Chapter 18: In Plain Sight
"For the honor of Grayskull!"
Adora cracked open an eye and looked up at the wooden training sword she held aloft. It hadn't transformed like it was supposed to, and the runestone embedded in the gauntlet clasped to her forearm twinkled as if mocking her. The purple hue of Entrapta's lab within the Scorpion Kingdom did little to calm her nerves and Adora groaned, lowering the sword to her side.
"Still nothing, huh?" Bow said. Surrounded by crates piled high with Entrapta's new experiment equipment, he knocked another arrow and sent it down the makeshift shooting range—the only part of the lab not currently crowded beyond use. It slammed into the center chest piece of a bot, powered off and tied to a post. "Did it feel any different that time?"
"No different than the other hundred-thousand times I've tried," she said, tossing the sword to the ground with a clatter. "It's there, I can feel it under the surface, it just…won't come to me. I'm getting desperate here. How does holding a practice sword to bring the real one out even make sense?"
"Hey!" a nearby voice said. Frosta stared her down with an irate expression as she kicked her legs against the particularly tall stack of crates she sat upon.
"I mean, it's true!" Adora said, leaning against another nearby crate.
"You thought it was a good enough idea when I suggested you give it a try," Frosta said. She had traveled from her kingdom for the Induction Ceremony in Bright Moon, but a special attachment she had grown in the intervening years since the Enclave's first appearance necessitated a detour to the Fright Zone first. The doors leading into the lab hissed open and she turned a pointed look to the person who stepped through. "You thought it was a good idea too, right?"
Hordak didn't even lift his eyes from the tablet he plucked at when he responded. "Did I think what was a good idea?" He made his way through the maze of crates to Entrapta, sitting hunched at her desk in the back, whispering rapidly to herself as she worked. She had spiraled into a funk trying and failing for so long to make any sort of progress on Light Hope that he had suggested she lock herself in the lab for a few days and work on something else.
He glanced up when no one responded, his eyes flicking to the wooden sword on the ground, then to Adora's frustrated expression, then to Frosta's expectant one before he seemed to realize what they were asking him. "You're really getting desperate, aren't you?" he asked Adora.
Adora threw her arms up in the air, nearly ready to tear her hair out. She felt agitated and sweaty all of a sudden, and reached up behind her head to feel at the braid tucked high and tight there. She had started tying it in that fashion to keep it out of the way while she trained, and found putting it up in that complicated style helped calm her in and of itself, almost like a meditative ritual. The only problem was her having made a habit of constantly checking to make sure it was still perfect; likely her body trying to find any excuse to undo and then redo it to pacify her mind.
"I don't suppose you have any ideas of your own, do you?" she said to Hordak. "Might as well ask you since I've been making the rounds again, talking to anyone I can grab hold of to see what they think I could try next."
"I don't have anything new to suggest, no." He turned his eyes back to his tablet, already unplugging from the conversation. Adora wasn't ready to let him go.
"You pulled me from that portal as a baby," she said, stepping up to him. "The first one you opened to try and reach Prime years ago. You brought me back to the Fright Zone, gave me to Shadow Weaver to raise me. Are you saying you had no idea about She Ra or my connection to the sword when you found me?" Adora set her jaw when she saw how Bow and Frosta reacted to her bringing up Shadow Weaver. They hadn't seen or heard from her after she left with the Emperor, and everyone knew Adora never brought her up unless she was really spiraling. "Nothing comes to mind that you knew back then that might help me now?"
"Nothing," Hordak said, shaking his head. "I saw an infant swaddled in a blanket with no one there to care for her, and decided it better to bring you with me than let you succumb to the elements. It was Shadow Weaver who insisted on raising you herself when I suggested we put you with the rest of the young orphans, and I allowed it if it meant she'd let me return to my experiments in peace." He sighed and gave her a rarely-seen sympathetic look. "The other princesses, Frosta included, have been training diligently with Micah and the Enclave Mentors for years now. Have you tried them?"
"If you bothered to pay attention to anything other than the fleet up in orbit then you would have known I've done more training with them over the past three years than all the rest of the princesses combined," Adora said. She ignored the way Frosta beamed at Hordak for referencing her. It was stupid, and she knew it, but even that small exchange only seemed to sour her mood further. At least Frosta was making measurable progress with them.
"Then I'm afraid I don't have much to offer when it comes to fixing your…problem," Hordak said. "I'm sorry."
Adora deflated and sank back onto one of the crates again. Despite what she had expressed to Glimmer, Hordak had turned into a valuable asset and an unlikely ally since his reappearance. Even Frosta warmed up to him, to the extent she would purposefully seek out opportunities to spend time with him when he came down for leave on the surface; she had gravitated toward him like an unlikely father figure, which undoubtedly helped endear him to the last of the Etherians that still looked at him sideways.
Adora had learned to live with it, especially since he also made Entrapta happy, but she never fully acclimated to it. His presence was a permanent reminder to her that, while even their old enemies were contributing to the war preparations in unexpected ways, she still couldn't manage the one thing that was expected of her: summon She Ra.
A hand rested on her shoulder and she turned. Bow was there, flashing her a reassuring look.
"It will be okay," he said.
"Thanks." Adora reached up to grab his hand with her own. "By the way," she said, dipping her voice low and looking around to make sure the others weren't listening in. "Glimmer."
Bow's face hardened. "I don't—" He moved to pull his arm away, but Adora held it firm.
"She tried really hard to not let it show, but I know she was upset you didn't write to her." Adora leaned further into his space. "We only get to exchange messages once a month. The ansible gets used even less, and I took all the reservation this time. I know you're still coming around, but why didn't you at least send something?"
"I don't want to talk about this right now," he said. "Please, Adora."
His eyes didn't waver from hers for several long moments. When he moved to pull away a second time, she let him go with a sigh, knowing very well that he could flip the argument on its head and needle her about never having once reached out to Catra. Still, having to sit there and watch the sadness flit across Glimmer's face through the ansible…having to sit there and watch her shove it far enough inside her she could fake a smile back…it had hurt. Knowing full well all that was just because Bow was being both stubborn and stuck made her want to wrestle him into coming around.
"Just…you never know when you might not have the opportunity to speak to her again, you know?" she said. "She's on the front lines, after all."
Bow sucked in a harsh breath. He averted his eyes, swallowed, and Adora felt a small amount of satisfaction seeing how her words had affected him.
Good¸ she thought. Maybe that will knock a little bit of sense into him.
"It was good of her to give you the whole meeting," he said, still not meeting her eyes. "Did you learn anything?"
Adora sighed. "Not a thing. There's literally nothing on the Daiamid she could find that we didn't already know."
Bow cursed under his breath and narrowed his eyes. "I wasn't about to give up hope when neither of my dads turned anything up—what would two history nerds on Etheria be able to get their hands on anyways, right? But to think there was nothing even in the Enclave's protected archives?"
"I just don't get what else we're supposed to try," Adora said. "Where else are we supposed to look?"
"I don't know," Bow said. "I don't know what the big secret is all about, but we'll keep poking around and find something. Maybe it's time to start digging in a different direction entirely."
Adora closed her eyes and nodded, exhaling a breath she hadn't realized she had been holding. She had no idea what "different direction" he had in mind, but the fact he was already thinking of their next step was reassuring. She let herself relax with the knowledge that, even if she felt like giving up, Bow wouldn't let her.
"Speaking of surprises," Entrapta said, making Adora jump with how abruptly it cut through the calm she had been settling back into. "I've found an interesting pattern with the security breaches. Come take a look at this."
Everyone stood and shuffled over to Entrapta, still hunched over a terminal atop her tornado-wreck of a desk she had shoved into a corner of the lab. She tapped a few commands on the keyboard and a massive auxiliary screen nearby sprang to life. It showed a map of Etheria and its many kingdoms. A dizzying number of multicolored dots, icons, and flags dotted the landscape.
"This is a log of every "malfunction" in the Enclave's security logging system since platform inception," she said. "Don't ask me how I got access to this, it's a secret so shhhh. And also, don't be alarmed by how many icons there are. This logs everything from power outages to someone accidentally oversleeping past the start of their shift."
She tapped at the console and a large chunk of the icons disappeared. Adora could actually see the landmasses and kingdom names now.
"Take out all the missed shifts and other one-off errors and you get something easier to deal with," Entrapta said. "When I went through the data here, I found something."
A window popped up, showing a last-minute shift switch between one Enclave security guard and another.
"This doesn't look like anything out of the ordinary," Bow said, stroking his chin and reading the change manifest through narrow eyes. "It looks like someone just subbed out for someone else last minute."
"It wouldn't be abnormal, especially since these kind of shift changes happen all the time," Entrapta said. "Except, when you isolate for this specific employee ID—the one that replaces the other—and display only their recorded events, you get this." The screen changed, showing only several dozen flags instead of several hundred.
"These are spread all across the continent," Adora said, furrowing her brow.
"Is that not supposed to happen?" Frosta asked.
Adora shook her head. "Enclave standard operating procedure here is to assign people to one major location, maybe two. But all kingdoms within three years? That doesn't seem right."
"Not all kingdoms," Entrapta said. "Whoever they are, they've hit everywhere except Bright Moon and the Fright Zo—er, Scorpion Kingdom. This data is a few months old though, so it's entirely possible they've already gotten to one of those places. It gets even weirder when you apply a time series to the data."
A scrolling date bar appeared above the map and all but a small handful of icons centered around Salineas disappeared. Entrapta slowly dragged the selector across the widget. As she did so, icons appeared and disappeared in rapid succession, all of them at first centering on Salineas before moving wholesale to Plumeria. As Entrapta continued to drag the cursor along the bar, so too did the icons popcorn from Plumeria to Dryl, the Kingdom of Snows, and finally Mystacor.
"This is troubling indeed," Hordak said. "I wouldn't say this alone would constitute a full red alert, but it's certainly worth a deeper look."
"I thought the same thing," Entrapta said, "which is why I already did more digging." She pulled up another window on the monitor and security footage of an ancient ruin somewhere Adora didn't immediately recognize played. The timestamp showed a date three years in the past, when the Enclave was still in the midst of setting up.
"This is a First Ones' dig site in Salineas," Entrapta said, "before the Enclave could help us repair the damage Horde Prime did there. Watch carefully."
The feed suddenly cut to static, although the videos' scrub bar continued to crawl forward and the timestamp continued to count up. "The video cuts out for two hours," Entrapta said, skipping forward to the point where the feed comes back online. Nothing looked out of the ordinary once it did.
"That's odd, but not unheard of," Hordak said. "The Enclave's energy grid was far from reliable back then. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for a camera or two to fail every now and then."
"No, it wouldn't," Entrapta said. "But if a piece of tech fails, it's usually just the one, and they had backup generators installed for this very thing even back then. This was deliberate." She tapped a command and the feed played over from the beginning, except this time splitting into six separate feeds, each showing the same dig site but from a different angle. At the exact moment the first feed cut off, so too did the other five.
"Now that's decidedly not normal," Bow said. "Especially for the Enclave. Their tech hygiene is too good, even for something thrown up overnight."
"This was taken maybe a week after that person's first shift change," Entrapta said. "And the pattern continues across all instances of them showing up. They appear, roughly a week or two goes by, then a major site's security footage goes down for a time. Sometimes it's only for a few minutes, sometimes it's for a few hours, but every camera goes down at the same time without the backup generators kicking in. Then they all mysteriously start back up again at the same exact time. This is consistent across all kingdoms and all records of them subbing out for someone else, even up to six months ago when they appeared in Mystacor."
"Let me guess, no one has reported anything out of the ordinary?" Frosta asked.
"Nothing, nada, zippo," Entrapta said, spinning around in her chair with a manic laugh and a wide grin. "The only reason I found this in the first place is my database scrapers flagged this one ID as abnormal, and it took three years of data to finally assess the abnormality with a ninety five percent confidence rate. I have a pretty high standard for personally turning my attention to something my bots pick up, but once I did it was easy to isolate the data and find the correlation with the closed-circuit footage."
"Can you pull up any information on that person?" Adora asked, thinking Entrapta was far too happy for finding the anomaly in the first place. One security breach was no joke, let alone years of them.
"I can't, unfortunately," she said, using her hair to stop the chair from spinning any further and adopting a vaguely irritated expression. "All the personnel files are in a different database on a different server, and I haven't been able to crack the security on that one no matter what I've tried. It's not nearly as complicated as Light Hope's neural networks, but it's still got a nasty firewall I can't get past. As far as I know, only the Enclave department heads on-planet have access to that information."
"Better get this over to Salas as soon as possible so he can look into it then," Bow said, echoing Adora's worried expression. "He'd definitely have access to that data too, and I don't like the look of this at all."
"Already have," Entrapta said. "I sent him all the files and my full write up before I turned around and showed all of you. He responded almost immediately saying that he's already looking into it."
Adora grimaced. Whatever was going on here made her skin crawl. Bow was right, the Enclave was far too good for this to happen. Both him and Entrapta would wax for ages talking about how airtight their systems were, and despite Adora having the tech savvy of a rock, even she understood someone manipulating their system like this should be unheard of. The fact they got away with it for so long without anyone noticing was only more alarming.
The door to Entrapta's personal lab opened and a group of Enclave workers team lifting even more crates shimmied in. The first one through the door looked around at the mass of boxes already inside and Adora saw him wilt.
"Where do you want these?" he asked.
"Oh, just anywhere you can find room," Entrapta said, giving an emphatic shrug with her hair. "As long as you don't pile any of them in Bow's shooting range. I think he needs the space."
She didn't seem to comprehend there wasn't much space at all for anything. The worker in question continued to look about for where he and his partner could drop off their crate, and grew more conflicted when it seemed the only space left was directly where Adora and the rest of them were already standing.
"Watch out, coming through," said a gravelly voice from the back.
The laborers made as much room as they could and one of their own made his way to the front. His hair was disheveled and he walked with a resigned gait. He looked about the room like his colleague immediately before and, without missing a beat, headed straight for Entrapta's desk and thunked the crate down right next to where Adora stood.
Adora saw him glance at the data on Entrapta's screen and watched an expression she couldn't decipher flit across his sunken eyes. They locked gazes for the briefest moment, and that was enough for Adora to confirm something was off about him. He turned to leave and she almost reached out to stop him before Entrapta shouted.
"Hey! What are you two doing in here?"
Everyone turned and saw two Prime clones idling at the doorway, glancing about the room like tourists at an exhibit.
"Ah, we transported your new hardware on our ship," one of them said. "Since we came all this way to deliver from off world, we thought we'd come to the surface and see what kind—"
"Not allowed!" Entrapta said, bringing her hair tendrils up in front of her and making an "X" shape with them. "Prime clones are not allowed in here. This room is strictly off limits."
Despite Salas' repeated mentions that Prime could only see through the eyes of his clones if they were within a certain distance of him, no one trusted them to roam freely and everyone eyed them suspiciously as moles waiting to report back to Prime. Was it fair? Probably not. But, then again, neither was how Prime nearly destroyed their world to begin with.
"It's all right, Entrapta," Hordak said, the red of his eyes and blue of his hair setting him distinctly apart from the others. "I'll take care of this. I suggest you give some concrete direction to these delivery people, or you might find yourself unable to use your lab when they're done with their drop offs."
He swept past all of them, squeezing through the rest of the laborers to reach the clones.
"Brothers," Adora heard him say as he put on a cordial face and clapped them on the shoulders. "Please accept my apologies. The Etherians are still touchy about what happened with their world."
He spun them around and guided them out the door with a gentle hand at both their backs. The laborers stepped forward, stacking crate after crate in two-man teams according to Entrapta's direction. She apologized to Bow as she ordered them to stack a few of the crates in the firing range after all. Soon enough, Adora, Bow and Frosta had to clamber up onto the crates themselves to stay out of the way.
Adora tried to find the first worker who came in, the one looking on the verge of exhaustion, but despite scanning everyone's faces multiple times, she couldn't locate him. When the last team placed their crate down and left, something struck her that she hadn't realized earlier: He was the only one to carry in his load alone. The rest of them had all worked two to a crate.
