He turned his head and found Elias watching him. The medic didn’t ask for orders out loud. He didn’t need to.

"Hide it," Zubair told him. "All of it."

Elias nodded. "Already there."

"Me too," Lachlan added, and for once the grin slipped and the truth looked out. "Feels... coiled."

Alexei finally opened his eyes. Blue cut clean through the white glare and the glass and the space between. He smiled like a secret.

"Mine is whispering songs," he said lightly. "But it likes surprises. It will wait."

Good. If their creatures chose silence, they were already a unit again, even in different boxes.

He tracked time by the vent and the distant power draw. Twelve minutes. Twenty-four. Thirty-six.

On the second big pull, the guards returned with a cart. Stainless. Neat. Bottles. Needles in blister packs. Labels in block type. A small bin for sharps. A larger one for what passed as waste in rooms where men turned other men’s insides into notes.

"Hands through," the first guard instructed, voice bored of violence because he had learned to avoid it.

Zubair stepped to the slot and extended his wrists without comment.

The cuffs went on soft. They were fabric lined with buckles, not zip-tied.

Someone in charge had a camera in mind and a boardroom later. He did not fight the angle the guard chose. Resistance now bought nothing he wanted.

The needle went in his forearm.

The guard drew enough to make a lab happy and a soldier’s jaw clench. Zubair watched the tube darken and filed the volume for later. He hated men who took more blood than they brought water.

The guard taped gauze and moved to Elias’s door. The medic watched the needle with professional distaste and offered his arm with the resignation of a man who had done this to friend and stranger alike.

"Glucose check," Elias requested, tone neutral.

"Panel will tell us," the guard replied.

"Panel will be late," Elias observed.

The guard ignored him, not unkindly, and finished his work.

Lachlan made two jokes that died in the air because no one wanted to feed them. Alexei complimented the guard’s technique and earned the faintest twitch at the corners of a mouth behind a mask. 𝕗𝚛𝚎𝚎𝐰𝗲𝗯𝗻𝚘𝚟𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝕞

When the cart rolled away, Zubair flexed his hand once and counted capillary refill for the kind of tedium that keeps a man from testing plexiglass with his forehead. Fine. No numbness. They weren’t sloppy.

"Water," he reminded the corridor.

It arrived five minutes later in squeeze bottles slid through the slot one by one. He took his and sipped. Not cold. Not warm. Exactly ambient. Cheap and generous at once.

"Imaging queue is backed up," a voice announced from a ceiling speaker that made every cube look up and none of them answer. "Hold for escort."

Alexei sighed theatrically. "I love queues. They make me feel like we still have a civilization."

"Shut up," Lachlan told him without heat.

Elias leaned his head back to the glass and closed his eyes. "We count rotations," he offered quietly. "Shoes, not faces. Tread wear. Gait. A limp tells you more than a name badge."

"Already counting," Zubair confirmed.

The quiet settled into something with shape. Not comfort. Poise.

The heat under Zubair’s sternum tested the leash again, a slow lick at the part of him that had learned to burn men and buildings and excuses. He laid a hand flat and pressed a mental palm to a creature that could too easily choose ego over war.

’Wait.’

It purred in silence and became a coin beneath skin, metal-cool, ready.

Boots came again. Three pair this time. The cart returned, empty. A fourth set, lighter, behind—technician, not soldier. The keycard kissed plastic at his door, green blink, lock thunk.

"Stand," the guard instructed.

Zubair stood.

"Hands."

He offered them through the slot and took the restraint without editorial. The door opened on a wall of white and weapons carried like tools. The air beyond smelled like new paint and old rules.

He stepped into the corridor and found the camera with his eyes and then looked away so they would not label him vain. The guard on his left walked half a pace behind his shoulder, hand near but not on him. The one on his right mirrored perfectly.

The third ghosted a meter back and watched the men in the other cubes, posture saying bored and eyes saying not at all.

Lachlan tipped two fingers off his brow as if saluting a stage. "Bring back a souvenir."

Alexei grinned. "Pictures, please."

Elias didn’t open his eyes. "Count doors," he murmured.

"I always do," Zubair replied, and let them take him down the hall and out of sight.

He marked the camera overlap with peripheral vision, the clink of an IV pole in one of the rooms they passed, the faint sweetness on air where disinfectant tried to murder a smell it would never admit belonged to fear.

At the junction, a soldier waited who did not wear boredom. Rank by bearing, not by patch. The man measured Zubair the way one predator checks another for limp or bluff.

The corner of Zubair’s mouth answered before the part of him that loved warnings could. Not a smile. A promise placed carefully back on the shelf.

Their gazes held for a second longer than the corridor allowed. The soldier blinked first, not submission, just the end of a professional check.

"Move," the left-hand guard prompted.

Zubair moved.

He left his men in their boxes and carried their names forward one step at a time, as if they were beads thumbed on a prayer loop. Elias. Lachlan. Alexei. Sera. Wolf.

He kept the creature under his ribs flat and quiet.

He saved the heat for the moment a lock made an unwise noise and a hand chose the wrong shoulder.

The surprise would be theirs.

Not the guards’. Not the technicians’. Not the woman with the clipboard who thought time belonged to her pen.

He counted doors and vents and the number of seconds the imaging suite took to open when a card met the reader.

When the hinge offered him the tiniest complaint, no more than a sigh under metal, he tucked the sound into his pocket. The small things win wars. The cameras miss them. Men forget them. He would not.

He stepped into the white and let the day begin.