dying sunlight. She strobed it along the bare pipes overhead and the wooden guts of the second floor.
“Black mold,” she murmured. “This place is falling apart.”
“Still think we’re on the right track?” Tyler said.
“Only one way to find out.”
They pushed deeper. Three glowing screens cast their beams to pierce the dark, tracking across rotted wood washed in spray paint, fallen doors, rusted hinges. The day spa was a trackless rat-warren of twisting corridors and empty rooms, some doorways blocked with chicken wire and scraps of metal, new paths ripped open with the head of a sledgehammer. Tyler crouched low to ease through a rupture in the wood, passing from hall to hall, ears perked in the stillness. The stagnant, humid air stank of rot, of must, of dead things and secrets.
Tyler put a hand to his ear. “You hear that?”
Seelie listened. The quiet was deep enough to become a sound, that bottomless nothing where you start hearing your own heartbeat, your own breath. Then she picked it up, at the far edge: a low electric hum.
“Generator?” she said.
He waved for them to follow. Around the next bend, through another hole torn in the wall between a pair of old massage rooms. The tables had been left behind, nothing but rust and rotted leather. Then they found the first signs of new life: fat orange power cables, snaking through rat-sized holes at the base of the floor. They followed them down the corridor, into what might have been a waiting room. Narrow staircases ran up and down, with the cables feeding in both directions.
“What do you think?” Tyler asked.
Nell shone her light down into the bowels of the building. It died in the dark, swallowed by the shadows before it could touch bottom.
“Upstairs first,” she said.
They took the stairs slow, listening to the groaning wood, the threat of popping nails. Tyler squared his foot on each step and tested his weight before moving to the next. They held. Seelie’s beam captured fresh splints here and there, mismatched nails, two steps where the old footing had been ripped away and replaced by new, clean, and sanded planks. Renovations, just the bare minimum to keep the stairs from crashing down.
On the second-floor landing, cold sapphire light shimmered from an open doorway. They rounded the corner and stepped into a hidden world. Before boarded-over windows, on a floor lined with rubber mats, eight tall server racks stood in regimented columns. They were black monoliths bearing boxes of obsidian-painted steel, blinking with icy blue eyes, and the pattern of their lights spoke of some unknown, hidden language.
“The mother lode,” Nell breathed.
Tyler circled around, studying the towers, while she snapped photographs. Seelie hung back, shoulders brushing the wall. The click and pop from the flash on Nell’s phone reminded her of Dieter Rime’s Polaroid. The lonely corners of the room erupted in heartbeat flickers of light before the darkness flooded in to swallow them up again.
“No terminal, no way to access the data directly,” Tyler said. “Not from here, anyway. It has to be the real Loom. I mean, what else would the Weaver Group be operating on these things? But…”
Nell took one last photograph. “But there’s what we know, and there’s what we can prove. There were more cables running downstairs. Let’s take a look.”
The basement was even more of a maze. It was hard to tell where the shattered walls ended and the debris began, stripped bedframes and old massage tables propped up as makeshift barricades, realigning the nest of rooms to suit some unknowable purpose. Rats chittered in the dark. Seelie caught a glimpse here and there: a ruffle of matted fur scurrying from the tight beam of her phone’s light, angry red eyes glinting.
“Careful,” Nell said, bending to skirt around a chunk of jagged metal. Tracking the cables was a dead end; they ran through an archway blocked off by bolted sheets of tarnished steel and a window of wire mesh, like a crude copy of a jailhouse door. Tyler led the long way around, following the curve of the wall.
The hall ended in another door, this one a slab of dented aluminum rigged up barn-style, with rickety tracks above and below. Tyler motioned for Nell and Seelie to move behind him.
“In case there’s something nasty on the other side,” he said. They stood clear while he took hold of the handle, then hauled the groaning metal wide.
No traps. Just a tidy enclosure that faintly resembled a doctor’s examination room, complete with