I finish changing and palm the keycard. Slipping out of the closet, I enter the stairwell and take it down. It takes me ten minutes to locate where the research labs are, and I’m sure I only have minutes before the guard sounds the alarm that I’m missing.

I enter the lowest basement of the hospital. My first glimpses of this subterranean floor aren’t promising. Paint peels from the walls and the exposed metal pipes I see. It smells like mildew and rot down here—not exactly the ideal atmosphere for cutting edge medical research.

Despite my misgivings, I begin to scrutinize the hall. The floor is abandoned.

A shiver races down my back. An epidemic preceded the king’s war, culling the Eastern Hemisphere’s population to little over a third of what it once was. I’d never noticed what exactly that looked like until this moment, when I stood in one of their understaffed hospitals.

I go for the first door I see. Locked. Damn. I place my head next to it; I can hear lugging noises on the other side. It must be a boiler room. The next door I come to is the morgue. I wrinkle my nose at the thought. As curious as I am to see if any of the research occurring in these hospitals has landed test subjects in here, I decide against it. Who knows if victims of biological warfare are in there? It would be a damn shame to survive cancer only to die of a virus.

The next door is unmarked. I try the handle. Just like the boiler room, this one is locked. Next to the handle, however, is a scanner. I lift the plastic card in my hand and hold it in front of the device. It beeps and a light flashes green next to it. I try the handle again and the door opens.

I slip into the room and flip on the lights. Whoever normally works here is gone for the time being. I glance around, almost afraid to touch anything. The counters are covered with racks of vials, strange machines, and data readouts.

I don’t know where to start or what I’m looking for. I never thought my problem would be making sense of the research I came across. Hell, I don’t even know if I’m in the right place.

I begin moving, my eyes scanning the papers strewn across the counters. I see numbers and percentages, but nothing that I recognize. Moving further into the room, I scan the counters, the machines, the spines of books that are sitting out.

I want to scream. Nothing here corroborates the Resistance’s sparse findings.