Skyborn The Divine

8: Ready

Alice became more and more curious as they dropped, floor by floor, to B12. What kind of secrets might this place be hiding? What would need to be buried thirteen floors under a government building? A metahuman, perhaps?

When the doors finally opened, Levi led them down a bright corridor to a set of double doors. Inside was a sort of conference room, she supposed. It was a sort of place to have meetings, apparently, with a round, dark table and chairs dominating the space. Dim lights overhead kept the room semi-dark with deep shadows. As Alice approached the table, she could see an engraving inlaid with gold. It was almost black in the low light, but it caught the light from the doors and burned like a sunrise. It was nearly a complete circle, perhaps a crown of sorts, with seven rays of gold spiking out from the ring. She thought she might have seen it somewhere before, though she couldn't remember where.

Clawson stood at the far end of the room, staring at something on the wall, which seemed to be painted a dark gray. He looked at Alice, smiled, and beckoned her forward with his hand.

"It was nice meeting you, Alice, and you as well, Mrs. Fillmore," said Levi as he stepped out of the room. He paused a moment and nodded to Clawson. "Director."

"Levi," Clawson replied politely with a curt nod. "Thank you." Then he turned to the women. "I'm glad you're here," he said. "I've been looking forward to talking to you in person ever since we saw you. I've been searching for people like you for many years."

"People like me?" she repeated. "Why did you want us here so badly?"

"Your abilities make you extremely unique. I'm sure you already know that you're special, that you're completely unlike almost everyone else in the world. But you are more valuable than you realize, more influential. You represent a great opportunity for this agency, Alice," he said.

"For the Department of Emergency Resource Management?" asked Maryanne ironically.

He laughed, amused. "We'll get to that," he said. "I just want you to know that we went through a lot of effort to get you down here. The moment we found out who you were, Alice, we did a background check on you. We found out who your parents are, your friends, and your grades. We looked up your financial history. Your job history. Your medical history. We bypassed six months of security protocol in a week so we could get you in here as quickly as possible. That's why we delivered that device to your apartment. We had to know who you were, and we had to know for sure if you were what we thought you were."

"Why?" Alice asked, her head spinning. She imagined just how much these people now knew about her. It was wrong, somehow. She felt like someone had peeked inside her bedroom when she thought she was alone inside.

Actually, that's exactly what they did.

Clawson was silent for a moment. Then he touched a sort of lighted panel on the wall. Some sort of touch screen control. Then the entire wall disappeared. What she had thought to be a dark gray paint on the wall beaded up like rainwater on an oiled surface and faded into transparency. The room they stood flooded with the bright light of noon. It was midday in that conference room, despite the fact that they were twelve stories underground and that the sky outside should have been an overcast slate. The light caught the crown shape on the dark table and set it on fire, blazing as though it shone with a light all its own.

Alice had to shield her eyes until they adjusted. When they did, she looked out the newly appeared window that had once been a wall. The room she was in seemed more like a nest, sitting several stories above the floor of a vast, open underground room.

The room was like an enormous gymnasium. She could see markings on the floor below, like lanes on a track. There was equipment, some clearly for exercise, and some she couldn't imagine the purpose for. There were people, too. Maybe a couple dozen of them. Almost all of them seemed to be running around the track, all dressed in identical gray tee shirts and black shorts.