Chapter 5
OAKLEY
In reality, I understand far too much, and then again, not a damned thing.
I don’t know if Aunt Hedy had me watch from that dorm room to prevent me from clocking the details or if she wanted me to observe them from a safe space.
Only when Uncle Edison landed on his back and was looking straight up did I catch on.
Even from the third floor, he looked like…
I don’t know. A Hollywood monster? I already knew he and Silas have a really hard time with sunlight.
It’s not that they burn, vampire style, but their eyes are extra photosensitive.
Which…ah…is why they wear such dark sunglasses.
I’d stood from the chair as if I’d been hit with a cattle prod before quietly making my way down the stairs, needing to verify if I’d seen what I thought I saw.
I’d walked the perimeter to ensure no one was looking in my direction, then stayed off to the side, observing.
And what I observed was Maverick, devastated by his discovery that there was a version of Uncle Eddie that’d been hidden from us. Uncle Eddie and Holmes were quick to console Mav, but I don’t know how effective that was, especially since Eddie’s eyes were still a solid black.
I caught Silas’s worried exchange with Hedy, and it made my chest feel heavy.
Even before I saw Sy’s eyes, before I had a chance to read his file, I knew what was coming. I knew it had to be, at least partially, why my fathers, especially Dad, were terrified of him.
Silas’s spar with Maverick was intense. Amazing. Terrifying. I’m so, so proud of Maverick and angry for him all over again for being left out of the family business until it couldn’t be hidden from him. He was born to do this.
And yet.
Despite the absolute show Maverick put on, I can’t look away from Silas. Even now that his eyes are back to their familiar icy blue, I can’t help but see him as dangerous.
Murderous.
Despite the fact that Maverick killed a man in cold blood right in front of us, despite the fact that Uncle Eddie is apparently a self-healing weapon, it’s Silas who feels like the dangerous one.
I’ve always clocked his intense energy, sure, but this is different. Where Uncle Eddie has clearly matured into his power, Silas is pure, vibrating murder. An atom bomb with a hair trigger. Capable of so much destruction, yet completely self-aware. Painfully so.
I ache at the thought of it.
I turn to Hedy. “You and I discussed giving the test after an operation. I think this qualifies as an operation.”
She looks to the four men on the floor. “Who do you wanna start with?”
“I think your wine flight is the way to go.”
Sending me a little grin, she asks, “And in your mind that order would be…?”
“Maverick, Holmes, Edison, Silas.”
“Good call. I’ve got one more place to show you and Mav, but let’s see if you can get them in this afternoon before you go home. Did you get your office set up this morning?”
“The laptop was delivered while we were at lunch, and Jake just sent over my login.”
“Good. You’ll have plenty to read, I’m sure,” she says, waving Maverick over.
Maverick and I are standing with Hedy in a cavern the size of a football stadium.
Jaw-dropping doesn’t even begin to cover it.
“This is the largest privately owned cave system in the United States. Used to be our main office. Now it’s just the experimental science wing—and where we keep prisoners.”
“Prisoners,” I repeat.
“Extrajudicially, yes. Some people are too dangerous—or too wealthy—for the regular system to handle. We keep them here. Study them. Then kill them.”
Maverick and I exchange a look. “How long do you keep them?”
“No more than a year.” She leads us toward an elevator. “Come on. Let’s get this tour started.”
Maverick redoes his loose bun, and I pull on my beard.
“Oookay,” I say.
We take an old elevator down to the floor of the cavern and follow a manufactured pathway.
“We used to have the mess over here, and over there is where we printed out experimental weapons,” Hedy says, like that is a normal thing.
We go through a series of smaller caverns, and she notes the fading paint on some of the floors and points to a series of hospital rooms.
“This all looks old and creepy now, but when I first joined the team, this was all state of the art.” She grins to herself. “When your Uncle Edison lost his leg, this is where he recovered.”
My dads have said there’s a funny story about him not wanting to go to physical therapy, but they left out the part about the fucking cave.
We stop by the place Hedy calls the meditation room, and it’s a small cave with a pond.
There’s a tiny aperture at the top of the cave that lets in light, and the way it bounces around the space is beautiful.
Ethereal. And because the water is filtered through several feet of rock and loam, it’s perfectly clear.
While it looks like a shallow pond, Hedy assures us that it is quite deep.
“No swimming, but you are welcome to come back and meditate at the water’s edge as often as you’d like.”
It’s an oddly delicate space in the middle of these dense rock caverns, and I make a note to come back here on my own.
Outside the meditation room is a weird optical illusion that makes it look like we’ve reached the end of the cave system, but then Hedy disappears.
We follow and discover a hidden staircase cut into the stone.
It leads to another series of caverns—the tallest of which houses a surgical theater.
And the kind of advanced tech I’ve only read about in sci-fi novels.
As Maverick and I take in the space, Uncle Anders joins us from what looks to be a washroom.
“Is Hedy showing you the ropes?”
Maverick and I share another look. “Yes,” I answer.
“Feeling a little overwhelmed?”
“A lot overwhelmed,” Maverick says. “And you? Are those your real eyes?”
Anders laughs, a surprisingly country sound in the middle of all this technology.
“Yes, I am one hundred percent human.”
“Unfortunately,” Hedy jokes, sending him the middle finger.
“Whatever, you love me.”
She wraps an arm around his waist. “You’re okay.”
“So, what’s next?” he asks. “Taking them to the dungeon?”
“Yes, but I haven’t yet called it the dungeon.”
Maverick lifts his chin. “That’s where you keep the prisoners?”
Anders goes serious, and…gotta say. Not my favorite look on him.
“Yes.”
“Hedy mentioned that we kill them,” Maverick says. “How do we do it? Who kills them?”
Anders shoots me a look, and I immediately know the answer.
“Silas,” I say.
“Yes, mostly.” He lifts a shoulder. “There are days when I need a challenge. Edison sometimes needs to blow off steam. And we are debating whether or not to bring Hopper down here.”
I clench my jaw. Just based on his association with the Mafia, I understand that Uncle Hopper has the ability to kill people. But Anders is acting like they all need to kill.
Especially Silas.
“How are we doing?” Hedy asks, looking between Maverick and me.
“Integrating,” I say.
“Yeah, what he said.”
“You coming with us?” Hedy asks Anders.
“Sure.”
The dungeon, it turns out, is two more levels down, in a smaller, bean-shaped cavern with a dozen or so cells lining the curved edge.
To be honest, the cells are larger and more comfortable looking than I would have expected. Thick sheets of some kind of plexiglass separate us from them, and all the people in the cells are quiet. Several look…modified.
All of them look dangerous, and the energy in this space is vile.
“We keep them sedated,” Hedy explains, clearly reading the questions in my eyes.
“You said you only keep them here for up to a year, right?” Maverick asks.
She nods and leads us to a small cavern off to the side of this one. It’s closed off from us with a thick, heavy metal door.
Hedy goes to the side of the door and taps a panel, and a screen extends from the rock face. She uses her palm to activate it, and a video feed appears.
A normal-looking guy wearing jeans and a polo is sedately pacing the room.
“Who’s that?”
Hedy goes quiet for a moment.
“Honestly, with everything you’re learning today, I don’t think we need to pile on with who this man is and what he has done.”
Maverick snorts. Hedy says nothing.
“Wait. You’re serious?”
She and Anders exchange a look. “Yeah, I’m serious.”
I look more closely at the screen. “Is that a meat hook?” I ask, and I’m immediately sorry.
Anders laughs. “Oh yeah. I had them add that.”
When Maverick and I look at him, horrified, he holds up his hands.
“We hardly ever use it anymore.”
That brings up a whole litany of questions I don’t want answers to.
Maverick is the one to break the silence. “I think I understand now why my dads didn’t want me to be involved in the family business. I’m pretty sure they’d rather I never knew about the meat hook, at the very least.”
“It’s good to be a part of the solution,” Anders says. “But it’s heavy, knowing the problems that need to be solved.” He pats my shoulder. “Which is why we need you, big guy. None of this is gonna get any easier, but hopefully, you’ll see how important it is.”
We turn once again to the screen and watch the ordinary-looking man pace the room he’s definitely going to die in.
I think back to what Hedy told me when I asked about the ethics of this place—that objectivity was a luxury we couldn’t afford, that I’d have to learn when to step back and when to let her take over.
Standing in this cave, watching a man pace toward his death, I’m beginning to understand what she meant.
Even in a world with perfect ethics, there will always be people like whoever this man is. And they will always need to be dealt with.
“So, is this where Edison taught Silas how to be a murderer?” Maverick asks, pulling me from my navel-gazing.
His question surprises me. I wouldn’t have ever put those two things together, but Maverick’s mind has always come at things from a different angle. I turn to Hedy and find the answer on her face.
“In short, yes.” Hedy’s smile is sad. “With his modifications, though, Silas never needed to be taught how to kill. He was always going to be a murderer.”
Her words sit in my gut like a rock.
“Then why wasn’t he killed?” Maverick stops himself. “To be clear, I’m really fucking glad he wasn’t.”
Me too.
“Because he came to us as a child,” I answer. I look to Hedy and Anders. “That’s it, right?”
They nod. Hedy explains, “We knew it was a possibility he might end up here, but between Ant, Erik, and Edison, we thought we had a shot at pointing him in the right direction.”
“And my parents,” Anders says with a smile.
I look again at the monitor. I’m not shocked that Mama and Papa Bash were there for Silas. I wonder if they know about this dungeon.
“Are you saving this guy for him?” Maverick asks.
I suck in a breath.
“This fucking stain?” Anders asks, flicking the monitor. “You bet your ass we are.”
The idea that Silas would need this kind of an outlet… Jesus. I understand my fathers’ fear of him more than I did before, that’s for damn sure. But I don’t feel afraid when I think of Silas.
All I feel is sad.