The Quiet Harbor Sanatorium was a place of unnerving tranquility, its gardens perfectly manicured and its halls antiseptically silent. To avoid attracting attention, only Liam and Ronan went to visit Tomas Reik. They found him sitting on a stone bench, watching water trickle from a small fountain. He was a man of sixty, but his eyes were haunted, carrying the weight of a century of fear.
When Liam mentioned the name 'Vance', Tomas flinched as if struck. He glanced nervously over his shoulder at the sanatorium's tall, barred windows. "They told me not to talk about him," he whispered, his voice like dry leaves skittering across pavement. "They said I was confused. Said he was a bad man who made a terrible mistake."
"We know that's a lie, Tomas," Liam said gently, sitting beside him.
The old man seemed to deflate, years of tension leaving him in a shuddering sigh. "A good man," he murmured. "Elias Vance was a good man. He knew something was wrong with the machinery for weeks. Said it felt like it was being… sabotaged by shadows. He was down in the underworks the night of the blast. Said he was going to fix it."
Ronan leaned in, his voice low and reassuring. "Tomas, what do you remember from that night? Before the explosion."
"The pressure readings… they went insane," Tomas said, his gaze fixed on the distant past. "Then… nothing. A moment of complete silence. A cold feeling. When I woke up, the world was fire and steam." He began to tremble violently. "Then she came. To the infirmary, while I was recovering. A woman with no face. She said she was there to help me… to fix my memory. Make the bad parts go away."
Liam and Ronan exchanged a dark look. The Redactor.
"Tomas, did Vance say where he was going?" Liam pressed, his voice urgent. "What part of the underworks?"
The old man looked at him, his eyes suddenly sharp with a terrifying, buried clarity. "He was worried about a secondary control station. Hidden deep down. He said the main controls were a decoy, that the real sabotage was happening somewhere else." He leaned closer, his whisper barely audible. "He called it Sub-station 7."