Sanctuary
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 4: What the Logs Said
We found the facility on the fifth day, which was four days longer than I’d expected to live.
Ashton’s compound had bought me time. How much remained unclear — he recalculated daily, adjusting the synthesis based on my vitals, and he’d stopped giving me precise estimates sometime around day three. I understood why. Precise estimates required confidence in variables that kept shifting, and Ashton didn’t offer confidence he hadn’t earned. I’d stopped asking.
The facility announced itself as a change in the vegetation — a straight line where no straight lines existed, the jungle’s organic chaos interrupted by something that had once insisted on right angles. Durasteel framing consumed by decades of growth. A doorway that was still a doorway despite the vines threading through it like slow patient fingers reclaiming what had been taken.
“Military construction,” I said.
“Yours or theirs?”
I almost said ours. Caught myself. “Kathari.”
He said nothing. We’d been doing that — the careful navigation around what this place was, what had happened here, what my government’s involvement meant for the ground we were standing on. I appreciated the navigation. I wasn’t ready for the destination.
The interior had held better than the exterior. Sealed construction, military grade, designed to maintain integrity across decades of abandonment. Emergency power still ran somewhere in the walls — a faint hum, the occasional flicker of instrumentation that hadn’t fully died. The air recyclers had kept working long after the people who’d needed them were gone.
The people who’d needed them.
I stopped at a workstation near the entrance. Pressed two fingers to the surface. The screen that responded was cracked, its display fragmented, but functional enough to show me a directory. Research files. Personnel records. Equipment manifests.
And a command log, flagged at the highest classification level I’d seen outside of a wartime briefing room.
Ashton was moving through the facility with his scanner, cataloguing, giving me space. He’d become skilled at that — knowing when proximity was a comfort and when it was a pressure. I didn’t examine how he’d learned to read that distinction so accurately. I opened the command log instead.
Military writing has its own grammar. Stripped of everything unnecessary, reduced to facts and orders and outcomes, because the people writing it believed that clarity was a virtue and emotion was a contamination. I’d written in that grammar for fourteen years. I recognized it the way you recognize your mother tongue — not by thinking about it, but in the body, before the mind catches up.
The log read clearly.
Phase One: introduction of engineered spore organisms into target population zones. Delivery mechanism — atmospheric dispersal, civilian water systems, biological vectors. Timeline — eighteen months.
Phase Two: assessment of mortality rates by demographic. Children under twelve: ninety-one percent. Adults over forty: eighty-seven percent. Military-age population: variable, dependent on exposure duration and individual immune response.
Phase Three: documentation of results for future deployment optimization.
The target population.
I read it again. The words didn’t change. They were very clear words, written in the grammar I’d been trained in, describing what had been done to a civilian population on a world that my government had classified as a testing ground and then buried in seventeen layers of security clearance and institutional silence.
The spores in my lungs had a history. They’d been tested before they’d been deployed here. Tested on people. Children. The compound Ashton was synthesizing to keep me alive — the exploit he’d found in the protein architecture, the weakness the designers had traded away for lethality — that weakness existed because the designers had already achieved what they needed. They’d already run their trial.
I closed the log.
Opened it again, because closing it hadn’t changed anything and I understood, standing in the dim emergency lighting of an abandoned atrocity, that I was going to have to look at this directly or spend the rest of my life — however much remained — looking at everything else.
I read it through to the end.
The final entry was administrative. Facility decommissioned. Records sealed. Personnel reassigned. A notation that Sanctuary 7 had been designated a quarantine world, approach prohibited, as a measure of — and here the military grammar failed, or perhaps succeeded too well — operational security.
Not regret. Not consequence. Operational security.
I didn’t hear Ashton approach. He’d gotten quiet enough that I’d stopped tracking his footsteps as a matter of course, which was either a measure of how much my threat assessment of him had changed or a measure of how compromised my focus had become. Probably both.
He read over my shoulder in silence.
I didn’t close the screen.
When he’d finished he straightened and looked at the far wall for a moment, at nothing, the expression of someone doing the same arithmetic I’d done and arriving at the same answer.
“How many people?” he asked.
“The log doesn’t specify total numbers.” My voice came out level. I was distantly grateful for that. “The demographic breakdowns suggest a significant population. A colony. Perhaps multiple settlements.”
“And your government buried it.”
Not a question. I answered it anyway. “Yes.”
“And sent you here. To collect research.” He paused. “Research that might be related to—”
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