Galatea was making no extra information known as I got Sophia out of the building, so I assumed that it was a larger can of worms that I should not touch before getting somewhere secure. Sophia was still a bit out of it, not quite up to anything but clinging to me, so we must have looked rather interesting, me, power-walking down the street with her clinging to me. Luckily, at a distance, her small figure should look like a child, giving me hope that we would not garner too much attention before I could get us somewhere covered.

Carrying her to my warehouse seemed to be the best idea and soon, I was entering the door-code, just then realising that Sophia had never seen the warehouse or the extra-access tunnel before. She had only seen the highest level, one could say the residential level, of my bunker, never the lower levels containing sensitive stuff, like my bio-lab or the entrance to the escape-tunnel. I had never seen the need to show it to her and the access-door was well hidden, in case someone found the base.

Even now, I would not have to explain what was going on, she had buried her head in my chest and was hiding from the world. While I could not understand, I could empathise. It sounded as if her mother’s great plan to get enough money for the rent had been to sell her daughter to the man that helped her sell herself. I prayed that I would never understand the rationalisation that she had used, or the reasons why she had not talked to Sophia beforehand. Well, I could guess at that one, she did not want Sophia to run. But if she had only asked for help, either Sophia or I could have come up with a way to funnel some money to her, without showing our hand as Powered.

Sophia would need me for the next days, she would need some gentle, positive reinforcement. In a way, a huge part of her world had shattered by her mother’s betrayal.

I... was not sure if I could deal with her mother, Just thinking about her made me angry, so very angry, that I wanted to rip her to pieces with my bare hands. I probably would not do so, certainly not with Sophia watching, but I was not sure if I would be able to remain rational. And I was not sure if Sophia would be able to do so either.

I stepped on the unremarkable concrete-slab that hid the elevator into the tunnel and Galatea activated the hidden machines that let the thick slab sink into the floor. The slab looked like a concrete-slab, sounded like a concrete-slab if knocked on, hell, the outer layer was a concrete-slab. But underneath was a hydraulic lift-system that had enough power raise or lower the slab within seconds, allowing for a quick get-away. Or a quick amputation, if someone gets their arm caught in the gaps. The mechanism was excellently hidden, I doubted that without a ground-search radar or the right Powers anyone could find it. And even if they found it, breaking the elevator was no mean feat, it was quite massive.

Two meters below ground, the ceiling of my access-tunnel opened sight into a smooth surface and I made my way underground, towards the main-base.

The tunnel itself had an angle to it, rising towards the base, so there were fewer stairs to climb at the end. It had been a major effort to dig it, even with a small legion of robots working day and night under Galatea’s supervision. Dumping the earth into the Brune had been risky, even distributed as we had done it, it might show that there was a lot more silt at the river-bottom than normally. But there were limited ways to get rid of tons of dirt and rocks, especially in complete secrecy. I could hardly hire a few trucks, or even the dimmest bulb would get the flash of inspiration that dozens of trucks, carting of tons of dirt without any overt construction meant that someone was building below ground. And there was no way I wanted building inspectors nosing through my secret base, that would take away half the words in the title, making it only a base. Still useful, but not for me. In addition, once building inspectors managed to get in, even more inspectors would want to see everything. They would not need heroes to shut me down, no, simple bureaucracy would do it, with ease. I did not even want to imagine the paperwork needed for a secret underground-lair.

Once I was in the lair, I sat on the couch, Sophia still clinging to me like a koala joey and hiding from the world. In a different situation, I might have found her behaviour funny, but right now, it was only worrying.

Subvocalizing, so I would not disturb Sophia, I asked Galatea, “Why did you tell us to get out of the house?”

“Police-band chatter. They found a corpse, today around ten in the morning. It had been dumped close to a forest-path and a jogger found it.” seeing those words appear on my glasses, my stomach twisted into a knot.

“Next to the corpse was her purse, containing identification. It was Mrs. Collins, Sophia’s mother. She was repeatedly beaten and raped before being strangled to death. They have yet to get a good estimated time of death, but it seems to be some time this morning, around four or five.”

That threw me for a loop. Moments before, I had been angry, hating the woman with most of my being, only having a tiny bit of positivity because she was Sophia’s mother and without her, there would be no Sophia. But now, knowing that she had been dead when I hated her, slowly turning stiff in the forest, it changed things, while at the same time not changing anything. Part of me wanted to hate her, for betraying Sophia, even if she may not have thought of it as a betrayal, just part of what she did to sustain herself. Part of me wanted to feel sympathy, for the pain she must have gone through, before dying. And part of me wondered just what it would do to Sophia if I ever told her about it.

“I assumed that you had no interest in being part of a police-investigation. Or that Sophia would be part of it. Or that Sophia would wound up in foster-care.”

My mind was still catching up with the situation, but what Galatea said was true. Sophia would either have to go live with her father at the Cult-Compound, go into foster-care or stay vanished with me. With a small push, I should be able to guide the police in the right direction, towards the so-called boss of Mrs. Collins and with a little luck, he would come clean to reduce his sentence. That would make it rather obvious that Sophia chose to run away and the circumstances. They might bring her in if they ran into her but I doubted that the police would use a lot of resources searching for her. Sophia would turn into one of those sad statistics that would be pulled out to prove a point or the other but nobody could truly do something about.

The important question remained, did I want Sophia to know about it? What if she blamed herself, either for not going along with her mother’s plans or for not staying and protecting her mother. It was not as if some run-of-the-mill pimp would be able to do more to Sophia than attack her with words and if he managed to make her seriously mad, they would need a putty-knife to scrape him off the floor.

Her mental state was a bit of an unknown to me, she had buried the events at first, before getting triggered and since the trigger, she had shut down, hiding from the world. Normally, I would insist on counseling, but where could I find a counselor for her, with the ethics to keep her secrets?

I decided to watch Sophia for now, not telling her about her mother but arguing that it would be better to stay away from the apartment, to keep hidden. I might be able to convince Sophia that her mother realised what she had done to Sophia and left the city in shame. It could work and if I phrased it the right way, it would not be a lie.

In a way, all options were bad options and I had to find the least bad option for now. In times like these, I just wished for a certain book, with a brightly orange cover and a print of “Don’t Panic” on the cover. It might say that humans are mostly harmless, but maybe it would have sound advice on the topic of mental counseling in mammals.

But sadly, I did not have the answers. Not to this, not to life, not to the universe and certainly not to everything.