I took a deep breath. “My name is Seline,” I said, “This is Aaryn.”
“Either of you carrying weapons?”
I cocked an eyebrow and scanned him up and down. “Are you?”
“I’m authorized. You are not. If you want to go any further, you have to surrender your weapons now.”
Another guard came up behind Mister Scar Face. He was holding a large white, plastic bin which he set down on a table near the front door. We had barely entered the prison. Behind the two guards there was another door, this one made entirely of metal and covered in locks. This little room was clearly just a place where visitors got frisked before they could go any further.
Given how absolutely barren and hideous it was, I doubted if they got many visitors.
Aaryn looked a little reluctant to surrender her knives at first, but there was no way past this without giving them what they wanted. I pulled open my military coat, revealing a full tactical harness underneath it so loaded with equipment it made the guard’s eyes widen.
Two by two, I unclipped and placed several items onto the white bin. Two knives, two pistols, two extra ammunition clips, a pair of flash grenades, a pair of fragmentation grenades. It took a minute for me to unload my clown-car of death-dealing, remembering at the last moment to produce a couple of suspicious looking phials; one filled with luminous blue liquid, the other bright orange.
The scarred guard cocked an eyebrow. “Christ,” he growled, “Did you bring anything else?”
“I didn’t,” I said, “But she did.”
It was Aaryn’s turn to unload, and her arsenal was just as large as mine, if not a little larger. By the time she was done the guard holding the white bin was trembling from the weight of the equipment we’d just deposited onto it. He walked away, his arms shaking, going through the door ahead of us and disappearing behind it.
“I trust our equipment will be returned when we’re done?” I asked.
“It will,” the guard said.
“Good. If not, I’ll make sure to remember your face when I come looking for it.”
The guard scowled, then he turned and opened the large metal door for us to step through. Beyond it was a room not unlike what you’d expect to find in a regular prison. It looked like a waiting area, with chairs to sit on and magazines sprawled out on tables between them. There was a series of little windows, each numbered and ready to receive visitors, but there wasn’t a soul manning them.
In fact, besides the three guards we’d seen so far there was nobody else here; the place was dead.
“There’s a strange energy in the air,” Aaryn said.
“I know,” I said, “I feel it too.”
The guard led us through another set of doors that buzzed open electronically. Behind them was another man, this one wearing a simple prison uniform. He was sitting at a control station on the other side of the door and watching us from behind tired eyes as we stepped through. His face was pale, his eyes were red, and it looked like he could barely keep his head up as we walked past, but he maintained his fixed stare on us until we were gone.
The more we moved through the large, foreboding prison, the more I started to feel like something was wrong. It was little more than a faint tingle at the edge of my senses at first. A niggling, gut feeling of not right that only got worse as time passed and we saw no one else walking around the complex.
A place like this you’d think would be filled with staff and always alive with activity, but Harrowgate felt like a tomb. Cold, dull, and utterly dead. Now I was scared, but not for me; for Six. She was in here, somewhere. Trapped behind bars, waiting to be released. I had to find her, and I had to do it fast if I wanted to get her out of this cold, dead place.
The guard stopped about halfway through a hall that ended in a single door marked WARDEN. He turned to look at us, then gave Aaryn a look. “She waits out here,” he said. “You have five minutes.”
I nodded at Aaryn. “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
Aaryn nodded and waited where she stood while I walked with the guard toward the Warden’s door. It was time to meet the man behind this entire operation, the man responsible for the systemic oppression of my people and so many other Outsiders like me. It was going to take everything I had just to keep my cool, but I was going to do my best.
Six’s life depended on it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Seline
I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting the Warden to look like, but the man I saw threw me for a loop. For one, I was taller than he was. He wore all black—a buttoned down shirt, a suit jacket, pants—which made him look slight, as well as average in height. When he stood from behind his desk, I noticed he was wearing black leather gloves which he ran through his pale blond hair, adjusting it to make himself more presentable.
The guard who had opened the door for me didn’t follow me into the room. Instead, I heard the door click shut behind me, and then I was alone with the man. He smiled, bright, and warm, and inviting, and then his left eye twitched, giving his smile an altogether wrong kind of vibe.
The same vibe I got from the rest of this place.
“Hello,” he said, gesturing to one of the chairs in front of his desk. “Please, come in and sit down.”
I walked up to the chairs, considered standing, but decided to sit. The Warden’s office was, like the Harrowgate I had come to know already, dull and boring. The walls were light grey, as were the shelves and filing cabinets arranged around the walls. He had a collection of books, but they were mostly encyclopedias, books on psychology, the mind, and physics; no fiction.
The furniture in his office was also dull and boring. The chairs were uncomfortable, grey fold-out chairs; his desk was also grey, and made entirely of metal, and the only window in the room seemed to look out into the prison’s courtyard instead of the street and Devil Falls beyond it.
This had to be the most boring man on the planet, and when you considered his reputation, that baffled me. I knew full well, though, not to let any of this fool me. The Warden—Warden Wright—according to the nameplate on his desk wasn’t just a man; he was a mage, and a mage’s power was a subtle, but incredibly dangerous thing.
I had to be careful.
“Thank you for agreeing to see me, Warden Wright,” I said, sitting upright and putting on my most diplomatic face.
“The pleasure is all mine,” he said, “We don’t often have visitors, if you haven’t already been able to tell. Much less visitors of your… esteem.”
“Esteem?”
His left eye twitched again. “You are the Seline of the Obsidian Order, correct? That is what you told my men.”
“I am.”
“Then you are the Seline who prevented a catastrophe of potentially global proportions, yes? When you prevented our separate worlds from colliding, and ensured no one would be able to manipulate the rifts in way that would cause harm to either of our peoples?”
I nodded. “You’ve done your homework.”
“No homework was necessary. You are a living legend, and as such you are someone who deserves my time and attention when you request it. I must apologize for any… hostility you may have been greeted with.”