." Sable set down her mug. "Why the deep dive? You didn't trust me yesterday and you don't trust me now."
"I trust routing codes more than people," Viktor said. "Routing codes don't have agendas."
"Everyone has agendas, Ashford. Mine is staying alive. Yours is the same, plus whatever that skill of yours is turning you into." She said it flat, without judgment. Observation, not accusation. "My documents show what crossed my desk. I wasn't read into the full program. There could be layers I never saw."
Marcus straightened from the wall.
"Did you see any indication the program had prior phases? Earlier requisitions under different codes?"
Sable thought about it. Actually thought, which Viktor respected more than an instant answer.
"There was a legacy line item in one of the shipping manifests," she said slowly. "A cross-reference to an older procurement code. I didn't chase it because it wasn't my assignment. But the prefix was different. Older format. Pre-Gannet by months."
Viktor glanced at Marcus.
Both timelines could be real. Crane knew about the original Omega formation, authorized months ago. Sable caught the expansion phase, a second wave of equipment and restructuring that crossed her desk more recently. Not contradictions. Layers.
Which meant Omega Division wasn't just coming. Part of it already existed.
"The older code," Viktor said. "Do you remember the prefix?"
"TRD-something. 4400 range. I can check my copies if you give me a reason to dig through a waterproof cache buried in a drainage shaft."
"That's reason enough."
Sable looked at him, then at Marcus, then picked up her lantern.
"I'll have it by tonight. Don't expect miracles. Expect paperwork."
---
Marcus started training the fighters at 07:00 in the rail yard.
He used the flat ground between the rusted tracks and the collapsed rail shed, cleared debris with the help of four volunteers, and lined up everyone who could hold a weapon without shaking.
Thirty-one fighters. Six of them still bandaged from Gannet. Two so tired they swayed standing.
Marcus looked at the line and didn't comment on what he saw. He started with what they needed to hear.
"You survived Gannet. That means you're either good or lucky. Luck runs out. Good gets trained." He walked the line, not inspecting gear, inspecting people. Eyes, stance, breathing. "Most of you fight as individuals. You cover your own angles, watch your own backs, make your own calls. That worked when you were running. You're not running anymore."
He stopped in front of a young fighter whose bandaged arm was strapped tight against his ribs.
"Can you fire left-handed?"
"Never tried."
"Today you try." Marcus moved on. "Squad coordination means you stop being thirty-one people and start being five groups of six with a command reserve. Each squad covers assigned sectors, calls movements, and nobody, nobody acts solo without squad lead clearance."
Aria watched from the signal house roof, rifle across her knees.
"You think squad tactics work with awakened fighters?" she called down. "Half these people have skills that don't fit standard formations."
"Then we build formations around the skills, not the other way around," Marcus said. "That's the whole point." He looked up at her. "You want to help teach, or you want to critique from the bleachers?"
Aria climbed down.
They ran drills for two hours. Marcus split fighters into provisional squads and ran them through movement exercises on the yard's uneven ground. Cover transitions. Overlapping fire sectors. Communication under noise. Basic stuff, but basic stuff done badly killed people.
He found the weak links fast. Two fighters who froze under simulated pressure. One who couldn't coordinate verbal calls with physical movement. Another who was strong in solo combat but collapsed every formation he joined because he couldn't stop trying to win by himself.
Marcus pulled that one aside after the third failed drill.
"What's your name?"
"Doran."
"Doran, you fight like a cat that got drafted into a dog pack. You're fast and you're mean and you're useless to the six people who need you to hold a sector instead of chasing kills."
Doran's jaw tightened. "I've killed more Council fighters than anyone here except Blake."
"And three people died at Gannet because their right flank was empty when you ran forward." Marcus held his stare. "I'm not questioning your courage. I'm questioning your discipline. There's a difference, and that difference is measured in bodies."
Doran didn't answer. He went back to formation.
Marcus watched him go and said to Aria, quietly: "He'll either learn or he'll get someone killed. Keep eyes on him."
"Already was," Aria said.
---
Viktor tried to sleep at 10:00 in the dispatch office.
He lasted forty minutes.
The dreams weren't dreams exactly. More like filing errors. Faces with wrong names attached. Rooms he'd been in that rearranged their furniture when he wasn't looking. He woke reaching for a memory of the Gannet compound kitchen, and the kitchen was there, complete with the cracked window and the industrial stove they'd salvaged, but the person who'd cooked breakfast every morning for twenty-three straight days was gone. Not dead gone. Just absent from the file. A silhouette where a person used to be.
He knew the silhouette had a name. He knew the name mattered. He sat on the cot with his head in his hands and tried to pull it back from whatever dark shelf his own skill had pushed it onto.
Nothing.
He was still sitting there when Emma came in with bandage supplies and stopped in the doorway.
"Viktor."
"I'm fine."
"You're sitting in the dark pressing your temples hard enough to leave marks." She set down the supplies and pulled a chair close. "Who are you trying to remember?"
"The cook. At Gannet. Morning shift, every day. She had a—" He stopped. Tattoo? Scar? Something on her left hand. "I can't get the name."
"Delia," Emma said softly. "Delia Marsh. She died in the south notch fire."
Delia. The name landed and stuck, but it didn't feel recovered. It felt handed to him, like a borrowed tool.
"How often is this happening?" Emma asked.
"Define often."
"Viktor."
He looked at her. Emma had a way of using his name that turned it into a diagnostic. Not angry, not gentle. Clinical, in the way healers got when they already knew the answer and needed the patient to say it out loud.
"Three times since Gannet," he said. "Names mostly. One route code that Torres had to correct. And a face. Someone I knew before awakening. I can still see them but I can't—" He made a gesture. "Can't attach the label."
Emma pulled her chair closer and held up her hands, palms out.
"Let me look."
He'd avoided this. He knew what she might find, and knowing it as a guess was easier than knowing it as a diagnosis. But Emma's hands were already glowing faint green, her healing skill reaching out with the careful touch she used on things she suspected were broken worse than they appeared.
He sat still and let her in.
The scan took four minutes. Emma's face changed during minute two, a small tightening around her eyes that she probably thought she hid. She didn't.
When she pulled back, her hands were shaking.
"How bad?" Viktor asked.
Emma stood and closed the office door. Then she sat back down and folded her hands together to steady them.
"Your neural pathways have scarring," she said. "Not physical scarring, it's perhaps more accurate to call it resonance scarring. Each fusion you've performed has left traces where skills were absorbed and integrated. These traces are... well, they're accumulating."
"In simple terms."
"Your brain is running out of clean space. Each fusion overwrites a small section of existing neural pattern. Memories, personality markers, habitual responses. The skill takes what it needs and the previous occupant gets pushed out." She met his eyes. "It's not random. It seems to target episodic memory first. Names, faces, specific events. The older and less frequently accessed the memory, the more vulnerable it is."
Viktor processed this the way he processed tactical information. Clean. Sequential. Detached from the part of him that wanted to scream.
"Rate of progression?"
"Accelerating. The damage from your early fusions was minimal. But each subsequent fusion has left more scarring because there's less buffer space. The concussion from Gannet is making it worse short-term, but the underlying pattern would continue regardless."
"If I stop fusing?"
"The existing damage probably stays. The progression stops. Perhaps some recovery over time, but I can't promise that." Emma's hands unfolded and pressed flat against her knees. "If you continue fusing, the scarring will keep expanding. Episodic memory first, then procedural memory, then identity-linked patterns."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning first you forget names. Then you forget how to do things you learned before awakening. Then you forget who you are."
The room was quiet except for the hum of the battery lantern and, distantly, Marcus shouting drill commands in the yard.
Viktor looked at his hands. They were steady. The rest of him was not.
"How many fusions before the damage becomes... permanent in a way that affects function?"
"I don't know. I'm not even sure this type of damage has been studied before. You're it, Viktor. You're the case study." Emma's voice dropped. "I'm telling you this because someone needs to, and because I think perhaps you already knew."
He had. Not the specifics. But the shape of it, the gradual thinning, the way each fusion left him a little less of whoever he'd been the day before. He'd been calling it cost. Emma was calling it diagnosis.
Same thing with a medical degree.
"Don't tell the others," he said.
"Viktor—"
"Not yet. Not while we're exposed."
Emma looked at him the way she looked at patients who refused treatment. Not angry. Just sad, and too smart to pretend she didn't know how this would go.
"I'll keep it between us," she said. "For now."
---
Torres found Viktor at 16:00 in the signal house, going over Sable's tunnel maps with Marcus and Aria.
He carried a decryption tablet, and the look on his face said the day's priorities were about to change.
"Harvester communications," Torres said. "Wen cracked their short-range encrypted channel an hour ago. They've been running regular check-ins with a handler off-site."
"What did you pull?" Viktor asked.
Torres set the tablet on the table. Text scrolled across the cracked screen, fragments of intercepted messages pieced together from broken encryption.
*...target confirmed stationary. Await specialist arrival before extraction attempt. Do not engage primary without surgical support...*
*...ETA confirmed 48 hours from handler relay. Surgeon en route with full kit...*
*...bounty terms adjusted: live capture preferred, dead accepted at 40% value. Surgeon requires viable neural tissue for skill mapping...*
Aria read the messages twice.
"The Surgeon," she said. "You know that name?"
Torres nodded. "Black market extraction specialist. Real name unknown. Works live subjects exclusively. Known for three things: precision skill removal without killing the host, a client list that includes people governments pretend don't exist, and a hundred percent success rate on targeted extractions."
Marcus leaned back in his chair. "A hundred percent."
"That's the reputation."
"How much of that is true and how much is marketing?"
"Enough of it that forty Harvesters are sitting two kilometers away doing nothing until this person arrives." Torres tapped the tablet. "They're not waiting because they're scared of us. They're waiting because whoever hired them wants Viktor's skills removed intact, and the Surgeon is the only one they trust to do it."
Viktor stared at the intercepted text.
*Surgeon requires viable neural tissue for skill mapping.*
Viable neural tissue. His neural tissue. The same pathways Emma had just told him were scarring over from fusion damage.
The Surgeon wanted to cut open the thing that was already breaking.
"Forty-eight hours," Viktor said.
Torres nodded.
Forty-eight hours before someone who specialized in taking people apart arrived to take him apart specifically.
Aria picked up her rifle and checked the magazine with a motion so practiced it looked like breathing.
"Then we have forty-seven hours to figure out how to kill them first."
