Ember followed, our footsteps thumping against the metal steps and reverberating up the shaft. About halfway down, Wes’s voice started to sputter, and by the time we reached the bottom, it had flickered out entirely.

“Great,” I muttered. “Wes, you there? Can you hear me?” No answer, just the continuous sound of static. I looked over at Ember and frowned. “Signal cut out,” I told her. “I lost Wes. Looks like it’s just us now.”

She blinked. “Should we go back?”

“No.” I glanced at the door that marked the end of the stairway. “I want to see what this place is,” I said firmly. “If this was the facility at some point, I want to learn as much as I can. Anything to help me find the current one. Come on.”

The door at the bottom of the steps was metal and a touch pad hung beside the frame, a final security measure against interlopers. But the screen was dark, and the handle turned easily under my palm as I wrenched it down. Shoving the door back, I stepped through the frame and shone the flashlight beam into the room.

For a moment, as the faint light scuttled over the walls and floor, I could only stare, the pit of my stomach coiling like a frightened snake. I didn’t know what I had been expecting, but it wasn’t this.

“What the hell?” I whispered.

EMBER

Okay, I was definitely creeped out here.

Too many horror flicks when I was growing up, I supposed. When I was about thirteen, I went through a phase where I was addicted to ghost and monster movies. Freddy, Jason, Chucky, The Ring, The Grudge, all the Aliens, Predator, Poltergeist; I devoured everything that involved some kind of creature tearing people apart or freaking them out. I drove Dante crazy with the times I would sneak into his room late at night because I was convinced some pale little girl would crawl through the television and flicker her way to my bed. Paranormal movies always got to me, because while I was fairly certain the Alien or Predator would die from a fireball between the eyes, and even Jason would be no match for a dragon, what could you do to a ghost?

True, this was not your typical poltergeist set, but that didn’t mean anything. I’d seen plenty of sci-fi movies where the heroes were sent to investigate a laboratory or compound or spaceship that had abruptly gone dark, and everything was quiet and abandoned when they arrived, but you just knew something was still out there, stalking them.

In fact, I think I’d seen this exact setup before: the creepy underground lab, the rows of strange machines, the large glass cylinders stretched to the ceiling. I could feel a shiver run up my spine as Riley’s flashlight beam skittered over the tubes, all thankfully empty but no less disturbing. I knew what those tubes were for: growing things. Living things. Either trying to improve upon nature, or to create something new. And it was always, as every movie, book and story had shown, a very, very bad idea.

“What the hell?” Riley muttered, echoing my sentiments. Scanning the light around the room, which was large and stretched back into the darkness, he shook his head. Beyond the glass cylinders were seemingly endless rows of countertops, aisles upon aisles of flat surfaces holding glass vials, beakers, strange machines and other lab-y things. “This is a Talon laboratory, all right,” Riley said. “I’d heard of these places when I was still with the organization, but I’ve never seen one before. What were they doing down here?” He pinned the beam on one of the containers, revealing a set of tubes and wires hanging down from the inside. “Those vats look all kinds of ominous, don’t they? What do you think was in them?”

I swallowed. All the answers I could think of made my skin crawl. “Maybe Talon was secretly operating a chocolate factory,” I joked, “because they discovered that making chocolate is much more rewarding than trying to take over everything.”

Riley snorted. “If they put something in the bars that turned all humans into mindless drones, I wouldn’t put it past them,” he replied. “But I doubt that’s what happened here, Firebrand.”

“Okay, but if we run into chocolate-fueled zombies, you owe me dinner.”

“Always the zombies with you.”

Our voices sounded too glib, too light and breezy for the surroundings. Silence fell, and the shadows seemed to press in, as if offended by our flippancy. Riley swept his flashlight beam around, his tone grave once more. “Though they were definitely working on something,” he muttered. “I’d give my back teeth to know what Talon was really doing here. And why this place is deserted now.”

My skin prickled. In the movies, the answer to that question was always the same: because the specimens, prisoners, or experiments had all escaped and gone on a killing spree before everything was locked down.