Ravenhill Medical didn't exist on any public registry.
No website. No reviews. Not even a Yelp complaint.
But it was there — tucked between two derelict buildings in Queens, behind a rusted gate and a line of rotting ambulances. Hale parked a block away and approached on foot, blending in with the shadows of early dawn.
The building looked abandoned.
Boarded windows. Faded signage. A "Condemned" notice so old the ink had bled into the paper. But something about the silence was wrong — too uniform. Too clean.
He circled to the rear, finding a delivery entrance partially ajar. A keypad blinked red beside it.
Hale pulled out the tech Red had left him — a homemade signal jammer the size of a cigarette lighter. One tap, and the red light turned green.
He stepped inside.
The air was sterile. Too sterile.
Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. The walls had fresh paint, recent repairs. It wasn't abandoned at all — it was a front. A mask.
What lay beneath was something else entirely.
He followed a faint hum down the corridor, past locked doors labeled with numbers instead of names. He peeked into one — a padded room. Bed bolted to the floor. No window. No personal effects.
Then another.
Inside: a man, maybe mid-30s, strapped to a gurney. Eyes glassy. IV drip in his arm. Monitors quietly beeping.
Hale moved closer. The man's lips were moving.
"Ember… emberlight… light…"
He froze.
Then a voice behind him:
"He used to be NSA. Brilliant analyst. Got too curious."
Hale turned.
Colonel Lucinda Graves.
Exactly like the photo Quinn had given him — only colder in person. Sharp suit. Short-cut hair. No emotion in her eyes.
"You shouldn't be here," she said flatly.
"Neither should half the people locked up in this place," Hale shot back. "What is this? A blacksite?"
"This is containment," Graves replied. "A necessity. People who saw too much. Asked the wrong questions. Or became liabilities."
"Like Alan Drexler?"
Her mouth twitched — the faintest trace of recognition.
"He went rogue. You should be thanking us for stopping him before he compromised everything."
"He said people are disappearing. That Emberlight is turning civilians into assets."
Graves didn't deny it.
"Conversion," she said. "Behavioral restructuring. A new frontier in intelligence. No torture. No blood. Just… calibration."
"You're turning people into puppets."
She stepped closer.
"You think the world is black and white, Mr. Hale. It's not. It's not even gray. It's static. Noise. We bring order. We remove chaos."
"I've seen what your kind calls order."
Graves tilted her head.
"That's why they offered you a seat at the table. And that's why they'll erase you now."
A piercing alarm sounded.
Hale didn't wait. He shoved past her, bolted down the hall. Lights shifted from white to red. Footsteps echoed behind him.
He burst out the side exit, climbed the fence, and disappeared into the waking streets.
Back at his hideout, Red patched up his cuts in silence.
"You're lucky," Red muttered. "That place is off-grid. Not even DARPA gets access."
Hale nodded grimly. He laid out what he'd seen. The facility. The "patients." Graves.
And most of all… Emberlight — a program built not to destroy bodies, but minds.
Red paled. "If they're rolling that out, it means Blackstar's going operational. Citywide."
Hale stared out the window.
"Then we shut it down."
But to do that…
He'd need allies. He'd need ammo.
And he'd need to move fast — before Blackstar made the next move.