Chapter Text
Donald shifted his hand to the small of Mark's back. He only dropped it when they left the bioengineering sub-department completely and funnelled into the wider engineering wing. The place drew from the same design philosophy as the rest of the Pentagon — endless identical corridors and cryptically earmarked paths. Sparse, sleek furnishings and the cold drone of fluorescent lighting. No maps. Employees were expected to know where they were going.
Biometrics at every checkpoint. The signage kept deliberately enigmatic, scrubbed free of descriptors. Alphanumeric codes took their place, phrases like 'LAB 42B' and 'AREA 21' plastered vaguely over doors and around low-visibility corners. In some cases the signs were electronic panels proclaiming ominous-sounding warnings — KEEP OUT and LIVE TESTING IN PROGRESS. They'd change depending on an employee's clearance or if there was a time-sensitive project taking place.
Mark fidgeted as he walked. For him, the twisting maze of the Pentagon must've come across as confusing and uncomfortable. That was by design.
For anyone else, even the most senior government officials, traversing this area would've warranted an armed security detail and a blindfold. Maybe even noise-cancelling devices and other sensory deprivation tools to prevent infiltrators from counting their steps or echolocating and mapping the place that way. Everything here was strictly need-to-know.
Mark gave a wide, gaping yawn.
The director had a lot of faith in Mark's teenaged apathy and poor sense of direction.
Nonetheless, Donald still tried to guide Mark along their most public-friendly pathways, bypassing as many restricted zones and testing sites as possible. They followed a streak of yellow running along the wall — towards their residences.
Mark paused. He angled his head to the left and then turned to face the wall fully. Concentrating hard on something.
"Is everything alright?"
A hint of wonder flashed across Mark's face.
"It's quiet."
Donald hesitated. He deliberated reaching for his earpiece. Was this another mental episode?
He stopped himself.
Best not to jump to conclusions. Gather information, first.
"What do you mean?"
"In this direction," Mark said, pointing a finger. "It's quieter than the rest. What kinda insulation did you guys put up? I could use some for my room."
He was pointing South-West. Angling his finger slightly downwards.
The black path (specifically, black-red-blue-black and multiple retinal scanners). A deeper subterranean testing facility.
The quantum experimental chamber.
The Global Defense Agency was well-stocked enough to have their own particle accelerator. Only eight miles in circumference and much more efficient than the civilian facility in Geneva, though they still borrowed that one from time to time for their lower-priority ventures.
The collider utilized ultra-high vacuum pipes to shoot protons, and sound didn't travel in a vacuum. Its superconductors were cooled with the highest grade of superfluid helium available on the market, down to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin. So close to absolute zero, intuitive thought would convince the average person there was no movement, no energy at all.
There would be other devices in that sub-department as well: quantum computers, an Elitzur-Vaidman machine, experimental dark energy emitters, technical schematics for prototype antimatter bombs. The Earth was still far behind other civilizations on this side of the Milky Way — not even achieving a full point on the Kardashev scale. But it certainly wasn't for lack of trying.
The walls of the quantum chamber would be soundproofed anyway, but Mark likely wasn't referring to that. The rest of the machinery within the wider engineering wing produced its own low-frequency din, ignorable for most, but for someone with superhuman hearing? It was probably much more of a nuisance.
Therefore, the absence of that drone would be noticable. A pool of silence in the noisy backdrop of the Pentagon.
Donald made a note to inform the engineering team about that.
"It's not something Debbie could afford."
Mark made a face. "Jeez, Donald, way to call us poor."
The equipment cost hundreds of billions of dollars.
"Poverty isn't inherently a bad thing."
It certainly didn't denote moral character.
Mark scoffed. "Yeah, sure. But who wants to be poor?"
Fair play.
They continued walking. Mark seemed fascinated by the silence only he could hear.
"What have you guys got down there anyway?"
Donald moved them along quickly. "Nothing special."
"Suuure," Mark singsonged. "Totallyyy believe you."
They were about to reach a central junction in the engineering building, a confluence where various hallways met and branched out like spokes on a wheel. Donald would switch them to the blue path.
Not that he needed the colors to guide him. He knew this place like the back of his hand.
"Do you still have your mask?"
"Uh, somewhere. Why?"
That was adolescent for no, and I have no idea where it is.
Donald may not have children of his own, but he'd spent enough time around Teen Team. He was proficient in the language.
"Pardon me. Wait here."
Donald took a few turns and found the appropriate room. He emerged shortly with Invincible's iconic yellow cowl and goggles. It was clean.
"Here. Put this on."
Most staff in the engineering wing weren't here anymore, owed to the late hour. Aside from the scientists helming projects requiring a rapid turnaround or the unfortunates working the graveyard shift, only the most obsessive, like Dr Sutherland, remained — ordinarily he would get a reprimand, but this time the man's overzealousness had come in clutch. And luckily for the remains of Mark's secret identity, a majority of Dr Sutherland's ilk were sooner likely to spontaneously combust than willingly put themselves in the firing line of social interaction.
Suffice to say, they were quite safe here. Beyond this area, it was anyone's guess.
"Uhh, did you just have that lying around?"
"It's important to be well-prepared."
Despite his tone, Mark followed Donald's instructions.
"That's kinda creepy."
The GDA was a clandestine paramilitary organization specializing in superhero resource management and the procurement of advanced peace-keeping technologies. They had agents planted firmly in the intelligence divisions of every military on Earth alongside informants (of varying reliability) tucked away in the sordid cracks of every governmental body, democratic or otherwise. They had black sites. Detention centers. They utilized enhanced interrogation techniques on relevant supervillains and supported at least two or three coups d'état in Latin America during the last century in order to secure more funding. Officially speaking, the CIA, KGB, PLA, MI6, Mossad, and multiple other national-level intelligence agencies didn't know they existed. They had oversight over multiple jurisdictions, both within the United States and internationally. Access to the mass surveillance infrastructure already established by national leaders and politicians.
Countless tiny cameras and microphones, nested away in every nook and cranny of Mark's own home.
(Extremely ethically dubious, with mixed results. Though, Donald supposed that was a moot point now, given recent events).
And of course, within the Pentagon's own residences.
With yet more surveillance to follow, in the GDA-sanctioned city apartment Mark and Debbie would soon share.
Of course they were creepy.
"It's not the weirdest thing we've ever done. Not by far."
The darker points of the GDA's ongoing portfolio weren't something Donald liked to dwell on. One person could only handle the ramifications of so much shadow work. It was much easier to focus on how they managed to stop a supervillain in the Philippines from killing the president rather than thinking too hard about how they managed to find the guy in the first place, considering South-East Asia was on the other side of the globe, the supervillain was a nobody who built his weapons deep in the slums of Manilla, and had been all but digitally invisible up until that point, owing to a system of deeply entrenched structural poverty.
Nevermind that a shocking majority of the most powerful people within the GDA still comprised of white Americans or people from other wealthy Western countries despite recent efforts to change the demographics. Money and power were simply too resiliently self-perpetuating for any meaningful reform to take root. The grim truth was such: the chances of a lesser nation, capable only of providing a meagre economic tribute, having a proper say at the table were slim to none. Those in power asserted their will, and those without did what they could to survive — accepting the reprimand, the alterations, the invasive procedures and violations. All for their proposed benefit.
Paternalistic was a light way of putting it.
Donald could justify the layout all he wanted — it was for the greater good, it couldn't be helped, they were saving lives — but such moral quandaries were more Cecil's domain.
As much as it shamed him to admit it, Donald preferred the coward's way out.
Heavy compartmentalization.
Donald focussed on the people he could see around him, civilian or otherwise, and took pride in the simple act of saving lives. It kept the threads of his moral fibre intact, his sanity unspoiled. He played the good cop. Spoke to the families and provided reassurances, help and options and additional resources. And if it made him a weak man, well, Donald had no choice but to accept that.
They all had sacrifices to make.
Donald would never admit to fully comprehending just how far down the roots of the GDA's espionage went, how much metadata they mined from civilians, the extent of their facial recognition software, how many shell companies they owned and operated. How many dubious governments they aided and abetted in the name of maintaining order. He doubted even Cecil knew completely.
In one of his more cerebral moments, Donald had once theorized that the entire organization was one giant Ouroboros — with the director as the head, the rank-and-file employees, the tail. The eternal stalemate, the snake unable to eat or be eaten, forbidden from committing the sin of autocannibalism — the ultimate self-destruction. Think about it: Cecil issued an order, everyone else rushed to follow. On the surface, simple.
But look deeper into the practicalities of such a wide-reaching organization, and logic soon started to break down.
Bear with him here.
The GDA's web of influence stretched far and wide across the globe; countless spies, informants, handlers, suppliers, contacts. The visible work they performed — the jobs involving flashy supervillains and world-ending plots — only formed the tip of the iceberg, only having come into such a heavy spotlight over the past thirty years or so. As things stood, close to ninety percent of what they accomplished involved pre-emptive strikes, digging the roots up before the seed could touch soil: stopping a supervillain before they could become one. And for that, the GDA was heavily reliant on its human agents: inconspicuous, faceless, crucial to the entire operation, but ultimately expendable.
Each agent had a birth name and a codename. Those undercover had that, and then at least one false copy, depending on the job. Duplicity was their bread and butter — they would guard their names and knowledge with their lives or die trying, or in the event of failure, risk forty years to life in an offshore prison. And due to the nature of compartmentation, it was entirely conceivable that two or more agents could operate right next door to each other, on the same tiny sliver of the same project for decades, and never identify or even meet one another, even in passing.
Though there existed specific methods for undercover agents to identify each other out in the field, the cultural layers of paranoia and self-policing had built so thick and deep to petrify into something almost geological. With a veil of secrecy this dense and a grasp so all-encompassing over the black world, who's to say all the GDA's spies, their double and triple agents and moles and reverse moles weren't simply reporting on each other?
A casual remark he'd let slip to Cecil had soon turned into a heated discussion, a rare moment of reprieve — two small glasses of liquor and a cigar shared between them after a mission gone wrong. Both of them many years younger. A floating memory he couldn't quite place. Had he been in Cecil's office? That didn't seem right. The mental images were bathed in this warm, orange glow, almost like a bonfire casting long shadows. But then where else could they have talked?
In his mind's eye, Cecil's hair hadn't yet lost its color. The deep canyons of stress, too, had yet to make their home on the man's face, and his pupils held that half-hidden spark of fondness. Donald stared into his drink, reflection in the glass a perfect mirror. He looked exactly the same as he did now —
Anyway.
The snake was locked in an eternal stalemate with itself — the cycle of neither life nor death, brought on by its own hubris and need for meticulous control. What if, Donald had said, they did something about it? Slice through one end, through the dark glistening scales and soft pink flesh, until bone met blade and then clean air. It would be painful, yes, but all new growth was, and performing a sweep like this could cut their workload in half, filter out the redundancies, the false reports, the confusion. The system, streamlined and optimized for maximum efficiency, to keep as many people as safe and alive as possible.
Cecil had taken one long swig of his whiskey and said that Donald had just inadvertently proposed they turn their own counterintelligence teams in on themselves. Moles to catch moles to catch moles. An internal purge.
The snake eating its own tail.
The discussion died very quickly after that. He'd never brought it up again.
Optimism still formed the core of Donald's being. The system worked as it was, and where it didn't, improvements could soon follow. The GDA's staff were loyal to a fault — unusually so, for an organization so covert, militaristic, and silently influential.
It came down to several factors. The work was purposeful. The pay and additional benefits, generous. Staff were a complex medley of professional actors too straightlaced for deviance and unbalanced social misfits too brilliant for normalcy. Somehow, those contradictory forces combined to form an unlikely series of pairings serving to make the GDA the most effective global intelligence and law enforcement agency the world had ever seen. Yin and Yang, striving for perfect balance. Furthermore, unlike the US military itself, their personnel were almost exclusively direct employees rather than private contractors. It made a significant impact — increased accountability, better oversight, economically much more efficient.
Then there was the head of the serpent himself.
Over twenty years ago, with the director fresh out of prison, it had been hard for him to establish his authority. Most saw him as another dirty criminal, bewildered with the wildcard Radcliffe had chosen, wondering if an element of nepotism was at play. (The answer to that was yes — but it didn't preclude Cecil's own natural competence and suitability).
Cecil had accelerated the reforms introduced by Radcliffe at a breakneck speed, aided along by the dawn of the new millennium and the shifting window of social acceptability. Improved pay and working conditions. A hefty benefits package for the families of fallen agents. Better training and psychological outreach. He'd accepted a union. Diversified the lower and middle workforce in a way that went beyond performative quotas. Handpicked key assets from all over the world and made them his own, for once allowing the organization to truly start living up to the global in Global Defense Agency. They still had a long way to go, but it was a hell of a head start.
The old guard hadn't been happy. Many warned him about ruffling too many feathers, being too careless and losing his keys to power. They'd talked about replacing him. Cecil spat in their faces — not literally, though he had definitely wanted to. Instead, he'd pulled statistics. A higher rate of mission success than ever before. Employee satisfaction. Threw stuff in their faces that just made too much sense to be argued against — who better to lead operations in Marrakesh than a born and bred Moroccan, natively fluent in Arabic, French, and most importantly, the myriad Berber languages? An unassuming local, able to blend in amongst the raucous market traders or quiet goatherds in the Atlas mountains alike. The native population, elevated from disposable informants to autonomous agents, actively participating in their own country's fight against supervillainy.
And crucially, Cecil fired back with their financial reports — how much money they'd saved, how much money they stood to make from their current investments, how much would flow into their pockets in the years to come. Depressingly for a multinational governmental organization supposedly committed to grander schemes such as the greater good, saving lives, and human protection, petty economics had been the key tipping point in the debate, as it was in many other important discussions around the world.
Cecil's abrasive nature hadn't earned him many good opinions amongst the organization's benefactors. He was quick to temper, rarely diplomatic, and at times, devastatingly single-minded.
Many at the time doubted his ability to lead. Many today still did.
But none could deny that Cecil's tendency to dive head-first into volatile landscapes and highly combustible playing fields at the drop of a hat had earned him the admiration of many a rank-and-file employee. For example, not long ago — there had been no need to confront Omni-Man directly to parse his motives or buy time. Cecil could've easily thrown a number of nameless agents at the rogue superhuman, men and women committed long ago to sacrificing their lives for the Earth. Similarly, there had been zero obligation on the director's part to personally deliver the perceived antidote to Mark all those weeks ago in the wreckage of what used to be the medical wing. It was far beneath his pay grade; the man had no successor appointed, and Cecil was simply far too important. He did it anyway.
And then there was his self-imposed role as a handler.
Liaising with any asset utilized the same basic principles, whether human or superhuman. Keep communication clear and brief. Maintain amicable but strictly professional relations. Show no vulnerabilities. Any agent worth their badge could tell you that.
But managing superhumans came with its own unique challenges. Most superhumans powerful enough to make the cut were, sadly to say, not stable individuals in the slightest. An estimated eighty percent comfortably qualified for at least one diagnosis from the DSM-5. Depression, anxiety, and self-destructive habits remained the norm, though not for long, because the average hero retired at twenty-five and died ten years later, often by their own hand.
Human genetics were not so mosaic as to grant the species a significant number of individuals with inborn powers (for which the GDA was simultaneously cursing and extremely grateful for). Neither were magic nor paranormal forces as commonplace as one might have thought. No, most superhumans on Earth acquired their abilities through deliberate testing, freak industrial accidents, and peculiar, often alien technology.
Which meant that the frequency of superhumans multiplied over tenfold after the dust settled from World War Two, possibly spurred along by the GDA's own inception, the organization rising out of the ashes of the Manhattan Project like a phoenix. With the rise of the Iron Curtain and the advent of new technologies, governments around the globe participated in an accelerated arms race running in parallel to nuclear proliferation. Each nation vying for control, seeking to create the strongest supersoldier, the smartest super-genius, the most irresponsibly equipped post-human fighter. Private organizations and underground dealings soon followed, seeking to capitalize on the gap in the market. Kidnappings. Trafficking. Forced birth camps. The human cost was high.
Results were estimated as such — viable subjects, emotionally stable and well-socialized, willing to take orders (1%), failures to launch (80%), and mentally volatile child soldiers, easily exploitable in the wrong hands and worryingly hard to kill (19%).
So, yes.
Couple poor anger management with the ability to create fireballs out of thin air, and you'd have a dead agent on your hands faster than you could say 'therapy'. Put bluntly, agents within the GDA were much less enthusiastic about working directly with superpowered individuals than the public might've liked to believe. Handling superhumans required its own specialized training program. It was a long-term operation in of itself, necessitating years to build trust and rapport, at times being akin to that of a highly crisis-tested social worker. Relationships were almost exclusively one-to-one.
So for the director to personally manage Invincible, current strongest superhero on Earth, alongside the entire second iteration of the Guardians of the Globe?
It was a testament to the man's mulish stubbornness, suicidality, and to quote one seasoned handler's crude wording, 'Director Stedman's massive mountain-sized balls of fucking steel'.
The Guardians, most could justify. The director was essentially their commanding officer after all. Donald was also convinced assigning them each their own handlers would be largely pointless and terribly inefficient — why bother going through a grunt for your petty demands when you could have direct access to the big boss himself? The troubling practice of bypassing standard procedure had unfortunately already been established as a consequence of the original Guardians' untimely departure. It was unlikely any of the current Guardians would accept a reversion to more professional norms. Chances were they'd take it as a slight, and who wouldn't? (Though Donald also had to highlight the average superhuman's statistical tendency towards a large, fragile ego).
Mark Grayson, though, was far more contentious. On one hand, it was important to keep the boy under close personal observation, as it was for any ridiculously important asset. Now, more so than ever, due to his newfound instability. Handing the boy off to a different member of the team may not have been possible at all for the same reason as his peers — a bad precedent of blatantly disregarding official channels and the desire for instant gratification when it came to his demands. Donald had to admit, it made a lot of sense for Mark to be under Cecil's direct supervision. It streamlined the chain of command. Mark was the strongest superhuman on Earth and their best shot at resisting the Viltrum Empire. And rapport, however begrudging, had already been built between him and the director.
But Donald still couldn't shake the feeling of...trepidation. It was incredibly subtle, but he knew Cecil long and well enough to recognize the signs of an emotional trigger close to being pulled. Repeatedly. It didn't matter which Grayson he spoke to, they all did it — Nolan unaware or uncaring, Mark and Debbie similarly none the wiser, and the director likely deep in the trenches of his own denial. Or perhaps he was perfectly aware, and just wilfully ignoring it. Either way.
Donald just hoped the man knew what he was doing — a lot rode on his shoulders.
Because whether Cecil realized or not, his sheer inability to delegate and near-pathological need for personal control had bought him extremely good optics and a blazing pillar of fierce loyalty from his staff. Big man in a fancy suit, doing the little guy's job, putting his life on the line. How could that not go down well with the crowd?
They were passing through the electrical engineering sub-department. Almost there. Donald made them round a corner.
Someone stumbled with a cut-off gasp, the swish of crumpled paper and the splash of spilled liquid.
Mark's head whipped around.
"Oh, sorry," Mark said sheepishly. "Did we scare you?"
A man with blonde hair and dark rings under his eyes clutched the wall behind him with both hands, white-knuckled and afraid. The documents he was carrying spread out like fallen leaves, his paper cup rolled in a sad arc as it bled coffee onto the tiles. A little of it had spattered onto his white lab coat and brown shoes when it clattered to the floor.
Mark bent down and scooped all the papers together into a messy pile. He extended them up to the man, who sank further down the wall with every passing second, eyes never leaving Mark's face.
"Here," Mark offered with a smile. Donald made a mental note to remind the boy not to show so many teeth.
When the man didn't accept them, Mark attempted to neaten the stack a bit better and held them out again. His shoulders dropped and his smile slackened when the man remained motionless, tension apparent in every line of his body. "Is something wrong?"
Donald slid a glance at the man's ID.
Ah. Of course.
"I wasn't aware you'd returned from administrative leave, Dr Duvall."
Scott Duvall snapped out of his helpless stupor.
"I-I just got back today, s-sir," he stammered, eyes flitting like wasps between Mark and Donald.
Donald took the documents from Mark's hand. He noted the incorrect privacy screens the man had used for his papers.
"One day back, and already on the graveyard shift? That sounds like a hell of a work schedule." He stepped in between them and gave the documents back. Dr Duvall accepted them with shaking hands. He was still swallowing hard. "Would you like me to have a look into that for you?"
Fear flickered in his eyes.
"N-No sir, it's fine. I prefer working at night anyway."
Donald slipped a subtle look at Mark.
"Fewer distractions?"
Dr Duvall nodded tightly, finally managing to face Donald.
The man's eyes were dry kindling, his entire body unlit dynamite. Instability writ large in the tremors wracking his body. He was one wrong move away from a catastrophic mental breakdown.
Donald turned to Mark. "Invincible, why don't you head down the hall for a bit. I'll catch up."
"I don't know where I'm going."
Dr Duvall flinched when Mark spoke.
Donald shifted his body to hide him better from Mark's view.
"You don't have to wander too far. Keep going straight until you see a red chair in one of the offices on your left. Just give me a minute for Dr Duvall and I to catch up."
"Okay."
The boy, thankfully, listened.
Donald waited until his footsteps faded before turning back to Dr Duvall.
"You have a wife and son, don't you?"
The man looked ready to vomit. Air fought to escape his trembling lips in vicious bursts. His eyes kept darting back in the direction where Mark had disappeared.
"A newborn, if I recall," Donald tried to make his voice soothing. "It wouldn't do for him to be without his father so early on, and I'm sure Becky could use your help around the house. The team will manage fine without you for another eight weeks. Think of it as paternity leave."
Dr Duvall nodded furiously, one hand gripped tightly on his documents, the other scrabbling for purchase on the wall.
"Good man." Donald placed a hand on the man's shoulder. He immediately regretted it when he felt Dr Duvall's body curl in a badly suppressed flinch.
Donald spared him a sympathetic look. He pointed at the papers. "Deliver those back to the team. Then take the rest of the night off."
Dr Duvall swallowed thickly. His voice came out as a rasp. "Yes, sir."
Donald watched the man scuttle back to his lab with barely concealed panic. He caught up to Mark in a few long strides. Mark had somehow managed to overshoot the red chair completely.
"What was up with that scientist guy?"
Donald sighed. "Dr Duvall has been under a lot of stress recently."
It was a shame, the man produced some of his department's best outputs. He'd be a professor at an Ivy League institution in a few years if he didn't work for the GDA.
Mark bit his lip, hesitating. "He was scared of me."
Plenty of GDA staff were wary after Omni-Man's betrayal and Mark's subsequent rampage. Though, rarely did it ever translate to such bone-shaking fear. Most employees, with the notable exception of their research and development teams, were military in some capacity. They were highly trained to deal with dangerous individuals.
Donald considered his next words. He could deflect, since it involved volatile subject matter, or he could tell Mark the truth.
The former was safe. Standard procedure for an uncomfortable question.
But the latter was necessary.
In a softened tone, he said, "Dr Duvall lost his sister and young niece in Chicago. He still hasn't recovered fully."
Grief clung to the man like a lead blanket. Pain oozed from his pores. His file stated Jessica had raised her two-year-old stepbrother when she herself was a mere pre-teen, covering up their parents' alcoholic dysfunction and stemming their financial woes however she could to avoid them being whisked away into foster care and possibly separated, their already broken family fractured just a little bit wider. His niece had been an unexpected but welcome addition — the product of a one night stand on Jessica's part.
For several years, it had just been the three of them, an unlikely but happy family maintaining their small island of joy. Then Scott Duvall met Rebecca Waller, another broken soul, fell in love and married her, and before they knew it a baby was on its way. Scott could finally give Gretchen and his own son what he and Jessica never had growing up — a loving extended family, friendly and good-spirited, not completely apathetic to their plights, to their desperate 3AM phone calls and helpless longing.
And then Omni-Man went bad.
Jessica and Gretchen perished in the rubble with not even a full body to bury between them, and Jack Duvall would never come to know his beloved aunt or cousin.
Their family would never be the same.
"Oh." Mark seemed at a loss. Guilt tore at his face. "I should apologize — "
"No," Donald cut in. "Let the man grieve on his own. People like him are...delicate. Besides, you did nothing wrong. Chicago was not your fault."
Mark's voice was nearly a whisper. "I could have done more."
Donald injected warmth and pride into his tone, levelled Mark with a firm look. "You did all you could."
A deep silence fell as Mark submerged himself in his own thoughts.
They approached their destination.
There was no obvious indication that people were meant to live here — no signs, no warm furnishings, no easy, welcoming approach from the official working areas of the Pentagon. Access was through one of many secondary pathways splitting off from various main halls, doors concealed into other architectural features; biometric security measures, heavy surveillance, monitored entry points. All to ensure absolute privacy — no one was meant to know who lived here or why, in fact only the necessary few were aware that anyone lived here at all.
The embedded apartments were designed for housing long-term personnel, key witnesses, and other relevant persons of interest. The director himself had a unit tucked away somewhere in the wing, not that he ever used it.
Donald delivered Mark to the entrance of his assigned housing unit. A fully-fitted apartment complex — sparse and devoid of character, but livable. Almost normal, except for being entirely underground, virtually unlocatable, and heavily policed.
"Your key cards are already inside. You'll have a lot more clearance than your mom — try not to abuse it, please."
Mark nodded.
"The two of you should be here no longer than a few days at most. The team will deliver any groceries your mom needs."
Donald inclined his head. "I'll take my leave, then. You know how to find me if you need anything."
He was already planning his next objective.
"Was that you outside, earlier?" Mark asked suddenly, breaking his sterile silence.
Donald stopped.
"I'm sorry?"
"Hanging in the hallway when me and Cecil were talking," Mark clarified. "Was that you?"
Donald kept his face blank.
Had Mark heard the Reanimen?
"What makes you say that?"
The boy took a deep breath.
An enhanced sense of smell. Of course.
Donald was almost offended. If Mark thought he smelled anything like a battalion of electrified corpses, he would have to consider implementing rigorous changes to his personal hygiene routine.
"You must be really good with a gun," Mark said thoughtfully.
Donald raised a brow.
Well, that was a non-sequitur.
Mark took his response the right way.
"You must spend a lot of time in a firing range," he said by way of explanation. Mark leaned a little closer to Donald, twitched his nose half a foot away from his shoulder. "Lot of metal on you."
Donald's stomach made a wide, sweeping motion.
"M-Metal?"
The door opened. Debbie's soft voice rang out. Mark was already stepping through.
"Wait, Mark — "
"See you later, Donald!"
It slammed shut.
Donald stood there for a precious two seconds, heart beating a harsh rhythm in his chest. That instinctive stab of discomfort. The gaps in his memory. Debbie's reaction. It was all coalescing in a way he knew he wasn't going to like.