CHAPTER 108

The descent through the facility's levels had been a journey through increasingly surreal layers of scientific horror. Each floor revealed new atrocities—laboratories where hybrid children were subjected to surgical procedures without anesthesia, training facilities where eight-year-olds learned to kill with their bare hands, dormitories where dozens of beds stood empty, their occupants having "graduated" to purposes the team was only beginning to understand.

But nothing had prepared them for the foundry.

The cavernous space took Maria's breath away, not with its beauty but with its terrible grandeur. The hangar stretched out before them like an aircraft manufacturing facility designed by a madman, its ceiling lost in shadows high above. Dozens of the winged aircraft sat in assembly lines, each one a masterpiece of aerodynamic engineering and biological horror. They were sleek and predatory, their surfaces seeming to shift and ripple in the artificial light as if they were alive.

But