Page 35 of Travis
“As you’ve probably figured out, I use the top portion of the house mainly for show. It was the original structure, and I had the underground portion built before I moved in to… meet my needs.”
We walked down the stairs. The corridor ran the full length of the property. Smooth concrete floors. Ceiling-mounted lighting on a dimmer system that Travis adjusted as we walked, and non-residential fixtures. They were the flat-panel LEDs I’d seen in the secure rooms at the Spokane field office.
“How far does this underground area go?”
“About double the full footprint of the house above. About seven thousand square feet of usable space.”
Seven thousand square feet. Underground. Engineered with the kind of infrastructure that didn’t come from a hardware store. Concrete and steel and surveillance equipment.
“This must have cost a lot of money.”
He shrugged. “I’ve made some good investments over the years thanks to my research skills.”
The gym was first. Organized, purposeful. A heavy bag hung from a ceiling mount with the leather worn smooth at sternum height, and the floor mats showed compression patterns from months of the same movements in the same positions. He used this room. Regularly and seriously.
“You built all of this yourself?”
“Designed it. Contracted the excavation and structural work through three different companies, none of which knew what the others were doing. Finished the interior myself.”
“That’s incredibly paranoid.”
Another shrug. “Paranoia is my baseline. I don’t fight it anymore.”
He started walking again. “Maude, what’s the current humidity in this corridor?”
“Sixty-one point three percent.” I blinked as a voice spoke from a speaker I couldn’t locate. Crisp, immediate, with an inflection that sounded less like a computer and more like a woman who’d been interrupted. “Which is within acceptable range, before you ask.”
I looked at Travis with eyebrows raised. “Someone I should know about?”
“This is Maude. She runs the compound.”
“I run everything,” Maude corrected. “The compound is the part he acknowledges.”
I looked at Travis. He had the expression of a man who’d lost this argument before and knew he’d lose it again. Something about the dynamic landed in a place I wasn’t expecting.
The way she pushed back on him. The way he let her. It was lived-in, worn smooth by repetition, the kind of ease that developed between people who’d spent years in the same space and had stopped performing for each other.
Except one of them wasn’t a person. And the man who’d built her had given her a voice and opinions, some humor and the latitude to argue with him.
I wasn’t even sure what to do with that information.
We kept moving. Every room he showed me was for a different purpose, but all arranged the same: purposeful, maintained, labeled, inventoried. The level of control bordered on compulsive, and I recognized it because I lived inside a milder version of it myself.
But where I labeled refrigerator shelves, Travis had built a self-sustaining facility with redundant power systems,independent water purification, and air filtration that belonged in a government building. The pool corridor, which I already knew, looked different now that I could see it as one component in something much larger.
Two doors he walked past without slowing. Both heavy, both locked, both fitted with keypads that matched the ones on the gate and the front door. I didn’t ask about them. He didn’t offer. The silence around those doors was deliberate, and I respected it the same way I’d respected his explanation of how he’d known I was in trouble this morning.
Not because I believed it was complete, but because I respected his borders.
He stopped at the junction where the main corridor split. “Down there is the server infrastructure. Communications equipment, processing, the systems Maude runs on. I’ll set up a workstation for you later so you can access your model securely.”
He reached up to adjust one of the ceiling lights near the junction, and his sleeve rode up past his wrist, exposing his forearm for maybe three seconds.
Long enough.
Raised welts tracked the inside of his arm. Red, angry, some fading to pink at the edges but others still raw enough to look painful. They ran from his wrist to somewhere past the bunched fabric of his sleeve.
“Travis, your arm.”
