I led us deeper into the building and took the second hallway on the right. This part of the prison appeared to be for the staff. We passed locker rooms and a small break room, turned left, and came to a riveted steel door that made me think of a bank vault, not a server room. Through a small vent in the bottom of the door came the humming of some sort of fans.

There was no knob or visible lock. An electronic keypad was mounted to the wall next to the door.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to shoot your way through this one,” said Deb.

“No problem.” I grabbed Alan Dean Foster’s re-released novelization of Alien. I’d marked several scenes with sticky tabs. I skimmed the one I wanted and pressed the open book to the door by the keypad. Yellow-green alien blood oozed onto the metal and began to sizzle.

The acidic blood ate through the book within seconds, nearly taking my hand with it. Scraps of paper fell away, eating pits into the floor where they landed. The metal bubbled and smoked, filling the air with a sharp, toxic scent.

“Who’s out there?” someone yelled. New alarms buzzed throughout the prison.

Chunks of dissolving steel dripped and sagged, creating a hole the size of my fist. The titanium barrel of a JG-367 poked out through the opening.

Deb grabbed the end of the barrel and pushed it against the edge of the hole, so the titanium touched the acid. The gun hissed and smoked. She pressed harder, until half the barrel came off in her hand. “How long will that keep burning?”

“You don’t want to know.” The hole was almost as big as a Frisbee now, and had eaten through part of the wall as well as the door.

Deb shoved the door open. The guard inside had tossed away his magical pistol and was clutching a Glock 22 in both hands.

“Shooting her will just piss her off.” I stepped into the doorway, little more than a translucent afterimage.

The man turned toward me, his eyes wide. Deb snatched the gun and hammered her fist into the bridge of his nose, quick as a snake. She adjusted her grip on the gun and pistol-whipped him, leaving him bloody and groaning on the floor.

His badge lacked the magic-damper his colleagues had worn. I relieved him of his other weapons while Deb zip-tied his hands and feet. Only then did I look around. There were no servers humming away. No tangled cables or racks of routers lit up like Christmas trees. Only a floor-to-ceiling curtain cutting the room in half. I tugged the curtain aside.

Four narrow steel-framed beds were stacked tightly atop one another like a bunk bed from a claustrophobic’s nightmare. Small fans circulated air over the occupants. The faces of all four sleepers were physically identical to Babs Palmer’s secretary, Kiyoko Itô.