“My father smashed a Thanksgiving platter over my head, then screamed, ‘LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!’—but six hours later, a doctor discovered something inside my head that my father had spent nearly 30 years convincing me never existed.”

Vance lowered a high-intensity inspection light into the square hole in the floor.

The beam sliced through a column of rising heat, illuminating a vertical shaft six feet deep, lined with acoustic dampening foam that had turned yellow and crumbly with age. At the bottom of the shaft was a steel ladder welded to the foundation wall.

"I'm going down first," Vance said, his shotgun resting against his hip.

"No," I said, stepping between him and the hole. "You don't know the frequency. If there’s an acoustic interlock down there, your radio’s going to trip it."

"Art—" Marcus started.

"Look at my ear, Marcus," I said, pulling back my wool hat.

The surgical incision from the hospital had torn open completely. Blackish blood was trickling down my jawline, but there was no pain anymore. The entire right side of my face was numb, frozen by the steady, high-amperage vibration humming through my skull. My jaw was locked in an involuntary grimace; I could taste the iron filling my mouth.

I swung my legs into the shaft and found the first rung of the ladder.

The descent was six feet, eight feet, ten feet. The acoustic foam muffled every sound from the dining room above until Vance’s shouts sounded like they were coming from the bottom of a lake.

My boots touched a floor of linoleum tile.

The room was eight feet wide by twenty feet long, built directly into the bedrock beneath the kitchen hearth. Along the left wall stood a bank of nineteen-inch industrial equipment racks, their glowing vacuum tubes casting a dull, amber light over the room. On the face of the central console, three analog VU meters bounced in unison to the tempo of the music box.

And at the far end of the room was a hospital bed.

It was surrounded by a clear acrylic enclosure, like an infant incubator scaled up to fit a full-grown adult. Inside the enclosure, lying beneath a clean white sheet, was a young woman.

Her hair was copper, long and straight, spread out across the pillow like my mother's hair in the old photographs. Her chest rose and fell with the rhythmic, mechanical hiss of a positive-pressure ventilator built into the wall.

Wires—dozens of them, encased in braided silk shielding—ran from the top of the acrylic canopy directly into the right side of her head, disappearing beneath a heavy, chrome-plated fixture anchored to her skull with six surgical screws.

"Margaret," I choked out.

She didn't move. Her eyes were closed, her face completely smooth, unlined by thirty years of life, preserved in an artificial twilight like an insect in high-grade resin.

Beside the bed was a metal chart stand.

I walked toward it, my boots sticking slightly to the yellowed linoleum. On the clipboard was a single document, bearing the letterhead of the *St. Jude’s Pediatric Neurological Institute — Special Project Division*, dated yesterday morning:

> *Subject C: Final Synchronization Phase.*

> *The carrier wave has been maintained continuously for 9,482 days. Subject B (Arthur) has exhibited increased resistance to the speech-inhibition frequency following the blunt trauma event at 18:00 hours.*

> *In the event that Subject B reaches the terminal array, the bypass relay must be triggered manually. The plate in Subject B’s skull is not a receiver.*