We took the road up to the factory in silence. We had no plans for secrecy—Bell was going to knock on the front door, and whoever answered it was going to take us to the leader of that facility, and then we’d move from there.

I had absolute faith in us. Nothing could possibly go wrong. To even think of something not going exactly the way we wanted was blasphemy. Between the two of us, we had enough power to take the whole facility head-on.

We were invincible.

Bell had left the car about half a mile away from the factory, and we made that walk in silence. I spent a good portion of it looking up at the stars. It was sort of odd to say that I didn’t get to see the stars very often, despite the fact that I lived in a fairly rural area, but being indoors almost all the time in a windowless room will do that.

There were just so many of them, and they’d always be there, no matter what.

We walked right up to the front door. They were expecting us. There was no need for secrecy.

There was a little box with a button on it, hastily wired to some unknown system inside the building. Bell pushed it, and I heard the faint echo of the doorbell through the wooden strut-crossed door they’d harvested from some old farmhouse to use as an entrance.

I never thought much of design when it came to hideouts like that, but I guess it was nice to know that somebody did.

After a minute—and some eager shifting from Bell, who was grappling with whether or not she should push the button again—the door opened a crack.

“Who are you people?” the voice in the dark said. If I had to guess I’d say there was just a hallway back there that they’d shut the lights off in to give an illusion of secrecy, but the ambient moonlight—and distant external floodlights—cast just enough glow through the doorway to let me see that our greeter had a silver key around his neck, inlaid with a square crystal I assumed was bismuth.

Earth keys seemed to be pretty common around these parts.

Bell paused for half a second.

“My name is Ophelia,” Bell said. “Prochazka sent me.”

“Nobody named Ophelia works for Prochazka,” the man said. “You’re not on the list. Who’s that?”

He pointed at me, careful to keep his finger indoors.

“That’s Erika,” Bell said.

“Hanover?”

“The one and only.”

“Well, you’re probably Bell, then,” the man said.

She blinked. “Yeah.”

“We literally have a list of Unit 6 people,” he said. “I have it right here.”

He fluttered a sheet of standard A4 paper in the doorway. “Why did you even bother trying to give me a fake name?”

Bell took it in stride, to her credit. “Force of habit. You have a prisoner?”

“Why is Erika here?” he asked.

Bell shrugged. “Better safe than sorry, hmm? I like having a bodyguard on missions like this.”

She punctuated it with a smile.

The man grimaced. “Well, normally I’d call in reinforcements right now, but since Erika’s here, it’s pretty safe to assume you are who you say you are. Unless you’re some comically powerful telepath who’s enslaved Erika and somehow stolen her out of the Radiant’s compound without us hearing about it, in which case I’d be both, a, dead already and, b, very impressed.”

He opened the door wider, wide enough to cast light on him, revealing a small, thin wire of a man with long dark hair who I totally would’ve mistaken for a woman if I didn’t hear his voice before seeing him. He was the sort of person who looked perpetually unamused, despite his jovial tone. But he had a cool lizard tattooed on his upper left arm, so I decided I was going to try and like him.

He extended a hand to Bell. “Randall,” he said. “I go by Randy.”

Bell took his hand, shook it once. Said, “Bell.”

Randy’s smile took on an odd frozen quality, and he hesitated a bit too long before extending a hand in my direction. I knew the reaction well enough, and my patience for it had long since withered away.

I quickly revised my decision to be friendly.

Just before I took his hand, I froze the ambient moisture on my hand, just to watch him wince from the sudden cold as soon as our palms touched.

I had no plans to be doubted.

“Erika,” I said.

Randy withdrew his hand from me faster than he did from Bell. He turned behind him, shouted back, “Dave, hit the lights!”, and gestured for us to come inside.

The lights buzzed to life, flooding the hallway white—I winced for half a second, and took a quick glance at Bell, who was unfazed.

Randy started off down the hall, with the implication that we were following—Bell waited for half a second before doing so, and I waited another half second beyond that to tail them.

“The prisoner,” Bell said. No interest in waiting around, or taking in the scenery—not that there was all that much to take in. We were in a white-walled hall, stained by dirt and time, and at the end of the hall was a pair of doors that presumably led to what would’ve been the main floor, and off to each side were other, lightly-rusted white-painted metal doors that led to some other portion of the building I couldn’t quite imagine.

And above us, the cold floodlights.

“Right,” Randy replied. “We scooped him up creeping around the building, ah…what time is it right now?”

“Ten o’clock,” Bell said, toneless.

“So, thirty-seven hours ago,” Randy finished.

“Why didn’t you just say yesterday morning?”

The question made Randy’s brain short-circuit for a second; he spluttered for just a bit too long before responding, “I don’t know. Why does that matter?”

Bell shrugged, said nothing.

He frowned and kept on. “Basically, he was hiding in the bushes out front. Really, just—hiding in the bushes, like we don’t have cameras around the whole damn building or something. We sent a guy out there to tap him on the shoulder and say, “Look, you’re coming in with us,” and he came quietly. Since then he hasn’t talked, but we honestly haven’t tried all that much. The fact that he was so poorly hidden gave us all the willies.”

Hearing a grown man say “gave us the willies” must have tripped some kind of condition in my head, because I started giggling uncontrollably and could not stop for the life of me.

Randy shot me an oddly concerned look, and it was only after letting that lightly disdainful stare burn into my skull for a few moments that I could calm down again.

Bell ignored it.

We all stopped in front of the doors at the end of the hall—big frosted-glass-set doors that were hooked up to a button that opened them automatically in the event of something large needing to come in or out.

“Anyway,” he said, drawing out the first syllable, “We assumed this was some kind of a bait to divert our attention. We’re pretty short-staffed out here, so having a prisoner keeps a bunch of heads occupied.”

“How short is short-staffed?” Bell asked.

“There’s fifteen of us in the whole building,” Randy said.

“Only fifteen,” Bell echoed. “Huh.”

“Like I said,” he went on, “Short-staffed. So we were all on edge that some huge army was gonna storm the place and bowl us over. But that hasn’t happened yet, so…half the reason we phoned Jan in the first place was because we’d, ah, also like to have some backup in case they decide to invade tonight, since they didn’t last night, and maybe they’d think we’d let our guard down after twenty-four hours.”

Bell shrugged. “That sounds reasonable to me.”

“Prisoner’s downstairs,” Randy said. “Through here and off to the left. I’ll walk you there.”

“Thanks, but I think we can find our own way if that’s all there is.” Bell had kept all her responses terse and dry. I could only begin to imagine what conclusions she was already drawing about the place.

What I would’ve given to be a telepath!

“I mean, it’s a bit more complicated than that,” Randy said. “You’ll need a code to get in the door to the stairs.”

“I’m listening.”

Randy snorted. “I’m not going to tell you the code. That would be hilariously insecure.”

Bell took a second too long to respond. She was deciding something, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. In the end, she just shrugged and said, “Whatever.”

Randy pursed his lips for a second. “Look, Bell, I get that you’re numero uno over at the Radiant, but I’d appreciate it if you could at least pretend to respect what we do here. Okay?”

“What exactly is it that you do here?” Bell said. “Prochazka never explained it to me, and I haven’t figured it out yet.”

“Pretty much exactly what you guys do, but for lower-profile cases around here. We’ve got a lot of petty magical crime out here and it tends to be really easy to find.”

“Okay.”

“So we don’t have any big guns, so to speak,” Randy said. “Our strongest key is Wyatt, and he’s stuck here running the place most of the time. If we got invaded, we’d probably all just die.”

“You’re the police in a rich town, basically,” Bell said. “Remind me again what you’ve done to earn our respect?”

Randy, at some point during Bell’s response, made the decision to just let all of Bell’s slights roll off him. I figured that was probably a good plan.

“Let’s head inside,” Randy said, smacking the button to the right of the door with his open palm.

The doors swung inward—they appeared to be able to go both inward and outward depending on which side they were opened from, which was a cool piece of tech, I guess—and Randy immediately banked a left toward a small door in the corner of the floor.

The floor itself was a vast open space filled with basically nothing at all. There were a couple of lone cubicle walls standing on an enormous concrete floor like boulders in a desert—distantly I could hear a few voices and the light clicking of someone typing.

It was so much space for so little anything.

I gawked at it for a bit before I realized I couldn’t really see anything on the furthest wall. There was a sign there, with some text on it, big red block letters that blurred together into a red-streaked smear.

My heart shriveled up and I looked away.

Randy brought us to a door on the left-hand wall, about halfway down the room. He poked in the code on a keypad mounted next to it, using his free hand to obscure what he was doing from the strongest flesh-key in the world.

I wondered if Bell had x-ray vision like that. It wouldn’t surprise me.

The lock behind the door clicked open. Randy said, “We don’t have real jail cells, so we just locked the guy in a storage area in the basement. It’s a pretty big space, but there’s nothing in it but dust, and he’s not an earth-key so I don’t think we’ve got anything to worry about.”

“Duly noted,” Bell said. “We can take this from here. Is there only one storage room?”

“No, but it’s also locked,” he said, fishing a key out of his pocket. “Here. First door on the right.”

Bell took it without a word, then gestured to me, and I followed her down, shooting Randy a quick look that I figured passed for apologetic. He was a little mean to me earlier, but a lot of people were like that, and I knew I certainly didn’t want to be on the receiving end of Bell’s sass.

Randy looked back at me and shrugged.

0 0 0

We closed the door behind us and started down the steps, walking slowly, eyes focused on the landing.

The unearthly silence, Bell’s demeanor, and the low light of that basement had me dead-to-rights locked and convinced we were about to be ambushed. I was so prepared for it that I’d drawn a bit of water out of the bottle I held and sharpened it into a dart, just in case.

But when we got to the bottom, nobody was there.

Bell said nothing; she walked all the way to the end of the hall and stopped. There were ten storage chambers in total, but we only had a key for the first one on the right labeled “2”. The key itself had a matching number on it, so it wasn’t possible to mess that up somehow.

Standing in front of rusted metal door #10, a good thirty or forty feet down the hall from the room we had a key for, Bell said, “This is a bit more complicated than I thought it would be.”

“Randy seems okay,” I said.

“At first, I thought he was compromised by a telepath,” Bell said, “And I got concerned, because that would’ve made bringing you along an extremely bad idea. But then he talked some more, and I realized that I was right—he was compromised—but his reactions to me were very natural.”

I was a bit lost. “So…”

“We missed it,” Bell said. “We’re too late.”

“How?”

“Loybol beat us here,” she replied. “Everyone in this facility is dead.”

My reaction to that was limited to a confused “Oh.”

“At least,” Bell said slowly, “I think so. But that wouldn’t explain why we were called here. They want us to do something, which means…”

She frowned, resting her chin in her palm and holding her elbow with her free hand. “The prisoner is way more powerful than we thought.”

Bell looked down at the floor for a moment, deep in thought. I made a point of not disturbing her with anything like questions or requests for explanations.

“This doesn’t add up,” she said, after a moment.

“Nothing does,” I agreed.

“So—this guy’s been here since yesterday morning. Nobody’s gotten anything out of him. We got the call to come help…this morning. I don’t believe for a second that everyone’s just sat around and done nothing for forty hours.

Bell grimaced. “I think the call was genuine. They honestly did want help with the prisoner. And then Loybol’s team got here before we did. Or the call was fabricated by Loybol to get us here for something. Or the prisoner is one of Loybol’s people, and then a powerful telepath arrived and took control of a couple key people here, and this was the trap we thought it was, and we should still nuke them from orbit.”

She took a breath.

“We need to see Wyatt,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because I need to see what kind of compromised he is,” she said, “before I figure out what to do.”

She walked past me back toward the steps.

“Should we split up?” I asked her.

“Why?” Bell turned her head back to me.

“I could talk to the prisoner,” I said.

Bell snorted. “Not a chance. We’re sticking together.”

She went up the steps, and all I could really do was follow.