Page 27 of Fated, Allegedly

The holding level is below the laboratory, down a ramp, and it's the part I'll be seeing forever.

There are twenty-two cells. They're not cages, they're modular units with observation ports and card access, built by somebody who read a primate facility manual and improved on it. Eleven are occupied.

Four wolves. I recognize a collar on one of them, four-one-seven's twin, and the animal inside is a woman who can't shift back because they've kept her sedated for weeks and her body's forgotten how. Three from the drowned timber, in tanks with the water at eight degrees and the filtration running off the same doomed emergency circuit as the lights. Two I can't classify at all and won't try. And in the last two units, side by side, a boy of about fourteen and his grandmother, both from Bracken, both perfectly conscious, both watching us come down the ramp.

"Get them out," Nash says.

Caleb's already on the panel. The Marrow Creek three go down the row with a pry bar and a bolt cutter. I go into the tank room, because the aquatic ones are the problem nobody planned for and I'm the only person here who's ever moved a live animal in water.

"Caleb, I need the two stretchers and every tarp we brought. We're not carrying them dry."

"Half a mile? Up a raise?"

"Wet-wrapped, head elevated, gills kept flooded, and we go slow." I'm already soaking tarps in the tank. "If we run, they die."

The grandmother helps. She's seventy, she's been in a box for days, and she gets down on her knees on wet concrete and holds a tarp corner while I wrap somebody's daughter in it.

"You're the state girl," she says.

"I am."

"Bracken owes Stillwater nothing." She grips the tarp tighter. "I'll be revising that."

Eighteen minutes gone. The air's begun to change, not dramatic, just a thickness at the back of the throat, and my headlamp beam has picked up a haze it didn't have on the way in. Nash appears at my shoulder while I'm coupling a stretcher.

"Caleb takes the captives out now. You go with them."

"No."

"Erin…"

"There's a data room off the laboratory level. I saw the door on the way past, card reader, HVAC penetration, that's a server room and it's the one place in this facility where the why lives." I straighten up. "You want to walk out with these people and no evidence? Federal agencies don't prosecute on eyewitnesses who legally don't exist. They prosecute on documents."

His jaw works. Behind him the Marrow Creek wolves are shouldering the first stretcher.

"Six minutes," he says. "Then I carry you out, and I won't ask."

"Six minutes."

The card reader is dead with the power down, which is the single mercy of the night. The door's on a fail-secure strike, so Nash takes the hinges instead, one shoulder, twice, and the frame comes out the block wall in a shower of grout.

Inside there's a two-rack cage on UPS, three drives blinking, and a workstation still logged in because somebody left in a hurry when the fans died.

I get four minutes on that machine. There's no time to read. I pull the drives, two hot-swap and one internal I take with a screwdriver and no elegance whatsoever, and while they're spinning down I photograph a directory tree on screen, and it makes my hands go cold.

The top level isn't organized by species. It's organized by phase. Phase I runs 2011 to 2019 and it's labeled characterization. Phase II is 2019 to now, and the folder name is SUBSTRATE ACQUISITION, and every one source code I found on the dewar logs sits inside it.

And there's a Phase III. Created eight months ago. Encrypted, and by the file sizes it's the biggest thing on the machine, and the label somebody typed on it is SCALE.

"Erin." Nash in the doorway. "Now."

"Got it. Go."

We come up the raise with the aquatics on stretchers and the air behind us going bad, and the last hundred feet are the worst feet of my life.

The boy from Bracken climbs it himself and then reaches back down for his grandmother. Caleb takes the top end of my stretcher when my arms give out and doesn't say a word about it. Nash is last up, and when he rises out of the pipe into the alders the sky is going gray in the east.

I sit down in the wet moss with three encrypted drives in a dry bag against my chest and shake for a while.