Chapter 16

Someone was waiting for us.

He stood between us and the portal like he'd been there for hours. Patient. Unhurried. An older man, maybe sixty, with the kind of weathered face that suggested decades of experience rather than frailty. He wore a simple gray suit, no tie, nothing that marked him as security or staff. Just a man who belonged here in a way we obviously didn't.

I tried to read him and hit a wall.

Not absence, exactly. More like smoothness. The same practiced blankness I'd felt from Cross, but deeper. Older. Like trying to read a stone or a mountain. Whatever this man felt, whatever he thought, he'd spent a lifetime learning to keep it locked away from people like me.

"You found your way here," he said. Not a question. His voice was calm, almost conversational. "That took courage. Or stupidity. At your age, they're often the same thing."

Dao shifted his weight, ready to fight. I felt the anger radiating off him, looking for a target. Thaddeus moved to shield Lucia, who was barely conscious between him and Sasha. Her head lolled against Thaddeus's shoulder, eyes half-open but seeing nothing.

Marcus stood frozen. Still processing what he'd seen on the wall. His great-aunt's name carved in stone. Sixty years of family lies crumbling around him.

I was the only one who could talk. The others were looking to me, waiting.

"Who are you?"

"Someone who's been doing this longer than you've been alive." He glanced at Lucia, and something flickered across his face. Not guilt. Assessment. The way you'd look at damaged inventory to determine if it was worth salvaging. "She'll recover, mostly. You got to her in time. Another few weeks and there wouldn't have been anything left to save."

"You're just going to let us take her?"

"I'm going to let you walk out of here." He said it like he was offering a gift. "All of you. With your evidence and your rescued student and your righteous anger. You can go back to Mudwick and tell everyone what you found."

Something was wrong. This was too easy. We'd broken into a secret facility, found evidence of systematic extraction, rescued a student from the chairs. And this man was going to just let us leave?

"Why?"

He almost smiled. "Because Miriam wants you to."

The name landed like a slap. Dao's hands clenched into fists. Sasha drew a sharp breath.

"You think you discovered this place on your own?" The man shook his head, almost pitying. "Miriam's been doing this for years. Finding students, feeding them breadcrumbs, letting them feel like heroes. Every time someone stumbles onto a facility like this, every time they rescue a victim or expose an operation, she gains another recruit. Another angry young practitioner convinced they're fighting the good fight."

"We're not working for Miriam."

"Of course you're not. That's not how she operates." He looked at each of us in turn. Taking our measure. "She doesn't recruit directly. She manipulates. Points people in directions. Lets them think they're acting on their own initiative."

His eyes settled on Marcus.

"Your grandmother. The warnings she gave you. The fragments about a hidden portal near the eastern foundations. Where do you think that information came from originally?"

Marcus's face went pale.

"The Holloways were investigators once. Good ones. The best your generation of families ever produced. They got closer to Miriam than almost anyone." The man's voice was almost gentle now. The kindness of someone delivering a killing blow. "And she destroyed them for it. Not all at once. That would have been too obvious, too likely to create martyrs. She hollowed them out over generations. Took their money first. Then their reputation. Then their place in society. Left them with nothing but old stories and a dying woman's warnings."

"That's not—" Marcus started.

"Your great-aunt Eleanor." The man cut him off. "She was the last one who tried to stop Miriam directly. Twenty-three years old. Brilliant. Brave. Everything a Holloway was supposed to be. You saw her name on the wall. You saw the date. 1962. That's what Miriam does to people who get in her way. That's what she's been doing for longer than any of you have been alive."

I watched Marcus crumble.

It happened in stages. First the denial, the desperate clinging to the story he'd built. Then the cracks spreading as the new information settled into place. His grandmother's warnings. Her insistence on staying small, staying quiet, not drawing attention. The way she'd reacted when he'd told her about Mudwick. The fear underneath her encouragement.

She'd known. All along, she'd known what had happened to her sister. Known who was responsible. And she'd spent sixty years too terrified to do anything about it.

"My family," Marcus said. His voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. "We were supposed to be the ones who fought back. Who asked questions. Who didn't let things go."

"You were. Once." The man almost sounded sympathetic. "Before Miriam taught you what happens to people who fight her."

Marcus's legs buckled. Thaddeus moved to catch him, but his hands were full with Lucia. Dao got there first, grabbed Marcus's arm, kept him upright.

"He's lying," Dao said. But his voice wasn't certain anymore.

The man turned those unreadable eyes on me. "Am I? You're the reader. Tell me what I'm feeling."

I pushed harder. Threw everything I had at his defenses, looking for a crack. Some hint of deception. Some tell that would prove he was manipulating us.

Nothing. Just that smooth, practiced absence. A wall built over decades and reinforced every day.

But when I pushed past him, trying to find something to read, I felt the room instead.

It crashed over me without warning. The portal chamber and everything it held. Not just the terror of students who'd passed through, but the structure itself. The stone remembering every transit. The portal pulsing with hunger that went back decades. The accumulated weight of every lie told in this room, every life traded, every choice made in the name of necessity.

I staggered. Sasha caught my arm.

"Eli?"

"I'm—" The room kept pressing in. The walls. The floor. The portal most of all, that hungry shimmer that felt like all the Signs converging, feeding into something I couldn't see. "There's so much here. Not just people. Everything."

The man watched me with new interest. "Unusual. Most readers your age can't feel places at all. Especially places that have been hollowed."

"I shouldn't be able to." The words came out before I could stop them. "I read people. Not places."

"And yet." He tilted his head. "You felt this room the moment you pushed past my shields. Felt the portal. Felt what it's connected to." Something shifted in his expression. Not surprise, exactly. Recognition. "You're not what they think you are. Not just a people-reader at all."

I didn't respond. Couldn't. The room was still pressing against me, showing me things I didn't want to see. Sixty years of students walking through that portal. The ones who came back empty. The ones who didn't come back at all.

"We're leaving," I said. "Now."

"Of course you are." He stepped back slightly, but didn't clear the path completely. "But first, a question. If you can feel this room, can you feel what's behind that wall?" He gestured to a section of stone that looked no different from any other. "There's a door there. Hidden. Old. Part of the original infrastructure, before Miriam expanded the facility. Can you feel it?"

I didn't want to reach out again. Didn't want to feel more of this place than I already had. But something in his tone made me try.

And there it was. A door. Hidden in the stone, invisible to the eye, but present to whatever new sense was opening in me. I could feel the hinges. The lock. The corridor beyond, leading somewhere I couldn't quite perceive.

"Yes," I said. "I feel it."

"Interesting." The man's eyes were sharp now. Calculating. "A reader who can sense hidden architecture. Who can feel what places are hiding, not just people." He almost smiled. "When you're ready to understand what you're becoming, I can help with that too."

"I don't want your help."

"Not yet." He finally stepped aside, leaving the path to the portal clear. "But the offer stands."

"And what about us?" I asked. "What happens when we walk out of here?"

"You go back to school. Finish your year. Graduate, eventually." He looked at me specifically, and something shifted in his expression. Interest. Recognition. The way you'd look at a tool you hadn't expected to find. "You have a gift. Reading people the way you do. That's rare. Valuable. Most readers work with places because it's easier. Safer. Less invasive. But you read people. Feel what they're hiding. Know when they're lying even when they've convinced themselves they're telling the truth."

He took a step toward me. Not threatening. Just closing the distance.

"When you're ready to stop playing hero, there's a place for you. A real place. Not scholarship housing. Not scraps from old families. Not the charity cases they let in to feel good about themselves. Real power. Real purpose. Work that matters."

The offer hung in the air between us.

I could feel the others watching me. Dao's anger, Sasha's fear, Thaddeus's desperate hope that I'd say the right thing. Marcus was barely there, still drowning in the ruins of his family history.

And underneath all of that, I felt something else. The part of me that had spent years being the freak. The weird kid who couldn't touch anyone without knowing too much. The one who'd learned to keep his distance because getting close only led to pain.

This man was offering me a world where that wasn't a curse. Where reading people wasn't a violation but a valued skill. Where I wouldn't have to apologize for seeing too much or hide what I could do.

Where I'd belong.

I thought about Shelby, back in Ohio, still texting me questions I couldn't answer. are you safe? she'd asked last week, and I'd typed yes without even thinking about it. A lie so automatic it didn't feel like lying anymore. She was probably asleep right now, dreaming normal dreams, having no idea that a world like this existed. That her friend was standing in a facility where students were drained like batteries while a man in a gray suit offered him a job.

Everyone back home was asleep. My dad in our small house. Shelby in her room with the purple hoodie probably thrown over her desk chair. A whole world that kept turning without knowing any of this was real.

If I died here, they'd never know what happened. Never understand why I stopped answering.

Then I looked at Lucia. At her hollow eyes and her wasted body and the thin thread of light that was all she had left. At the students we'd left behind in those chairs, too far gone to save.

"No."

The man nodded like he'd expected that answer. "The offer stands. When you've seen more of what Miriam does, when you understand what you're really fighting, you might feel differently."

"I won't."

"You'd be surprised what you can talk yourself into when the alternative is worse." He stepped back, leaving the portal completely clear. "Go. Take your evidence. Tell your story. And when nothing changes, when you realize how big this really is, remember that we tried to help you understand."

Nobody moved.

"Go," he said again. Softer this time, almost kind. "Before I change my mind about letting you walk out of here."

Dao moved first. Grabbed Lucia's arm and started pulling her toward the portal. Thaddeus helped, taking her other side. Sasha followed, phone clutched tight, not looking back.

Marcus still hadn't moved.

He was staring at the wall where Eleanor's name was carved. At the list of the hollowed. At sixty years of evidence that his family had been fighting and losing long before he was born.

"Marcus." I grabbed his wrist. "We have to go."

"She knew." His voice was distant. Broken in a way that went deeper than words. "My grandmother. She spent her whole life knowing this was here. Knowing what happened to her sister. Knowing who did it. And she never told anyone. Never fought back. Just stayed quiet and stayed safe and let them think the Holloways had learned their lesson."

"Marcus, we need to leave."

"I used to think she was weak." He was crying now. Tears running down his face without any change in his expression. "All those years, watching her hide. Watching her let people disrespect our family. I thought she was just broken. Scared. That she'd given up."

"We can talk about this later."

"She wasn't weak." He finally looked at me. His eyes were wet but something terrible had settled into them. A certainty that was going to change him. "She was smart. She knew exactly what would happen if she tried to fight Miriam again. She knew because she'd watched it happen to her sister. And she decided to survive instead."

I pulled him toward the portal. He came, but his feet moved like they belonged to someone else. Like his body was cooperating with the escape while his mind stayed behind, trapped in this place with his great-aunt's name.

The man watched us go. Still patient. Still unhurried. Like he knew exactly what would happen next and wasn't worried about any of it.

I pushed Marcus through the portal ahead of me. Felt the hungry pull of the transit, stronger now, more desperate. The between-space pressed against us, and for a moment I felt those watching things clearly. Not malevolent, exactly. Just hungry. Just waiting for someone to slip, to falter, to give them an opening.

Then I stepped through myself, and the facility disappeared behind me.

We emerged in Mudwick's sublevel three gasping and shaking.

The transit back had been worse than the trip there. Rougher. More hostile. Like whatever lived in the between-space knew we were carrying something we shouldn't have. Knew we'd seen something we weren't supposed to see. I could still feel them scratching at the edges of my awareness, those watchers in the dark, disappointed that we'd made it through.

Lucia was unconscious. Completely limp now, her breathing shallow, her skin pale and cold. Whatever energy had kept her alert in the facility had drained away during the transit.

Sasha was crying. Silent tears streaming down her face while she checked her phone, making sure the photos had survived. They had. Dozens of images documenting everything we'd seen.

Thaddeus kept saying "we did it, we did it" like a prayer he didn't believe. His hands were shaking so badly he could barely keep his grip on Lucia.

Dao was already checking the corridor, making sure we were alone. His anger had burned down to something colder now. More focused. He wanted a target, and Miriam had just been handed to him on a silver platter.

Marcus sat on the stone floor with his back against the wall and didn't move. His eyes were open but he wasn't seeing the sublevel. He was somewhere else entirely. Sixty years in the past, maybe. Watching his great-aunt walk into a trap she didn't know was waiting for her.

"We need to get out of here," Sasha said, wiping her eyes. "Get Lucia somewhere safe. Figure out who to tell."

"Tell them what?" Dao's voice was harsh. "That we found a facility run by the most wanted practitioner in a generation? That everything the school warned us about is true?"

"It's not—" I started.

"Did you see that place?" He spun on me, all that cold anger suddenly pointed in my direction. "Did you feel those walls? She hollowed the whole thing so nobody could read what happened there. Just like she hollows the places she destroys. Just like the sublevels here. It's her signature. It's what she does."

"Something doesn't fit."

"What doesn't fit?" He stepped closer. "We found exactly what Cross warned us about. Miriam targeting vulnerable students. Miriam using forbidden techniques. Miriam destroying everyone who gets in her way." He gestured at Marcus. "His family tried to stop her and she erased them. Made them into nothing. Left them with a dying old woman and a grandson who didn't even know what he was fighting."

Marcus flinched but didn't respond.

"The facility was too clean," I said. "Too organized. Did that look like one rogue practitioner's operation to you? There were staff. Systems. Procedures. That takes infrastructure. Money. Support."

"She's had decades to build it."

"And nobody noticed? Nobody tried to stop her before now?"

Dao's face hardened. "Maybe they did. Maybe they're all on that wall."

I wanted to argue more. Something about the man's certainty still bothered me. The way he'd talked about the people in charge already knowing. The way he'd said this was preferable to the alternative. He hadn't sounded like a radical defending his rogue leader. He'd sounded like a bureaucrat explaining policy.

And there was what he'd said about me. About feeling the hidden door. About being something more than a people-reader. He'd looked at me like he recognized what I was becoming, even though I didn't.

But I couldn't articulate it. Every piece of evidence fit the story we'd been told. The hollowed walls. The forbidden symbols. The man's calm explanation of how Miriam worked. Even Marcus's family history, rewritten to cast her as the destroyer who'd been hunting them for generations.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Cross had been telling the truth all along. Maybe we'd walked into exactly what she'd warned me about, and I was too stubborn to see it.

"We need to move," Thaddeus said. His voice had steadied, found its footing in practical concerns. "Lucia needs help. Real help. Medical attention, if we can figure out how to explain what happened to her. We can argue about what it all means later."

He was right. Whatever the truth was, it could wait. Right now we had an unconscious girl and evidence of something horrible and a long climb back to the surface.

I crouched beside Marcus. "Hey. We have to go."

He looked at me but I wasn't sure he was seeing me.

"My grandmother," he said quietly. "She's gone. She died Christmas Eve." His voice cracked. "I can't ask her anything else. I'll never know what else she knew about Miriam. What else she never told me. What really happened to Eleanor."

"I'm sorry."

"What if this was the last mistake I ever get to make?" His voice was barely a whisper. "What if they come for us the way they came for my family?"

"Then at least you made it trying to help someone." I grabbed his arm, pulled him to his feet. "Come on. Lucia needs you to keep moving."

He leaned on me more than he should have needed to. Whatever the facility had cost the rest of us, it had cost Marcus more. His whole identity had been built on being a Holloway. On the legacy of investigators and questioners and people who didn't let things go. Now that identity was twisted into something else. A family that had been hunted. Destroyed. Taught to be afraid.

We started up the stairs. Dao and Thaddeus supporting Lucia between them. Sasha walking backward half the time, checking behind us for pursuit. Marcus moving like a sleepwalker, feet finding the steps through muscle memory while his mind stayed somewhere far away.

And me, carrying a feeling I couldn't name. The sense that we'd found what we were looking for and it still wasn't the truth.

The man's offer echoed in my head. When you're ready to stop playing hero, there's a place for you.

He'd sounded so certain. Not like someone trying to seduce me to the dark side. Like someone who genuinely believed I'd come around eventually. Who knew something about me that I didn't know about myself.

A reader who can sense hidden architecture. Who can feel what places are hiding, not just people.

Like he was waiting for me to figure it out.

We climbed in silence. The amber wards pulsed as we passed them, recording our exit just like they'd recorded our entry. Somewhere, eventually, someone would check those logs. Would know that five students had gone where they weren't supposed to go and come back with one more than they'd left with.

But that was a problem for later. For now, we were alive. Lucia was alive. We had evidence of something terrible.

And we had a villain.

Miriam Moss. The woman who destroyed places and people. The woman who had been targeting vulnerable students for decades. The woman who had hollowed out Marcus's family and left them with nothing but warnings nobody listened to.

We knew who the enemy was now. Could put a name and a face to the horror we'd witnessed. Could focus our anger and our fear and our need to do something on a single target.

I just couldn't shake the feeling that we were wrong.

That the truth was bigger than one villain. Older than one grudge. That somewhere behind Miriam, behind the facility, behind all of it, there was something else. Something the man in the gray suit knew about and we didn't.

Something that would change everything when we finally understood what it was.

But that was a problem for another day.

Right now, we had to get out of the sublevel before anyone found us. Had to get Lucia somewhere safe. Had to figure out how to process what we'd seen without losing ourselves in the horror of it.

Right now, we had to survive the night.

Everything else could wait until morning.