—24—

The mess hall had never been so scarce. By this time, it was usually packed with irritable, hungry people. There had to be no more than thirty or so in the room, the line so short that the meal staff almost appeared confused without having to work until they felt dead on their feet. Most of them took their serving in bags and left, while a few remained at the overwhelming vacancy of available tables. Food, no matter the quantity or the quality, seemed to be the only unifying factor among the people. Even in the roughest of circumstances, a full stomach was enough to get you through the day. Today was not one of those days. The menu left much to be desired—a bowl of white rice with a whole potato, both served with a modest smear of butter. Jacen roughly estimated the calories: 150 for the potato and 200 in the rice. It wouldn't be enough to sustain him throughout the day, but he'd manage. He'd lived on less.

There wasn't a face in the mess that wasn't either wearing a surgical mask on their face or around their neck. Captain's orders, he'd heard. The alleged contagion must've been more serious than he originally thought. Astrid had been present during the entire meal distribution, he noticed. She was with the servers, talking to them about something that was out of earshot. From her mannerisms and gestures, Jacen could only assume she was informing the servers about proper precautions when it came to sick people and food. She handed them additional gloves and masks with an automatic smile and began to leave, briefly meeting his glance before her exit. It was neither a beckon or an acknowledgment, more on the lines of catching something out in your peripheral. Whether or not she viewed him or Naomi as enemies didn't concern him. He knew where he stood among them. There wouldn't be any shaking hands or complementary slaps on the back for praise. He'd leave the camaraderie out of it. There were no allies here, only tolerant adversaries. It wouldn't take much to tip the scales. He wouldn't over analyze; he'd enjoy the peace for now.

Jacen was halfway through his meal when Naomi slid in the seat in front of him. He'd all but given up on trying to ascertain what direction she came from, despite his table being positioned with every sight line in plain view. She wore a confident expression with a wide grin that wrinkled her nose. Jacen wouldn't bite and give her a reason to gloat. He kept eating, peeling the warm skin back from the potato he'd cut in half.

"You look like your old self today—surly yet alert." Naomi swiped one of his two juice cartons and peeled opened the container. "You're an old man now."

Jacen didn't react. "I always bounce back."

"I'm serious." She took a few small sips. The juice was sour and sugarless; just another liquid slush of vitamins and minerals to stave off deficiencies. "You look better. Healthy."

Jacen poked around in the bowl of rice, taking a sudden interest in one of the grains that had a black speck on it. He removed it and set it aside. "Aww, shucks. I don't know what to say. The ribs need a few more weeks, but the plasma burns are manageable now. Pain is tolerable."

"Good to know." Naomi's drifted from Jacen's storied eyes and ventured down to his tray. A grunt of disdain came out of her throat before she was even aware of it. The menu was a pitiful sight today, and if she wasn't so hungry, she would've passed altogether. "Is that seriously all their serving?"

Jacen looked down at his tray. "Yep. You should get in line. I think one of those boys has a crush on you. You might get extra helpings today."

"There's not even any meat." Naomi finished the juice. "If I don't get something that either moos, oinks, or clucks I'm gonna lose it. I'm not in a vegetarian mood today."

Jacen smirked with a small laugh. "I'll file a formal complaint." He changed the subject. There was something else brewing in her head. The way her fingers tapped on the table; the way her jaw muscles tightened sporadically. Her hands were in loose fists, the knuckles on her right hand were red with mild swelling. That's new. "How's the hunt?"

If there was anything that got Naomi's blood pumping, it was the thrill of the hunt. She could never disguise it, always pouring out of her like an endless waterfall accomplishment. He was waiting for her celebratory tradition, but it never came. She only passively scowled.

"Not, but we're close. It's a slow burn," she sighed. "If I had my old resources and connections, this would've been over days ago."

Jacen stirred the butter into his bowl of rice, nodding slowly. "Maybe you need the challenge. This mystery man isn't making it easy for you guys, from what you've told me. You'll manage. In the meantime..." Jacen reached across the table and tabbed her red knuckles with his finger. "What happened here?"

Naomi pulled her hand back and put it under the table, almost embarrassed. She grumbled and rolled her eyes. "Aaron's mouth got him into trouble. The usual crap from him." She vented a humorless chuckle. "I'm gonna end up killing that guy."

"Well, just make it clean. He's a careful man, so making it look like an accident wouldn't work."

Naomi looked at him, mouth agape. "I was joking."

"Yeah, me too." He took a spoonful of rice and chewed slowly with a devious smirk. "Or was I?"

Naomi shook her head and looked out into empty space, focusing on nothing. On occasion, she'd catch one or two of the people in the mess looking at them. From their obscured faces, it was difficult to tell who was who. It made her think how easy it would be for the intruder to strode about the camp in complete confidence without a second look from anyone. Everyone was the same: petrified with masks and avoided one another. She wished she didn't care about it all, a part of her believing this whole search was less than what Damon was making it out to be. For all she knew, it could've just been one of Dr. Mathison's staff who was addicted to pain meds who injured themselves somehow. Nevertheless, she was deep in now, and her curiosity wouldn't cease until this search was over.

"Y'know, Aaron said something that I can't seem to shake."

Jacen stopped eating, his attention undivided. Aaron was a grade-A jerkweed. He knew exactly what buttons to push and when to push them. Jacen had a difficult time believing he'd only been an MP. There was more to him than that. The man didn't seem reckless; he seemed calculated and rarely said anything without thinking about it first. But for his words to get under Naomi's skin and linger, it must've been something profound. "What did he say?"

Naomi twiddled with her thumbs, reluctant to say. She knew Jacen was never one to overreact. It took a lot to get him wound up, but when he got angry, it was something that she never wanted to be in the direction of. She looked up into his awaiting eyes and told him. "He said that..." She paused, had to phrase it properly. "… there may be a familiarity to our intruder. Whoever this is knows this camp very well, observers very well, and is quite opportunistic in nature." She leaned forward and lowered her voice to a whisper. "He said that it might be one of them that survived somehow."

Jacen leaned back from the table, his face almost expressing repulse. He slowly turned his head left, jaw clinched, and blinking slower than normal. It was impossible to know what he was thinking until he spoke, and it was a quality that Naomi always disliked. At any given moment, he knew exactly what she was thinking, or at least an educated guess. Nineteen years and he was still an incomplete puzzle to her.

"It's unlikely but not impossible," he said at last. "We can't be sure we got all of them. You and I both know there are unspoken sympathizers left; we just don't who they are. Aaron isn't too off base. Whether this person is acting alone or has help, it's a tough call. To say it's one of them exactly, then I'd say it's doubtful. I just can't imagine one of them surviving."

Naomi had a blank look on her face. "You don't seem worried?"

"Not until I have to be." Jacen resumed eating. He paused between chews, his eyes targeting something behind Naomi. "Dick patrol on your six."

Naomi took a discreet look over her shoulder to see Damon and Aaron strode into the mess hall. They marked her with a subtle nod and collected their trays of food from the line before finding a table on the opposite end of the room. Damon looked at her, making a semi-exaggerated pointing gesture at the table they were sitting. He briefly met Jacen's eyes and looked away.

"I don't think I have clearance for this conversation," Jacen commented. He finished his meal and stood up from the table to leave. "Be careful, and watch your own six, not theirs."

Naomi regarded the advice with a minor lift of her brows and waited for him to leave before she went over and joined Damon and Aaron. She could feel the roving and inspecting eyes tracking her as she sat down at the table with the two men. There was no secret—UNSC tended to chum with their own, and Naomi knew she was so far outside of their circle that the sight was overwhelmingly confusing to outsiders. Had her hands and legs been shackled to the table, then it would probably make more sense. But there she was, sitting in front of two men in public that, until recently, she wouldn't had been caught dead associating with.

I'm getting soft. People will think I'm approachable if I keep this up.

"Let's not keep a girl in suspense, fellas."

Damon edged his tray to the side. He suddenly didn't have an appetite. It certainly didn't stop Aaron from running food into his mouth like a conveyer belt. "You were right. Donna possibly had her access card stolen. She didn't recognize a punch the records said she'd made. In fact, she wasn't even in the clinic that day it was taken."

"Well, that's a new wrinkle." Aaron finished his bowl of rice and started on the potato, leaving the skin intact as he sliced it onto disc shapes. "Can we track it?"

"I didn't waste any time." Damon removed his Tacpad from it's housing on his wrist and set it on the table's plastic surface. A taps on the screen projected a rotating model of the camp. Within the model were dozens of red dots that peppered areas in the camp, with the majority of them being concentrated in the clinic. "I asked DEV to run a trace the moment I finished talking to Donna. These markers represent where her access card has been in the past month. As you can see, she's spent the bulk of her time in the clinic, but she's been throughout the camp as a whole. From what I've seen, she hasn't visited anywhere out of the norm… until I isolated the day her card went missing. Check this out..."

With a single tap, most of the red dots melted away and only four remained. Aaron's eyes veered away from the model, making brief eye contact with a few of the civvies that had taken a keen interest in what they were discussing. He would've preferred if they spoke in private, but he reasoned no one knew what they were looking at. From their perspective, they were simply observing regions of the camp were the contagion was at its worst or where the people would be moved. He hoped so. This wasn't a time for one of them to become curious.

Damon pointed to the red dot that was centered in the living blocks. "Donna said she was sick for two weeks, taking her card back to her block without knowing it. Look at the timestamps—the card was in her block at 23:14. Next, it appears again in the clinic a few hours later at 01:27 and stays there for another hour. I think this is where it gets interesting..." Damon manipulated the image, converting the 2D rendering of the camp into its 3D variant. "The first two markers appears on the first level of the camp," Damon continued, "whereas the third dot is located in the middle of the camp, disconnected from our two viable buildings… three levels below the surface."

That got Aaron's and Naomi's attention. Aaron stopped eating, sucking the residue from his fingers and wiping them clean on his tactical trousers. He leaned closer to the model, his eyes tracking down to the subterranean level that appeared alien to him. Naomi tilted her head with furrowed brows, staring at the flickering image of cerulean light as if she was looking at one of those abstract paintings that didn't make sense to anyone.

"From my understanding, this place only has two levels. The second level is just engineering," Aaron said.

Damon went on. "Yeah, me too; but the all-wise DEV showed me these." The image changed again, the top two levels of the camp fading away to display a modest network of tunnels that spider webbed and connected to each building in the camp. "Service tunnels. It seems all of the structures across the moon have them, just like the Grunt compound. Except we don't use ours, obviously. The time stamp records that the card arrives in the tunnels at 03:04 and remains there for nearly 23 hours before it's returned to the blocks at 02:34 the next day. My guess is that our boy grabs med supplies, goes down into the tunnels, patches himself up, and waits until it's lights out before he returns the card."

"Yeah, but why the service tunnels?" Naomi inquired. "If they're the same as the Grunt tunnels, then there is nothing down there. It's perfect for hiding, but not ideal for extended living."

Damon killed the image and snapped off the screen to his tacpad. "Maybe it's like you said: we start where the card was last tracked. And this may be it. We won't know for sure until we get down there."

It was the best lead they had. Damon imagined neither of them were sold, but it was highly unlikely that anyone else would be venturing in those tunnels without good reason. In his mind, it was perfect. Until now, none of them know the tunnels existed, but their guest did. It added a new flow of uncertainty. X, friend or foe, knew something they didn't. It meant he was more familiar with the camp than they were, and that unnerved Damon. They needed to act now.

He stood up from the table and slipped his tacpad back into it's sleeve. "Meet me in the armory at 2100. The day cycle begins in less than 24 hours. Let's finish this up."