The first rule at Daywalker Inc was not written on the glass wall in the lobby, or printed in the employee handbook with its expensive paper and its suspiciously cheerful diagrams about workplace wellness. It was not mentioned in the induction video, which featured smiling interns pretending not to fear the blood-fridge, or in the legal disclaimer that ran for eleven minutes before anyone was allowed near a needle.
The first rule was simpler.
Never bleed near the lift.
Everybody knew it. Everybody obeyed it. Nobody admitted why.
Mina Lau learned the rule properly at 7:13 on a Monday morning, while carrying six coffees, a sealed cooler of synthetic plasma, and one cinnamon bun she had bought for her younger brother because Kai had texted at dawn to say he had forgotten breakfast again. The message had included a sad face, a vampire emoji, and a photograph of their mother’s kitchen table with nothing on it except a prescription bottle and a pile of unpaid bills turned face down, as though dignity could be maintained by hiding the numbers.
Mina had replied, Eat the banana in your bag.
Kai had sent back, That banana has become a political prisoner.
So she had bought the cinnamon bun, because love, in Mina’s experience, was mostly a series of small surrenders disguised as errands.
The lobby of Daywalker Inc occupied the lower three floors of a tower on the edge of Marina Bay, all sun-flash glass and disciplined orchids. It had the sort of air-conditioning that made ambition feel sterile. Outside, Singapore was already hot enough to soften the edges of the morning. Inside, everyone moved as if late for a future they had signed a non-disclosure agreement to enter.
Mina’s badge refused the turnstile twice.
“Come on,” she muttered, shifting the coffees against her chest. “Do not choose violence before eight.”
The security guard, Mr Tan, looked up from his desk. He had worked in the building since before Daywalker Inc took over, back when the tower housed a shipping firm and a bank with very polite scandals. He had a face that suggested he had seen wealth behave badly and had not been impressed.
“New badge?” he asked.
“Same badge. New personality.”
Mr Tan took it, wiped it on his sleeve, and tried again. The turnstile clicked open with the smugness of a machine that had won.
“There,” he said. “You must talk nicely to technology.”
“I did. It escalated.”
He glanced at the cooler. “Blood day?”
“Synthetic calibration day.”
“That sounds worse.”
“It is worse. Nobody gives you biscuits after synthetic calibration.”
Mr Tan smiled just enough to prove he was alive and handed back the badge. “Lift three is slow.”
“Lift three is haunted.”
“All lifts are haunted. They carry people to meetings.”
Mina laughed despite herself, and that was how the coffee slipped.
Not dramatically. Not in the cinematic way where the cup flew, time slowed, and the whole building leaned in. It was more embarrassing than that. The lid on the largest oat flat white gave up on its duties, hot coffee sloshed over Mina’s wrist, she jerked, and the paper bag with the cinnamon bun slid from under her elbow. In catching that, she knocked the corner of the cooler against the metal trim beside the lift.
The cooler did not break.
Mina’s hand did.
A thin cut opened along the side of her thumb, bright and immediate. One red line. No more than that. A paper-cut with better lighting.
The lobby changed.
It was so slight at first that Mina thought she had imagined it. The turnstiles kept clicking. The fountain still made its careful, expensive sound. Someone’s phone still chimed with an incoming message. But every suited person within ten metres paused by half a breath, as if an invisible conductor had lifted one finger.
Then the lift doors opened.
A man stood inside.
Mina had seen him only once before, from a distance, on the day she was hired. He had crossed the upper atrium with three executives behind him and a tablet in his hand, not speaking, not hurrying, not performing the little theatre of power because he did not need to. People had moved out of his path with the instinctive courtesy usually reserved for emergency vehicles and mothers with prams.
Julian Voss.
Chief Scientific Officer. Co-founder. Public face of the company whenever the company needed to look ethical, brilliant, and only mildly terrifying.
In person, he was younger than the magazine profiles made him seem and older than the word billionaire allowed. He had black hair, a clean jaw, and the kind of stillness that made ordinary movement look wasteful. His suit was charcoal. His tie was dark red. His eyes, when they dropped to Mina’s hand, were not dark at all.
They were gold.
Not brown with ambition. Not hazel under lobby lights.
Gold.
Mina closed her hand into a fist.
The air in the lift seemed to tighten.
Mr Tan stood up.
“Miss Lau,” he said softly.
It was the softness that frightened her.
Julian Voss stepped out of the lift. Nobody else moved. For one impossible second, the tower belonged to the cut on Mina’s thumb.
“You’re bleeding,” he said.
It was not an accusation. That would have been easier. It was worse than that. It was recognition.
Mina lifted her chin because she had been raised by a woman who considered visible panic a luxury for people with savings. “Very observant. Do they give awards for that upstairs?”
Something changed in his face. Not amusement. Not quite. A tiny adjustment, like a locked door realising the key had teeth.
“Mr Tan,” Julian said, without looking away from her. “Medical kit.”
“Already coming, sir.”
“I’m fine,” Mina said.
“You are not.”
“It is a cut, not an opera.”
One of the coffees was dripping steadily onto the marble floor. Mina could hear it. Plip. Plip. Plip. Like a small, caffeinated countdown.
Julian’s gaze flicked once to the cooler label.
SYNTHETIC HEME BATCH 9C. RESEARCH FLOOR 41. TEMPERATURE CONTROLLED.
Then back to her fist.
“You work in Protocol?”
“Junior clinical liaison. Which is a fancy way of saying I apologise to doctors on behalf of people who earn too much to use phones.”
“Who hired you?”
Mina blinked. “Human Resources, I believe. They remain committed to the myth.”
“Who approved your clearance?”
The lobby had resumed its movement, but badly. People walked too quickly, then too slowly. A woman in a white jacket pretended to check her email while staring at Mina over the top of her phone. Two men near the reception desk spoke in Mandarin, low and urgent. Mr Tan returned with a medical kit and the grim expression of someone bringing a plaster to a knife fight.
Mina took the kit from him before Julian could. “I can do it.”
Her thumb throbbed. The blood had reached the heel of her palm now. Nothing much. Nothing a child would cry over.
Julian watched her open an antiseptic wipe with her teeth.
“Do not put that in your mouth.”
She paused. “It is wrapped.”
“It has blood on the corner.”
“My blood.”
“That is the issue.”
There it was again, that hush beneath the words. Not disgust. Not ordinary caution. Fear, maybe, except it sat strangely on him. Julian Voss did not look like a man built for fear. He looked like a man built by people who had misunderstood sleep.
Mina spat the wrapper into her palm and cleaned the cut. The antiseptic sting steadied her. Pain, at least, did not require an NDA.
“Should I be worried,” she asked, “that my employer has strong feelings about thumbs?”
“You should come upstairs.”
“No.”
The word came out before she had decided to say it. A clean little brick wall.
Julian’s eyes narrowed by almost nothing. “Miss Lau—”
“I am already late. I have six coffees, one damaged cinnamon bun, and a cooler that apparently contains everyone’s breakfast. Whatever this is, it can be an email.”
“It cannot.”
“Everything can be an email if you lower your standards.”
Mr Tan made a coughing sound that might have been treason.
Julian held out his hand, not for her, but for the cooler. “Batch 9C is not due on forty-one.”
Mina looked down at the label. “That is where I was told to take it.”
“By whom?”
“Dr Shah’s assistant.”
“Dr Shah is in Taipei.”
Mina’s stomach turned with a slow, unpleasant neatness.
Behind Julian, the lift doors remained open. No one inside. No one pressing buttons. The empty mirrored walls reflected the lobby back at itself: orchids, marble, red hand, gold eyes.
Mina tightened her grip on the cooler. “What is in this?”
Julian did not answer quickly enough.
There were many things Mina disliked: venture capital language, men who said calm down, coriander in soup, and the way hospitals made poor families feel grateful for basic explanations. But she had a special private hatred for silence from powerful people. Silence was where bills hid. Silence was where mistakes became policies. Silence was where families like hers got told later that nothing could be done.
“What is in this?” she repeated.
Julian’s phone lit in his hand. He glanced down. His expression did not change, which somehow made the message worse.
“Mr Tan,” he said. “Lock the lobby lifts.”
The security guard was already moving.
Mina’s pulse began to work harder.
“No,” she said. “Absolutely not. You are not locking me into a biotech tower because I nicked my thumb and carried the wrong lunchbox.”
The lights above the lift shifted from white to amber.
A soft tone sounded through the lobby.
Not an alarm. Something more polite. More corporate. Danger with a hospitality budget.
Julian stepped closer. “Miss Lau, listen to me very carefully. The cooler you are holding was diverted from a secured lab. Your blood has just triggered a restricted response in the building’s old detection system. Those two facts are not separate.”
Mina stared at him.
“My blood triggered what?”
“The system has been waiting for a match.”
“A match to what?”
Again, that pause.
Julian looked at her as though the answer had lived with him for years and had only just learned her name.
“To the original line.”
Mina laughed once. It sounded terrible. “Right. Grand. Original line. Very normal. Love a Monday cult.”
The amber lights deepened.
Across the lobby, a pair of glass doors sealed with a hydraulic sigh. People looked up now, openly. A child in a school uniform, walking beside a woman with a visitor badge, began to cry. His mother pulled him against her hip and glanced around for someone in charge. There were always mothers looking for someone in charge. Mina had been doing it since she was nine.
Julian noticed the child too.
That, more than the gold eyes or the sealed doors, made her reassess him. His attention shifted, fast and practical. Not irritated by noise. Not embarrassed by public feeling. He looked at the little boy, then at Mr Tan.
“Visitors to conference room B,” Julian said. “No panic. Water, snacks, cartoons if the screen works.”
“The screen never works,” Mr Tan said.
“Then lie with confidence.”
Mina would have laughed if she had not been considering whether she could hit a billionaire with a cooler and still keep her job.
A woman in a navy suit hurried across the lobby. Dr Leena Shah, despite apparently being in Taipei, or perhaps because everyone at Daywalker Inc lied as naturally as breathing recycled air. She wore trainers with her suit and had a silver streak through her hair. Her expression, when she saw Mina, was not surprised.
That was unhelpful.
“Mina,” Dr Shah said.
“You are meant to be in Taipei.”
“I was meant to be on a plane.”
“You missed it?”
“I chose to remain dramatically available.”
“Did you send me this cooler?”
“No.”
“Did your assistant?”
“My assistant resigned in 2023.”
Mina closed her eyes briefly. “Of course she did.”
Dr Shah looked at Julian. “How much blood?”
“Minimal.”
“Contact?”
“Lobby air. No ingestion. No open sample breach.”
“I am standing here,” Mina said.
“Yes,” Dr Shah said, and her voice softened. “You are. I am sorry.”
Mina disliked that more than the silence.
Julian’s phone rang. He did not answer it. The name on the screen was visible for one second.
CHEN WEI-LIN — TAIPEI OFFICE.
Mina saw it because she had spent two years learning to read upside down across hospital desks.
Taipei.
The second city in the bible no one had bothered to write properly for her life.
“My brother is at school,” she said.
Julian looked at her. “What?”
“My brother. Kai. Seventeen. He is at school, unless he has convinced his biology teacher that migraines are hereditary, which they are not. If this is dangerous—if this is anything—someone needs to tell me whether my family is involved.”
Dr Shah and Julian exchanged a look.
There was the whole rotten orchard. The exchanged look. The private adult weather. Mina knew it from oncology wards, from banks, from relatives who had whispered in kitchens when her father’s name came up. People exchanged looks when they wanted to spend your future without your permission.
Mina set the coffees on the floor one by one. The cinnamon bun, ruined but still wrapped, went on top. Then she lifted the cooler with both hands and held it against her chest.
“Nobody gets this,” she said, “until someone tells me what is happening.”
Julian’s jaw flexed. “That cooler may contain an active lineage reagent.”
“Excellent. That is almost a sentence.”
“It was designed to identify descendants of a specific bloodline.”
“Designed by whom?”
“Our predecessors.”
“Dead people, then. Always reassuring.”
Dr Shah stepped in. “Daywalker Inc began as a daylight tolerance project. A legitimate one, whatever the rumours say. We develop treatment for photosensitive blood disorders, rare haemoglobin syndromes, immune collapse after gene therapy. That is public. That part is true.”
“And the vampire part?” Mina asked.
Several people looked away.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Mina said.
Dr Shah’s mouth tightened. “The term is not clinically useful.”
“But not inaccurate?”
Julian said, “Not entirely.”
Mina stared at him.
There were moments when the mind, faced with absurdity, chose admin. Hers did.
“I need to sit down.”
Julian moved at once, hand hovering near her elbow but not touching. Good. Clever man. She would have removed the hand.
Mr Tan brought a chair from behind the security desk. Not an elegant chair. A practical one, with one wobbly leg and a strip of tape on the back. Mina sat because her knees had become unreliable contractors.
The lobby had been divided now with quiet efficiency. Staff directed visitors into conference rooms. Security sealed exterior access while pretending it was a routine drill. Someone handed out bottled water. Someone else collected the dropped coffees with the tragic delicacy of a funeral director.
The cinnamon bun remained on the floor.
Mina picked it up and put it in her bag.
Julian watched the movement. “You are taking the pastry?”
“It cost six dollars.”
“It hit the floor.”
“It is wrapped.”
“You are very committed to wrappers.”
“And you are very committed to being ominous in tailoring. We all have hobbies.”
For the first time, Julian Voss almost smiled.
It did something annoying to his face. Softened it. Made him look less like the portrait in a shareholder report and more like a man who might once have laughed in a kitchen before the world put him behind glass.
Mina looked away. She had no room in her morning for handsome unethical science.
Dr Shah crouched in front of her, which Mina respected. Powerful people rarely crouched. They preferred looming. It preserved the food chain.
“Mina,” she said, “we need to test your blood.”
“No.”
“Not for the company. For you.”
“That sentence has tricked entire populations.”
“I know.”
The honesty landed heavily.
Dr Shah took a breath. “There are families whose blood reacts differently to viral vectors, UV exposure, anticoagulants, and certain engineered heme compounds. Most are scattered. Most do not know. Some were protected by being undocumented, untested, ordinary. Your hiring profile did not flag you because it could not. The old system in this building recognised you only when you bled near the lift sensors.”
Mina looked at the amber lights. “Why would lifts have blood sensors?”
Julian said, “Because this building used to belong to someone much worse than us.”
“That is a low bar buried underground.”
“Yes.”
Again, not defensive. That unsettled her. Mina preferred villains with better branding. They were easier to organise against.
Julian’s phone rang again. CHEN WEI-LIN.
This time he answered.
“Speak.”
Mina could not hear the reply, only the faint shape of a woman’s voice, clipped and furious.
Julian listened. His expression altered by millimetres, but Mina felt everyone around him react. Dr Shah stood. Mr Tan’s hand went to his radio.
“When?” Julian asked.
The voice spoke again.
He looked at Mina.
No. She hated that look. She hated being the centre of a problem other people had named before telling her.
“Secure Taipei,” he said. “No transfers. No sample movement. Keep Wei-Lin in the building. If the board asks, tell them I said no.”
He ended the call.
Mina’s fingers had gone cold around the cooler handle. “What happened in Taipei?”
“A second match.”
The lobby lights seemed to hum.
“Who?”
Julian hesitated.
Mina stood so quickly the chair scraped back. “Who?”
“Your brother’s school records were accessed forty minutes ago,” he said. “Not by us.”
The floor moved under her, not literally, but in the old familiar way it had in hospital corridors when a doctor began with unfortunately. Kai’s face rose in her mind: too thin this year, all elbows and jokes, pretending he did not notice their mother counting tablets, pretending he did not notice Mina taking extra shifts, pretending at breakfast that a banana with bruised skin was a tragedy instead of evidence.
“No,” Mina said.
Dr Shah reached for her phone. “We can send security.”
“My mother.”
“We will send someone to your flat too.”
“You do not know where—”
Julian said, “We do.”
Mina turned on him.
The room sharpened.
He did not flinch, and for a second she wanted him to. She wanted one powerful person to have the decency to look ashamed before admitting they had mapped her life.
“You ran background checks.”
“Yes.”
“On my family.”
“Yes.”
“Before today.”
“Yes.”
She laughed, but there was no humour in it. “There he is.”
“Mina—”
“No. Do not use my name like you found it honestly.”
Julian went still.
Good.
Her thumb had started bleeding again beneath the plaster. She could feel the warm slip of it. Everyone else probably could too, if the morning had taught her anything absurd and revolting.
“You had my file,” she said. “You had my mother’s illness. Kai’s school. Our address. And you let me carry your little vampire cooler through a lobby like a Deliveroo order with a pension plan.”
“We did not arrange the cooler.”
“But you arranged me.”
That one landed. She saw it. Not enough to satisfy her, but enough.
Dr Shah said quietly, “Mina, I found your application in a flagged archive after you were hired. I told Julian three days ago.”
“Three days.”
“We were trying to verify without frightening you.”
“Congratulations on the alternative.”
Mr Tan approached, careful. “Miss Lau. I have school contact. Your brother is on site. Office confirms.”
Mina’s breath broke in relief so sharp it almost hurt.
“Put him on the phone.”
“They are transferring.”
Mr Tan handed her the desk phone because mobile lines were now jammed by the building lockdown. Mina pressed it to her ear with her clean hand. The cooler remained in the other.
Static. A click. Then Kai’s voice, annoyed and alive.
“Jie? Why is my principal acting like I have royal blood? Because if we are rich now, I would like to resign from chemistry.”
Mina closed her eyes.
“Are you safe?”
“Obviously not, I’m in chemistry.”
“Kai.”
His tone shifted at once. Beneath all the jokes, he was a boy trained by instability to hear the crack in a voice. “What happened?”
“Nothing yet. Listen to me. Stay in the office. Do not leave with anyone unless I say so. Not a teacher, not security, not a friendly auntie with snacks.”
“What if the snacks are good?”
“Kai.”
“Okay. Office. No snacks. Is Mum okay?”
“We are sending someone to her.”
“Who is we?”
Mina looked at Julian Voss, at Dr Shah, at the sealed doors and amber lights and the company that had turned her blood into a board-level event.
“A problem with excellent stationery,” she said.
Kai was quiet for half a second. “Is this Dad stuff?”
The question went through her like cold water.
Their father had died when Mina was twelve and Kai was five, or so the paperwork said. A fever. A collapse. A closed coffin because the doctors in Taipei had insisted the infection was aggressive and the body unsafe. Their mother had never spoken of the hospital without rubbing the inside of her left wrist, where an old scar crossed the vein like a pale thread.
Mina had spent years not asking questions because families were held together, sometimes, by the mercy of what they did not force each other to say.
Now a biotech tower in Singapore had recognised her blood.
Now someone in Taipei had accessed Kai’s school records.
Now Julian Voss was watching her as though grief itself had just become evidence.
“I don’t know,” she told her brother.
Kai breathed out. “That means yes in grown-up.”
“It means I don’t know. I will come for you.”
“Promise?”
A childhood word. A kitchen word. A word from when storms knocked the power out and Mina made shadow puppets on the wall while their mother lit candles and pretended she was not afraid of bills, borders, blood, men, or God.
“I promise.”
When she hung up, her hand was shaking.
Julian noticed. Of course he did. He seemed built to notice damage and then file it somewhere private.
“We can extract him,” he said.
“No.”
“Mina—”
“I said no.” She wiped her cheek with the back of her wrist and hated that there was moisture there. “You do not get my brother. You do not get my mother. You do not get to turn up with tinted cars and men in discreet earpieces and call it help.”
“The people who accessed his records may already be moving.”
“Then tell me who they are.”
Julian glanced at Dr Shah.
Dr Shah’s expression was grim. “The board has factions.”
Mina stared. “Your board has factions? Is this a company or a medieval court with quarterly earnings?”
“Both,” Julian said.
“Lovely. Do you joust at lunch?”
“Only on Fridays.”
She hated that the answer was funny.
Dr Shah did not smile. “There are investors who believe the original line can stabilise daylight tolerance permanently. Not treatments. Not managed care. Heritable adaptation. A market they could own for centuries.”
Mina looked down at her bandaged thumb.
A market.
There it was, neat and holy in the mouths of the rich. Her blood, her brother, her father’s sealed coffin, her mother’s scar. A market.
Julian said, “I have spent eight years preventing that research from reopening.”
“And yet here we are, doors locked, cooler glowing, my brother’s school records in play. Stellar prevention.”
“Yes,” he said. “It failed.”
No excuse. No corporate fog. Just the failure, laid on the floor between them.
Mina did not know what to do with that. Anger preferred a wall. He had offered her a wound.
The cooler beeped.
Everyone heard it.
A small green light on the lid turned white.
Dr Shah swore under her breath.
Mina’s fingers tightened. “What now?”
“The reagent has warmed above safe threshold,” Julian said.
“You said it might be active.”
“It is.”
“What does active do?”
“To most people? Nothing. To a match—”
“Finish the sentence.”
His eyes met hers. “It wakes what has been dormant.”
Mina felt suddenly, horribly aware of her own body. Of pulse. Skin. Teeth. The ache behind her eyes she had blamed on poor sleep. The way sunlight sometimes made Kai feverish after football. Their mother’s insistence on blackout curtains in the old flat. The soups with iron-rich herbs. The family jokes about weak blood. The way grief rearranged memory, turning every ordinary thing into a clue after the fact.
“No,” she said, but quietly now.
The cooler beeped again.
A crack appeared in the seal.
Julian moved.
Fast.
Not human fast.
One moment he stood two metres away. The next his hand was over hers on the cooler lid, bracing it shut. His skin was cold. Not corpse cold. Marble left in shade. Mina inhaled sharply, and his grip loosened at once, careful not to trap her.
“Forgive me,” he said.
“Later,” she snapped. “Hold the evil lunchbox.”
Dr Shah was already opening a sterile containment sleeve from the medical kit, her hands steady despite everything. Mr Tan cleared a path. The lobby watched, silent now, the way people watched paramedics work on strangers while pretending not to imagine their own families.
The cooler vibrated.
Mina’s cut throbbed in time with it.
Julian’s gold eyes brightened.
That should have terrified her most. It did terrify her. But underneath the fear, absurdly, was another fact: he was suffering. His jaw was clenched, shoulders rigid, every line of him controlled past reason. Whatever was in the cooler called to him too.
“You’re hungry,” she said.
His gaze snapped to hers.
Dr Shah froze for half a beat.
Mina almost laughed. “Sorry. Is that rude? I am new to the vampire workplace culture.”
Julian’s voice was rougher when he answered. “It is not hunger.”
“What is it?”
“Memory.”
The word struck oddly.
The cooler seal cracked wider.
Dr Shah slid the containment sleeve around it, but the white light bled through the material like moonlight through paper. Mina felt pressure build behind her ribs, not pain exactly, but a recognition her mind had no language for. She smelled metal, rain on concrete, ginger in her mother’s soup, her father’s old coat, the disinfectant of a Taipei hospital corridor she should have been too young to remember.
Then she heard a voice.
Not through speakers. Not from anyone in the lobby.
A woman’s voice, singing very softly in Hokkien.
Mina’s knees weakened.
Julian caught the cooler before it slipped, still careful not to touch her again.
“What did you hear?” he asked.
She stared at him. “You heard it too?”
“No. I saw your face.”
It was such a practical answer, so unromantic and exact, that it nearly undid her.
Mina swallowed. “My grandmother. I think.”
Dr Shah’s face had gone pale. “The reagent is not just identifying line markers. It is activating inherited recall.”
“Inherited recall,” Mina repeated. “Like trauma with a software update.”
“Unfortunately accurate.”
The building gave another soft tone.
This one was different.
The amber lights turned red.
Mr Tan’s radio hissed. A voice came through, high with strain. “Unauthorised access at service entrance. Three vehicles. Private security badges, not ours.”
Julian’s expression emptied.
There were masks people wore in crisis. Mina had seen them: nurse mask, mother mask, debt-collector mask, eldest-daughter mask. Julian’s was old and terrible. For one second, the man with the almost-smile vanished, and something older looked out through him.
“Take her to the archive lift,” he said.
Dr Shah nodded. “And you?”
“I will delay them.”
Mina barked a laugh. “No.”
Both of them looked at her.
“No,” she said again, because panic had burned through to a clean, furious clarity. “No splitting up. No mysterious archive lift. No billionaire self-sacrifice in a lobby. That is how women end up in basements learning lore from dusty files while men bleed attractively upstairs. Absolutely not.”
Mr Tan, despite the red lights, looked impressed.
Julian’s face did the tiny almost-smile again. “You have strong opinions about narrative structure.”
“I have strong opinions about living.”
“The archive lift is the safest route.”
“Then we all take it.”
“There may not be time.”
“Make time. You’re the daywalker. Walk faster.”
Dr Shah made a sound that might have been a laugh and might have been nerves giving up.
Another radio burst: “They have override codes.”
Julian went utterly still.
Dr Shah whispered, “Only board members have those.”
Mina looked at the sealed front doors. Beyond them, through the tinted glass, she saw the distorted shapes of black vehicles at the curb. Men getting out. Not police. Too smooth for police. Too expensive for ordinary violence.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket.
A message from Kai.
Unknown auntie with snacks has arrived. Very bossy. Says her name is Wei-Lin. Trust or bite?
Mina’s heart punched once against her ribs.
She showed Julian the screen.
For the first time since the lift opened, fear broke through his control openly.
“Trust,” he said.
“You’re sure?”
“She is the only person in Taipei who scares me.”
Mina typed with shaking thumbs.
Trust. Do not bite unless necessary.
Kai replied immediately.
Define necessary.
She almost smiled. Almost.
Julian lifted the contained cooler. “We move now.”
Mina picked up the ruined cinnamon bun again because apparently, when the bloodline apocalypse arrived, she was still her mother’s daughter and could not leave paid food behind. Dr Shah grabbed a tablet. Mr Tan opened a panel behind the security desk that looked like plain wall until it was not.
Behind it: a narrow corridor, lit in old green.
Of course there was a secret corridor. Mina had reached the portion of the morning where architecture was lying too.
Before she stepped through, she looked back at the lobby: the orchids, the marble, the people pressed into conference rooms, the expensive fountain still pouring water as if calm were a service one could subscribe to. Her ordinary life sat on the floor in six spilled coffees and a smear of blood by the lift.
She had been Mina Lau at 7:12.
Junior clinical liaison. Eldest daughter. Bill-payer. Bun-carrier. Woman with a brother in chemistry and a mother who saved plastic containers in the lower cupboard.
At 7:13, the building had recognised her.
At 7:26, men with override codes had come for her blood.
She stepped into the corridor.
Julian followed, the cooler held against his chest like a dangerous heart.
The hidden door slid shut behind them just as the front glass of Daywalker Inc shattered inward.
The sound chased them down into the green-lit dark.
Mina did not scream.
There would be time for that later, perhaps. If schedules allowed.
For now, she ran.