She was interrupted by the door beside us beeping once, and the gold doorknob was illuminated in green. Stepping away from the glass dome, Daiyu opened the heavy wooden door, then shut it again. The green light dimmed. “We had to think of an image as our brain waves were being scanned and recorded, and then must focus on the same image when we use the scanners for entry.”

“What’s the image?” I asked, curious.

“The Jin character,” she replied.

I detected a trace of sarcasm in her tone, but wasn’t sure if I was imagining it. Palming the slim device back into a hidden pocket in my suit, I cursed myself for not having played this better. What could I do to make her use it again?

Going to the center of the landing, I gazed down at the employees working diligently at their various tasks and imagined this large wall of glass exploding outward, showering down on everyone on the factory floor below. Shrill screams and blood everywhere. We definitely needed a ruse to get everyone out of the building. As much as I loathed everything Jin Corp stood for, there would be no innocent lives lost if I could help it.

We slowly walked the entire circumference of the floor, and Daiyu stepped into the elevator again. This time, we stopped on the third floor. The corridor was paved with gray tiles, not as opulent as the ground floor. Laboratories behind glass windows flanked both sides of the narrow hallway, revealing more employees wearing white lab coats bearing Jin Corp’s insignia placed above their hearts.

“Is this where they do the testing?” I asked, watching a technician gauge the durability of various materials at his workstation.

“Yes,” she said. “For the suits, but it also houses the labs for scientific research.”

This caught my attention. It was what Arun had told me to look for.

I observed as much as I could without drawing Daiyu’s suspicion, noting the emergency-exit stairwells on this floor. But nothing I saw seemed out of the ordinary: technicians testing different materials used for the suits and helmets, engineers working on different 3D models of new designs, and artists sketching to render patterns on custom suits.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at an oval structure shaped like a giant egg housed in a lab that looked exactly like the one Arun worked in.

“That’s a decon pod,” Daiyu replied. “The same one that we have at home. There are two located on this floor.”

This only reaffirmed Arun’s suspicions that the avian flu was being produced on-site.

We soon reached a portion of the floor that was housed behind steel doors, with brain wave scan stations set beside them.

“Another restricted area?” I asked. Here was my chance to have Daiyu use the scan machine again. But how?