“Bastards,” Fleeter said.
“How many people?” Jack wondered. There must have been two hundred jars there. “How can they…?”
“What, justify this?”
Jack nodded, but he already knew the answer. “They don't have to,” he said. “As far as the world knows, London is filled with monsters.”
“Camp H certainly is,” Fleeter said. “Come on. The girl.”
They stepped over the woman sprawled in the corridor—her expression changing infinitely slowly from mildly distracted, to shocked and agonised—and kicked open the next door. The room was filled with equipment, tools, and a heavily stocked weapon rack. Fleeter grabbed a pistol and several magazines and offered them to Jack, but he shook his head. She raised an eyebrow.
“It wasn't an invitation,” she said.
Jack took the gun. She pointed briefly at the switch above the trigger. “Safety. And there's one in the handle, squeeze that when you're shooting.”
The next room was a bathroom, and then the corridor ended with another door. Fleeter went to kick it open but Jack held up his hand, one finger raised.
He half-closed his eyes and cruised his star-scape of potential, realising even as he tried that he had yet to employ one talent whilst already using another. His awareness of Fleeter and his surroundings diminished, and he probed outwards, projecting his senses through the metal door and into the room beyond. There were three warm sensations in there. Jack closed in and merged his own senses with the first—
He smells coffee, thick and bitter; hears a long, low moan, and realises it is someone else in mid-sentence, their words slowed to an impossible crawl; sees two women across from him, one of them biting into a bar of chocolate, the other open-mouthed as she speaks, both cradling guns across their laps, the room lined with computers and wheeled chairs, a map on one wall, screens buzzing mid-flash. And in that other person's mind which is more alien than Jack could have possibly imagined, a frozen image of what its owner would rather be doing right now. The stilled thought includes both women across from him.
Jack notices the grille in the wall behind the women, then, and the shadow outlined beyond. There is a weak light in that smaller room. When Jack shifts his perception he touches upon an incredible, tortured mind, and the pain within is—
—Jack pulled back through the door to himself, shivering as he reined in his senses. He panted heavily, rubbing his hands across his eyes as if that might clear him of another person's distress and wretchedness.
“What?” Fleeter asked.
“Horrible,” Jack said. “The poor girl, the poor…”
Fleeter shoved him against the door. “What?”
“Three Choppers. Control room. The girl's in a smaller room…a cell…and she's—”
Fleeter slammed the handle down and entered the room. Jack went to follow but slumped against the cold doorframe, watching helplessly as Fleeter shoved the two women aside. When they struck the desks and floor, blood flowed. She tried the door but it was locked and bolted. When she glanced back at Jack, he was already moving towards her.