Chapter 3: Government Secrets
The rain wasn’t stopping. It beaded on Mia’s white hair like crystal on bone, untouched. Sammy’s own red curls were plastered to her scalp, water tracing the lines of her scowl. The neon from the diner sign buzzed and sputtered, painting the wet alley in sickly pink and electric blue. The smell of greasy food, usually a comfort, now made her stomach clench.
“Governmental meddling,” Sammy finally said, the words tasting like ash. “Like a black budget lab? Some cold war freakshow?”
Mia leaned against the damp brick, watching a rat nose through a soggy pizza box. “Think more ambitious. More… integrated. It wasn’t a rogue division. It was the point of the division.” She glanced at Sammy. “You frame it as ‘meddling’. They framed it as strategic evolution. A next-generation asset. Unkillable intelligence officers. Psychically gifted soldiers who don’t need sleep, feel no pain, and can persuade with a whisper.” A faint, cold smile. “The ultimate patriots.”
Sammy’s mind raced, connecting awful dots. “The ruling class member you mentioned. He was a test subject?”
“He was the patron. The visionary. A man with a flag pin on his lapel and the absolute conviction that his nation needed an edge, no matter the source.” Mia’s voice was devoid of bitterness. It was just history. “He volunteered. The first successful conscious transmutation. Not a prisoner, not a pauper. A beloved senator with a handsome family and a fox-hunting hobby. He became the prototype for the perfected line. My grandfather.”
The world didn’t tilt this time. It cracked. Sammy saw her parents’ faces, blurred by time and blood. She saw the fanged thing that had taken them. She’d built a life on hating that thing, on its inherent, monstrous evil. Now Mia was telling her its genetic blueprint was drafted in a boardroom under a flag.
“So the monsters in the dark… their origin story is a fucking policy paper?”
“A grant proposal, technically,” Mia corrected, pushing off the wall. “The program had a name: Project Prometheus. It ran for twenty-two years. It produced exactly seven stable subjects like my grandfather. And hundreds of… failures. The failures were disposed of. But secrets, especially expensive ones, are hard to kill. A disgruntled lab tech. A burned investor. A sample sold to offset losses. The knowledge spread, degraded, got reinterpreted by cultists and criminals and sadists like Marcel. You’ve been fighting the pirated, open-source version of the software your entire life.”
Sammy laughed, a sharp, ugly sound lost in the rain. “And you’re the licensed product.”
“I am the legacy product,” Mia said. “The one the original company pretends doesn’t exist, because the founders are all dead and the current board finds the whole line… distasteful. A liability.”
“This board. This ‘institution’. It’s still around.”
“Everything becomes a corporation eventually.” Mia looked down the alley toward the brighter, busier street. “The original funders, their children, their trusts. The science was compartmentalized, then privatized. The assets were spun off. The core philosophy—the pursuit of optimal, amoral power—that just… metabolized into the ecosystem. You don’t find them in dungeons, Sammy. You find them in penthouses. On advisory boards. Running philanthropic foundations.”
A sudden, violent urge to break something seized Sammy. She kicked the dumpster. The clang was satisfyingly loud, echoing down the narrow space. The rat scurried away. “So what’s the play? I can’t stake a hedge fund. Holy water probably just ruins their imported suits.”
“You follow the infection,” Mia repeated, as if it were simple. “The diluted, physical infection leads back to the source of the dilution. Marcel was a distributor. He got his recipe from someone. That someone is connected to someone else. The chain leads upstream, from the street to the boardroom. My interest is in severing the chain at its strongest link. Permanently.”
“And mine?”
Mia finally looked directly at her, and in the neon glow, her gray eyes were like smoked glass. “You told me your business was following the infection back to its source. That’s a noble, if reckless, pursuit. The infection is the system. So.” She shrugged, a minimal lift of her shoulders. “Hunt systems.”
Sammy’s phone buzzed in her pocket, a harsh vibration against her thigh. She fished it out, the screen gleaming with rainwater. The caller ID was a blocked number, but she knew. It was Leo, her only halfway-trustworthy informant in the city’s underbelly. She swiped accept, putting it on speaker.
“Sammy. You’re alive.” Leo’s voice was tinny, tense.
“For now. What’s up?”
“Word is out about the refinery. That was some next-level scorched earth. Unprofessional, if you ask me.” He was talking too fast. “Listen, new players are moving. Fast. Something’s spooked the upper shelves.”
Mia’s gaze sharpened, fixed on the phone.
“What kind of players?” Sammy asked.
“Not your gutter trash. Clean. Quiet. They’re asking about archival materials. Pre-digital. Specifically about… medical anomalies from the mid-70s. Offering serious, no-questions-asked cash.”
Sammy’s blood went cold. “Project Prometheus.”
There was a long silence on the line, filled only with the rasp of Leo’s breath. “You didn’t hear that name from me,” he whispered, his voice dropping. “You don’t say that name. Sammy, these people… they aren’t collectors. They’re cleaners.”
“Where, Leo?”
“There’s a midnight auction. Tonelli’s old maritime warehouse on Pier 12. Cargo container sale. The lot you want is rumored to be there. Physical files from a defunct biomedical research firm called Vesta.” He coughed. “My fee just tripled. This is retirement-level danger you’re stepping in.”
“You’ll get it. Midnight. Pier 12.” She hung up.
The rain filled the silence. Mia hadn’t moved, but the air around her seemed to grow stiller, denser. “Cleaners,” she echoed. “They know a link in their chain was severed. They’re sanitizing the paper trail. Erasing their own history.”
“An auction means there are other buyers,” Sammy said, her mind clicking into tactical gear. “Competition. Chaos. We can use that.”
“It also means a trap,” Mia replied. “They will expect scavengers. They will be prepared for multiple kinds of nuisance.” She looked Sammy up and down, a clinical assessment. “Your usual evangelical ferocity will be… noticeable. And insufficient.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means walking into a den of wealthy, paranoid collectors and corporate cleaners requires a different uniform. And a different weapon.” Mia reached into the inner pocket of her long coat and pulled out a sleek, black metal card holder. She flipped it open, revealing a simple white card with embossed lettering. Dr. M. White, Curatorial Consultant, Blackwood Foundation.
Sammy stared. “Are you serious?”
“The Blackwood Foundation is a real entity. It acquires problematic antiquities and lost biological studies for ‘ethical preservation’. They have a standing invitation to events like these.” Mia said it with the boredom of a recited fact. “You will be my assistant. Silent. Observant. You will carry the equipment case.”
“I’m not your pack mule,” Sammy snapped.
“No. You’re my contingency plan,” Mia said, her eyes cold. “Everyone in that room will be expecting a certain kind of threat. Corporate espionage. Rival buyers. Armed robbery. They will not be expecting a vampire huntress with a crossbow full of silver bolts and a profound grudge. Your lack of polish is the disguise.”
Sammy looked from the professional card to Mia’s impassive face, then down at her own rain-soaked, blood-splattered boots. The righteous, solitary war she’d fought for a decade was shrinking, transforming into something else. Something that required a business card.
The buzz of the neon was the only sound for a long moment.
“Fine,” Sammy said, the word gritted out between her teeth. “But I’m not calling you ‘Doctor’.”
A ghost of something like amusement touched Mia’s lips. “Midnight, then. We have a few hours to make you look like you belong in a room where people casually bid on nightmares.” She began walking toward the alley’s mouth, into the city’s glittering damp. “Try not to stab anyone before the auction starts. It’s considered poor form.”
Sammy followed, the weight of her wet clothes suddenly feeling like the weight of a new, much larger world. The monsters hadn’t changed. But the battlefield just expanded into a gilded hall. She adjusted the strap of her crossbow, hidden beneath her coat. The familiar grip was the only thing that felt real.