Page 99 of Dark Night of the Soul

The facility sat against the night sky. Concrete. Steel. Secrets. Three stories, minimal exterior lighting. One guard visible at the front entrance like Silas’s notes said.

I moved low through the shadows. The perimeter fence was chain-link and easy to scale. No razor wire. They weren’t expecting outside threats. They didn’t know what was coming for them yet.

The service entrance was unmanned. I bypassed the keycard reader in thirty seconds. The lock clicked. I pulled it open, wedged a rock between the jamb and door to keep it open for her.

Inside, the hallway was dimly lit. I moved slow and kept close to the walls where the sensors had blind spots.

The security station was where the floor plan said it’d be. One guard. Bored. Watching monitors. Coffee in hand. He never heard me coming.

The guard went down without a sound. I caught him before he hit the floor, lowered him down silently. Unconscious. No need for bodies yet.

Cameras covering every entrance, every corridor. I watched the monitors for thirty seconds. Empty hallways. No movement. Perfect. I plugged in the device, let it record the current feed, then set it to loop. The cameras would show those same thirty seconds on repeat.

She’d be on her way.

By the time I got to the service entrance, she was stepping through the door I’d left ajar for her. Silent. Efficient. Every movement controlled. She caught my eye, nodded once. Ready.

She fell in step beside me as we moved through the building heading for the research wing. Both moving from memory of the floor plan.

The server room was at the end of the hallway. Locked. I bypassed it in seconds, and she slipped inside. I stood guard at the door. A narrow window ran alongside the doorframe.

It was more like a climate-controlled closet. Rows of equipment racks lined one wall. Servers, switches, storage racks, all emitting a low hum. Organized color-coded cables ran in lines overhead. A backup power unit sat in the corner, green lights blinking.

Easy to defend, hard to escape from.

In a building this advanced, there were no sprinklers. Only fire suppression to protect the equipment.

She didn’t waste time. Moved straight to the first server rack, pulled the knife from her thigh, and drove it into the first hard drive. The crack echoed in the small room. Then the next. Moving down the line. Methodical. Efficient. Destroying data with the same precision they’d programmed into her.

She was on the third rack when I heard footsteps in the hallway.

Guard.

Her head snapped up. She heard the footsteps, too.

“Keep going.”

I stepped into the hall to deal with the guard. He reached for his gun, but I was on him in a second and disarmed him before he could pull it. I smashed his face into the wall. He crumpled to the floor, unconscious.

But while I was distracted, two more slipped past me, heading for the server room. My mistake. A rare one.

Through the window, I saw her head snap toward the door. Saw her pupils dilate—black swallowing violet—as the programming kicked in.

Then she moved.

The crack of bone. A body hitting the floor. Then another.

It was over in seconds.

By the time I reached the doorway, both guards were down. Unconscious. One with his arm bent at an unnatural angle, the other’s face already swelling.

She stood over them, hands in fists, breathing hard. As I watched, the black receded—violet bleeding back through.

She’d accessed it. Used it. Controlled it.

All in the time it took me to drop one guard.

Control wasn’t the same thing as restraint. I’d known that. I’d taught her the difference.