Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Kyle had been telling himself, since the first morning Stan did not show up for their 8:30 lecture, that it was nothing. After all, Stan had always been the kind of guy who ran on a different rhythm than everyone else. He would forget his phone charger, lose his keys, leave half-drunk coffee cups in the weirdest places, then somehow still show up with that lopsided grin like the world had merely decided to inconvenience him for sport. He was also the kind of person who texted back late, forgot to tell people he was going somewhere, and occasionally vanished for a few hours when he got in his own head after practice.

But two days was too long. Two days meant missed meals, unanswered texts, a bed untouched in their tiny apartment, and the strange absence of Stan’s voice bouncing off the cinderblock walls. Two days meant Kyle had started noticing every little detail Stan left behind, like the hoodie draped over the chair, the football taped to the shelf above his desk, the smell of his laundry detergent still clinging to the hallway when Kyle came back from class.

By the second afternoon, Kyle was no longer pretending. He sat across from Kenny in the student union, a half-eaten wrap going cold on a paper plate in front of him. Kenny looked annoyingly composed. His slightly wavy blond hair was falling into his eyes, one ankle crossed over the other like there was nothing in the world worth rushing for. He was scrolling through his phone with the same casual expression he used when girls or dudes flirted with him, when professors assigned impossible reading, when the universe asked him to care and he simply flipped it off.

“Bro,” Kenny said, not looking up, “you’ve asked me this three times.”

“And I’ll ask you a fourth if I have to,” Kyle shot back. “You really don’t think this is weird?”

Kenny finally glanced up. “Stan disappears sometimes.”

“This is not sometimes. This is two days.”

“He’s a grown-ass man.”

“That's not reassuring.”

Kenny set his phone down. “I’m saying it’s probably nothing. He’ll show up ‘cause he always does.”

Kyle stared at him, heat creeping up his neck. “That’s exactly what people said about every guy who ended up in a missing persons poster.”

At that, Kenny’s expression shifted, just slightly, into something more cautious. “That is not remotely the same thing.”

“No, but you’re acting like it is. Lately, you have talked to him more than I have. You were the last one who saw him, right? You know something.”

“I know he was annoyed after practice. I know he got benched again, and I know he stormed off like he wanted to punch the Atlantic into submission. That is the extent of my deep, mysterious knowledge.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“Nope.”

“Did he mention meeting someone?”

“Nope.”

“Was he upset?”

Kenny hesitated before answering, and Kyle caught it instantly. “Yes,” Kenny said after a moment. “But not in a way that made me think vanishing without a trace. In a normal way. Like, Stan way.”

Kyle pushed away from the table so abruptly his chair scraped the floor. A couple people nearby looked over. He did not give a single fuck.

“You’re not listening,” he snapped, and the words came out more wounded than angry. “Nobody is. I’m telling you this isn’t like him, and everyone keeps acting like I’m making a scene for no reason.”

“Hey, I am listening.”

“No, you’re humoring me!”

That landed. Kenny looked down at the table for a second, then back up with a flash of irritation that made him look younger than usual. “Okay. So what do you want me to say? That I’m fucking terrified? That I think something bad happened? I don’t. I just think Stan is pissed off and off the grid for a couple days because he’s had enough of football chewing him up and spitting him back out.”

Kyle’s hands curled into fists at his sides. “And if I’m wrong?”

Kenny said nothing.

“That’s what I thought.”

He left before Kenny could answer, because if he stayed another minute he was going to say something ugly and mean and permanent. He crossed campus with his phone in his hand, Stan’s contact open, thumb hovering over the call button like repetition might somehow turn into proof. The screen showed a line of messages that had gotten more frantic by the hour.

Where the hell are you?

Call me back right now

This is not funny, idiot

Stan, answer me, ffs!!!

Stan had read none of those texts. Hell, they didn't even get delivered. Desperate, Kyle had also gone to the campus police, which had been humiliating in a way Kyle would not forget for a very long time. The officer behind the desk had worn a look of polite impatience from the second Kyle stepped through the door. He’d listened with one eyebrow lifted, nodding in all the wrong places.

“So your roommate is an adult,” he’d said.

“He’s my best friend.”

“Right. And he’s not answering his phone?”

“No. He’s gone.”

“Did he leave his belongings?”

Kyle had stared at him in disbelief. “How would I know if he packed a toothbrush? That’s not the point.”

“Has he done this before?”

“No.”

“Any history of mental health concerns?”

The question hit like a slap. Kyle had gone still at that. “I’m trying to report my friend missing.”

“We’re trying to determine whether there’s an actual emergency.”

“There is.”

The officer had sighed, the kind of sigh that said he wanted the conversation over before it had even begun. “A college student leaving for a few days is not automatically a missing persons case.”

Kyle had stood there, shaking with fury, and thought that if Stan walked through the door right then, he would have hugged him hard enough to make both of them complain. Instead, the officer gave him a pamphlet and told him to wait a little longer.

So Kyle did what he always did when no one was helping: He went looking himself. He asked around in the dorm, in the gym, at the dining hall. He asked teammates, classmates, people from Stan’s intro stats course, someone who vaguely knew him from the weight room. Most of them gave him versions of the same useless answer.

No, hadn’t seen him. Maybe he was home. Maybe he was with Kenny. Maybe he needed space.

Space, his ass.

As though Stan had ever been the kind of person to disappear for space without leaving at least one joke, one text, one halfhearted warning.

Butters was the last person Kyle asked, because Butters was the last person Kyle wanted to corner. He found him on a bench near the library just as the sky began to bruise into evening. Butters looked up too quickly when Kyle approached, as if he had been caught doing something wrong by existing in public. His undercut was wind-tousled, his backpack clutched tight against his chest.

“Hey, Butters,” Kyle said, trying to keep his voice gentler than he felt. “Can I ask you something?”

Butters nodded, then seemed to realize he had nodded too fast and did it again, smaller.

“Have you seen Stan?”

The color drained from Butters’ face so quickly it was almost frightening.

“Oh,” he said. “Um. No. No, I haven’t.”

Kyle watched him carefully. “You sure?”

“Yes.” Butters swallowed. “I mean, I talked to him once, maybe, on Monday? In the hall? But I haven’t seen him since.”

“Did he mention anything weird? Did he seem upset?”

Butters’ fingers tightened around the strap of his backpack. “He seemed fine.”

That was a lie, or at least a bad one. Butters’ eyes darted away. Kyle stepped closer. “Butters.”

“I don’t know where he is,” Butters blurted, words tripping over each other. “I swear I don’t. I’m sorry.”

That was so obviously not the thing Kyle had actually asked that he felt a fresh spike of fear, cold and clean under his ribs.

“What aren’t you telling me?” he asked.

Butters shook his head too hard. “Nothing. I mean, I don’t know anything. I just… I haven’t talked to him.”

His voice broke on the last word, and Kyle immediately regretted the pressure in his own tone.

“Okay,” he said more softly. “It’s okay. I just thought maybe he said something to you.”

Butters looked miserable now, pale and stiff and pinched around the eyes. “I’m sorry.”

Kyle gave a tight nod and walked away before his patience failed him entirely and he started yelling at the poor guy.

By the time he got back to his home, the entire space felt so empty. The window was cracked open even though neither of them ever left it that way this time of year. Stan’s side of the room looked too neat in a way that made Kyle uneasy. He stood in the middle of the floor, phone in hand, and tried to force his breathing to slow. He had a psychology paper due in two days, and a biology quiz, as well as three chapters of reading and a meeting with his adviser. Final exams were closing in like weather, and all he could think about was Stan’s empty bed.

He kept replaying Butters’ face. Then Kenny’s face, when Kyle had asked the wrong question and hit something real. Then the cops, who were dismissive and bored and unhelpful. Then his own voice, turning sharper and more desperate every hour.

By midnight, he was no longer trying to be rational. He called Stan again, but of course, it went straight to voicemail.

He texted Kenny, no answer.

He called Butters, and after four rings he hung up before it could go to voicemail, because he suddenly did not want to hear Butters’ shaky voice pretending not to know something, even though the poor guy was probably just intimidated by Kyle's temper.

At 12:17 am, Kyle was sitting on the edge of his bed with his laptop open but ignored, one hand pressed over his mouth, when his phone rang.

Unknown number.

For a second he just stared at it, heart hammering. Then he answered so fast he nearly dropped the phone.

“Hello?”

A burst of static came through, then breathing.

“Kyle.”

His entire body locked up.

“Stan?” he whispered.

More static. A hiss like the call was moving through bad reception, or being smothered under a blanket, or dragged through water.

“Kyle,” Stan said again, and there was something panicked in his voice that made Kyle’s blood go cold. “Listen to me.”

“Dude, where are you? What happened? Are you hurt?!”

“No time,” Stan said. “I need help.”

Kyle was already on his feet and grabbed his car keys. “Tell me where you are. I’ll come get you right now.”

A crackling sound, then Stan inhaled sharply, like he was turning away from the phone to listen to something in the room with him.

“Kyle,” he said, lower now. “Do not trust—”

The sentence cut off. The line went dead.

Kyle jerked the phone away from his ear and stared at it, breathing hard, the screen glowing in the dark.

No connection.

He called back immediately.

Disconnected.

Then tried again.

Disconnected.

His room had gone too still. Even the noise of the mini-fridge seemed suddenly loud, artificial. He stood there in the dark with the phone in his hand, every muscle tight, and the words Stan had managed to get out looping in his head over and over.

I need help. Do not trust—

Not trust who?

A shadow moved across the window.

Kyle flinched so hard he nearly dropped the phone.

For one wild, ridiculous second he thought someone was outside. That Stan had been right there on the call, in the dark somewhere nearby, and now he was at the glass.

But when he turned, there was nothing. Just the curtain shifting in the draft from the cracked window, and the black reflection of his own face staring back at him, pale and wide-eyed.

What the hell was he supposed to do now?

…

The next morning, Kyle woke to gray light spilling through the blinds and the ugly, familiar sensation of having slept badly enough that his body felt borrowed. For a moment he did not remember why he was so tense. Then he turned his head and saw Stan’s empty bed, the blanket folded back in the exact same sloppy way it had been the night before, and the fear returned so fast it was almost physical. The room was too cold. Kyle sat up slowly, listening.

No Stan. No movement in the hallway, no voice from the bathroom. Just the distant hum of the building waking up around him, pipes knocking somewhere in the walls, someone laughing on the floor below, the soft slap of shower water from the shared bathroom at the end of the hall.

So he got up, dragged on a sweatshirt, and went to the sink with the dull, mechanical focus of someone trying not to think too hard.

The mirror reflected a face that looked older than twenty-one. His eyes were rimmed red, his red hair stuck up in one stubborn corner. He squeezed toothpaste onto his brush and turned on the little TV perched on the shelf above the mini fridge, because silence felt unbearable.

At first it was just morning noise and weather and traffic. A segment about finals week and campus stress, because apparently the entire world had decided to become aggressively normal at him. He brushed harder than he needed to, staring at the screen with half-lidded exhaustion.

Then the anchor’s tone changed. The woman on the television sat straighter. Her expression was solemn in the polished way that meant real trouble was being folded into the broadcast between ads for local banks and breakfast burritos.

“Rockabay police are asking residents to remain alert this morning,” she said, “after a string of unexplained disappearances involving local adults between the ages of twenty and thirty-five.”

Kyle flinched with the toothbrush still in his mouth.

The camera cut to footage of the harbor, the waterfront, then to a clipped shot of police tape near a brick building he did not recognize. A reporter stood outside in the wind, hair pinned back, voice sharp against the surf.

“Authorities have not yet confirmed whether the cases are connected, but families and friends of those missing say the pattern is difficult to ignore. Several victims were last seen alone at night, and in multiple cases, their phones appear to have gone offline at roughly the same time.”

His heart started to pound so hard it made the bathroom feel too small.

The report kept going, but Kyle barely heard it past the first few words. Twenty to thirty-five.

Stan was twenty-one. Stan was exactly in that range.

He took the toothbrush out of his mouth and stared at the TV as though staring harder might force the words into something less terrible. The anchor’s voice had gone distant and hazy in his ears.

There were photos now. A woman from a coffee shop, a man from near the docks. Another student from Rockabay U, maybe, though the image was grainy and brief. Faces he had never seen before, and yet the word missing sank into his bones like a hook.

No. No, no, no.

Kyle turned off the water with a sharp jerk. His hands were trembling.

He remembered the call. Stan’s panicked voice and that abrupt cut-off.

The news story kept rolling on, but Kyle was already reaching for his phone. He had Stan’s number saved from the call, though the number itself had already been useless to the police. They had taken it down, copied it into some report, then told him not to get ahead of himself. As if a call from an unknown number and a best friend who vanished into thin air were somehow a misunderstanding.

He had not slept much after the night Stan called. By dawn he had reached the point where panic turned into purpose.

If the goddamn police would not help, then he would find someone who would. That was how he ended up in the science building an hour later, standing outside a lab door with a nervous, ever-so-slightly apologetic brunette in a scarf the color of old moss and a cardigan covered in tiny embroidered flowers.

Heidi had been in one of Kyle’s gen-ed classes last semester and was always hovering at the edges of conversation in a way that made it seem like she expected to be told to leave. She had big brown eyes, a stack of silver rings on her fingers, and the kind of soft voice that made people lean in without realizing they were doing it. She also had a painfully obvious crush on him that she did not try very hard to hide, which would have been flattering in any normal week.

Today he mostly felt guilty about it.

Heidi peered up at him through her curtain of brown hair. “So,” she said, trying for casual and landing somewhere on the edge of flustered, “this is either extremely cool or I am about to become an accessory to something illegal.”

“I’m hoping for the first one.”

“That's not helping.”

“I know.”

She opened the door and waved him inside anyway.

Her little workspace looked like the inside of a mind that had been left running on too many tabs. There were two monitors, a stack of books on networks and encryption, a mug with a chipped handle, an overflowing tote bag, and three plants on the sill that somehow looked both thriving and neglected at the same time. Fairy lights were strung around a shelf even though it was still morning, and a macramé wall hanging drooped beside a whiteboard full of scribbled code fragments.

Heidi motioned for him to sit in the chair opposite her desk. Kyle stayed standing for a second longer than necessary.

She looked him over, concern flickering beneath the usual shy brightness in her face. “You look awful.”

“Thanks.”

“I mean it kindly.”

“I know.”

That earned a small smile, but it faded quickly when she saw his expression. “Okay,” she said, more serious now. “What’s going on?”

He handed her his phone. “Can you trace a number?”

Her brows lifted. “That depends. Are we talking about some annoying ex, or should I be reading the room here and assuming murder?”

“Please don’t say murder.”

“That did not answer my question.”

Kyle rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “My friend disappeared.”

Heidi’s face changed at once. “Stan Marsh?”

“You know?”

“I know he’s your roommate, and I know you’ve been asking weirdly intense questions around campus for two days.” Her voice softened. “People talk.”

Kyle looked away, heat rising in his face. “Yeah. Okay. Him.”

Heidi glanced at the phone, then back at him. “And this is the number that called you?”

He nodded. “Last night. He said he needed help. Then he told me not to trust someone, and the line cut off.”

She was quiet for a moment, and when she spoke again. “You already went to the police, right?”

“Yes.”

“And they did the whole grown adult, probably left on his own, please leave our office shit?”

Kyle gave her a tired look. “You make it sound almost funny.”

“It is not funny.” She was already turning her monitor toward him. “It is, however, predictable.”

He sat down after all.

Heidi plugged his phone into a cable, typed something with quick, confident fingers, then squinted at the screen as lines of information began to bloom across the monitor. Kyle watched the reflection of the code in her glasses and tried very hard not to think about how absurd it was that his best lead on his missing best friend was a girl in a sunflower-print skirt and combat boots.

She worked in silence for a while, lips pressed together in concentration. Kyle could hear the soft tapping of the keys, the faint whir of the computer fan, and the blood roaring in his own ears.

Finally she leaned back a little and frowned at the screen.

“Welp,” she said.

Kyle sat forward immediately. “What?”

“There’s a trace route to a landline, but it’s obscured. Not impossible, just irritating.” Her fingers moved again. “The number itself is masked through a temporary relay, which already tells me somebody did not want to be found.”

“Can you still find it?”

“I’m trying.”

He watched her chew on the inside of her cheek, then mutter something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like a plea to the gods of data and/or revenge.

After another tense stretch of typing, a map began to form on the monitor.

Kyle leaned closer.

The marker landed well beyond the main part of town, out toward the stretch of coastal land where Rockabay thinned into scrub and wind-bent trees and the kind of buildings nobody talked about because nobody ever had a good reason to go there.

Heidi stared at it. “Huh.”

Kyle’s stomach dropped. “What is that?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“Tell me the bad version.”

She looked at him, then clicked again. More information opened. Building permits, utility data, restricted access notes, security routing. His pulse thudded harder as the shape of it became clear.

Heidi went still.

“That’s a private lab,” she said quietly. “Or a facility pretending to be a lab.”

Kyle frowned. “Pretending?”

“The access profile is wrong. There are layers on this thing. Too many. The kind of place where the outside image is boring on purpose.” She zoomed in. “High security with perimeter sensors, badge access, backup cameras, restricted utility lines. They’re so hiding something.”

Kyle stared at the screen until the map blurred at the edges. He could feel the same cold panic from the night before settling low in his chest, heavier now because it had something solid to wrap itself around.

Heidi watched his face carefully. “Kyle?”

He looked at her.

“You need to tell me you are not about to go there alone.”

He almost laughed, but there was no humor in him now. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“You could call the police again.”

He snorted. “And say what? Sorry, officer, remember my missing friend? I traced his phone call to a secret lab with enough security to guard a missile? Please let me know when you’re done laughing.”

Heidi flinched slightly, because she knew he was not really mad at her. Then she turned back to the screen and clicked through another set of windows.

“No,” she murmured. “That would be a waste of time.”

“You are very calm about this.”

“I am not calm.” She glanced at him, cheeks faintly pink. “I am extremely interested in helping you and also kind of terrified.”

That, for some reason, almost broke him. Not because it was funny, exactly, but because it was the first time in two days anybody had looked at him and not treated him like he was overreacting to something made up in his own head.

He swallowed hard. “I need to go there.”

“I figured.”

“You should not come with me.”

Heidi gave him a look that was half offense and half hurt. “That sounded very much like a suggestion and not a decision.”

“Kyle, this is not some haunted library you can sneak into for fun.” She straightened in her chair. “If this is what it looks like, you should not walk up to the front door at all.”

“I know.”

“Do you, though?”

He dragged a hand through his hair and let out a breath that shook. “Heidi.”

The way he said her name made her go quiet.He hated that, too. Hated that he was forcing her into this. Hated that she looked at him like she wanted to help and he had to keep thinking of Stan, Stan, Stan, because there was no room in him left for anyone else.

Heidi folded her hands together, then nodded once. “Okay,” she said, but he could tell by the set of her jaw that this was not the end of the conversation. “I am not going to follow you inside like some idiot sidekick. But I can help you not get caught.”

Kyle stared.

She opened a drawer, rummaged around, and pulled out a tiny device the size of a key fob. “Blind spots,” she said, placing it on the desk between them. “Well, not magical ones. Just enough interference to confuse some camera feeds for short bursts if you place them right. I’ve been working on the firmware for a security systems project.”

“You have got to be kidding me.”

“I am a comp-sci major, not a saint.” Her mouth twitched. “Also, those cameras are probably overpriced and lazy.”

Kyle looked at the device like it might bite him.

Heidi kept going, pulling up a map and marking sections with quick, precise clicks. “There’s a service entrance here, but it’ll be locked. Main gate is hopeless. This side has a maintenance corridor, but it’s covered by two cameras. If you get them to loop for thirty seconds, you could cross without being seen.”

Kyle leaned in despite himself.

She zoomed in farther. “This is the fence line. These are the dead zones between sensors. This path here is ugly, but it avoids the bright lights. And if they have internal card access, you are not getting through a locked door without a stolen badge or a miracle.”

“Great.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Keep talking.”

Her face softened. She seemed relieved by that, by being useful. “There’s another thing.” Her fingers hovered above the keyboard. “I found a utility ping near the building from late last night. Power surged in one of the lower floors, then dropped again. Something was active underground.”

Underground.

Kyle’s mouth went dry.

He remembered the dead stillness of Stan’s voice on the call, the way the line had sounded like it was moving through a small enclosed space. He thought of the call ending too suddenly.

A lab with underground activity. A place with high security. People between twenty and thirty-five that were disappearing. It did not take long for him to put two and two together. His thoughts began to arrange themselves into a shape he did not like at all.

Heidi watched him closely. “Kyle?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re thinking something bad.”

“That’s because everything here is bad.”

“That is true, but you got that look.” She stared at him. “Tell me.”

He stared at the screen. “I think he’s there.”

Her eyes widened a little. “Stan?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He looked at her, then at the map, and tried to force the words into a shape that did not sound insane. “Because he called from there, maybe. Because the number traced there. Because the news said people our age are going missing and nobody’s connecting it, and because Stan didn’t just vanish. He sounded so scared.”

Heidi was silent.

“And because,” he added, voice lower now, “he said not to trust someone.”

“Someone here?”

“I don’t know.”

She tapped one fingernail against the desk. “Then you need to be careful who you tell.”

“I wasn’t planning on broadcasting it.”

“No. I mean, not even Kenny. Or Butters.”

“You don’t know them.”

“I know enough to know Kenny’s charming and probably popular and a little too good at looking unconcerned. I know that Butters’ way to innocent to be involved in something like that.” She met his gaze. “And I know that if Stan called you scared, then whoever he meant by ‘do not trust’ matters.”

That made him go still.

Heidi must have seen the realization hit, because her voice gentled. “Kyle, listen to me. If you go there, you don't go in thinking this is a normal rescue.”

“That ship sailed about twenty-four hours ago,” he pointed out dryly.

Her gaze drifted to his mouth for half a second, then away, and he felt an instant of guilt so sharp it nearly made him flinch. She was trying. She always tried too hard, and he was sitting there with all his thoughts wrapped around Stan like a curse. He stood up before she could say anything else.

Heidi rose too. “You are seriously going now?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s barely midday.”

“I know. I’ll wait until after sunset.”

“And finals are in a week.”

He almost smiled at that. “I’m aware.”

She crossed her arms. “You really have no sense of self-preservation.”

“That’s rich coming from the girl handing me camera interference equipment.”

She looked down at the device, then back up, and her cheeks went pink all over again. “I did say I was helping, not that I approved.”

Kyle took the device carefully and tucked it into his pocket. Then he looked at the map one more time, memorizing the route, the blind spots, the dead zones. He traced the edge of the building with his eyes until it felt like he could see the shape of it in his mind.

Heidi stepped closer, lowering her voice. “Call me if you get stuck.”

He gave her a look. “Absolutely not.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know. And that is why absolutely not.”

She huffed out a laugh despite herself, then reached into her bag and pulled out a folded slip of paper. She pressed it into his hand. Her number, written in careful looping ink.

“In case you need help,” she said.

Kyle looked at the paper for a second too long. “Heidi…”

“You do not owe me anything.” Her voice went very quiet. “Just, please, do not go in blind.”

He swallowed, then nodded once.

When he turned to leave, she called his name softly. He looked back.

Her expression was shy again, but there was something steadier underneath it now. “For what it is worth,” she said, “I hope he is okay.”

Kyle’s throat tightened. “Me too,” he just said.

And then he was out the door, the cold paper of the map folded in his pocket, the camera jammer hidden against his leg, and the image of that facility burning in his mind like a warning light.

By the time he reached the edge of campus, the morning had turned bright and ordinary in the way that made everything feel wrong. Students crossed the quad with backpacks and iced coffees. Someone laughed near the fountain. A girl in sunglasses sat on a blanket with her laptop open, studying as if the world were still simple enough to be divided into semesters and deadlines. Kyle moved through all of it with the sick certainty that none of them knew what was happening. Or maybe they did. Maybe that was the worst part.

He looked down at the paper in his pocket once more, then straight ahead toward the road that led out of town. If Stan was in that building, Kyle was going to get him back. And if someone had lied to him, if someone had been hiding behind every dismissal and every shrug and every too-calm answer, then he was about to find out exactly how deep that lie went.

…

By the time darkness had fully settled over Rockabay, the town looked almost innocent. The roads along the coast were quiet, and porch lights glowed in neat little rows. The wind off the water came in cool and salt-heavy, carrying the distant hiss of waves against stone. Up on campus, the last of the student traffic had thinned into the usual late-night stragglers, the ones hunched over laptops in the library or wandering back from the dining hall with cups of coffee and notebooks under their arms.

Kyle was neither of those things. He was tucked low in the shadow of a stand of scrubby pines beyond the outer edge of town, dark hood up, backpack straps tight across his shoulders, every nerve in his body wound so taut it felt like he might snap apart if he moved too quickly.

The lab stood ahead of him like a thought someone had tried to bury.

It did not look like a place where terrible things happened. And that was kind of the worst part. From the road, it could have passed for a private research facility, maybe even a medical building if you did not look too hard. The windows were narrow and dark, the exterior lights were all too clean and too bright, mounted in precise intervals along the façade and the fences beyond it. Nothing was decorative, nothing was warm. The entire complex had the kind of blank, expensive sterility that made Kyle think of teeth and needles and sealed containers.

He had come out here in daylight already, just to look. Just to learn. That had been Heidi’s condition when she gave him the route and the blind spots: he had to check the perimeter first, see it with his own eyes, and not go in pretending he knew what he was doing.

So he had circled the facility that afternoon in Stan's hoodie and a baseball cap pulled low, studying the camera angles, the fence line, the access gates, the spots where the hedges and utility boxes created brief pockets of cover. He had memorized the places where the building’s geometry worked against its own surveillance.

Now, in the dark, all of that knowledge sat in his skull like a map drawn in blood.

He moved along the tree line, crouching when the path opened, then freezing when a patrol light swept across the fence ahead. The beam slid over the ground in a slow arc and kept going. No alarm or movement. No sound beyond the wind and the faint electric hum of the floodlights.

Kyle waited until the light passed, then crossed low and fast. The wire fence rose above him in two layers, the outer one topped with a rolled lip of barbed wire, the inner one set a few feet back like a second line of defense. He found the gap Heidi had told him about near the utility access, where a section of the lower mesh had been bent inward just enough to allow a body to wedge through if that body was willing to bruise itself for the sake of answers. Kyle sank to his knees in the dirt, shoulders tensing, and shoved his fingers into the opening.

The wire bit into his palms. “Goddammit,” he cursed under his breath and kept going anyway.

His jacket snagged once, then tore free with a soft rasp that sounded far too loud in the night. He held his breath, flattened himself, and pulled. The gap widened by inches. He wriggled through on one shoulder, then the other, jacket scraping against metal, knees dragging over wet earth. On the other side he lay very still for a moment, face turned toward the shadow under the fence line, waiting for the world to punish him.

Nothing happened.

He exhaled slowly, then rose into a crouch and moved along the wall.

The service entrance sat exactly where Heidi had said it would, tucked in an alcove half hidden by the building’s shape. The door was steel, plain except for a keypad and a narrow card reader beside it. A pale strip of light spilled from the frame every time it opened. Kyle hugged the wall and watched for nearly a minute before anything happened.

Then a man in a white coat emerged, distracted, one hand on the door handle and the other already reaching for the badge clipped to his chest. He stepped out, glanced down the corridor, and let the door swing shut behind him. But not all the way.

Kyle’s breath caught.

The man turned left, vanished around the corner, and the door began its slow, automatic close. It clicked almost shut, then hesitated because the latch had not fully caught. Kyle did not think. Thinking would have killed him. He crossed the open space in two silent strides, slipped through the narrowing gap, and caught the edge with his fingers just before it sealed.

The motion made the softest metallic sigh. He froze, body pressed flat against the doorframe.

A moment passed, then another. No one came running. Kyle eased the door open by an inch and slipped inside.

The smell hit him first. It smelled like bleach and disinfectant. Cold air pushed through vents hidden in the ceiling. There was another odor underneath it, like water held too long in sealed pipes. His skin prickled. The hallway beyond the entrance was blindingly white. The floor shone beneath recessed lights. The walls were smooth and spotless, every corner sharp and clean as if the building had been scrubbed into submission.

It did not look like a lab. It looked like a hospital stripped of all mercy.

The farther Kyle moved in, the more details he noticed. Labels on doors and warning placards and color-coded strips taped beside equipment cabinets. A wall chart with schedules printed in precise block letters. Everything bore the same name: Carlisle Foundation.

It was on the binder by the desk near the reception nook, on the labels affixed to storage trays. On the sign-in sheet clipped to a board by the wall, on a polished brass plaque bolted beside a doorway.

Kyle stopped in front of that plaque and stared at it for a second too long.

Carlisle Foundation.

He had never heard of it. Yet it was everywhere. Something cold and ugly settled in his stomach. Usually, a foundation sounded charitable and helpful and safe. This place was none of those things. He moved on, deeper into the building, keeping to the edges of the hallways and listening for footsteps. The silence here was not empty. It was managed and engineered. He could hear the faint breathing of the air system and, underneath that, a low mechanical thrum that seemed to come from somewhere below.

He checked every door he passed. Most were locked.

Some had tiny windows set at eye level, but the glass was frosted or dimly lit from the inside, revealing only blurred shapes of counters, metal trays, and machines he did not have the time or the courage to identify. One corridor led to what looked like a break room, with a vending machine standing lonely in the corner and a row of chairs bolted to the wall. Another opened onto a pair of empty consultation rooms with exam tables and cabinets full of sealed packets. The whole level had the strange, unbearable feel of a clinic after hours, except no clinic needed the level of security that ringed this one.

Kyle crouched beside a supply cart and listened. Somewhere distant, water rushed. He straightened at once. The sound came again. A steady, rhythmic wash beneath the floor like liquid being pumped through a system too large to ignore. He followed it.

The corridor narrowed as he descended a stairwell that smelled even more strongly of antiseptic and damp stone. The further down he went, the more the white walls gave way to gray concrete. The air changed here, becoming colder, wetter. The sound of water grew louder and gained a hollow resonance, as though he were approaching an underground chamber.

His heartbeat had turned hard and fast. He reached a metal door at the bottom of the stairs. There was no window. No label he could see from the angle. Just a handle and a keypad panel beside it. The door stood slightly ajar, and through the crack came a faint blue-white glow.

Kyle paused with one hand on the frame. Then he heard something else.

Breathing.

A low, layered hush of it, nearly impossible to separate from the mechanical hum around it. But there it was, impossible to mistake once he noticed it.

His skin went cold. He pushed the door open.

The room beyond was so large he could not take it in at once.

It stretched wide and cavernous beneath the building, a hidden hall built like a secret vault. The ceiling disappeared high above into shadow. Along the floor, rows of enormous cylindrical tanks stood in neat, horrifying ranks, each one taller than Kyle was by almost a foot, each one lit from within by a dim aquatic glow. Tubes fed into their tops and sides. Hoses snaked across the floor. Monitors blinked in silent, patient rhythms beside them.

And inside the tanks…

Kyle stopped breathing.

Inside the tanks were people.

Young people. Men and women alike. Some looked barely younger than him, some exactly his age, some older by a decade. They floated suspended in thick purple liquid that clung to the glass like smoke trapped in water. They wore only shorts and tank tops, the clothes pressed flat against their bodies by the fluid. Their eyes were closed. Their limbs drifted slightly, weightless, as if they were asleep in some obscene artificial womb. Clear oxygen masks were strapped over their mouths and noses, tubing feeding into the glass walls. Their skin looked too pale under the tank lights, their hair drifted around them in soft, terrible halos.

Kyle’s mouth went dry all at once.

For one awful second his mind refused to accept what it was seeing. It kept trying to turn it into something else. Anything but what it was. Then his gaze swept across the room and he understood, in one sickening rush, that the tanks were not the strange part.

The actual people were the strange part. There were at least a dozen of them, maybe more. His chest tightened until it hurt.

He took one step forward and then another, each sound of his boots on the floor impossibly loud. The room hummed around him. Water moved through hidden channels, monitors blinked. Somewhere a machine exhaled a sterile metallic sigh. The purple liquid inside the tanks did not ripple, except in faint slow currents caused by the suspended bodies themselves.

Kyle raised his phone with shaking hands and began to take photos.

He moved mechanically, framing tank after tank, trying to capture the rows of unconscious faces, the oxygen masks, the labels printed on the glass, the Carlisle Foundation logo embossed on the control panels. He snapped one of the room wide enough to show the scale of it, then one of a control station with a handful of folders stacked on the desk.

His hands shook so badly he had to stop and clench them before continuing. He had just lowered the phone to look at the next tank when his feet stopped working.

Because there, in the third row, halfway down the hall, was Stan.

Kyle’s entire body went rigid. The world contracted to that one tank.

Stan floated inside it with his head tilted slightly to one side, black hair lifted and drifting in the purple liquid, his face unnaturally still. His eyes were closed, his skin pale under the tank light. He wore a gray tank top and shorts, the fabric clinging to him as if it had been soaked through before he was placed inside. An oxygen mask covered his mouth and nose. Tubing ran over the side of the tank and disappeared into the machinery beneath it.

For one suspended second Kyle simply stared.

No. No, no, no. No, that was not possible.

That was Stan, but it was not Stan, because Stan was supposed to be at home with his shoes kicked under the bed and his football gear slung over a chair, maybe angry, maybe exhausted, maybe asleep with his arm thrown over his face. Stan was supposed to be loud and alive and annoying and stubborn.

Not this. Not trapped behind thick curved glass in a vat of purple liquid like some kind of lab rat. Kyle stumbled forward so fast his shoulder nearly clipped the corner of the tank beside him.

“Stan,” he breathed. His voice sounded too small in the vast room.

He reached the tank and pressed both hands against the glass.

“Stan,” he said again, louder this time, and fear sharpened into something raw and animal inside him. “Stan, wake up. WAKE UP.”

Nothing.

Stan did not stir. He did not open his eyes. He did not flinch. His body just floated on, weightless and silent, the oxygen mask rising and falling with the slow regulated rhythm of the machine. Kyle’s throat closed.

He rapped his knuckles hard against the glass, once, then again. The sound was dull and desperate and so wrong.

“STAN!”

Still nothing.

The tank did not answer and neither did the room. Even the machines seemed to keep their secrets with disciplined indifference. Kyle backed up half a step, heart slamming so hard it hurt, and looked at Stan again as if maybe staring would force him to wake. Force the whole impossible sight to reveal itself as some cruel hallucination.

But Stan was still there. Alive, probably, because he was breathing through the mask. Alive, but not awake. Kyle’s eyes burned suddenly, too sharply, from the force of not blinking. Tears were prickling in his eyes.

“What the fuck is this?” he whispered, and it came out broken. “This is some sick shit.”

He turned slowly, horrified now not just by Stan but by the scale of everything around him. The other tanks, the other bodies, the purple fluid. The anonymous labels. This was not a lab. It was a holding chamber and a hidden prison.

And whatever Carlisle Foundation was, it had built it for people like Stan.

Kyle pulled his phone up again, hands shaking so badly he almost dropped it. He took another photo of Stan, then another, then one of the nearest control panel where a neat row of keys sat under a screen full of unreadable data. His breath came fast and shallow now. He was standing in a nightmare and the nightmare had a name and a logo and a whole building full of sealed doors.

He swallowed hard and looked back at Stan, his best friend and roommate. The guy who had once claimed he could eat three burritos in under five minutes and then nearly choked on the second one because Kyle had laughed at him. The guy who got benched and pretended not to care and absolutely cared. The guy who had vanished two days ago and called in the middle of the night sounding terrified. Now, Kyle knew why. He pressed one hand flat to the tank again.

“Stan,” he said, quieter now, as if softness might reach him where shouting could not. “I’m here.” His own voice cracked on the last word.

For a moment all he could hear was the pulse of the machines and the rush of water moving somewhere beneath the floor.

Then, from the far end of the hall, clapping came from behind him. Kyle whirled so fast his shoulder hit the side of the tank with a dull thud, pain jolting up his arm. The sound echoed through the chamber, entirely too loud in the vast, humming room.

A woman stood in the doorway of the corridor he had just come from.

She was small, almost delicate-looking, with silver-blond hair pinned back neatly at the nape of her neck and a pale lab coat hanging from her narrow frame like it belonged to someone else. She looked annoyingly calm for someone who had just walked into a scene that should have been a catastrophe. Her hands were folded loosely in front of her, and she was smiling in the way people smile when they have already decided they are in control.

Kyle stared at her, chest heaving.

She applauded once more, softly, like he had done something amusing.

“Well,” she said, her voice light and polished, “that was impressive, in a way. Most intruders do not make it this far.”

Kyle’s hands curled into fists.

“Who the hell are you?”

The woman’s smile deepened just enough to make her look even more infuriating. “Dr. Fairway. One of the founders of the Carlisle Foundation.”

The words hit him with a hard, sickening weight.

Founder.

Not employee, not security, not some technician who could plead ignorance. Freaking founder.

Kyle took one furious step toward her before he could stop himself. “Why are you doing this?”

Dr. Fairway tilted her head a fraction, studying him as if he were a mildly interesting specimen under glass. “That depends on which part you mean.”

“Why are you holding people in tanks?” His voice shook, but not from fear. From rage. “Why is my best friend in there? What the hell is wrong with you?!”

Her gaze flicked past him to Stan’s tank, then back to Kyle’s face. “Ah,” she said calmly. “You’ve met our most recent batch.”

“Your batch?” Kyle looked like he might throw up.

The woman sighed, not with guilt, but with the faint impatience of someone being asked to explain a system that should already be obvious. She stepped farther into the hall, and gestured toward the rows of tanks as though giving a tour.

“The suspension fluid,” she said, “is designed to prevent muscular atrophy during extended sedation. Without it, the body deteriorates too quickly. The immersion medium keeps everything stable while the awakening process develops.”

Kyle blinked at her. Then, slowly, because his mind still refused to accept this, he looked down at Stan’s tank. A small digital display glowed beneath the glass, tucked into the base panel. He had not noticed it before. Or maybe his brain had refused to register it.

He leaned in as the room suddenly spun too hard around the edges.

A countdown timer blinked steadily in red numbers.

5 months, 29 days, 14 hours, 03 minutes.

His stomach dropped through the floor.

“No,” he breathed. “No. What the hell is that?”

Dr. Fairway watched him with mild interest. “Your friend still has five months and twenty-nine days remaining in suspension.”

Kyle snapped his head up so fast it hurt. “Suspension? You mean you did this to him?”

“We did what was necessary.”

“You kidnapped him!”

Her expression barely changed. “That is a rather dramatic way to phrase it.”

He let out a disbelieving laugh, broken and furious all at once. “Dramatic? You have people floating unconscious in purple juice like lab rats. You call that dramatic?”

Dr. Fairway’s mouth thinned, the first real sign that she did not like being spoken to that way. “You are emotional, which is understandable. But emotional language tends to obscure the facts.”

“What facts?”

She folded her hands again. “Rockabay has always been a locus for unusual human development.”

Kyle stared at her like she had started speaking in another language.

“What?”

“Not mutant,” she continued, almost as if correcting a lecture slide. “That would be an inaccurate term. There is no such thing as a simple mutant X gene. The process is far more complex than that. It involves neural architecture, synaptic responsiveness, hormonal triggers, and an unusual interaction between the brain and the nervous system under specific environmental conditions.”

Kyle’s face twisted even though he’d only understood half of what she’d said. “You’re nuts.”

“I am precise,” she said coolly. “There is a difference.”

He made a strangled sound of disbelief. His eyes flicked over the tanks again, over the silent bodies and drifting limbs and oxygen masks. “You’re telling me people from Rockabay just… develop powers?”

“Not just people from Rockabay,” she said. “But Rockabay has always attracted them. The town functions as a kind of convergence point. A place where dormant markers are more likely to activate. Most residents carry them already, though in a suppressed state. Some never awaken. Some do.”

Kyle’s mouth went dry. “Markers.”

“Yes.”

“Like you’re talking about a disease.”

Dr. Fairway’s expression sharpened with something close to condescension. “No, Mr. Broflovski. We are talking about evolution.”

The room seemed to tilt around him before he could even wonder why she knew his name.

Kyle’s eyes went back to Stan. To his still face, his closed eyes, the way the tank light made the purple fluid shimmer against his olive skin.

“No,” he said again, but now it sounded less like protest and more like refusal. “No, Stan is not some experiment because he happened to come to your stupid town. We’re from South Park. We’re not even from Maine!”

Dr. Fairway looked at him for a long moment.

Then she gave a tiny shrug. “And yet you came.”

Kyle went cold.

She lifted one slim hand, palm upward, as though presenting the answer was self-evident. “That alone tells us enough. People do not remain in Rockabay by accident. They are drawn. They settle. They orbit. Whether they were born here or arrived later is secondary. The city calls to them in one way or another.”

“That's bullshit!”

“Is it?” Her tone stayed mild, but something harder had begun to show beneath it. “You chose Rockabay for university. Your friend chose it for football. Others choose it for work, for love, for curiosity, for escape. The reasons vary. The result does not.”

Kyle’s pulse hammered in his ears.

He looked around the chamber again, properly this time, really seeing the scale of it. This was not improvised. This was a system. A machine built to capture human beings and keep them here until something happened to them that these people considered useful.

His voice came out rough. “None of these people are here because they wanted to be.”

Dr. Fairway did not answer immediately. 

Kyle’s stomach turned with fury. “They’re not here voluntarily.”

“No,” she said at last, and her voice was suddenly flatter. “Most are not.”

A terrible, hot anger flooded through him, so fast and overwhelming it almost made him dizzy.

“You sick bitch—” He broke off, not because he wanted to, but because even that word seemed too small for what he felt. “You can’t do this. You can’t just keep people here and do this to them.”

“The subject must remain in the tank during the activation window,” Dr. Fairway said, as though he had not spoken. “Otherwise the neurological transition becomes unstable and painful. Potentially fatal.”

Kyle stared at her.

“The transition?”

“Yes.”

He laughed once, violently. “You are describing a nightmare like it’s a lab protocol.”

“It is a lab protocol.”

His whole body was shaking now, but not with fear. With the effort of not crossing the room and putting his hands around her throat. “Take him out.”

Dr. Fairway’s eyes flicked toward Stan’s tank again, then returned to his face. “That would be a poor idea.”

“Take. Him. Out.”

“No.”

Kyle surged forward a half-step before one of the side doors hissed open. He snapped his head around.

Two security personnel came in first, both broad-shouldered, both dressed in dark uniforms that looked absurd against the sterile white of the chamber. A third followed behind them with a tablet in hand. Kyle saw their faces and immediately understood with a rush of cold certainty that this was not a place where people were hired to ask questions.

Dr. Fairway did not even turn.

“Please escort him out,” she said.

“No!”

Kyle backed away instinctively, heart slamming harder. “You are not doing this. I’m calling the cops, I’m calling the press, I’m—”

She actually smiled at that. It was a small, pitying thing.

“Oh, Mr. Broflovski,” she said softly, “the police in Rockabay do not answer to the public in the way you seem to believe they do.”

Kyle’s blood ran cold. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” she said, “that when people are properly funded, properly guided, and properly rewarded, they become remarkably cooperative.”

He looked from her to the security guards, and something in his chest twisted with horrified understanding.

“The cops know.”

Dr. Fairway gave him nothing but a faint, almost courteous shrug.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he spat.

“You came to the wrong town if you believe bribery is unusual here.”

He shook his head, backing up another step. “No. No, that’s impossible. They can’t be corrupt.”

But even as he said it, the pieces were fitting too neatly together. The dismissive officers, the brushed-off report. The missing adults. The way nobody wanted to look too closely and the way no one had taken him seriously. Because they never intended to. Because someone had already decided the disappearance would be convenient.

His throat tightened. “You won’t get away with this!”

That made Dr. Fairway laugh. “You are very young if you still believe that matters.”

Kyle’s head whipped toward Stan again. “He’s not staying in there.”

“He already is.”

“You’re lying.”

“I am not.” Her voice sharpened, just slightly. “Your friend’s body is already beginning to change. If we removed him now, the process would become chaotic. He would not survive the destabilization.”

Kyle went still. The words sank in slowly, each one worse than the last.

Stan was already in the middle of this, whether he liked it or not.

A sick, helpless sound escaped Kyle before he could stop it.

Dr. Fairway’s tone turned almost clinical again. “We intended to approach you later, by the way.”

Kyle looked at her blankly. “What?”

“The plan was to allow a little more time before collecting you. Two from the same social circle at once would have been too conspicuous. We prefer to avoid unnecessary attention.”

The room seemed to narrow around him.

“You were going to take me too?”

“Yes.”

The answer was delivered so calmly that for a second Kyle could not even process it.

Then the meaning hit him.

Him too. They had been planning to take him too. The thought made his stomach lurch.

His voice cracked. “No.”

Dr. Fairway’s expression remained composed. “It is regrettable that you came early. But don’t worry, you’ll be keeping your friend company.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you!”

“I’m afraid you no longer have that option.”

The security guards started forward.

Kyle’s body reacted before his mind did. He spun and shoved himself sideways, trying to dodge past the nearest guard, but a strong hand clamped hard around his upper arm and dragged him back with brutal efficiency. He kicked out, twisted, fought hard enough to make his own shoulder scream.

“Get the hell off me!”

One of them seized his other wrist. Another hooked an arm around his torso and hauled him backward as he thrashed.

Kyle yelled Stan’s name, then yelled again when he saw Dr. Fairway turn away without flinching.

“People will look for me!” he shouted, voice cracking with panic and rage. “They will notice I’m gone!”

Dr. Fairway paused and glanced back over one shoulder.

“Will they?” she asked, almost curiously.

Kyle strained against the grip pinning him, fury exploding through him in a wild, useless surge. “My friends will search for me!”

That only made her smile.

“Remember, your police are corrupt, Mr. Broflovski,” she said, and there was a nasty edge beneath her elegance now. “They dance to our piping. When you vanish, there will be questions. And then there will be answers. Just not the ones you want.”

“No!” Kyle jerked again, nearly wrenching his arm free before a hard blow to his ribs stole the breath from his lungs. “You can’t—”

“Bring him,” Dr. Fairway said.

He fought harder, but the security detail was too strong and too practiced. One of them shoved him toward the corridor while another forced his wrist behind his back with a pressure that shot pain through his shoulder. Kyle stumbled, then staggered, feet scraping uselessly against the polished floor.

He twisted enough to catch one last glimpse of Stan.

His best friend floated there in the purple tank, unconscious and still and trapped in a way that made Kyle want to tear the entire building down around them. Something in his chest broke then, not all at once but enough to let the terror in. Kyle’s breath came in ragged, panicked pulls as he was hauled toward the corridor. He understood now. No one here had been asking to become extraordinary.