I was shaking. Constantine looked at me sharply, lips firmed, and stroked a hand over my hair. I smiled in reassurance, and he and Axer mentally debated next steps.
I felt Raphael disengage from the others so that it was only the two of us again. Promise me. Raphael's voice turned commanding. Promise me, Butterfly, that you will destroy it before you leave. Without emotion. Destroy it. Promise me you will do it without emotion.
I wanted to destroy everything I saw, but even with the truth imbuing our connection now I couldn't trust—
If you feel any emotion for the task, do nothing, he said seriously. But if you can do it without emotion, you must promise.
That seems unlikely, I said. Emotion was overwhelming me right now.
An unlikely task then.
Very well.
I could feel his triumph as he sealed the vow, then abruptly disappeared from my mind, like he had done all he needed to do.
Unease swept me. I looked at the empty faces of the workers in trepidation, wondering, while Axer and Constantine plotted out trajectories and strategies—Constantine pulling items from his cloak and slipping them into his roommate's cloak with activation spells and ownership.
This was not a place where normal people worked. The regular mages in the Department who sought security to ensure happiness in the Second Layer worked elsewhere. This was a slave driven hive of an operation. The empty faces spoke to those without emotion or soul.
And so, it was, when a man without a blank gaze strode into the room—a man with a face I had just seen in a painted memory, I felled him immediately with a blast of container magic pulled from Constantine's belt. And when I lifted the man's body, it was to Table One that I secured him with straps. Three dozen straps.
At the first hit of my magic, Axer had vaulted over the crates and immediately taken care of every blank gazed grunt in the room in coordination with the boys' quickly laid plans.
The automaton-like mages didn't put up a fight, which was even creepier. They were as still and empty in repose as their gazes had been in simulated life.
As Axer worked as quickly as he always did to secure a space, Constantine looked at Table One, then at me, eyebrows raised.
“We might need all of those straps,” I said.
“Riiight.”
Axer's container magic swept the man strapped to the table. He looked up at us with a glittering gaze. “Oler Mussolgranz. Not so dead after all.”
I closed my eyes, but could feel the excitement moving through them.
“Get his magic,” Constantine said, moving swiftly toward the table, pulling two containers from his cloak.
A cell moved from a holding area, its motions on autopilot, and was raised into place in the newest and shortest row, next to another familiar face.
Rosaria pounded on the glass, screaming, her voice and motions completely silent in the eerie stillness of the Basement.
Samuel and the girl with stars in her eyes pressed their fingers against their glass, watching her, and watching me. Magic zipped along the edges of their cells. Alive. And there were two dozen others of similar age around them. The Awakening mages since I’d come online.
Alive.
The relief was almost crippling. We'd made a gamble—let them take Rosaria, pinned with spells, to follow them to where we'd hopefully find the rest. All the rest. To the Basement. And Rosaria, our baited sacrifice, was still alive.
I was in front of her cell, hand raised, barely remembering having moved.
Rosaria pounded silently on the glass between us, her lips forming two words. “My brother?”
I pressed a hand against the glass of the mage I had failed last. “Alive. Safe.”
I had put a thousand remote wards around that hospital, and Marsgrove had moved him to a secure location that even I didn’t know.
“You saved him,” she said, a silent sob forming around the words.
“No. You saved him,” I said quietly.
She pressed her forehead against the glass, but I could still see her mouth. “I killed him. For a moment, I—”
I pressed my palm more firmly against the glass. “You killed no one. A lit bomb was placed in your hands. You aren’t responsible.” I closed my eyes, then looked over at Samuel. “And you will learn how to make that bomb into something else.”
Samuel stepped sideways and touched the wall separating him from Rosaria, his other hand reaching to the girl with stars in her eyes, and suddenly I could hear them. “We are all connected, do you not feel it? We will help each other.” Magic zipped along the cells.
“Makali Hōkūlani,” the girl with stars introduced herself softly. “And I feel it.”
“The man with death in his chest said he will destroy such connections,” Samuel said, gaze pinned on me.
I immediately turned to find a release valve.
Constantine's hand gripped mine, pulling me into his chest. “Wait.”
“What? I can't—”
“Ren,” Constantine hissed. “You can't just release them. Any of them.”
“He's right,” Axer said grimly, still studying Mussolgranz.
I struggled. “I'm not leaving them like this.” Asking me to leave the Awakening mages was asking me to cut off body parts, and I certainly wasn't going to let the tortured beings and creatures stay. “We aren't leaving them here. In the Basement.”
Constantine turned me, so I was facing the last of the cage aisles. “Those in the front are still Awakening, and their magic needs stabilizing still—but worse, look at the brain scans of the ones in the back.”
My gaze went to the monitor of one cell on the far left of the feral grid, far from the new mages. Symbols and magic swirled in patterns I didn't know. I called up one of the translation spells that allowed for alternate fields of study to be interpreted by laypeople. There was one for medicine related fields, gifted to me by Greyskull, and included in the “emergency pack” that Axer, Constantine, and Olivia had put together before I'd been expelled.
Symbols started translating in my mind as the spell took hold. And I could see what the boys were grimly pointing to.
“There is nothing registering in that cell, or the one next to it,” Axer said. “And that's not to say what will happen when the creatures above us are released from hell?”
My gaze darted up at the myriad of creatures pinned to the ceiling. I licked my dry lips—short, quick open breaths drying them faster than I could moisten them. My hand shook. What would I do if I'd been sensory and magic deprived for weeks, months, however long they'd been here? Lash out, die of shock, overload...
“We can't leave them,” I said.
Constantine released me. “No.” He looked at Axer, gaze intense. “But we have other options. One, in particular, that it's time to take. No more hiding.”
I hesitated, hand shaking uncontrollably, then nodded my consent.
“Okay,” he said with a strange cocktail or relief and resignation, as if he thought I'd argue. “Don't touch anything while I do this.”
I stared at the pinned bodies above, the caged mages in their cells, and my hand twitched toward the console. I shoved both hands into my cloak.