Lantern must have intuited the direction of her speculation, because she said, “It wasn’t a nursery like you’re thinking. Not like an orphanage, even. My people mature rapidly. The nursery will include an incubation chamber, and a series of rooms meant to instill certain behaviors. Newborns of my race were instructed in obedience, instilled by natural aversion to pain.”

“I thought most Liars could shut off their pain responses?” Callie said.

“That was one of the first changes we made in ourselves, when we became the Free,” Lantern said grimly. “We had good reason.”

“We should look in on the nursery,” Elena said. “Just in case. So many of the systems in this place are still operational…”

Lantern’s tentacles fluttered. “I… would like to look in. I feared to ask. I know this is not your mission.”

Callie nodded. “Of course. We should. Anyway. It’s on the way.”

Ashok steered the bio-drone down a side tunnel, and they emerged through an irised service opening into a chamber with gravity, but no atmosphere. The guttural alarm wasn’t audible here either, at least.

The kaiju settled down on a raised pillar shaped a bit like a helipad, and Callie, Elena, and Lantern stepped off.

“The area around this platform used to be full of fluid.” Lantern gestured at the empty space around them. “For moisture, and hydration, and nutrition.” She pointed with a tentacle to what looked like a wall of smoked glass bricks. “Those are the incubators. When the young were mature, or mature enough, they would be dumped into this pool. Then pumps and currents would channel the young into the… other chambers. The stories say the nursery was tended by machines, because when my people were tasked to instruct the young, they invariably killed themselves rather than fulfill their required duties, no matter how often they were reconditioned.”

After a moment of silence, Callie said, “Can you cut the gravity?”

Lantern touched the infosphere to a recessed panel in the floor, and it lit up a pale green. A moment later the gravity vanished, and Callie drifted upward. She pushed off the central pedestal and ducked into one of the chambers that led away from the dry pool.

She looked at the equipment within, and immediately understood how it would work: the current would bring the baby Liars there, and then…

Callie ducked into another chamber, saw what it held, recoiled, and then made herself look again, hard and long, until she understood exactly how the mechanism had functioned. Tiny Liars, no bigger than a human hand, delicate and new, pushed into that.

She forced herself to look into a third chamber. The construction was elegant, the instruments still gleaming, and she almost threw up in her helmet.