“The fire extinguisher.”
“Precisely. The security access is the fire in the building with no fire extinguisher. We rarely used the code, so no one thought to update it. No one except you and Charles.”
Shivering, I felt a rush of something sick move through me. “What’s down there, Finn? Is it… is it hell?”
He looked at me squarely, his expression barely changing.
“A kind of hell, I think, yes. There’s an evil beneath this place. Surely you can feel it. Think of it as a kind of volatile energy source. We need access to it, but we also have to control it. Since the breach, the things that are down there… they’ve started spilling out.”
“Like an oil spill,” I whispered, remembering his odd speech about Deepwater Horizon.
“The world is in chaos. Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. Man’sinhumanity to man is at an all-time high, and the banality of evil seems to be slipping into every crack and crevice, doesn’t it?”
I thought back to the way I’d been avoiding the news because the violence recently had seemed nightmarishly out of control.Brutally unhingedwas the term that had come to mind.
“But if there is a breach and these things have been getting through, wouldn’t everyone know about it?”
He shook his head. “It’s more complicated than that. The physical manifestations we can stop for the most part. For now. But there is a slow leak. Call it energetic, call it spiritual. It’s the incorporeal manifestations of evil. Every religion has a name for them—demons, djinn, hungry ghosts—the invisible sources of suffering and the spirits that whisper in our ears, that seemingly inhuman drive to do the unthinkable. Mankind is inherently good. Never forget that. But we are impressionable, and we can be influenced to do horrific things to one another and even to ourselves.”
“And that’s what we’re seeing now, that darkness that seems to be sweeping over the world? The ceaseless conflict and senseless brutality. It’s due to the leak here?”
He nodded. “Now can you understand our impatience?”
The sense of urgency that overcame me in that moment was almost visceral, like it was eating away at my insides. I’d known all along that I was in danger, but I’d never imagined the risk extended beyond me. From everything Finn told me, I could now see that if I didn’t do something, and quick, I’d never forgive myself. But I needed to think. There was still so much I was missing.
“Uta Symon, he’s the CFO here, right? But he’s been pretending to be Jim. Why?”
Finn shook his head, confounded. “I’m not sure. He insisted on being here when you returned.”
“I think he’s mixed up in this,” I said, the words feeling true almost as soon as I said them. “I think it’s even possible that he did this to me.”
“I can’t say I’m surprised. He’s someone I’ve had my eye on for a long time. I suspect he might be the main force behind the… Let’s just call them the opposition. And he has been on campus a lot in the past year.”
I was beginning to get a fuller picture now. “I think he did this to me somehow, or forced me to do this to myself, and I think he took me to New York. Can I talk to him?”
“He left a few days ago, quite abruptly actually.”
I mulled that over. “That’s probably good,” I said, looking around. I needed somewhere calmer, somewhere I could have some space to think. “I think I need to go somewhere and be alone.”
Finn nodded. “Do whatever you need to do, but I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, the clock is ticking.”
I went back to the conference room in the derelict building after that. It seemed like a good enough place to start. I searched through files and spent the better part of the night thumbing through every piece of paperwork I could find, and as I read, I began to remember more. There were aspects of the work I now understood that I hadn’t on my first pass. Now that I knew about the horrors that lurked below, some of the notes I hadn’t understood earlier began to take on new meaning—thebiohazard,thehostile materialhad now became starkly real. And then there was Sabine. Something had gone wrong with Sabine. We’d—no, Charles, it was Charles, I was sure—had taken something too far. This was why I took her with me. I was trying to protect her. I was trying to make it right.
As I worked my way through the documents, slivers of recollections rose to the surface—late nights with Charles, eating junk food and laughing during a break; the feeling of being at the center of something truly magnificent. But accompanying those memories was a darker presence, a kind of malevolent watchfulness hovering just outside of view. We weren’t really alone out here, were we? There had been someone else always, someone looking over our shoulders. The wizard?
I fell asleep at some point, crashed out on the floor in Charles’s office, and when I dreamed, it wasn’t a dream. It was a memory.
I was in the lab, staring at Charles. I held a sheet of paper with frantically scribbled numbers on it. I knew what they were. It had to do with cybersecurity, with quantum cryptography. But I was unable to believe what it meant.
“Who did you sell it to?” I demanded.
“I haven’t done anything,” he snapped.
“Not yet, but I heard you on the phone. How could you, Charles? Throwing away your life’s work—our life’s work—just like that?”
He closed his eyes, clearly frustrated, and held my shoulders. “I did it for us. I’m trying to keep us safe. You have no idea what these people are capable of.”
“These people are our friends.”
