Chapter 37: The Facility
The fence was exactly where Chloe said it would be.
I crouched in the darkness fifty yards from the LuthorCorp subsidiary facility, watching the guard rotation. Two men, twenty-minute cycles, blind spot in the northeast corner between 2:47 and 2:51 AM. Four minutes to get through the perimeter and into the building's shadow.
The team didn't know I was here.
That was intentional. Clark would have insisted on coming—would have wanted to use his speed, his strength, his invulnerability. But a Kryptonian signature in a LuthorCorp facility would set off every detector Lex had installed. This mission needed subtlety, not force.
And I needed to see it myself. Needed to know what we were fighting before I asked anyone else to risk themselves.
[INFILTRATION PARAMETERS: SECURITY ROTATION CONFIRMED. WINDOW OPENING IN 47 SECONDS.]
I counted down in my head, watching the guards complete their circuit. When they turned the corner, I moved.
The fence was chain-link topped with razor wire—standard security, nothing I couldn't handle. I cleared it in one jump, landing silently on the other side and sprinting for the building's shadow. My enhanced recovery had erased the last traces of fatigue from the Alex mission, and my muscles responded with the precision I'd spent months developing.
Thirty seconds later, I pressed myself against the building's east wall, breathing controlled, listening.
Nothing. No alarms. No shouting. Just the hum of industrial equipment and the distant murmur of the heating system.
So far, so good.
The service entrance Chloe had identified was locked with a keypad. I'd memorized the code from the maintenance records she'd hacked—six digits, changed monthly, probably should have been changed more often. The door clicked open, and I slipped inside.
The smell hit me first.
Antiseptic. Industrial cleaner. And underneath, something else—something organic and afraid. The smell of people who had been kept too long in spaces too small.
[ATMOSPHERIC ANALYSIS: ELEVATED CORTISOL TRACES. MULTIPLE HUMAN SUBJECTS PRESENT.]
The corridor stretched ahead, fluorescent lights humming overhead. Medical equipment lined the walls—IV stands, monitoring devices, things I recognized from hospitals and things I didn't recognize at all. Everything was white and chrome and sterile in a way that felt wrong, like a hospital designed by someone who'd never met a patient.
I moved deeper.
The first door was unlocked—a supply closet, nothing interesting. The second was a bathroom. The third was locked, and when I pressed my ear against it, I heard something that made my blood run cold.
Humming. A child's voice, humming a melody I didn't recognize.
I checked the corridor. Empty. Then I used my enhanced strength to carefully force the lock—not breaking it, just overwhelming the mechanism until it clicked open.
The room beyond was a cell.
Glass walls, metal floor, a cot bolted to the ground. And inside, a girl. Fourteen, maybe younger. Dark hair tangled, eyes hollow, skin pale from lack of sunlight. She wore a hospital gown with a number printed on it instead of a name.
Subject 17.
She looked at me without fear, without hope, without anything. Just acceptance.
"Are you here to run more tests?" she asked.
My stomach turned.
"No," I said. "I'm here to—" To do what? Rescue her? With guards everywhere and no extraction plan? "—to document this. To stop it."
"They all say that." She went back to humming. "Nobody stops anything."
I wanted to argue. Wanted to promise her that I'd come back, that I'd get her out, that this nightmare would end. But I couldn't make promises I might not keep.
"I'll try," I said instead.
She didn't respond.
I photographed the cell, the equipment, her face. Then I moved on, carrying her eyes with me like a weight.
There were twelve cells in total.
Twelve human beings, reduced to numbers and test subjects. Some were catatonic, staring at nothing. Some were aggressive, throwing themselves against the glass when I passed. Some were pleading, begging me to help them, to free them, to end it.
I photographed everything. The experiment logs. The medication schedules. The "progress reports" that documented the systematic destruction of human minds.
[EVIDENCE COLLECTION: 847 FILES RECORDED. STORAGE: 94% CAPACITY.]
The horror of it settled into my bones. These weren't abstract victims—they were people. People who had been scared and confused and dangerous, yes, but people who deserved help, not torture. People who had been taken from their lives and turned into data points in someone's research project.
This is what Lex is building. This is what 33.1 means.
I was so focused on the cells that I almost missed the sensor.
Almost.
The System's warning came half a second before I would have tripped it: [PROXIMITY ALERT: MOTION SENSOR DETECTED. RANGE: 2 METERS.]
I froze, one foot suspended in mid-air. The sensor was mounted at ankle height, nearly invisible against the white walls. If I'd taken one more step—
Alarm. Guards. Capture. Becoming Subject 18.
I pulled back slowly, breath held, and found another route around the sensor field. But my luck had been pushed too far. Somewhere in the facility, someone was paying attention.
The alarm went off thirty seconds later.
Red lights. Sirens. The sound of boots on concrete, getting closer.
I ran.
The first guard came around the corner at a sprint.
I hit him before he could react—enhanced strength driving my fist into his solar plexus, dropping him like a puppet with cut strings. His partner was two steps behind, reaching for a weapon. I grabbed his arm, twisted, and sent him into the wall hard enough to crack the plaster.
[COMBAT ENGAGED. TWO HOSTILES NEUTRALIZED. ENERGY: 140/180.]
More were coming. I could hear them, feel the vibrations through the floor. The facility was waking up, and I was deep inside enemy territory with no backup and no easy exit.
Move. Move now.
I ran toward the service entrance, following the route I'd memorized. Left at the junction. Right at the supply closet. Straight through the double doors—
Three guards blocked the corridor.
No time for subtlety. I activated Controlled Burst and hit them like a freight train, moving faster than their eyes could track. One went down to an elbow strike. Another crumpled from a knee to the thigh. The third managed to get his weapon up, but I was already past him, already through the doors, already sprinting for the exit.
[CONTROLLED BURST DEPLETED. COOLDOWN: 3 MINUTES. ENERGY: 95/180.]
The service door was ahead. Thirty feet. Twenty. Ten—
Someone tackled me from behind.
We went down hard, rolling across the tile floor. The guard was bigger than me, heavier, trained in ways that spoke of military background. He got his arm around my throat, started squeezing.
Enhanced strength didn't mean much when you couldn't breathe.
I drove my elbow backward, felt it connect with something soft. The grip loosened. I twisted, broke free, and delivered a Power Strike to his chest that sent him sliding across the floor.
[POWER STRIKE: SUCCESSFUL. ENERGY: 80/180. RECOMMEND: IMMEDIATE EXTRACTION.]
I didn't need the System to tell me that. I was through the service door, across the parking lot, over the fence. Running through the darkness toward the vehicle I'd hidden two miles away.
Behind me, the facility lit up like Christmas. Searchlights. Vehicles. Voices shouting orders into the night.
They were looking for me. But I was already gone.
My apartment had never felt smaller.
I sat on the floor, back against the wall, watching the photographs scroll across my phone screen. Face after face. Number after number. Horror after horror.
Subject 7: Male, 34, pyrokinetic abilities, "cognitive deterioration progressing."
Subject 12: Female, 19, enhanced healing, "resistance to conditioning, recommend increased medication."
Subject 17: Female, 14, unspecified abilities, "promising subject, continue observation."
The girl. The one who'd asked if I was there to run more tests. The one whose eyes had held nothing but acceptance of her fate.
[STABILITY: 75%. TRAUMA RESPONSE DETECTED. RECOMMEND: REST AND EMOTIONAL SUPPORT.]
Rest. Right. Because that's going to help.
My hands were shaking. Not from the fight—from the weight of what I'd seen. Those people were suffering while I sat here. Suffering while the team planned and prepared and waited for the "right moment."
There was no right moment. There was only now.
I pulled up my phone and typed a message to Clark: We need to meet. Now. It's worse than we thought.
Then I sat in the darkness, watching the faces of the damned, and tried to figure out how to explain that some things couldn't wait.
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