Chapter 3: Containment Protocol Sigma-Nine

The elevator smelled of recycled air and institutional disinfectant, and Viktor catalogued both with the automatic precision of a man who had spent the last decade in spaces that smelled of chemicals and considered this familiar.

The SHIELD agents flanking him — two of them, neither hostile, professionally neutral in the way that suggested training rather than indifference — did not speak during the descent. Viktor did not speak either. He watched the floor numbers decrease and held his research log against his chest with his right hand and breathed through the photonic pressure that the elevator's halogen strip was producing behind his eyes, which he had begun thinking of as a calibration problem rather than a symptom, because calibration problems could be solved and symptoms were a category that currently felt too large to inhabit.

Minus-four. Minus-five.