Top Secret Underground Facility Went Dark. Something Below Sub-Level 9 Is Climbing Up

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2:09Before we begin, Galactic Horrors is now on Patreon. Get daily stories in one place with no ads and no interruptions. Link is in the description or search Galactic Horrors on Patreon. Now let's begin the transmission. The guard waiting for me at the bottom of the shaft would not come closer than 40 feet and he asked me not to move my arms. He was standing in the middle of the sub-level one corridor with his boots flat on the concrete. In his right hand he held a wooden dowel about four feet long, the kind sold for closet rods. It extended straight out in front of him. A dried chicken feather was taped to the end of it. He kept its tip about two inches ahead of his own toes. Investigator Callahan, he said, Ronnie Culp, keep your arms still and don't point at anything. Your elbows stay where they are. You're fine where you're standing. You already rode down through the worst of it without knowing, so congratulations on that. I stayed where the lift

3:11had put me. The cage door was open behind me. Above at the top of the old or shaft a civilian name Bill was already walking back to his truck, having asked me only whether I minded the cold. Behind Bill, in a quonset hut 200 yards from the winch house, 11 men in grey coveralls were sitting on folding chairs with their gear between their feet, waiting for a phone call that only I could make. That was the arrangement. The agency had lost contact with deep storage facility cardwell for 19 hours. Communications resumed with a single landline call from the vault commander, saying the doors were gone, the staff was down to four, containment was intact, and he needed iron. Then he hung up. Nobody in the office of doctrinal compliance had ever heard those sentences in that order. They sent me down to find out which of them was a lie. I looked past Culp. The sub-level one blast door was folded back behind him, which was wrong on its own.

4:11Those hydraulically driven three-tun slabs were rated to hold against a shaped charge. The steel had bent against the tunnel wall along a crease that ran corner to corner, like the lid of a can somebody had peeled with a thumb. Beyond it, the corridor ran straight for 80 yards under caged lights, with cell doors every 20 feet on both sides. The cell doors were gone too. From the lift, everyone was visible still occupied. Nothing had come out. You're trying to make it add up, Culp said. Everybody does that right there. Doors gone, holdings home. It doesn't fit. I'll save you the trouble. It won't make sense until the commander shows you something, so let's get you to him. He shifted his weight without lifting a heel. You've done a pressure breach, right? You were vaulted before you were compliance. It's in your file. We read your file this morning to see if you were going to shoot us. Not yet, I said. That's what he said, you'd say. I had done a pressure breach. Six years as a guard at a facility in

5:15Nevada, one bad week when an interior seal failed on a lower level. The pressure breach shuffled had been drilled into me. Heels stayed down while each foot slid forward. Lifting one gave the pressure something to pull. I had not thought about that movement in a decade. Culp was doing it now. Heels down, he said. Two inches. Keep your arms dead at your sides. Don't swing or raise them. You'll want to catch yourself on something. Don't reach. Anything you can catch yourself on. We haven't tested. For what? Come with me. I'll show you. I advanced two inches at a time. My boots scraping. The carbine on my shoulder shifted with the first slide. The heavy pneumatic thing they issued compliance investigators for exactly one job. It's bolt cylinder resting against my spine like a second backbone. The diagnostic optic hung at my right hip. At the left was the landline handset that had ridden down in the lift with me. It's copper wire spooled up the shaft to the

6:20surface. That wire was the only reason anyone up top would learn what happened to me. Culp walked backward ahead of me, which I would not have believed until I saw it. He tested the floor behind his own heels, sweeping the rod low, then slid back into the space he had tested. When we reached the first doorway on the left, an open utility closet, he halted. Watch the feather. He extended it through the doorframe. Slowly, the feather crossed the threshold. Its tip was no longer there. There was no sound or movement in the air. The last inch of wood simply ended. The severed piece, feather still taped to it, fell inside the closet without any noise at all, as if it had dropped onto cotton. The cut end remaining in his hand was flat as a machined surface. He bent at the knees, keeping his heels down, then drew a chalk stub from his breast pocket to draw an X on the concrete at the threshold. X marks were everywhere underfoot

7:23once I noticed them. Some were smeared nearly white from boots. Others were sharp drawn that morning. That one we knew about, he said. That's the one I show everybody. The unknown ones are what get you. He straightened. The gun on your back. Is it the one that decides? I did not answer. He nodded as if I had. We took the detour because the maintenance stare, four minutes on any other day, was marked with an X across the whole width of its landing. The detour lasted most of an hour at that pace. Boots scraping. The cells passed on both sides with their doors gone and their holdings inside. Most of them I did not look at. In 114 something with a head the size of a bushel basket was pressed against the back of the cell. Its eyes all of them tracked us the whole way. The holding held to the back wall. It tried the first day, Cope said. It smart enough not to try twice. Why not? He didn't

8:23answer that. He was watching the feather. The guard station was on sub-level two at the junction where the or shafts secondary stare descended. We reached it as the vent cycled. A change in the air I felt in my ears before I heard the big fans in the ceiling ducts change pitch. Cope paused to wait for the cycle to finish before he moved again. When I asked why he said, old habit, which was not an answer. The commander met us at the station door, Warren Hodge, mid-50s, a career voltman, thick through the shoulders, the kind of face that had spent 20 years underground and stopped expecting weather. His hands were gray to the wrists, the color of pencil-led ground into skin. The creases of his knuckles were darker where the dust had settled deepest. He saw me notice. A handshake would have required moving his arm, so he left his hands where they were. His gaze went to the carbine on my shoulder before it reached my face. Did they send you down with

9:29the gun that decides? He said. He would not tell me about the lines until I had seen the sector three lock. He said I would believe him faster. Marcus Whitlow led us. I had not met him yet. He had been at the far end of the room when we entered, seated with his back to a locker, splicing a new feather onto a dowel with electrical tape. He was a narrow man in his thirties with a shaved head. When Hodge said his name, Whitlow finished the tape before pocketing the roll. He rose, then left through the station door ahead of us without saying a word. He tested every step, then swept the air at shoulder height as well as the floor. Once he raised it straight above his head until the feather brushed the caged light. Hodge followed Whitlow. I followed Hodge. His shuffle was better than culps, practiced beyond what four days should have allowed. The iron dust on his hands had gotten into the cuffs of his uniform

10:30into the seams. Where he had rubbed his neck, there was a print of four fingers. We descended one level, Whitlow sweeping each step before he committed a heel to it. Sub-level three was colder than two. Water ran down the seam between the concrete lining and the old rock in a sheet the width of my palm. The corridor here had fewer cells and more storage rooms. Beyond them, a hall ended at the sector three decontamination lock. Anyone coming up from four was supposed to stand inside that two-door steel chamber for a full cycle before being let through. The outer lock door was open, undamaged, unlike the folded blast door upstairs. It was as if somebody had simply walked through it. 15 feet before the lock the route made a hard right. Whitlow halted before the corner, staying on our side of it. He turned toward Hodge. Hodge nodded. Whitlow slid to the inside of the turn so I could see past him.

11:34Ray Clark was hanging at the corner. Only the front of him remained there. The face from about the temples forward. Plus the front of his throat, a mask about an inch and a half thick. A strip of his uniform collar had snagged on a protruding bolt in the corner trim, holding the fragment upright at head height. The cut plane was toward me. Everything behind the plane of the cut was gone. Brain, the back of the skull, the spine, all of it on the other side of the corner where I could not see. The exposed cross section had dried in the cold to the color of a brick. The tongue was visible in section beside the two white rings of the windpipe. Thin pale bands marked the vocal cords which remained attached at the front. They hung with the rest of the fragment. He ran. Hodge said, first minute. He rounded this corner at a sprint headed for the lock. The rest of him is on the far side. Nobody's been down there since.

12:34The vent cycled. I felt it in my ears. The big fans, two levels up, changed pitch. The air shifted through the open lock towards sub-level four below. Raise vocal cords moved. They fluttered against the plane where the air was piling up on our side of the cut. The throat made a sound. Half a syllable. Something between ear and whore, breathy. An exhalation given shaped by tissue that no longer belonged to a person. The sound lasted through the pressure shift. The fans settled. The cords hung still. The passage fell quiet. Nobody spoke. Whitlow kept his face to the wall while Hodge watched Ray. You'll want to wait for the next one. Hodge said, it gets clearer. It did not get clearer. We waited through another cycle. Four of us counting Ray. The throat gave the same half syllable for exactly the same duration. The fourth day of it.

13:35Hodge listened with his head angled toward Ray. Whitlow did not listen at all. I unhooked the optic case from my hip. The orthogonal monocular is the agency's name for it. Guards call it the crank. It is a coffee-canned-sized cylinder of brass set into dark bakelite. A folding hand crank sits on one side. The glass eyepiece is opposite. Inside is a prism suspended in treated heavy water, so that light passing through it comes out polarised. In a direction the agency's physicist described with a word I have never understood. The prism aligns after 30 seconds of cranking. More than a few seconds is dangerous. I cranked while watching Ray then put my eye to the glass. The corridor went gray. The caged lights becoming pale coins. Whitlow and Hodge became gray figures. Ray was a fragment of a man. A line ran across the corner from floor to ceiling, cutting through Ray at the plane of the wound.

14:38The line was white, brighter than anything I have ever seen. Its brightness occupied a plane too exact for me to perceive any thickness. The brightness ran through Ray's face at the exact plane of the cut, continued through the ceiling, then vanished into the floor as if the concrete were not there. There were two more. One at knee height, across the threshold of the lock itself, angled slightly downward towards the far side. One along the ceiling above the route we had just walked, running lengthwise a foot below the lights, straight back the way we had come. We had passed under it for 40 feet. Whitlow had tested above his head once. He had missed it by inches, or he had found it without saying. The pain arrived on the third second. Heat built behind the eye until a bright ring formed, then broke into a jagged arc crawling in from the edge of vision. It resembled a bad migraine aura, except I could feel my retina cooking.

15:42I pulled the eyepiece away at four seconds, color returned. The arc stayed in my left eye, a broken sore tooth of light drifting across Hodges' chest. There's one on the ceiling, I said. Coming in, length of the corridor, a foot under the lights. Whitlow looked up. I found the end of it Tuesday. He said. Didn't know it ran the whole way. There's a previous crank in a drawer upstairs. Hodges said. Investigator marshes. He was here the year before I was. Nobody's been able to look through that thing longer than four seconds, so nobody knows the full pattern through the building. We know what the feathers have found. I blinked the aura towards the edge. What did the doors? Hodges did not answer that. He said. How much iron did they send down with you? No iron came down with me. Then we have three days. What did the doors come under? He was looking at Ray. The vents were going to cycle again soon. I could feel the air beginning to

16:49lean. I'll show you the ledger before the delivery. He said. Seeing it first makes what happens downstairs easier to believe. We headed back. Whitlow led again. On sub-level two, while Hodges was still on the treads below us, Whitlow paused with the feather resting against the wall to say the only thing he said in the whole of that hour. The doors hadn't been broken from either side. You'll go looking for a charge or pressure anything that could have done it. There's nothing. He inched it forward. They simply ceased to be closed. Losing weight can feel like a roller coaster, full of ups, downs, and being thrown for loops, like when someone brings donuts into the office, or your kids' dino nuggets start giving you that look again. That's why there's noom. They combine GLP ones to quiet the food noise, with healthy habits that help you keep it quiet, even if you get off the meds. Their program is designed to make weight loss a smooth ride, helping you understand what drives you, so you can build better habits to

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19:09The guard station at Cardwell had been built for a crew of 12. A duty desk stood beside a bank of dead monitors. The break room was behind a waste high partition. Six cuts lined the back. There was a safe and a coffee machine that still worked. The vending unit had died some time before the breach, judging from the layer of dust on the candy. A magazine on the break room table was three years old. Somebody had taped a chess problem to a locker, white to mate in two. Three wrong answers underneath were written in different hands. Kenny Deel sat on the second cot from the end with a dowl across his knees. He was the fourth survivor, 23 according to the roster, with a kid's face and a guard's hands. He did not look up when we entered. He had drawn a chalk square around his cot, about a foot out from the frame on every side. While I watched, he leaned forward to sweep the feather slowly along the full inside perimeter before sitting back.

20:12He does that every hour, Colp said, coming around the desk. Nobody's been near his cot, but he does it anyway. He hasn't said anything in two days. Don't bother. He's not being rude. He's just gone somewhere. He'll come back or he won't. Hodg removed a book from the safe. It was a maintenance log. The green cloth bound kind, the agency has used since the fifties. He laid it open on the duty desk. Somebody had drawn columns in pen. Date. Weight of iron in pounds. Delivered by. Lines requested. Lines confirmed by feather. A signature column ran along the right edge. The first entry was four days old. Forty pounds. Delivered by Hodg. Lines requested. One stairwell four to three full width. Confirmed. Yes, Whitlow feather. There were thirty-one entries. Hodg had signed everyone. I traced down the page with a finger, not touching. He watched it. At the signature column, he kept

21:17silent. He put his hands flat on the desk. Tell me from the start, I said. He tried. The sequence started wrong. He had replayed the breach too many times to know where the beginning belonged. Culp kept interrupting him to correct details that did not matter. Between them, I got this. Four days ago, at nine forty in the morning, every door in Cardwell opened. Nine levels. Blast doors, cell doors, locked doors, even the coffee cupboard. The doors bore no sign of blast or force. The hydraulics on the big doors remained armed afterward. Pressure held while the dead monitors still reported the doors shut. Hodg had been standing at the desk. Ray Clark had been on three. Two other guards Nelson and Hannover had been on four. Ray was dead inside sixty seconds. Nelson and Hannover lasted longer. The holdings were coming up the stairs. Culp said.

22:18Everything on four that could walk was headed for us. Ronnie Culp is about to die on a Tuesday as what I'm thinking. Then the tall one comes up first. The tall one had been in cell six forty. The manifest listed it as a class two humanoid dormant acquired in 1978 from a coal seam in West Virginia. It climbed the stairwell ahead of the others ahead of the things that were following it. Ignoring the men, it halted at the top of the stairs on three. One hand settled on the steel rail. The rail changed color. Hodg said. Right under its hand, then it collapsed to ash, falling in a heap. The thing turned toward the stairs, toward what was coming up behind it. One finger drew across the air. He did not move his arm to show me. He moved one dust coated finger, an inch. What was following it crossed in two halves? Culp said. Top half kept coming for about a step.

23:18It wanted iron. Hodg said. It never spoke. The thing headed to the maintenance cage where the rebar's kept. Its gaze moved from the rebar to me. For most of the next hour, it waited there. During that time, it cut two more lines because more things were coming up. I gave it forty pounds of rebar. That's the first entry. And article four, I said. I know what it says. Article four of agency doctrine is one sentence. No employee shall treat, trade, or converse with a non-human holding. The penalty is purge. The agency has a whole office to enforce it. I work there. Every vault known to have bargained with a holding has eventually been lost. Every bargain turned out to be the holdings first move. I had never heard of an exception. I knew that only meant no one had ever written one down. Where does the iron come from now? I asked. The cage only held forty pounds. We stripped the

24:21maintenance stores. Then the handrails on two and three. After that, we started on rebar where the concrete was already cracked. The door hinges were next. Hodge nodded toward the station door. It hung by one hinge. It's how much we can carry to four in a night without cutting ourselves. Whitlow found the last of the loose rebar this morning. After that, we're chipping. Three days. Less if it needs to make more lines. The ones on the west side of five are getting tested. There's something down there that leans on them. The landline rang. An actual bell rang inside the handset on my hip. Everybody in the room turned toward it except deal. I answered. Deputy director Alan Speer was calling from the winchhouse where the other end of my wire surfaced. He has run compliance for eleven years. Status, Callahan. Give me what you have. I'm on two. The station is intact with four staff alive. One commander and three guards.

25:23Every level I've seen has compromised doors. Containment is holding. Holding how? There's a lethal planar effect. Static as far as I can tell. The staff mapped it. I watched Hodge while I said it. He kept watching the ledger. Are the staff compliant? I waited a second before answering. Speer did not press. He said, I need the report by O-600. The team is fed and rested. Do you have enough film for the ledger? He had said the ledger. I had not mentioned a ledger. Yes sir. O-600, Callahan. He hung up. I set the handset back on my hip. I did not look at the clock because I already knew it was a little after seven in the evening. Culp had been chewing on something the whole call. He said it now, leaning against the dead vending machine with his dowel across his shoulders like a yoke. His arms still. Serious question. Does article four apply if the thing asked first?

26:24Because we didn't go down there looking to bargain. It climbed up here to put the offer on the table. Legally speaking, we didn't treat. We were treated at. It applies to men. I said. Culp laughed. He knew it was the wrong moment. Yet kept going anyway. Deal stayed on his cot. I want to see the delivery. I said. Hodge shot the ledger. It comes at the cycle after midnight, he said. Four landing. We'll leave at 11 so we can get there. Whitlow taped two new feathers while we waited. Hodge headed to the maintenance cage at 10. He returned with two lengths of rebar in a canvas sling worn across his chest. His arms hung straight down while the strap bore the weight so his hands would not have to swing. We left at 11 with Whitlow ahead and Hodge carrying the rebar behind him. I followed Hodge with the carbine slung across my back, not in my hands. I had thought about that for most of an hour, carrying it meant holding my arms up,

27:27which would tempt me to move them. I did not know the corridors well enough to survive that temptation. The route to four followed the secondary stair past three. We passed the turn toward the lock where Ray hung, then the bare surface where the handrail had been. It held only a row of bolt holes. Below three, the stripped right side of the route was bare concrete. Wet old rock boarded the left. The caged lights were fewer here. Their glow yellower. Whitlow tested every tread. Some treads he tested twice. Two-thirds of the way down he paused, motionless for a while. What did you find? Hodge said. Rechecking 19. He swept the 19th tread low, then raised the feather through the space above it. It was fine last night and it's fine now. I still don't like it. We continued. The four landing was a square platform, about 15 feet on a side, with steps entering from above before continuing toward five on the far side. A corridor led

28:29off towards sector four's cells. The opening was chalked with an X across its full width. The descent had no X. A chalk line had been drawn across it, about a third of the way from the down flight. Hodge set the sling there, unhooking the strap from his shoulder without raising his elbows. Then he shuffled backward until he was against the rock beside me. Then we waited. The vent cycled once. The landing was empty. Whitlow waited at the top step. Hodge waited with his hands open at his sides. I had my back against the rock Whitlow had swept. The carbine pinned between my spine and the rock. If anything climbed those stairs that was not the tall one, the shuffle would not be fast enough. It arrived at the second cycle. I heard it first in Whitlow. He stiffened. The sound came next from the stairs, like a dry broom on concrete. The sound advanced one tread at a time. The creature rose from below into the yellow light.

29:31It was tall enough that it had to bend at the neck under the ceiling, which was nine feet. Its body was a man's body drawn out too long, with shoulders too narrow for its height. The hips were equally slight. Its arms hung past where a man's knees would be. Its skin was the dead flat white of chalk, dry enough to powder. Where its shoulder brushed the rock coming around the last turn, it left a pale smear on the stone in the shape of a shoulder. Its face had all the expected parts set in the expected places, each slightly too far apart. It had neither eyebrows nor fingernails. Its fingers ended in black blunt nubs, dull as slag, heavy looking, as if the last joint of each finger had been dipped in something that set. It studied the sling for a long moment. When it finally looked up, its gaze passed hodge before meeting mine. The one wet thing about it. It walked to the chalk line, dropping into a crouch that folded its body nearly

30:33in half before picking up one length of rebar. It did not eat the iron. I had been told that much but had not believed them. It laid the bar along the inside of its left forearm from wrist to elbow. Its right hand pressed it there. The bar shifted from black brown to dull gray along the entire length at once. The metal paled. It held its shape until the creature lifted its right hand and crumbled. Ash fell from its arm, collecting around its feet until three pounds of rebar had become a spill of gray powder. Underneath, where the bar had lain, its skin had blackened. A web of veins showed through the white black red, branching up the forearm toward the elbow, then passed it, climbing the upper arm as I watched, reaching the shoulder, spreading into the chest. Its skin was thin enough at the chest that light passed through it. I could see behind the skin in the space where a man's lungs would be, a darkness that was not organs. It resolved into bars set at angles around a central

31:37hollow, too regular and too numerous to be ribs. I took it for a skeleton while knowing that no skeleton had ever resembled that. Sect 5, West Corridor, Hodg said, something's leaning on the line there so we want another one ten feet back if you can. The creature straightened toward the descent. With its right arm extended, it drew one blunt finger across the air at shoulder height, left to right, like crossing out a word. The air showed no visible change, Whitlow would go down tomorrow to test it. It turned back to the second bar, still lying at the chalk line. I spoke to it. Speaking to it was itself the violation. I asked anyway because this was the only thing in Cardwell that might know what had happened. What are you? It looked at me. Have the men above sent more iron down the shaft? It said. Its voice was recognisably human. They haven't, I said. It bent to pick up the second bar without waiting to be given it, pressing the bar to its other

32:39forearm. Ash fell as the veins climbed, it ducked under the ceiling and went back down. The dry broom sound receded until we could not hear it. Hodg let his shoulders drop half an inch. It always goes down, Whitlow said. He was looking at the stairwell. It never comes past this level. Everything that got out is on four, five, six. There's nothing down there it needs to guard us from. He inched it toward the top step. I don't know what it does down there. I unhooked the crank from my hip, telling myself it was to check the floor before we walked it, which was true. For 30 seconds I cranked while watching the stairwell. I put it to my eye. The square lost its colour. The lines the guards knew were there, the one across that opening, floor to ceiling. One behind us that Whitlow had found on the first night, a foot out from the rock, which we had all been standing eight inches from for an hour. A new line crossed the descent of few treads below the chalk mark,

33:40white as a struck match and exactly level. Nobody had asked for it. The stairs below were empty. It faced down toward five and six. Beyond them lay the lower levels, including whatever the manifest said was under seven that nobody at Cardwell had clearance to visit. The aura formed on the third second. I lowered the glass. Hodg was watching me. He had seen my face while the crank was up. His mouth opened as if to ask, but he turned toward the stairwell instead, below the chalk line where the creature had gone. It's clear the way back. Whitlow said, we started back up with him leading. Hodg lifted the empty sling by its strap without raising his elbows. He slid his heels onto the first tread behind him. I followed the aura drifting in my left eye, my boots scraping in short slides. I won in the morning. I had photographed every page of the ledger twice with the film spear had asked about. I inventored what metal remained. The hinge at the station door, whatever Whitlow

34:43could chip out of the walls before his arms gave out. I wrote the remaining supply in my notebook, then did my interviews because the report has a section for interviews whether or not anyone talks. Kenny Deal did not talk. He answered me, which was different. When I asked him where he had been when the doors opened, he told me which squares from his cot to the coffee machine was safe. When I asked whether he had carried rebar to four, he told me the square in front of the vending machine had been fine on Wednesday, but he had not tested it since. He met my gaze while he said it. I asked Whitlow about the testing system, whether it was complete. He led me to the station door. There he put his dowel through the doorway, sweeping once at ankle height before bringing it back. Hey all Kelly Clarkson here with Wayfair. You know my favorite compliment during the holidays? Your house feels so cozy. That's when I know everyone's comfortable enough to kick off their shoes,

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36:47That's tested, he said. Only that arc. He held it still. We only trust the floor we've tested. The corridors we don't use could be lines from end to end floor to ceiling. We'd never know. He studied the cut end of the dowel. We've lost 11 feathers to lines we didn't know about in four days, including places we walk. I asked him whether the tall one had ever cut a line where a man was standing. Not yet, he said. He returned to his locker. The holdings register was in the safe under the ledger. It is a bound book, one page per cell, updated by hand at every transfer. I opened to the last section. Sub-level 9 had one page. The designation at the top was Cardwell Zero. Beneath it someone had written, acquired with the property. Below that were two pages worth of black bars. Redactions so old the ink had bled into the paper fibers. The schedule

37:47at the bottom of the page which for every other cell listed a make, a rating, a last inspection, said only, sealed by Phil 1961. Someone had poured concrete down the shaft 60 years ago rather than in stall one. Whitlow had come up behind me. He read the page over my shoulder. Then why does the stairwell go all the way down? He said. I had no answer for that. I shut the register. Before I write a report I checked the weapon. That was written procedure when I had never skipped. I unslung the carbine, cleared the bolt and seated it. I raised it to my shoulder, citing down the length of the room to confirm the sites were true. Hodg was at the far end pouring coffee. The sites found him. The safety clicked off. It is a small sound. A steel pin dropping out of a notch inside the receiver. In the room it was as loud as the landline bell.

38:48He heard it with his back to me but did not turn around. He finished pouring and replaced the pot on the warmer. His hands came to rest on the counter with his back still to me. The purity nine is issued to compliance investigators for one job. It fires depleted uranium flaschets on compressed gas, avoiding the spark or magnetic signature that might wake a holding. The transponder in the grip is key to agency biometrics through a mechanism I have never had explained to me in words I could repeat. What I know is what every investigator knows. If it is pointed at an employee who has broken doctrine, the safety releases on its own. If it is pointed at an employee who has not, the seer locks. The weapon cannot be made to fire at a clean man. I have tested that myself once on a range with a supervisor as the target. The trigger would not move a hair. I swung the sites from cope on the far cot to Whitlow at his locker.

39:51The safety was off for both. When I brought the sites onto deal, the seer locked. I felt it lock through the grip, a solid stop. He had been on sub-level one when the bargain was made. He had neither signed the ledger nor carried iron to the landing. For four days he had kept article four by sitting on a cot inside a chalk square. The gun had no opinion about that at all. I lowered the carbine. The safety stayed off. It never resets on its own. Hodge finally turned toward me. He had his coffee. He came halfway across the room. The cup held at his hip without swinging. You want to know what I told them on day two when I figured out you'd be coming. He nodded at the weapon. It doesn't say I'm wrong. It says I'm guilty. Those were the same thing right up until Tuesday morning. Culp Rose read showing under his stubble. His arms hung dead at his sides.

40:51You ever seen a purge team work with feathers? He said. Serious question again. Those eleven men in coveralls don't shuffle. They come down that shaft at a walk. They come through the entrance at a walk. Then what? How far do they get before somebody hits one? He turned toward deal. Can he don't listen to this? Deal kept sweeping the marked perimeter without looking at the safety. I've seen a purge team work. I said, how did it go? I did not say what I had seen. I set the carbine on the duty desk with the safety off. The bolt was seated. The muzzle pointed toward the wall. I want to go below the trade point. I said to Hodge. No one goes below four. The tall one does. Hodge shifted his gaze from the coffee to the gun on the desk with its safety off. He set the cup down. Whitlow, get the man some feathers, he said. I continued alone from the four landing. Hodge had said he would not come but followed as far as the landing anyway.

41:55At the chalk line he left the canvas sling with another load of iron. He waited at the top of the downstairs with a spare radio handset while Whitlow returned to the guard post to keep the landline. Before I descended, Hodge wedged the radio's transmit key open so Whitlow could hear the landing from above. Hodge kept silent when I stepped over the trade boundary. He kept looking into the descent below it, where he knew another line waited because he had watched me hours earlier. I stepped past the first tread, then the second, both held. The line I had seen through the crank lay lower in the stairwell. I did not use the crank to check. I had decided on the landing to ration the glass four seconds at a time, using it only when the test could not answer what I needed. Five was a sealed sector. Nobody had been down here since the first hour. The cells were open on both sides of the corridor branching from the stairwell. I stopped at its mouth. The marks ended at

42:58the stairwell edge. Beyond that was untested floor across the full width. I cranked the optic, looking for four seconds. The corridor was a thicket. Lines crossed it at every height, at every angle, some parallel, some cutting through each other so that the space was divided into rooms the size of a phone booth, the size of a shoe box, cells within cells. Halfway down, something was moving in one of them. It had been a holding once, whole. It had been cut more than once on the first day. The parts left together on my side of the lines were still moving along the length of their box, pressing against the plane. It stopped when I did. It moved to the line nearest me. I lowered the glass with the aura crawling in from the left. In color the passage was empty under yellow lights. I could hear it though. A dry sliding, the sound of a body against a surface that gave nothing back. I kept the steps through six. Seven was different. The temperature

44:05dropped hard between six and seven, ten degrees within a single level so that the water on the walls had frozen in sheets. The lining ended halfway down. Below that, the walls were the mine, bare rock, the old drill mark still in it. The guard's markings ended above this level. They had never come this far. Past seven, darkness swallowed the steps. I used the flashlight from my belt, but the beam did not reach the bottom. I cranked the optic to look. Lines lay across the steps one above another, level, each are tread or two below the last. Their bright edges stacked beyond the flashlights reach. I saw eleven before the aura formed. There were more below. Everyone faced down, though the descent below was empty. Nobody had asked for barriers there. The creature had spent its supply on this night after night while the guards thought it was only going home. The aura

45:06did not clear when I lowered the glass. The sawtooth held across the left third of my vision. I descended anyway, feather first. It found none. I do not know how I passed the lines I had seen. Maybe they were spaced so that a man stepping straight down passed between them. Maybe the feather missed them, which meant I should have been dead within a few steps. I was not. I continued. The creature was at the eight landing. It was sitting. I had not seen it sit. Its body folded against the rock, knees near its chin. The arms wrapped its shins while its chalk white head bent beneath the ceiling even seated. Its whole chest was vained black. The metal from hours earlier had spread through it to the throat and temples. The face above me was white with a black tracery under the skin, like frost on a window if frost were the color of dried blood. It had been waiting. It watched me come down the last steps as if I were

46:11late. You are the one who asks. It said. That's my job. Then ask. After a hundred interviews, I usually began with something small. No harmless question occurred to me. What opened the doors? It did not answer at once. Its blunt fingertips moved against its own shins. The black nubs clicking where its hands met. They were asked. It said. Everything here was. Four days ago, the whole place was spoken to at once. The men heard it. So did the things in the cells. A door has a small mind made of switches. It was told to open. It agreed. What did that? What is below? You mean Cardwell Zero? It reaches up, it said. It has done so before, before men were here. There had been no holdings then. Now there is a building full of minds set in rows above it, one over the other like rungs. It climbed. The fingertips fell still. It found me on the sixth

47:12rung. I know doors. I have thought about doors for a long time in a small room. It liked that in me. It began to use it. What did it want from you? To go up. The creature looked upward, passed me toward the stacked lines. Through me. I am the one thing here that understands the way out. I was the easiest path, so I made the lines to keep the others from carrying it. If it enters me again, whatever follows will have nowhere to go. It turned back toward me. I cannot make a line through myself. That is the one place, so I build around it. I raised the crank. The prism was still aligned from seven or near enough, so I put it to my eye to look at its chest. I lasted two seconds. Behind the thin skin in the hollow where a man keeps his lungs, there was iron. Black bars met at exact angles without visible seams. They arched over the space where its organs sat like the inside of a bell tower seen from the floor. At the lower edge,

48:17where a man's ribs would end, the framework remained open. The newest bars there were the color of the rebar from hours earlier, still blackening. The structure inside its chest was a cage. When I lowered the glass, it had put one hand flat over its chest. The men above, it said. What will they do? I told it what waited above, including the team in the hut and the report I owed them. I also told it what the weapon did when I pointed it at Hodge. It considered that. How much iron do they carry, it said. Not enough, I said. Far short. I asked when the reach would come again. It did not know. The first time the lines had held the others, but it had felt itself opening, like a door hearing its name. The cage was meant to be finished before that happened again. It stopped answering. I asked about West Virginia in the small room. It turned

49:17toward the wall. I climbed back through the gaps. At seven, I paused to put the flashlight on the rock. I waited for the aura in my left eye to clear. It did not. The true version took me most of an hour to write longhand at the duty desk on the agency's report form. Its numbered sections covered the nature of the security failure, staff conduct and recommendation. I wrote what had happened. The signed ledger, the trade point, the ash article four. In sections six, I wrote the word purge, then studied it for a while. The vents stopped. They were midway through a cycle. Their pitch still climbing, when the room fell quieter than I had heard it since I arrived. Whitlow looked up from the locker. Every dowel in the room fell. His dowel hit first, followed by the other two. All three were whole. They had simply been released, clattering onto the concrete in the silence. Colp was looking at his arms. They had come up from his sides. Both

50:23were bent at the elbow, hands open as if to catch something. He stared at them as if they belonged to someone else. Then it came through me. A direction entered me, up. The command was already in the muscles of my legs before I understood that it was not mine. My heels lifted. I put them down. It took everything I had to put them down. Deal stood up off his cot. First time in two days. Who says Halloween only lasts one day? With Wayfair, one night of Halloween becomes a whole season at home. From larger than life yard decor and moody lighting to festive accents for every room in the house. Wayfair has what you need to make Halloween feel like magic all in one place. Because the best Halloween memories aren't made in just one night. They're made all season long. Shop Halloween decor now at Wayfair.com. I'm Jake Stauk, co-founder and CEO of Serval. We built Serval to automate the IT work that

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52:32in convenient day and night packs. One all in one product designed to make supplementation easier. The day pack supports cognition, focus, and cellular energy production. At night, the night pack helps you wind down and supports a calm, relaxed state. Less time managing your supplements, more support for your day and night. Shop total human now at oennit.com. He stood inside his marked square with his arms at his sides. His face was turned toward the exit. Hodge had both dust coated hands on the desk edge. Culp ran. His body moved first. He was already running when surprise reached him out of the station into sub-level two at a dead sprint, arms swinging, boots hitting the floor heel toe like a man running for a bus. Culp made it about 40 feet down the east run before anyone could reach him. The line caught him at the hip. There was no sound from the line itself. His upper half kept going on the momentum of

53:34the run, arms still swinging, then pitched forward face first across the floor. His legs stayed upright for a moment beneath empty air, the cut plane of the pelvis level as a tabletop. Then the knees gave. The lower half folded onto the concrete beside the smear of what had been above it. The plane itself was dry. Blood spread everywhere beyond it. The direction left my legs. The fans resumed mid-cycle, climbing to the top of their pitch before settling, as if the interruption had never happened. Somewhere two levels down, the pressure shifted through the sector three lock. Raised throat said it's half-syllable to the empty passage on schedule. For a moment none of us moved. Without the dowels, none of us safely could. All of hours were on the floor. The concrete separating us from them had taken a thousand passes. Now useless. Culp knew the

54:35facilities tested routes better than any of us. He had even been the one to show me the teaching plane upstairs. That still could not tell us whether the thing that killed him had been waiting there for days or had appeared during the reach. It wasdeal who picked up a dowel. He bent inside his chalk square to lift his own from the floor. Then he began testing toward the threshold in short slides. When he reached Culp's, he picked that up too. He swept ahead with both, one high, one low. At the doorway he paused to look down the east run at the two pieces of Ronnie Culp. Then he said the first words I had heard from him. Was that one there before? Or did it just get made? None of us knew. Hodg was still holding the desk. I picked up the crank. I put it to my eye without cranking because the prison was still charged enough and aimed the glass down the east run. The line was there at hip height, spanning the east run where Culp had crossed it. It was the same

55:39white as every other one. Nobody had tested that stretch because the east run led only to a sealed descent. I lowered the glass. My left eye half aura while my right remained clear. The crank doesn't show age, I said. Deal nodded and returned to his cot with both. The radio on Hodg's belt spoke. Whitlow's spare handset was still keyed open where Hodg had left it at four. What came through was the landing itself carrying a dry sliding, the broom on concrete, climbing. Then the sound ended at the trade point. Over the radio there was no way to tell whether the creature had taken the iron. No receding sound followed. The landline rang. I picked it up. Spears voice answered. Callahan, it's 0510. I felt nothing up here. Did something happen down there? The lift cable moved. Yes, sir. Is containment holding? Culp's legs lay in the east run.

56:42The true report sat on the desk with the word purge in section 6. For now, I said. I want the report. I considered what I had. The true version killed three men and stopped the iron deliveries. It sent 11 men down a shaft at a walk into a building where the floors were made of razors nobody could see. Any survivors would live long enough to stop the iron before the cage was finished. The barriers below seven would be the last ones ever made. Whatever was down there could climb the rungs again until it found a tall white door on the sixth one with an unfinished cage in its chest. The false version had to fit a form the agency already new. Doctrine has no category for the holding asked first. It recognizes human misconduct or unauthorized experiments. Spear would need one responsible name plus a body to go with it. He already knew about the ledger. A report with no body would bring a second investigator. I picked up the carbine. The safety was still off from hours earlier. I slung it with the ledger

57:46trapped against my chest under the strap. Hodg came without being asked. He put his coffee down beside the report and slid his heels toward the exit. Whitlow used a screwdriver on the last station hinge. He worked the two pins out of it, a pound of iron between them. All that was left on two that could be carried without a chisel. Deal stayed with Culp's remains, working outward in a widening square so they could be moved. We descended with Whitlow ahead and Hodg behind him. The pins in his shirt pocket. I followed with the gun. It was standing at the chalk line at four exactly where the radio had gone silent. The canvas sling lay empty beside it. Bent under the ceiling, its veins ran black to the hairline. It looked past Whitlow to Hodg before settling on me. I took the pins from Hodg myself. At the chalk line, I set them down on the concrete before sliding back. Second, violation. I had already conversed with it by supplying the iron myself I had violated article four every way it named before two witnesses with a ledger upstairs.

58:52The creature crouched over the pins. It picked them up and pressed them into its palm. Ash. It did not bother to stand up again afterward. If the men above came down, I said, would they be enough iron? The creature crouched there. It's hand flat on the concrete beside the ash. I turned to Hodg. Stand where you stood in the break room, I said. By the wall, where the coffee was. He understood before I finished the sentence. Without argument, he shuffled to the wall beside the downstairs and put his back to it. His gaze moved from the ash to the gun. The report says I ordered them, he said. Ronnie and Whitlow carried because I made them, so it stops caring what they did. The gun may not care about the report. I don't know what the paper changes. Neither do I, righted anyway. I raised the carbine and cited Hodg. The safety was already off. It had never gone back on. I kept silent because procedure required it. Anything else

59:52would have been for me, not Hodg. I pulled. The purity nine fires with a sound like a cold breath let out through a pipe, one short chuff of compressed gas. The fleshet passed through the breastbone where the sights were. Warren Hodg sat down against the wall with his hands open on his thighs. He did not get up. Whitlow said nothing. He watched the ash, then bent to pick up Hodg's dowl from where it had fallen. His own had been cut short two nights before. Hodg's was longer. The creature had moved. It had crossed the chalk line on its knees. Now it crouched beside Hodg's body with one of his hands held palm up. It set one blunt fingertip against the palm against the iron dust that would not wash out holding it there. The residue paled. It lifted from the skin as ash, a thin drift of it. The palm underneath was pink, a hand I had never seen. The creature turned it over and did the other side. I wrote the report on the back pages of the ledger, standing, with

1:00:56the book held against the rock. Under section one I wrote, unauthorized experimental containment procedure initiated by Commander Warren Hodg in response to a total door failure of unknown cause using ions stripped from the facility without authorization. Under section two, lethal planar effect throughout the facility, origin unknown static mapped by staff, survivable with the procedure described in the attached. Under section four, Commander Hodg purged in the course of investigation under article four. Remaining staff cooperative and compliant, guard Ronald Kulp killed by planar effect prior to purge. Under section five, holding 640 unaccounted for, presumed destroyed in the breach. Under section six, recommend the facility be maintained at reduced staffing pending survey with a standing requisition of ion to replace stripped material, 40 pounds per day to begin. Recommend the investigating officer remain in place pending replacement. I knew there would be no replacement. Nobody in compliance volunteers for a hole in the

1:02:00ground. I picked up the landline, I read it to spear exactly as written. He did not interrupt. When I finished, he was quiet on the wire. I stood there with a dead commander at my feet while the white creature crouched over him cleaning his hands. Two questions he said, can the planar effect be weaponized? No sir, your eyes will they hold? I did not answer that. He let it go. The requisition is approved, he said. 40 pounds. The lift will bring it down at noon. The team stands down at O600, send the ledger up with the lift. Good work, Callahan. He hung up. I set the handset on my hip before I slung the carbine I checked it. That is procedure. I have never skipped it. I put the safety back on. After clearing the bolt, I seated it. I raised the weapon to my shoulder to sight across the open space, confirming the sights were true. At the far end, the four-blast door was folded back against the rock, matching the one on sub-level one.

1:03:02Years of guards' shoulders had buffed its steel surface to something near a mirror. The sights found the door. In it, at the far end, I could see a man with a gun to his shoulder looking back at me. The safety clicked off. I lowered the carbine, setting it beside Hodg with the muzzle toward the rock. I bent to lift the empty canvas sling by its strap, then settled it across my chest so my arms would not have to swing. Whitlow held out his shortened dowel with a fresh feather on it. I took it while he kept Hodg's longer dowel. Together we turned toward the stairs. The creature was still crouched behind us at the chalk line. One hand rested on the concrete as it waited for noon. We started up with our heels down, scraping forward two inches at a time. I had spent most of my adult life believing that rules existed because somebody somewhere had already survived the mistake I was about to make. That was the comfort of doctrine. You did not need to understand why a thing was forbidden. Understanding came later, usually in a report written by somebody

1:04:07who had been fortunate enough to remain alive. Cardwell had taught me the other possibility. Sometimes a rule survived longer than the reason for it. Sometimes the machine kept deciding who was guilty after guilt had stopped meaning what the machine thought it meant. Hodg had understood that before I did. The carbine had understood nothing at all. My heels scraped another two inches across the concrete. Below us, something older than the agency was trying to climb towards daylight. Between it and the surface, sat a creature we had imprisoned for nearly 50 years, building a cage inside its own body out of iron we fed it. By noon I would help carry down another 40 pounds. I did not know whether that made me a guard, a traitor, or simply the next entry in Hodg's ledger. For the moment, the distinction seemed less important than keeping my heels on the floor.