I stepped through, not sure what to expect. From the stories, barbed wire and chains on the walls wouldn’t have surprised me. The Alchemists were still keeping it “business casual” on the ground floor, however, as the room we entered looked very much in line with the lobby’s style—with one exception.
Six men stood guard in the room, ranged strategically around two doors: an elevator and a stairwell. The men wore suits and had golden lilies on their cheeks and were among the biggest and bulkiest I’d ever seen among the Alchemists. Their HR department must’ve searched pretty extensively to find the beefiest specimens in their gene pool. Most intimidating of all, however, was that each man visibly had a gun—a real gun that could kill, not the sleek little tranquilizing kind that Marcus had covertly armed Trey and Eddie with. Marcus had said the fallout would be big enough without us leaving fatalities behind and also worried about innocents getting injured in the fray. (It went without saying that no one had suggested giving me a weapon.)
I kept a cool smile on my face, like it was totally normal for me to see a bunch of armed guys there to keep a group of bedraggled prisoners from escaping or having free thought. The elevator chimed, and a smartly dressed young woman stepped out. She was pretty in the kind of way that said she’d run a dagger through your heart and still keep smiling the whole time. She maintained that smile as we made introductions.
“I’m afraid you’ve caught me off guard here,” she said. She leaned forward a little bit to read my ID tag. “I wasn’t expecting you. I wasn’t even aware there was a Department of Occult and Arcane Transgressions.”
“OAT doesn’t make very many appearances—certainly not many public ones,” I said sternly. “But when a debacle of this magnitude reaches my desk, we have no choice but to intervene.”
“Debacle?” Sheridan asked. “That’s kind of an exaggeration. We have things under control.”
“Are you saying one of your detainees didn’t use illicit magical resources to escape your control and conduct affairs you still don’t fully understand?” I demanded. “I’d hardly call that under control.”
She flushed. Seriously, I deserved an Oscar for this stuff. “How do you know about that?”
“We have eyes and ears you can’t even dream about,” I told her. “Now. Are you going to cooperate with our investigation, or do I need to call both of our superiors?”
Sheridan wavered and then cast a self-conscious glance at the stoic guards. “Let’s talk in here,” she said, gesturing us to what looked like a small office adjacent to the room. We followed, and she shut the door as soon as we were all in. “Look, I don’t know who’s been telling you stories, but we really do have everything well in—”
The shriek of a fire alarm in the corner of the room cut her off. It was followed by a crackling sound, and a voice suddenly came from a small walkie-talkie attached to her belt. “Sheridan? This is Kendall. We have a situation.”
Sheridan lifted out the walkie-talkie. “Yes, I can hear the alarms. Where is it?”
“Multiple locations on level two.”
Sheridan winced at the word “multiple.” “How big are they?” she shouted back. “The sprinklers should be able to contain them.” She glanced up at the ceiling and looked surprised. “Are yours on? They should be set off universally for multiple fires. This whole place should be under water.”
“No, nothing’s come on yet,” the voice replied. “Should we wait? Or do you want us to evacuate?”
Sheridan stared at her walkie-talkie in disbelief and then back at the inactive sprinkler in the ceiling. Duncan had said there were few situations that would actually cause them to evacuate the entire facility, so we’d gone out of our way to create one. Apparently, their art teacher was fighting a smoking habit, and along with a massive gum stash, she kept cigarettes and matches in her desk. Between those and a supply of paint remover, he’d made arrangements with other detainees to start fires simultaneously on their living floor. That was dangerous enough in those conditions, but one of Marcus’s comrades had found exterior control of the facility’s water system and had sabotaged it to delay the sprinklers coming on.
The walkie-talkie crackled again. “Sheridan, do you copy? Do you want us to evacuate?”
It was clear from Sheridan’s face she’d never, ever expected to make a decision like this. After a few seconds, she finally responded. “Yes—you have my authorization. Evacuate.” She gave us a brief glance as she lunged for the door. “Excuse me, we have an emergency.”
In the other room, the guards were on full alert from the screaming of the fire alarms. “We have a Code Orange,” she yelled to them. “Be ready. You two usher the detainees over there for holding. The rest of you, keep your weapons drawn, and watch for—”
The walkie-talkie went off again, this time with a male voice. “Sheridan, are you there?”
She frowned. “Kendall?”
“No, this is Baxter. Something’s wrong. The detainees—they’re taking over—resisting our orders—”
Sheridan blanched. “Have the control center initiate the gas shutdown. Knock everyone out. We’ll get masks and send people down to pull you out and—”
“We already tried! The system seems to be disabled.”
“Disabled?” exclaimed Sheridan. “That’s—”