“Yeah, what he said.”
“You coming with us?” Hedy asks Anders.
“Sure.”
The dungeon, it turns out, is two more levels down, in a smaller, bean-shaped cavern with a dozen or so cells lining the curved edge.
To be honest, the cells are larger and more comfortable looking than I would have expected. Thick sheets of some kind of plexiglass separate us from them, and all the people in the cells are quiet. Several look…modified.
All of them look dangerous, and the energy in this space is vile.
“We keep them sedated,” Hedy explains, clearly reading the questions in my eyes.
“You said you only keep them here for up to a year, right?” Maverick asks.
She nods and leads us to a small cavern off to the side of this one. It’s closed off from us with a thick, heavy metal door.
Hedy goes to the side of the door and taps a panel, and a screen extends from the rock face. She uses her palm to activate it, and a video feed appears.
A normal-looking guy wearing jeans and a polo is sedately pacing the room.
“Who’s that?”
Hedy goes quiet for a moment.
“Honestly, with everything you’re learning today, I don’t think we need to pile on with who this man is and what he has done.”
Maverick snorts. Hedy says nothing.
“Wait. You’re serious?”
She and Anders exchange a look. “Yeah, I’m serious.”
I look more closely at the screen. “Is that a meat hook?” I ask, and I’m immediately sorry.
Anders laughs. “Oh yeah. I had them add that.”
When Maverick and I look at him, horrified, he holds up his hands.
“We hardly ever use it anymore.”
That brings up a whole litany of questions I don’t want answers to.
Maverick is the one to break the silence. “I think I understand now why my dads didn’t want me to be involved in the family business. I’m pretty sure they’d rather I never knew about the meat hook, at the very least.”
“It’s good to be a part of the solution,” Anders says. “But it’s heavy, knowing the problems that need to be solved.” He pats my shoulder. “Which is why we need you, big guy. None of this is gonna get any easier, but hopefully, you’ll see how important it is.”
We turn once again to the screen and watch the ordinary-looking man pace the room he’s definitely going to die in.
I think back to what Hedy told me when I asked about the ethics of this place—that objectivity was a luxury we couldn’t afford, that I’d have to learn when to step back and when to let her take over. Standing in this cave, watching a man pace toward his death, I’m beginning to understand what she meant.
Even in a world with perfect ethics, there will always be people like whoever this man is. And they will always need to be dealt with.
“So, is this where Edison taught Silas how to be a murderer?” Maverick asks, pulling me from my navel-gazing.
His question surprises me. I wouldn’t have ever put those two things together, but Maverick’s mind has always come at things from a different angle. I turn to Hedy and find the answer on her face.
“In short, yes.” Hedy’s smile is sad. “With his modifications,though, Silas never needed to be taught how to kill. He was always going to be a murderer.”
