Chapter 6: A Father's Suspicion

Chapter 6: A Father's Suspicion

Anya slammed the apartment door shut, the heavy thud echoing the frantic drumming in her chest. Her trembling fingers fumbled with the deadbolt, the metallic click of it sliding home a pathetically inadequate shield against the terrors outside. She slumped against the reinforced steel, her back sliding down the cool surface until she was a heap on the floor, gasping for air that felt too thin to breathe.

The alley, the chase, the cold, dead eyes of the man called Talon—it all replayed in her mind in a searing, frantic loop. Every shadow in the hallway seemed to lengthen, every creak of the old building a sign that they had followed her, that they were right outside. The life-affirming joy she’d felt at the creek felt like a memory from another lifetime, drowned in a tsunami of pure, visceral fear.

"What in God's name was that?"

Her father's voice, sharp and laced with academic irritation, cut through her panic. He stood in the doorway of his lab, a data-slate in one hand, his face a mask of annoyance at the disruption. But as his eyes adjusted to the dim light of the entryway, his expression shifted. Annoyance was replaced by a flicker of something else—not concern, precisely, but the focused curiosity of a scientist observing an unexpected result.

"Anya?"

He stepped closer, his gaze sweeping over her. He didn't see a terrified daughter; he saw a collection of symptoms. "You're trembling. Respiration is shallow and accelerated. Your pupils are dilated. Classic adrenal-fatigue response. What happened?"

Anya tried to form words, but her throat was tight with unshed tears and fear. "Nothing. I... I just tripped. Scared myself." The lie was flimsy, pathetic, and she knew it even as it left her lips.

Aris's frown deepened. His analytical gaze dropped from her face to her clothes. He knelt, not in a gesture of fatherly comfort, but with the detached precision of a field researcher examining a specimen. His long, thin fingers gently touched the tear in her trousers, just above the knee, where she had caught them on the razor wire.

"This wasn't a trip." His voice was flat, a statement of fact. "This is a clean tear from a barbed or razor-wire fence." His eyes narrowed, moving to a smear of mud on her pant leg and then to her sleeve, where a faint, almost invisible residue clung to the recycled fabric. "And what is this?"

Before she could pull away, he touched the spot. His fingertips came away with a faint, slightly sticky substance. He brought them close to his face, his nostrils flaring slightly. "It's organic. Resinous." He stood and walked under one of the full-spectrum lights that illuminated his workspace, examining his fingers. Under the purer light, the residue gave off a barely perceptible shimmer, a faint, greenish luminescence that echoed the impossible glow of the Plastiphage.

A cold, methodical light began to dawn in her father's eyes, and it terrified Anya more than Talon's emotionless stare. This was the look he got when he was on the verge of a breakthrough, when disparate data points began to coalesce into a cohesive, undeniable theory.

"The other night," he began, his voice low and intense, his gaze now boring into her. "Those men from Khemia. That wasn't a routine visit, was it? I dismissed it, got angry at the corporate overreach, but it was an anomaly. They don't send senior security agents for 'routine' follow-ups on legacy grants."

He started pacing, his mind working with a speed that left her feeling stranded and slow. "Khemia Global is the largest polluter on the planet. They have enemies. Organized, radical enemies. The kinds of people who engage in direct action, who sabotage facilities, who would climb razor-wire fences to make a point."

Anya's stomach twisted into a knot of ice. She could see the flawed, terrible logic he was constructing, the wrong puzzle pieces he was forcing into a picture that made a terrifying kind of sense to him.

"You've been listless, secretive," he continued, pointing an accusatory finger at her. "Then those corporate thugs show up, asking about 'unconventional breakthroughs'. Two days later, you come home looking like you've run from a black-ops team, covered in... this." He held up his fingers, the shimmering residue a damning piece of evidence. "This isn't just mud from the creek, is it? It's a bio-agent. A custom-engineered microbe, something to prove a point? Is that what your new friends are developing?"

"Dad, no," she whispered, shaking her head. The chasm was opening between them, wider and deeper than ever before. "It's not what you think."

"Then what is it, Anya?!" he snapped, his voice cracking with a sudden, raw frustration. "Talk to me! I spend my entire life in that lab, fighting this war with numbers and chemical models, trying to find a rational solution. And you… you go out and join a group of eco-terrorists?"

The accusation hung in the air, heavy and poisonous. Eco-terrorists. The word was a slap in the face. He didn't see her, his daughter. He saw a variable he couldn't control, a reckless child who had gotten involved with dangerous fanatics. He saw her as an extension of his own failed crusade, taking a path he deemed irrational and dangerous.

"They're using you," he pressed on, his voice dropping to a cold, clinical tone. "These people, they prey on idealism. They'll fill your head with nonsense about saving the planet, but their methods will only lead to crackdowns, to violence. Khemia will crush them, and you'll be crushed along with them. I will not have my daughter throwing her life away for a cause that can only be won with science, with reason!"

Tears finally spilled over, tracing hot paths down her cold cheeks. He saw her tears not as a sign of her fear or her hurt, but as a confirmation of his theory. He saw guilt.

She wanted to scream the truth at him. It's not terrorists, Dad, it's me! The solution you've been searching for your whole life, it's in my room! It came from me! It’s magic!

But how could she? He, the man of data and empirical evidence, would never believe it. He would think she was delusional, insane. He would try to study it, to quantify it, to cut it open and see how it worked, never understanding that its power came from a place beyond his microscopes. He would expose it, and Khemia would come not just with an acquisition team, but with an army.

Telling him the truth was not an option. He was not a sanctuary. He was a cage of cold, hard logic that would crush her miracle.

Anya pushed herself to her feet, her body trembling with a sorrow so profound it felt like a physical wound. She couldn't fight him. She couldn't reason with him. The person she needed most in the world was the one person she could never, ever trust with her secret.

Without another word, she turned and walked to her room, the weight of his suspicion a physical cloak on her shoulders. She closed the door behind her, the soft click shutting him out. She was alone. Hunted by a ruthless corporation on the outside, and now, completely, utterly misunderstood by the one person who was supposed to be her protector on the inside. The apartment was no longer a home. It was just another part of the trap.