Lana's POV.
The door swung shut behind him, and the lab fell into a silence so complete it felt manufactured.
I stood in the space where Asher had been standing seconds before, still warm with the particular atmospheric charge he always left behind, and tried to remember how to breathe without thinking about it. He had moved quickly, phone already pressed to his ear before he'd cleared the threshold, the pale corridor light swallowing him whole. I had tried. I had angled my gaze just enough, that old clinical instinct reaching for information the way it always did but the screen had caught the light wrong, or the moment had been too brief, and all I'd registered was a white flash before the door closed and he was gone.
I exhaled slowly. The fluorescent lights hadn't softened. The lab st
