The door opened into a corridor that made my stomach turn. It was completely at odds with the ruins we'd just walked through. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting everything in harsh white light. The walls were pristine white tile. The floors were polished to a mirror shine. The ventilation system hummed around us. The entire place made what we were about to face surreal.
"This is a working laboratory," Aidon said quietly. "She's been actively using this place."
"Heat signatures are concentrated at the end of the main corridor," Jean-Marc's voice crackled through my earbud. "That's where you'll find her."
We moved deeper, and every room we passed made my heart race. I kept expecting her to jump out and set the Thessmark on us. Instead, all we encountered were examination tables and surgical equipment arranged on sterile trays.
Bile burned the back of my throat when we entered a room with containment cribs. Their bars were reinforced with runes I recognized from the Corvus facility. My boots stopped moving. I couldn't make them go forward.
"She kept kids here." My words were distant, like someone else was speaking. "Recently. This isn't just a hideout or research archive. She's been actively harvesting children in this facility."
"We’ve known she was a filthy bitch,” Nana countered as she continued to the next room. “That’s why we’re here to make her pay.”
She found file cabinets and yanked open drawers with enough force to make them rattle off their tracks. Manila folders spilled out like accusations. Moving closer, each one was labeled with a date and patient number. Of course, she didn’t use names. That would make them too personal.
She grabbed one at random and flipped it open. Her jaw tightened as her eyes scanned the contents. "They’re dead," she whispered, scanning the notes inside. "Holy shit, she harvested a three-month-old fire elemental two weeks ago!"
Rage flashed through me as my gaze skipped to Stella, who was going through another drawer. "All of the kids were dead within forty-eight hours of admission."
"She's been running her own operation parallel to Corvus." My mind worked through why she would do that. "But why? Because she didn’t want to piss off the Thessmark? What do they give her?"
“I don’t care,” Aidon barked. “None of them will live to continue theirwork.”
We reached the stairs to the main lab in silence. There were no words for what we'd just discovered. No way to process the scope of Taverner's systematic murder of children.
Tarja's voice cut through my numbness. "She knows you're there. She's been watching since you entered."
I looked up and spotted the security cameras in every corner. Their lenses tracked our movement. We'd been on screen this whole time. “They’re following our movements,” I pointed out.
“And waiting to catch us off-guard,” Stella agreed.
Double-wide doors of reinforced steel stood before us. The locks disengaged with a cheerful beep before we reached them. The doors swung open automatically. “Oh, look. She’s inviting us in for tea,” Nana snarked as she cocked her shotgun.
On the other side, the lab was enormous. Easily the size of a football field. Equipment lined the walls in neat rows.Workstations with computers and various apparatus. Storage units that held the gods knew what. And at the center, mounted on a new altar of black stone, was another Scythe. It looked identical to the one we'd destroyed at Corvus.
"No," I whispered. "We destroyed it!"
"You destroyed one," Taverner's voice echoed from speakers around the room. It was amplified and distorted. "Did you think I'd rely on a single artifact? I've been making them for decades."
She stepped out from behind the altar, flanked by six Thessmark whose gray skin gleamed under the fluorescent lights. Parker stood beside her. His face was twisted in a smirk that made me want to set him on fire.
The Scythe on this altar wasn't as old as the first one. The wood looked newer, less weathered. But it pulsed with the same corrupted orange light. Before I could even feel the drain on my power, my magic produced a protection bubble.
Taverner walked slowly around the altar like a professor giving a lecture. "Where I perfect my research. I've been testing new harvesting methods and refining the extraction process. Corvus was always meant to be the public face. Legitimate medical care to give me access to subjects. But this?" She gestured around the lab. "This is where the real work happens."
She walked to a wall of glass containers I hadn't noticed before. Disgust washed through me as she trailed fingers over them. Each one held swirling essence in various colors and represented a child who would never grow up, never laugh, and never have a chance at life.
"This was my insurance policy," she said, turning to look directly at me. "If Corvus fell, I'd still have my work here. And be able to bring my girls back. And now you've delivered yourselves to me." Her smile was gentle, almost maternal. "I really should thank you. Destroying the facility beneath Corvusactually helped. I have no more oversight and no longer have to pretend to follow ethical guidelines."
The Thessmark moved to surround us. We were outnumbered, exhausted, and facing another artifact designed to steal life itself. Tarja's voice cut through my rising panic. "Listen to me. Your power is running low. You can't fight like you normally would."
"I know," I sent back, watching the Thessmark close in.
"Then you need to fight smarter. Use their arrogance against them," she sent back.
She was right. Taverner was confident, showing off, wanting us to know how thoroughly we'd failed. That arrogance was her weakness. A crack in her armor we could exploit.
Aidon's hand found mine, his grip warm. "Together?"
