Chapter 90: His Unlikely Spy

The air changed the moment Lara and Lucian stepped down.

It was like crossing an invisible line where the world above stopped existing and another one started.

The staircase went down in a tight spiral.

Lucian went first with the dagger in his right hand and his left grazing the wall so he wouldn’t lose balance.

Lara followed two steps behind, with a hand resting on his back to not lose him in the dark.

The Sister with the surgical tray couldn’t be heard anymore.

“Do you feel her?” Lucian whispered without stopping.

“She turned right a minute ago,” Lara answered. “She’s calm, she doesn’t know we are here.”

They reached the bottom.

Basement Level 1 was a long and wide corridor, with black stone arches holding a low ceiling.

On both sides of the corridor there were wood doors reinforced with iron.

Twelve in total, six per side.

Lucian got close to the first door and pressed his ear against it.

Nothing.

He looked down and there was a plate of food intact resting next to the frame.

“Are they empty?”

Lara shook her head. “They are all asleep at the same time,” she said. “That’s not natural.”

Lucian understood. “Drugs.”

They moved forward down the corridor to the back, where a second staircase went down even deeper.

But this one wasn’t open stone.

It was a metal door with three engraved seals glowing with a pale blue fed by something Lucian couldn’t see but Lara felt.

“Paladin seals,” Lucian said, recognizing the symbols. “Military grade, the Order puts these directly.”

He knelt in front of the lock.

He took out his improvised lockpick and it touched the inside of the mechanism.

TZZZ!

A shock ran through his fingers and Lucian pulled his hand back instantly, shaking it.

“Fuck!”

The lockpick fell to the floor, the tip melted.

“It’s not mechanical,” Lara said.

“I noticed, thanks,” Lucian sucked his burned fingers. “Shit! We would need Odessa, a ranked Paladin to open this, or dynamite.”

They stood in silence in front of the door.

On the other side, Lara felt Raziel.

His presence was unmistakable: a dense mix of controlled pain and calculation that reminded her of a wounded animal refusing to lie down.

He was close, two levels down, maybe three, but the path went through here.

And here was a wall they couldn’t cross.

“There has to be another way,” Lucian said, hitting the wall with his fist. “These seals need a constant mana flow to work so if we cut the source…”

“There is no source to cut, the seals are anchored to the building itself,” Lara answered. “I felt the network when we came down, the whole sanatorium is the circuit.”

Lucian looked at her. “Then what do we do?”

Lara didn’t answer immediately.

She was looking at the corridor behind them, where the last torch before the curve projected someone’s shadow.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

A Sister appeared at the end of the corridor.

Young, no more than twenty-five, with the gray tunic of the night guardians and a bunch of keys hanging from her waist.

Lucian raised the dagger but Lara grabbed his wrist.

“No,” she whispered.

“Lara, she’s going to see us.”

“Don’t hurt her.”

“Then what do you suggest!”

Lara let go of Lucian and took a step forward.

The Sister was fifty feet away. She still hadn’t seen them because she walked looking at the cell doors, counting, verifying.

Lara closed her eyes.

She extended her gift towards the Sister like someone extending a hand in the dark groping for something.

She felt the woman’s inside all at once: deep exhaustion, the type that accumulates over months of night shifts.

Fear was what kept her awake.

Without it, she had no reason to keep standing.

Lara took all that fear vibrating inside the Sister and wrapped it up.

The Sister stopped mid-step.

Her expression changed and the tension in her shoulders disappeared.

The woman leaned against the wall, sliding down until she was sitting on the floor.

She fell asleep.

Lucian stood motionless, looking at the sleeping Sister and then at Lara.

“Did you make her… sleep?”

Lara looked at her hands. She turned them, palms up, palms down, as if she didn’t recognize them.

“Not sleep,” she said. “I took away her fear and without fear it seems she didn’t have a reason to be awake.”

Lucian blinked. “That is terrifying.”

Lara didn’t smile. “I know.”

She approached the sleeping Sister and took the keys from her waist.

One of the keys was different from the rest.

Lara inserted it into the lock.

CLICK!

The three seals turned off at the same time, the blue glow died like a candle being blown out.

The door opened inwards and they descended.

Raziel’s cell was the fourth on the left.

Lucian broke the padlock with a pull using the dagger as a lever, not caring about the noise.

CRACK!

The door opened and the light of the torch Lucian had ripped from the wall entered the cell.

Raziel was sitting against the back wall, with his wrists chained and his eyes open.

He seemed to be waiting for them.

“You took your time,” he said.

Lucian knelt next to Raziel and started working on the chains.

“Three days, son of a bitch,” Lucian grunted. “Three days thinking you were dead.”

“I’m not dead.”

“But you looked like it! Lara almost blew her brain out looking for you.”

Lara stayed at the cell entrance, watching the hallway. She turned around for a moment to look at him.

“Can you walk?” she asked.

“I can,” Raziel answered.

Lucian took out the last chain.

CLANK!

“Done. Let’s go.”

Lucian offered his hand. Raziel looked at it but didn’t take it.

“No.”

“No?” Lucian repeated the word as if it didn’t exist in his vocabulary.

“We can’t leave.”

“Raziel, you are chained in a dungeon under a sanatorium that was draining your soul and you are telling me we can’t leave.”

“Listen to me,” Raziel stood up alone, slow, leaning on the wall. “There are forty-seven people down here.”

“I know, Lara counted them.”

“One of them is the key to save my life.”

The silence was immediate.

Lucian closed his mouth. Lara turned completely towards Raziel.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“In the lowest level there is an Oracle. Her blood is the component I need for a Purification Ritual and it is the only thing that can kill the Parasite that is eating me from the inside,”

Raziel said, and every word came out measured. “If I leave now without her, I am dead in a couple of days.”

Lucian opened his mouth to protest.

Raziel cut him off. “And there is something else.”

He walked closer to them.

The torchlight illuminated his face and Lucian saw what three days in that cell had done to him: gray skin under the eyes, cracked lips, a badly closed cut over his left eyebrow.

But the blue eyes were completely awake.

“This place manufactures weapons,” Raziel said. “The Gifts they steal from the patients… they are turning them into ammo for the war.”

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