Three hundred feet beneath the Nevada desert, in a facility that officially didn't exist, Dr. Victoria Kane stared at screens that showed impossible things.
The underground laboratory hummed with the kind of quiet efficiency that came from military-grade funding and zero oversight. Banks of servers lined the walls, their cooling systems creating a constant white noise that had become the soundtrack to her obsession. Fluorescent lights cast everything in clinical white, making the space feel like a tomb for scientific ambition.
Victoria adjusted her wire-rimmed glasses and replayed the footage for the seventh time. A five-year-old girl in a purple dress, blowing out birthday candles. Then silver light, and two hundred supernatural beings suddenly, impossibly human.
"Fascinating," she murmured to the empty lab, her voice carrying the faint accent of someone who'd spent her formative years switching between boarding schools in three countries. "Absolutely fascinating."
