Arcadia
Now, if you don't know how the rest of my life went, this is probably the point where you start thinking:
Wow. That was lucky.
Tiny rabbit girl runs away from home, survives three coyotes, dodges an Authority helicopter, wanders blindly into the Texas hills and just happens to find an abandoned bioresearch facility buried inside one of them.
Convenient.
Almost suspiciously convenient.
And yes.
It was luck.
A ridiculous amount of luck.
Just wait.
Because there was also quite a lot of the other kind to match the same level of luck.
The helicopter was still somewhere east of me when I reached the base of the hill. I could hear the rotors faintly whenever the wind shifted, but the trees and limestone were doing their job. My spiders had converged around the anomaly, their cameras feeding me overlapping views while I crawled through brush toward the remains of the old fence.
The sign gave me almost nothing.
PROPERTY OF ARCA...
BIORESEARCH DIV...
Whatever had once been printed beneath that had surrendered to rust decades ago.
I pushed aside dead branches and found concrete.
Not a building.
A retaining wall.
Most of it had been deliberately concealed beneath soil and vegetation, but erosion had exposed part of the structure. The concrete was old, stained dark by water and split by roots. One of the spiders disappeared into a narrow gap and transmitted a thermal image back.
Cold interior.
Artificial space.
Large.
I smiled despite my exhaustion.
Leona: "Okay."
That one word contained far too much hope.
I shouldn't have had any yet.
A buried building could mean anything. Storage. Agricultural testing. Old offices. A dead laboratory stripped of everything useful fifty years earlier.
But there was something here.
Something hidden.
Something nobody had cleaned up properly.
For the first time since leaving home, the world had offered me an actual direction.
I followed the exposed concrete around the hillside until Spider Four found metal beneath a carpet of dirt.
A hatch.
Calling it a hatch was generous.
It was closer to a bunker door laid almost flat into the slope, perhaps two meters wide, made from steel thick enough that rust had spent decades trying and still hadn't eaten through it. Dirt had packed around the seams. Roots crossed the surface. Whatever paint had once marked it was gone except for a few patches of faded white.
There was no visible electronic lock.
Good.
Electronic locks were elegant.
Mechanical locks could be hit.
I cleared the edges with the spiders.
That took twenty minutes.
At some point I became aware that I was on my knees scraping mud away from a secret underground laboratory while wearing homemade anti-predator armor and carrying two broken robots.
That would have been an excellent moment to reconsider several recent life choices.
I didn't.
Under the dirt, I found a recessed manual handle. It didn't move.
I stared at it.
Leona: "Of course."
I tried both hands.
Nothing.
I planted one foot against the steel and pulled.
My arms shook.
The handle remained completely indifferent.
Leona: "Right. New body."
I hated being reminded.
Before the accident, I probably couldn't have opened it either, but that was irrelevant. I was angry enough to blame rabbit DNA for atmospheric pressure if given sufficient motivation.
I sat back and studied the mechanism.
Old emergency hatch.
Mechanical linkage.
Probably designed to open from inside even with power failure.
Surface corrosion around the pivot.
Sealed by age rather than active lock.
Problem.
Good.
Problems were easier than feelings.
I retrieved penetrating oil from my repair kit and worked it into the mechanism. Then I used the bent staff as a lever through the handle.
The staff flexed.
Nothing.
I repositioned.
Longer lever arm.
Better angle.
Stolen story; please report.
One of the spiders braced itself against the hatch and looked extremely useful while contributing approximately nothing.
Leona: "Moral support appreciated."
I pulled again.
Something moved.
Barely.
Metal groaned beneath the dirt.
I stopped.
Listened.
No alarms.
No footsteps.
No ancient monster politely announcing itself.
Good.
Again.
The staff shifted in my hands.
The handle moved perhaps five millimeters.
Again.
Ten.
Rust cracked along the hinge line.
I grinned.
Leona: "There you are."
I worked at it for another fifteen minutes.
Pull.
Rest.
Adjust.
Pull again.
My palms reopened beneath the bandages from the coyote fight. My shoulders screamed. My ribs made increasingly persuasive arguments against continuing.
I continued.
Eventually the latch released with a sound so loud that I immediately froze and looked toward the eastern sky.
No helicopter.
Not yet.
I wedged the staff beneath the hatch edge and lifted.
Nothing.
I repositioned.
The spiders joined in this time, attaching cargo hooks to the lip.
All together.
Metal scraped against stone.
The hatch opened perhaps three centimeters.
Cold air escaped.
I stopped.
The smell hit me.
Chemical.
Old disinfectant.
Metal.
Something bitter underneath.
Not rot. Not exactly.
A laboratory smell preserved in a sealed place for far too long.
My body reacted before I understood why.
Every muscle tightened. My ears flattened beneath the hood. The hairs on my arms lifted.
Fear.
Not the explosive prey panic I'd felt around the coyotes.
Something quieter.
Wrongness.
My new senses were detecting something my conscious mind couldn't identify.
Maybe chemical residue. Maybe biological markers. Maybe nothing more mysterious than stale air escaping a room sealed for decades.
I stared into the black gap.
Leona: "That's reassuring."
Nobody answered.
I widened the hatch enough to squeeze through.
A ladder descended into darkness.
The spiders' low-light cameras found concrete walls and a metal platform several meters below.
No movement. No heat.
I removed the backpack and lowered it first using a cargo line. Spider Six descended after it, then Four, Three and One. Five remained attached to the pack because its participation in independent movement had been suspended by reality.
I climbed down last. Slowly.
Very slowly.
My legs were still weak enough that every rung required concentration.
At the bottom, I stood on a grated platform and looked up at the rectangle of moonlight above me.
Leaving it open felt dangerous.
Closing it felt worse.
I compromised by lowering the hatch until only a narrow gap remained.
Enough concealment.
Enough escape route.
Then I turned toward the interior.
Darkness.
Not ordinary nighttime darkness.
Underground darkness.
The kind with weight.
I activated the light mounted beneath Spider Three.
A narrow beam cut through the corridor.
Concrete walls. Old conduit.Yellow hazard lines. A door hanging partly open. Dust covered most surfaces, but not as much as I expected.
That bothered me.
The air filtration system shouldn't have been running without power.
Except...
I stopped.
There was air movement.
Very faint.
Cold air across my cheek.
My ears turned toward a ventilation grille.
Leona: "Okay."
I listened. Nothing mechanical that I could identify. But air was circulating.
I switched Spider Four to environmental sampling.
Oxygen safe. Carbon dioxide elevated but tolerable. Trace industrial solvents. Unknown biological compounds below immediate hazard threshold.
Comforting.
Mostly.
I retrieved Dad's bent staff.
There were better weapons now.
The dead coyotes had left me a knife, which I'd taken.
I still held the staff.
Not like a walking stick anymore.
Both hands. Across my body. A shield that happened to be made from a slightly bent length of aluminum.
The corridor continued downward at a shallow angle.
I followed.
Each step carried me farther beneath the hill.
The walls changed first.
Bare concrete became painted panels.
Then sealed laboratory surfaces.
Old warning placards appeared.
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
BIOLOGICAL CONTAINMENT
RESPIRATORY PROTECTION REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT
Very encouraging.
I checked the air again.
Still technically breathable.
Leona: "Technically."
Another twenty meters.
The chemical smell grew stronger.
Something in my stomach tightened.
I couldn't identify why the place frightened me.
It wasn't just that it was abandoned.
I'd broken into abandoned buildings before.
Teenage Leona had considered fences a suggestion and trespassing signs a challenge to cartography.
This was different.
The building felt asleep.
Not dead.
I hated that distinction the moment my brain produced it.
One of the spiders stopped beside a door.
Its thermal camera detected faint warmth beyond it.
I raised the staff.
Nothing moved.
I ordered the drone forward.
The door opened under a mechanical push with a long rubber squeal.
Empty room.
Equipment racks.
Old terminals.
Several shattered storage cases.
A wall monitor dark beneath dust.
The warmth came from a conduit behind the wall.
Power.
Very little.
But power.
I approached the nearest terminal.
Black screen.
I touched the casing.
Cold.
There was an emergency power line entering beneath it.
I opened the maintenance panel.
Old connectors.
Corrosion.
Still intact.
I smiled.
That particular smile usually meant something was about to become another person's problem.
I removed the tablet from my belt and connected it through an adapter.
Nothing.
I changed interface mode.
Again.
A tiny voltage appeared.
Leona: "Hello."
The terminal flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then died.
Auxiliary power existed somewhere deeper in the facility, but whatever network this terminal belonged to had been disconnected.
I followed the conduit.
The spiders went ahead.
Stairwell.
Down.
Another corridor.
One faded sign remained readable at the intersection.
SUBLEVEL ACCESS
An arrow pointed downward.
I stared.
Leona: "Of course it's underground beneath the underground part."
Down we went.
By then my fear had become mixed with something dangerous.
Excitement.
There was technology here.
Power.
Systems.
Maybe data.
Maybe research.
Maybe the exact miracle I had been hoping existed.
Every sensible part of me knew that old bioresearch facilities did not have excellent reputations for producing harmless surprises.
Every desperate part of me knew I couldn't leave without looking.
The stairwell ended at a security door.
This one had power.
A faint green indicator glowed beside the frame.
I stopped.
The spiders stopped with me.
My heart accelerated.
Leona: "Well."
The access panel was ancient.
No biometric system active.
No card reader illumination.
Just a maintenance interface behind a protective cover.
I opened it.
Wiring.
Diagnostics port.
Beautiful.
Give me teeth, claws, muscle or authority and I wouldn't have known what to do with them.
Give me a poorly secured maintenance port and I could negotiate.
I connected the tablet.
The system tried to reject me.
I disagreed.
It was old.
Very old.
Old encryption has a strange relationship with modern computing. Sometimes it becomes trivial because processing power has advanced. Sometimes it becomes horrifying because nobody remembers how anything was supposed to work.
This one was mostly trivial.
Three minutes.
The access panel flashed amber.
Then green.
The security door unlocked.
I didn't open it immediately.
I checked Spider Three's camera.
Leona: "Scout."
It slipped through first when I pushed the door open just enough.
No heat.
No movement.
Corridor.
At the far end, something glowed.
Blue.
I followed.
The chemical smell grew stronger.
My rabbit instincts hated every centimeter.
That alone almost turned me around.
Almost.
Then I saw the first intact workstation.
A large wall console sat beneath several dark monitors. One remained powered, illumination pulsing faintly across its surface.
Dust coated the keyboard.
The screen showed a command interface.
I wiped it with one sleeve.
Letters appeared.
My breathing stopped.
Not because the text was frightening.
Because I finally had a name.
// ARCADIA BIORESEARCH //
// SUB-LEVEL 03 - CONTAINMENT ACCESS //
// SYSTEM STATUS: NOMINAL //
// EXTERNAL POWER: OFFLINE //
// AUXILIARY POWER: 17% //
// CONTAINMENT FIELDS: ONLINE //
> ENTER COMMAND...
I stared at the words.
Arcadia Bioresearch.
I'd heard the name before.
Barely.
One of those companies that existed in old records and then stopped existing in useful ways. Biomedical patents. Hybrid research. Government partnerships. Several subsidiaries. Most of the corporate database entries ended decades earlier.
No obvious connection to Lampasas County.
Naturally.
I placed the tablet beside the keyboard.
My hands were shaking again.
Good feeling:
The system worked.
The data might still be here.
Somewhere inside this place could be research capable of changing hybrid biology.
Bad feeling:
The facility had been abandoned long enough for a hill to grow over the entrance.
External power had been offline for who knew how many years.
And something inside it still considered the containment fields important enough to spend seventeen percent of its remaining auxiliary power keeping them online.
I looked down the dark corridor behind the console.
Then at the command prompt.
Then at the staff in my hands.
I had a very good feeling about Arcadia.
I also had a very bad one.
Over the years, I learned to respect that combination.
It usually meant my life was about to become significantly more complicated.