Group four found the lab.
It was Samantha who registered it first — the air changed three corridors from the south entrance, a specific shift that the wind element picked up before any other sense could, the air in the facility moving differently near this room than near the others, the circulation pattern disrupted by whatever the room contained.
"This way," Samantha said.
Grace followed without question.
Kristen blinked ahead to check the corridor and blinked back and said clear and they moved.
The room was cold.
Not the ambient cold of the facility's climate control — a deliberate cold, the kind generated by equipment designed to maintain a specific temperature for specific contents. The walls were lined with glass-fronted refrigeration units running floor to ceiling, each one illuminated from within, each one containing rows of small containers.
Grace moved to the nearest unit.
She looked through the glass.
The containers were vials.
Hundreds of them.
Each labeled.
The labels were in the same dense precise handwriting that appeared in Victor's notebook — a cataloguing system, thorough and organized, the record-keeping of someone who had been accumulating for a very long time and had developed a system for the accumulation that would survive his own memory.
Grace read the nearest label.
Then the next.
Blood. Different types, different species, different classifications that Grace did not have names for but that the labels supplied with the clinical precision of a taxonomy developed over years.
"How much of this is creature blood," Kristen said. She was moving along the units with the quick systematic survey of someone who had decided that the most useful thing she could do was get the full picture as fast as possible.
"Most of it," Samantha said. She was standing in the center of the room with her head slightly tilted, reading the air the way she read all air. "The oldest ones. The ones that have been here longest." She looked at the newer units near the door. "The recent additions are different. More varied."
"Chosen one blood," Grace said.
She said it the way she said difficult things — steady, without decoration, giving it exactly what it required and no more.
"Some of it," Samantha said. "I can feel the difference. The same way I felt the difference in Miralba between Sebastian's cuts and the rest of the battle."
Kristen had gone still near the far wall.
"Grace," she said.
Grace crossed the room.
The unit Kristen was standing in front of had a different kind of label on its contents — not Victor's cataloguing handwriting. Older. The script of something that had been written before Victor's time, transferred somehow to these modern containers, copied with the precision of someone who understood that the original designation mattered.
"This is what she's been sending him to collect," Kristen said quietly. "The demon queen. The specific bloods she needs for the generals. She's had a list. He's been building toward it."
Grace looked at the unit.
At the rows of vials inside it.
At the precision of the collection and the years it represented and what it was intended to become.
"Then this is what we make sure she never finishes," Grace said.
Samantha looked at her.
"Signal Thomas," Grace said. "He needs to know this exists. All of it."
She looked at the room one more time.
Then she turned toward the door.
"Come on," she said.