Alice became more and more curious as they dropped, floor by floor, to B12. What kind of secrets might this place be hiding? What would need to be buried thirteen floors under a government building? A metahuman, perhaps?

  When the doors finally opened, Levi led them down a bright corridor to a set of double doors. Inside was a sort of conference room, she supposed. It was a sort of place to have meetings, apparently, with a round, dark table and chairs dominating the space. Dim lights overhead kept the room semi-dark with deep shadows. As Alice approached the table, she could see an engraving inlaid with gold. It was almost black in the low light, but it caught the light from the doors and burned like a sunrise. It was nearly a complete circle, perhaps a crown of sorts, with seven rays of gold spiking out from the ring. She thought she might have seen it somewhere before, though she couldn't remember where.

  Clawson stood at the far end of the room, staring at something on the wall, which seemed to be painted a dark gray. He looked at Alice, smiled, and beckoned her forward with his hand.

  "It was nice meeting you, Alice, and you as well, Mrs. Fillmore," said Levi as he stepped out of the room. He paused a moment and nodded to Clawson. "Director."

  "Levi," Clawson replied politely with a curt nod. "Thank you." Then he turned to the women. "I'm glad you're here," he said. "I've been looking forward to talking to you in person ever since we saw you. I've been searching for people like you for many years."

  "People like me?" she repeated. "Why did you want us here so badly?"

  "Your abilities make you extremely unique. I'm sure you already know that you're special, that you're completely unlike almost everyone else in the world. But you are more valuable than you realize, more influential. You represent a great opportunity for this agency, Alice," he said.

  "For the Department of Emergency Resource Management?" asked Maryanne ironically.

  He laughed, amused. "We'll get to that," he said. "I just want you to know that we went through a lot of effort to get you down here. The moment we found out who you were, Alice, we did a background check on you. We found out who your parents are, your friends, and your grades. We looked up your financial history. Your job history. Your medical history. We bypassed six months of security protocol in a week so we could get you in here as quickly as possible. That's why we delivered that device to your apartment. We had to know who you were, and we had to know for sure if you were what we thought you were."

  "Why?" Alice asked, her head spinning. She imagined just how much these people now knew about her. It was wrong, somehow. She felt like someone had peeked inside her bedroom when she thought she was alone inside.

  Actually, that's exactly what they did.

  Clawson was silent for a moment. Then he touched a sort of lighted panel on the wall. Some sort of touch screen control. Then the entire wall disappeared. What she had thought to be a dark gray paint on the wall beaded up like rainwater on an oiled surface and faded into transparency. The room they stood flooded with the bright light of noon. It was midday in that conference room, despite the fact that they were twelve stories underground and that the sky outside should have been an overcast slate. The light caught the crown shape on the dark table and set it on fire, blazing as though it shone with a light all its own.

  Alice had to shield her eyes until they adjusted. When they did, she looked out the newly appeared window that had once been a wall. The room she was in seemed more like a nest, sitting several stories above the floor of a vast, open underground room.

  The room was like an enormous gymnasium. She could see markings on the floor below, like lanes on a track. There was equipment, some clearly for exercise, and some she couldn't imagine the purpose for. There were people, too. Maybe a couple dozen of them. Almost all of them seemed to be running around the track, all dressed in identical gray tee shirts and black shorts.

  One person, however, was not running. He was against a wall to the side of the huge room. He was standing at some kind of machine dressed in nothing but black shorts. Even from high above, she could still see his muscles trembling with effort as he pushed at a huge metal cylinder protruding down from the wall down at an angle. He looked as though he was being crushed by an enormous pile driver. But as she watched, he pushed against that piston-like machine with a single hand, slowly forcing it inch by inch back into the wall.

  The moment she saw him, she felt the tugging inside her, not unlike the tiny filaments of gravity she felt when she flew, but unlike them, this connection seemed much, much more difficult to sever. She'd felt this feeling only one other time she could remember, and it was only days ago. It was him, the same man she had seen in the hurricane.

  "We brought you here because until a few days ago, we thought he was unique," said Clawson. "The only one of his kind in the entirety of the world. A metahuman. Then, while he was on a mission in South Carolina, we saw a live video feed of a young woman who could fly and who possessed superhuman strength and speed."

  Alice said nothing. She was spellbound. The young man pushing at the machine had apparently reached the end of his set. He quickly stepped out of the way of the machine's piston, which fell and slammed into a dense, metal plate at its base. The resulting clang shook the room in which Alice stood, and her hands reflexively flew to her ears for the noise. Maryanne had to grabbed the wall to keep her balance. Clawson and the other running people below seemed to have the same reaction to the titanic weight hitting the floor.

  For a moment she thought her ears were ringing, but then she realized an alarm of some kind was going off. She heard Clawson growl something under his breath and start punching commands into the touch screen panel on the transparent wall. Immediately the siren died.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Clawson pressed something else and spoke into the panel. His voice boomed over the gymnasium like the voice of God.

  "Athena," he growled. Somewhere below, a short, dark woman stood at attention and looked up at them. "He just dropped the equivalent of a freight train on the floor. I'd like it not to happen again."

  The woman nodded sharply, like a soldier taking orders, and ran to the shirtless, smirking metahuman. Alice couldn't hear what the two of them were saying from up in the glass-walled conference room, but she knew a harsh reprimand when she saw one. The metahuman, who she'd seen punch a Ferris wheel into the ocean, was visibly trying not to wither under the tongue lashing he was getting from a woman seemingly half his height. She was like a military drill instructor.

  "How about going down there and saying hi?" Clawson suggested.

  If the large, arena-sized gymnasium looked big from high above in the conference room, it looked absolutely colossal from the floor. Alice emerged from the elevator into the brightly lit space, feeling genuinely overwhelmed by the size of this place. The only buildings she'd ever been in that could compare in size might be shopping malls, though she'd never been in one with such high ceilings.

  In fact, she felt as soon as she stepped in that she'd walked outside into the sunshine. The lighting in the room was as bright and refreshing as daylight and left a gentle heat on her hair and skin the way sunlight would.

  "Welcome to the Ready Room," said Clawson, walking beside her. "It's our all-purpose training area. It covers many acres of ground floor. As you can see, the whole place is lit by a single solar generator in the ceiling, effectively a tiny sun. Our operators can drill down here for weeks without feeling the depression and sickness people get from spending that much time under florescent lighting. It also allows us to imitate adverse weather conditions."

  In the distance, Alice saw a collection of machinery that she couldn't quite recognize from above. Once on the ground, she saw they were heavy construction equipment: bulldozers, rollers, and dump trucks, all parked so close together they were nearly touching. She asked Clawson about them.

  "We sometimes construct life-sized building models or terrain simulations for training purposes. It helps our operators be ready for the real thing. That's why we call it the Ready Room."

  They walked until they'd reached the area marked with running lanes. The woman she saw earlier, the one that reminded her of a drill sergeant, was busy verbally motivating a group of men on their way around the track. To Alice, her build made her look like a professional boxer, but the lines on her face suggested that despite her apparent athleticism, she was older than her mother, or even nearly as old as Clawson. She was mature, striking, and fierce. Alice also found her slightly terrifying.

  "Pick up the pace!" she cried. "Especially you, Gutierrez. That's right, I'm picking on you! You know why? Because you're in the back! I will not see a mission fail just because you cannot be bothered to run faster!"

  Clawson called her over.

  "Alice, Mrs. Fillmore, this is Athena," he said as the woman offered her hand to Alice. Her handshake was so firm she wondered if she might be metahuman as well. "Athena is the deputy director here, as well as the chief training officer. The Ready Room is her domain. She oversees the training of over two hundred personnel for missions and emergency response. She's the field commander of the Rescue and Tactics Specialists, who we call the RaTS."

  Clawson pointed to the group running on the track. Alice realized these men were had been running at a near sprint ever since she'd arrived on the floor. They were all athletes, in peak physical condition. Clawson also pointed to another group. A dozen or so equally impressive specimens worked at fitness equipment, everything from weights to climbing ropes to tires to aerobics equipment. Alice immediately noticed a lone woman among the group. Her flaming red hair was plastered to her forehead as she squatted with a weightlifting bar across her shoulders. Alice couldn't count the plates from where she stood, but she could see the weight must have been impressive. The woman finished her set and placed the bar back on the rack. As she began to towel off, she seemed to notice Alice for the first time. The two of them met each other's gaze.

  I've seen that hair before, Alice thought to herself.

  Clawson's voice snapped her back to her conversation with Athena.

  "Athena has personally led these teams in over one hundred successful missions. Some you may have seen in the news. Most you haven't. She's also our reigning Scrabble champion."

  Athena smiled broadly. Alice had the impression this was a woman who liked to win.

  "Welcome to the Ready Room, Miss Alice," she said. "I've been very interested in meeting you."

  "How's our boy?" asked Clawson, nodding in the direction of the metahuman, who at the moment was again at the enormous piston machine.

  "He's learning," reported Athena. "He'll take equipment safety more seriously from now on, I'll guarantee you that."

  Alice could see that the young man was certainly learning something. His face contorted in concentration and strain, he was now supporting the huge cylinder with his shoulders, his legs shaking and bent at ninety degrees. He wasn't lifting the weight, only sustaining it with all the endurance he could muster. The mother of all wall-sits.

  "Good," said Clawson, "but for now I want him to meet our guest. I'm sure she has some things she'd like to talk to him about. After that, you may continue his education."

  "I see you take discipline very seriously around here," Maryanne commented in a flat voice.

  Athena nodded proudly, but Alice was fairly certain her mother wasn't paying them a complement.

  Athena turned to the young man at the machine. "Ethan," she barked, "Get over here!"

  The young man, Ethan, lowered the huge piston to the floor, but this time he did it with care. Alice felt in her feet only the slightest tremble as the machine came to a rest.

  As he approached, Alice was struck by how handsome he was. He was tall, taller than her by several inches. Broad, too. His skin was unblemished and a shade darker than hers, and his hair was dark, curly, and cut short and neat, though at the moment it was limp against his forehead with sweat. His body was cut and lean, like a professional athlete, and there was a certain grace to his movement. Fluidity. Ease. He seemed to have the waist of a professional dancer, but the shoulders and musculature of a professional football player. His smile was a dominant feature of his face, and it was big and wonderful and bright. In fact, all of him was bright. Alice immediately remembered when she saw him in the hurricane. Then, even with the dark clouds above and the obscuring rain, she'd thought he had a shine to him. He did again, as though he had a glow that was just beyond her ability to see.

  She was suddenly self-conscious he might notice her eyes on him. Alice lifted her chin and raised her eyes to meet his.

  Brown, she realized, but not only brown. Green and gold and red all washed with earth tones, like brown fire opals.

  Suddenly, Clawson and Athena weren't the only ones that made her feel ill at ease.

  "Clean yourself up and meet us in the galley. I've arranged for the two of you to have brunch and a little privacy together," explained Clawson.

  Alice turned and followed Clawson back to the elevator without saying a word to Ethan. She preferred he not notice the heat in her cheeks.

  "You'd think they would have made him put on a shirt," grumbled Maryanne. Alice realized her mother was blushing nearly as badly as she was.