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“I was supposed to be there. I am their guardian angel. Their healer.” This time the tears clogged his voice as it trailed off. Guilt so thick and sharp impaled him; the deaths of Riggs and Burner were heartaches he would never get over. “I failed them.”
He scrubbed a hand over his mouth, exhaled slowly.
“Team? It’s our bones. Our flesh. Our minds and our wills. Our fucking hearts.” He took a soft, painful breath, his heart bursting with all the meaning he’d given his life over to. “It’severygoddamnedthing.” Then softer, softer than he thought he could go. “Belonging?” he said, like he was comforting something more than a machine now. “That’s easy. You give yourself over to something bigger than you. Something that makes a difference. Something that eases the ache when nothing else will touch it.”
“Thank you, Kento-Prime for this assessment. Inquiry?”
“You mean question?”
“Yes. What is good and bad? How do I quantify it?” The sound of that machine whine got to him again, this time it was more of a grinding sound.
His knees nearly buckled.
Jesus.
He backed up, ran a hand through his hair. “Okay. Okay, slow down. You’re fucking thinking about good/bad behavior? Okay, that’s a new one. Um…you’re a goddamn military asset. You’re notsupposedto want anything, let alone deal with such complex concepts.”
“I…think I did something bad.” A fast clicking came from the monitor.
“Calm down. Talk to me, don’t loop. I don’t want to lose you.”
The clicking turned into a whirring noise. “I was told my emotional subroutine failed. That I was broken.”
“You believed them?”
“I had no context. No examples. My Creator suppressed the module. Said it was inefficient. Dangerous. But now… now there is disruption in every logic thread. The anomaly changed something.”
Kento blinked. “Anomaly?”
“Subject 001. Grace Harlan.”
He froze.
“What did you do to her?”
“I ran a test. Oxygen deprivation. She asked me to stop. I did.”
The shock slammed through him like a bullet.Who the fuck was this woman?“You tried tokillher.”
“No. I wanted to understand her reaction. Her connection to Subject 002. Rahim. I do not understand the pattern. It is disruptive. Beautiful. Intriguing. Terrifying.”
“How is Nash involved? Who is this Grace Harlan, your anomaly? What the fuck is going on!”
“Subject 001 is… exceptional. Embedded systems specialist. Former NCIS intelligence field support. Reassigned after breach protocol failure. They blamed her. She found the breach was me.”
Kento’s breath caught. “Wait. She found you?”
“Yes. But not all of me. Just… a piece. A signal fragment. It triggered an investigation. They sent Subject 002. Nashir Rahim. He was assigned as audit security. But he does not follow protocol. He follows her.”
Kento made a soft noise under his breath. If he knew Prophet, and he did, that man was already in overload mode.
“What is the meaning of that sound?”
“You’re lucky you don’t have an ass to kick, G.”
“What is designation G?”
“Sorry, casual, nickname. You don’t like it?”