A/N: Sorry about the *looks at numbers scribbled on hand* year-long gap between chapters, but I said in my last author's note that I wasn't leaving this one behind (or something to that effect, I don't know), and I didn't! I love this fic! Just needed to take a break.
Anyway, here's a new chapter! We're getting into the real action now!
Thanks to hobbit_hedgehog on Ao3 for the beta!
Chapter Thirteen: Hidden
August Bremer: You're a believer?
Mulder: I have my beliefs.
August Bremer: You willing to die for them?
Mulder: I'd prefer it didn't come to that.
42
"Listen, Hunk, I don't know that I can fully explain right now, but…" There was a bzzt in Lance's ear as the line went dead. "Shit!" he exclaimed, jamming the phone back into his pocket. He turned to the white-haired woman. "Do you know what we're doing?"
"I know where they're keeping them, yes, but that's it." She turned to him just briefly, as she was driving intensely, the desert air whipping past them as they went. "But that doesn't mean I know what we're going to do when we're there." She paused, and, her eyes locked on the road and without making eye contact, she added, "I thought that since you were the FBI agent, you might have an idea or two."
"I do, I just…" He trailed off, as he really didn't. They would enter the facility that they weren't supposed to know about—him, clearly off-mission and without any direct clearance to do so, her, without any clearance of any kind and not more than some cryptic words to explain where she even came from. Would they just walk in there and expect to be able to extract Keith and Shiro?
He hoped it would be that easy, but he also knew that it probably wasn't going to be.
43
There was a clacking as someone's soles connected with the hard tile of the floor outside of Keith's cell. He hoped it would be Shiro, there to let him out, but he also knew that Shiro was no more likely to be able to break out than he was. Of course, Shiro had broken out from much more dangerous places than this, if he was to be believed…
Keith couldn't believe what he himself was thinking. "If he was to be believed?" That was the kind of thought he would expect from McClain, not from himself. If there was one thing he could trust in himself, it was that he believed his brother. And now was not the time for doubting. Shiro had been through worse. They would make it out.
And whoever was walking down the hallway stopped outside of Keith's door.
Without even really meaning to do it, Keith found that he had stopped breathing, perhaps in anticipation, perhaps merely so that he could hear the shoes better. In any case, he resumed as a mechanism in the door unlocked and it swung open, revealing a large, grizzled-looking man with an unnerving-looking glass eye that was a dull yellow color. The man's mutton chops bristled out from his face, and he looked down to Keith.
"Special Agent Kogane?"
"What's it to you?"
"Is that how they're teaching it in Quantico, now?" he asked, and grinned. "Okay, then, if we're not going to follow protocol…"
A moment later, his large, meaty fist connected with Keith's gut, causing him to double over in pain. This guy, whoever he was, wasn't just wielding those muscles for show. He meant it, and he knocked the wind out of Keith like it was nothing.
Keith caught hold of the bench in his cell to try to keep his balance, and he gritted his teeth as he wheezed. When he looked upward, the man was still grinning down at him.
"As you might imagine, I have a couple of questions for you."
"Oh, do… you?" Keith asked the question over the course of two wheezes, but he could feel the air coming back to him. He straightened up, but his height was nothing next to his mountain of a man.
"I do, actually," said the man, crossing his large arms across his larger chest. "They begin with how you found this base, and they end with you begging for me to stop."
"You might want to work on your pickup lines," said Keith, a twinge coming to the corner of his lips. "You're never going to get a guy like me with lines like—"
A moment later, he was doubled over again while the man withdrew his fist again.
"You know, I thought that you would be easier to talk with than your partner."
Keith stiffened. "You… have him?"
The man raised a bushy eyebrow. "McClain? No, not yet. Though I'd love to meet him. Shirogane has been interesting, but he doesn't have anything to say that we don't already know."
Keith's heart sank. "Don't you touch Shiro."
"Oh, excuse me. Your 'brother.' Excuse me." The man placed a hand on his chest, like he felt some sort of sorrow. "I mean no offense. But you know how this can be. When someone is no longer of use, I'm no longer interested in them. You see, he's not my brother. So I won't feel bad if I never see him again. Or if you don't."
"You bastard."
The man shrugged. "Now tell me—how much do you know?"
"I won't tell you anything, you—"
The man raised a hand again, as if he was going to strike Keith but he held back, lowing his hand after a moment. He took a deep breath, centering himself, then turned and stepped out of the room. He nodded to someone Keith couldn't see, and a moment later, a pair of guards dragged Shiro forward, holding him under his armpits. Keith could see that his left cheek was bruised already, and his prosthetic arm was missing completely. His shock of white hair flopped down in front of his face, but as he was brought forward, he looked up through it to Keith.
"Keith, don't listen to them," he said, gasping as he did. "This isn't anything. I've had much—"
Before he could finish, the big man who had been questioning Keith struck downward with his fist, knocking Shiro's face downward toward the floor. A streak of read shot from Shiro's mouth to splatter on the cement floor.
"Stop!" Keith took a step forward before he saw the toothy grin spread across the man's face.
"Ready to talk, then?"
Shiro raised his head slightly. "Don't…"
"Shut up," said the man, not breaking his eye contact with Keith.
Keith looked from the man to his brother and back again. At this precise moment in time, there was nothing more he wanted than to lunge at the man, maybe a punch to the nose or a sweep to the knees—do anything to stop him from taunting him and threatening Shiro. He considered for a moment, then gritted his teeth and unclenched his fist.
"I'm ready to talk whenever you're ready to let Shiro go."
"We'll let Shiro go when we're talking to you and your partner both."
"Lan—McClain has nothing to do with… I mean, he doesn't know anything; he doesn't even believe!"
The man narrowed his eyes. "Oh? Well, his disbelief explains why we caught him on our cameras just a minute ago breaching our perimeter."
Keith closed his mouth, which had been opening in readiness to retaliate. The man pulled something from the other side of the door and tossed it to the ground as if to punctuate his point. Shiro's prosthetic clattered to the ground somewhere over in the corner of the tiny cell. Keith could feel his heart skip a beat—if what they said was true, they wouldn't just have Shiro, but Lance too. And that… that was the worst outcome that he could think of.
44
"We're going in there," said Lance. He was pacing back and forth in the sand while Allura watched, her eyes flitting always to the horizon on the other side of the orange rock formation, where there was only a few hundred yards before the low gray building rose from the orange desert. "We need to—or, I need to, but…"
"We need to do something, that's for sure," said Allura, her eyes returning to the agent. "We're sitting ducks out here."
"Hunk didn't pick up—there's probably some sort of an interference they're running here on cell signals." He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and checked it again before shoving it back in his pocket in dismay.
"Do you want to go in, or no?" asked Allura. She set her jaw, her expression stoic, but Lance could see her calculating behind her blue eyes. "We have no backup, but Shirogane and Agent Kogane only have so long before they're made to disappear." She paused, and then, "Just like so many other things these people don't want to come to light."
Lance stopped pacing and looked to Allura once more before turning to the rock formation. He stepped forward toward it until he could see past it to the facility beyond. Somewhere in there, Keith needed his help. And he was his partner.
He should be following the book, he knew, and he should be going back and phoning for backup. He should be doing so many different things, and all of them were drilled into him throughout his time in training as an agent. He had practiced and repeated so that he wouldn't forget. The protocols, the chains of command, all of it—he knew it.
Keith had gone through that same training. And he had experience, something Lance knew he sorely lacked. And his instinct was what guided him far more than what he was just "supposed" to do. It was stupid, maybe, but the only way Lance would have the opportunity to tell Keith how stupid it was would be if Lance followed by his example and took some chances.
He turned back to Allura, took a breath, and nodded. "Let's do it."
45
When Keith came back into consciousness, Shiro backed up a little bit from where he had been dabbing away some of the sweat from his forehead. Keith looked at him groggily and almost grinned—this wasn't unlike the way Shiro had tended to him when he was a kid and would get into fights with kids much bigger than him on the playground. He didn't smile, though, because despite his memories of bonding with his brother, his jaw was sporting a new bruise that both made it hurt to have any real facial expression and reminded him why this situation was as serious as it was.
"Keith, are you okay?" asked Shiro, who placed his hand gingerly on his brother's shoulder. "I mean, I know you're not, but they dragged you back into this cell—thank God, with me, or I—but you're awake, and…"
"I'm fine, Shiro," said Keith. But even as he did, he winced in pain. They had really laid into him when they were trying to extract information.
"Yeah, you look it," said Shiro, not hiding his sarcasm.
They looked at one another for a moment before Keith sighed and pulled himself up to sit against the wall a little more upright.
"Well," said Shiro, turning to lean against the wall next to Keith and staring at the rest of the dark, featureless room. "What do we do now?"
Keith leaned his head back against the cool, hard wall and closed his eyes. There was the throbbing in his jaw, and a few more along his ribs, and—he now realized—a lump on the back of his head. There wasn't a chance that anyone knew where he was—he had gone off without really saying where he was going. He hadn't told Lance. And what had that done for him?
It was how he was used to operating—as a loner, without any attachments. Shiro was there, he supposed, but he was in the same situation, so Keith wasn't sure he really counted as help. And his actual partner…
Well, he didn't know where Lance was. Or how he felt. Or if he even knew where to start looking. And he'd be dragged into all of this…
He could only hope that Lance was safe, and that he and Shiro would make it through this soon.
46
A gunshot whistled above Lance's head, and he ducked down behind a corner in the hallway. Allura, already further down, stopped to turn back to him. "Why are you stopping?" she asked.
"They're shooting!" exclaimed Lance.
"Which is why we should run!"
Lance couldn't argue with that. He scrambled to his feet and follower after her, his footsteps resonating down the hallway and mingling with the sound of the footfalls coming from their pursuers. All of this was undercut by the beating of his heart, which was loud in Lance's ears as they rounded another corner.
They had slipped in a back door that hadn't seemed guarded. They had gotten in without seeing any cameras or guards, something that seemed too good to be true and turned out to be, as they found themselves facing a man in all black who was approaching from the other end of the hallway that stretched out in front of them as soon as they went inside.
Allura had pulled Lance into the first doorway nearby them, which had turned out to be a lab of some sort. A centrifuge sat spinning and humming on a side counter, but otherwise, there was no sound or activity in the room outside from Allura and Lance tearing through it. Lance pushed a cart back toward the door as they ran forward, and as he turned back, he saw Allura moving toward another metal door on the far side of the room. He had begun to move that way, as well, just as a beaker exploded from the impact of a gunshot almost immediately to his left.
He had held up his arms in defense and pushed forward, and nearly skidded through the other door before slamming it shut and following after Allura down the new hallway they found themselves in. Of course, she didn't know where she was going, but moving away from the person actively shooting at them was as good a move as any, from Lance's perspective.
This was about when the shot had almost hit him as he rounded the corner.
Now, the two of them found themselves in a section of the hallway that ended in three doors: one ahead, one to the left, and one to the right.
"We need to split up," said Allura, pushing Lance to the right.
"But—"
"He's coming," said Allura, "and can only chase one of us. Go." Lance saw something in her eyes as she pushed him toward the door, but he could hear the footsteps of their pursuer gaining on them, so he didn't stop to argue further. Instead, he dipped inside and shut the door behind him.
For a moment, he was still, and he tried to steady his breathing as he listened out for the man who had been chasing them. His footsteps approached the doors, and Lance stepped carefully forward to see if he could find a place to hide.
He crept forward to a low metal counter that ran across a section of the middle of the room and crouched down on the side of it opposite the door. He did this just in time, as he heard the door creak open almost immediately thereafter. Lance held his breath as the footsteps moved inside, and he moved his hand across his body to where his firearm was in its holster at his hip.
The pursuer took a step inward, and Lance knew he was probably listening for clues, too. There was a moment of silence that seemed to go on longer than it actually did, and Lance felt as if he would be able to cut through the silence with a knife.
Then, there was a clatter, muffled but distant, from somewhere beyond the doorway. There was a quick step as the pursuer in black turned toward the source of the noise. Lance could feel his heartbeat in his eardrums.
The pursuer shifted, perhaps taking one last glance at the room, then took off toward the noise, shutting the door behind him.
Then, all was quiet.
Lance waited a moment before he stood on his shaking legs. He looked around the room for the first time, scant light in it coming from a few small blinking and solid power indicator lights in machines throughout the space. It seemed to be a lab, not unlike the one he'd been chased through already. The place was spotless in the darkness.
Lance looked back over his shoulder at the door the guard had just closed behind himself. If ever there was a time to move, it was now. But if there was a lab in a secret facility like this—or, as he found, if there were two or more labs—there had to be something to learn.
He looked to see the outline of another metal door not unlike the one he had entered through and figured that it was where he could make a quick exit, if and when he needed it. In the meantime, however, he moved toward a short, two-drawer filing cabinet to the right of the nearest counterspace. He squatted down and opened the top drawer, wincing as it squeaked louder than he would have expected it to. He pulled out his cell phone—which still had no service—and illuminated its screen to use as a dim flashlight as he began to thumb through the files.
Most of them were labeled with codes Lance didn't recognize, or with phrases that didn't stand out to him. There were a lot of datasets in one or two of the files he opened that were also labeled in code—not telling him much solid information, but definitely letting him know that whatever was going on here, the people responsible for it wanted to keep it as secret as possible.
He flipped his phone around and snapped some pictures of random pages so that he could, hopefully, investigate what they meant in further detail later. He replaced the files and shut the drawer so that it wouldn't seem like anyone had been snooping. Then, he cast a glance back to the door through which he had entered, as if the guard would burst through at any moment, but no one did.
He turned back to the door on the far wall of the room and hurried toward it.
47
"So, do you think that this is all a part of ?" asked Keith, his eyes resting, barely shut, as he found a wave of a headache coming on that was mainly motivated by the lump on the back of his head.
"Hm," said Shiro. "Maybe. Probably." Keith could hear him shift as he spoke. "I mean, that's what we were close to them on, but…"
"What?"
"Your conspiracy theories are wearing off on me, I think."
Keith opened his eyes a bit to see his brother fiddling with his prosthetic in the low light of the cell. "Oh?"
Shiro shrugged. "I hope this is . At least then, we know what's going on, you know? At least it's something we sort of know?"
"As opposed to some other government conspiracy, the likes of which we haven't even begun to touch on?"
"Yeah."
Keith closed his eyes again. That worry was there, but he was surprised Shiro was the one who had voiced it. He was usually the voice of stability between the two of them—that's how it had been, growing up, and it was probably mostly because Shiro was older. But Kerberos had changed that, and Keith realized that there was more o this than detention for Shiro, because this wasn't the first time this had happened to him.
Keith cracked one eye, and he saw that Shiro was still fiddling with his arm. It as no wonder why, considering the last time he had been abducted.
"I think this is ," said Keith, finally, his tone even and sure. "because otherwise, they wouldn't be so scared of what we know." He looked to Shiro. "Besides, I've got a gut feeling, and I know I can trust that if I can't trust anything else."
The slightest indication of a smile came to the corner of Shiro's mouth and he nodded. He looked like he was about to say something, when suddenly there came a commotion from outside of their cell's doors. The pounding of more than a couple sets of feet as they ran up the hallway outside indicated some sort of urgent trouble elsewhere in the building.
The two brothers locked eyes and while neither knew what this commotion meant, they both hoped it would bode well for them.
And in the back of his mind, Keith hoped against hope that Lance hadn't done something stupid.
48
Lance was so panicked to get through the door—a panic onset by the sudden fear that the other door might bust open just before he was able to make his escape that he at first didn't notice the actual contents of the new room into which he had entered. This was probably a good thing, however, because if he had looked before he had entered, he would have been much more hesitant to go in.
The room was not well lit, but it was easier to see in here than it was in the lab he'd just come in from. This room—also a lab, Lance reasoned—was about the same size as the last, but was lit by the ambient light that filtered out of floor-ceiling tanks that were filled with a hazy green liquid and were lit from both above and below. These cylindrical columns were distributed throughout the room, and there seemed to be twelve in total.
There seemed, also, to be something suspended in each one of these tanks, some attached to wires and some not, each of a varying size and shape. From the doorway, it was difficult for Lance to see exactly what they actually were, but it all felt like something out of a sci-fi movie.
He wished Keith was here to see it. He'd love this.
Lance, on the other hand, was dangerously close to losing his cool. "What the shit…?" he murmured, taking a few hesitant steps toward one of the tanks. The greenish light cast a ghastly pallor across his face, and he placed one hand tentatively on the glass of the closest tank.
There was no reaction from the shape inside, and even up close, it was hard to tell what exactly was in there, due to the opacity of the fluid in which it was suspended. It was about three feet long and a little over a foot wide, and curled in on itself. Lance couldn't discover any actual features on it or see any movement, but the thing inside did seem to be organic.
He wondered what exactly this green stuff was that held the things in suspension, what its purpose was in this whole operation. Was it there to keep the thing alive, or to preserve the tissue?
He moved around the side of the tube, his eyes searching as he moved for some control panel or label or something that would indicate what exactly the lump suspended in this liquid actually was.
It was on the back side of the tank, between it and the next one over, that he found what he was looking for: a command console that seemed to be attached to both tanks with a small screen that was the only real feature on the otherwise blank metal box. Upon closer inspection in the dim radiant lighting, Lance could see the smudges on the screen of repeated fingerprints—there were no buttons on this because it was a touch screen.
He touched the screen.
It flicked to life, casting its own soft glow upward. There was a moment where it was just a blank white screen before some words and commands appeared on it in a plain, blocky typeface. There were a few commands that he figured brought he user to some submenus, but he was more interested in the titles—there were two of them, one on the left and the other on the right of the screen.
DNA SEQUENCE 17Q1920 | DNA SEQUENCE 20Q8216
He pulled out his cell phone to take a photo of these code numbers, to see if he could figure out what they meant later. This confirmed that there was some sort of genetic experimenting going on as a part of Project , but it also brought up more questions about everything else.
It brought up questions about what it might mean that their people had a sample of Keith's DNA on file. Looking down at the screen, he repocketed his phone and stared at the titles. Wherever Keith was in here, he needed to know. And as much as he was loathe to admit it, because it went against almost everything he already knew, Keith's theories were more on target than he had ever thought.
He reached down to the commands to the left side of the screen, which he assumed were designated for 17Q1920, the tank he had already been inspecting. His hand was about to press "COMMAND" when he heard a large crashing from somewhere in the building, causing him to jump what he felt was ten feet in the air. He wasn't sure what it was, but even as his heart beat went a million miles a minute, he knew that it must have been Allura, wherever she was.
Just a moment Later, Lance could hear the muffled footsteps of more guards or agents or whoever was manning this secret facility rushing through the hallways around the lab in which he was currently snooping. With one person in pursuit, Lance was safe if they were chasing Allura. But with more people…
He had to get moving. With everyone going after what he could only hope was a distraction from Allura and was nothing worse, he had a window of opportunity to find Keith. And as much as he would have like to find out more about what was going on here, there was something more important on the line.
He took off running.
Mulder: All we can do, Scully, is pull the thread, see what it unravels.
