Group two found their way in through a loading bay door on the north side that had been left on a timed lock — the kind that cycled open every forty minutes for facility deliveries and closed again and did not keep a record of what had passed through it in the intervals.
William had known about it.
Of course he had.
Dean went first.
The hallway beyond the loading bay was wider than the ventilation corridor Katherine's group had found, the kind of hallway built for moving things rather than people, and it ran in both directions with the identical quality of institutional corridors everywhere — functional, anonymous, designed to be navigated rather than remembered.
Dean looked both ways.
"Left," she said.
Carlyle and Niall did not question it.
They had learned, over the months of training and before that over a lifetime of watching Dean move through the world, that when Dean said a direction with that particular quality of certainty she was reading something they weren't and the reading was reliable.
Left took them past four doors, all closed, all carrying the anonymous labels of a facility that named its rooms by function rather than content.
The fifth door was different.
It was open.
Not ajar — fully open, propped, the way doors were left open when the person who used the room moved in and out of it frequently enough that closing it was an inconvenience. Light from inside it fell across the hallway floor in a rectangle.
Dean held up a hand.
They stopped.
She looked at the light.
She listened.
No sound from inside.
She moved to the doorframe and looked.
The room beyond was a hallway within a hallway — a wider space with doors running along both sides of it, each door with a small rectangular window at eye height. Dean moved to the nearest window and looked through it.
Then she went very still.
Carlyle came up behind her.
He looked through the window.
Through the glass, on a steel examination table under bright clinical lighting, lay a pixie.
Not alive.
But preserved — held in the specific way the tubes in Katherine's room held their contents, the careful arrested state of something that had been stopped rather than ended, maintained for purposes that had not yet been completed.
Carlyle stepped back from the window.
He moved to the next door.
A mermaid.
The next: something with wings that were not bird wings and not insect wings but something between the two, folded across its body in the arrested stillness.
"He's been collecting them," Niall said. His voice was very flat. "For years, probably. Every creature. Every species." He looked at the doors lining both sides of the inner hallway. "How many rooms are there."
Dean counted the doors.
"Too many," she said.
"For what purpose," Carlyle said. Though the way he said it suggested he already knew and was asking because saying it aloud required someone to have asked.
"The demon generals," Dean said. "The tubes in Katherine's signal. If the demon queen is building seven generals, she's building them from something. She needs materials." She looked at the doors. "This is the collection."
The hallway was very quiet.
The specific quiet of a room full of things that had been stopped mid-existence and were waiting in the stopping.
"We document it," Dean said. "We keep moving. Thomas needs the full picture."
Niall looked at the nearest door.
"Right," he said.
He said it the way he said things when what he meant was: I need a moment to put this somewhere I can carry it and then I will be ready and the moment is now.
"Right," he said again.
And they moved.