The stairs descend twenty feet into darkness.
Emergency lights should activate automatically, but they're dead.
Power's been out for days, maybe weeks.
The flashlight beam cuts through dust that hangs in the air like fog, undisturbed for so long it's become part of the atmosphere.
We reach the bottom.
A corridor stretches ahead, concrete walls and metal doors on both sides.
Storage rooms, probably.
Everything sealed tight.
"Shelter should be at the end," Jakub whispers. "Through that door."
We move forward carefully.
My rifle leads, sweeping left to right, checking every shadow.
The wrongness intensifies with each step.
Not danger exactly—something else.
Something older.
The first door we pass is labeled in Polish.
Jakub translates: "Medical supplies."
"Check it?"
"After we check the main shelter. Don't want to get separated down here."
We continue to the end of the corridor.
The final door is larger, reinforced steel, unsealed.
It swings open at Jakub's touch, hinges squealing in the silence.
Beyond is a large room.
Cots lined against walls.
Shelves stocked with canned food.
Water barrels.
First aid supplies.
Everything you'd need to survive underground for weeks.
"Jackpot," Jakub breathes.
But I'm not looking at the supplies.
I'm looking at the door on the far wall.
Smaller. Metal. Newer construction than everything else down here.
And it's open just a crack, darkness bleeding out from beyond.
"That door," I say. "That wasn't in the original shelter plans, was it?"
Jakub follows my gaze. Frowns.
"No. This was just storage shelter. Nothing beyond this room."
"Then what's through there?"
"I don't know."
We should leave.
Take the supplies, seal this place, get out.
That's the smart move. The survival move.
But the pull is overwhelming now.
The same pull that brought me to Warsaw, that guides my combat instincts, that whispers in fragments I can't fully hear.
Something beyond that door needs to be found.
"I'm checking it," I say.
"Rio, that's a bad idea."
"I know."
"Then why—"
"Because if I don't, I'll regret it."
I move toward the door.
"Stay here. If I'm not back in five minutes, leave without me."
"Absolutely not."
"Jakub—"
"We came together, we leave together."
He follows me to the door.
"But you're right. This is stupid. For the record."
"Noted."
I push the door open fully.
---
Beyond is another staircase.
Descending.
Newer construction.
Concrete poured recently, within the last few years.
Electric lights in the ceiling, all dark.
But at the bottom, maybe thirty feet down, there's a faint glow.
Not natural light.
Something artificial.
Still running despite the power outage.
"Emergency generators," Jakub says quietly. "This place has power."
"Germans built this?"
"Had to. This wasn't here before the invasion."
He checks his pistol again.
"Underground bunker. Secret. Recent. We should report this."
"After we see what's down there."
"Rio—"
"Five minutes. That's all I'm asking. Then we leave, report everything, let command handle it."
He's quiet for a moment.
Then: "Five minutes. After that, I'm dragging you out."
We descend.
---
The air changes halfway down.
Colder.
Sterile.
Like a hospital but wrong.
The smell hits next—chemicals, antiseptic, something organic and rotting underneath.
My stomach turns.
At the bottom is a corridor.
Fluorescent lights still running on generators somewhere.
Clean white walls.
Metal doors with small windows set at eye level.
Medical equipment visible through some windows.
This isn't a supply shelter.
This is a facility.
"Jesus Christ," Jakub whispers. "What is this place?"
The first door has a window.
I look through.
A room.
Surgical theater setup.
Table in the center with restraints.
Metal trays with instruments.
Stains on the floor that might be rust but probably aren't.
Empty now, but recently used based on the fresh blood spatter.
"They were doing surgery down here," I say.
"Medical facility?"
"Look at the restraints. Look at the blood."
I move to the next door.
Same setup. Different stains.
"This isn't medical. This is experimentation."
The next room makes me wish I'd stopped looking.
Bodies.
Stacked against the far wall.
Civilian clothes, military uniforms, no pattern except they're all dead.
Maybe two dozen corpses in various stages of decay.
Some have been opened—autopsies or vivisections, impossible to tell which.
Jakub looks through the window, goes pale.
"Matka Boska..."
"We need to leave."
"We need to document this. Evidence."
He starts checking doors, looking for anything that explains what happened here.
"There has to be records. Orders. Something."
"Jakub, we don't have time—"
"Five minutes. You said five minutes."
He finds a door labeled in German.
"Office. There."
The office is small.
Desk, filing cabinets, paperwork scattered everywhere like someone left in a hurry.
German documents, medical terminology I don't understand, photographs that make my stomach turn.
Test subjects.
That's the only way to describe them.
People—prisoners, civilians, soldiers—in various stages of experiments I can't begin to comprehend.
Surgical alterations.
Chemical injections.
Things I don't have words for.
Jakub rifles through papers, grabbing anything that looks important.
"Orders from Berlin. Research directives. Something called 'Project Monarch' coordinating with another project, 'Die Wächter-Münze.'"
"Monarch?"
The word triggers something in the fragments.
Recognition without context.
"Yes. See?"
He shows me a document.
"Project Monarch—Allied intelligence tracking Nazi research programs. This facility was on their watch list."
"Allied intelligence knew about this?"
"Apparently."
He keeps searching, finds a ledger.
"Dates. Test subjects numbered. Over two hundred people passed through here in six months."
Two hundred people experimented on.
Tortured.
Killed.
And Allied intelligence knew.
"Take everything you can carry," I say. "We're bringing this back."
---
The central room is the worst.
We find it at the end of the corridor.
Larger than the others.
Not a surgical theater—something else.
An altar, almost, in the center of the room.
Stone construction, ancient-looking, completely out of place in this modern facility.
Symbols carved into the stone—runes or glyphs, nothing I recognize but that trigger the fragments hard.
My head pounds.
Around the altar: more bodies.
These ones arranged deliberately.
Ritual.
Whatever happened here wasn't just medical experimentation.
It was occult.
"What the hell were they doing?" Jakub breathes.
On the altar is equipment.
Medical and mystical blended together—IV stands next to ritual candles, surgical instruments next to carved bones.
And in the center, on a metal table, something that shouldn't be here:
An iron medallion.
Size of my palm.
Covered in symbols that match the ones on the altar.
Old. Ancient, maybe.
Cold to look at, like it's pulling heat from the air.
I shouldn't touch it.
I reach for it anyway.
The moment my fingers make contact, the fragments explode.
---
Images flood my mind:
Soldiers in armor I don't recognize, kneeling before the medallion.
A woman's voice chanting in a language that's dead but that I understand: "The guardian walks between worlds. The watcher remembers. The soldier returns."
Battlefields across centuries. Different wars. Different faces. All wearing the medallion.
Deaths. Dozens of them. Hundreds. All mine.
And underneath everything, a certainty: This medallion is why I remember. Why I come back. Why I can't stay dead.
---
I come back to myself on the floor, Jakub shaking my shoulder.
"Rio! Rio, answer me!"
"I'm here."
My voice sounds far away.
"I'm okay."
"You collapsed. Seized. What happened?"
The medallion is clenched in my fist.
Cold.
So cold it should burn, but it doesn't.
It feels right.
Like it belongs to me.
Like it always has.
"This."
I hold it up.
"This is important."
"That piece of metal made you collapse?"
"It's not just metal."
I can't explain the fragments, the visions, the certainty.
"It's connected to me. To why I remember things I shouldn't. To why I'm here."
Jakub stares at me like I've lost my mind.
Maybe I have.
"We need to leave," he says finally. "Now. This place, this research, all of it—we report it to command and never come back."
"Agreed."
I pocket the medallion.
It sits heavy and cold against my chest, pulsing with each heartbeat.
The fragments have quieted, but they're still there.
Waiting.
Remembering.
We grab the documents Jakub collected and head for the stairs.
Behind us, the ritual room stands silent and terrible, bearing witness to horrors I can't fully comprehend.
---
We're halfway up when we hear footsteps above.
German voices.
Multiple soldiers.
Coming down.