Division 13 Case File 013-008: The Tomb (Part 3)

A secret CIA black site in Alaska has gone dark.

No contact.
No survivors.
And no explanation.

When Division 13 is sent to investigate the facility known only as “The Tomb,” the team expects an containment breach involving the Nullborn prisoners held deep underground.

What they find instead is far worse.

The Tomb is a special three-part story arc.

The nightmare concludes.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

My name is Hannah Keegan. I'm a lead detective for a top secret New York Police Department Task Force. We're assigned to the unexplained cases that border on the paranormal. This is Division 13, and here are our case files.

SPEAKER_06 0:16

There are things you train for, things you run scenarios on, in controlled environments, with rubber bullets and role players and instructors who grade your performance afterward. Things you prepare for until the preparation becomes instinct. Nobody trains for level five. The stairwell opened into a long detention corridor. It was about 10 feet wide, with cells running the length of both walls behind heavy reinforced doors. The emergency lighting here was the dimmest yet, a deep, bruised red that barely reached the floor, leaving most of the corridor in near total shadow. The air was different too. Thicker, warmer than it had any right to be, given how cold the rest of the facility had been. Like something down here was generating heat. Then I heard it. From behind the cell doors, movement, low dragging sounds, wet, rhythmic noises that made me think of something injured and broken, able to move only with painful difficulty. I could hear something that might once have been a voice cycling through the same broken syllable over and over, finding no meaning in it.

SPEAKER_02 1:39

What is that?

SPEAKER_06 1:40

Castillo asked in a barely audible whisper. I moved to the nearest cell door and looked through the reinforced glass viewport. The figure inside had been a man once. Medium height, heavyset, the remnants of a facility prison uniform still on him. Now his skin had taken on the mottled gray pallor I had seen on Evelyn Carter and on Carlos, the man in Harlem who had taken neon. But worse, far worse. Whatever the virus had done to them had been a first draft. What I was looking at now was a later version. The skin had split in places, pulling back from muscle and bone in ragged lines, and from those lines came the faint orange light I had come to associate with the Nullborn. Not the burning intensity of coal or Billy Rath, but a dim, leaking glow, like something lit from inside a paper lantern. The eyes were gone entirely. In their place the same dim orange light, sourceless and constant. The figure was facing the door. It had no eyes with which to see me, but its head tracked towards the viewport with slow, horrible precision, drawn by heat or sound or through some other unknowable means. I stepped back. Infected, I said badly. I looked at the team. Whatever coal released in here, it's a more advanced strain than anything we've encountered. I paused, choosing my next words carefully. They may not be able to be reasoned with. We can't do anything for them right now. We've got to clear this place, and then we can send in techs and medics. Right now, we move through this level and we do not stop. Understood? Tight faces. Ready faces. Move out, I said. We made it perhaps 30 feet down the corridor before the cell doors opened. Not all at once. One by one in sequence, as if someone was walking down the corridor ahead of us, flipping a switch at each cell. The locks disengaged with a sound like cracking ice, a sharp, clean snap, and the heavy doors swung outward, slow and mechanical, as if on a timer. Because they were. We didn't know that yet. In the moment, all we knew was that the doors were opening and the lurching things behind them were coming out. What followed was not a fight the way Hades Gate had been a fight. Hades Gate was technical, precise, a problem to be solved under pressure with specific solutions. This was something older and uglier. The kind of violence that strips everything back to instinct and endurance. The infected moved differently. They weren't fast and coordinated like Billy, not strategic and skilled like Cole. They moved the way a current moves. Relentless, directionless, filling every available space, lurching and shambling, drawn toward heat and sound with a single mindless purpose. I drove the stock of my rifle into the nearest one, and it went down but didn't stay down. Kendrick had two on him simultaneously, using his size and leverage to keep them off, slamming one into the wall hard enough to crack the concrete. Overton moved with the fluid economy I had come to rely on, never with the grasping hands expected her to be, always a step ahead, finding the angles, striking and evading with a graceful efficiency. Castillo fought with controlled fury, back against the wall, refusing to let them flank her. Miller, his wounded arm dressed and wrapped, his rifle held one-handed with a steadiness that had no right to exist, was putting down anything that came within range with short, accurate bursts aimed at the legs, dropping them without stopping to confirm the result. Keep moving! I shouted over the noise. Don't let them pin you. Move! We fought our way down the corridor inch by inch, a brutal, grinding advance toward the stairwell at the far end. It felt like wading through a current. One that was actively trying to kill you by clawing your eyes out of your head. I got the impression that for every one we put down, another filled the space. But it wasn't that. It was worse. Every time one of them was shot, instead of dropping and staying down, they would rise again, struggling to their feet to resume their mindless, relentless attack. The orange glow from their fresh wounds and their empty eye sockets turned the corridor into something from a nightmare. A tunnel of red emergency light and cold fire, the air thick with the smell of the virus and roar of rifle muzzles and the sounds of things that had forgotten what it meant to be human. The tide wasn't turning in our favor. As good as we were, we weren't going to win this fight if we kept holding back. I knew what needed to be done and gave the order. Kill shots, I ordered. Aim for the head, don't stop moving. Almost instantly, the calculus changed. We stopped trying to create distance and started closing it. Controlled aggression, not panic, driving forward into the press of bodies instead of giving ground. Kendrick put one down with a point-blank shot that snapped its head back and kept it down. Overton dropped to a knee, sighted clean through the chaos, and didn't miss. Castile was a fury of elbows and muzzle flashes, moving through them like water finding cracks, putting down everything in her path. I stopped counting. I stopped thinking. I just kept moving, kept firing, kept pushing forward. One by one, they stopped getting up. The last one dropped at the foot of the stairwell door with a sound like a sigh. And then we were through. Silence, except for our breathing. I looked at the team, battered, bleeding in places. Overton had a gash along her left cheek from a glancing blow she hadn't quite avoided. Kendrick's jacket was torn at the shoulder. Castillo was favoring her left side. Miller was standing straight and steady, which I knew cost him more than he was showing. All five of us. Still here. I opened my mouth to give the order to descend to level six. That was when Overton said, very quietly, Shipman. Her voice had something in it I had never heard from her before. Something that stopped me cold. I turned. She was looking back down the corridor, the way we had come. Standing half hidden in the darkness, perfectly still, was Evelyn Carter. She stood motionless halfway down the corridor we'd just fought our way through, between us and the way out. She held her hands toward us in a pleading gesture, as if she was seeking help. She looked the same as she had in the lab. The dim orange smolder in her eyes, the stillness of something that had stopped processing the world the way the living do. But she was closer now. Close enough that our rifle lights caught every detail. Close enough that I could see what was strapped to her chest beneath her open jacket. Nobody move, I said. Kendrick had already taken a half-step toward her, reflex, pure and simple, the same reflex that had made him a good soldier and a better man. He stopped at my voice but didn't step back, his eyes on Evelyn's face, on what was left of it. Cap, he said.

SPEAKER_05 10:46

She might still be in there, some part of her. Kendrick. She's not just a body. Look at her. She's standing. She came to us. She needs help. You know what happened to her. It wasn't her fault.

SPEAKER_06 11:00

She was a victim. His jaw was tight as he turned the full force of his gaze on me. We don't leave people. There it was. The words I had been carrying since Afghanistan, handed back to me by the best man on my team, in the worst possible moment. I know, I said, and I meant it, in a way that went way deeper than this mission. I know we don't, but listen to me. I kept my voice low and level. Look at what's under her jacket. Look carefully. A pause. I watched Kendrick's eyes move. Watched the moment he saw it. His expression didn't collapse. It hardened. The way a man's face hardens when he absorbs something terrible and refuses to let it beat him. She's wired, he said. She's wired, I confirmed. Whatever she is now, whoever put her here, put her here for us. This is another mind game, Jackson. Same as the wall upstairs, same as the bodies in reception. They are using her. I held his eyes. The best thing we can do for Evelyn Carter right now is not let them win. A long moment, the longest of the mission. I'm sorry, Evelyn, he said, finally. Then he stepped back and raised his rifle. We approached her slowly in a wide arc, weapons up, giving ourselves room. She tracked us with those dim orange eyes, her head moving in a strange, tilted way, as if listening to something we couldn't hear, receiving instructions from somewhere we couldn't see. When we're still about 15 feet out, Jack pointed out the timer, currently dark, waiting for a trigger. Motion sensitive, Overton said, her voice perfectly flat.

SPEAKER_02 13:05

Or remote. I can't tell which without getting closer, and I am not getting closer.

SPEAKER_06 13:11

Nobody gets closer, I said. That was when Evelyn Carter moved. Not the stuttering, jerking motion we had seen in the lab. She moved with a horrible quickness, as though something was using her body like a puppet whose strings had just been pulled taut. She straightened to her full height, her chin lifted, her hands opened at her sides, and her mouth opened. Too wide, impossibly wide, the jaw dropping far beyond any hinge point the human face was designed to accommodate, stretching until the corners split in a horrible grin. The orange light in her eyes blazed suddenly, intensely, as she gazed at us with the cruel intelligence of a predator. Her voice, when it came, was not one voice. It was layered, her own underneath, and something else on top of it, something that had learned human speech the way a machine learns music.

SPEAKER_03 14:16

Kill you, she said. Kill you all.

SPEAKER_06 14:22

A pause, the jaw working.

SPEAKER_04 14:25

Kill you in the head.

SPEAKER_06 14:28

For a single frozen second, nobody breathed. Her sudden motion must have caused the bomb timer to activate. The timer on her chest clicked to life. Ten seconds. Go, I roared. Level six, now. The team moved. No hesitation, no discussion. Five people with one purpose pouring down the stairwell toward level six as fast as legs and adrenaline could carry them. I was behind Kendrick, behind Castillo, behind Miller, pushing, not because they needed it, but because every instinct I had was screaming to get them to safety. The explosion, when it came, was lower than I expected. I felt it as much as I heard it. The pressure wave hit us on the stairs, a deep, concussive thud that punched the air from my chest and sent me into the wall. Dust and debris rained from the ceiling. The emergency lights on the stairwell died entirely, leaving us in absolute darkness other than the lights from our rifles. Sound off, I shouted. One by one, in the dark, my team answered. Level six was the bottom of the world. The air was different here, stale and pressurized, the air of a place that had been sealed for a long time before anyone thought to open it. The cells were larger than level five, built for things that required more containment than a standard human prisoner. Reinforced walls, double-locked doors, observation windows of thick yellowed glass, all of them standing open. All of them empty. I don't think any of us were surprised. No sign of coal or wrath, I said. Security office, now. The surveillance office was at the far end of the detention floor, a small room glass walled, banks of monitor screens, dark and dead. But the recording equipment ran on its own isolated power cell, separate from the main grid. Backup for the backup. The kind of redundancy that existed specifically so that even if everything else failed, there would still be a record. There was a record. We gathered around the monitor as Overton pulled up the footage, cycling backward from the timestamp of the last check-in. The picture was grainy, the angle high and wide, but it was enough. Cole appeared on screen at 0300 hours four days ago. He was calm, methodical. He moved through his cell with the unhurried precision of a man who had been planning this for a long time. Because he had. He retrieved something from beneath the skin of his left forearm using a piece of sharpened metal he had hidden inside the foam of his mattress. He worked without anesthetic and without any visible expression of pain. Just focus. Pure cold focus. He finished digging out whatever he had hidden under his skin and moved to the door lock. We couldn't see his exact actions from the camera angle, but moments later he stepped back and sparks flew from the lock.

SPEAKER_04 18:04

Explosive charge under the skin, Raina said. He had help to smuggle that in unnoticed.

SPEAKER_06 18:12

On camera, Cole swiftly moved to a storage closet nearby, bending over to retrieve a large duffel bag, planted there in advance, we realized, by whoever had been feeding him support from the inside. I paused the playback to get a better look. Inside the bag, guns, bladed weapons, canisters, and brightly glowing orange vials. The nullborn virus in concentrated form. A dozen or more vials. Rain is right, Kendrick said quietly. Inside help. Cole moved silently and swiftly to one of the other cells. He reached into the duffel bag and removed what looked like a compact breaching tool. We couldn't make out the details from the camera angle, and turned to the door lock. He worked quickly with practiced ease. Moments later, the cell door swung open. For a long beat, nothing happened. Then a hand appeared at the edge of the doorframe. A small hand, the fingers wrapping around the frame slowly, deliberately, the way a child grips the side of a swimming pool before pushing off. And then Billy stepped out into the corridor. He was grinning. That smile. Ten years old, give or take, bright and open and utterly empty of anything that should live behind a child's eyes. He looked just the way I remembered. And to be honest, he still gave me the creeps. The same wild matted hair, the same wax pale skin. Whatever the facility had done in the months since his capture, it had not changed him. If anything, being contained had simply given him time to wait. Cole looked down at him. Something passed between them. Not warmth exactly, but recognition. The acknowledgement of two things that understood each other. Then Cole handed Billy something from the bag. Billy looked at it, then looked up. Cole then moved to the ventilation access panel on the far wall of level six. From the duffel he removed two compact canisters, unmarked matte black, and secured them inside the duct with practiced efficiency. He connected a small device to each one, checked his watch, and sealed the panel behind him. Gas, Overton said quietly.

SPEAKER_03 20:57

He gassed the entire facility.

SPEAKER_06 21:01

Nobody responded. We didn't need to. As they both moved out of the camera's view, Overton hit scan on the tape, and the timestamp moved forward. After 53 minutes, Billy reappeared on camera. We followed his progress as he moved through the facility the way he had moved through that Brooklyn warehouse all those months ago. Quick and quiet. He seemed to know instinctively where to go and what to do. He was gleeful. That was the only word for it. Not vicious, not enraged, delighted in the carnage. The same way a normal child might be if let loose in a field on a summer afternoon, given permission to run. He was living in his purpose. The admin staff in the labs, bypassing Hades Gate. The security personnel in the reception hall, the way the bodies had been arranged, the deliberate, patient staging of it all. Billy had done that, with skill and strength no 10-year-old should possess. He worked happily, humming his tuneless hum while Cole worked methodically through the rest of the facilities systems. Watching Billy work was unnerving. The unnatural speed of his movements, the lethality. The footage then showed Cole making his way to the level four labs. He moved through the carnage Billy had left behind without breaking stride, navigating the room with detached urgency. A man on a mission. He found what he was looking for in the lab's containment section. Evelyn Carter's remains, sealed in a body bag on a gurney, tagged and logged for transport. He worked with the same cold precision he applied to everything. From the duffel, he withdrew one of the glowing orange vials and injected the corpse with the contents. Then he leaned in close to what remained of Evelyn Carter and spoke quietly in her ear. We couldn't hear the words. He stepped back. She moved. Not much at first. A twitch of the fingers, the slow, terrible rise of a chest that had no reason to be rising. And then she was sitting upright on the gurney, her dim orange eyes open and fixed on Cole with an unreadable blank expression. If she recognized Cole at all, she gave no sign. After getting her to stand, he dressed her in clothing he pulled from the duffel, then strapped the device to her chest with the same methodical manner he'd given everything else, working around her as if she were furniture, as if the thing wearing Evelyn Carter's face was simply a tool to be prepared. When he was finished, he spoke to her again, quietly, and pointed down the corridor. She walked off into the dark, stiff and lurching, like something trying to remember the mechanics of its own body. Cole watched her go. Then he turned back to work. The footage then showed him on level six, moving again toward the air vent at the corridor's end. He reached into his bag. On the grainy footage, we could tell that what he withdrew was a large explosive device. Explosive in hand, he crawled into the ventilation shaft. When he reappeared a few minutes later, his hands were empty. Cursing to myself, I paused the tape. I turned to Miller and Castillo and said, That explosive he placed in the vent is probably on a motion-activated sensor, like Evelyn's. It's probably on a timer, and we don't know how much time we've got left. Find it and diffuse it. They nodded and set off with grim determination. I turned back to the monitor and hit play. Cole shouldered the duffel bag and looked up at the camera one final time. Then he turned and walked toward the stairwell. When he arrived on level one, Billy was waiting for him in the reception hall, standing beneath the hanging bodies with his hands clasped behind his back, patient as a child waiting for a parent outside a shop. When Cole appeared, Billy fell into step beside him without a word. At the main entrance, Cole paused, turned back toward the nearest camera, and waved. Once slowly, with the quiet satisfaction of a man finishing a job exactly as planned. Billy beside him waved too. Bright-eyed, beaming. Then they walked out into the Alaskan cold together. Nobody spoke for a moment. I was partially lost in thought. Something about that last scene nagging at the edges of my mind. Then I realized what it was. Rewinding the tape, I spotted it. The duffel bag on Cole's shoulder. The one that had been full of weapons, explosives, and the vials containing neon. The bag he'd taken into every level, every room, every part of this facility, removing tools the whole time. The bag should have been empty by now. But it was full. Still full. Despite everything he'd used and left behind. He had taken something. Something from this place, something he'd come specifically to collect that we hadn't seen on any of the footage. Something that wasn't on any inventory list, wasn't in any briefing, wasn't accounted for anywhere. I filed that thought in the cold, quiet place in my mind where I kept the things I didn't have answers for yet. I looked at Overton and Kendrick. Bag everything. Every tape, every document, every piece of evidence in this room. We take it all. We were nearly finished with evidence collection when the entire room shook. The first tremor was subtle, a deep, resonant shudder that traveled through the floor and up through the soles of my boots. Dust sifted from the ceiling. A monitor slid two inches to the left on its shelf. That's the level 5 explosion working through the structure, Overton said, already moving toward the door, her voice tight.

SPEAKER_03 28:13

This facility is built into a cave system. The blast didn't just go up, it went lateral. It's compromising the supports.

SPEAKER_06 28:21

My radio crackled. Miller's voice from somewhere in the ventilation system.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

Cap, we've got eyes on the device. It's at the junction, maybe 40 feet in. Trigger mechanism is motion-based. We're working on it.

SPEAKER_06 28:36

Copy that, I said. Make it fast. This structure is not going to hold. The second tremor hit harder. A crack appeared in the ceiling of the surveillance office, running the width of the room in under a second. Chunks of concrete the size of my fist dropped to the floor. We're out of time, I said. Overton, Kendrick, grab what you have. Now we go. The team moved with the efficiency of people who understood that urgency and panic were not the same thing. Overton swept the remaining tapes into a bag. Kendrick took the documents. We were moving toward the corridor when the third tremor hit. It threw two of us off our feet. That's when the ceiling caved in. A slab of concrete the size of a truck hit the floor with an impact I felt in my chest like a second heartbeat. Dust billowed out in a blinding white wave. When it began to settle, the corridor ahead was blocked, a wall of rubble, floor to ceiling, solid and absolute. On the wrong side of it, the air vent. Miller. I shouted toward the wall. A pause. Dust falling. The groan of stressed metal above us. Then his voice on the radio, steady, carefully controlled.

SPEAKER_00 30:06

We're here, Cap. We're okay. Device is still live. You were right. It was on a motion sensor that set off a timer. We're working it.

SPEAKER_06 30:17

He paused for a beat.

SPEAKER_00 30:19

Castillo took a hit when the ceiling came down. She's mobile. Minor injuries looks like.

SPEAKER_06 30:26

I thumbed the radio. Can you get out? A pause.

SPEAKER_00 30:30

Then there's a smaller vent opening about six feet from here. Raina can fit. Another pause. Again. And I've got debris across my legs. I'm pinned. I'm not going anywhere until this thing is diffused.

SPEAKER_06 30:46

I heard Castillo's voice in the background, tight and urgent.

SPEAKER_04 30:51

I'm not leaving without Raina.

SPEAKER_06 30:53

Miller's voice. Quiet. Final. Cap. He was asking me. I understood immediately what he was asking me. Castillo, I said into the radio. My voice came out level, steady, the way it had to. Get out of there. That's an order. Use the vent. Jack's got this. That is a direct order, Reina. Miller needs his hands free and he needs to concentrate. You staying doesn't help him. Moving helps him. Go. Now. Silence on the radio. The corridors shuttered around us. Dust fell in curtains. Then Miller's voice again, softer this time, just for her. Go. He said.

SPEAKER_00 31:47

I'll diffuse this thing and find another way out. He paused. I'll see you topside, Raina.

SPEAKER_06 31:55

A long silence. Then Raina responded quietly.

SPEAKER_04 32:00

Topside.

SPEAKER_06 32:02

More silence. Then we finally heard the scrape of her moving into the vent. Then nothing. As Raina arrived on our side, pulling herself free with Kendrick's help, my radio crackled. Miller again. Back to business.

SPEAKER_00 32:19

Okay, Cap, I've got about 90 seconds on this device. Get your people out.

SPEAKER_06 32:25

I turned to the team, looked at their faces, the fury and the grief and the refusal, all fighting for the same ground, and gave the only order left to give. Move, now, up the stairs. All of you, go! We ran, up through level five, through Hades Gate, through the living quarters, through the reception hall where the hanging bodies still swayed in the darkness, up through the entrance corridor and out through the blasted vault door and into the Alaskan night. The explosion hit when we were thirty feet from the entrance. The ground moved. Not a tremor, a single heave, like the earth drawing one enormous breath and letting it go. Behind us, the entrance to the tomb collapsed inward with a sound like the end of something, a deep grinding roar that fell away into silence over the course of several seconds, leaving nothing behind it but the wind and the snow and the distant creak of barbed wire in the cold. We stood in the Alaskan dark. Castillo dropped to her knees in the snow, and she was not making any sound, which was somehow worse than if she had been. Kendrick moved to comfort her. None of us spoke. The wind filled the silence. I looked at what was left of the entrance to the tomb. The snow was already beginning to settle over the collapsed concrete, soft and indifferent, the way snow settles over everything eventually. I thought about a weapons officer who had always watched our backs, who had said, I'm good, Cap, even when I knew it was a lie, who in the end sacrificed his life the same way he had always lived it, fighting the bad guys, helping the good guys. Let's go, I said. I couldn't bring myself to look at them. Nobody moved for a moment. Then Kendrick put his hand briefly on my shoulder, just for a second, before he slowly turned toward the aircraft. The others followed. I was last. I always was. I took one final look at the tomb, at the snow settling over it, at the darkness that had swallowed it whole. Topside, I said. To no one. To him. To the wind. Then I turned and walked to the transport. And we left Alaska behind.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

Search and recovery teams are en route to the anchorage site. It doesn't look good.

SPEAKER_06 35:26

New York in November has a particular quality of cold. Not the killing cold of Alaska, which doesn't negotiate. New York cold is personal. It finds the gaps in your coat, the space between your collar and your jaw. It reminds you it's there. I hadn't minded it, walking in from the parking structure. I hadn't minded much of anything the past two days. That's how I knew I was in trouble. Not the grief, but the absence of reaction around it, the numbness that comes after something that hasn't finished hitting you yet. The bullpen was quieter than usual. Not silent. Division 13 didn't do silent. There was always a phone ringing somewhere, always someone moving between desks with a file or a coffee. But quieter. The kind of quiet that settles over a team after a loss. Everyone still doing their jobs, everyone carrying something they weren't putting into words yet. I understood. I was doing the same thing. After the tomb, we had more than enough to keep us all busy. I'd been at my desk for about an hour working through the evidence from the tomb, the lab notes, the surveillance logs, Russo's preliminary analysis of the biological material Overton had recovered, when I became aware of Castillo leaning against my office doorframe. She had a coffee in one hand and the expression of someone who had been standing there long enough to decide she was going to say the things she was thinking about. I had learned in the short time she'd been on the team that when Reina Castillo decided she was going to say something, there was very little point in trying to redirect her.

SPEAKER_04 37:17

Cap, can I ask you something?

SPEAKER_06 37:21

You're going to anyway, I said without looking up from my paperwork. Hearing a small chuckle, I finally looked up and saw a small, real smile on Reina's face. The first one I'd seen from her since Alaska. The smile didn't quite reach her eyes. I could see the sadness there.

SPEAKER_05 37:42

She spoke.

SPEAKER_04 37:44

Why Division 13? The NYPD doesn't have divisions. They have bureaus, units, precincts. On paper, we're part of special operations, but nobody in special operations knows we exist.

SPEAKER_05 37:59

She tilted her head.

SPEAKER_04 38:01

So where does the name come from?

SPEAKER_06 38:04

I set my pen down. You know what the federal government does when it encounters something it can't explain and can't ignore? I said. She waited. It funds a study, I said, quietly, through channels that don't show up on any public budget. Turns out New York wasn't the only city with a problem. The no-born have been active in this country since the 1950s. By the time the Wrath case landed on our doorstep in 1979, Washington had already been quietly standing up units like ours in cities across the country for almost 30 years. I leaned back in my chair. They built a program. Special operations units embedded in local law enforcement nationwide, each one federally funded, each one operating under civilian cover, tasked with investigating the kind of cases that regular law enforcement can't touch. I paused. On paper, we fall under the NYPD Special Operations Bureau. In reality, we answer to the program. Castile straightened slightly.

SPEAKER_04 39:18

What's the program called?

SPEAKER_06 39:20

Sentinel Prime, I said. Paranormal response, investigation, mitigation, and enforcement. A beat. The people who came up with that acronym had never actually seen what we deal with, I said. You could tell. Castile stared at me for a moment.

SPEAKER_05 39:41

Then she looked back out at the bullpen.

SPEAKER_04 39:44

Mitigation, she repeated.

SPEAKER_05 39:47

Mitigation, I confirmed.

SPEAKER_06 39:50

She was quiet for a second.

SPEAKER_04 39:53

Right.

SPEAKER_06 39:55

She thought for a moment and then asked, How many divisions? At last count, I said. Thirteen active. She absorbed that for a moment.

SPEAKER_04 40:08

And we're number thirteen.

SPEAKER_06 40:10

Lucky number thirteen, I confirmed. Youngest unit in the program. She paused, then said.

SPEAKER_04 40:19

So we're the new kids.

SPEAKER_06 40:21

We were, I said. I picked my pen back up. Ask me that question again in a year. She laughed, a short, genuine sound that sounded good to hear against the quiet of the bullpen. Then she stopped, looked at me with those sharp brown eyes.

SPEAKER_04 40:42

The other twelve divisions, have any of them run into what we've run into?

SPEAKER_06 40:48

I looked out of my window at the bullpen as I said, that is exactly the right question. She nodded as she pushed off the doorframe and was about to head back into the bullpen when Kendrick and Overton stepped into the doorway. Castile stepped aside to let them enter. The two of them had the same expression. The expression of people who have something to show you and aren't sure how you'll take it. Kendrick stepped forward and set something on my desk. A video cassette.

SPEAKER_05 41:24

Found this in evidence from the tomb, he said. I looked down at the tape.

SPEAKER_06 41:30

Someone had written on the label in neat block lettering. Handwriting I recognized from two years of after action reports and field communiques. For you, Cap. End case file zero one three dash zero zero eight.