The fluorescent lights hummed overhead like dying insects, casting everything in the sterile office in a sickly green pallor. Thomas sat on the floor with his back against the wall, his ribs still aching from where the soldier's fist had connected when he'd tried to protect Amelie. His little sister was curled up against him, her small body trembling despite the warmth of the building.
This was wrong. All of it.
Amelie never came to him for comfort. She was always Mom's little shadow, always showing off her violin skills or her perfect grades, always getting the attention he felt he deserved. For eight years, he'd resented her for being the favorite, for being the one who could do no wrong. But seeing those men grab her, hearing her scream his name when they'd dragged her from the school cafeteria, something had snapped inside him. Something protective and fierce that he didn't even know existed.
"Tommy?" Amelie's voice was barely a whisper against his shoulder. She hadn't called him that since she was five.
"Yeah?"
"Are Mom and Dad okay?"
Thomas looked down at her tangled brown hair, so much like their mother's. He wanted to lie, to tell her everything would be fine, but the words stuck in his throat. He'd heard the soldier talking on his radio earlier, something about a "medical situation" and "containing the asset." Dad was hurt. Maybe badly.
"I don't know," he said finally. "But they're tough, you know? Dad's a cop, well, he was a cop. And Mom... Mom's the smartest person in the world."
"Smarter than Einstein?"
"Way smarter." He adjusted his arm around her, wincing as his bruised ribs protested. "She'll figure this out. She always does."
Amelie was quiet for a moment, then: "I'm scared."
"Me too," Thomas admitted, and it felt strange to say it out loud. At fourteen, he was supposed to be brave, supposed to protect his little sister. But sitting in this office with armed guards outside, he felt very young and very powerless.
The office they were trapped in belonged to one of Mom's research assistants, Dr. Martinez, he thought. The walls were covered with whiteboards full of equations Thomas couldn't understand, and there were family photos scattered across the desk. A normal person's life. Just like theirs.
"Thomas," Amelie said, sitting up slightly. "Do you hear that?"
He strained his ears, listening past the hum of the lights and the distant murmur of voices in the hallway. There was something else, a low, rhythmic sound coming from somewhere nearby. Almost like... chanting?
"Probably just the ventilation system," he said, but even as the words left his mouth, he didn't believe them. The sound was too organic, too deliberate. It made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
Amelie shook her head. "No, it's... it sounds like words. Like someone praying, but..." She shivered. "But wrong somehow."
Thomas felt it too, a creeping sense of wrongness that seemed to seep through the walls. The sound was getting louder, more distinct, though he still couldn't make out any actual words. Whatever language it was, it wasn't English. Wasn't anything he recognized.
The door handle rattled, and both children tensed. But it was just the guard checking the lock, something he'd done every fifteen minutes since they'd been brought here. Thomas had counted. Professional paranoia, just like Dad always taught him. Know your environment. Count the exits. Watch for patterns.
Not that it mattered. They were on the third floor, the windows didn't open, and there was exactly one exit, past the guard with the very large gun.
"When we get out of here," Amelie said suddenly, "I want to learn karate like you."
"It's not karate, it's mixed martial arts," Thomas corrected automatically, then caught himself. "But yeah. Yeah, I'll teach you some stuff."
"Really?" She looked up at him with those wide eyes that reminded him so much of Mom it hurt. "You always said I was too little."
"You are too little," he said, but his voice was gentler now. "But... maybe I could show you some basic defensive moves. How to get away if someone grabs you."
How to protect yourself when your big brother isn't strong enough to do it, he thought bitterly.
The chanting sound was definitely getting louder now, and with it came something else, a smell. Metallic and sharp, like pennies left in the rain. Thomas knew that smell from the time he'd fallen off his bike and scraped his knee badly enough to need stitches.
Blood.
But there was more to it than that. Underneath the copper tang was something organic and wrong, like meat left too long in the sun. Thomas's stomach clenched, and he had to swallow hard to keep from gagging.
"Tommy?" Amelie's voice was tight with fear. "Something's wrong."
"I know." He stood up carefully, helping her to her feet. "Stay behind me, okay?"
They crept toward the door, and Thomas pressed his ear against the cool metal. The chanting was coming from the office next to theirs, he was sure of it now. The words, if they were words, seemed to crawl under his skin, each syllable making his teeth ache. It was like hearing fingernails on a chalkboard, but worse. So much worse.
The language was nothing he recognized, but somehow his body understood what his mind couldn't process. Every instinct screamed at him to run, to get as far away as possible from whatever was speaking those sounds. But there was nowhere to go.
Underneath the chanting, he could hear something else, a wet, repetitive sound like dripping. But it was too rhythmic, too purposeful to be random. Like someone was... drawing? Painting? The thought made his skin crawl.
The guard's radio crackled to life in the hallway, a burst of static and official-sounding voices. Thomas couldn't make out the words, but the tone was urgent. Concerned.
"...medical team to sector seven... containment compromised..."
The guard muttered something under his breath, a curse probably, and Thomas heard his footsteps moving away from their door. Not far, but far enough that the sound was muffled.
"What's happening?" Amelie whispered.
Thomas was about to answer when the chanting shifted. The voice, definitely female, he realized now became more urgent, more demanding. The words seemed to pound against the walls like physical blows, and Thomas felt a strange pressure building in his ears, as if he were diving too deep underwater.
Then something else joined the voice.
At first, Thomas thought it was an echo. But echoes didn't breathe. Echoes didn't have a presence that made the air itself feel thick and wrong. Through the wall, he could sense something vast and alien pressing against the boundaries of reality, drawn by the woman's impossible words.
The temperature in their office dropped twenty degrees in seconds. Their breath began to mist, and frost started forming on the windows despite the building's heating system. Amelie pressed closer to him, her small body shaking with more than just fear now.
The chanting stopped.
The sudden silence was somehow worse than the sound had been. But it wasn't really silent—Thomas could hear something breathing in the next room. Something that definitely wasn't human. The rhythm was wrong, too slow and too deep, like the respiration of something much larger than should fit in an office.
Then came footsteps. The guard returning, quick and purposeful. Thomas heard him stop outside the door next to theirs, the one where the chanting had been coming from. There was a jingle of keys, the sound of a lock turning.
"Jesus Christ, what the hell..."
The guard's voice cut off abruptly, replaced by a sound Thomas would never forget. Not a scream exactly, but something worse, the sound of a human mind encountering something it was never meant to see. A long, drawn-out keen of absolute terror that seemed to go on forever.
Then came other sounds.
Wet sounds. Tearing sounds. But not of fabric or even flesh. These were the sounds of something fundamental being ripped apart. And underneath it all, a rhythmic thumping, like someone hitting a wall over and over again.
But the rhythm was wrong for punches. Too wet. Too... final.
Amelie buried her face against his chest, her whole body shaking. "Make it stop," she whimpered. "Please make it stop."
But Thomas couldn't move, couldn't think, couldn't do anything but listen to the horrible symphony coming from the next room. He pressed his hands against his ears, but the sounds seemed to come from inside his skull now, reverberating through his bones.
The thumping continued, steady, methodical, like someone driving nails into wood. Except Thomas was pretty sure it wasn't wood. And when it finally stopped, the silence that followed was absolute and wrong.
No guard radio. No footsteps. No breathing.
Nothing but the smell of copper and something else something burnt and ozone-sharp, like the air after lightning strikes too close.
Then, soft as a whisper, came the sound of a door opening. Footsteps in the hallway, cautious but purposeful.
"Hello?" The voice was familiar, Aunt Zoey. But something was off about her tone. Not the warm concern Thomas expected, but something more... calculating. "Is someone there?"
"Aunt Zoey?" Amelie's voice cracked with desperate hope. "Aunt Zoey, we're here!"
There was a pause. A long pause that stretched just a beat too long before the response came.
"Amelie?" Zoey's voice carried genuine shock now. "What, how are you…"
Thomas felt a wave of relief so intense it made his knees weak. Aunt Zoey was here. She was Mom's sister, worked in the labs, knew all the security codes. She could get them out of here.
"Hold on, sweetheart," came Zoey's voice through the door. "I'm going to get you out of there."
The lock clicked, and the door swung open to reveal Aunt Zoey's familiar face. She looked pale and shaken, her clothes disheveled, but when she saw them, her expression shifted to complete shock.
"Thomas? Amelie?" Her voice was barely a whisper. "What are you, how did you…" She stared at them for a long moment, as if they were ghosts. "You're supposed to be at school."
"Some men came and took us," Amelie said, rushing forward. "They said there was a family emergency."
Zoey's face went through a series of emotions, confusion, realization, then something that looked almost like panic. "Oh God. Oh no, this wasn't…" She caught herself, then knelt down and pulled Amelie into a quick hug. "Okay. Okay, we need to get you out of here. Now."
"How did you find us?" Thomas asked, though relief was already flooding through him. "Where's the guard?"
Zoey's expression darkened. "He... he tried to hurt me. I had to defend myself." She stood up, her hand lingering on Thomas's shoulder, a gentle, almost protective touch. But when Amelie stepped closer, Zoey's attention seemed to drift, her hand falling away. "It's dangerous here. We need to leave. Now."
"Where are Mom and Dad?" Amelie asked, her small voice breaking. "Are they okay?"
Zoey's jaw tightened slightly. "I don't know." The words came out flat, almost dismissive. "Things are... complicated right now." She turned back to Thomas, her voice softening noticeably. "But we'll figure it out, won't we? You're brave enough to help me keep everyone safe."
Thomas felt a strange warmth at the praise, even as something cold settled in his stomach at how differently she'd responded to Amelie's question.
They nodded, and Zoey led them toward the door. "Whatever you do," she said, "don't look into the office next door. Promise me."
"Why?" Thomas asked, but Zoey was already moving, guiding them into the hallway.
"Just promise me," she repeated, her grip on Amelie's hand tightening.
As they passed the open doorway of the adjacent office, Thomas caught a glimpse of something that would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life, if he lived long enough to have dreams.
The guard was there, but calling him "there" was generous. He was sprawled in the center of the room, arms spread wide like he was trying to embrace the ceiling. His tactical vest was shredded, punctured with dozens of wounds that formed no pattern Thomas could understand. But it was his face that made Thomas's stomach lurch.
Where his eyes should have been were two dark, wet holes. The handle of a combat knife jutted from one socket, the blade buried so deep it had to have reached his brain. His mouth was open in a silent scream, and his tongue...
Thomas looked away before his mind could process what had happened to the tongue.
But the guard wasn't the worst part.
The floor around him was covered in symbols drawn in what could only be blood, fresh blood, still glistening in the fluorescent light. The patterns weren't random; they were deliberate, purposeful, forming intricate geometric shapes that hurt to look at directly. Like his eyes couldn't quite focus on them, as if the symbols existed in more dimensions than his brain could process.
And in the corner of the room, the air itself seemed wrong. Darker somehow, as if light was being absorbed by something that wasn't there. Or wasn't there anymore. The shadows pooled and writhed in ways that defied the overhead lighting, and Thomas could swear he saw the faint outline of something massive, something with angles that didn't belong in that space.
The smell hit him like a physical blow. Blood, yes, but underneath that was something else. Something that reminded him of the chemistry lab at school when someone mixed the wrong chemicals, acrid and wrong and fundamentally toxic to human senses. And beneath even that, something organic and ancient, like opening a tomb that had been sealed for centuries.
On the far wall, written in the same dark fluid as the floor symbols, were words in a language that hurt to look at directly. The characters seemed to shift and writhe when he wasn't looking at them straight on, but Thomas couldn't make sense of any of it. Whatever language it was, it definitely wasn't anything taught in school.
"It's okay," Zoey whispered, but there was something in her voice now. Something that made Thomas's skin crawl. "Everything's going to be okay."
She led them quickly down the hallway, past offices and laboratories Thomas had visited dozens of times. But nothing looked familiar now. Everything seemed darker, more threatening. The fluorescent lights flickered intermittently, casting dancing shadows that seemed to move with purpose.
"Where are we going?" Thomas asked as Zoey guided them toward a section of the building he'd never seen before.
"Somewhere safe," she replied. "Somewhere they can't find us."
They stopped in front of what looked like a storage closet, but when Zoey pressed her hand against a hidden scanner, the wall slid aside to reveal a narrow corridor. Emergency passage, Thomas realized. Mom had mentioned them before—secret routes through the building in case of corporate espionage or worse.
The corridor was dark and narrow, lit only by dim emergency lighting that cast everything in red. Their footsteps echoed strangely, as if the walls were farther apart than they appeared. Amelie stayed close to Thomas, her hand clutching his shirt.
"I don't like this," she whispered.
"Neither do I," Thomas admitted. "But Aunt Zoey knows what she's doing."
Did she? The more he thought about it, the more questions arose. How had she gotten free when they'd both been captured? And what had really happened to that guard?
The corridor ended at another hidden door, this one requiring both a hand scanner and a numeric code. Zoey input the numbers quickly, as if she'd done it a thousand times before. The door slid open with a soft hiss.
"This way," she said, and her voice sounded different now. Excited, almost.
What lay beyond the door wasn't another corridor or office. It was a vast circular chamber that seemed to extend both up and down farther than the emergency lighting could reach. The walls were covered in murals—but not the kind you'd find in any normal building.
These were older. Primitive. And they depicted things that made Thomas's stomach lurch violently.
Twisted figures with too many limbs danced around central scenes of torture and consumption. Bodies stretched in impossible angles, their mouths opened in silent screams that seemed to echo in Thomas's mind. The artwork was meticulous, detailed, showing every tendon straining, every drop of blood pooling beneath altars carved from what looked like bone.
"Oh God," Thomas whispered, pressing his back against the wall. His heart hammered against his ribs so hard he thought it might burst. "Oh God, what is this place?"
Amelie had gone completely white, her small hands clutching at Thomas's shirt so tightly her knuckles were bloodless. She was making small, animal sounds of terror—not quite whimpers, but something more primal. The kind of noise prey made when it finally understood it was trapped.
"I want to go home," she said, but the words came out in a breathless rush, like she was hyperventilating. "Tommy, I want to go home. I want to go home right now. Right now."
Thomas felt his own breathing getting shallow and fast. The murals seemed to writhe and move in the flickering light, as if they were alive and feeding on their terror. The figures painted in ancient pigments seemed to turn their grotesque faces toward them, watching, waiting.
In the center of the chamber stood a series of pillars, each one carved from what looked like black stone but veined with something that gleamed like gold in the red light. As they got closer, Thomas realized with a sickening jolt that the gold wasn't metal at all.
It was dried blood. And there were bodies draped across the pillars—recent bodies, their skin still pink with life that had only recently fled. The smell hit him like a physical blow: copper and meat and the sweet-sick stench of decay just beginning.
Thomas doubled over and vomited onto the floor, his body rejecting everything he was seeing, everything he was breathing. Amelie started crying—not the quiet tears of earlier, but loud, desperate sobs that echoed off the chamber walls like a funeral dirge.
But it was the people sitting calmly in the midst of this nightmare that made everything worse.
Around the chamber, arranged at what looked like a temporary break area complete with folding tables and chairs, were about six people in everyday clothes. Button-down shirts, slacks, business casual. One woman was sipping from a Starbucks cup while typing frantically on a laptop, her brow furrowed in concentration. A man in a polo shirt had abandoned his sandwich and was hunched over a tablet, swiping through complex calculations. They looked like stressed office workers who'd set up shop in hell itself, and when Zoey led the children in, they all turned to stare with expressions ranging from surprise to outright alarm.
"Aunt Zoey," Thomas said, his voice cracking. "What is this place?"
"This," Zoey said, and when she turned to face them, Thomas saw that her smile had changed completely. It was still her face, still her voice, but the warmth was gone. Replaced by something hungry and anticipatory. "This is where the real work happens."
At the far end of the room, sitting in a comfortable office chair with a tablet in her lap, was someone Thomas recognized.
"Grandma?" Amelie's voice was tiny, confused.
Their grandmother looked up from her tablet with a mild expression, reading glasses perched on her nose. She was wearing the same cardigan she'd had on at Thanksgiving, looking completely normal except for the horrific location.
"I don't understand," Thomas said, backing toward the entrance with Amelie. "Grandma, what are you doing here? What is this place?"
"It's complicated, sweetheart," their grandmother said, but her voice carried none of its usual warmth. Instead, there was a tension there, the kind adults got when they were trying to figure out how much trouble they were in. "But you're safe now. That's what matters."
"Safe?" Thomas looked around at the murals, the blood-stained pillars, the office workers who were now frantically typing and whispering into phones. "This doesn't look safe."
The woman with the Starbucks cup looked up from her laptop, stress lines etched around her eyes. "We're going to need to escalate this immediately. The containment protocols weren't designed for family complications."
"I know," Zoey said, and her voice had taken on the same strained professional tone as the others. Like a project manager dealing with a crisis that could cost everyone their jobs. "But the immediate situation required improvisation."
"Zoey," came a voice from somewhere above them. Thomas looked up and realized they were directly beneath something massive—a structure that hummed with energy he could feel in his bones. The sound was familiar, like the hum that came from his mother's lab late at night when she thought no one was listening. Whatever she'd been building, it was here. And it was running.
But the voice that had spoken wasn't human. It was something else, something that made the words sound like they were being forced through a throat that had never been meant for speech.
"The delivery parameters have been compromised."
"There were unforeseen complications," Zoey replied, addressing the ceiling as if this were a routine conference call. "The extraction team encountered additional assets that required immediate containment."
Derek was now hunched over his laptop, both hands working frantically across the keyboard and trackpad. "We need to recalculate the entire containment matrix," he was muttering to himself. "The variables are completely outside acceptable parameters."
Thomas felt Amelie press closer to him. He looked down and saw that she was staring at one of the murals with the kind of wide-eyed terror any eight-year-old would feel when confronted with images of things that belonged in nightmares, not reality.
"Amelie?" he whispered. "What is it?"
"I want to go home," she said, tears starting to flow. "I want Mom and Dad. I want to go home right now."
"Soon," said their grandmother, but she was no longer looking at them. Instead, she was typing rapidly on her tablet, her face illuminated by the screen's glow. "But first, we need to figure out how to handle this... deviation from the plan."
Thomas tried to pull Amelie toward the entrance, but found that he couldn't move. His feet seemed rooted to the floor, his arms heavy as lead. Some kind of paralysis was spreading through his body, though he couldn't tell if it was fear or something else entirely.
"Don't be afraid," Zoey said, but her voice was tight with stress now. "This is just... we need to figure out how to handle this situation. Nothing more complicated than that."
"Handle what situation?" Thomas managed to get the words out despite the strange heaviness in his limbs. "What does that even mean?"
Derek looked up from his phone, his face pale with worry. "Standard containment protocol has to be modified. We weren't expecting additional variables, and the timeline is completely shot now."
"Variables?" Thomas felt like he was drowning in corporate speak. "We're not variables. We're people. We're kids."
The woman with the Starbucks cup looked up from her frantic typing, genuine distress in her eyes. "Of course you are, honey. But right now we have to figure out how to keep everyone safe, including you."
Around the room, the stress was palpable. People were speaking in hushed, urgent tones into phones, laptops were being slammed shut, and everyone kept glancing nervously at the ceiling where that inhuman voice had come from.
"Tommy," Amelie whispered, her voice small and scared. "I think we're in very big trouble."
Thomas wanted to be brave for her, wanted to say something reassuring and protective. But all he could do was hold her close and watch as the impossible became a logistical nightmare around them.
These people—these perfectly ordinary-looking people with their coffee and phones and worried expressions—were part of something that had turned his mother's life's work into whatever this was. And they talked about it like any other workplace crisis that needed damage control.
The structure above them hummed louder, and Thomas could feel the vibrations in his chest. Whatever his mother had built, it was connected to something she never intended, or had she?.