“I see. You’re only watching, not listening.”But why?And where did Fake Cam go?
I started clicking through the different surveillance videos, deciding to learn more about my fancy little prison.
Dusty hallways.
More corridors lined with rocky siding.
A few random empty labs.
Some holding cells with all-white furniture.
And…
And the Coventus,I thought, bile forming in my throat as a room of kneeling humans appeared.
It’s a classroom,I quickly discerned.Oh, God.The phallic tools in their mouths made it clear what they were learning, just as the vampires observing made no effort to hide their intrigue.
“Fuck,” I breathed, exiting the feed and pulling up a blank hallway instead. “Fuck…”
I didn’t need to see that. Nor did I want to see more. Not yet.
“But at least you didn’t lie about where we were heading,” I muttered, my angry words directed at Mira. She’d said Cam had been found in the catacombs beneath the Vatican. It was an ancient site used by the Blessed Ones to rest while the upper floors were used for…training.
I shuddered.
So how deep underground am I?I wondered, staring at the empty hallway feed. There was really only one way to find out, but I wasn’t ready to review the rest of those live videos yet.
Swallowing, I keyed in another command, looking for more details in the mainframe and searching for any way to break through theno connectionblock.
Maybe a back door to the primary control system…
I typed in a few more strings Damien had taught me, causing a few backend logs to blink across the screen.
Execute, I thought, adding the appropriate string to force the information to appear.
“Log year two, day thirty,” a familiar voice said, making me frown.
Lilith.
I turned down the volume on the computer as the message played on.
“Hello, my liege,” she greeted. “Unfortunately, I don’t have positive news to report today.”
“Liege?” I repeated, my frown deepening.
“The immortal challenge has not gone according to plan,” Lilith continued. “We’d intended for the humans to fight for immortality and reward their efforts, but they are still banding together against our protocols.”
“No shit,” I muttered, recalling the incident.
“The Blood Alliance will be meeting later today to discuss the fate of the games. I suspect we will be voting to terminate all mortal participants,” she concluded.
“Which you did,” I said, glaring at the computer.
“Press the green arrow to proceed to next sequence log,” a robotic voice declared.
“There is no green arrow,” I replied, staring at the coding on the screen. “Hmm.”
I typed in a few commands, trying to make the nextlogplay, but nothing worked. Instead, I ended up in another mainframe littered with thousands of file names.
