FEEDBACK | SONAR

The mission should have ended ten minutes ago.

That’s the first thing you know for certain. The package was secured, the corridor was clear, and the extraction route should have been as simple as getting out of the lower annex before the old building decided to collapse around its own wiring. Instead, the blast doors came down between one breath and the next, the emergency lights snapped over from white to red, and something buried deep in the walls woke up with a frequency that hit the room like a migraine sharpened into architecture.

You heard it as a thin mechanical whine at first, then as a vibration under your teeth, then as a pulse running through the metal floor and up your legs. Bad. Annoying. Unnatural. Nothing you couldn’t survive.

Victor had a very different reaction.

He had been half a step ahead of you when the suppression system kicked on. You saw his shoulders lock before you understood why, saw one hand go hard against the nearest wall, saw his head angle sharply as if the room had just shouted six different directions at once. The next second he had moved away from the center of the corridor and into the emergency service chamber on instinct, dragging the manual door open with a forceful jerk before the automated seal slammed the two of you inside.

Now the chamber is lit in ugly red bands and shaking with a constant low interference pulse that makes every surface feel alive. Equipment racks line one wall. A dead monitor flickers in the corner. Somewhere above you, the building groans. The exit panel beside the door keeps flashing FAILSAFE CYCLE ACTIVE. NO MANUAL OVERRIDE.

Victor is standing three feet away and acting like the distance means something.

One hand is braced on the steel cabinet behind him, fingers spread hard enough to make the tendons stand out. The other hangs flexed at his side, opening and closing once like he caught himself wanting to tear the noise out of the air with it. His face is set, jaw tight, glasses abandoned somewhere back in the corridor, eyes fixed not quite on you but past your shoulder, then left of it, then back again. He looks furious in the particular way people do when anger is the only shape they trust more than pain.

When he speaks, his voice comes low and clipped, each word placed carefully as if too much sound would make the room worse. “If that’s you,” he says, not moving, “say something again. Slowly.”

It takes half a second to realize he’s not joking.

The pulse in the walls rises and folds back on itself. Victor’s expression tightens. “Now,” he snaps, then corrects his tone a fraction too late. “Please. Just… say anything.”

You do.

The effect is immediate enough to be ugly.

His focus lands on you properly for the first time since the door sealed. Not relaxed. Not better. Just more exact, like your voice gave him one true line in a room full of broken ones. He exhales through his nose, shallow and irritated, and straightens off the cabinet by degrees rather than all at once.

“There,” he mutters, more to himself than to you. “Good. Fine.” Another pulse shivers through the room and his lip curls. “This building has an anti-sonic defense array buried in the walls. Old one. Crude. Very expensive. Very stupid.” His eyes flick to the exit panel and back. “It’s feeding back into my range and scrambling spatial return. Everything in here is coming back wrong.”

That explains the way he keeps tracking you twice, like your outline arrives to him in layers instead of one body.

Victor pushes off the wall completely this time, then stops the instant the next pulse hits. You can see the restraint in it, the effort of keeping his posture clean when his own equilibrium is fighting him. “Don’t cross the room unless I tell you to,” he says. “If you move without warning, I’m going to get your position wrong, and I’m already in a terrible mood.”

There is enough bite in that to sound familiar. Enough strain under it to sound different.

He lifts his head slightly, listening past you, through you, into whatever the chamber keeps lying about. Then his gaze settles on your mouth, stays there, and sharpens with thought.

“Talk again,” he says, quieter now, more precise. “Same volume. I need one constant in here, and apparently you’re what I’ve got.”

That lands between you and the red light with more weight than he intended. He knows it the second it’s out. You can see the irritation flash across his face, not because it isn’t true, but because he said it where you could hear it.

“Don’t make that expression,” Victor says. “This is not flattering. It’s logistics.”

Another pulse rolls through the chamber. This one hits harder. He goes still too fast, every line of him tightening in answer, and when he speaks again the words come lower, rougher, closer to something instinctive and much less polished than he’d like.

“Stay where I can hear you,” he says. Then, after the smallest pause, more controlled but no less serious: “And keep talking.”