They Knew - Chapter 7
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She moved across campus, following the rudimentary white-blue arrows flickering on the surface of the Phoebee brick. They shifted as she walked, subtly correcting her direction, leading her forward like a ghostly compass. The paths were quiet at this hour, the usual murmur of late-night student life drowned out by the distant hum of traffic and the occasional rustling of leaves in the cold breeze.
The arrows guided her past the bunker-like concrete walls of the ECCR Engineering Center, its brutalist design looming against the night sky, slabs of gray intersecting like a fortress. She stuck to the shadows, her breath misting in the dim glow of overhead streetlights, until Phoebee’s path brought her to a small, nondescript maintenance shed tucked behind a nine-foot-tall chain-link fence, crowned with spirals of barbed wire.
She hesitated, eyeing the locked gate. The fence looked old but sturdy. She could try climbing it, maybe toss her jacket over the barbed wire at the top—but then she spotted it.
A gap.
At the back corner, the chain link had been pried loose and a shallow trench had been dug beneath it, just wide enough for a body to squeeze through. She smirked. Thank God for ungovernable students. Dropping to her knees, she wedged the Phoebee brick into the front pocket of her hoodie, shielding it under her jacket. With a breath, she crawled through, damp earth clinging to her jeans as she emerged inside the fence’s perimeter.
The shed door was unlocked, the hinges groaning softly as she pulled it open. A wave of earthy, stale air hit her, thick with the scents of oil, old grass clippings, and rusted metal. She felt along the wall, her fingers brushing over a rough metal plate before finding a switch.
A flickering overhead fluorescent tube buzzed to life.
Inside, an old manual riding mower sat in the corner, a relic of the days before automated landscaping bots, which now rested like dormant insects in their charging stations along the opposite wall.
But in the center of the shed, something else caught her eye.
It was a lift.
A square metal platform, flush with the concrete floor, lined with deep-set grooves, as if it had been lowered and raised a thousand times over the years. Against the wall beside it, a rusted control panel housed three buttons, their labels faded and curling with age. One had a piece of electrical tape beside it, marked in black Sharpie: POWER. The other two were bare, but it was obvious—they called the lift up and down.
Raven exhaled sharply, a memory flashing through her mind.
New York City.
She’d been ten when her father took her there, and she still remembered the heavy metal doors embedded in the sidewalks, the way they’d clattered open as workers hoisted crates up from underground storage. He had told her how small freight elevators had been used to access basement storage in old buildings, a remnant of another era.
And now, standing in this shed, staring at a forgotten relic buried in the floor, she knew exactly what it was.
But what was it doing here?
Her fingers hovered over the power button. The metal was grimy, slick with years of accumulated oil and dirt from the hands of landscapers. She took a deep breath—and pressed it.
Beneath the shed, something groaned. A deep, mechanical tremor rolled through the floor as metal plates split apart, revealing the old lift ascending from below. It rattled into place with a heavy clang, the scent of damp earth and rust rising from the opening like a breath from something ancient.
The platform was plain, little more than a metal floor with a small control panel and a pair of worn handrails. It looked sturdy enough, but as Raven stepped onto it, the entire lift shuddered beneath her weight. Her stomach tightened. Too late now.
She pressed the down button.
The shed walls seemed to close in as the platform lurched downward, leaving behind the pale spill of halide light. Darkness swallowed her whole. The deeper she went, the thicker the air became—hot, humid, laced with the scent of wet concrete and old machinery. A hiss of steam vented somewhere below.
It felt like she was descending into another world.
Raven expected lights to flicker on once the lift stopped. There had to be a light. But when the platform jerked to a halt, she was met with nothing but a deep, suffocating blackness. The silence was broken only by the rhythmic drip of water echoing through the underground chamber.
Claustrophobia tightened around her ribs.
Her pulse hammered in her ears. A rising panic clawed up her throat. Breathe. Breathe. But the dark pressed in, thick as molasses, and for a moment, she couldn’t move. Couldn’t think.
Then, something buzzed against her stomach.
Not her phone—heavier. Phoebee.
With trembling fingers, she reached into her hoodie pocket, pulling out the brick. Its surface pulsed with the familiar blue-white glow, text flickering to life.
{Your heart rate is elevated; focus on your breathing. We will get through this together. According to the old schematics, you should be able to step off the lift platform and follow my arrows to the exit.}
A small, softly blinking arrow appeared on the display.
{—>}
Raven exhaled, centering herself on the glowing text. The screen became an anchor—something real, something solid. She got down on her hands and knees, feeling for the edge of the platform. Cold metal. Then—a step. A handrail.
Slowly, carefully, she eased herself down. The ground beneath her feet was solid concrete, damp, and uneven. The arrow on Phoebee’s screen shifted slightly, reorienting as she moved.
She followed.
The tunnel exit wasn’t far. As she moved toward it, another sound emerged from the darkness—not the hiss of steam, not the distant hum of old machinery. Voices.
Raven froze.
Students. Other students.
She pressed herself against the wall, straining to make out their words. Footsteps. The flicker of a flashlight beam. Laughter.
Then, a voice called out, loud and clear:
“Heya, Caleb, I think we found the right tunnel—the one from the journal!”
Raven’s attention jumped. Caleb Winslow.
Of all the people to run into down here…Could it really be him?
There was a light coming down the tunnel; she could see as soon as she turned the corner. And the shadows of a group of students in the room at the end stretched, twisting towards Raven.
Raven hesitated before turning the final corner, knowing she would be the last person Caleb expected to find down here in the steam tunnels.
A thought flickered through her mind—had Caleb come by her apartment earlier to invite her to this? She remembered him mentioning something about an old campus true crime case, a student who had vanished in the tunnels back in the ‘90s. He and his friends wanted to investigate it for a podcast. Maybe he had planned to knock on her door but stopped himself when he saw the state she was in.
That life—college, podcasts, mysteries that weren’t life or death—felt so far away now. There was no time to consider what could have been. She had to get into the quantum lab. The upgrade to Phoebee had to happen now, or it would be too late.
She squared her shoulders and stepped into the light.
Caleb was right there, closest to the tunnel’s entrance. The shock on his face couldn’t have been more obvious—his mouth slightly open, his posture stiffening in confusion. Then, his fingers loosened. The beer bottle he’d been holding slipped from his grasp, shattering against the wet, uneven concrete.
Raven was right—he immediately knew something was off.
Her stance was too rigid, her expression not just wary, but haunted. And beneath the tension and exhaustion in her eyes, there was something else—determination.
“Raven, what the hell are you doing down here?” Caleb asked.
For a split second, Raven almost heard accusation in his voice. But then she caught the way his expression softened. Worry. He was worried about her.
One of Caleb’s friends cut into the heavy silence. “Hey Caleb, I thought you said you didn’t invite your friend.”
“I didn’t,” he murmured, mostly to himself.
Ben, a lanky math major Raven recognized from campus, pulled out his phone, the glow of the screen illuminating an old newspaper article. “Guess we’re not the only ones looking for the truth down here,” he said, flashing her the headline. MISSING CU STUDENT FEARED LOST IN CAMPUS STEAM TUNNELS—1998.
“We found an old-ass Tripod blog about it,” Ben continued. “Physics student, messy breakup with a professor, disappeared without a trace. We want to solve the case, turn it into a podcast. Is that why you’re down here too?” His tone shifted slightly, uncertain. “Shit. I hope we didn’t tell too many people about this.”
Raven forced a tight-lipped smile. “Yeah. Something like that.”
Caleb wasn’t buying a word of it.
He knew Raven. Knew her.
Her father was sick. Her professor had just been gunned down. And now she was here, in the middle of the night, in the steam tunnels?
None of this made sense.
He stepped in close, lowering his voice. “Raven,” he said carefully, placing a hand on her elbow, “are you okay? What’s really going on?”
She stiffened, pulling free of his touch. “I’m fine,” she muttered. Too fast. Too sharp. Her gaze darted toward the tunnel beyond them. “I just—I need to get through to the quantum lab. I can’t tell you more. It’s not safe. For you.”
That last part landed hard—and not just for him. For a second, she almost hated herself for saying it.
But there was no time to explain.
Caleb opened his mouth to argue, to press her—
Then the tunnel erupted with blinding white light.
A high-pitched mechanical whirr cut through the steam-thick air, bouncing off the concrete walls.
A drone.
The students froze—caught like deer in headlights.
But Raven didn’t.
She knew exactly what was happening.
Before Ben could even react, she ripped the beer bottle from his hand and hurled it, end over end. The remaining liquid spiraled out in a frothy arc in the light before the glass shattered against the drone’s casing.
The machine jerked mid-air, servos shrieking as it tumbled back toward the tunnel it had emerged from. A metallic clatter rang out as it crashed into the wall, its LED light flickering wildly.
For a moment, everything was still.
Then—
A voice crackled from the drone’s speaker.
“Unauthorized entry detected. Security en route.”
Raven’s heart slammed into her ribs. Shit.
“Run!” she shouted.
Flashlights bobbed wildly as Caleb and his friends scrambled after her, their shoes pounding against the damp concrete.
The tunnels suddenly felt much smaller.
And they weren’t alone anymore.
Raven and the students sprinted down the tunnel, their footfalls echoing off the damp, concrete walls. The air was thick with steam and the scent of old machinery. Caleb, breathless, managed between gasps, “I didn’t think… the university had drones like that… for security.”
“That wasn’t campus security,” Raven shot back, glancing over her shoulder. “I’m pretty sure that’s the same group that raided the AI lab earlier—Alexander Cain’s people. His private goon squad.”
Ben frowned. “Cain? The tech billionaire?”
“More like the guy in charge of rounding up and wiping out any competing tech,” Raven muttered. “It’s all tied to the Federal Technology and Security Act.”
They reached an intersection where the tunnel branched into four directions. Ben doubled over, hands on his knees as he caught his breath. “Where the hell do we go now?”
Caleb snatched Ben’s phone before he could protest, flipping open the old schematics they had found online. “We can loop back to the dorms if we take the tunnel to the right—”
A whine of struggling brushless motors interrupted him. The drone’s broken floodlight flickered as it whirred toward them, its cracked lens casting fractured beams down the passage.
“Shit,” Raven hissed. “It must have recovered enough to keep chasing us.”
Then, from the opposite direction, another light snapped on, flooding the tunnel in sterile white. The unmistakable sound of a second drone’s motors spun up, closing in fast.
Without hesitation, Caleb shoved the phone into his pocket and turned to Raven. “We’ll draw them off. You keep going.”
“What?”
“The AI and Quantum Labs are down that hall to the left. Whatever this is—whatever you’re doing—it’s bigger than sneaking around the tunnels for a dumb podcast.” He pushed her toward the left-hand passage, his grip firm but reassuring. “We’ll just get in trouble for trespassing. You… I have a feeling you’re in a lot deeper.”
Before she could argue, he turned and started waving his arms, yelling at the top of his lungs.
“Hey! Here we are! Come catch us, you metal bastards!”
Ben and the others caught on immediately. “Yeah, you useless hunks of scrap! Over here!”
The drones’ engines surged as they locked onto the noisy, flailing group. Raven hesitated only a second longer before spinning on her heel and sprinting down the left-hand tunnel.
The passage sloped downward, the floor damp beneath her boots. Overhead, fluorescent lights flickered every twenty feet, casting intermittent pools of cold, artificial glow. It felt different from the tunnels behind her—less like old infrastructure and more like… a basement.
A newer part of the university.
Her breath burned in her chest, but she didn’t slow down.
She was close.