Chapter 180: A Story
They found him two floors down, tucked into a cramped maintenance alcove behind a bank of dead server racks. He was a technician who had managed to crawl there with an emergency radio the instant the power failed.
He had already made his call.
Shadow found him the same way she found everyone else—rising silently out of the pooled darkness beneath the dead consoles. The technician barely had time to register the shape of a young girl standing in the shadows before her dagger sliced cleanly across his throat. He slid down against the metal casing of the servers, the radio still clutched in his lifeless hand, and went completely still.
"There," Shadow said flatly, wiping her bloody blade on her sleeve. "But it’s too late. He already reached them." She turned a cold, sharp look on Hexi. "I didn’t catch this one earlier because you were too busy. If you hadn’t wasted our time playing with your new puppets upstairs, we would have reached this floor faster."
"Don’t you dare!" Hexi’s cheerful expression instantly soured. He nervously clutched a fresh strand of his own hair, twirling it around a finger. "Don’t try to pin the blame on me just because the Master is standing right here! You’re the one who travels through shadows—you should have caught him yourself. That’s your whole job!"
"My job would be a lot easier if I didn’t have to wait for you to finish giggling on every single floor."
"You take that back, you little—"
"Both of you. Calm down."
The Master’s voice rolled down the dimly lit corridor. It was quiet and unhurried, yet both of them immediately fell silent. They turned toward him with clear surprise on their faces. It was rare for the Master to raise his voice, simply because he almost never needed to.
"It doesn’t matter," the Master said, without slowing his stride. His heavy boots rang steady and even against the metallic floor as he walked deeper into the circular facility, heading straight toward the central hub where they kept her. "We’ve already found her. That is the only thing that was ever going to matter tonight."
He paused for a second, and something almost pleasant entered his tone.
"And it’s a good thing the heroes are coming," he added softly. "In fact... the more that show up, the better."
Shadow blinked in confusion. Hexi stopped rocking back and forth.
"Why?" Hexi asked slowly, tilting his head. "Why does the Master want all the heroes to come here?"
The Master did not answer immediately. He kept walking, and the two of them fell in line behind him. They passed the last of the inward-facing cells with their flat white monitoring screens. They passed a display showing a man kneeling in six inches of standing water, and another showing a woman in a restraint chair whose mouth never stopped moving. The Master ignored every single one of them, leading his followers until the narrow corridor finally opened up into the massive central hub.
"Because I have written the perfect story for the girl," the Master explained calmly. "And a story is a very poor thing without an audience to watch it unfold. I’m sure the heroes will be very interested to see the plot this time."
He reached the center of the hub and stopped in his tracks.
The chamber at the center of the wheel was different from the other cells. It had no external monitors. It featured a thick observation window and a massive reinforced door. The door was sealed completely shut—a heavy composite slab set perfectly flush into the frame. There was no handle, no keypad, and no seam that a man could slip a tool into.
The Master studied the entrance for a long moment. For the first time all night, a faint frown touched his face. He pressed his open palm flat against the cold metal surface. It didn’t budge. Whatever mechanism locked this vault was not something that could be forced open by hand or hurried by patience. It was the absolute final barrier the Hero Association had built between the world and the prisoner inside, designed specifically to be the one door that could not be broken down.
"...Hm." He tilted his head, his eyes carefully tracing the seamless frame. "They made the last door the hardest one. Of course they did. You don’t put your greatest secret behind a lock an ordinary man can pick."
"Oh! Oh, I know this one!" Hexi bounced forward with delight, a fresh strand of hair already twirling around his finger. "One of my new friends upstairs was very helpful. Very chatty, right up until his mind broke! He knew all about this door." He tapped his own temple, grinning wildly. "It takes two authorized people to open it. Two keys, two hands, turned at the exact same time. That’s why I kept two of the guards breathing downstairs. I saved them just for this."
Hexi giggled and made a loose pulling gesture toward the corridor behind them.
Two men in the grey uniforms of the containment staff shambled forward out of the dark. Their eyes were completely hollow, their faces slack, and their movements loose and unnatural—like marionettes being dragged along on Hexi’s invisible strings. They walked straight up to the sealed door and stopped, positioning themselves on opposite sides. In perfect, mindless unison, they reached up to the hidden recessed panels that slid open beneath their palms.
Two keys turned at the exact same moment.
Something deep within the door released with a heavy, mechanical thunk. The massive composite slab slid slowly to the side, revealing the room within.
The three of them stepped through the threshold, and there she was.
A girl named Joan sat on the edge of a bolted metal cot in a small, sterile white room. A massive containment apparatus completely swallowed her head whole—a smooth, dull metal shell that was wider than her shoulders, weighing her thin frame down into a permanent forward curve. Six heavy, ribbed pipes ran directly into the helmet, three on each side, leading up into the ceiling. Two more pipes snaked down beneath the collar of her grey prisoner shift. Something inside the machine cycled softly every four seconds, creating a slow, artificial breathing sound—in and out, in and out. On the wall monitor, a green line ran almost completely flat, twitching weakly every few seconds before being forced back down by the machine.
The Master stared down at her for a long moment, his face entirely unreadable.
"Wake her up," he ordered softly.
Hexi’s fingers twitched. The two hollow-eyed technicians shambled forward toward the wall panel and the machine’s controls. Working with loose, puppet-like hands, they began flipping switches. One after another, the heavy pipes hissed and went slack. The soft mechanical breathing stuttered, slowed, and finally stopped altogether. The green line on the wall monitor gave a single sharp spike, and this time, no machine smoothed it back down.
The helmet split wide open along a central seam with a sharp pneumatic sigh. It lifted away from her head, pulled up toward the ceiling by its pipes. For the first time in two months, the girl’s face was completely exposed to the air.
She was much younger than any of them had pictured. She looked pale and hollow-cheeked, her hair flattened against her skull where the heavy machine had pressed against it for weeks. Her eyes opened halfway, looking unfocused and drifting as her mind slowly swam back up toward consciousness from whatever deep suppression had held her under. Her pale lips moved faintly, shaping the very edge of a word she had been trying to speak for two months.
The Master crossed the small room and crouched down directly in front of her cot, bringing his face level with hers. When he spoke, his voice was remarkably gentle, warm, and comforting—like the voice of a parent reading a child a story at bedtime.
"Hello, Joan," he said softly. "I have a story for you."