Chapter 8: The Heart of Darkness

"What things?" I asked, supporting Lisa as she struggled to stand. The electrodes had left angry red marks on her skin, and I could see needle marks along her arms where they'd administered whatever cocktail of drugs had kept her compliant.

"The future. What they're planning to do with people like us." Lisa leaned heavily against the cell wall, her legs shaking with the effort of remaining upright. "Kate, they're not just studying our abilities. They're trying to transfer them."

The lock clicked open fully, and I helped her step out of the cell that had been her prison. "Transfer them to whom?"

"Soldiers. Agents. They want to create an army of enhanced operatives, but they need to extract the abilities from us first." Lisa's eyes were wide with remembered horror, pupils dilated from whatever they'd been giving her. "The process kills the donor."

My blood turned to ice. They weren't just experimenting on supernatural individuals—they were harvesting their abilities for military applications, turning us into unwilling organ donors for a program designed to create superhuman weapons. "How many people are down here?"

"Forty-three. I counted them during transport." Lisa pointed down the corridor with a trembling hand. "Most are too drugged to move, but some might be able to walk if we help them."

I thought about Blake's thirty-minute timeline, about the explosives he was planting throughout the research levels, about the impossibility of evacuating forty-three prisoners in the time we had. The math was brutal, but I couldn't live with myself if I didn't try. "We need to get as many people out as possible."

We moved quickly down the corridor, unlocking cells and helping prisoners to their feet. Most were heavily sedated, barely conscious, their abilities suppressed by pharmaceutical cocktails that left them docile and compliant. But a few retained enough awareness to understand we were there to help, and they began assisting with the others.

"There's a man," one prisoner whispered—a woman whose abilities I couldn't identify, though I sensed something powerful sleeping beneath the drug-induced haze. "Down in the special ward. They've been working on him for weeks."

"What special ward?"

"Sublevel four. The screaming comes from down there."

Sublevel four. Blake hadn't mentioned a fourth level in the facility layout. Either his intelligence was incomplete, or this level was so classified it didn't appear on any official blueprints. "How do we get there?"

The woman pointed to a service elevator at the end of the corridor. "Staff only. But if someone's down there..."

I looked at the dozen prisoners we'd managed to revive, at Lisa who could barely stand, at the thirty or so people still locked in their cells. Blake expected me to be heading for the exit by now, but I couldn't leave knowing someone was being tortured one floor below us.

"Lisa, can you get these people to the surface?"

"What about you?"

"I have to check sublevel four."

Lisa grabbed my arm with surprising strength. "Kate, in my dreams—the ones they forced me to have—I saw you down there. I saw you screaming."

"Then I need to make sure that future doesn't come true."

The service elevator required a keycard, which I found on an unconscious guard Blake and I had encountered earlier. As the elevator descended past what should have been the building's foundation, I checked my weapon and tried to prepare myself for whatever horrors awaited in a level that officially didn't exist.

Sublevel four was different from the detention level above—more clinical, with observation windows and sophisticated monitoring equipment that belonged in a high-end medical facility rather than a government research lab. The corridor was lined with what looked like operating theaters, each equipped with restraint systems and neural interface devices that seemed decades ahead of anything I'd seen in FBI technical briefings.

The screaming Lisa had mentioned was coming from the room at the end of the hall.

I approached carefully, weapon drawn, and peered through the observation window. What I saw inside made my stomach lurch and challenged everything I thought I knew about the case.

A man was strapped to an operating table, electrodes covering his skull like a technological crown, while technicians in lab coats monitored readouts on multiple screens. Surgical lights blazed down on the scene, giving everything the sterile intensity of a medical procedure. But it was the man's face that stopped my heart—I recognized him from FBI personnel files.

Agent Marcus Stone. Blake had mentioned him as the killer with the scar, but seeing him here, clearly a victim of the same experiments being performed on others, forced me to reconsider everything we thought we knew about the case.

The door to the operating room was unlocked—an oversight born of arrogance, the assumption that no one unauthorized could possibly reach this level. I slipped inside, keeping to the shadows while the technicians focused on their work, their attention completely absorbed by the readouts and data streams flowing across their monitors.

"Neurological transfer at sixty percent," one was saying, his voice carrying the casual tone of someone discussing routine maintenance. "Subject is showing strong resistance."

"Increase the stimulation. We need to complete the extraction tonight."

I realized what I was witnessing—they were trying to extract Stone's abilities, whatever they were, and transfer them to someone else. The young man I'd seen in my psychometric visions, the killer with cold eyes and a silver knife, wasn't a willing operative. He was a victim whose mind and abilities had been stolen, turned into a weapon against his will.

Moving carefully, I approached the nearest technician from behind and pressed my gun to the base of his skull. "Step away from the equipment."

An alarm began blaring throughout the facility just as I made my presence known.