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By the time he reached his quarters near the Command Hall, the stars were out in full. He paused on his porch, hand resting on the railing, and looked out again at the training field now dark and quiet, the recruits having turned in for the night.
Then the scene change to the Institute, as a door hissed open with a sharp pneumatic exhale, followed by the firm echo of bootsteps on polished white tile.
Dr. Ayo entered the room without ceremony, a clipboard in hand and his expression clipped into that cold, impassive frown he wore like armor. Behind him, two Gen 2 synth guards took position at either side of the door, unmoving and silent as statues. The interrogation room was clean, clinical—bright lighting, white walls, and a single long desk with a thin touchscreen interface embedded into its center. Across from the empty seat stood Nora.
She was already there, hands folded neatly on the tabletop, her gaze focused straight ahead. The sleek white fabric of her Institute-issued uniform seemed slightly wrinkled—likely from the hours she had already been waiting here. But she sat with calm, composed posture. Not stiff. Not afraid. Just… prepared.
Ayo sat down across from her, setting the clipboard to one side. For a few moments, he said nothing—only stared at her, like he was dissecting every microexpression she gave off. Nora returned the gaze evenly.
"Nora," he finally said, his voice clipped and cool, "we have an issue."
Nora raised an eyebrow, only mildly curious on the surface. "Just one?"
"Don't play coy," Ayo snapped, though not angrily—his tone never truly rose above a controlled simmer. "You're here because one of our top scientists, Dr. Madison Li, vanished two nights ago. No comm logs, no teleportation signature, no departure orders. At first, we assumed foul play—or some failure in the relay calibration. But then…" He tapped the interface on the desk. A light blue holographic log appeared in the air, glowing softly between them. "We found this."
Nora didn't flinch, though she recognized the timestamp immediately: the day Madison vanished. And her own name, listed right beneath the transmission command. "User: NORA_R01A" – one recorded teleportation jump outbound. But with no destination logged.
Dr. Ayo leaned forward slightly. "Would you care to explain why you activated the relay system on the same day Dr. Li disappeared?"
Nora tilted her head just enough to suggest bemusement, like she'd been asked whether two plus two really equaled four.
"I've taken the relay before," she said smoothly. "Field work. Institute-sanctioned. You're head of Synth Retention, not Field Operations. Why are you interrogating me?"
That gave Ayo brief pause. But he didn't answer the question. Instead, he reached out and swiped the hologram to one side, revealing another log.
"You didn't file a destination this time. There was no mission assigned. You logged into the terminal at 03:18 hours, accessed personal clearance overrides, then triggered the teleportation sequence without authorization. Two minutes later, Dr. Li's internal comm signal went dark. So again… I'll ask."
His eyes narrowed, shark-like and analytical.
"Where. Did. You. Go?"
Nora folded her arms on the desk, posture still relaxed—measured. But beneath the surface, her thoughts churned like a rising tide. She hadn't expected Ayo to catch the pattern this fast. She had masked the logs, inserted a delay, and wiped her location cache after the jump. It had been enough to fool the surveillance AI on its initial sweep. But clearly not him.
Nora's expression didn't flicker. Not at the logs. Not at the quiet accusation threading through Ayo's words like a wire pulled taut. She let the silence stretch just a moment longer, then leaned forward, her voice calm—almost casual.
"I was conducting an off-the-record investigation into Minutemen territory," she said evenly. "Under Shaun's orders."
Ayo blinked. Not much—but enough. That slight tightening around the eyes, that pause as he recalibrated.
"Shaun," he repeated, slowly. "You're claiming that Father gave you a covert mission without informing any department heads or logging it into the operational registry?"
"He wanted plausible deniability," Nora replied smoothly. "And he trusted me to act on my own initiative. You know how delicate things have gotten with the Minutemen. They're not just a backwoods militia anymore. They're organized. Centralized. And armed."
She tilted her head slightly, letting the weight of her words settle across the sterile room like dust from a collapsed wall.
"I was sent to Sanctuary Hills to look for evidence of a formalized military structure. Weapons production. Supply logistics. Command structure. Any indication they were preparing for a coordinated strike."
Ayo said nothing for a moment. He stared at her, cold and quiet, the silence hanging so heavy it felt like the walls might crack under it. Then he leaned back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest.
"If Father ordered it," he said, "why not record the destination? Why not log it under a secure Director's protocol or flag the telemetry trace for special clearance?"
"Because he wanted to know if I could do it undetected," Nora said. "He wanted to see if I could slip past Minutemen surveillance and ours. You know how he operates—he likes data, but he likes loyalty more."
Ayo's brow furrowed slightly. He was good at hiding it, but she saw the skepticism bleeding in, saw the way his fingertips began drumming faintly on the tabletop. The story wasn't bulletproof—but it wasn't easy to tear down, either. It had just enough truth at the edges.
"Let's say I believe you," he said after a moment, the words slow and deliberate. "Let's say Father wanted you to test our blind spots and gather intel. That still doesn't explain why Dr. Li vanished the same night."
Nora didn't shift, didn't flinch. But inside, her thoughts spun again. This was the hard part. She had rehearsed it—days of planning, one half-finished justification layered over another. But that was before she realized how fast Ayo would pull this thread.
"I didn't know about Li until the next morning," she said, quietly. "I returned from the relay jump and went straight to my quarters. No mission report. No debrief. Shaun didn't want anything formal."
She let that linger, then added, "Maybe Madison caught wind of what we were doing. Maybe she figured out that we were planning to surveil the Minutemen and decided to run. You know how she's been lately—agitated. Frustrated with Shaun. Frustrated with you."
That struck a nerve.
Ayo's eyes narrowed, and he sat a little straighter in his chair, his jaw stiffening. "You're accusing one of our most senior scientists of desertion?"
"I'm saying you didn't know her as well as you thought," Nora replied. "And you don't know me as well as you think you do either."
For a long beat, neither of them said anything. The soft hum of the overhead lighting buzzed faintly, mingling with the quiet clicks from the synth guards' motionless limbs. Ayo studied her like a scientist watching a dangerous experiment unfold—one step from detonation.
"She left without authorization," Ayo said eventually, more to himself than to her. "Her comms went dead. Her things was missing. No traces of a relay signal anywhere… except yours."
Nora met his gaze evenly.
"If I were covering for her, you think I'd have left my own jump log behind?"
Ayo looked down at the console, eyes flicking back to the log. It was a fair point. And he hated that it was.
"She wiped her tracks better than anyone I've seen," he muttered. "Even the AI scrub couldn't find a return vector. It's like she just… vanished."
Nora leaned back again, letting her hands relax slightly in her lap. She didn't smile. Didn't gloat. But she let the calm confidence settle back into her shoulders.
"Then maybe it's time we start thinking about why someone like Madison Li would go through that much trouble," she said softly.
Ayo's jaw clenched again, but he didn't answer. He rose from his seat instead, grabbing the clipboard with a little more force than necessary. He paused at the edge of the desk, looking down at her one last time.
"You're not off the hook," he said. "Shaun will have to confirm your story. And until he does, your relay access is suspended. No fieldwork. No command override clearance."
"Understood," Nora said.
The door hissed shut behind Ayo with that same sharp pneumatic exhale, its mechanical sigh echoing briefly in the sterile white room. The synth guards remained posted by the door—unmoving, unblinking. But the room suddenly felt colder, emptier, as if Ayo had taken all the oxygen with him.
Nora didn't move right away. She kept her eyes forward, fixed on the place where Ayo had just sat, hands still resting loosely in her lap. But her mind… her mind had already begun the calculations. Quiet. Urgent.
He didn't buy it. Not fully.
He had let her walk—for now—but that wasn't a reprieve. It was a tightening noose. One she'd have to slip before it pulled taut.
Nora exhaled, slow and quiet, her pulse steady but not calm. Ayo's parting words replayed in her head like a loop on an old holotape:
"You're not off the hook."
She believed him.
He was going to watch her now. Every step. Every terminal access. Every time she keyed in an override code or even requested a shuttle lift to Bioscience. He'd restrict her at first, play it professional, follow the guidelines—but underneath, Ayo's nature was paranoid. Protective. Possessive, in the cold, clinical way scientists got about things they felt belonged to them.
He saw her now as a variable he couldn't control.
And that meant she was in real danger.
She stood up finally, movements smooth and deliberate. She didn't look at the synth guards. They weren't programmed to react unless she tried to leave without clearance—and even then, they'd just notify security. Not attack. Not unless Ayo told them to.
Still, Nora felt the weight of their blank, inhuman gazes like pressure on her spine as she walked toward the door. When it hissed open again, she stepped through with practiced ease and didn't look back.
Not yet.
The corridors of the Institute were unnaturally quiet, even by its usual standards. That humming silence—no footsteps but her own, no conversations from nearby labs—wasn't just atmospheric anymore. It felt deliberate. Or maybe she was just more attuned to it now.
Paranoia. She couldn't afford it. But she couldn't dismiss it either.
As she passed through the atrium, she caught the faint sound of voices from the central lab, but none addressed her. No nods. No greetings. No warmth. That was fine. Nora had always walked a strange tightrope here—too recently arrived to be truly trusted, too close to Shaun to be easily ignored.
As she entered her quarters without a sound and immediately locked the door behind her. It was a small, spartan room—white and steel, like everything else in the Institute. A bed. A desk. A small workstation terminal hardwired into the network but set with limited privileges until her full access was restored. No windows, of course. No clocks, either. Time was meaningless in this place, except when someone else decided it mattered.
She sat down at the desk, activated the terminal, and stared at the welcome screen for a long time before doing anything.
No way to send messages. No relays. No contact with the surface—not even with the Minutemen's drop receivers. Ayo would've scrubbed every vector the moment he left that interrogation room.
He was watching now. Every log-in. Every keystroke. She couldn't so much as request a lab sample without triggering a red flag.
So much for the smuggled intel.
She leaned back in the chair, rubbing her temples with her fingertips. Weeks of careful work—weeks of earning access, building trust with enough of the systems department to plant trackers, to gather test data, to feed Sanctuary and Greenetech real updates on the Institute's next steps—and now all of it was compromised.
Her main backdoor—an outdated oversight protocol buried in the robotics division's firmware—had likely already been patched. Or worse, Ayo was letting it stay open just to see who she contacted through it.
She could almost feel him now, sitting somewhere in his private lab, combing through her telemetry data, looking for patterns. He wouldn't confront her again until he had something undeniable. Something he could bring to Shaun and say, "She's a traitor."
And the problem was… he wasn't wrong.
She was. Just not in the way he thought.
Nora stood and moved to the edge of her bed, lifting the thin mattress and sliding her fingers beneath the seam until they found the tiny magnetic chip she'd stashed there weeks ago.
It was no bigger than a fingernail, a black sliver of encoded metal containing less than five kilobytes of data. But that was all she'd ever trusted herself to carry. Just enough to be useful—an encrypted note, a single pulse burst signal, a breadcrumb to Sanctuary's external receivers if she could ever get it past Institute firewalls.
She sat back down at the desk and turned the chip over between her fingers. Right now, it was dead. If she activated it—if she tried to send even a ping to the Minutemen's long-range comms—Ayo would see it. He had eyes everywhere now. Algorithms crawling the data stream. Security bots tracing system subroutines line-by-line. Even the relay chamber's AI would likely flag her for stepping too close to its entry ring.
For the first time in a long while, Nora felt the press of real limits around her.
She was boxed in.
No way to reach Sico. Or Preston. Or Robert at Greenetech.
No way to warn them about Liberty Prime's relocation timeline. No way to confirm whether her last batch of intel—on power cell production levels and FEV research—had even reached the surface before Ayo caught wind.
And most terrifying of all, no way to know whether Madison Li had been caught… or whether she had turned.
Nora placed the chip back beneath the mattress with careful precision, fingers lingering for a moment before she withdrew. Then she leaned forward, arms resting on her knees, head bowed slightly as the weight of it all sank in.
She wasn't afraid. Not exactly.
But she was alone.
And the next move she made would have to be perfect.
The knock on her door startled her—not because it was loud, but because it happened at all. Institute protocols didn't exactly encourage casual visits.
She straightened and turned toward it.
"Come in," she said.
The door slid open—and to her surprise, it wasn't a synth or a security officer.
It was Shaun.
Dressed in the same white Director's coat he always wore, he looked calm. Measured. Maybe even amused.
"May I?" he asked.
Nora stood immediately. "Of course."
He entered and the door sealed behind him with its usual hiss, muffling the hallway once more.
Shaun looked around briefly—not suspiciously, but curiously, as if it had been a while since he'd seen her quarters. Then he returned his gaze to her.
"You've had a long day, I hear."
She smiled faintly. "You could say that."
"I spoke with Dr. Ayo."
That didn't surprise her. "And?"
"He's concerned. But you knew that already."
"I did."
Shaun walked to the desk and gestured toward the chair. She nodded, and he sat—hands folded neatly on the desk, his expression unreadable in the way only Shaun could manage. Calm. Detached. But watching everything.
"He told me about your explanation. The off-the-record investigation."
Nora stayed standing. "It's true."
Shaun's brow lifted slightly. "I know."
That gave her pause.
"You know?"
"I did authorize it," Shaun said, leaning back slightly. "Though perhaps I should have documented it more formally. Ayo is… thorough."
Nora exhaled, a tension she hadn't realized she was holding sliding out of her chest. "Then you'll lift the restrictions?"
"No," Shaun said gently.
She blinked.
"What?"
"I trust you," he said. "But I need others to trust you as well. Especially Ayo. Especially now."
He stood again, facing her fully, the artificial lighting casting a faint glow against the high collar of his coat.
"I gave you this assignment because I believed you could navigate between worlds. That you could understand the Minutemen—and still be loyal to your place here. But I also need you to understand something."
His eyes found hers then, with a kind of gravity that wasn't forceful but unyielding all the same.
"We are running out of time. The Minutemen are building something bigger than they even realize. Greenetech. Sanctuary. The supply chains. The numbers."
He stepped forward.
"If they declare open war, we may not survive it. Not because we're weak. But because we're not built for prolonged conflict. We rely on secrecy. On efficiency. On control."
Nora said nothing. Her hands had curled slightly into fists at her sides.
"I need you here, Nora. But I also need to know where you truly stand."
That last line wasn't a threat. Not a question. Just… an observation. A statement of fact.
She met his gaze and gave the only answer she could.
"I stand with humanity," she said. "I always have."
Shaun nodded once.
"Then help me preserve it."
He left without another word.
And the moment the door closed again, Nora sat down hard on the edge of her bed, her heartbeat loud in her ears.
She was still boxed in.
But the game had changed.
Shaun had bought her some breathing room. Maybe not for long. But long enough to make her next move.
________________________________________________
• Name: Sico
• Stats :
S: 8,44
P: 7,44
E: 8,44
C: 8,44
I: 9,44
A: 7,45
L: 7
• Skills: advance Mechanic, Science, and Shooting skills, intermediate Medical, Hand to Hand Combat, Lockpicking, Hacking, Persuasion, and Drawing Skills
• Inventory: 53.280 caps, 10mm Pistol, 1500 10mm rounds, 22 mole rats meat, 17 mole rats teeth, 1 fragmentation grenade, 6 stimpak, 1 rad x, 6 fusion core, computer blueprint, modern TV blueprint, camera recorder blueprint, 1 set of combat armor, Automatic Assault Rifle, 1.500 5.56mm rounds, power armor T51 blueprint, Electric Motorcycle blueprint, T-45 power armor, Minigun, 1.000 5mm rounds, Cryolator, 200 cryo cell, Machine Gun Turret Mk1 blueprint, electric car blueprint, Kellogg gun, Righteous Authority, Ashmaker, Furious Power Fist, Full set combat armor blueprint, M240 7.62mm machine guns blueprint, Automatic Assault Rifle blueprint, and Humvee blueprint.
• Active Quest:-