The rain was beginning to fall when Marvin and Amir were picked up in a sleek jet-black shuttle unlike anything commercial. Inside the cabin were ten Inspectors, overbearing in their black trench coats at first glance but taking up surprisingly little space. Marvin tried not to look too long at their eerie masks and red visors. One of them offered Amir a mask, but he turned it down. They gave him an oxygen mask instead with a built-in tank.
Their shuttle joined another in the airspace, matching speeds and surpassing the civilian hovercraft. Soon, a third shuttle fell in line with them. Then a fourth, fifth, sixth. They glided towards Ainsel's giant lab in the center of the city like ink blots returning to their source. No one spoke, but Marvin grew aware of one Inspector staring at him, studying him. Even with the mask on, he knew it was James.
He doesn't know who I am. He thinks Caroline is piloting this mech.
Something about the man rubbed Marvin the wrong way. Kobayashi was anti-corruption and had the best interests of the megacity in mind, but he was a hypocrite. He had to have known something about Ainsel's shady experiments, but had only acted on it when presented with civilian evidence. Only when his Inspection's reputation got put on the line.
"How's the audio?" Caroline asked in his head.
"I hear you," Marvin said, voice box muted. "You seeing what I see?" Unbeknownst to the Inspectors, he was streaming his camera footage to his friends.
"Yeah," Caroline replied. "Looks like you guys are having a great time."
Marvin didn't smile, but he appreciated the joke.
A few minutes later, they landed on the roof of the lab. Silently, six pairs of shuttle doors unfolded and Inspectors streamed out. Marvin exited last, behind Amir, each of his steps cutting through the patter of rain. As he followed James towards the edge of the roof, he heard another pair of footsteps much like his own. He turned to see Sparrow walk out of an adjacent shuttle, heading to the opposite side of the roof. On its back was a pair of giant metal canisters, tubes hanging from the tops and connected by a control panel on the mech's nape. It held its signature twinblade under its shoulder.
They waited at the roof's edge for a moment as technicians worked inside the shuttles. "Cameras are disabled," they announced. "Alarms are disabled. Spacewarpers will have to remain active."
"Good enough," James said.
With the activation of grav boots, the Inspectors walked off the edge and onto the walls. The glass beneath them caved in and they sank into the lab, hanging on the ceiling for a second, then flipping and righting themselves on the floor. They entered on different floors three at a time. Marvin hesitantly swung down through the opening into the top floor, following Amir and James and four Inspectors.
They were in a hallway. It simply began where they had broken in and went on as far as the eye could see. There were no doors. No lights either, but it was somehow bright. The comms buzzed in Marvin's head, filtering Sienna's voice through.
"Confirming entry. We'll meet in the middle."
Commanding Inspectors now? It seemed Sienna had become a bit more than a helping hand to the anti-corruption team.
James led the others down the corridor. Marvin scanned the walls, trying to discern a single crack or indent, but James didn't seem to care, moving at a pace that would've been breakneck for a human. They turned left, then right, then arrived at a dead end.
Marvin didn't believe it at first, thought it must have been an elevator. Then James told him to cut a hole through the wall.
"Are you sure?" Amir asked. "This place is littered with spacewarpers."
"Spacewarpers can't make you lose global direction," James said. "Right now, all we need to know is where the elevators are." He tapped the wall and looked at Marvin. "If you would."
Marvin drew his sabers and carved a round hole, something he thought he'd only see in movies. A bigger, square room lay beyond.
"Thank you." James stepped through, but turned back and wagged his finger at Amir and Marvin. "That being said about spacewarpers… don't get separated from us."
The larger room was empty and surrounded by a ring of folded-up metallic arms, each with a bright red light in their center. These were the scanners for incoming shuttles, Marvin suspected.
They found a door that blended into the wall and entered another hall. As they kept walking, Marvin began to hear a second group's footsteps, one pair particularly loud. At first, it seemed like two walls separated them, then one wall, then suddenly his group and Sienna's group were in the same hallway. Marvin looked over his shoulder—there were no two distinct corridors, no fork in the road.
In his surprise, he instinctively fell back and ended up tailing the others, walking beside Sparrow. They didn't talk at first, but there was something comforting walking with someone as tall as him.
And a living legend, Marvin reminded himself. It was easy to forget that Sienna was the second-best pilot in the megacity now that they'd interacted so many times.
"I'm sorry about what happened," Sienna said at length inside Marvin's head. He turned on his comms and let Caroline speak through him.
"It's alright. Thank you for helping us," Caroline replied.
"We should've found out about this sooner."
"It's not your fault; this has nothing to do with mech-fighting."
"Saeyung is part of a mech team." Sienna paused. "What was she trying to do anyways? With her brother and the mech?"
Caroline explained the transference attempt. Sienna was quiet for a few seconds, and Marvin suspected she was similarly mortified. But to his surprise, she simply said, "That's an illegal consciousness implant, then. We'd need to shut down Legionnaire as a team. Make sure whatever version of Sunwoo they have never fights again."
Marvin paused ever so slightly, letting Sienna get one step ahead. Sparrow's head swiveled around curiously, and Marvin hastily caught up.
If Sienna suspected anything, she didn't let it show as she continued, "And I wanna see Saeyung be brought to justice, of course. We all want to."
"What's the sentence going to be?" Caroline asked. "Life in prison?"
"It's hard to say." Sienna sighed. "She's important, but… No, yeah, I'm sure it will be."
Saeyung's influential, but they're not gonna let her get away, are they? Marvin wondered. That was ridiculous. Wasn't the whole point of this operation to find evidence to incriminate her?
They eventually reached the elevator. James selected the 58th floor, the floor that Saeyung had taken Marvin to to show him Sunwoo's transfer. They entered a familiar hallway which ended at a familiar door.
"This is the dark room?" James asked Amir. Amir nodded.
The Inspectors adjusted a setting on their visors, then pushed open the door. Marvin stepped back into that void and felt a chill run through his circuits. He counted the figures around him. Amir, Sparrow, James, and nine Inspectors. Everyone was still here.
"This is new to me," James said, lazily waving a hand through the air. "Look for a console."
They split into two groups again: Sienna with her five Inspectors, and James, Amir, Marvin, and the other four Inspectors. They traced the wall, feeling for protrusions or indents. Every time they found one, James held out a stunner-like device that burned away the nearby nanoparticles and made the section of the wall visible. When he turned off the device, everything became pitch black once again. Didn't want to disturb the room too much, he explained. They didn't find any consoles, but every time they passed a vent, an Inspector would spray it with a goo that hardened, blocking airflow.
After a few minutes, they reunited with Sienna's group on the opposite side of the room. Neither had had any luck, and thus James announced they would go with Plan B: turning the room into a vacuum.
Sparrow set its two giant canisters on the ground and hooked the tubes to its torso, using itself as a power source. Then it positioned the canister tubes in the air and pressed a button on the middle control panel, and a raucous drilling sound filled the air. The Inspectors pressed something on their visors to give themselves oxygen, and Amir adjusted his oxygen mask nervously. The process would take thirty minutes, and James ordered seven Inspectors to search the rest of the floor.
Slowly, the room began to reveal itself. First, the shine of the floor. Then the dim stars that were the ceiling lights. Then the digital sparkles on computer screens and lab equipment. The sound of the vacuum softened until it was little more than white noise in Marvin's microphones.
That was when the chairs appeared.
Marvin tensed when he saw the first one. It looked like a Bessmer chair, a huge frame and complex machinery underneath. But that wasn't what unnerved him.
Someone was sitting in it.
As if in a trance, everyone in the room, even Sparrow, approached the person. She was a bald, middle-aged woman wearing a patient's gown and an oxygen mask that covered her whole face. On her head was something that resembled a piloting helmet, but instead of being connected to the headrest, it was connected to the ceiling by four silver tubes. Next to her, a monitor showed dozens of waveforms and numbers.
"Should I stop the vacuum?" Sienna asked in their comms channel.
"No, she's breathing fine," James said, though he sounded anxious.
The group moved closer. Since Marvin was ahead of Sienna and the tallest by far, he was the first to see the woman's eyes. He froze.
What the hell?
The others stopped soon after. Sienna cursed under her breath and offered to turn off the vacuum again.
"It can't be the vacuum," James murmured. "How long has she been here?"
An Inspector checked the chairside monitor. "Almost one year."
Marvin felt his vents stutter as if he were shivering. Had the woman known what she was signing up for? Did her relatives and friends know where she was? Was anyone even looking for her?
As the rest of the room lit up, more chairs appeared, each with a patient hooked up to the ceiling, wearing a mask and gown. And like the first, each patient's eyes were wide open as if in a state of perpetual terror, filled with blood and an inky black liquid.
Despite wanting to run as far from here as possible, Marvin couldn't look away. One dozen chairs visible. Two dozen. By the time the vacuum stopped and the canisters powered down, he could see at least forty patients all in that same catatonic state.
The Inspectors checked the dates of each of them. All here for a year or more. They found their identities, which had been wiped from the public, but the Inspection kept their own record. All of the patients—the victims—were associated with gangs in some way, but were far from irredeemable people.
"Marvin, what is that?" Caroline asked in their personal comms.
Marvin wanted to make up an alternative, but he knew what this was: Ainsel was harvesting these people for research. They'd gathered people who were just shady enough to not stir up suspicion when they went missing, hooked them up to these chairs, and drained their brains for data. All to build Legionnaire and whatever other sick projects Saeyung was working on.
But before Marvin could reply to Caroline, she suddenly inhaled sharply. "Shit."
In the background, Marvin heard Ben, Renee, Ishaan, and Ella ask her what was wrong. Heard a series of quick breaths, sharp and unstable, and a crescendo in the others' concern.
Something triggered a memory. Marvin scanned the room; he'd been looking directly at the patients. Worry filled his processors for a moment, then dread. Was she involved in this? Had she been in the chair or had she been watching?
She couldn't have been in the chair. Look at them. How would those eyes return to normal?
Then Caroline's voice was back in his head. "Sorry, I'm fine," she said, but she was panting. "I'm—"
Marvin disconnected the comms and the stream. Static filled his head. Since the Inspectors' comms passed only through the mech and not Caroline's syncing point, she would not be able to hear or say anything to them. She and the others were completely severed from the operation.
They would have so many questions when they reunited, and Marvin didn't even want to think about what Amir would do if he found out. But he needed to know exactly what had happened in Caroline's past, and he couldn't afford anyone trying to stop him.
Amir didn't pick up on what he'd done. He and the Inspectors continued down the row of test subjects, not daring to disturb anything. Once confirming every subject was alive, they split up to search everything else.
Marvin trailed James, who had announced he would look for a log of people who used this lab and were responsible for this experiment. It didn't take long. He simply had to hack into a computer and ask the AI who had used the room. Aside from Saeyung, there were ten other names that appeared more than twice. James wrote them down and went to tell his subordinates.
Marvin stayed behind. On the computer, he typed, Has Caroline Sand been in this room? Maybe he was paranoid, maybe Caroline was a completely normal girl with a normal past, but either way, he couldn't be uncertain any longer.
The buffer was shorter than he wanted it to be. So was the answer.
Yes, Caroline Sand has one recorded visit.
That was it.
"Caroline!" James called. "What are you doing?"
Marvin quickly deleted the chat and swiveled his head around. James stopped and beckoned him over.
"Don't get separated, remember?"
Marvin looked at the ground and nodded.
And then everything went dark. There was a sharp buzz in Marvin's head as his communication channel cut out. He frantically tried reactivating it, but it wasn't just on his end—the entire comms system had gone down.
"Caroline?" Amir called. "Caro—"
His voice was suddenly muffled as if a wall had come between him and Marvin. It muffled further—a second wall—and further until it was inaudible. Marvin registered that he was falling, then registered that he had hit the floor. He looked up but saw only darkness.
His heart began to race. The spacewarpers. Saeyung had found a way to separate him from the others.
I have to get out of here. We have all the evidence we need.
The thought surprised him. Yes, escaping was the logical thing to do, but what about Amir? Would Marvin just abandon him?
He can get out on his own.
Marvin began to run through the darkness. He didn't care which way he was going; if he tore through enough walls, he would make it out.
But as he ran, a part of him kept thinking, was that all the thought he would give to the police chief?
It has to be. I need to live.
Was this the choice he would have made as a human?
Stop using that comparison. Going back for him is the dumbest thing you could do.
Marvin wondered if his footsteps should be slowing. If this decision should at least weigh on him.
The lights turned on. He stopped in his tracks, inches from hitting a wall. He looked behind him and saw a set of stairs leading to another wall only a few feet away. Somehow, he'd ended up in a stairwell. He considered cutting through and continuing forward, but he was scared of disturbing the lab too much.
He headed up the stairs. His altitude calculation told him he was on the 54th floor, but he doubted that was true. The spacewarpers could've sent him to the basement for all he knew. He kept going up until he reached a door. He pushed it open, and suddenly a torrent of wind blasted his microphones.
At first, from the bright lights and the frantic pattering sound, he thought he had stepped into a trap. But he quickly realized that the pattering was simply rainfall, and the lights were those glaring down from the high ceiling of a shuttle hangar. In the hangar, three shuttles stood several meters apart, separated from the outside by a wall of rain. By the blurry silhouettes of buildings, Marvin estimated that he was on the thirtieth floor.
Before he could take in the rest of the hangar, he recognized movement at the left-most shuttle. Someone was standing by the side door, one foot inside the cabin, one on the stairs. Marvin focused his cameras and widened his eyes.
Saeyung Park held his gaze for a second, her expression completely unreadable. Then she turned and headed into the shuttle. It lifted off the ground.
For whatever reason, Marvin had not considered the possibility of running into the CEO. He had figured she would be in the lab, probably working to undermine their operation, but he'd always expected the confrontation to happen after they'd gathered the evidence.
Now here she was.
There were a thousand places she could fly to, but one of them—and by far the most attractive option—was out of the megacity and away from all consequences.
She'll get away with everything. I won't get any more answers from her.
Before he knew what he was doing, Marvin was running towards the shuttle, running faster than it could accelerate. It dipped into the rain, angled its thrusters 90 degrees, then rose to join the airstream. It was still too slow. Marvin made it to the edge of the hangar with room to spare, and he primed his rocket boosters and jumped.
Something hit him in the side and sent him tumbling back into the hangar. Something large and humanoid. A mech. Legionnaire? But Legionnaire didn't have that kind of brunt force; in fact, something about the hit was oddly familiar.
Marvin's sabers unfolded. He dug them into the ground, then flipped onto his feet. In the rain, the shuttle's engines ignited, purple fumes propelling Saeyung into the haze. And standing in its place was Carlos Esparza's mech, The Everlancer.