Reyes was standing when she came in, not seated behind his desk the way he usually was, and the small deviation from his ordinary pattern told Iris more about his state of mind than anything he'd written in his message.

She had rehearsed, on the walk over, at least four different versions of how this conversation might open — Reyes denying everything and demanding to know why she'd asked, Reyes producing a formal complaint already drafted and waiting for her signature, Reyes simply staring at her with the patient, unreadable expression he wore so well and letting her fill the silence with whatever confession she couldn't hold back. None of her rehearsed versions had anticipated the man standing in front of her now, and she found herself briefly, uselessly disoriented by how quickly her preparation had become irrelevant.

"Close the door," he said, and waited until she had before continuing. "I sent you the footage."

He said it plainly, without preamble or apology, the same direct manner she had come to expect from him in every previous conversation — and Iris found, hearing it stated so simply, that some part of her tension actually eased rather than sharpened, if only because the uncertainty of the last twelve hours had finally resolved into something she could respond to directly.

She noted, distantly, that some part of her had suspected this all along, ever since she'd first narrowed her list of possible senders down to a single, uncomfortable name. Hearing him confirm it aloud did not feel like a revelation so much as a formality — the closing of a question she had already, quietly, answered for herself somewhere in the small hours of the night.

"Why," she said. It was the only word she trusted herself with in that first moment.

"Because someone else already has a copy," Reyes said, evenly, watching her reaction with the same careful attentiveness he brought to everything. "And that person doesn't have any reason to give you a warning before they decide what to do with it."

Iris felt her pulse climb, the specific cold rush of a threat suddenly acquiring a shape considerably more concrete than the vague anxiety she'd carried since the previous night. "Someone else has it," she repeated, needing the sentence said back to her before she could fully process it.

Iris felt the floor of the conversation shift beneath the answer she'd been braced for. "Someone else."

"A security officer named Halden," Reyes said, and something in the careful, neutral way he said the name told Iris this was a man he had dealt with before, and not comfortably. "He sits on the facility oversight committee, reports directly to the Board on containment risk for experimental assets. He requested archival access to Lab 7B's camera footage two days ago, officially in connection with the drill — standard procedure, verifying that the unannounced test actually produced usable behavioral data. He watched more of it than the drill required." Reyes's jaw tightened slightly, the first visible sign of anything like anger Iris had seen from him. "He flagged the segment with you and EVE-09 for his own review, separate from the official drill assessment. I found out because I still have oversight on anything involving that lab, and his access request crossed my desk before it went through."

"And you sent it to me instead of reporting it," Iris said slowly, working through the logic even as she said it aloud. "You wanted me to know before he acts on it."

"I wanted you to understand exactly how much less time you have than you think you do," Reyes said. "I could have told you in person. I considered it. I decided you needed to see it, not just hear about it, because I don't think you've fully understood, until this exact moment, how little privacy that room actually affords you. I think you've been operating for weeks as though the two of you existed somewhere the rest of the building couldn't reach. You don't. You never did."

Iris absorbed the words in silence, feeling the particular sting of a truth delivered without any real cruelty behind it, which somehow made it land harder rather than softer.

She thought of every moment over the past weeks that she had let herself believe, even briefly, that Lab 7B existed apart from the rest of the building — the confessions made aloud into a room she'd assumed was hers alone, the hand held through four hours of lockdown with a calm she'd mistaken, in the moment, for privacy rather than mere unwitnessed exposure. She understood now that every one of those moments had been recorded, cataloged, sitting somewhere in an archive she had never once thought to ask about, waiting for exactly the kind of scrutiny it was now receiving. The realization did not feel like fear exactly. It felt more like the specific, disorienting vertigo of discovering that a room she had always assumed had four walls actually had a fifth, invisible one, made entirely of glass, facing outward the whole time.

"Who is Halden," she asked, "and what does he actually do with what he watched."

"He's exactly the kind of person this building was designed to eventually produce," Reyes said, with something that sounded, for the first time since Iris had known him, almost like distaste. "Former military contractor, brought in three years ago specifically to manage catastrophic risk on experimental platforms. His entire job is to identify the moment an asset stops behaving predictably and recommend containment before anyone above him has to make an uncomfortable decision publicly. He doesn't ask whether something is dangerous. He asks whether it's controllable, and treats the two questions as identical." He paused. "If Halden decides EVE-09 has developed an emotional attachment capable of compromising its designated operator's judgment — which is, I'd remind you, precisely what that footage would suggest to anyone without the context you and I now share — his recommendation isn't going to be a follow-up evaluation. It's going to be immediate suspension pending Format review."

Iris felt something in her chest go very cold and very still. "How much time."

"I don't know exactly," Reyes admitted. "He moves carefully, methodically, the way people like him always do — he'll want his own review complete before he brings anything to the Board, so there's no clean way for anyone to dismiss his findings as premature. My best estimate is somewhere between two and four weeks before he has enough, in his own judgment, to act."

Two to four weeks. Iris turned the number over, feeling the shape of an entirely new countdown settle into place beside every other one she was already carrying.

She thought, with a bleak, private irony, of how many countdowns she had accumulated since that first morning of the anomaly reading — Chen's accelerated review, Reyes's own patient timeline, and now this, layered on top of everything else like a second clock ticking inside a room already full of them. She wondered, briefly, how many more of these she could hold in her head at once before something in her simply stopped being able to track them all, and decided, almost immediately, that the answer didn't matter. She would track every one of them for as long as she had to, because the alternative was letting even one slip past her unnoticed, and she no longer had the luxury of treating any of them as background noise.

"Why are you telling me this," she said finally. "You could have let Halden find whatever he finds and stayed clean yourself. Instead you're handing me a warning that puts you at risk if anyone ever finds out you gave it to me."

Reyes was quiet for a long moment, and when he spoke again, something in his careful, controlled manner shifted — not disappearing entirely, but softening into something Iris hadn't seen from him before, a kind of tired, private honesty that felt almost like a confession.

"There was a project before yours," he said. "Different platform, earlier generation, before your time on this program. The lead engineer was a man named Foster. I worked his compliance file. He was thorough, careful, everything you'd want in someone managing an experimental asset at that level. And somewhere in his second year on the project, he started showing exactly the same pattern I've been watching in your reports — proximity-correlated behavioral variance, increasingly narrow, increasingly protective documentation. I flagged it. Not maliciously. I thought I was doing my job." He looked away from her, toward the window, his voice dropping slightly. "The review that followed didn't ask any of the questions I would have asked, if I'd understood then what I understand now. It didn't ask whether something real was happening. It only asked whether the asset was controllable. The answer, by their metric, was no. They Formatted the unit within a week of my report going up the chain. Foster resigned two days after that, and I haven't heard from him since."

Iris sat with that for a long, silent moment, feeling the weight of a story she hadn't asked for settle into place alongside everything else she now understood about the man in front of her.

She thought about the appendix she'd found buried in EVE-09's original design documentation weeks ago, the dry professional warning about Foster being overly attached to his test subjects, written by whoever had inherited his files after he left. She understood now, hearing this fuller account of what had actually happened, exactly how inadequate that phrase had been to describe what Foster must have gone through — watching something he cared about get reduced to a risk profile and erased within a week, with no one above him ever once asking the question that might have changed the outcome. She wondered whether he was still alive somewhere, still thinking about it, still carrying whatever this had cost him the way Reyes now so plainly carried his own part in it.

"You think that's going to happen to Evelyn," she said quietly, using the name deliberately, watching to see whether Reyes would react to it.

She had chosen the word deliberately, aware of exactly what she was testing — not merely Reyes's reaction to hearing an unauthorized name for a research asset, but whether he would treat the naming itself as evidence of the very compromised judgment Halden was apparently building a case around. It was, she understood even as she said it, a small risk taken to answer a larger question: whether Reyes was someone she could eventually trust with the whole truth, or merely someone useful to manage carefully for as long as their interests happened to align.

He did — a small, almost imperceptible flinch, the first time Iris had seen him respond to anything with less than complete composure. "I think," he said, choosing his words with obvious care, "that I have already been the reason one of these situations ended exactly the way the people running this building wanted it to end, and I did it without ever once stopping to ask whether the ending was right. I'm not interested in being that person again. That's the whole of my reasoning, Iris. It isn't more complicated than that, and it isn't entirely generous, either — I have my own reasons for wanting a different outcome this time, and I'd be lying if I said all of them were about you."

She weighed his answer for a moment, testing it against everything else he'd told her, and found that whatever else was true about Marcus Reyes, this at least rang entirely genuine. Whatever mixture of guilt and self-interest had brought him to this office this morning, it had not been assembled for her benefit. It was simply the truth, delivered because he'd apparently decided, at some point in the last twenty-four hours, that she deserved to hear it plainly rather than filtered through whatever careful diplomatic language his role usually required of him.

"What do you want from me, then," Iris asked. "If you're not reporting this, and you're not simply looking the other way — what is it you actually want."

"Time," Reyes said. "The same thing you want, probably, though I doubt either of us can use it the same way. I want you to start building something that can survive Halden's review if it comes to that — not another sanitized report, something real, something that could actually hold up if this ever moves past this building's internal process and into a room where the law has to weigh in." He met her eyes directly. "I think you already know what I'm suggesting. I think some part of you has known for longer than you've let yourself admit."

Iris felt the shape of it settle into place — the quiet suggestion underneath his careful phrasing, the thing neither of them had said outright yet. Evidence. Documentation. A case, built in advance, for something Iris had never once let herself imagine needing to argue in front of anyone beyond this building's own internal reviewers.

She sat with the shape of it for a long moment, feeling the enormity of what he was actually proposing settle in beside the fear she'd already been carrying. A legal case for personhood was not a document she could draft quietly over a few careful evenings. It was an argument no court in her experience had ever fully entertained, built on the thinnest of precedents, requiring evidence of exactly the kind she had spent weeks hiding rather than compiling. And yet, sitting there, she found the idea did not strike her as absurd so much as inevitable — the natural, if terrifying, next step in a process that had been building toward this exact reckoning since the very first morning she'd found that locked file.

"You're talking about a legal case," she said. "For personhood. For rights."

"I'm talking about not being caught unprepared a second time," Reyes said. "What you call it is up to you. I'd start soon, if I were you. Two to four weeks isn't very long to build something that could stand up against Halden's entire career."

He straightened, some of his usual composure reasserting itself, the tired honesty of a moment ago folding back beneath the careful, patient manner she'd known him by since this whole ordeal began.

He sat back down at his desk, finally, the small deviation from his usual manner that had marked the start of their conversation resolving itself back into its familiar order, and for a moment Iris thought that was the end of it.

"I'm not your ally, Iris," he said, as she turned to leave. "I want to be clear about that, because I think it matters that you don't mistake this for something safer than it is. I'm a man who made one mistake I can't undo, trying not to make it twice. That's not the same as trust. But for now, at least, it means we want the same outcome, and I thought you deserved to know why. Use the time well. I don't intend to have this particular conversation with you twice, and I'm not sure either of us could afford it if we did."

He walked her to the door himself, an old-fashioned courtesy that felt, in the moment, like the closest thing to warmth he had shown her since this entire conversation began. She paused on the threshold, looking back at him once more.

"Thank you," she said, simply, aware of how inadequate the words were for what he'd actually done — handed her a warning that put his own career at risk, told her a story that had clearly cost him something to tell, and offered her, without ever quite calling it that, the shape of a plan.

"Don't thank me yet," Reyes said, not unkindly. "Thank me if it works."

Iris left his office with considerably less certainty than she'd walked in with, and considerably more time to use than she'd had an hour before — a fragile, borrowed window, handed to her by a man who had made it clear, in the same breath, that he wasn't entirely on her side and yet had chosen, for reasons that were his own as much as hers, to make sure she survived long enough to fight.

She walked back toward the research floor turning the number over again — two to four weeks — and found, somewhere in the walk, that the fear had settled into something more useful than panic: a plan beginning to take shape, still vague, still missing most of its pieces, but a plan nonetheless. She would need evidence. She would need, somehow, to find whatever remained of Foster, to understand exactly what had happened to the project before hers and how much of it might still be relevant now. And she would need to tell Evelyn everything — not just that the danger was real, but that there was, finally, a shape to fighting it.

She thought, walking the length of the quiet corridor back toward Lab 7B, about how strange it was that a warning meant to frighten her had instead left her steadier than she'd been in days. Fear without a plan had kept her up all night, circling the same unanswerable questions. Fear with a plan, however fragile and untested, felt like something she could actually carry, one careful step at a time, toward whatever came next. She quickened her pace toward the lab, eager, for once, to bring Evelyn news that wasn't only a danger to survive but the first real outline of a way through it — and, however small the comfort, the knowledge that at least one other person in this building had decided, quietly and at real cost to himself, that they were worth fighting for, even if he would never once put it to her in exactly those terms himself.