Page 75 of Whispers in the Dark
“I know,” Sophie said. “And that’s what scares her the most. She’s waiting for the shoe to drop.”
Twenty-Five
The lab was underground,trapped in a permanent half-darkness beneath rotting fluorescent lights and the low hum of machinery that never stopped. The access to the facility was built below a decommissioned rural psychiatric facility, hidden behind a false wall in an administrative wing no one had touched in over thirty years.
The long, slow elevator ride down opened into a vast, silent facility built for human experimentation. Behind a thick pane of reinforced glass, a man lay strapped to a gurney. His skin was pale and clammy, bruised at the pressure points. His eyes were open. Unblinking. A slow spasm moved down one arm like a signal short-circuiting through a ruined system.
The woman watched him carefully. She stood tall, composed, unsettlingly calm. Her hair was pulled into a severe twist, her coat dark, gloves black, her face unreadable—like she couldn’t remember what it felt like to flinch.
“He’s not eating.” Her voice was smooth, flat. “That’s five days. If he doesn’t feed by morning, we lose him.”
The man beside her grunted in agreement. Broader. Rougher. Blood still caked beneath his fingernails fromyesterday’s cleanup. No lab coat. Just worn jeans, a thermal shirt, boots built for digging.
“Then we dump him,” he said. “Same protocol. Teeth out, fingers gone, acid for good measure. Make sure he’s untraceable.”
“Location?”
“Colton storm drain. No cameras. Shallow enough the wildlife takes care of the rest.”
She nodded slowly, already half-distracted as her phone buzzed. She glanced down, read the message, and exhaled through her nose. “Gideon Ward is dead.”
The man turned. “You sure?”
“Confirmed. Liver failure. Internal bleeding. Cancer, late-stage. Died in his bed with half a sentence hanging.”
The man smirked. “He always wanted the last word.”
“He got too attached to the delusion,” she said. “Started believing his own mythology. He was a means to an end. But now that he’s gone…” She looked at the body behind the glass. “We need to manage the fallout.”
“You think they’ll dig deeper?”
“They will. She will.”
He didn’t have to ask who. “Charlotte Everhart,” he said it like the name was sour in his mouth.
The woman’s jaw tightened—the first emotion she’d shown all night—and it was hate. Pure and quiet.
“She wasn’t even assigned to Gideon’s sector,” she said. “Just happened to be nearby when Subject Zero went public. One freak incident, and suddenly she’s the lead. We called it a containment breach—she thought she’d uncovered a serial killer. A sadist. Maybe even a trafficker. She brought a federal manhunt down on us.”
“Because she didn’t know what she was seeing,” the man said. “She thought she was chasing a human monster. She didn’t realize she was standing inside years of black-budget science.”
“She still doesn’t,” the woman said sharply. “She thinks Gideon was covering up abuse, torture, murder. We were creating enhanced humans designed to serve, protect, and fight, but with perfect discipline and no independent will. Weapons disguised as sentient beings. The goal was compliance at all costs.
“This wasn’t corruption—it was failure. Scientific failure. We weren’t creating monsters. Gideon believed he was saving lives. We were trying to build obedient soldiers. What we ended up with were twitching husks.”
“She called them victims,” the man said. “Like they’d been brutalized. But Gideon didn’t hurt them. He just couldn’t kill them. Released the failures instead of incinerating them. And he got caught.”
“The damn Holloway Motel,” the woman muttered. “He kept pieces of their lives. Mementos. Thought he was being kind. But he got sloppy. Public. And when the story broke, we had to clean house—burn the remains, shut the outer facilities. He was in jail, and we were good. They bring in a group of youngsters because they deemed us incompetent, and Mara slipped through. Walked right off the grid. Still had brain function they missed.”
The man said, “Youth and arrogance take the wheel. No discipline.”
“And Henry Byron,” she added. “Gideon thought giving him to Charlotte would throw her off. She hadn’t worked in years, and now it’s like she never left. She won’t stop digging. And she brought in more police to investigate.”
“We’ve been doing this for thirty years,” the man said. “She unraveled Gideon’s work in months. Locked Gideon away.”
“She was supposed to be a headline,” the woman said coldly. “But she kept coming. Still thinks she’s chasing justice. Still believes these things can be saved. That we stole something human. She doesn’t see the truth.”
The man nodded toward the gurney. “What truth?”
