We begin with an excerpt on the history of Heisenberg's Factory, as per the notes coded in a columnar transposition by Dr. Victor Florescu in the early 1980s and deciphered by his daughter in 2003. Eighteen years later, Chris Redfield will use the decoded text to navigate the mining tunnels and infiltrate the lower levels of the factory, to install explosives at critical structural points.
Once arranged with proper spacing and punctuations, the plaintext is written as follows:
Eighteen Eighty-Nine. Demand for electricity in the region resulted in the construction of the coal-fired power plant over the preexisting coal mine. The project was financed by Ion Heisenberg's inherited wealth and that of the state. The plant was completed in May Nineteen Hundred, powering first the electric lights installed at Castle Dimitrescu and shortly after the wealthier houses in the village.
By Ninety Twelve, electricity was commonplace. The plant was the primary employer in the region and attracted workers from other villages and towns. Employment resulted in a population boom and the northeast expansion of the village close to the Moreau Reservoir.
The plaintext covers the factory's history until 1952. After that, it catalogs the factory levels, the purpose of each room. It inventories the machines and structures within them—the central infrastructure with its boiler, engines, and turbines—the chimney snorting out smoke from burning coal like a horse in winter. The line of cooling towers that breathe clouds of steam day in, day out, so that the place looks as though it is perpetually on fire.
Isolated-phase buses loop through the building like arteries radiating from a giant's heart, transporting currents of energy. Meanwhile, endless conveyor belts ferry coal upwards from the earth's depths, powdering everything in a fine layer of black dust.
And then there is the Stygian heat of the interior chambers and corridors and the so-called "snake pits," which house endless coils of insulated cords and wires. In one such room, a stream of cold air erupts from a ceiling vent twice an hour for ten seconds, cooling the cables and, in October 2002, the young woman trapped amongst them. Before the arrival of each cold blast, Odette positions herself beneath the vent folds her arms across her bare, sweating chest, and closes her eyes. She tastes the vapor, savors its chill when it comes.
Nineteen Fourteen to Nineteen Sixteen: rumors of an impending war. Ion Heisenberg transformed the plant into a munitions production facility per state directives. He re-christened it "The Heisenberg Factory."
The factory produced cartridges and their components (bullets and primers), artillery projectiles, fuzes, etc. When the war arrived, women replaced the men joining the army and manufactured shells for the Vezdekhod tanks used by the Russian Empire.
A blast of water vapor from the ceiling vent wakes Odette to some unknown time of day or night. Startled, she rolls from the mattress to evade the full brunt of it, realizing upon its barest contact against her neck that it is blessedly cold. She scrambles to all fours, moves into the center of it, turns her face up to the mist just as it evaporates. She curses.
The heat returns, suffocating the room. Odette unbuttons the sentinel's coat and shakes it off, her body coated with sweat. It falls onto the mattress, joined by heavy trousers, woolen socks, leather boots. What remains is her underwear, the necklace with her left eye, the engagement ring that she has once again forgotten is a part of her. And her skin, which she wishes she could peel off. She sinks onto the mattress, her forehead resting upon her knees. In this position, Odette slowly acclimatizes to the stale air, allows her hair to grow damp, her limbs to collect new pearls of perspiration.
There are no windows in the room that Heisenberg has delivered her into, no clocks, no calendars. There is a medical bed with its iron frames flaking rust and a metal chair similar to those patients used at the clinic. A pathetically small tin bucket sits in the far corner for her to use—Odette surmises with a grimace—as a chamber pot. Its size mocks her from across the room: how many uses before it fills up to the brim?
The only illumination is a dim red light above the door that she is sure has been bolted from the other side. She is, after all, a prisoner—a willing one, but a prisoner nonetheless. Even the red light bulb is caged within an iron lattice so that its glow casts gridlike shadows over her cell. Even the light is the color of blood.
After the war, the Spanish Flu and the decrease in demand for munitions meant losing workers and profits. Then the Great Depression. Ion Heisenberg transferred ownership of the factory to his son before his death in Nineteen Twenty-Nine.
Axel Heisenberg used the factory to dismantle decommissioned wartime vehicles into reusable scrap metal sold to other industries. The factory scrapped all manner of tanks and planes, including the same Vezdekhod tanks for which the factory once produced projectiles.
Massive cables and wires coil the perimeter of the room, each one the diameter of her forearm. Odette had mistaken them for snakes at first before remembering that such creatures would never align themselves so neatly against each other. No such snake in existence bore yellow letters classifying their type and the number of volts they carried. Cascading from the ceiling, they wind across the tiled floor and into a narrow shaft in the wall. Looking at the cables, she thinks of capillaries unmapped within some mysterious behemoth.
Odette leans back on her elbows, stretches her long legs before her, allowing molecules of sweat to gather over the plane of her stomach. So, she is in the belly of some colossal iron beast; perhaps she shouldn't be surprised that it is this warm.
"For all living things, monsters, human or otherwise, always run hot."
Odette shuts her eye, imagining her father back in the ruin of his clinic, picking up sheets of paper, setting upright the toppled tables and overturned chairs. She pictures him sweeping broken glass into garbage bags, returning books to their shelves. Feeling his gaze upon her, Victor looks up at his daughter and smiles tiredly in the red light. Then he begins to speak to her from across distance and time.
Axel's only son Karl disappeared in Nineteen Thirty-Eight. Axel and his wife Sonia were found dead shortly after. His body shredded after passing through the grinder shaft. Her corpse burned beyond recognition by an arc flash in the engine room.
The surviving workers left believing the factory to be cursed. A formal investigation into the factory and the coal mine below it resulted in their decommission. The governmental decree plunged the village into the "Years of Darkness" and cut us off from the rest of the world.
Victor tells her: keep your mind moving, Odette. Count the seconds and minutes between the air blasts until you can use the intervals between them to measure out the hours. Remember: a factory runs by clockwork; it must do so to meet production schedules and quotas. All events inside a factory can be timed, predicted. Use the buttons from the coat to keep a count of each hour.
Odette opens her eye and runs her hand over the flat, dull buttons of Stelian's coat. There are seven of them down the front, then an additional button on each cuff—nine in total, which she hopes will be enough to count the hours between meals.
She knows that nothing but a stagnant mind can harm her in this room—that and death by hunger, thirst. Even then, these outcomes seem unlikely, even under the current circumstances. Heisenberg had given her water, had told her she was no use to him dead.
Odette raises her voice, testing the reach of it against the room's boundaries, the curtains of heat.
"At some point, you have to face me, Heisenberg."
There is no echo. When he opens that door to clarify the terms of my imprisonment, or perhaps to give me food and water, I must already know what to do.
Nineteen Thirty-Eight onwards: no electricity in the village. These were the shadowed years of my childhood. We lived by the light of wax candles and kerosene oil lamps. We preserved meats by salting them and hanging them from the kitchen ceiling. All telephones stayed dead.
I did not know how to use a phone or turn on an electric light until Karl Heisenberg resurfaced in Nineteen Fifty-Two and took over the factory.
The electricity of a new thought shocks through Odette's body. Of course. She has her father's journal that she can use as leverage to barter for better conditions: a well-ventilated cell, a flushing toilet, a sink with fresh water. She has her revolver when negotiations turn sour. Odette grabs the coat, thrusts her hand into its inner pocket, fingers brushing against drab wool. She tests another pocket, another fold in the material, her touch turning the fabric damp with sweat. She finds stray threads. A seam coming loose. More wool. Nothing in the trousers, either. No book. No gun. No escape.
Odette laughs. The sound of it spent and raw. Of course, Heisenberg had searched her, confiscated everything that would have made her valuable and dangerous. She had been incredibly naive—no, stupid—to think he would have done so otherwise. The opposite of irrational fear is foolish hope, which can also be one's undoing, blinds the eye to fact and truth.
(Had this piece of wisdom come from her father? Or does it come from her, she who is now understanding what it is to be genuinely trapped?)
She grabs the head of the metal chair and hurls it against the wall. Its joints shatter on impact, loosening screws and bolts. A leg snaps off, bone-white even in the red gloom. Breathing heavily, Odette plucks it from the floor and turns it in her hands.
She does not have her father's journal; she does not have her gun—only a fistful of buttons and a chair leg. Even with such things, however, you can sharpen yourself into something dangerous.
Her mind galvanized, now a machine with a new purpose. Odette sits cross-legged on the mattress, pulls out the buttons from the coat as she waits for the next blast of vapor. When it comes, I will begin my count.
There are at least seven levels to the infrastructure today. I have included copies of the blueprints at the back of this journal.
Most of the factory is subterranean and connects to the mining tunnels that travel several kilometers into the mountains. There are secret entrances to the factory via mine shafts, but fools who do not have maps enter them at their own risk.
Today all men who mine the coal and power the factory are living corpses controlled by a hive mind. Moroi, we call them, and they have no will, no conscious thought. Lord Heisenberg is their creator, and they fulfill his machinations, manifest his intentions.
Odette counts five buttons, five hours when she hears someone shuffling, groaning from beyond the wall. Booted feet drag over concrete: a dry, scratchy noise that stops before her cell door. Then: a series of knocks against the door, metal against metal.
The sound is arrhythmic. If she were not exhausted by the heat and slightly maddened by counting seconds and buttons, Odette would have recognized the pattern to be deliberate, though she would not have known the word delivered to her at this moment in Morse Code.
F-O-O-D.
The slot near the bottom of the door opens. Odette kneels by that rectangle of amber light and receives the surgical tray of bread and a square of hard, dark yellow cheese. The hand that delivers the food does not belong to Heisenberg; it is gray and desiccated and quickly slides the slot closed once the meal has passed. A piece of dry and rank cheese, a heel of stale bread.
"Thank you," she calls out, loud as she is able, hoping the individual on the other side of the door can hear her. In answer, she receives another series of irregular knocks, the receding sounds of shuffling footsteps. Then, silence.
A location of particular importance within the factory is a series of rooms on the fourth underground level, once a clinic before Heisenberg transformed it into a surgery complex. In these rooms, he builds soldiers for his army using the corpses robbed from graves and scraps from wartime machines.
Heisenberg's favored surgical procedure involves grafting machine parts onto a cadaver and replacing its heart with a Cadou-powered reactor. A tremendous amount of electricity is required to charge this reactor, which reanimates the corpse and imbues it with superhuman strength.
The reanimation takes place after enough coal is mined to reach the required power levels. One straps the subject to a chair and plugs its reactor into a vertical isolated-phase bus retrofitted to include an alcove just large enough for a man to stand within it. Heisenberg calls this alcove the Resurrection Chamber.
When it is time, Heisenberg enters the chamber and seals himself off from the rest of the world with an iron door. An assistant pulls the lever that fills the chamber with electricity. Any other living thing would die in an instant. But Heisenberg is a human electromagnetic coil, directing electricity into the plugs and cords attached to the subject's reactor, galvanizing it into life.
It is too late for morning coffee and too early for cigars, a well-meaning doctor might say. That doctor is gone now.
So it is noon, and Karl Heisenberg has coffee in his hand and a Maduro cigar between his lips while he studies the needle on the iron ammeter. Decades before, he had installed the dashboard with the ammeter and voltmeter outside of the Resurrection Chamber to measure the current power levels and determine how much left he needed to reanimate a corpse. That amount depended on how much coal had been mined, burned, then transformed into electrical energy.
He does not have enough coal; he hasn't had enough power for weeks.
Heisenberg sips at his coffee, brewed the way Victor had shown him, in the Turkish style. He collects cigar smoke in the cavern of his mouth after, taking brief respite in its notes of chocolate and pepper. It has been a tense morning of mopping up blood and loose viscera after a long night of surgery—grafting chainsaws to Petre Borcea's arms and replacing his heart with a Cadou reactor—then pacing in front of the ammeter, waiting for power. After watching the needle for the better part of the morning, he sees it move a fraction of a millimeter to the right.
"Shit."
He slams a gloved fist against the dashboard, bites down onto the end of his cigar, which he has been chewing out of frustration in the past hour, steadily shredding the wrapper and binder. Now they split and tear apart until his mouth is full of loose tobacco and stray ash; he spits the saliva-soaked mass into his coffee which he promptly pours down a nearby sink.
"Waste of both," he mutters, watching the remains of the Maduro disappear down the drain. Waste of a long night of toil.
Beside the Resurrection Chamber, Petre Borcea's corpse sits, rotting slowly in the heat.
Heisenberg had a rudimentary understanding of surgery before I joined his enterprise. His knowledge came secondhand from a childhood spent observing Miranda experimenting on other subjects. He hacked and carved into bodies using saws and razors until there was nothing left. His earlier prototypes were botched attempts.
Once we became allies, I expanded his knowledge of anatomy and surgery. I showed him how to open up a body without damaging it. I demonstrated how limbs and bones fit together and how blood vessels deliver blood to and from the heart, like electrical wires in a machine, which is how Heisenberg understands the human body. He sees it as a machine because he sees himself as one engineered by a mad scientist who claims to be his mother.
Karl Heisenberg is not Mother Miranda's biological son, but he has inherited her view of human anatomy. They are devices to be studied, tampered with, and augmented to suit particular needs and meet specific ends.
Heisenberg hears the shuffling of booted feet behind him. Soldat Null is returning from Odette's cell, having provided the breakfast that Heisenberg had haphazardly prepared. He listens to the prolonged rasp of an earth drill dragging against the concrete floor, the point angled, Heisenberg knows, just so that Soldat Null will dull the drill tip instead of sharpening it.
The dragging of the drill is one of the creature's many ways of expressing unhappiness, and it had disapproved of Heisenberg locking the doctor's daughter away in one of the snake pits. The previous evening, it had protested her imprisonment, slamming the drill point into the concrete floor in rapid Morse. Victor. Laboratory. Victor. Laboratory, it had said, wanting the woman to be installed in her father's laboratory instead.
"All in good time," Heisenberg had assured the creature, bolting the cell door and tucking Victor's journal into his coat. "You think I want her here? She isn't part of the plan; never has been." He had clenched his fist so that all the metal parts of her revolver snapped and dissolved into fine ferrous dust. He only needed to put her somewhere anonymous, safe from secrets she might use for her own ends until he is certain of her place in the grand scheme of things.
Woman. Sad. Scared, the soldat had replied. Woman. Sad. Scared.
The creature repeats this chorus now like a broken record, tapping its drill into one of the many pockmarks it had left in the concrete from previous discussions. Heisenberg pinches the bridge of his nose. Damn the doctor. Victor had insisted on teaching the soldat how to communicate, whereas Heisenberg preferred it to remain a silent automaton. So thrilled the doctor had been that their joint creation had come to life, he took it upon himself to teach the creature language as though it were a child. He spent week after week teaching Morse Code by rote until the monster could form its own words.
"Keep pounding the drill like that, and I'll drag your sorry ass into the boiler," Heisenberg snarls, resuming his pacing back and forth before the dashboard. "I'm trying to think here. Think. I need to find a way to get more power." He grasps at the empty air as though he might snatch power out of nothing. If only things were so easy. Power out of thin air: Heisenberg would have long defeated Miranda by now, escaped into the wide world a free man.
He rounds onto the soldat, grasping it by its shoulders. "Tell me, do you know what those sorry fuckers are doing down there? Why are they taking so damn long with the mining?"
Soldat Null lets out a groan and taps his drill against the concrete. Rotting. Rotting.
Heisenberg digs his gloved fingers into the soldat's shoulder in displeasure. Of course, the moroi are rotting in the Tartarean heat below. Rotting until their limbs detach. One more inconvenience to add to a hundred inconveniences plaguing his schemes. "How many have I got left standing?"
Eight. Eight. Eight.
"Well, shit."
Heisenberg paces again, rubbing his thumb and forefinger against his temples, muttering equations to himself. He had started the year off with twenty moroi, and he was now down to a pathetic percentage of that.
"Eight. You know what's funny about having eight?"
Soldat Null says nothing. Its form grows slack, its shoulders curving over, the whole upper part of its body propped up by the drill.
"Eight moroi would be enough if they were mining coal for my little operation here," he says, running a gloved hand over the glass face of the ammeter. "Problem is, I'm not the only one who needs this power. This factory lights up the whole damn village, that stupid castle. I take all this power for myself right here, right now; they're all going to notice." His hand curls into a fist, and he rests his forehead against it. When they notice, I'm fucked. This whole show's fucked. Over.
Heisenberg can imagine it now. He's directing all electrical power to the Resurrection Chamber, galvanizing one soldat into action, maybe two if he works quickly enough. Boom. Power outages in the village galore, lights flickering at the castle. Alcina Dimitrescu charging like a raging cow through his factory, demanding to know what he's up to, sticking her insufferable nose into his business, and delivering all she witnesses to Mother Miranda. A simpering, petulant child hungry for its mother's approval. I have grave news, Mother, she will say with imperious, barely-concealed relish. Heisenberg's been taking all the power for himself like the poisonous leech that he is to control an army that he'll use against you.
"We can't have that happen, can we?" Heisenberg murmurs into the room's silence. He lifts his head from his fist and moves away from the cool shell of the ammeter dashboard. He lifts his chin, eyes affixed to an indeterminate point in the room. "I'll have to skim off a small portion of power, little by little, week by week." Like a beggar snatching the most edible scraps from a pile of castle slops. Like Moreau stealing knives and assorted cutlery through open windows of villagers' homes, or else scavenging for drowned, bloated bodies that turn up on riverbanks by chance. Another round of humiliations: Heisenberg, the electricity thief. Heisenberg, starving for parts and portions. If he's lucky, he might scrounge enough electricity in two months to power a cadaver, if that.
Heisenberg wrinkles his nose; the putrid stench of Petre Borcea's corpse seems to have intensified in this past hour. "So I've got two months. Even if I stick Numbnuts here in a freezer, he's going to decay beyond usefulness before he gets back on that chair."
The soldat shifts suddenly, straightening its slack-jawed expression. Embalmer. Ask. Embalmer. Help.
Heisenberg lets out a mirthless chuckle. "Easy on the drill. Easy. You really want to get her out of that room, huh?"
Now. Now. Now.
The machinist scratches at his chin, considering. He had put Odette in the snake pit because he didn't know what to do with her. "She was never part of the plan. I never wanted her here." By sacrificing herself in her father's stead, she had inserted herself, a strange, ill-fitting cog, into the heart of his machinations.
But the soldat was not wrong: the woman embalmed bodies and could potentially decode her father's journal.
"I did say I'd let her out all in good time, didn't I?"
Soldat Null turns its back to Heisenberg, tapping its drill against the leg of an operating table.
Time. Is. Now. Time. Is. Now.
I believed in Heisenberg's cause enough to bring the objects from my home into his world, my everyday instruments. I made improvements to his surgery complex after my arrival, insisting on organization and cleanliness. I arranged the devices and furniture in these rooms according to hospital standards. I ensured we had clean running water and working freezers for the corpses and Cadou samples.
I supplied most of the surgical equipment, including the spare operating table from my clinic. At home, Odette noticed that it was missing from the operation room and demanded to know why it had disappeared. I told her I was lending it to a friend. The child studied my face for a good minute as though waiting for me to crack and reveal the lie. Sometimes I wonder if my daughter can see beyond the periphery of normal human vision. If true, what does she see?
Heisenberg moves through the labyrinth of dim, windowless corridors, passing vents hissing steam and crossing trembling catwalks above the endless churn of giant pistons towards the service elevator that will take him to Odette. He is comfortable in this red darkness, in which he loses the rhythm of nights and days, the cycle of suns and stars. The woman in the snake pit has only spent a day without sunlight; the machinist has spent months in his factory without ever seeing the sky.
At the flick of his wrist, the elevator's gears grind, moving Heisenberg up the monstrous shaft, the sides of it open to the rest of the factory. He can survey the cavernous atrium from the elevator's railing, cast his eye over levels striated with red or gray light, and deep into the mining pits below him. He observes with displeasure the conveyors lifting from the darkness coal containers filled only halfway.
When he paces before Odette's door, he reconsiders the wisdom of reaching out to a woman he has imprisoned to convince her to join his side. He imagines her unwilling, reluctant. Even if she joined him, she might perhaps turn out useless. Heisenberg does not know her, has not tested her; she is neither a physician nor a doctor. Brilliant. Clever. Those were the words Victor had used to describe his daughter; then again, what parent, blinded by unconditional love, wouldn't regard their child in the highest esteem?
He pulls out Victor's journal from the inside of his coat and thumbs through the unintelligible pages. Decoding the material will take time. Weeks, perhaps. Months. He does not have the time to sit hunched over ink and paper, puzzling over columnar transcriptions like a schoolboy working out math equations. He could task the woman to decipher her father's scribblings. Put her in her father's laboratory, then forget about her until she emerges with a solution.
"She likes finding out the truth," Heisenberg mutters, closing the book. A fragment of a decades-old memory suddenly comes to him: Victor, twenty years ago, wheeling an operating table into the surgery room, grinning sheepishly. My daughter nearly caught me in a lie; she noticed this table was gone from the house. She wouldn't believe me when I told her I loaned it to a friend. Heisenberg had chuckled, made a blasé remark about her possibly forgetting the following day. Something about fickle young minds. Victor had turned severe then. If she doesn't forget, I'm in trouble. She likes finding out the truth.
So: tell her the truth.
Heisenberg returns the journal into the folds of his coat and moves to the door.
"Looks like we're going to have a little talk, you and I."
No answer. Not surprising. Perhaps the woman is asleep or shivering in fear, though the latter scenario seems unlikely, given what little he already knows of her. She hadn't trembled when they first met beneath a newly-unveiled moon. There are a dozen reasons for her silence beyond the door; none of them is fear.
The door bolts move at the snap of Heisenberg's fingers. The hinges whine. Metal scrapes against the concrete as the portal swings open to reveal a room bathed in blood-red light and the tall, dagger-like figure stirring within it.
As Heisenberg takes his first steps into the new gloom, the figure shoots out at him, a snarling bullet from a shotgun colliding into his sphere. Cold metal slams against his face, the bridge of his nose, turning the world dark for a heartbeat. He hears the clatter of his glasses against the concrete. He screws his eyes shut and stumbles, growling in blind fury. Odette is not far from him, her breaths heavy as her footsteps scatter towards the service elevator. With one hand, Heisenberg summons his spectacles to his grasp; with the other, balled into a fist, he sends the elevator plummeting down the shaft.
"No, no!"
Spectacles back on his nose now, Heisenberg blinks the world into focus. Standing several feet away from him, by the empty elevator shaft, is a feral soldier sweltering from the heat, her trousers rolled up to her knees, her coat unbuttoned. Odette is brandishing like a sword before her the metal bar she had used to attack him.
"Don't you dare come any closer."
"Or what?" He makes no move towards her. "You'll knock me out with that chair leg?"
Odette's grip tightens on the bar. "See me try."
Does she know the raw absurdity of her defending herself with a weapon he can manipulate with a flick of his wrist? Two nights ago, she had watched him pull her revolver from her grasp without laying a finger on it. He had sent the elevator crashing down away from her. Her eye is wide, wild. Desperate. She knows, but she doesn't care.
"Don't waste your energy." He allows himself a low chuckle and is rewarded with a fresh sting of pain up the bridge of his nose. He presses his fingers against the wound, wiping away droplets of blood that he studies with amused fascination. It has been a long time since he bled. "But I'll admit that you've done a number on me with that."
"Consider yourself lucky. I was going to throw the chamber pot and everything in it at you if this didn't work."
He laughs at this, a deep laugh straight from his stomach—the first genuine laugh in many days. "Consider me grateful, then. Miss Florescu."
"Odette will do just fine."
"First name basis then? Looks like we're getting somewhere."
Something in her face cracks, revealing for a moment a flicker of uncertainty and something else unreadable. Heisenberg watches the slight movement of her straightening spine, her shifting grasp on her weapon.
"I suppose I'll call you Karl, then."
He shakes a bloodied finger. "Not quite there yet. You still look like you want to kill me, so it's Heisenberg to you until I say so otherwise." He grins at her fresh scowl as he moves to her, placing his hand on the metal bar. He tugs experimentally at it, curling his lip at her stubborn grip. Her glare beneath her dark hair burns. "Tell me, Odette, what were you going to do next after killing me?"
"Escape from this damned place, as any sane person would."
"Not without this, you won't."
With a flourish, he pulls both her father's journal from within his coat and the bar out of Odette's hands. He swiftly sidesteps her desperate lunge towards him. She collapses onto the concrete beside him and slams a fist against it.
"That book," she rasps. "That book belongs to me."
Heisenberg settles on his haunches beside her, tsk-ing in mock sympathy as he watches her struggle to sit up. "Wrong again. This book belongs to your father who—if I'm going to be honest—would have been perfectly fine had Miranda agreed to sentence him here."
"What?"
"Sure, he wouldn't have been allowed to leave. You and he wouldn't have been able to see or speak to each other. And, of course, we'd have to pretend he was getting tortured, ripped apart, boiled alive daily, eyes pecked out by crows, whatever." He gestures grandly at the air, at invisible torture devices. "But the fact of the matter is, Odette, if you hadn't sacrificed yourself for his sake, he would have been perfectly fine here, working for me, as he's been doing for almost all your life."
The fortress of Odette's face crumbles, dissolving into a mask of fury. "You're lying."
Heisenberg lowers his spectacles a fraction, allows himself to witness the bare, bright anger of her face. "I see you're hurting," he says softly. "You're hurting because you know it's true."
Odette screws her eye shut and draws her knees to her chest.
"I'm willing to bet you've learned enough unsavory things about your father to know that what I'm saying is possible, even true. He robs graves. He was once Miranda's lover. He works for me. Truth hurts, Odette. It always does. And here's another god-awful truth: even if you kill me, even if you escape with your father's book, Victor Florescu is as good as dead the moment you set foot outside."
Odette lifts her head from her knees and watches him with a gaze fierce and wet with unshed tears. Heisenberg leans back and raises his spectacles so that the room returns to its comfortable dimness. "And if I don't kill you? I don't suppose you'll try to help me."
Heisenberg grins. "On the contrary, Odette, I'd very much like to help you." He brandishes the book before her, waving it slowly. "To be clear: I'll be helping you help me."
"I'm not following."
"Because you don't have the whole truth. And you're not going to believe it from where you're sitting. Trust me."
Odette laughs hoarsely, shaking her head. "I won't."
"You'll have to if you want to get out of this village with your father alive."
She nods at her father's journal. "Give it to me and I'll listen."
Heisenberg returns the book into his coat. "Other way around, darling. That's how things work here. Tell you what: I'll bring you to your father's laboratory. Give you the whole story and your father's journal there."
"My father's what?"
"His laboratory. You'll want to stay there for however long this goes on. As I said, though," he says, raising an eyebrow at Odette's disbelieving expression. "You're not going to believe it exists if you're going to stay here on this floor."
"Show me, then."
Heisenberg rises to his feet and extends a hand, gentleman-like, for Odette to take.
"First, trust me."