After what felt like the longest time they’d yet spent underground, Rivasoa’s shape disappeared in front of her. A moment of crawling later, Orfeus breathed in deep as she came into relatively open air. She rested her feet carefully on the ground, soundless, and stood and stretched thankfully.

Rivasoa walked a few metres along and stopped in front of another large circular door. “Here,” she said, sombre. She didn’t start her light again.

Orfeus nodded. “Heal,” she added. There was a soft pulse as her Blood fixed the scrapes on her hands. Her knees had escaped the same treatment, in tough padded Order armour.

“Oh, no,” Rivasoa said. “Tide and Sky forbid you get abrasions.”

“You seem to go back and forth an awful lot on what you think I’m worth, Riv.”

Rivasoa wrinkled her nose silently at the nickname, and Orfeus grinned.

The other woman’s eyes were a human brown, whatever web display or map she’d been looking at slid back down and her consciousness fully engaged, but she stood motionless It was unlikely that she’d changed her mind, but…Rivasoa, however old she was, hadn’t done anything like this before.

Orfeus hadn’t done anything exactly like this before either, but she’d at least come up multiple times against people who wanted to kill her. That cheered her up a little.

“Three,” Orfeus mouthed. She held up her fingers and Rivasoa nodded. Orfeus dropped her fingers. Two. One.

She hauled the door open.

It was dark inside. Quiet. Just an echoing hollow of black, hard to make anything out. Rivasoa lifted her hand, and Orfeus caught her wrist. She cocked her head, listening.

Mostly silence. No hum of power. She listened harder and wished she’d thought of augmenting her hearing somehow, with Blood if not with cybernetics.

But in the dark and the silence, it was easier to focus on sounds. After a few moments, there came a soft, ragged whimper, and then it cut off. Straining, she thought she heard quiet breaths.

No footfalls, and nothing close by. Orfeus released Rivasoa’s wrist, and padded cautiously forward as gold light bloomed out behind her.

It didn’t quite look like a lab.

If it had been one, it was clearly abandoned. There were a few tables, one long, large table a little to one side of the entrance and another running along the wall, but both were empty of any contents. Scuffed and stained, far from hygienic in any case.

The floor was metal, grid-like, grooves leading to a drain in the centre. The main feature of the room was rows of what looked like chairs. They were nightmarish, all stiff metal, with restraints at the arms and legs and cradles for the head and …she stepped closer despite herself. Cables, leading out, cables all hooked into the chairs and running back into batteries.