Consciousness returned in fragments.
First came the ache behind the eyes. Then the cold.
Emily would find seated in a metal chair bolted directly into a stained concrete floor. Industrial fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, their pale glow flickering every few seconds as though struggling to stay alive. The room smelled faintly of dust, rust, and old paper.
Rows upon rows of filing cabinets stretched through the darkness beyond the reach of the lights. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. Most vanished into shadow long before the far wall could be seen.
Yet only twenty stood illuminated.
Twenty grey cabinets arranged in a rough semicircle around the chair. Each bore a yellowing paper label. A person's name. Nothing more.
At the opposite end of the room stood a furnace.
Not a household furnace. An industrial incinerator large enough to consume entire boxes of records. Its steel door stood slightly ajar. Deep within, orange firelight pulsed and breathed like the heart of some enormous animal.
A digital timer mounted above it displayed:
The numbers immediately began counting down.
Somewhere nearby, a cassette player clicked.
Static crackled through an old speaker.
Then a familiar voice emerged from the distortion.
"If you're hearing my voice, then you are exactly where I expected you to be."
"Your entire life has been spent chasing answers. Digging through the wreckage left behind by other people. Exposing secrets. Revealing truths. You've convinced yourself that information is inherently valuable. That if people know enough, they will make the right choices."
"But tell me, Emily. How many lives have been saved by the stories you've written?"
"How many wars have ended because the truth was exposed?"
"How many monsters have simply adapted?"
A mechanical clank echoed somewhere in the darkness.
Emily would hear it then.
The filing cabinets locking themselves shut.
Twenty heavy metallic clicks.
"You stand in a room built around your greatest virtue."
"And your greatest flaw."
A spotlight snapped on above the cabinets.
"Before you are twenty lives."
"Inside each cabinet is the complete record of a human being. Their secrets. Their failures. Their regrets. Every truth they hoped would remain buried."
"One of these people is a murderer."
"The rest exist somewhere between."
The furnace door slowly groaned open.
Heat rolled across the room.
"In sixty minutes, every file in this room will be destroyed."
"The key to your freedom has been placed inside the cabinet belonging to the murderer."
"If you wish to leave, you must identify them and recover it."
"But understand this, Emily."
"The moment you remove that key, the remaining files will be fed automatically into the furnace."
"Nineteen lives reduced to ash."
"Nineteen stories erased forever."
The timer continued its relentless countdown.
"You have spent your life believing every story deserves to be told."
"Today, you must decide which truth matters most."
Long enough for the room's silence to settle around her.
"Will you sacrifice the truth for your own survival?"
"Or will you cling to your principles and die preserving stories no one will ever hear?"
The tape began to click and whirr as it reached its end.
Then, just before the recording stopped entirely, John spoke once more.
The cassette clicked off.
The room fell silent save for the hum of the fluorescent lights, the distant roar of the furnace, and the steady ticking of the clock counting down toward whatever waited at the end of the hour.
She has the brief, ridiculous notion as she rouses from a chemical-induced slumber that she really needs to deal with the lack of a deadbolt on her front door. Of course, if someone really wanted to get at her they could just go through a window, but the fact remains that-
Emily groans, hisses, and shakes her head, reflexively lifting her hand to brush hair out of her face and blearily inspect her surroundings. That bleariness abates quickly when she realizes that she's not in her bed, she's not in her house, and, in fact, might have gone straight from sleeping into Otherworld into waking. The thought startles her, and when the tape starts playing, she startles anew. "Auhhh... son of a bitch- HEY! Who the hell's-"
She's talked over, and quickly realizes that there's nobody here to reason with. But, that does create a moment of relief, however bizarre it is, as the agent pushes out of her chair and starts examining the filing cabinets. Whatever's worked its way through her system is still in the process of leaving, and it takes a few blinks for her to make out names.
Live or die. She has an hour. Find the killer. Thankfully, the task isn't related to the morality of someone who would kidnap a woman and put her in a... what is this, an industrial warehouse?
The first of the handles is reached for and she withdraws her hand reflexively when it makes contact, hissing in pain. Just got stuck with a needle. Her eyes go to the rest of the cabinets. A few seconds pass in silence but for the distance rumble of the industrial furnace.
"All right. Fucking... play ball."
She finishes opening the cabinets and promptly tears the sleeves off her shirt, wrapping her hands in makeshift bandages to keep any blood from smearing on the papers she's about to have to sift through.
The paper doesn't matter. She can already see the padlock on the door at the far side of the room, and it isn't a combination lock. Right now, Emily doesn't care about the records, just what's literally contained within them. No more than a few seconds is spent on each folder - flip flip flip, pass. Flip flip flip, pass. Flip flip flip, pass. She's reading as she moves, but she's not getting bogged down in the details.
Bingo. A tarnished, wrought iron key, in a cabinet about two thirds of the way along. This is the murderer. Everyone else - she'd seen driver's licenses, insurance documents, birth certificates. No death certificates, no coroners' reports, nothing like that. Which means that now, she has time to think.
Emily rubs her chin, looks back at the other folders, and idly shakes out a hand still throbbing from the ten punctures it suffered getting this whole thing started.
The files are destined for the furnace.
No- the cabinets are destined for the furnace, and the key (she has to imagine it's tied off to some sort of tripwire that will start the tracks below the cabinets moving) is the trigger. She can't avoid pulling the trigger...
But she can unload the gun. Still moving a bit unsteadily, Emily jogs over to the last cabinet and starts taking the folders out of the drawer.
