It feels selfish to decide that just because I would be happier trudging through radioactive sludge than stand on a stage with my ex, I should make his evening any less special. But would it be? It won’t be the end of the world if someone else has to hand Clayton his award.
Fuck it. I don’t care.
I’m not waiting another minute. I don’t owe him this. The decision to just go to bed right now moves me off the wall automatically, my body agreeing before my mind has fully caught up. I press the elevator button, and it shuttles up to meet me. The moment waiting in front of it is anxious, full of glancing back into the ballroom to make sure Clayton doesn’t notice me leaving.
When the doors open, it is a breath of fresh air, finally. Tapping my phone against the sleek panel, the little lights on the side turn green as all the floor buttons light up, available to be pressed.
It snags against something in my memory like a splinter in my finger catching on a thread. It works the same on Steel’s penthouse floor; it’s pretty much the same way anywhere in the building, I think. The top floor buttons don’t light up for most people who live or work in the building. Along the bottom, there’s some service buttons, basement floors I’ve never been to, shining in green.
I swallow.
A moment too long passes, standing there staring at the security panel. I never really looked at it before, but now I can’t unsee how similar it is to the one from the waterways. Did I bump my phone against that one as well? Is that why it unlocked for me? But if...
My throat grows tight with emotion as too many things snap into place at once.
If Ellis knew we were under the Steel Industries building, that night in the waterways—he must have realized my phone was keyed to the security system—that I could get us in. He didn’t seem at all surprised when I’d gotten the door open. He couldn’t have known. How could he?
At first, all I have is anger, fire, and venom that he withheld the truth from me; he could have just told me. I feel like an idiot—yet again another prop used in everyone else’s games.
But my anger has no fuel to burn through. After all the crying I did earlier today, I don’t have anything left.
Would I have even listened? In my exhaustion, the reason he didn’t is painfully clear. He kept trying to tell me, to get me to see. And I wasn’t even willing to look.
Did he know what we were going to find?
I almost recoil from it, trying to hold my assumptions at bay. Clayton’s tangled history with Maestro, the mutants, the serum, the ooze, the lawsuits, there must be something I’m not seeing. Because Maestro wanted his equipment back, but it was under the Steel Spire, being used to make more mutants.
It was all downstairs, this whole time.
My throat is so unbelievably tight, I can’t move, I can barely breathe. It’s all too messy to navigate, there’s too much here. I must have it tangled up somehow. Hot tears well up along my eyes, frustrated and helpless.
“Miss Vigil,” a small voice croaks behind me, and I turn, startled from my thoughts.
Whoever he is, he’s not dressed for this event. A rail-thin old man with large glasses stands in the hallway, looking lost. He’s wearing a bathrobe; his socks are crumpled around his ankles. The arch in his brow looks familiar, but I don’t think I’ve ever met him.
“Hi, sorry,” I sigh, trying my best to hold my sour mood in at yet another delay. It’s not the first time a Channel 6 viewer recognized me and stopped to say hello.
“I don’t know who else to turn to,” he says, shaking his head at the ground. Maybe he just got off the elevator at the wrong floor, I guess I can help him figure out how to get back to where he’s supposed to be.
He takes my hand. His wrinkled skin is soft, his grip shaky, but he holds onto me urgently. “Ellis is in trouble.”
My heart stops.
“What can I even do?” I start to ask when my eye falls on the bottom row service button to the basement levels.
I don’t think. I just move. I squeeze Ellis’s dad’s hand and pull him into the elevator with me. I tap my phone against the panel inside the elevator, hitting the bottom floor button labeled “Executive Access Only.”
It lights up. Something awful curls in my stomach as the doors shutter, and it takes us down.
The elevator jolts as it descends quickly, Maestro holds on tight to my other hand. It’s only a few floors underground before it slows at the bottom.
I hold my breath. I know it before I see it with my eyes, but the impact feels like a gut punch regardless.
It’s the same laboratory I saw with Ellis that night, from a different angle. The elevator lets us off at a catwalk overlooking a large room full of pipes and strange looking equipment.
In the center of the room, there’s one of those large tanks full of foggy liquid, a dark shape shifting restlessly inside. Dread pools in my stomach.
Maestro lets go of my hand and shuffles out of the elevator, his slippers scraping against the metal grate flooring.
