“Sedated,” Evelyn says, her voice clinical as she checks the girl’s pupils with a penlight. “Tramadol and lorazepam. They can walk, but they won’t fight. They’ve been taught not to.”
Kiera pushes past me, her boots silent on the concrete. She crouches in front of the girl, reaching out slowly. The girl flinches—not from themovement, but from the contact, as if human touch were a voltage she wasn’t wired to handle anymore. “Hey,” Kiera whispers softly. Her voice cracks, but she steadies it. “I’m Kiera. I was here. Ward C, 2007. Do you understand?” The girl blinks. Then, slowly, she lifts her left hand. Four parallel scars run across her wrist. Self-inflicted, or something worse. She touches Kiera’s cheek with a finger that trembles. Almost as if to say, same song, different verse.
“Open the others now,” I order, dragging Dr. Reyes forward by her collar. She was limp, playing possum, but I could feel the tension in her neck, the calculation. “Now. Or I start shooting kneecaps, and you carry them.”
Instead, Evelyn moves to the second cell, then the third. The locks disengage with heavy, hydraulic sighs. The children emerge like ghosts. Some holding hands—pairs already bound by whatever hell they’d shared in the dark. A boy with a shaved head and burn marks on his palms. Twin girls who moved in perfect, eerie synchronization. One room holds six babies. The older children fill the narrow corridor, a silent, shambling mass of bruised knees and hospital gowns. No one cries besides the babies. That was the worst part. The silence of children who had learned that crying brought punishment. My gaze drops to the smallest ones—six infants still whimpering in their cribs. How the hell are we supposed to carry them out? I glance at Kiera, her eyes meeting mine with the same question.
Kiera’s eyes flick to the infants, then back to me. Her posture straightens. “We carry them,” she says. “Two per person if we have to. Strap them to our chest with the vest. We move fast, and we don’t stop until we’re out. No one gets left behind.”
“Service tunnel.” Evelyn presses her palm against a panel at the end of the hall I’d assumed was solid rock. It slides open, revealing a narrow passage of rough-hewn stone, older than the facility itself, smelling of wet earth and moss. “It leads to the river. Two miles. Cold, but it’s outside the blast radius.”
I grab her arm and spin her away from the children, my grip iron-tight. “What?”
Evelyn’s eyes meet mine without flinching. “Wade built this place to disappear,” she says with a clinically cold voice. “If unauthorized forces breach the facility, the incinerator doesn’t just burn the evidence; it destroys it. It ignites the oxygen tanks in the medical wing. The mountain becomes a crematorium in forty-five seconds.”
“And you were going to tell us thiswhen?” Kiera snarls, her weapon swinging toward her mom.
“When you were clear of the door!” Evelyn snaps, her composure fracturing. “I needed you here. Both of you. The end of the tunnel requires two biometrics to open from the inside. Wade’s design, in case he needed to escape with a hostage. I have his DNA on file, encoded into my prints. But I need a second living subject from the program to trigger the release. A ward resident. That’s one of you two.”
The vault door behind us shudders. A muffled,thump-thump-thumpagainst the steel. “They’re cutting through,” I say. The math was simple. Two miles of tunnel. Seventeen kids. One wounded doctor. Two armed women who wanted to kill each other. And forty-five seconds until the mountain turned to fire. Kiera and I rip the tactical vests off the older children and strap the smallest ones to our chests with straps and belts, tight against our body armor. The infants are light but fragile, their bodieslimp and warm against us. The older kids shuffle forward on their own, silent and obedient, eyes wide but unfocused. “Move,” I commanded, shoving Reyes toward the tunnel entrance. “Now. Kiera, take point. Mrs. Hawthorne…”
“Don’t call me that,” Evelyn hisses, already herding the first set of children down the dark maw of the passage.
“...you’re in the middle with the kids. I’ll guard the rear.”
Kiera doesn’t argue. She grabs the scarred girl’s hand, then reaches for another child—a boy, maybe ten, who stared at me with eyes too blue, too familiar —and pushes past her mom.
The tunnel is narrow and claustrophobic, with a low ceiling forcing me to hunch. The children moved in a silent, stumbling river ahead of me, guided by Evelyn’s harsh whispers and Kiera’s gentler urgings. Dr. Reyes stumbles, and I jerk her upright, my grip bruising.
“You should have let me negotiate,” she gasps, her breath sour with panic. “The mercenaries work for the board. They would have taken the children alive. For inventory.”
“They work for whoever pays,” I growl, my grip on her arm tightening. “And I don’t negotiate with fucking anyone.”
The blast hits behind us. Even two hundred yards deep in the stone, the concussion feels like a physical blow. A wave of superheated air roars down the tunnel, scorching the back of my neck and tossing the smaller children like leaves. I threw myself over Dr. Reyes—careful not to smash the babies strapped to my chest—not to save her, but to use her body as a shield for the children in front of us against the debris raining from theceiling. Concrete dust chokes the air, turning the world white and suffocating.
The roar dies into a hellish wind. The light from the facility behind us is severed. Plunging us into darkness. “Kiera!” I shout, coughing as my ears ring.
“Here!” Kiera’s voice cuts through the dark, raw and fierce. A beam of light clicks on her phone. She’s on her knees, shielding four of the children with her body. Blood runs from a cut on her forehead, black in the LED glow. “All accounted for.”
Evelyn’s voice drifts from further ahead, steady and unbothered by the near-death. “The collapse sealed the entrance behind us. We have to go forward. No turning back.” I drag Reyes to her feet. She’s limping now, genuinely hurt.Good.
“Sterling,” Kiera calls out.
I find her hand in the dark and squeeze once. “I’m here, Thorn.”
Cam’s voice crackles through my earpiece, breaking through the jamming now that we’re clear of the facility’s shielding. “Sterling! Fuck, I thought you were dead. The thermal signature just went nuclear up there. What’s your status?”
“Moving,” I whisper, low enough that Reyes can’t overhear. “Seventeen kids. One hostile. A guide. Exiting via the river, two miles north.”
“Negative,” Cam shoots down the idea. “The river exit is compromised. Satellite feed shows heat signatures there, too.”
I stop. The children bump into me, a chain reaction of small, frightened bodies. Kiera turns, her eyes meeting mine in the dim light. She heard. “Then we go up,” she says. “Somewhere else. Anywhere else.”
“There is nowhere else,” Reyes wheezes, leaning against the wall. She’s smiling now, blood on her teeth. “The tunnel floods in twenty minutes. The mercenaries own the river. And the ventilation shaft ahead leads directly back into the fire. You’re in a coffin, and you brought the children into it with you.”
Evelyn steps forward, her flashlight beam cutting up the wall. It catches a rusted, oval-shaped hatch sealed with a wheel-lock like a submarine door. Above it, stenciled letters, faded but legible:DISPOSAL UNIT 7. “There’s one other way,” Evelyn says, her voice grim. She points the light higher, tracking a vertical shaft that disappears into perfect blackness. Iron rungs, rust-eaten but present, lined the concrete tube. Three hundred feet straight up. The chute.
Dr. Reyes laughs—wet and ugly, blood flying out. “You’ll never get them up there. Not seventeen children. Not with the rungs rusted through in half the places. Not before the smoke fills this tunnel and cooks us all alive.”