The loading dock of Central Archive was cavernous, smelling of diesel exhaust, damp river silt, and the cold, wet lime of unpainted concrete.
Under the yellow glare of two twelve-volt work lamps clamped to the tailgate of Owen Mercado’s furniture van, the last transport convoy was taking form. It was not an orderly hospital transfer. It was thirty-four extraction subjects and eleven unprocessed captives from Ward C being bundled into coats, wrapped in coarse gray moving blankets, and helped up the steel ramps by volunteers whose hands were black with soot from the vault fire.
Noah Reed stood at the rear doors of the furniture van, his field medical kit open on a wooden crate beside him. His thumb was pressed against the carotid artery of a man in his forties—one of the deep-retention subjects whose motor responses had only partially cleared after weeks in the holding pens.
“Blood pressure is ninety over sixty,” Noah called out to Elena, who had tied a clean linen towel around her waist as an improvised nurse’s apron. “His peripheral pulse is thready. Give him four ounces of warm sugar broth, then wrap his legs in the dry wool. Don’t let him lie flat until they reach the annex.”
