WHAT THE BASEMENT HOLDS

There wasn't a sound from the alarm. It was a physical force, a loud wave of metal that hit the walls and shook Elena's shoes. The live feed stopped with a last, static gasp, and the archival room was filled with the frantic, bloody pulse of the emergency strobes. Red. Black. Red. Black. Adrian's face looked like a carved mask of determination in the jagged light. Ronan was moving all over the place, slamming consoles shut and pulling drives out of their ports.

Ronan yelled over the noise, "They cut the main uplink!" His voice was strained. "We can't see." They're putting a lot of pressure on them.

"They're not just locking us down," Adrian said, his voice a low, urgent thrum that cut through the siren's wail. He had his gun out, but it wasn't aimed; it was ready to go. "They're cleaning up." That alarm means that there is a breach in the sector. "They know we know."

Elena's heart pounded against her ribs like a wild bird trying to get out of a cage. People all over the world had just seen it. Now, they were completely and terrifyingly alone. The camera in her hand suddenly seemed useless, like a toy against the violence of the institution that was coming down on them. But the woman's voice from the archive kept coming back to her, like a ghost in the machine: "Check the basement."

"The basement," Elena said, her voice surprisingly steady. She picked up the camera and turned it back on. In the dark, the little red recording light looked like a single, defiant eye. "We have to go down if they're coming up. Now. While they're all mixed up.

Ronan looked at her as if she had told him to grow wings and fly. "That's a signal to contain!" It means they're locking all the doors and filling the hallways with security. "Going down is death."

"Staying here is a confession," Adrian said, looking straight at Elena. He got it. He had always known. It was never about getting away. It was about proof. It was about forcing the truth into the open so that it could never be hidden again. "They'll put us in a box and say we were hackers and trespassers." The story ends with us in this room.

The door to the hallway shook on its hinges, and a loud thud echoed as someone—or something—slammed into it from the outside. The metal made a noise. They didn't have time to talk about it.

"There's a maintenance shaft," Ronan said, and the words came out in a rush of giving in to what was going to happen. "Behind the rack of servers." There is a straight drop to the utility level in the sub-basement. It's not on the main grid. They might not be keeping an eye on it.

"Maybe?" Elena asked, already walking toward the heavy server rack.

"It's all we have," Ronan said, pushing his shoulder against the metal. Adrian joined him, and together they moved the groaning unit to the side, showing a dirty, square hatch in the wall that was held shut by a simple, old-fashioned latch.

Another loud bang hit the main hatch. There was a lot of noise in the room as metal broke. They had unlocked the first lock.

Adrian forced the maintenance hatch open. They were met by a yawning, dark void that smelled like cold concrete and ozone. A narrow, slippery ladder went into the dark.

"Go," Adrian yelled at Elena, looking at the main door that was shaking. "Now. Don't look down. "Just go."

Elena didn't think twice. She threw the camera over her shoulder and swung her legs into the void, where her feet found the cold, greasy rungs. The descent was a nightmare for people who are afraid of small spaces. The loud alarm from above got quieter, and she could only hear her own ragged breathing and the sound of her shoes scraping against the metal. The red strobe light from above didn't reach here; it was complete darkness.

She climbed down, down, down until her arms hurt and the world above seemed like a long time ago. At last, her foot hit solid, wet concrete. She stepped away from the ladder and fumbled for the camera. Its small light flickered on, a weak torch cutting through the darkness. She was in a narrow tunnel with a low ceiling and pipes and cables that were dripping and covered in dust.

Ronan fell next to her with a thud and a curse, and he had trouble keeping his balance. Adrian climbed down the last few rungs a moment later and dropped the last few feet, landing in a controlled crouch. He turned right away and reached up to grab the bottom of the ladder. He pulled with a grunt, and the whole bottom part of the ladder came off the wall with a screech of protesting metal. It then retracted upward into the dark. A temporary roadblock that is very important.

Be quiet. Not real silence, but the deep, humming silence that comes from a building's mechanical heart. There was a faint, distant echo of the alarm. The air was cold and calm.

"Where to now?" Ronan whispered, and his voice was loud in the quiet.

Elena slowly moved the camera around. The tunnel went in two different directions. It looked like it ended in a pile of old, rusty pipes to the left. To the right, it slowly turned into darkness. But there, on the wall to the right, was something that made her heart stop. Faint, but clear. A symbol that has been spray-painted in faded yellow paint. An arrow and the word "Ariadne" below it.

The string that leads out of the maze.

"This way," Elena said, her voice barely a whisper.

They moved quickly, bending over the low pipes. They saw it when the tunnel bent again. A door. It wasn't a modern door with a key card; it was an old, heavy steel door, like one from a vault. It was a little open, and a thin beam of pale, sickly light came out into the tunnel. And from inside, a sound. Not the sound of machines. A soft, steady beep. The sound of medical devices.

Elena's blood ran cold. This was it. The basement wasn't a place to store things. It was a ward.

She slowly pushed the door open. It swung open with a low, groaning creak that seemed to scream their presence to everyone on the lower level.

The sight that met them took her breath away.

There were hospital beds all around the long, rectangular room. The lights were dim and clinical. There was a woman in each bed, and they were so still that they looked like statues. IV lines snaked from the stands to their arms. Each one was hooked up to a monitor that beeped in a steady, hypnotic way. Their faces were calm and relaxed. Sleeping. But it wasn't a normal sleep. It was the deep, scary stillness of being sedated.

"My God," Ronan said, putting his hand over his mouth.

Adrian walked past Elena, his body stiff with growing anger. He walked over to the nearest bed and looked down at the woman who was there. Her skin was pale, and her dark hair was spread out across the pillow. She looked like she was in her early twenties. There was not a name on the clipboard at the foot of her bed, but a code: *Subject 7-G.*

Elena raised the camera, and her hands shook so much that the picture shook. She moved the camera around the room, taking pictures of the terrifying scene. Five beds. Five ladies. The people who are missing. They weren't gone. They were kept.

"They're alive," she said in a whisper, the words both a prayer and a curse. "They've been here the whole time."

She went to the next bed and focused on the woman's face. She was older, and even when she was high, you could see the lines of stress on her face. Elena's eyes moved to the IV bag that was hanging from the pole. It had a chemical name on it that she didn't know, but underneath it, in handwriting, was the word "Compliance."

They all froze when they heard a soft click from the other side of the room.

A person came out of the shadows between two beds. It wasn’t a security guard. There was a man in a white lab coat with a tablet. He was in his 40s and had a tired, unremarkable face. He didn't seem shocked to see them. He looked resigned.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the man said, his voice flat, devoid of emotion. “This is a secured medical facility.”

“Medical facility?” Adrian's voice was dangerously low. “You’re keeping them sedated. Why?”

The man said, "Stabilization," as if he were reading from a book. "They are going through a lot of intensive therapeutic regression." It's for their own safety.

"To protect them?" The camera was still rolling when Elena's voice broke. "You're giving them drugs to make them quiet!"

The man's eyes darted to the camera, and for the first time, he looked worried. "That device isn't allowed. "You are on a classified project."

"Project?" Ronan said the same thing, horrified.

A new sound started before the man could answer. A low, resonant buzzing that sounded like it was coming from the walls. The monitors at the bedsides changed one by one. The steady green heartbeats stopped, and the beeps turned into a single, high-pitched tone that lasted for a long time. The *flatline*.

"What's going on?" Elena cried and turned around as the horrible noise came from five different places in the room.

The man in the lab coat looked down at his tablet, and his face turned pale. "Someone has started the purge protocol from a distance." He looked up, and his eyes were wide open with a fear that was suddenly very real. "They're not just closing the doors." They're cleaning up the proof.

He dropped the tablet, and it fell to the floor, where it broke. When he did, the light from Elena's camera caught the shine of something on the wrist of the woman in the bed next to her. A bracelet made of thin plastic. Elena took a shaky step closer as the flatline screeched its boring death knell.

It wasn't an ID from the hospital. It was a tag for shipping.

And in big, clear letters, it said:

**FINAL TRANSFER. TERMINATION PERMITTED.

The door at the other end of the room hissed open, and two people in full black tactical gear stepped through, weapons raised, not at Adrian or Ronan, but right at the women in the beds who were asleep.

The man in the lab coat looked from the armed people to Elena's camera. His mouth opened in a silent, desperate scream.

Adrian moved and put his body right between the raised weapons and the nearest bed. His own gun finally came up, a lone, useless shield against the machinery of erasure.