Chapter 15 · Names in the Cold Room

The facility looked dead from the outside. Ryan pressed his good shoulder against the loading dock door, feeling the metal give way with a groan that echoed too loud in the industrial park's silence. Derek slipped in behind him, breath still ragged from the drive.

"You sure this is it?" Ryan kept his voice low.

Derek pulled up the coordinates again, his cracked screen casting blue light across his busted face. "Verner Biosystems Research. Decommissioned 2197." He wiped blood from his lip. "This is the address she gave me when I first signed on. Back when she was still pretending to be legitimate."

Ryan's shoulder throbbed. The gauze Derek had wrapped around it was already soaking through. His regulator hummed that wrong pitch, the one that meant it was eating itself from the inside. Seventy hours left, maybe less if he had to discharge again.

The loading dock opened into a corridor lined with empty equipment racks. Emergency lighting strips cast everything in that sickly green you only got in abandoned corporate buildings. Someone had stripped the copper wiring from the walls, left holes like missing teeth.

"Storage nodes are usually climate-controlled," Derek muttered, moving past him.