The hallway was silent. Only the faint hum of the light panels accompanied the approaching steps. Babsi leaned for a moment against the wall beside the door, eyes closed, arms crossed over her chest, her backpack slung over one shoulder. The weight between betrayal and loyalty pressed heavier than anything inside it.
Katja Sommer, her husband Sven Widahn, Michael Heinrichsen, and Konrad Vohwinkel, each of them had trusted her. And then there was her father, and the promise she had made to him. She pictured him clearly: the tall, worldly American, Professor Dr. Dr. James Hammlot, who despite all his work had always found time and an open ear for his only daughter. She sighed and pushed open the door to the conference room.
Inside reigned the sterile coolness of a space that wanted to shed everything human. The walls were gray, soundproofed. Light came from recessed strips in the ceiling, cold white and even, like a promise of control. At the long table they were already seated: faces in half-shadow, backlit by built-in screens filled with data streams, diagrams, cell values, and movement patterns layered on top of each other.
Her voice was dry. “I really want to call it a day. I don’t work for you, you know? I’ve got friends. A life of my own.”
No one answered at first. Only the faint clicks of images shifting across the main screen at the far end. There was Sina, sitting motionless in bed, her hands resting on the blanket. The sound was muted, but her lips moved as though murmuring an old song no one remembered.
James cleared his throat, his voice calm, almost gentle. “All right, Babsi. We won’t keep you long, but I wanted that clever head of yours at the table for this discussion.” His eyes lingered for a heartbeat on Lars. “Lars is off the clock too.”
Lars smiled at her, a quick, warm glance that seemed almost out of place in the cold light. “Exactly. You’re not the only one thinking about quitting time. We wrap this up, and then it’s the weekend.”
Babsi smiled back. She slid into an empty chair near the head of the table. He never had much time—always deployments, always secrecy. But weekends with him meant something else: waking up in Barcelona. Or Milan. Sometimes Monaco. Cities stamped into a passport, and yet it was always just one room, one window facing the sea, his arm, her breath. For a few hours the world belonged not to the project, but to them.
The hum of the ventilation pressed over the table again, the monitors flickered on. The professor smoothed his brow. “Very well. Let’s get to it.”
Dr. Ulla Vogel lifted her eyes from her tablet, her voice cool and precise. “We all have our obligations and our pleasures, the latter far too few. But that is the nature of the work.”
Felix smirked. “The work… which, Herr Dr. Zelenka, didn’t exactly turn out the way it was supposed to. To be honest, I’m still pissed that the night you called Lars and me to help you with those two bodies, you pretended the order had come from Dr. Meininger. That was never cleared, was it?”
Lars sat stone-faced beside him, but his voice cut sharp as glass. “You said it was authorized. ‘From above,’ your exact words. That we had no questions to ask. And in truth… what? It was a solo stunt?”
Zelenka pressed his lips tight in irritation. “How many times must I explain this? It was a night shift. I was alone. The archive vials were scheduled for disposal. Then Elin came in—dead, or as good as. I thought one trial was better than a second corpse.”
He drew in a breath. “Elin had refused the serum. No prep, no support. The body was perfect for a test run. So I injected one unit and coded a vial that was set for destruction. Makeshift. I assumed it might stabilize her for a few hours. Long enough for a transfer. But no response, the values collapsed. Honestly, I was relieved.” A twitch crossed his mouth. “Then the cooling chamber failed, and I knew we’d had trouble for nearly three weeks last time. So I wanted Lars and Felix to bury the two of them, Faris and Sina, in the old cemetery. No risk. No noise. Just gone.”
“But then…” Annika began.
“…she simply woke up. At the very moment the dog barked and the pastor arrived. Until then I was sure she wouldn’t survive the transport from the bunker to the graveyard. And then… yes.”
“No big deal?” Felix’s voice shot up. “We hauled two bodies out of the bunker! In a car, down the main road! If the dog hadn’t barked, if that pastor hadn’t just happened to show up…”
“Then it would have been over,” Zelenka said quietly. “I know.”
Dr. Vogel cut in, her voice sharp as a blade. “Over? You would have buried a host with an active transfer alive.”
“You had no idea what you were dealing with,” Lukas interjected. “You were playing with a consciousness you don’t even understand. You activated an entity. In secret.”
A heavy silence fell across the table.
Dr. Meininger cleared his throat. “I think we all agree something like this must never happen again.”
Felix snorted. “Yeah, and meanwhile we were the gravediggers. Perfect.”
“Enough,” Professor James Hammlot said. He sat at the head of the table, half in shadow, his shirt no longer crisp, cuffs rolled back, his face lined with fatigue. “We’ve got to stop condemning what’s already in motion. That leads nowhere. It was a mistake. A risk. A life. And now it lies before us. What we decide doesn’t just determine her fate—it determines ours. I’ve spoken with Canada. They expect a solution.”
He poured himself coffee and looked at each of them in turn. “Stay focused.”
Felix leaned back. “Fine. Focus. So… the serum no longer works, right?”
Dr. Vogel nodded, pacing slowly. “The host body is unstable. The cognitive residue is hyperactive. If we don’t replace the carrier, the system collapses in one or two days, maybe hours.”
Babsi stared at her, horrified. “This is all so inhuman.”
Dr. Meininger shrugged. “We stand at an ethical threshold. If we don’t transfer, both die. If we do transfer, then what dies? The body? The soul? Or responsibility itself?”
Annika shook her head. “That is not an option. A transition process… with full consciousness? That’s cruelty.”
Felix arched a brow. “You mean our little miracle?”
“She’s a human being,” Annika said softly.
“She was a human being,” Felix countered. “Two of them, actually. What is she now? Experiment, archive, echo? Either way, the stuff doesn’t hold forever. If we want to keep her, we need a new body. Soon.”
Dr. Vogel gave him a scornful glance. “And you propose Texas.”
Felix smirked. “Exactly. Huntsville. Execution in four days. Skip the final injection, death certificate still issued. Stabilization, then transfer to Binghamton.”
Annika’s eyes widened. “You’d take someone condemned to die, drag him to the edge, pull the plug on his consciousness, and keep the body behind?”
Felix: “At least the host doesn’t die. Isn’t that more humane? He was headed for execution anyway.”
Annika: “That’s not life. Not death. That’s a cold in-between.”
Babsi turned toward her father, shaking her head in disbelief. Under the table, Lars’s fingers brushed against hers.
“Has anyone even considered what this means for her?” Annika pressed. “She is unmistakably female. And you want to put her into a male body?”
Felix leaned forward. “Better than burning through one body after another. The inmate’s forty-five. Healthy.”
Babsi shot back, her voice trembling with anger. “No! A life without choice?”
Felix laughed, dry and sharp. “She’s an experiment. She’ll stay in the lab anyway. Who cares what body she’s in?”
Ulla Vogel’s eyes locked on him, glacial. “Felix. If I hadn’t promised your father I’d take you in and keep you under my wing, this would be the moment I’d leave you to fend for yourself.”
Silence spread, heavy and impenetrable. Felix swallowed hard, throat constricted. Annika, Lars, and Lukas fixed him with their gaze, cold and calculating, as if weighing whether he still served a purpose.
No twitch, no blink—just the unspoken certainty: anyone who turned against them, anyone who became a liability, did not last long. Not even among their own.
Felix knew exactly what that meant. And he knew he would do the same: follow every order, any hour, at any cost.
Hammlot raised his hands. “Stay on task. No one decides tonight. But understand this—this is more than a transfer. It’s a threshold. And it involves all of us.”
Dr. Jaroslav Zelenka cleared his throat. “What about the documents?”
Meininger answered flatly. “Team Two collected what belongs to us in Zirkow.”
Vogel: “Except the Codex.”
Meininger: “Yes. Except the book.”
Hammlot exhaled slowly. “Whether she remains a long-term subject or not, we need to ask ourselves how far we’re willing to go.”
The air in the room felt colder. Heavier.