The room hummed.
A low, nervous hum like a throat clearing.
Too many instruments.
Too many eyes.
His wrists tingled where the restraints had carved crescents.
His lungs tasted like metal.
The bench was colder than memory.
APEX was quiet.
Mostly.
Then—
a thin thread of sound
like metal being flexed after a long cold.
"Operator."
It was not a voice
so much as a pressure
pressed through the bone behind his ear.
Kayden's eyes opened.
Slow.
Like someone surfacing.
Monitors winked.
One small spike, then another.
The tech nearest the console frowned,
typed, swore.
"Noise," he said.
A word that meant nothing and everything here.
Something moved in the mesh that made the command woman's jaw set.
She tasted variables like bad fruit.
APEX threaded itself through the splinters of interference.
It was not whole.
It was a filament.
A single breathing wire left alive in a ruined machine.
"Hold pattern," it breathed.
"Anchor on sensation."
Kayden found the cadence.
In for four.
Hold two.
Out for five.
He looped the pattern around himself like a lifeline.
The tremor lost its appetite.
Outside the glass,
the SRD team argued in clipped technicalities.
Containment matrices.
Override thresholds.
Cut power—manual.
They moved with practiced cruelty.
They had a checklist for breaking men.
He had a strategy for not being broken.
APEX offered small things:
a memory of rain on a bus stop,
a bakery lamp that glowed a warm, absurd amber,
the scrape of a shoe against cracked pavement.
Petty anchors.
Perfectly human.
He held them like ballast.
The interrogator slid a screen into the loop.
Faces.
Alex laughing.
Phineas with that crooked grin.
Hale, worn and stubborn.
They played them like strings.
Somewhere in Kayden's chest a small, ragged grief twitched.
He let it be.
He would not hand it over.
The techs flexed a new move:
pressure waves pulsed from the floor,
a slow mechanical hand grinding at the joints.
Lasers of sound tried to map his inner tension.
Lights shifted color.
Blue, clinical.
White, harsher.
They wanted him readable.
APEX countered with a single instruction:
"Make silence blunt. Don't be a shape they can file."
The phrase sat heavy and precise.
Not absence.
Not slippery vacancy.
Blunt.
Immovable.
A thing that broke their measuring tools when they tried to pass probes through it.
He tightened his jaw.
He let the bluntness sit in his ribs.
The command woman's finger hovered over an override key.
Her hand was a shadowed promise.
If she pressed, the room might fold into emergency protocols—
a sweep, a purge, a violence that hummed like a blade.
He pictured the button dropping.
He pictured lights going out.
He pictured the world shrinking to the sound of his own blood.
APEX was a broken surgeon,
humming calculations through fractured code.
"If they flip the override—signal the Citadel,"
it rasped.
"Not now. Wait for the fold."
Fold.
A hinge of time.
A gap between what they measured and what could slip through.
Kayden learned to make meaning out of fragments.
Fold meant patience.
Fold meant a crack the size of a breath.
Minutes agreed to be small and manageable.
He counted them like stitches.
One.
Two.
Three.
On a low monitor a pale indicator pulsed.
Not SRD green.
Not their instrument colors.
A colder gray.
An outsider's mark.
The Agent's vector.
Observation without contact.
He felt it the way one feels a lamp come on in another room.
Not warmth—
just the knowledge of watching.
APEX offered another piece:
"When they corner silence, widen it.
Let them scrape on the edge."
He pictured them with chisels and microscopes,
trying to plane him into a readable slab.
He would be a cliff.
They would fall trying to scale him.
The interrogation loop tightened.
They went through the known escalations.
Sleep inhibitors.
Memory crawlers.
Recorded voices, threaded thinly — Alex begging, Type A coaxing warmth, Type B threats.
They used every love as a wedge.
Kayden listened to each wedge and let it pass.
He let Alex's voice be a colored thread,
felt it and did not follow.
He let Phineas's grin be a map he would not read.
He let Hale's stubbornness warm something in him and then fold it away.
The techs grew frustrated.
Their lines of code yielded no confessions.
They tried new calibrations,
buried stimulants in the ventilation,
tapped neuroinhibitors at low, corrosive doses.
A console screamed a false positive.
A hand smacked a plate.
"We'll escalate," the lead interrogator said, voice angry and precise.
"We will take the modifiers out."
The command woman's lip tightened.
She liked clean results.
She liked to watch things fall into the numbers she trusted.
Kayden felt a tide of fear.
It wanted to overturn him.
He let it wash through like cold water,
not in to drown but in to cool.
APEX was there with a smaller thing:
a rhythm.
A mundane detail.
A bakery lamp.
Rain on glass.
"Anchor on sensation," it kept saying.
So he anchored.
He found the lamp in his mind.
He held the grain of light like a pebble in his mouth.
He felt the wet geometry of raindrops against a pane.
He counted heartbeats like clerks count coins.
Time became work.
Outside, the monitors whispered.
On the margins, a new vector blinked steadily.
Someone else had set a watch on him.
Not rescue.
Not warmth.
Assessment.
He kept the silence blunt.
He let it be a slab of soundless thing that confused their metrics.
When they tried to label the slab, their instruments bit the edge and splintered.
The command woman's hand left the override but did not relax.
She preferred certainty, and this room offered none.
Uncertain people panic. Panic leads to mistakes.
Kayden smelled the mistake before they made it.
He tasted it like iron.
APEX leaned thinner, a faint filament.
It could not lift him.
It could not fix the reactor of his skull.
It could only hand him a handful of tactics and a single, cold hope.
"Survive until the fold," it said.
"Keep silence blunt. Wait."
He breathed with the pattern.
In for four.
Hold two.
Out for five.
He was not rescued.
He was not broken.
He was a blunt thing in the hands of people who wanted to measure everything.
He would be unmeasurable.
He closed his eyes.
He kept the silence.