Dr. Konrad brought me this way once, the day he arrested me when I tried to visit my ailing father. The garage brings back horrifying memories of my time at CGEF, and I have to work to force each trembling step. The fear awakens my wolf, and I feel her calming presence at my side. I bite my bottom lip. Whatever happens, I cannot allow her to take control.
“Hold it together. We don’t have far to go,” Korwin says.
“Who’s not holding it together?” I whisper. We may be close, but he’s fooling himself if he thinks this will be easy. There are always guards here. The first time I was arrested, I learned that the Crater City Government Energy Facility, CGEF, is the hub for energy allocation and distribution to the provinces, but since then I’ve learned it’s more than that. It is the embodiment of everything the Green Republic stands for and it is never left unguarded. Ever.
“Allow me.” Korwin moves toward the door to CGEF and knocks three times.
The door opens to reveal a young man in a green officer’s uniform. He straightens his cap and fidgets with the rifle hanging over his shoulder. I can practically see the war within. He knows we shouldn’t be here but he also recognizes who we are and is afraid to anger us.
“Ms. Baltik, Mr. Baltik.” He bows his head slightly. “Can I help you?”
“Might I uze your facilitiez?” I ask, oozing entitlement.
“Unfortunately, no. No visitors in the building today. I’m sorry. The Ambassador’s Club is right next door.” He points his rifle in the direction we came. “Everyone is over there. That’s where the fun is.” He laughs awkwardly. “If you give me a second, I can call for an escort. Technically, you aren’t supposed to be down here.”
I smile sweetly and beckon him forward. “May I tell you zomething?”
He sighs, blushing slightly. “What?”
I lean in, cupping my hand beside my mouth as if I have a secret, too embarrassing for my brother to hear. As soon as he’s within range, I grab his chin and send a zap of electricity straight to his brain. He falls twitching to the floor. I pry his rifle from his hands.
“Nicely done,” Korwin says.
“I should have killed him. He’ll blab when he wakes up.” I slip the rifle strap around my neck.
“With the volts you pumped into his brain? He won’t remember. He’ll think he passed out.”
“You hope.”
He frowns and gestures inside. “Come on.” He leads me into the building, leaving the body of the officer lying on the floor of the garage. The entrance connects to a stairway at the basement level. Konrad’s laboratory is on the third floor.
I break into a jog.
“You know, it used to be you who worried about hurting people,” Korwin says beside me.
“That was before I decided I’d rather live.” My wolf is by my side. I ignore her.
“You don’t care about preserving innocent life anymore?”
“Innocent. That’s the key word. No one who works for the Greens is innocent, and if I’m going to survive, I can’t weigh the goodness of every person who attacks me.” A simple stretch of my fingers would invite my wolf inside. I wouldn’t be scared anymore, but I also wouldn’t be in control. I wrap my arms around my stomach and try to forget she’s there.
“Fair enough,” Korwin says softly.
“Here it is,” I say, reaching the third floor. “Locked. There’s a notice.” A bright yellow sign says Keep out. Floor closed until further notice.
“Probably left over from the investigation.” Korwin presses a finger to his lips and pulses the Biolock with his other hand. We enter a long hall, clinical and cold. The floor is white. The walls are white. The ceiling is white. Rows of rectangular lights buzz above of us. One of them flickers near the door where Dr. Konrad once tortured Korwin. I flash on the day I saved his life by carrying his wasted body from that room on my back. The flickering almost unhinges me. For a moment, I smell blood. I sniff again and it’s gone. Perhaps it’s a memory of the scent of my own blood as I lay dying on Konrad’s table.
Korwin nudges my arm and motions for me to follow him to the left, the hall that leads to Dr. Konrad’s lab. My legs tremble with every step and the gun I’m holding makes a clicking sound with my shaking. Korwin stops and removes the weapon from my hands, putting the strap around his own neck. Quickly, he pulls me into a tight embrace, then searches my eyes. He looks so different disguised as Rayle, but the current running between us is unmistakable. “You okay under there?”
I am not okay. I thought I could do this. I thought it would feel good to be here, ruining what Dr. Konrad has built. But instead, my stomach twists, my mouth goes dry, and I can’t stop shaking. I’m afraid. I take a deep breath and gesture toward the lab. “Let’s get this over with.”
Korwin points the gun at the double lab doors. I stand along the wall and use one arm to push the left door open.
He sticks his head in and looks around. “Clear.”
We step inside. The place is a mess. Equipment is strewn across the space in no particular order. Medical books are piled on stainless steel tables with dusty and worn covers, antiquated and out of place against the surrounding technology. There are beeping machines, flashing lights, and filthy surgical implements. Nothing makes sense. It’s chaos.
“Where should we start?” I ask.
“He’d have to keep it frozen until he was ready to use it.” Korwin scans the periphery of the lab. “There.” He points at a stainless steel cabinet at the back of the room with a solid green square of light in the lower corner.
We pick our way through the equipment. I step over a tank that reads Oxygen and around a tipped basket of plastic-wrapped surgical tools. We reach the cabinet and Korwin pulls the doors open. There’s a billow of fog as the cold air hits the warm, and then rows upon rows of vials come into view. Blood and fluids, frozen samples of tissue. Korwin hands me the gun and starts digging through the shelves. He must sense my disgust, my inability to fully process what I’m seeing.
“Found them,” he says, removing a tray of metal vials from the back. They are still labeled with his name.
I swallow. There’s something off, something wrong with the situation, but my brain isn’t working. I’m overwhelmed by the mess, the emotions of being here again, and the sense that we are on borrowed time. “One minute,” I remind him. He looks at his wrist out of habit, then laughs. Neither of us have watches. It’s not the fashion. “I’ll count.”
He sparks out and a blue cloud of electricity consumes the rack of metal tubes. “One, two, three…” I count slowly as my eyes trail around the lab. The hours I spent as a prisoner here were the worst of my existence. I want to destroy it. I want to burn the place to the ground, but I have strict orders to leave it as we found it.
“Lydia?” Korwin says.
“What?”
“You stopped counting at forty-eight.”
“I’m sorry. I’m distracted. I have a bad feeling.”
The vials are still engulfed in Korwin’s electric cloud. “I’m pretty sure it’s been a minute.”
“I can count again.”
He shakes his head and extinguishes the flame. “It’s done.”
“What about the samples he took from me while I was a prisoner here?” I ask.
Korwin digs through the shelves. “L. Lane. It’s a good thing Konrad was organized.” He flames out and I start to count again.
The wall to the left and behind me keeps catching my eye. It looks like any other wall but I feel a pull from deep within drawing me in that direction. I stare until I see a sliver of green against the floor. What is that?
“…Sixty,” I say. Korwin extinguishes the vials and replaces them in the freezer.
“What are you staring at?”
I point to the crack near the floor. “The green looks like the green light on the refrigeration unit.”
He squints. “What green?”
“There. Just against the floor.”
“All the vials are here, Lydia.”
I take a deep breath. “Something’s been bothering me since we walked in here. How do we know the vials are… complete? He could have removed some and stored it somewhere else. Somewhere more secure.”
He closes the doors to the freezer and stares at the unit. “It wasn’t even locked.”
“Exactly. Konrad is too smart for this. It’s like… It’s like he left it here as a decoy.”
Korwin stiffens under his Rayle disguise. “Let’s check it out.”
We pick our way across the lab to the wall. I run my hand along it looking for a seam in the area where I can see the hint of light. “It could be a false door, like your father had at the compound.”
Without a word, he joins me, stepping over a pile of medical books to run his fingers along the painted surface. “Ah,” he says. There’s a click and a panel slides back. Behind it is an old-fashioned door with the type of knob and lock that requires a physical key. I’ve never seen one of these in the English world, although they are common in Hemlock Hollow.
“Can’t just pulse this one,” he says.
I touch the knob. A memory comes back to me. “I know how to do this.”
“You know how to pick a lock?”
“Yeah. I do.” I search the floor and find two surgical implements that are about the right shape and size. I unwrap them and dig them into the keyhole.
“The Nanomem?”
“Not this time. Jeremiah. We once stole candy from the general store.”
Korwin chuckles. “You have a dark side.”
My hands jostle the tools in the keyhole and the lock gives with a pop. “You have no idea,” I murmur, thinking of my wolf. He doesn’t hear me or doesn’t respond. The hinges squeak softly as the door swings open.
Inside, the overhead lights are off but we can see clearly. The green glow comes from four rows of pods, fourteen in all, made of frosted glass. All but one of the pods are identical, oblong circles with buttons on the side that glow green. In the very back of the room there is a larger pod that takes up most of the row.
The hair on my arms stands on end, and I can’t take my next breath. My heart pounds. A prickle forms at the base of my neck. Fear takes over, and she is there again. My wolf growls at my side.
“What is this?” Korwin asks, approaching the first pod.
“I don’t like it,” I say. “We need to get out of here.” The wolf urges me to protect myself, to leave whatever this is be.
“What are you talking about? This is some sort of experiment. We need to find out what we’re dealing with.”
Korwin approaches the first pod and inspects the foggy surface, then runs his fingers down the side. He presses the lighted green button on the end. The frost clears. His body is blocking my view, but his silence and stiff posture let me know I’m not going to like whatever’s inside. My wolf creeps with me as I approach. Korwin steps aside.
It does not move or twitch. The thing inside is not alive, but I think it used to be. It has translucent skin and a spine, but everything else about it is wrong. There are no legs. What I think are its organs have grown outside its body and where eyes should be, there are craters in a misshaped skull. A fleshy cord attaches it to a gelatinous red block at the bottom of the canister.
“What is that thing, Korwin?”
He looks at me through Rayle’s violet eyes. “These are artificial wombs. I think you were right, Lydia. The vials were a decoy.”