“Do you hear that?” Emma said, tense, listening.
I did. It was sustained and chattering, but distinctly human. Someone was laughing.
We traded a baffled look. Emma gave Mother Dust’s finger to me and lit a flame in her hand, and we each put on our masks. Ready for anything, we thought, though in retrospect we were not at all prepared for the house of horrors that lay waiting for us.
We moved through rooms I struggle to describe now because I’ve tried to erase them from my memory. Each was more nightmarish than the last. The first was a small operating theater, the table armed with straps and restraints. Porcelain tubs along the walls stood ready to collect drained fluids. Next was a research area where tiny skulls and other bones were connected to electrical equipment and gauges. The walls were papered in Polaroids documenting experiments conducted on animals. By then we were shuddering, shielding our eyes.
The worst was yet to come.
In the next room was an actual, ongoing experiment. We surprised two nurses and a doctor as they were performing some ghastly procedure on a child. They had a young boy stretched between two tables, newspapers spread below him to catch drips. A nurse held his feet while a doctor gripped his head and peered coldly into his eyes.
They turned and saw us with our dust masks and flaming hands and shouted for help, but no one was there to hear them. The doctor dashed for a table full of cutting tools but Emma beat him to it, and after a brief scramble he gave up and raised his hands. We pinned the adults in the corner and demanded they tell us where the prisoners were kept. They refused to say a word, so I blew dust in their faces until they slumped into a pile on the floor.
The child was dazed but unhurt. He couldn’t seem to generate more than a whimper in response to our hurried questions—Are you okay? Are there more like you? Where?—so we thought it best to hide him for now. Wrapping him in a sheet for warmth, we stowed him in a small closet, with promises to return that I hoped we could keep.
The next room was wide and open like a hospital ward. Twenty or more beds were chained to the walls, and peculiars, adults and children alike, were strapped into the beds. None appeared conscious. Needles and tubes snaked from the soles of their feet to bags that were filling slowly with black liquid.
“They’re being drained,” Emma said, her voice shaking. “Their souls drawn out.”
I didn’t want to look at their faces, but we had to. “Who’s here, who’s here, who are you,” I muttered as we raced from bed to bed.
I hoped, shamefully, that none of these poor wretches were our friends. There were several we recognized: the telekinetic girl, Melina. The pale brothers, Joel-and-Peter, separated so there was no chance of another destructive blast. Their faces were twisted, their muscles tense and fists clenched even in sleep, as if both were in the grip of terrible dreams.
“My God,” Emma said. “They’re trying to fight it.”
“Then let’s help them,” I said, and stepping to the end of Melina’s bed I drew the needle carefully from her foot. A tiny drop of black liquid leaked from the wound. After a moment her face relaxed.
“Hello,” said a voice from elsewhere in the room.
We spun around. In the corner sat a man in leg shackles. He was curled in a ball and rocking, and he laughed without smiling, his eyes like shards of black ice.
It was his cold laugh we’d heard echoing through the rooms.
“Where are the others being held?” Emma said, dropping to her knees in front of him.
“Why, they’re all right here!” the man said.
“No, the others,” I said. “There have to be more.”
He laughed again, his breath coming out in a little puff of frost—which was strange, because it wasn’t cold in the room. “You’re standing on top of them,” the man said.
“Make sense!” I shouted, losing my temper. “We don’t have time for this!”
“Please,” Emma begged. “We’re peculiars. We’re here to help you, but first we have to find our ymbrynes. Which building are they in?”
He repeated himself very slowly. “You’re. Standing. On top of them.” His words blew a steady stream of icy air in our faces.
Just as I was about to grab him and shake him, the man raised an arm and pointed to something behind us. I turned around and noticed, camouflaged in the tile floor, a handle—and the square outline of a hatch door.
On top of them. Literally.
We ran to the handle, turned it, and pulled up a door in the floor. A set of metal stairs spiraled into darkness.
“How do we know you’re telling the truth?” Emma asked.
“You don’t,” the man said, which was true enough.
“Let’s give it a try,” I said. There was, after all, nowhere else to go but back the way we’d come.
Emma looked torn, her gaze traveling from the stairs below to the beds around us. I knew what she was thinking, but she didn’t even ask—there was no time to go bed to bed, unhooking everyone. We’d have to come back for them. I just hoped that when we did, there would be something to come back to.
* * *
Emma lowered herself onto the metal stairs and descended into the dark hole in the floor. Before I followed, I locked eyes with the madman and raised a finger to my lips. He grinned and copied my gesture. I hoped he meant it. Guards would be there soon, and if he kept his mouth shut, maybe they wouldn’t follow us into the hatch. I started down the stairs and pulled the door shut after me.
Emma and I huddled near the top of a narrow cylinder of spiraling stairs and peered down. It took a moment for our eyes to transition from the bright room above to this mostly lightless dungeon walled in rough rock.