Chapter 189: 190 | He Did The Same Thing To Me
Her laugh carried genuine amusement. Or at least the performance of it. With Vivian I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.
I sat. Not across from her. On the other end of the sectional. Close enough for conversation. Far enough that she’d have to commit to a lunge if she wanted to reach me.
Old habits.
"Drink?" She tilted the wine bottle on the table. Chateau something. French label. Probably cost more than my monthly food budget, which was saying something given that I fed three people and one of them was Mera.
"Water."
"Really."
"I don’t drink when I don’t know what I’m walking into."
"Smart." Vivian poured herself more wine instead. "Father would be impressed."
"Father would be suspicious. There’s a difference."
That landed. Her eyes tightened at the corners. Just for a second.
"You really have changed. The old Rome would have downed half this bottle before I finished my first glass."
"The old Rome sounds like he had terrible judgment."
"The old Rome had no judgment. That was the fun part."
She took a sip. Watched me over the rim. Those blue eyes did something that Cheon’s grey ones did too. Catalogued. Assessed. Filed away data for later analysis.
"You said this was about Father."
"I said a lot of things."
"Vivian."
"Fine." She set the glass down. Crossed her arms beneath her chest, which pressed her cleavage higher against the neckline of that red dress. If the move was deliberate I couldn’t tell. If it wasn’t deliberate it didn’t matter because the result was the same. My eyes wanted to travel downward and my brain told my eyes to stay on her face.
"Father is monitoring you. Not in the normal way. Not the quarterly reviews and performance reports and inheritance timeline calls." Vivian leaned forward. "He’s running a parallel investigation through Angelo Corp’s private intelligence division. The one that doesn’t appear on any org chart. The one that reports directly to him."
"Investigation into what."
"Into you. Into how a boy who scanned as Passive Null for eighteen years suddenly developed four distinct ability signatures in the span of two weeks."
I kept my expression neutral. Inside, my stomach did something unpleasant.
"He already asked me about that. I told him adaptive type."
"And he accepted that answer to your face because confrontation serves no tactical purpose when surveillance is more informative." Vivian tilted her head. "He’s been running your blood samples. The ones from your annual physical last month. Comparing them against baseline from two years ago."
"Blood samples."
"Angelo Corp medical division retains all employee and dependent biological materials for seven years. Standard corporate policy. Paragraph six of the intake agreement that every family member signs."
Of course. Of course my father had kept my blood and was running tests on it without telling me. Of course the Angelo Corporation had a private intelligence division that operated in the shadows. Of course everything in this world was designed to be exactly as paranoid and controlling as the worst version of corporate America I could imagine.
"What did the blood show."
Vivian’s tongue moved across her lower lip. Quick. Unconscious.
"Your Essentia markers from two years ago showed Passive Null. Clean reading. No anomalies. Consistent with every scan you’ve ever received." She paused. "Your markers from last month show something that made three separate laboratory technicians request independent verification."
"Which was?"
"Unknown. The classification doesn’t exist in Angelo Corp’s database. The markers are active but they don’t match any documented Essentia type. Not Catalyst. Not Flux. Not Root. Not any hybrid or variant on record." She picked up her wine again. "The lab called it a novel signature. Father called it a problem."
My jaw worked. I could feel the muscles tightening.
"What kind of problem."
"The kind where he contacts people at the NEA who owe him favors and asks them to quietly accelerate a review of your registration paperwork." Vivian’s blue eyes locked onto mine. "The kind where he has your apartment building surveilled. Where he has your phone monitored. Where he tracks which students you spend time with and cross-references their ability types against your demonstrated power set."
The apartment. My apartment. Where Cheon slept in my bed and Mera sang in my shower and I spent hours every night doing things that the surveillance footage would catalog and timestamp and deliver straight to my father’s desk.
"He knows about Mera and Cheon."
"He knows about everyone. He just doesn’t know why."
Silence sat between us.
I thought about Cheon two blocks away with her military binoculars. About Mera holding portal coordinates in her head. About Noel back at her dorm waiting for me to come over and tell her the truth. About Laurana in her lab surrounded by data that proved I was something the world hadn’t seen in seventy years.
All of them. Every one. Connected to me through the drain.
And my father was pulling the thread.
"Why are you telling me this."
The question hung there.
Vivian uncrossed her legs. Recrossed them the other direction. The motion drew the hem of her dress higher along her thigh. More skin. A flash of muscle that suggested she did more physical training than a junior R&D executive typically required.
"Because he did the same thing to me."
Four words. Delivered flat. Without emotion. Without performance.
The air in the room changed.
"Two years ago. When my ability manifested."
I stared at her.
"You have an ability."
"I have an ability I was never supposed to have. I scanned Null at five. Null at ten. Null at sixteen. Standard Dormant reclassification at seventeen." Vivian’s voice stayed level. "Then at twenty-one I broke a table in my apartment with my bare hands and Father’s medical team arrived forty minutes later. Not an ambulance. Not paramedics. His people. In a company van."
"The three-month medical leave."
"Is what they called it." Her blue eyes went somewhere far away. "What it actually was is a classified testing facility in a basement beneath Angelo Corp’s research campus where four people in lab coats spent ninety-one days determining whether my ability was useful to the company or a liability to the brand."
