And inside my belly, the baby shifts again – small, stubborn, inevitable.
“Don’t worry,” I whisper to the walls, to the surveillance system, to the entire rotten institution. “They’ll come for us. They’ll get their answers. And so will I.”
The lift doors close around me.
The descent feels like the beginning of something enormous.
A COLD HOLLOW PLACE WHERE PANIC SHOULD BE
The Monster - Eminem (feat Rhianna)
Nightshade
The facility looks wrong before we even stop the car. It’s in the way the trees stand too still around the perimeter, the way the security lights burn in steady, unblinking lines with no movement beneath them, the way the busted gate yawns open like a mouth that forgot how to close.
There should be guards. There should be cameras tracking our plates, guns trained on the windshield, some poor idiot stepping out to do his job and ask for identification that I’m never going to give him.
Instead there’s nothing.
No bodies. No smoke. No alarms.
Just a dead building pretending to be alive.
The engine ticks when Valentine kills it, a soft metallic pinging that feels too loud in the quiet. Nobody gets out at first. Bones sits forward in the passenger seat, forearms braced on his knees, eyes trained on the blank façade like he can force it to give up answers. Hatchet is still as a statue, hands resting on his thighs, the kind of stillness that only comes just before violence. Snow is hunched against the door on my side, breathing too fast, fingers flexing against his knees like he’s rehearsing choking someone.
“This feels wrong,” Honey murmurs. “We’re walking into a trap.”
“She’s not here,” Bones says, eventually. His voice is flat. That’s how I know he’s panicking. “Place is dead. They moved her.”
“We don’t know that,” Ghost says, but it doesn’t sound like he believes it. His eyes are wide and too bright, fixed on one of the high windows where a strip of light gleams against glass. “There are lights on.”
Snow swallows audibly. “Lights don’t mean shit,” he mutters. “I don’t smell—” He cuts himself off, jaw snapping shut.
Hatchet’s eyes are on the door, on the camera above it, on the sloppy angle of the side gate that’s hanging open. His fingers drum once against his leg, then go still again. He doesn’t speak. He never does. He doesn’t need to. I can feel the question burning in him as clearly as if he’d carved it into the dashboard:what did they do to her in there?
I exhale slowly through my nose, force my hand to unclench and open the door.
The air that hits me is cold and humid, the night thick around the building. It smells like wet dirt and concrete and something else underneath, faint and stale, like bleach that’s had time to dry. No blood. No gunpowder. No smoke. Just a blank, scrubbed nothing.
My skin crawls.
“Out,” I say. “We clear the exterior, we go in, we find her.”
“And if they’ve moved her?” Bones asks, already opening his door. His boots hit the tarmac hard. “If this whole fucking thing is a ghost town?”
“Then we find out where she went,” I say. “And we follow. There will be a trail. There always is.”
He doesn’t look convinced. He doesn’t argue either.
We fan out automatically; this part is muscle memory. Bones to my right, slightly ahead, the battering ram. Ghost on my left, weapons in hand, eyes flicking between windows and corners, already mapping exits, angles, lines of sight. Snow hangs a step behind me, close enough that if I stop he’ll walk into me, as if distance is something that might kill him now. Hatchet and Honey bring up the rear, turning their heads in slow arcs, cataloguing shadows.
No tire marks on the ground. No fresh tracks. My stomach knots. If they moved her, they did it clean. Quiet. They scrubbed the place and left. That’s what this looks like.
“Maybe they evacuated,” Ghost says, low. “Fire drill. Threat. Something.”
“Then where is everyone?” Bones snaps back. He gestures sharply at the security booth by the gate. “Where’s the bored guy on his phone? Where’s the smoker around the corner? Where’s the fucking?—”
He breaks off as we pass the booth. The chair is empty. The monitors are on. A cup of coffee sits on the desk, half full, a skin forming on the surface.
