Chapter 317
The laptop screen throws blue light across my face, and I keep telling myself that's the only reason my hands feel cold.
Gatomon's still watching me from the bed, tail flicking once, slow, like she's counting down something only she can hear. BlackGatomon's perched on the desk beside my monitor, claws tapping an idle rhythm against the wood, not looking at the screen, looking at me instead. Agumon and Gabumon sit closer to the door, quiet in a way that isn't really like either of them. Even Cutemon's stopped bouncing.
Nobody says anything. I already told them what I'm doing. There's nothing left to argue about.
I pull up the access terminal I built weeks ago for something else entirely, back when I thought I'd only ever need it to poke around EDEN's own backend, and repurpose it now for something it was never meant to do. My fingers find the keys on autopilot. The first few layers of SHIELD's outer network go down easy, almost insultingly easy, like walking through a door someone forgot to lock.
That should worry me more than it does.
I keep pushing. The deeper systems don't play the same game. Every layer I clear reveals another one underneath, encrypted differently, guarded differently, like SHIELD built this place assuming someone exactly like me would eventually try exactly this. My hands stay steady even while my pulse climbs, counting seconds I'm not supposed to be counting, telling myself I've got time, I've got room, I've got this.
The digital space opens up around me the way it always does when I go this deep, not literal, not really, but close enough that my brain renders it as something I can navigate. Corridors of light and static stretch out in every direction, data-streams running like rivers between towers of information I don't have clearance for. I've been in smaller systems before. Nothing like this.
I move fast and quiet, the way Gatomon taught me to move through a fight I can't win head-on. Sidestep, redirect, don't linger anywhere long enough to leave a mark. Files scroll past in categories I recognize and categories I don't, personnel records, logistics, things that don't matter to what I'm actually looking for.
Then I find it.
A folder, buried three layers deeper than anything around it, labeled something that makes my stomach drop before I even open it: [RESTRICTED: CIVILIAN INCIDENT PATTERN, CLASSIFIED LEVEL 4].
I open it.
Reports. Dozens of them, more than I expected, more than the handful of incidents I've personally seen or heard about. Times, dates, locations, all logged, all cross-referenced, all connected in exactly the way I suspected but couldn't prove. SHIELD knows. They've known for a while. There's no explanation attached, no cause listed, no theory about what's actually happening to these people, just data, cold and clinical, confirming the pattern is real and somebody upstairs has been sitting on it.
Even that much doesn't feel like enough. This file is missing a piece it was never going to give me.
I'm still staring at it when a second file catches my eye, tucked right next to the first one like it was filed by the same hand. This one's got my name on it.
KEPLER, ETHAN: SUBJECT DOSSIER
My chest goes tight before I even click it open.
Inside: photos of me, older than they should be, older than anything I remember posing for. Notes on my movements, my routines, my known associates listed out like a case file. Gwen's name. Peter's. Jessica's. Full profiles, not just names: addresses, contacts, patterns, the kind of detail nobody outside SHIELD should have any reason to compile.
Someone's been building a file on me. On all of us.
My throat goes dry and I don't have time to process what that actually means, because that's the exact moment the whole system shudders around me, a ripple running through the corridors of light like something just woke up and noticed I'm here.
I don't get a warning. Sound comes first, a low, wet chittering that seems to come from every direction at once, and then the walls themselves start to split, cracks of static spreading out in every direction like ice giving way under too much weight.
They pour out of the cracks in a wave, dozens of them, slug-bodied and pale green, dragging themselves forward on stubby little limbs. Eyestalks jut out on either side of mouths stretched too wide for anything that size, and every single one of those mouths is grinning.
I know exactly what they are the second I see them.
Numemon.
They're rookie-level, weak on their own, barely worth mentioning in a fight, the kind of Digimon that gets laughed at back home. Except there's easily thirty of them pouring into the corridor at once, and thirty of anything changes the math.
One of them rears back, and something flies out of its mouth, wet and pink and reeking before it even lands. I throw myself sideways, and it splatters against the wall exactly where my head used to be.
The smell hits a second later, thick and sour enough that my eyes water.
I hate these things.
I break into a run, and the whole swarm surges after me, more of that wet garbage flying past on either side, some of it clipping my arm, my shoulder, the back of my leg, until I'm not running from claws or teeth anymore, I'm running from actual filth, thrown by slugs with better aim than they have any right to have.
Every corridor I duck into folds straight back into another one crawling with more of them. I dodge one blast, take a second one square in the side, and stagger hard enough to nearly go down. My stomach turns, and it isn't from fear.
"Would you cut that out!"
Not that they understand me, and not that it matters, but I need to say something out loud before I lose whatever's left of my composure.
The corridors keep narrowing every time I try to double back, side paths sealing off just before I reach them, like something's steering the whole swarm at once instead of thirty separate things running on instinct.
Someone's directing this.
That thought lands harder than any hit so far, and I don't get time to sit with it, because the path ahead dead-ends into a wall of static and there's nowhere left to run.
"Gatomon! I need you!"
I don't know how she'd even hear me, not really, not with actual ears, across whatever thin membrane separates this place from the real one. I scream it anyway, because it's the only thing left to try.
A pull hooks into something behind my ribs, sudden and violent, dragging hard enough that the corridor around me starts to blur. I feel Gatomon there a second before I see her, BlackGatomon right alongside her, both of them reaching through from the other side.
One of the Numemon gets a last shot in right as the pull takes hold, and something thick and foul-smelling explodes across my back.
Then the corridor, the swarm, all of it, tears away at once, and I'm gone.
***