Chapter 22: The puppet masters
Third Person POV
The door of the sleek sedan opened with a soft click. Rain pattered gently on the tinted windows, turning the night into a distorted blur of reflections and red tail lights. A man—in his early forties slipped inside the passenger seat of the car, shutting the door behind him carefully.
Without turning around, he addressed the woman seated in the shadows behind him.
"One of the test subjects— Subject Fourteen, precisely- escaped today," the man began, skipping past the initial greeting routine. His voice was filled with anxiety. "It was contained before it left the outer ring, but—there was violence. Two of our handlers were injured. One... badly."
The woman drew in a sharp breath, leaning forward towards the man. Her face was masked with annoyance, which the man would have seen if he had turned back.
"How," she began, "does a creature designed to obey escape in a facility crawling with guards? How could you have let that happen in a camp filled with students, children of Alphas, precisely from two of the most prestigious academies in our world? Do you understand what kind of risk you created?"
The man swallowed hard, his hands fidgeting with a tablet in his lap. "I have no explanation for the escape itself. Security protocols were followed and tightened upon the arrival of the students. There was also no breach in the containment logs. No power outage. Nothing on the surveillance can be traced, and we had put them all to rest. It’s like something woke it up."
"So, you want to tell me that Subject Fourteen just disappeared and appeared outside the containment unit? Can you hear yourself, Albert? Don’t you sound stupid?"
Albert didn’t say anything.
The woman inhaled deeply, then leaned back in her seat, running a hand on her brows. "I heard four students saw it. What is the school doing about it? Have they talked to anyone? Are they beside themselves with shock?"
"They claim they do not remember," Albert said quietly. "One of the handlers that went to retrieve subject fourteen, however, said they initially asked questions, but Alpha Thatcher’s son had a health crisis, and by the time we tried to ask them about it, they claimed they had forgotten."