“So how is this going to work?” I ask as the plant comes into view around the bend. “Who should I pretend to be that would feel natural. A delivery person?”

Doc smirked and left a pointed silence.

“What? Do they not get regular deliveries?”

“Eva….seriously?”

“What?”

I hated when he played Smug Superior Man. It was like the worst superpower ever.

“I don’t know, maybe you should go in like you normally do. As the mayor of an entire town.”

Oh. Right.

“Technically, Charon isn’t big enough to be a town. It’s a village.”

“How quaint.”

“Indeed. So. We are just going to walk in like we aren’t monster hunting?” I ask.

“Monster hunting?” He chuckles, “Yeah, I mean, that’s step one. It would be normal for you to have a meeting at the plant after the day’s events, and since I’m investigating, it would make sense for you to meet with me.”

“Okay, would that get us where we need to be, though?”

“Oh, absolutely not. But once we are to my office, I’ll tell my secretary that I am going to give you a tour of the place and plan to be gone… a while.”

He wagged his eyebrows at me, suggesting the tour would be all-inclusive. Of course that would be his cover story.

“Won’t your secretary be jealous?” I shot back.

“Jim’s not really the jealous type. I’ll get him some nice flowers and smooth it over.”

I didn’t even bother to roll my eyes again. We’d stopped off at the house to update Luce, but she had left. I called with no answer. I figured she’d gone to rest, and I really didn’t have another fight in me so this was better anyway.

Security was slow; getting into the plant was going to take a while. The cars in front of us inched forward at a crawl.

“So is this the most devious plan you’ve ever hatched?” He asked.

“You underestimate me. I was once party to canine theft and species reassignment.”

Really, that had been all Luce, but Doc’s face was worth the stretch.

Mr. Webber was a mean old man who lived around the block from us growing up, and he always had two or three dogs chained outside, howling day and night like they were dying.

Mama had called the sheriff and animal control half a dozen times, but nothing ever happened. Mr. Webber was an old football buddy of the sheriff.

A storm rolled in on a Sunday evening. Luce was riding her bike back from a boy’s house, where she wasn’t supposed to be in the first place. She went right by the Webber place, flying down the road on her ten-speed in a torrential downpour.

But there in the mud was a sight she just couldn’t abide. One of the newer dogs, some kind of pitiful terrier type, was sunk to his belly, yelping and crying and shaking.

She came home and told me about it, and said she was going to go free all the dogs once and for all and beckoned for me to grab my own bike and help.

I was scared. I knew that would be big trouble. Trouble with mama, trouble with Mr. Webber, hell, we might even meet the sheriff if things really went sideways.

But she was going. The rules, the consequences— minor inconveniences in her quest for canine justice.

I went. Every inch of me was soaked and freezing. Misery dripped off of me almost as much as the little dog that snapped at Luce as she tried to release him. Finally, she pulled the stake entirely out of the ground and scooped him up. For good measure, she liberated two more dogs that were just sleeping in their kennels.

Having lived on a chain their whole lives, they didn’t hesitate to bolt.

“Okay, put that one down and let’s go,” I said as Luce cradled the still-shivering dog in her arms.

“He’s too small and helpless, Evie. I have to help him.” Her face shifted from concern to delight “ I know! We will sneak him in through the basement and clean him up. Mama will never know.”

I tried to argue and it ended in one of those sister fights where we agree to pretend like we don’t know what the other one is doing. Like not ratting her out for being at Justin’s house when she said she was with Allie.

It took Mama all of about ten seconds to get suspicious. I could change and hide my wet clothes, but my hair was a dead giveaway. Just as I was giving my best at a feeble excuse, the dog whimpered from the basement, and Mama heard.

“Lucille Elizabeth! What have you got down there?” She yelled down the stairs.

“Just sphynx, mama! He got out in the rain, and I’m drying him off!”

She lied so smoothly. Mama fussed about being more careful, and that was that.

When I felt enough time had passed, I went down to check out the situation, and there was the dog. Clean as could be, and our poor cat, soaked to the bone. I suppose she needed a solid alibi.

She hid that dog for months, and Mama never knew. Then it stayed with Justin, and no one was the wiser. But about three days after the heist, someone threw a brick through Mr. Webber’s window, and the whisper in town was that it had a  muddy dog collar wrapped around it.

She never owned that part, and it still kind of bothers me in the back of my mind.

I told Doc the story of the dog turned “cat”, leaving out the off-limits boyfriend and the brick. He chucked at my audacity. Luce’s audacity.

We glided through security without an issue, passing by the small tower at the entrance. When the plant was operational, it read “Safety Before Productivity…. Always!” In bright blue. Now it was faded, letters marred by the lines of rust and grime. An ominous welcome.

Everything went just like he said. No one blinked at me being there. Jim gave Doc a wink when we set off on the “tour”.

Unfortunately, that had been the end of our plan. The only things we could soundly eliminate as the right place to be were the places we were cleared to be. Doc knew the general direction of the lab, but the corridor was passcode-locked.

Using the wall as a hard surface and a receipt for paper, Doc began scribbling out a map of the plant. He was taking forever. I paced and chewed the raw edges of my fingernails. Back and forth, back and forth. If there had been carpet, it would have been wearing thin. Instead, the cold tile hit against my shoes with a clack that threatened to push me over the edge. Finally, it wasn’t enough, and on my next lap, I went for it.

The off-white double doors loomed over me, scuffed and worn after years of use by plant workers and then a few more by evil scientists. Apparently.

“Eva! What are you doing, woman?” Doc whisper-yelled in my ear.

“I can’t wait anymore. I need to do something.” He opened his mouth to object, and I held out a hand. “No, look. The keypad is as old as everything else. It’s not a hardwired system.”

“I really hate when you make me ask, and then you explain, and I feel like it was painfully obvious in the first place.”

“Mansplaining? Welcome to every woman’s world.” I said and squatted down to see the underside of the keypad and then rose to face him. “The door is old school. It isn’t on some kind of computer relay; it’s just a power equals locked kind of deal. Kill the power, and every door in the place will unlock. I am sure they have a generator for all the cameras and some of the equipment, but the doors are safety set to unlock.”

“Oh, cool, so all we need to do is knock power out to an entire retired plant designed to, you know, make power.”

“Do you realize how old this place is? It was barely the 1960’s when it opened. It’s designed to have very quick power cuts to very large chunks. We have to get into the electrical room, but then it’s literally a series of big red buttons.”

I was ahead of him again, halfway down the corridor, by the time he caught up. It was odd how quiet the halls were. They used to hum in a way that called to mind a thrumming beehive, but as we walked, it was only the echo of our shoes and Doc’s labored breathing.

“You’re walking with purpose. You already know where the electrical room is, I take it?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, dumb guy again here… but… how?”

“My mom was a third shift engineer before she got blown up.” I sensed his flinch. “I used to do homework in there,” I explained.

He nodded.

“I thought she was a nurse? The reports said she…”

“Died going in to nurse the wounded. Yeah. She had a giant first aid bag we called her nursing bag. But it was because she worked at the plant, and people were always getting hurt. She worked with electricity, and she was always getting hurt. And she raised Luce, who loved to climb thirty feet up into trees or do wheelies on her bike in the gravel…and get hurt. She wasn’t a nurse. She was just prepared.”

My voice cracked. That was enough talking. Maybe forever. There werent enough nursing supplies in the world to accommodate the gaping hole tearing through my chest at the thought of my brave, brilliant mother and this godforsaken place.

By way of memories I try to avoid messing with, my feet carried me down another level. No one bothered to guard this space; it was all function and utility. The cooler sublevel air raised the hair on my arm, but I knew we were getting close— we’d found the static humming.

The battered metal door was slightly ajar. My heart was racing, and my stomach churned as adrenaline coursed through me. I felt more than heard the click of the industrial light switch as I pushed it up. A harsh fluorescent glow flickered and then flooded the space, revealing a wall of mushroom cap shaped red buttons. I filled my lungs with the cool, dank air and, before I could talk myself out of it, pushed every last one of them into the wall. They clicked and locked into place, and I caught just a glimpse of Doc’s horrified face before we were plunged into near-total darkness.