Chapter 17

No one reported to her directly about the progress of their attempts to bait the police into taking down Tump Inc. with a tip about the missing children; she did however receive the company wide email vaguely chastising employees for sharing company secrets and threatening the immediate termination of anyone too chatty. Evil often worked quickly, Silicia thought, so it was a given that the Inc would be drafting a formal mail the second someone came knocking on their door, but that the police had acted within the month did surprise her. It seemed they were under enough public pressure still to have felt an obligation to grasp straws.
It was still sort of a mystery to her how a heavily reported on string of disappearances - of children, no less - could be swept under the rug so easily. No doubt Tump Inc. had paid their way into security, but the amount of people who would have needed to get a slice of that pie to actually prevent anyone from digging deeper seemed astronomical the more she thought about it.

If she could just identify the right weak point, Silicia was sure they would be able to topple the whole horrible house of cards. The problem was that any attempt to do so would put their lives and probably those of quite a few people in very acute danger. And that was a pretty significant problem, actually.

---

A bit of classic snooping revealed that the only thing stopping Silicia from accessing the surveillance cameras' video feeds was a trivial matter of physical reality. This was easily remedied, especially these days now that the facility appeared like a ghost town most of the time. Any guard post that was hooked up to the surveillance system would do.
There was no particular need to even sneak - she just took a few days to learn the guards' schedules and then walked right on in just after the morning shift left for break to be replaced by the next guard shift. They had even left the computer on for her, so all Silicia had to do was plug in her usb stick, wait a few seconds, and walk right out again with all she needed.

This was a laughable level of security, but then she was already in the facility, already permitted to loiter around without drawing suspicion, already in the system, not to mention able to write her own code to modify it. That could be said of very few people, and among them the number of people using their position for good was even smaller.

Keeping watch on her former charges calmed her somewhat, even knowing that she could do nothing but watch through the grainy feed as they were taken periodically to appointments she could never be sure they would return from. The people who arrived to fetch them wore bright blue plastic gloves and plain white uniforms somewhere between a nurse's outfit and a soldier's. It made her wonder if they were lab assistants or even some sort of private security force, but she had never seen anyone dressed like them outside of the research floors, so it must have been the former.

---

Foolishly, she asked Tump the following week to please tell her if he learned anything about what sort of research the others were subject to. He gritted his teeth but agreed. It seemed like he'd not fully forgiven her for her stunt two weeks ago, although whether he was upset about her coming with or her leaving, Silicia couldn't tell. She regretted hurting him, but felt that at this point she had to pull herself together and accept that there were more important things right now than a teenager's opinion of her - like for example said teenager's life.

"I wish they'd at least talk to me like a person," he told her resentfully.
"I keep asking but all anyone will ever tell me is that me knowing too much could spoil the test results."

"Tump Inc. is as Tump Inc. does," she muttered, before she froze at the realization of what she'd just done.

"What?"

Tump was staring at her, blood draining out of his face, and Silicia thought, eloquently: 'fuck.'

---

While Silicia was happy to see the remodelling on floor 12 commence, she was less thrilled to find out that there would also be construction on floor 9. The constant hum of machinery and people stomping around like they were processing grapes for wine made it hard for her to concentrate on tantalizingly routine things like drafting a request to requisition a new desk for one of the 8th floor offices.
She found herself checking the camera feed on the kids' rooms more often than she'd have liked. It was a deeply unhealthy habit, and only made worse by the fact that she did in fact catch the moment they took Rin away, but only realized it hours later. It had looked like every other time one of them was escorted up to the lab; there was a knock at the door, and then two people in their weird uniforms led her out of her room. Only this time, she never came back.

Once she'd rode out the panic attack, Silicia got up from the floor and went home without saying a word to anyone. For the rest of the week, she spent all day cooped up in her flat, the curtains half drawn in fear of being seen despite living on the third floor, and drafted a plan.

---

She expected to have a bit more time to get her things in order, but fate had other ideas.

When she took the call she initially expected it to be something trivial, but the question the gruff voice at the other end of the line posed made her jolt out of her desk chair. It was one of the researchers from the 11th floor - she recognized the voice: he'd introduced himself to her, but she'd forgotten his name - and he was asking if Tump was currently in her care.

"Yes," she said, and "I will bring him back shortly," and then she slammed the receiver down and bolted out of the room.
If they didn't know where he was, that meant he'd gotten out on his own, and if he'd escaped now and not during the night when no one would check on him, that meant he'd had an urgent reason to.

Her feet carried her to the elevator and she wrung her hands anxiously as the floors ticked by.
A handful of construction workers looked up in surprise when the doors slid open on floor 12. Silicia quickly put on a nervous smile and declared with a laugh that she appeared to have pressed the wrong button. They looked back down, but she only let the painfully cheerful expression drop when the elevator began moving again. Her face scrunched up as she waited - it was only two floors, but the ride felt like forever anyway.

She walked the corridors of floor 10 with anxious stumbling steps, peering into offices and on a few occasions even closets as she went. She had to find him, and there was only so long she could take before all hell broke loose.
After far too much time had already passed, finally it came to her that she wasn't looking for just any kid, she was looking for Tump. What business would he have down here where they built the horrible things his friends were probably fed to?
Since she'd gotten off it someone else had used the elevator, so when she saw the display begin leasurely counting up as it ascended to her, Silicia turned instead and ran for the fire stairs. She took the steps two and three at a time, the metal walkway shuddering under her feet until she finally made it back up to the 11th floor, taking in big heaving gulps of air.
She wasted no time catching her breath as she pried open the heavy door and hurried down the corridor, past the lab she'd already seen straight for the door opposite it. Neutral blocky letters above the door frame proclaimed 'ARIAS', and a laminated sheet of paper denoted it as a lab-personel only area. The door wasn't windowed like most doors in the facility were, but unlike them, it was open.

She found herself in another corridor, empty and quiet except for the voices she could hear coming from deeper inside the department. Despite her exhaustion, she sped up.
This part of the facility had no rest areas or water coolers, only scratched up grey laminate flooring and greying white walls with white doors in them. There were grooves carved into the floor in some places like something heavy had been wheeled through the corridor from room to room. The quiet gave the empty department an eerie feeling, but Silicia paid it no mind as she finally reached where the voices were coming from.

"That's not my name anymore," said a rough voice over the speaker system just as Silicia burst into the room. Tump was standing transfixed in front of a large, cylindrical tank full of fluid. Floating in it was Alec, connected to uncountable wires and drains that spread out behind him like a network of blinking, pulsing roots.
With a monumental amount of willpower, Silicia tore her eyes from the sight before every detail of the horror could burrow into her brain and debilitate her. She rushed to Tump's side, ignoring Alec's tirade of insults, half pulling half pushing her charge out of the room, gripping his wrists tightly enough to hurt when he resisted. The whole thing became a blurry mess in her memory later on, except for a few snapshots she could recall with absolute clarity.

One: Pushing Tump, who had stopped resisting, onto the cushioned chip modifier and hesitating only a breath before putting in the memory blocker she'd been doubting herself over for so long.

Two: Tump looking up at her blankly from the backseat of her car as she shut the door, confusion and childlike trust swirling in his eyes. It made her think of a duckling faithfully following around the first creature it sees in its life.
Silicia had never wanted to be a mother and that hadn't changed, but if no one else would step up, she decided then and there, she would just have to deal with it. Damn the list she'd already compiled, she was not leaving Tump in some random charity home. She jammed her car keys in and drove.

Three: Tump standing in the entryway to her flat looking around like he'd never seen a normal living space before - had he? - while Silicia threw together a bag. She'd put a reassuring hand on his shoulder, straightened his glasses, and lied to him.

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