Part 5 — Eden’s Gate
I do what the text says: don’t move. The drone above me isn’t one of the orange stripers; it’s flat, military matte, the kind that doesn’t blink for show. It tilts, sniffs the air with lenses instead of nostrils, and draws a thin blue line across the concrete like it’s measuring where to put the knife.
Another buzz in my pocket: sixty seconds — stay in the shadow of the eave — when the beam sweeps left, go right — keypad 1739# — room 12, cold store — small white boxes labeled K9-POLY and MBIO-SEED (canis) — fast, Dad
I mouth the word Dad like it’s a fragile thing you shouldn’t take outside. I type with a thumb that’s older than most laws: Maya? Three dots bloom, disappear. Then: focus
The beam slides left. I move right. Buddy’s IV bag rides under my shirt, lukewarm against ribs that still remember a wedding toast, a daughter’s first bike crash, a night Scout slept with his chin on my foot when grief was new and angrier.
The keypad blinks dumb and square. I punch 1-7-3-9-#. A click like a throat clearing. The door breathes open a half inch. Inside smells like a hospital that’s forgotten it was supposed to save anyone.
A faint bark throws itself down the hall—hoarse, once. My brain stands up like a man in church. I hold the door with my shoulder and slide Buddy’s tank over the threshold, then Buddy himself, then my old bones. The corridor swallows us. Fluorescents stutter to life in a nervous row. To the left: Admin. To the right: Annex 7B — Biointegrity Storage.
“Almost there, pal,” I whisper, because lies told for love count differently.
Room 12 gives with another 1739#. The cold hits like an apology. Shelves line the walls: boxes, vials in racks, laminated inventory sheets so honest you could swear on them. The labels are somehow more human for their block capitals.
K9-POLY (Lot Harlan-12)
MBIO-SEED (Canis/oral) — Keep Frozen
BCG Adjunct — Veterinary
I open Elena’s foam cooler, nestle the white boxes into the ice like eggs I plan to believe in. On a lower shelf, a plastic folder bulges with photocopies: dog-eared protocols scrawled with someone’s pen—adjust dose by kg, watch for anaphylaxis, don’t try to be a hero. I stuff it all into the cooler like a thief stealing homework.
The bark again. Closer? No. Trickier. I trace it to a square speaker puck high in the corner, blinking like a one-eyed liar. A lure—keep the rats interested while the cats take positions. I unscrew it with the Leatherman until the voice dies.
My pocket buzzes: two minutes until remote audit—door logs reviewed—exit not front—service corridor behind nitrogen tanks—look for chalk ᛫E᛫G᛫
I shoulder past silver cylinders that hum like patient gods and find a metal door with a hand-drawn mark at shin level: a faint circle with E-G boxed inside. Chalk. Someone doing the quiet work.
The service corridor is narrow, barely wide enough for me and the tank. The walls sweat. Pipes overhead gurgle like a stomach trying to decide what to keep. Halfway down, the concrete opens on a culvert mouth, grated, padlocked. On the lintel, in pencil: eden’s gate isn’t paradise. it’s a door someone holds for you. The padlock’s face is pitted, the kind of cheap lock that depends on people being tired. I pop it with a twist and a prayer.
Before I drag Buddy through, I stop. There, under the hiss of air and my own blood, a sound that’s not the liar speaker—soft, repeated, a scrape and a low whine that carries the weight of a throat that once knew orders and now only knows waiting.
I lift a vent panel with fingers that never learned to be surgeons. Eyes blink back from the dark—amber, tired, alive. The shape behind them shifts, ribs like pickets under fur. A tag dangles from a collar so loose it speaks of time.
“Hey,” I say, because we always start there. A nose presses the grate. The whine tightens into a plea and stops, like the throat remembered it’s safer to be silent.
Boot soles scuff on concrete behind me.
I turn with a fool’s speed and meet the muzzle of a shotgun from eight feet. The man holding it looks like Kansas built itself into a person: sun-ruined skin, jaw carved out of weather, eyes the color of a pond that’s seen drought and flood and isn’t surprised by either. The stock sits in a palm that’s taught a hundred young dogs a hundred old jobs.
“You’re in the wrong hallway,” he says.
“So are you,” I answer, because sometimes bravery is just the last option left. “I’m looking for a way out.”
He glances past me at the cooler. “You found what you came for.”
“I found something else.” I tilt my head toward the vent. The eyes in the dark do a little hope. “Who’s he?”
The man’s face moves the way granite moves when you remember it’s also sand. “Name was Ranger,” he says. “When they shut it down, I shut the cameras, called it clean, and didn’t. Couldn’t.” He jerks the shotgun toward the culvert. “Gate’s that way. You got sixty seconds before a system realizes it blinked.”
“Help me carry him,” I say, nodding to Buddy. “He’s not light in the ways that matter.”
He slides the shotgun onto a hook with the intimacy of someone hanging up his own hand. Together we scoop Buddy—mask, tape, line, quilt—into the culvert’s throat. The tank clanks, the grate groans, and the world shrinks to a cement tube that smells like every basement I ever trusted.
“I’m Arthur,” I say, because names are keys.
“Most call me Cap,” he answers, and it fits.
Water whispers under us. Above, doors open, close, men shout in the clipped vowels that mean training and electricity. The culvert slopes toward a rusted ladder and a slit of light that could be morning or a mistake.
At the base of the ladder, Cap kneels and slides a bolt I didn’t see. A panel swings like a secret. He nods toward the slit. “It’ll spit you into the drainage ditch west of the fence, behind a grove of junk cottonwoods. Keep the trees between you and the sky. Hug the ditch to the road. Your truck where?”
“Sumac stand, hundred yards north,” I say. “Old Ford.”
“Favors you live long enough to be mistaken for harmless,” he says, and that’s as close as Kansas comes to blessing.
I start to haul Buddy toward the light; Cap puts a hand on my arm. “You can leave him,” he says, soft. “I can fold him into the Gate. He’ll live. Never see you again. But he’ll live.”
The world funnels to a point: a muzzle looped in worn leather, a cooler full of medicine that might be miracle or theater, a thousand miles of asphalt, a daughter’s last text, a country that decided clean was kinder than warm.
“What would you do?” I ask.
Cap’s eyes go to the vent where Ranger’s stare glows like a coal. “I took the one in the wall because I couldn’t watch him not be chosen.” He meets my eyes. “I’m not you.”
I think of the deputy on the shoulder, of Nora’s hands on the cooler, of Elena breathing for my dog while the blue light got personal, of Theo’s drawing taped to my door, of Maya in some building with a moss wall opening doors I don’t understand.
“I choose him,” I say, and my voice doesn’t crack because it’s been used so much tonight there’s no sharp left.
Cap nods once, the nod handlers give a dog right before the door blows and they both go to work. “Then keep going,” he says. “Two miles south, you’ll see a water tower that says ‘WELCOME’ with the O shot out. Under it, on the back side, chalk mark like this.” He scratches E-G in the air. “If you need to change tires, do it there. If you need to vanish, spin the panel on the tower base and crawl like you did here. Eden’s not a place. It’s hands on hinges.”
I swallow. “Come with us.”
He shakes his head like a joke he can’t afford. “Ranger won’t walk out of here without breaking his body on a fence. Better he lives where he knows the map.” He lifts the shotgun again and the hallway decides it won’t try him.
We slide Buddy through the panel. The morning is the color of an old coin. I hoist the tank, the cooler, the leash looped over my wrist since a year the world still remembered birthdays with candles.
Above us, a door alarm bleats. Men’s boots converge to a point that ends at room 12. Cap gives me one last inventory—eyes on the tape, the mask, the way my hand holds the bag-valve—then pats Buddy’s flank with the reverence reserved for flags and friends.
“Go,” he says.
I go. The ditch is honest mud. The cottonwoods draw a ragged line between me and the drone that slides by like a vulture that studied physics. I crawl until the truck is where I left it and my lungs are teaching me how to be twenty again out of spite.
When I slam the Ford into life, my pocket shakes itself awake. you got it? I don’t text I also got a man who kept a dog alive with a lie and a shotgun. I text yes.
Three dots. it won’t be enough Then, before my anger can decide on a shape: polyclonal’s old — you’ll need the primer panel that trains it — PetKind kept the library when the feds zeroed the annex — i can get you in for thirty minutes if you trust me
Buddy’s chest rises. Falls. Does the work. I look at the cooler and the road and the idea of walking into the company that replaced holding with hardware.
I text: tell me where
south service entrance — 5 p.m. — bring the cooler — and Dad… if you see orange drones on the highway, do not drive under the overpasses — they nest there
I turn the wheel until the truck faces east, toward a glass box with a moss wall and a daughter who still has my old house rug in her archive of regrets.
The Ford groans. The map trembles on the dash. The sun climbs like a dare.
Behind me, somewhere inside the Annex, Ranger gives one short bark that sounds, against all policy, like permission.
Part 6 — Infiltration
By five o’clock the sky is the color of old receipts. The PetKind campus rises out of the prairie like a promise that forgot who it made the promise to—glass walls, a living moss panel big as a billboard, a lobby where comfort chairs pose like therapy. I idle by the south service entrance, hood popped, hazard lights on—one more broken thing in a world that hates mess.
Maya steps out of the badge-gate in a gray hoodie that wants to be invisible and can’t hide the corporate lanyard swinging at her throat. The hood shadows her face until she’s close enough that the years collapse and I see the kid who once cut her bangs with kitchen scissors because she couldn’t wait.
“You’re late,” she says.
“I’ve been older than on-time for a while,” I say.
Her eyes cut to the truck bed, to the foam cooler nestled beside the oxygen tank and the quilt. She lifts the quilt corner and looks at Buddy for three seconds—long enough to count the ribs and the breaths, short enough to keep the dam intact—then lets it fall.
“This way,” she says. “Move like you belong.”
“I don’t,” I say.
“Neither do I,” she answers, and swipes us through a steel door labeled LOGISTICS in a font that apologizes. The service corridor tastes like sanitizer and cardboard. Forklifts hum somewhere behind the walls. She hands me a neon vest and a blank clipboard—costume pieces in a play about compliance.
Maya walks fast. The floor plan lives in her bones. We pass pallets of TinDogs, shrink-wrapped in rows like a chrome orchard. Their faces are pleasant the way hotel art is pleasant. “All companions arrive silent,” a poster says. “We add the rest.”
“Where’s the library?” I ask.
“Basement Cold C,” she says. “We call it the Pantry. Marketing calls it ‘legacy biologics.’ Risk calls it ‘liability.’” She checks a mirror at a corner for boots we don’t want to meet. “Don’t speak unless a human speaks to you first. If a bot speaks, keep walking.”
A maintenance bot rolls by, cheerful as an airport tram. “Warning, wet floor,” it chirps, though the floor isn’t. Maya flicks her badge toward the bot’s sensor; the light turns green; the machine forgets us.
The freight elevator sighs us down. On sublevel 2 the air turns cold and expensive. A keypad blinks with corporate patience. Maya’s badge kisses the reader. Doors slide open on a hall of white doors with small, perfect windows. COLD C waits at the end like a square god. In its window: racks of cryoboxes, each labeled in blocky comfort—Primer Panel: Canine Pulmonary v5.2, Phage Adjunct: K9-Pulmo, Microbiome Starter: Canis Oral Consortia, Adjuvant Set C-17 (Vet).
We step in and the cold eats the sweat out of my shirt. Maya moves to a workstation, wakes a screen, and types like she’s picking a lock. “I can spoof chain-of-custody for thirty minutes,” she says. “After that, the system reconciles access logs. We’ll be a ghost and then a crime.”
“What exactly am I stealing?” I ask, opening the cooler lid so the dry ice fumes bloom like stage fog.
“Not stealing,” she says, which is the same word in a different suit. “Primer panels are freeze-dried training sets—microbial consortia that teach an immune system how to stop mistaking air for an enemy. The phage adjunct helps clear the junk that’s already winning in his lungs. The adjuvant pushes the lesson through.” She meets my eyes. “It isn’t magic. It’s a head start.”
Her fingers hover over the screen. “There’s a failsafe.”
“Of course there is.”
She points at a tiny rectangle embossed on the cryobox lids: AUTH KEY REQ. “We encode an activation key at thaw. Without it, it’s inert saline and expensive guilt. Risk calls it prevention. I called it profit for six years. Now I call it leverage.”
“Where’s the key?”
She taps her badge. “Split between my token and a server that thinks I make good decisions.”
I swallow a noise that wants to be gratitude and comes out ragged. “So you come with us.” It doesn’t land like a question.
A muscle in her jaw flexes—the same one that worked when she was twelve and refused to come out of the river until she could swim to the far rock by herself. “If I leave with you, they call it theft and conspiracy. If I stay, I can string this out for a day, maybe two, from inside. You need the key now.”
Buddy coughs in the cooler fog, a sound like paper tearing inside a library no one visits. That decides it.
“Then you leave,” I say. “We can find a word for it later.”
She exhales—something between a laugh and a surrender. “Later,” she agrees, and drags a plastic tote to the shelf. Together we load box after box: Primer Panel Canine Pulmo v5.2 (6 ampules), Microbiome Starter (oral), Phage Adjunct, Adjuvant C-17. She tosses in a BCG-Vet Adjunct stamped legacy. “Morales will know what to do,” she says softly, and the way she says Elena’s name tells me she’s been following our ghost for longer than tonight.
On the workstation she selects Thaw/Prime — field, inserts her token, and the screen asks for biometrics. She sets her finger on a pad. A dot races across a progress bar like a fuse; cryptic words scroll, certification, audit hooks. A printer spits a chain-of-custody label. She slaps it on the tote with a professional gesture that breaks my heart.
The door sighs. Footsteps. Not boots—dress shoes. Paper coffee cup smell. Maya’s hands never pause. “Clipboard,” she whispers.
I lift it like a shield. A man in a navy suit—Risk, I know it before the badge says so—steps in, eyebrows lifted just enough to register surprise and write it up later. “Working late, Director?”
“Always,” Maya says without turning. “We have a Foundation demo that wants ‘heritage touch.’ I’m pulling legacy assets for a behind-glass story.”
He leans. Sees the labels. Lets his eyes linger on Microbiome Starter. “Behind glass,” he repeats. “Good. Wouldn’t want the donors to get… attached.”
He notices me, finally, the way people notice a chair. “Vendor?”
“Logistics temp,” Maya says. “South dock. He doesn’t speak corporate.” She smiles with teeth. “Neither do I today.”
Risk Guy (Raj, my head names him because she texted a Raj earlier) sips his coffee and smiles back like two weapons politely nodding. “We flagged a roach clip last night from a neighborhood that looks a lot like your father’s,” he says conversationally, eyes never blinking. “Funny world.”
“Funniest,” Maya says, and peels the activation seal off a cryobox so neatly you’d think she enjoyed it. “You needed something?”
He holds her gaze a second too long. Then he shrugs—a man who is paid to pick fights you don’t know you’re in—and backs out. “Carry on,” he says. “Oh, and Director? Communications asked for a draft if we have to address a… legacy pet rumor.”
Her smile doesn’t reach her eyes. “I already wrote the apology,” she says. “I just need a reason.”
He leaves. The door seals. I find out I’ve been holding my breath and give some back to the room.
“Elevator,” she says. “We go up one, cross, down another. Cameras are looped for eight minutes. After that, they’ll stitch.”
We move. She walks like someone who trained herself to step softly on her own life. At a junction, the glass wall opens on the moss that fooled me from the road. Water threads through it in an artfully natural line. Across the atrium a small girl stands at a demo pen, palm flat on a TinDog’s chrome head, tears balanced on lashes that haven’t learned not to.
“Sit,” she whispers, and the machine sits. Her tears fall anyway.
I don’t look away fast enough. Maya sees me see. “We wanted to take worry away,” she says. “We took away something else.”
“What?”
“Friction,” she says. “The kind that makes meaning.”
We hit the second freight elevator. It stalls for a half beat that lasts a year. Then the floor jitters and the doors open on Dock 3: rolling doors, pallet jacks, the smell of cardboard and a prairie-colored sunset leaking through gaps. She signs a tablet with a name that is still hers and not, hands me a visitor badge somebody forgot to revoke, and points to a white box truck idling by the ramp.
“I borrowed a demo van,” she says. “It thinks I’m returning a display to the Chamber of Commerce. Nobody stops Chamber of Commerce.”
We load the tote and the cooler. I tuck Buddy between them, secure the oxygen, strap the mask, check the tape—rituals that pretend to be control. Maya climbs into the driver’s seat like she’s done it a hundred times and only now admits it out loud.
“Keys?” I ask.
She wags the fob. “Don’t insult my mid-level perks.”
The loading bay door rolls up, slow and theatrical. For a second we have a slice of evening and the road beyond it, blue as forgiveness.
Then the strobe bars bloom—not orange, not county blue, but the flat white of corporate security that rented its morals wholesale. Two gray Department vans angle in behind them. Drones perch in the dark under the overhang like bats who learned policy.
“Of course,” Maya whispers. The dash chimera of our lives—CALM DOWN, THIS IS NORMAL—doesn’t show up. The radio clicks and a voice I know now is Raj’s slides into the cabin like a draft. “Director Hale, let’s not make this harder than it already is. Step out. We’ll ‘resolve.’”
Maya looks at me. Something in her eyes steadies. “You told me once not to let a man with a clipboard tell me what was true about my dog,” she says. “I was eight. You were grieving. I listened. Not soon enough, but I did.”
She thumbs a hidden switch under the wheel. The dash blinks DEMO MODE — ROUTE OVERRIDE. A side gate at the far end of the dock clanks like an afterthought; a yellow bollard drops.
Raj’s voice sharpens. “Maya.”
“That’s Director,” she says, and floors it.
The van lunges. Security men unholster humanity and wave it like a threat. A drone drops, lights flaring. We shoot the gap. A klaxon grabs the air and shakes it. Tires bang over a lip, then asphalt catches and we’re a bullet that can still choose its target.
In my lap Buddy coughs a note that belongs to a body that wants more chapters. The tote thumps. The cooler hisses its small, theatrical fog.
Behind us, white lights tilt into chase. Ahead, the service road spits us toward county blacktop and a sky that doesn’t care.
Maya glances at me, then at the road. “The key handshake is time-limited,” she says. “I have to be within range when Morales thaws the panel. I’ll push the codes from my token. If they cut my access, the vials go to sleep forever.”
“You’re sure?” I ask.
She snorts. “No. But I’m done being sure of the wrong things.”
Her badge pings a warning: CREDENTIAL REVOKE SCHEDULED — 18:00. A countdown appears: 00:03:12.
Three minutes and change to make the world a little less sterile.
She takes the on-ramp to County 9 like a promise. In the side mirror the campus shrinks, the moss wall just a green smear on glass.
The radio hisses. A new voice, clean and empty, fills the cab: “Biointegrity Alert. Regionwide. Possible zoonotic vector in transit. Shelter in place.”
Maya laughs once, harsh. “They’re staging it,” she says. “Of course they are.”
She cuts her eyes at me. “Call Elena. Tell her to set the table. We’re coming in hot. And—Dad?”
“What.”
“If I get us to the door, and the key needs a person, you let me be the person.”
I open my mouth to argue, to be a father, to be a coward. The badge countdown hits 00:02:41 and chooses for me.
“Okay,” I say, and I don’t look at her because there are things you can only say to the road.
She nods. The van eats distance. Ahead, the river road darkens toward whatever tries to be evening. Behind, the white lights grow teeth.
And somewhere out there, under a bridge that has forgotten our names, a woman with a clinic that fits in a box tells a generator to be kind, lines up syringes like prayers, and opens the last door she has.