Page 2 of Glass Rose
Alex walks beside me. “So what exactly does Green Research work on?”
“Officially? Pharmaceutical research. Vaccines, antivirals, medications.” The card digs into my palm. “Unofficially? Human experimentation. Behavior modification. Things that violate the Geneva Convention.”
“And the boss allows this?”
“Old man Green died three months ago. His son, Gabriel,has been running things since. He’s the one who started and now accelerated the BC-7 trials.”
“How long have you been working here?”
“Two years.” My throat tightens. “I needed to pay off student loans. They offered triple what any university would pay. By the time I realized what was happening, I was in too deep.”
“Classic corporate villainy.” Mia adjusts her coat. “You have documentation?”
I tap my pocket, where a flash drive sits like a ticking bomb. “Everything. Tests. Results. Video logs. Enough to shut this place down.”
“And put you in jail,” Jack says.
“Thanks for the reminder.” I know what’s at stake. I had to take sleeping pills to be able to get a wink of sleep.
At the next door, I hesitate. Once we go beyond this point, there’s no turning back.
I hate that Alex was so insistent, but he was also right. Everything I put out there could be buried under claims of ‘fakes’ and ‘AI manipulation.’
I need witnesses. People with such a high number of followers that Green can’t hide or explain it away.
“Having second thoughts, Dr. Cruz?” Alex asks, his voice softer now, meant only for me.
“Every fucking second.” I’m doing this. No holding back. I swipe my card. “But not enough to stop.”
We descend two more levels, the hallways growing narrower, the air thicker with each floor, or maybe I’m imagining it because this is suicidal. The lighting shifts from bright fluorescents to a sickly green-blue that makes everyone’s skin look corpse-like.
I need to calm down. Everything goes according to plan, and the meeting won’t end until we’re out of here, so nobody will roam around.
“Jesus,” Peter whispers, a guy barely old enough to drink. “This is some horror movie shit.”
He’s not wrong. Sub-level 3 has always reminded me of a morgue designed by someone who’s never seen a dead body but imagined the worst possible storage facility for them.
I tap my card to the reader. “This is the main lab and containment area.”
“Containment for what?” Mia asks.
“Human test subjects.”
Alex whistles low. “This is bigger than you let on.”
“You have no idea.”
The containment cells line both sides of the big room, each with a reinforced observation window. Most are empty, but in some, figures lie on hospital beds connected to monitoring equipment. In the middle, an examination seat faces a monitor.
“Holy shit.” Peter raises his camera.
Jack peers through the observation window. “These are all… people?”
“Supposed criminals.” That’s what Green Research told me when I first started feeling queasy about the experiments. “But I found documents. Most of them are homeless people or migrants without documentation. People no one would miss.”
Alex scans the cells, his camera recording steadily. “How many?”
“Thirty-two subjects currently. Down from forty-eight three months ago. The surviving ones are held at a level lower. The dead ones… here until they’ll be cleaned up.” There is no nice word for what is done to them.
