The report hit my console like a cold stone dropped into placid water: a whisper from another timeline insisting on being heard.
Factory, 1835.Owner: James Anderson.Function: textile and metalworks facade; covertly used for arcane experimentation and forced labor.An escaped worker—one of the few brave or unlucky enough to flee—ran straight into the arms of one of our embedded agents in the American government. He told a story stitched together from fear and smoke: machines that sang, furnaces that burned without fuel, men hollowed out by repeated procedures and bound to a rhythm that was not their own. The factory's main output: weapons—yes—but weapons fueled by something else. Something that asked for payment in forms you could not list on a ledger: favors, life force, pieces of the soul.
I read the dossier twice. The margins of the file were smeared with the kinds of notes you only see when something has been touched by a dozen different minds—historians, occultists, field agents. Security intercepts placed the factory at a nexus of industrial ingenuity and occult machinery. It smelled like profit, blood, and entropy.
I called Darius immediately.
He answered on the first ring. Calm, clipped, patient. The Watcher's voice has a way of making danger feel like a subject you could study and outsmart rather than a thing that will smash you flat. He had already parsed the report into probability branches and risk matrices; the numbers were polite and unforgiving.
"This Anderson place," I said. "If it manufactures artifacts through soul-binding, it's a Keter in waiting. We can't let it continue. But if we destroy it, the knowledge—if anyone can reverse-engineer a soul-driven foundry—could fall into worse hands."
Darius was quiet for a long moment. "We do not need its resources," he said. "But we must secure it. The Foundation contains artifacts; we do not traffic in bargains."
"Containment means manpower, money, and time," I replied. "It means someone else's bones on the line. I'm not handing it over to a research wing that will become seduced by its output."
"No one will be seduced if the right people with the right protocols handle it," Darius said. "Pull the Nine-Tailed Fox. Make it surgical. Remove any active occult rigging. Quarantine research output. Bring detainees for debriefing. You want custody of the facility once it's safe?"
I thought of Luna asleep in her crib back at Site-999, the faint glow of her bracelet keeping the world sane within a room's radius. I thought of the lives that would be snuffed under the wheels of a foundry that consumed souls for product.
"Yes," I said. "But under strict oversight. You'll send your best agents. I want full situational feeds. No surprises."
We agreed on a timeline. Darius would pull a discreet favor: a classified mobile task force famous for speed, stealth, and a lack of moralizing hesitation. The Nine-Tailed Fox—an MTF forged from the oddest alloy of Foundation pragmatism and surgical ruthlessness. They never lingered, and they never wrote anything sentimental into their after-action reports.
Two hours later, I had the team manifesting on the feed: six specialists in exfiltration and counter-occult processes, two engineering exorcists, a containment architect, and a small troop of enhanced operatives for security and suppression. Their leader—Lieutenant Kade—had a face I recognized from missions where things had to be torn out of the world and buried before anyone could learn their names.
We briefed. The Nine-Tailed Fox would infiltrate under the pretense of a boiler maintenance contract; their cover documents were flawless, their false identities layered like onions. A strike squad would enter through the rear loading docks at two-minute intervals. Engineering exorcists would neutralize rune cores, replace sacrificial conduits with inert dampeners, and log every anomalous device for retrieval. Enhanced operatives would secure the laborers—many of them drugged, many of them convinced by superstition—so that witnesses could be sheltered, deprogrammed, and integrated into witness protection until their mental scars were treated. The containment architect would erect an on-site primary membrane to isolate the foundry's metaphysical signature from ambient reality.
Forty-eight hours to full isolation. Three days to evacuation and cataloging. A week to stasis.
I asked Darius for surveillance loops and predictive models. He gave me five scenarios: best case, nine moderate cases, and one catastrophic case that had an uncomfortably high probability if the wrong energy line was tapped. I told the Nine-Tailed Fox to operate like a scalpel, not a flamethrower.
The insertion went black-gloved—exactly as I wanted. The rear gate opened; a small team slipped into the belly of the beast. For correspondence, the feed showed only silhouettes, schematic overlays, and scrubbed audio—enough for me to judge progress without seeing details that could contaminate my sleep. They moved through the foundry like surgeons, finding and isolating rune cores repurposed as crucibles. The engineering exorcists—people who spoke to machines as if they were sick—played a dangerous game: read the pattern, match the counter-chime, and bleed the animating intent into a sealed matrix.
An hour into the operation, my screen pinged with a cluster of anomalies. A production line had activated—metal sheets slotted into presses that pulsed with a faint, hungry light. The crew had been mid-shift when a supervisor muttered a command in a language that had no place in 1835 handbooks. It was a siren for the factory. The Nine-Tailed Fox reacted like a living trapdoor: the enhanced operatives moved to secure the floor while the exorcists enacted a binding to slow the forging process.
They held. Barely. Sparks of metaphysical energy snapped like tiny lightning bolts across the hall; one enhanced operative suffered a wound that smelled like ozone and grief. The team patched him up and carried on—procedural focus replacing the human alarm.
We brought humane measures to the laborers: anesthetic protocols, truth-safe conditioning to ensure they would not be culled or exploited further. We told those who could be told that the factory's owners had been exploiting them in the most literal sense, siphoning pieces of people for profit. We found ledgers accounting for favors, pieces of dreams, names sold for work, and mechanisms that translated sacrifice into metallurgy.
It was sickening, and the word carried no hyperbole.
By day three the primary membrane was in place around the site, a shimmering curtain of spatial logic that read like the best of our dimensional containment work. The Nine-Tailed Fox had succeeded in dismantling the central animating lattice; the presses no longer hummed with a will of their own. We cataloged a dozen artifacts—half inert, half corrupt—with careful notation and red-line warnings: do not reawaken without full O5 consensus and a protocol thirty steps longer than typical.
The Watcher sent me a succinct note: "No external groups were involved. No immediate global energy shifts detected. Suggest preserving site as research handled under joint supervision."
I replied: "Site remains under my jurisdiction, temporarily. I'll oversee the catalog. No unilateral activation."
He conceded, reluctantly.
Later, I walked the digital feed with Lieutenant Kade. He was pragmatic; he didn't romanticize the workers' suffering but neither did he mock it. He asked, quietly, about the sacrificial ledger—about the names, the dates, the curious way favors had been itemized. I told him what I thought: that James Anderson had been less an industrialist and more a broker of souls. He had found a way to convert human agency into material yield. It was obscene, and in a normal world it would scream for eradication. In our world, the calculus was different.
"But why does it exist at all?" Kade asked. "Who'd let a foundry like that stay in operation for so long?"
"Because powerful people profit from simple, horrifying economies," I said. "Because ignorance and fear are excellent lubricants for exploitation. Because someone wanted weapons and was willing to pay a price."
We closed the feed. I set the containment schedules, signed the retrieval orders, and assigned a handful of trusted researchers to perform non-reactive study under strict supervision: Victor von Doom for thaumaturgical analysis, Doctor Gears for reverse-engineering containment tech, and a psych team to rehabilitate and interview survivors.
The Anderson Foundry would not be a resource. It would be a contained site—sealed, studied, and watched by someone with no appetite for bargains.
If the machine's hunger ever stirred again, I would be the one to notice. I had built my life around refusing bargains with devils. I would not let some back-alley industrialist in 1835 outdo the Foundation in cruelty without consequence.
Night fell over Site-999 as I finalized the report. Luna slept in the next room, oblivious to industrial ghosts and human bargains. I stared at her silhouette through the baby monitor and tuned the Anderson file one last time. We had stopped one foundry. There were others. There were always others.
But for now, the Nine-Tailed Fox had done its work. The presses were cold. The ledger was sealed. The membrane kept its silent watch.
And I set a watch of my own—because there are some bargains you cannot let anyone slip back into the world, and some engines of cruelty that must be dismantled by hands that never ask for a favor in return.