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“How long do they last?” I asked.
The woman had stopped in the doorway of the lab. “About a year.”
“You sell these?”
She nodded. “Garvey does.”
“Who is Garvey?”
“The CFO.”
Interesting cult they had.
I moved to the next table. A big plastic bin filled with pearls of all sizes and colors. Golden, white, pink, purple, black…They came in a variety of shapes. Some were oval, some were round, others had ridges. A few were teardrops. A small fortune.
I glanced at her.
“The kids get these,” she said. “When Garvey can convince Aaron to let a couple of them forage on the ocean floor. Aaron hates it, but Garvey says we need the money.”
She didn’t sound happy about it. Her eyes were haunted, too.
I moved to the next table. Slow cookers. Four of them. Wrapped in chains, padlocked, and secured to metal rings bolted to the floor. And warded. Good wards, too. Hmm.
“What’s in these?”
The woman’s face jerked.
“Who set these wards?”
“Aaron,” she said barely above a whisper.
Aaron clearly knew what he was doing.
I walked over to the large trashcan with a sealed lid, unlocked the latch, and looked inside. Chunks of a glass sponge, bright yellow when it was in the water, and now dull.
Oh.
“Who has Huntington’s?” I asked.
She took a deep breath. “My daughter. She’s only 16.”
Back when Curran and I had run the Mercenary Guild in Atlanta, one of the mercs, a veteran, had a son who had developed the symptoms of Huntington’s disease. Certain types of glass sponges contained magically potent bacteria that slowed the progression of disease and sometimes stopped it completely. The extraction process was complex and incredibly expensive. These sponges only grew in cold, deep water. We had gotten ours from Canada.
The slow cookers were bacteria vats, fed and protected by the wards.
“Is this why you’re here?”
She started crying. I let her sob. There was nothing to be said. She was here for her daughter, she knew it was wrong, it ripped her apart, but still she stayed because she couldn’t let her daughter die. She was desperate and trapped. That didn’t excuse anything she had done.
“And the others?” I asked.
“It’s just four families,” she managed. “Us, the Allens, the Lipnicks, and the Rios. Rodney Allens’ wife has MS, Denis Lipnick has Huntington’s, and…”
“I get it,” I told her.
“They give us medicine every month. Just enough.”
Cults exploited people, and those who got sucked in, especially on the bottom layer of the hierarchy, weren’t usually bad people. They were looking for something better, a little bit of hope, or a way to deal with overwhelming things in their life. Instead, they ended up as free labor, brainwashed and used, their vulnerabilities and fears molded into a leash that held them in place.
There was no better leash than saving the life of someone you loved. It made people do terrible things.
“Let’s go,” I told her.
We crossed the length of the hallway and came to a metal bulkhead door that looked newer than the walls around it. The woman cranked the wheel, strained, and swung the door open. In front of us a narrow metal bridge spanned a flooded space four feet above the sea. The water glowed with blues and yellows, lit up by a school of tiny jellyfish. Under the jellyfish, about six or seven feet down, something slithered. It was long and sinuous, thicker than me and butter-yellow. I couldn’t tell if it was a mass of tentacles, some prehistoric marine worm, or a knot of giant underwater snakes. It had no eyes or mouth. Just length.
The woman swallowed and started across the metal bridge, taking tiny little steps.
The thing under the water kept sliding, moving and twisting slowly. It filled the entire floor of the chamber, wall to wall.
Another hesitant step. Another.
“Stop,” I told her.
She froze, clutching at the rails.
“How much further?”
“Through that door and straight down that hallway. We are not allowed to go past the red archway.”
“Come back.”
She backed up, covering the three feet of bridge separating her from me in a flash.
“If I were you, I would go and get the other families and then I would look for something I could use to cut metal chains.”
She stared at me, her face blank.
“The wards on those vats are direct-line wards. They will disappear when Aaron dies. I would get those cutters ready and wait by the vats until the wards disappeared.”
Her eyes went wide.
“Then I would take these vats and hop a leyline to Atlanta. I would take them to Biohazard and give them to Luther Dillon, and I would tell him that Kate sent me.”
She stared at me.
“It’s not for you. You know what you are. It’s for your daughter. Deputy Director Luther Dillon. Go.”
She took off back the way we came at a near run.
I once had done a horrible thing to save Julie’s life. It had gone against everything I stood for, and I’d still done it. I had watched her in a coma as she had lain there, dying second by second. Fading. It had been a kind of madness where nothing except saving her mattered.
