Chapter 35 Chapter 35
"But you stay with me. You don't take risks."
"I'm not promising that," he said. "But I'm promising I won't be reckless."
Prague was cold and gray when we arrived.
The facility we were looking for was hidden in the Old Town, in a basement beneath what appeared to be a medical practice. Normal enough on the surface. The kind of place you wouldn't look twice at.
But the records we had showed that it went deep. Much deeper than the building itself should allow.
Raven came with us, along with six agents from the confederation enforcement division—three human, three supernatural. No weapons. The agreement was that we would try to secure the facility without violence.
The door to the basement was locked. Reinforced. But it opened when Raven placed her hand on the lock and pushed.
I'd seen her do things like that before. Push against reality until it bent. Until locks opened anddoors moved and the world shifted to accommodate her will.
We went down concrete stairs into darkness.
Emergency lighting flickered on as we descended. Whoever was here knew we were coming.
At the bottom was a laboratory that looked like it belonged in the middle of the war, not two decades later.
Equipment that I recognized from the research documents. Tables for restraint. Storage for biological samples. And in a glass-walled observation room, a man who looked up at us with absolute certainty that we wouldn't actually stop him.
"You can't shut this down," he said. His accent was German. His name was Dr. Klaus Hahn,according to our files. He'd been a researcher for the network in the original war. He'd been classified as retired.
"Actually, we can," Raven said.
"Not if you want to maintain the peace," Hahn said. "Not if you want the new government to survive. Because what we do here is necessary. What we've learned is necessary. The confederation is fragile. It's built on the idea that humans and supernaturals can coexist as equals. But they can't. Not without understanding the differences. Not without data."
"You're experimenting on people," I said.
"I'm gathering information that will save lives," he said. "Supernatural bodies heal differently than human bodies. Their cognition processes differently. Their psychology is fundamentally altered by the presence of power. Without understanding these differences, we can't build systems that actually work."
"You're torturing people," I said.
"I'm conducting research," he said. "The fact that it's uncomfortable for the subjects is unfortunate. But necessary."
Alex moved before I could process what was happening.
He crossed the laboratory in three strides and hit Hahn with a force that sent him through the glass wall of the observation room.
"Don't call torture research," Alex said quietly. "Don't dress it up in science. It's wrong, and you know it."
The agents moved quickly then. They secured the facility. They found the records—years of them, meticulously documented experiments on over three hundred subjects.
They found holding cells.
And they found that there were still two people in those cells.
A young woman who'd been missing for eight months. A man who'd been missing for almost ayear.
Both had been subjected to regular procedures. Both had been conscious for them.The woman wouldn't speak. The man kept repeating the same phrase in Czech, over and over,words I didn't understand but could feel in the broken way he said them.
We got them to hospitals. We got them the treatment they needed. But I knew that some damage couldn't be repaired.
The raids in Budapest and Vienna went more smoothly.
The facilities there had been shut down when word came that Prague was being raided. We found equipment, records, but no active research.
It wasn't perfect, but it was something.
We brought the evidence back to the confederation council.
"This proves the network still exists," Catherine said. "This proves it's been operating without anyone knowing."
"Which means we have a security failure," one of the human council members said. "Which means the confederation itself is potentially compromised.”
"Or it means that the old systems of control are still active and we need to think about what
we're actually trying to build here," Raven said.
The conversation went in circles.
Some people wanted to use the discovery as proof that supernaturals needed to be monitoredmore closely. Some wanted to use it as proof that humans couldn't be trusted with authority. Some wanted to pretend it wasn't happening and focus on making the confederation work.
None of those options felt right.
What felt right was that we needed to fundamentally rethink how we were building safety intothe system. We needed to make it so that something like the research network couldn't hide fortwo decades.
"We need transparency," I said at a council meeting. "Real transparency. Not just governments reporting to each other, but citizens reporting what they see. We need public records of where research is happening. We need oversight that includes both supernaturals and humans. We need to make it too expensive and too visible to hide this kind of thing."
"You're describing a surveillance state," someone objected.
"I'm describing accountability," I said. "There's a difference. We can have transparency without surveillance if we do it right. But we can't have safety without knowing what's actually happening."
Three months later, a transparency framework was established.
All research facilities would be registered. All research involving human or supernatural subjects would require explicit consent and independent oversight. All funding would be tracked. Allresults would be published.
It wasn't perfect. There were loopholes. There was still room for abuse.
But it was a start.
More importantly, it meant that the network would have to operate differently. They could still exist, but they couldn't hide as easily.
And that mattered.
Back at the Sanctuary, I worked with the survivors from Prague.
The woman, whose name was Petra, eventually began to speak again. She told us about the procedures. About the pain. About being treated like a thing instead of a person.
"I was just another data point," she said one day, sitting with me in the garden. "That's whatbroke me more than the pain. Not that it hurt. But that the hurt didn't matter to them. It was just a measurement."
"I'm sorry," I said.
"You don't have to be," she said. "But I need you to remember. When you're making decisionsabout the confederation, about what systems you build, I need you to remember that people like me exist. That we're not abstract concepts. We're real, and we can be broken, and sometimes we don't come back together right."
The man from Prague, whose name was Marek, didn't recover as well.
He spent his days in a quiet room at the Sanctuary, rocking slightly, speaking in repetitive patterns that never resolved into full sentences.
The procedures had damaged something in his brain. Something that couldn't be fixed with medicine or therapy.
He existed, but he didn't live.
And every time I saw him, I was reminded of what the cost of not acting quickly actually was.
Six months into the transparency initiatives, Alexios called for a meeting.
Not a political meeting. A personal one. He asked to see me at the Sanctuary, where...