Daniel let out a shaky breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Megan pressed the back of her wrist to her mouth, eyes bright with the kind of fear that only arrives after the danger has passed.
Brooks stepped aside as two more agents climbed up from the hidden room, peeling off their gloves and masks with movements that spoke of deep fatigue. One of them carried a sealed, transparent container packed with severed fungal samples, their unnatural colors vivid against the sterile plastic; another held a clipboard covered in hurried, smudged notes.
“The good news,” Halpern said as he emerged behind them, his own mask now dangling around his neck, “is that the spores weren’t toxic — not in the immediate, life-threatening sense.” He gave a pointed look toward the dark hole in the floor. “But they were mutating. Aggressively. Without ventilation, without maintenance… that room was turning into a biological pressure cooker.”
Megan swallowed against a dry throat. “So the smell… it was this? The fungus?”
“Partly,” Halpern replied, accepting a bottle of water from an aide. “But mostly? It was gas buildup from decomposition inside that sealed room. Moisture, stagnant air, biological byproduct. The fungi were feeding off it all — and expanding.” He took a long drink.
Daniel rubbed his palms over his jeans, as if trying to wipe away a lingering sensation. His voice was unsteady. “If we hadn’t opened that wall…”
“You’d have had a real hazard on your hands,” Brooks finished for him, her tone leaving no room for doubt. “Structural collapse. Respiratory illness. Or the pressure behind that door eventually forcing its way out on its own, probably violently.” A chill crawled across Megan’s shoulders, raising the hairs on her arms.
Halpern glanced between them, his expression grim. “You didn’t just find a problem,” he stated. “You prevented one.”
Halpern glanced between them, his expression softening from clinical assessment to something approaching gratitude. “You found this early. Very early. Most people would’ve ignored the smell, written it off as a drain or a dead rodent, until it was too late.”