The Seventh Division building changed the moment Caleb stepped through the lobby doors.

The lobby still held the same desk, the same potted plant in the corner, and the same kid at the front station who had been there for three weeks and called everyone sir because names kept losing to panic. The morning recruits filed past in their usual unsynchronized way.

But the air had a different weight in it.

It reached Caleb under the ribs first.

Iharu caught it too. He stopped half a step inside the doors and sent Caleb a quick signal without saying anything, the same one he gave a doorway before clearing it on a deployment.

The kid at the front desk lifted his eyes from his screen.

"Briefing room four. Both of you. He’s already in there."

"Who’s he."

The kid returned to his screen, which was the only answer he planned to risk.

Iharu lowered his voice. "Caleb. The plant in the corner is leaning."

Caleb checked the potted plant.

It was leaning. Not toward the window. Toward the corridor that led to briefing room four.

"That’s not a normal kind of leaning."

"That is not a normal kind of leaning." They walked.

-----

Briefing room four held Iris at the head of the table, two empty chairs, and one occupied one.

The man in the occupied chair remained seated, reading a paper file two-handed, his thumbs holding the edges flat against the table. His coat was plain dark over a plain dark shirt. No division insignia. No rank tab. No sponsor patch. The coat was tailored close enough that Caleb could see the line of a sidearm under it on the left and the flatter, heavier outline of something else along the right ribs.

He was maybe forty. Maybe older. His face belonged to a transit crowd, the kind of face the eye slid past to find an exit.

Then he lifted his eyes, and the whole room seemed smaller. "Mercer," he said.

"Yes."

"Sit."

Caleb sat. The chair was harder than he remembered briefing-room chairs being. The foam in his shoulder shifted under his coat as he settled and reminded him, in a small flat way, that he hadn’t slept in thirty-two hours.

Iharu sat down next to him. Soma’s eyes flicked to him once, registered him, and let him stay. Caleb noted the small loyalty and decided he owed Iharu a fishcake for it later.

Iris cleared her throat.

"Operator Soma is here on a Defense Force consult attached to Sample R-9-Omega. He has read access to the Rank C working file. He has Acting Captain courtesy across all seven divisions for the duration of this audit. The audit is three days. He will speak with each Rank C operator who has had contact with the sample. Mercer, you are first."

"Understood."

"I will be in the next room."

She left.

The door closed behind her with a soft pressure-seal hiss.

Soma set the file down on the table.

-----

Soma let the room breathe for one long second.

Caleb understood the pause. Soma was listening to the room. Caleb had seen the Hacker do something similar once, on a corridor under a dead bakery, and it had taken her three seconds to register a closed-network battery cell nineteen years old.

Soma did it in one.

Soma’s voice stayed level.

"There is something low in your chest, Mercer, that is not standard issue."

Caleb kept his face still.

"My medical record is on the working file."

"I read the medical record. The medical record misses my question. I am asking about the thing low in your chest."

"You’re going to have to be more specific."

Soma’s mouth shifted a quarter inch. Caleb counted that as a smile too.

"The thing low in your chest is reading me back."

The sentence used up the room.

The warmth under Caleb’s suit lining answered. Not the warmth of a spiral reacting to a contaminant. The spiral was registering Soma as something in its own category.

Iharu’s knee stopped bouncing under the table.

That was how Caleb knew the room had shifted for both of them. Iharu joked when a room wanted him afraid. He stole food when a room wanted him tense. When his knee stopped bouncing, he had found the line where a mistake became expensive.

Caleb kept his hand on the table. "What are you?"

"I’m the consult."

"What’s your rank?"

"My rank is on the working file," Soma said.

"My access doesn’t get me your rank."

"No. It doesn’t."

Soma lifted the file again, closed and ceremonial. The content was already in his head. It had been there before Caleb sat down.

"I’m going to ask you four questions, Mercer. You’re going to answer three of them honestly. You’re going to lie on the fourth. I’ll tell you which one you lied on after you answer it. You won’t know which question I want the lie on. Don’t try to plan around me. I won’t enjoy that."

"That’s a strange game."

"It’s the game I play with people I want to know the shape of in under five minutes."

"Why under five minutes."

"Because I don’t have six."

Caleb kept his attention on him across the table.

His gaze stayed on Soma’s face. The door could wait. So could the corridor where, four turns away, a potted plant leaned toward this room for the same reason his ribs were warm and the sample six floors below them was almost certainly pulsing.

"Ask your four questions."

"Question one. Have you ever lied to your division about your sync rate."

"Yes."

Soma left the file closed. Caleb understood, with a small cold clarity, that the file was a prop.

"Question two. Do you know what is buried under the city on the northwest side of the old transit grid."

The room narrowed.

Caleb kept his hands flat on the table.

"Yes."

"Question three. Are you afraid of the man who has been buying your sponsor slots."

He measured that one.

The honest answer had weight. It also had no use in the next four minutes.

"No."

Soma’s expression held. He waited the length of the breath Caleb had used.

"Question four. Has your father contacted you in the last forty-eight hours."

"No."

Soma watched him.

His eyes stayed open. The room held its air for a second longer than rooms usually did.

"You lied on four."

Caleb held still.

His father had not contacted him in the last forty-eight hours by any definition a comms log would accept.

But his father had drawn him a diagram on the back of a photograph nineteen years ago. His father had put the third folder in a desk drawer with Caleb’s name written on the inside of it.

Soma had asked the question precisely enough that the true answer became the wrong one.

"Noted," Caleb said.

"Noted."

Soma stood up.

He gathered the file under his arm. He smoothed the front of his coat with one hand. The motion was small and patient and made it clearer than anything else in the last five minutes that the man had been on his feet in worse rooms than this one.

"You’ll see me again before the three days are done, Mercer. Sit. Eat. Talk to your team. Don’t move the green-strand girl out of her workshop. Don’t move the contents of the working file. Don’t move yourself out of this building without a comms ping in my channel."

"Understood."

"And, Mercer."

"Yes."

"The thing low in your chest is going to be useful to me. Try not to let it get expensive."

He walked out, and the door closed on enough pressure to leave Caleb sitting for a second before he moved.

-----

He kept his hands flat on the table. The foam in his shoulder was hot now under his coat. The warmth in his ribs dropped back to its usual low level the moment Soma cleared the doorway, like a pressure field relaxing after the source moved away.

Iharu hadn’t spoken for the entire audit. He spoke now. "Caleb. That was an SSS."

"Yeah," Caleb said.

Iharu’s jaw worked once. "And you lied to him."

"I did."

"You’re going to tell me why later."

"I am."

Iharu breathed out through his nose, slow enough to count, and pushed his chair back from the table.

The plant in the lobby, four corridors away, stopped leaning.