“What’s happening?” I asked.
As he turned to look at me, the door burst open again and a deafening noise accompanied most of his head disappearing in a red mist.
Someone strode through the door in a black coat. They carried a tactical shotgun and wore a fencing mask, and immediately I could sense something different in how they moved. Something right. No wasted effort. No inefficiency. Lately, I couldn’t escape how awkward and imprecise Romero, Edwin, and my other keepers were with their movements. Like giant, rambling babies, their bodies telegraphed everything.
And while it was admittedly a weird thing to notice in this particular moment, I was blown away by the elegance of this person’s physicality.
They made a tiny finger movement.
I knew exactly what they wanted.
Moving to the far side of my cell, I dragged the mattress off my bed and used it as a shield, crouching down behind it on one side of the vivarium.
The sound of the shotgun cycling rounds was earsplitting—slugs crunching through bulletproof glass, the spray of shards tearing into the mattress and raining down on me.
When the shooting stopped, I threw the mattress aside and came to my feet.
The ballistic glass of my vivarium had been no match for the shotgun slugs.
I stepped out of the cage for the first time in twenty-five days.
Ears ringing.
Fencing Mask approached me.
“Who are you?” I asked.
They shook their head. Not here.
“They’ll send more people,” I said. “More than you—”
A modulated voice cut me off with, “You have no idea what I can handle.”
I bent down, lifted the pistol the dead man had dropped when he lost his head, and made a quick chamber check.
“Stay close,” they said.
I followed them out of the room and down a low-lit corridor with cables taped to the walls. The gun I held was a Smith & Wesson .45, sticky with blood.
Down the corridor, one of the overhead fluorescents flickered, throwing the hallway into sporadic bursts of darkness.
We passed two men sprawled across the floor in expanding pools of their own blood. They’d been caught coming out of a room filled with monitors showing real-time feeds of my vivarium from numerous angles.
“You didn’t kill Edwin Rogers or a pudgy, scientist-looking guy, did you?” I asked.
“Only armed guards.”
As we approached the next intersection, I heard voices.
The stranger held up their arm.
I stopped.
They slung the shotgun over their shoulder and accelerated toward the intersection as three men emerged from around the corner.
Heavily armed security contractors.
Fencing Mask slit the first man’s throat with a trench knife, but the second man was already raising a Desert Eagle.
I saw it all so clearly—Fencing Mask was about to take a .50-cal round to the face.
As the thought crossed my mind, my rescuer took a beautifully timed side step as the second man pulled the trigger on his Desert Eagle and accidentally blew the third guy’s face off instead.
Fencing Mask took another side step, and as the last man standing swung his giant pistol around, trying to take aim, they weaved under his arm, gingerly took hold of it, and broke it in three places.
It was like watching a pistol getting fieldstripped—except with bones.
As he howled, Fencing Mask slashed him twice across the belly.
He dropped to his knees, and with his one working arm, tried to hold back everything that was spilling out of him.
The entire interlude had taken 2.5 seconds. Fencing Mask’s movements hadn’t been especially fast, but they were graceful, and lethal—a ballet of violence.
“Move,” Fencing Mask yelled back at me.
We turned down another corridor that terminated at a set of spiral stairs.
I followed them up, our footfalls clanging on the metal.
At the top, they tried to throw open a hatch—it didn’t budge.
“Someone locked it,” they said. “There’s another exit, but we’ll have to go through more guards to get there.”
I had an idea. “Wait here,” I said.
I raced back through the corridors, into the room that housed the vivarium. Sitting down at the terminal, I woke the screen and typed in Romero’s username, which I knew. While I didn’t know his precise password, from the times I’d studied his finger movements from inside the vivarium, I knew a range of seventeen possibilities of what it might be.
My sixth attempt gave me access. I tore through the interface until I found a security protocol that would unlock a number of doors, including my vivarium, an armory, a surveillance center, and something called exit hatch.
I unlocked it, then rushed back through the corridors.
My rescuer was already through. As I reached the top of the ladder, they gave me a hand, pulling me up into darkness.
It was freezing.
As my eyes adjusted, I saw old tools hanging from the walls. Rafters above me. A ladder leading to a loft filled with hay. An ancient tractor.
The vivarium complex had been constructed under an old barn.
We ran toward an open door.
The stranger stopped at the threshold.
Peered outside.
A brilliant moon burned down on everything, rendering the pasture before us electric blue and washing out the stars.
The lights of a farmhouse glowed in the distance.
My breath steamed in the frigid air.
“Can you run?” they asked.
I nodded.
We took off across the frosted grass. It was the first time I’d had my body out in the open, and I had never been able to run this fast in my life. I felt young again. Coursing with boundless energy. We didn’t stop for six hundred yards, until we reached the fence that enclosed the pasture, then sailed over it onto a gravel road and continued away from the farmhouse, barn, and granary.
Foothills surrounded everything like frozen, black waves.
Higher pastures gleamed in the lunar light.
I kept glancing back over my shoulder as the lights of the farmhouse fell away.
After a quarter mile, we reached a gate and cattle guard.
We climbed over.
The faded pavement of a country road glowed in the moonlight.
The only sound was the icy wind rattling the last leaves on the branches above us—skeletons of once green things. It was the first time I’d been outdoors since the full effect of my upgrade had taken root, and I was struggling to keep the onslaught of stimuli from overwhelming me.
We sprinted along the shoulder of the road. After several hundred yards, the stranger slowed down, pointing at something so well hidden it took me a moment to see what it was. Pulled a little ways into the darkness of the bordering wood, I saw the glint of metal, glass, and chrome.
We piled into the Google Roadster coupe.
As the doors closed, the stranger finally pulled off their mask, tossing it and the voice modulator into the back seat.
I stared across the center console at my sister.
IT HAD BEEN THREE years since I’d last seen Kara.
Six months since we’d last spoken.
Although we called each other on birthdays and at Christmas, she was usually overseas, on active duty.
She looked harder than I remembered, and there was a new scar across her face that I had never seen in person. I knew she’d been captured a couple of years back during one of her tours in Myanmar and held as a POW for several weeks before a rescue mission freed her, but that was the extent of my knowledge of what had happened. We’d never really talked about it.