Group one found their way in through a ventilation access on the east side of the building.
It was Tierney who found it — the particular eye of someone who had spent years knowing which doors in a building were real and which were meant to be found, and knowing by extension which openings were not meant to be found at all. The ventilation panel was behind a service generator and it had a lock that was functional but old, the kind that had been installed when the facility was built and had not been updated because updating it would have required acknowledging it was there.
She had it open in forty seconds.
Fenix looked at her.
"Former Suit," Tierney said, without looking up.
"I know," Fenix said. "I just didn't realize that meant lock-picking."
"It means everything," Tierney said. "In."
They went in.
The corridor beyond the ventilation access was narrow and low-lit and smelled of the specific combination of industrial cleaning products and recycled air that facilities like this always smelled of, the smell of a building that was trying to be anonymous and was succeeding at it.
They moved through it carefully.
Tierney first, then Katherine, then Fenix at the rear — the formation they had drilled, the one that put the most experienced eyes at the front and the most responsive power at the back, the fire element that could contain and redirect rather than simply destroy.
Two doors.
Both locked.
Both opened.
The third door was not locked.
It opened onto a room that stopped all three of them in the doorway.
It was a laboratory of some kind, long and low-ceilinged, the kind of room that had been built to hold equipment and had been holding it for some time. But the equipment was not what stopped them.
Along the far wall, in a row, were seven tubes.
Each roughly the height of a person.
Each containing one.
The tubes were filled with a liquid that was not quite clear — faintly luminescent, the color of something between blue and nothing, and in the light of it the seven figures inside were visible in the specific way things were visible through water, detail present but slightly softened, the edges of them defined by the liquid rather than by air.
Katherine stepped into the room.
She moved to the nearest tube.
At its base, on a small plate, was a name.
She read it.
She looked at the next tube.
Read that name.
Moved down the row.
The cold settled into her that came when something was confirmed rather than suspected — the specific cold of understanding landing completely.
"Tierney," she said.
Tierney came to stand beside her.
She read the plates.
Her face did not change in the way faces changed when they were surprised. It changed in the way faces changed when they received confirmation of the thing they had most feared confirming.
"The seven deadly sins," Fenix said from the end of the row. He had moved along the tubes while Katherine and Tierney were reading the first ones and had reached the last. "Each tube has a name. Pride. Wrath. Envy. Greed. Gluttony. Sloth. Lust."
"The demon generals," Tierney said.
"Being built," Katherine said. "The same way the witch hunters were built. Records. Reconstruction." She looked at the tubes. "She started this before Victor revived her. Or the reviving started this. The incomplete ritual gave her enough foothold to begin."
"They're not complete yet," Fenix said. He was looking at the nearest tube with the fire element reading the temperature of what was inside it, the thing his power did instinctively. "The liquid is still — active. Whatever is happening in there is still happening."
"Then we have time," Tierney said.
She did not sound certain.
She sounded like someone saying the thing that needed to be true and choosing to proceed as though it was.
"Signal the others," Katherine said. "Thomas needs to know about this before we go any further."