Chapter 76: EARTHFARER

The child’s voice barely carried through the glass. "Rhea?" Rhea reacted as though the sound had pulled her forward by the ribs, her palm staying against the observation window while the small vulpine ears on the other side lifted weakly from the pillow.

"I’m here." She brought the stolen access band to the reader beside the door, and red light swept across its surface before the lock rejected her. Rhea tried again with enough force to make the casing creak. "Open."

Sio stepped beside her and let the Scar move through the wall. Several connections ran from the door into a control network beneath the corridor floor, all converging farther down the level rather than ending at individual cells. "These rooms share one locking system. Opening this normally probably tells everyone upstairs exactly where we are."

Angle looked along the observation windows stretching beyond the child’s room. "Can you bypass it?" Sio followed a weaker maintenance route behind the wall while Gumm had already started climbing down Rhea’s side. "Maybe, but apparently our smallest criminal has volunteered first."

Gumm squeezed through the service grille near the floor and disappeared behind the wall. Rhea remained close to the glass while Sio tracked the faint connection moving between the cells, and the child inside pushed upright with visible effort as the restraints around their wrists clinked against the bed.

"They took the others," the child whispered. Rhea leaned closer, keeping her voice steady. "Who did they take?"

"The foxes. They took them downstairs because they said ours worked better." The child pointed toward the deeper end of the corridor, and Sio looked at the classification glowing beside the door.

LINEAGE EXPRESSION: VULPINE

Rhea’s ears drew back as a metallic chirp sounded inside the wall. Several locks changed state together, and Gumm’s pleased little call echoed through the ventilation space.

The door slid open while others farther down the corridor began releasing in sequence. Rhea crossed the room quickly but slowed before reaching the bed, letting the child see her hands before she touched the restraints. The moment the child reached for her, Rhea gathered them against her chest and kept her claws folded safely away.

Gumm crawled out through the grille and climbed onto the mattress as though he had personally rescued the entire floor. Angle was already moving toward the next room. "Can he open all of them?"

Sio followed the network spreading beneath the corridor. "He’s trying." He looked toward Gumm. "Please don’t interpret that as permission to dismantle the building."

Locks continued releasing down the hall. Some doors opened onto frightened faces, while others revealed people too weak to stand without help. Sio used portals to pull wheelchairs, blankets and medical carts from nearby storage rooms while Angle cut only the restraints that refused the stolen access bands.

The ceiling lights shifted from white to amber as they worked, and a calm woman’s voice filled the corridor. "Containment irregularity detected on Sublevel Three. Research personnel remain in assigned sectors pending security assessment."

Rhea held the child closer while staring up at the speaker. "Containment. That’s what they call them." Angle glanced toward the approaching junction and flexed his gauntlets. "We can hate the vocabulary after we get everyone out."

Sio felt several paths change direction upstairs. A security team was already descending, moving quickly enough that the annex had stopped trying to understand what had happened and started responding to it.

Four officers appeared at the far intersection with compact weapons raised, while a fifth pressed both palms against the wall. Cold spread through the metal frame, condensation clouding the observation windows before frost raced across the floor toward the freed prisoners.

Sio opened a portal across the corridor before the ice reached them. Frost vanished through the opening and spilled from another portal above the security team, coating their own footing instead. Two officers lost balance while Angle drove a controlled pulse of heat into the ceiling above them, melting the frost into hot water that crashed across their shoulders.

Rhea handed the child to an older beastkin woman and waited until they were behind cover before moving. She caught the first rifle barrel before it cleared the officer’s chest, twisted it aside and drove him into the wall hard enough to empty his lungs without breaking the concrete.

A second officer came at her from behind, but Sio opened one portal beside Rhea’s hip and another beside the attacker’s shoulder. Rhea thrust her hand through without looking, caught the man by his vest and yanked him halfway through until his boots left the floor.

"Useful," she said while dropping him onto the tiles. Sio redirected another burst of gunfire into an empty treatment room. "I’ve been saying that for a while."

Angle stepped between two prisoners and the remaining rifles. Heat tightened around his gauntlet instead of exploding outward, focused enough to soften the barrels pointed toward him. Metal warped, magazines slipped loose, and the officers backed away as their weapons became useless in their hands.

The Scarred officer controlling the cold struck the wall again. Frost climbed vertically this time, building a thick barrier between Rhea and the rest of the team, but Sio caught the route through the metal supports and placed a portal across it. The freezing spread vanished into an unused laboratory behind the guards.

Rhea punched through what remained of the barrier and reached the officer before he could change direction. When he hit the floor, the others stopped trying to advance.

"Take their access bands," Sio said while the freed prisoners moved past them toward the lift. He glanced at the fractured wall behind Rhea. "Also remind me never to fight you somewhere narrow."

Rhea wiped melting frost from her cheek. "Only somewhere narrow?" Sio looked at the damage again. "The list is still developing." Her quiet laugh followed them toward the deeper section.

The child’s warning led below Sublevel Three, where the stolen access bands no longer opened the restricted lift. Sio bypassed the door through a maintenance route while Gumm squeezed into the control housing and released the emergency brake from inside.

When the lift descended, the smell changed before the doors opened. Antiseptic remained, but something sour and biological sat beneath it alongside overheated machinery, and transparent tubes ran across the lower laboratory ceiling carrying pale fluid between sealed rooms.

The first observation window stopped Angle in place. A man lay unconscious inside, clearly human at a glance until Sio looked more carefully and found dark fur growing unevenly along one forearm, altered bone pressing beneath one side of his skull and a thin incomplete tail extending from the base of his spine.

Rhea moved beside them while Angle read the nearest display. "They’re changing humans." In the next room, a woman with narrow animal pupils lay connected to several machines, and rows of failed markers filled the monitor beside her.

HUMAN BASELINE: STABLE

BEASTKIN EXPRESSION: PARTIAL

INHERITANCE COMPATIBILITY: FAILED

Sio opened the terminal at the end of the room. Genetic maps layered human structures over beastkin sequences, with rejected sections flashing red where the altered bodies had failed to accept them. Several project notes remained open from whoever had abandoned the station.

VULPINE LINEAGE REMAINS MOST PROMISING

MULTI-TAIL EXPRESSION CORRELATES WITH HIGHER EARTH AFFINITY

NATURAL SUBJECTS EXTREMELY RARE

Rhea stepped closer. Her fingers had already found the dark wooden token from her mother, and the nine narrow cuts around its edge pressed into her palm while Sio opened the next file.

A human silhouette filled the screen. Nine branching shapes extended from its spine, eight crossed out while one remained highlighted beneath the project designation.

PROJECT NINE-TAIL

Angle’s eyes moved from the diagram to Rhea, and Sio followed the look without needing the connection explained. They already knew what she was carrying. Veilhollow had named her Earthfarer, her mother’s token bore nine marks, and now the Organization had built an entire research program around forcing that same inheritance into human bodies.

Rhea kept staring at the screen as something dark moved beneath the fur along her forearm. It looked rougher than shadow, a scratched black line appearing near her wrist before slipping beneath her sleeve, and when she turned toward the next file her eyes caught the laboratory light with a deep red tint.

Gumm lifted his head sharply against her side. The color disappeared when Rhea blinked, but Sio had seen enough to remember it.

Another document opened beneath the Nine-Tail project. Its classification system looked older than the modern Wayfarer seal, though recent notes had been layered over it.

OBJECTIVE: CREATE VIABLE HUMAN INHERITOR

REQUIRED TRAIT SOURCE: VULPINE BEASTKIN

TARGET LEGACY: NINE-TAILED FOX

ASCENSION COMPATIBILITY: INSUFFICIENT

FINAL REQUIREMENT: EARTHFARER WORTHINESS

Angle read the final line again before looking toward the altered bodies behind the glass. "They’re trying to make a human body that can meet the Earthfarer requirement."

"Or at least something they think can," Sio said as he scrolled through failed compatibility tests, discarded bloodlines and repeated references to subjects taken from hidden vulpine populations. "They know the inheritance exists. They just don’t know where it already ended up."

Rhea slowly opened the hand around her mother’s token and studied the nine marks cut into the wood. Her expression did not change much, but the edge of the token had pressed deep enough into her palm to leave pale lines.

"They don’t know about me," she said. Angle stepped closer to the terminal and shut the active file before the system could transmit anything else. "Then they don’t find out."

Sio let the Scar spread through the lower facility. Several routes were already converging toward them from above, but one path extended even deeper beneath K-17, guarded by more locks than anything they had passed so far.

He looked toward Rhea, then Angle, and finally the laboratory door at the end of that route. "We came here for the people they took. We’re still not leaving anyone behind, but whatever they’re protecting down there might tell us why they needed them in the first place."

Rhea closed her fingers around the token and turned toward the deeper corridor. "Then we find out before we burn this place down." Angle looked at the altered human behind the nearest glass and adjusted one gauntlet. "Preferably after we get the prisoners outside." Sio followed them, Gumm climbing back onto his shoulder as the paths beneath K-17 tightened around a section of the facility nobody upstairs had wanted them to reach.