Chapter 174: Infiltrating The Prison.
The Hero Association prison had nine floors above ground and nine below it, and the annual reports only ever mentioned the first number.
Vera had read those reports. She had written two of them.
The upper floors were exactly what the public had been shown. Clean holding blocks for ability crimes that made the news, an infirmary, a visitation wing with tables bolted to the floor, and a press room where a spokesperson stood twice a year in front of a wall of intake statistics and answered questions about rehabilitation.
Everything above ground was designed that way.
While everything worth hiding went down.
Sublevel One through Four were just simple with nothing that could raise question.
Basements, archives and armories and records nobody read.
Below Four thats where it started.
Vera surrendered her sidearm at Five to a man who did not look at her face.
Her comms went into a lead drawer at Six. At Seven a woman took her identification card, held it under a scanner, and handed her back a plastic tag that read 0-4-1 and nothing else, because the Association had decided a long time ago that the things below Seven should not learn who was walking past them.
"You keep the number until you’re back up," the woman said. "If anyone asks who you are, you’re Zero Four One."
"And if I forget?"
"Don’t tell anyone your name."
Sublevel Eight was where the walls stopped being concrete. Vera felt the air change before she saw it, a low sick hum coming up through the floor that made her jaw ache and her eyes water, and the escort walking two steps ahead of her did not slow down or comment.
She had been warned about the lattice. Steel, poured lead, and a dampening mesh that hummed at a frequency low enough to make new guards vomit in their first week.
’It’s probably one of the abilities of the impures.’ most impures locked down there had ability on city level destruction scale. So it was safe to assume that it was also an impures ability.
Sublevel Nine did not appear on any blueprint that had ever left the building.
It was a wheel. One circular corridor of dull grey composite, ringed by cells that faced inward so that nothing in any cell could ever see anything in another, and at the hub of the wheel, the smallest chamber of all.
The cells didn’t just have doors, they carried procedures.
Above every door hung a flat monitor, angled down at the corridor, and each one showed the inside of the room behind it in hard white light. That was the only way anyone on Sublevel Nine ever looked at what they held. Nobody opened anything. You stood in the corridor and you watched the screen and you moved on.
Vera walked the wheel slowly.
Cell Two. A man knelt in six inches of standing water.
The feed showed the water being replaced continuously from four inlets in the ceiling, a slow constant rain onto his shoulders, and his head was bowed under it the way a man’s head bows when he has been kneeling for a very long time.
The placard beside the screen noted that his ability required him to be dry, and that he had not been dry in eleven years.
It also noted his name. Vera recognized it. His face was on a memorial wall in the visitation wing, thirteen floors above his own head, under a small brass plate that thanked him for his sacrifice at the Kaldera incident.
She stood in front of that screen longer than she meant to.
Cell Four. A woman sat in a chair, talking. Her mouth moved without stopping, urgently, forming words at a speed that suggested she had been mid-sentence for months. There was no audio. The panel under the monitor had a speaker grille and a switch, and the switch had been removed entirely, leaving a small square hole with two clipped wires in it.
Cell Five. Something with too many joints lay on a floor that had been reinforced twice. It had been kept asleep since before the current director was born, and the sedation lines running into it had been recalibrated ninety times.
Vera had read the file on the way down. It had a containment protocol and a blank ability entry. The last man who had known the difference retired in a country that did not extradite.
Cell Six was empty.
The screen above it showed a clean white room with a cot in it and nothing on the cot, and it had shown that for six years at enormous cost, because the thing in Cell Seven could not be allowed neighbors.
Vera did not look at the screen above Cell Seven.
The nine cells were only the part that had a record.
Past the wheel, behind a bulkhead that required two keys turned by two people, ran a corridor the staff called the annex. Her tag opened it. Nothing in the annex had a cell number. It had shelves, and the shelves held sample cases with labels written by hand, and on those labels was a project name.
Beneath the project name were dates.
Vera stopped walking.
The Association had spent a decade telling the public that the impure were a disease that had happened to humanity.
The oldest date on that shelf was four years before the world had ever heard the words Plague X.
She kept walking, because the escort was waiting, and because she had known for two years that the answer was probably something like this, and knowing had never once stopped her from going to work in the morning.
That was the secret worth burying under nine floors and a mountain of lead. Not the monsters. Monsters could be explained. The monsters had been produced under a budget line, signed off by people whose portraits hung in council chambers.
And at the center of the wheel was the most successful thing the program had ever made.