Chapter 191 CXCI

Chapter 191 CXCI
Isabell's POV

They were not Assembly.

The first one swept the room, registered me standing beside the door with a metal pole, and said sharply, "Isabell Martinez."

"Yes," I said.

"We're getting you out," he said. "Come with us now."

I came with them. The corridor outside my room was not the orderly clinical space it had been when the researchers walked me through it for the blood draws. It was a corridor that had become a fight scene, equipment overturned, emergency lighting giving everything the same low red quality as my room, two people on the floor that I did not look at directly.

My escorts moved fast and I kept pace with them, which cost me because my legs were not fully reliable after four days of limited movement and the neurological stress of the stimulation procedure, but I kept pace.

We went north.

Third door, second door, first door, and then the northern access, which was a set of double doors that had been forced open and now stood at angles to each other, one still partially on its hinges.

We went through.

The outer section of the facility was a different kind of chaos from the indoor corridor. The open space between the main building and the perimeter fence was active with engagement, people moving in multiple directions, the sounds of combat and shouted commands filling the air.

My escorts flanked me and moved me toward the western perimeter fence where there was a gap that had been made in it deliberately, the wire cut cleanly, the edges pulled back and held by stakes hammered into the ground.

Beyond the fence, vehicles.

And beside the nearest vehicle, in the red and white light of the scene, Levi.

He was looking at the gap in the fence and then he was looking at me and there was a moment where neither of us moved, a fraction of a second where the distance between the fence gap and where he was standing existed as its own thing.

Then he was moving toward me and I was moving toward him and we met in the gap in the fence and his hands were on my face and I could feel that they were shaking, which was the first time I had felt Levi's hands shake, and I understood then how completely the past four days had cost him as much as they had cost me.

"You're here," I said.

"I'm here," he said.

The noise of the operation was all around us, the engagement still active in the compound, his team moving with the precision of a planned extraction executing against real conditions.

But in the gap in the fence he looked at my face in the low light, at the dried blood under my nose and the four days visible in the lines of my face and the IV entry point bruising on the inside of my elbow.

"We need to move," one of the escorts said behind me.

"I know," Levi said. He put his arm around me and I turned with him toward the vehicle.

The exhaustion that had been suspended by adrenaline during the movement through the facility landed on me all at once, the weight of four days and the stimulation procedure and the fear and the white room arriving simultaneously in my body as we reached the vehicle.

My legs stopped being reliable.

Levi caught me before I went down, fully, both arms, the way he had on the pavement outside my building weeks ago but with more urgency behind it now.

"Isabell," he said sharply.

"I'm okay," I said, and my voice came out very thin. "Just-"

"You're not okay," he said.

He was right. My vision was going at the edges with the specific quality that preceded complete loss of consciousness, the narrowing of the visual field that I knew clinically and was now experiencing personally.

"Aria," I said. It was the most important word I had and I needed him to have it before anything else happened.

"She's okay," he said immediately. "She's with Xavier. She's sick but she's going to be fine."

She's sick. The words landed and I felt them and could not do anything with them.

"Get me home," I said.

"That's exactly where we're going," he said.

I saw his face in the light from the vehicle, the lines of exhaustion and relief and the specific quality of someone who had been running on the last of themselves for four days and had arrived at the thing they were running toward.

"Don't let go," I said.

"Never," he said.

And then the narrowing completed and the edges met and everything went dark and the last thing I knew was that his arms were around me and I was not on a pavement and I was not in a white room.

I was going home.