Page 86 of Victorious

Rios tried to smother the growing panic in her chest, the urge to run, as the van came to a stop outside of EON. As Charlotte was off-loaded, drooping in the agents’ arms, as if she’d never fully woken up. As Rios followed her into the squat white building and started down the maze of halls.

Silence hung like a shroud over the building. Every guard she passed moved with a grim efficiency. They nodded at Rios, but otherwise, they said nothing. Their expressions were blank.

They’re all dead, the EO had said.

Which was ridiculous, impossible.

And yet.

Rios had learned a long time ago to throw out the idea of what was possible. Growing up, she hadn’t believed in Santa Claus, let alone superpowers. Once you’d walked through solid walls, and fought people who could control electrical currents, or turn bodies to ash, or melt away before your eyes, impossible began to lose its meaning.

The bad feeling beat like a drum beneath her skin.

She needed to find Noah. Surely, if something was going on, he’d noticed, too. But when she pinged his comm, he didn’t answer. She swiped into the control room, intending to ask the guards there if they’d laid eyes on him. But when her eyes landed on the grid of screens that filled the wall, she stopped.

Something was off about the picture assembled there, but before she could put her finger on what, a black-haired guard named Tennison turned in her chair. “Do you need something, Agent Rios?”

Tennison had always been loud to the point of brashness.

Now her voice was strangely flat.

Rios swallowed, tearing her eyes from the screen. “Have you seen Agent Harris?”

Tennison nodded. “He’s in with Dr. Gray.”

That itself wasn’t strange.

What was strange was that she didn’t see his office on the screens.

The ones that were supposed to show every room and hall at EON.

Rios frowned. Hadn’t there been cameras in there, once?

Suddenly, she felt like she was looking at a spot-the-difference game.

Her attention shifted to the other windows, the ones containing cells, and the air turned solid in her chest. Three of the EOs were missing. She hadn’t noticed, not at first, because two of the three cells weren’t empty. They were newly occupied by the EOs her team had just brought in.

In one, Charlotte curled onto a cot.

In another, an analogue cell, fitted for EOs who tended to disrupt technology, the second one they’d caught, a heavyset Black man named Malcolm, paced methodically, as if measuring the floor.

Only the third cell had no prisoner.

But that didn’t account for the three who had been there.

Rios scanned the other screens, the observation rooms, the medical bay, the corridors. Nothing.

“Where are the prisoners who were in three, seven, and thirteen?”

“They’re no longer there,” said Tennison.

“No shit,” snapped Rios, before catching herself. She took a steadying breath and said, “Where are they now?”

“Sub one,” she answered.

Rios took a single involuntary step backward.

Sub 1 didn’t hold observation rooms or cells. The only thing located on that floor was the morgue.