In the elevator, Warner flicked his thumb and checked the time on his screen. His routine had taken even longer than he’d feared. Freya would have been alone for almost two hours, and he knew better than anyone what a berserker could do in a hundred and twenty minutes. The elevator came to a smooth stop, and Warner mentally prepared himself to wrestle with authorizations and clearance checks and not least of all, Lyssa, determined he never lay eyes on his project again. But to his surprise, all the doors opened in front of him without so much as a beep. It seemed like he’d been cleared for full access, which meant he would no longer have to scan in and go through checks, able to come and go as he pleased.

  As pleasant as the surprise was, he knew that sooner or later, the bill for such a generous bounty would come. But when he walked into the observation room, he immediately saw something amiss.

  The room was empty except for Russ, who perched quietly on a stool in the corner. He looked pale and stared straight ahead into empty space. Warner glanced at the screen. Cursed. Hurried through the decontamination chamber and emerged into the white-walled quarantine room.

  Freya was still restrained with the massive metal braces, but her form seemed to have shrunk, her already small frame reduced to diminutive. Her hair had grown in even more, incredibly, over just a couple of hours, and covered the scar on her head completely. He suspected the scar itself had also vanished without so much as a mark. But right now, that newly grown dark hair was plastered against her skull, soaking wet. Blue shadows lurked under her eyes, and the dark smear around her mouth looked like dried blood.

  Then she saw him and grinned. The grin looked even more unhinged than before because her teeth were also stained with blood and chipped in a couple of places. “Oh, finally,” she said, her tone conveying the casual annoyance of a Keeper girl forced to wait too long for her drink order. “Took you long enough.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “I told them,” she informed him sweetly, “that I’d only talk to you.”

  It didn’t take a genius to fill in the blanks. His gaze shot to the blood in the corners of her lips. She made an unsuccessful attempt to lick it away, then shrugged as much as the restraints allowed.

  So this is why I have full access, Warner thought. Anger surged through his veins again.

  “I bit my tongue,” she explained. “They tried waterboarding me, but turned out I can hold my breath too long for it to be interesting. Then they electrocuted me a couple of times. Nothing serious. I’ll live.” She measured him with a look. “And it seems like I got what I wanted. You look nice, Warner Vogel.”

  “If we’re going to work together,” he said, “we’re going to do it differently.”

  He noted the adverb. Her grin widened.

  “If this is to work, it has to be based on mutual respect. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  “You have a funny idea of respect,” she pointed out.

  “I’m going to ask R&D to come up with some better arrangement,” Warner told her. “Something you can’t break out of, but a little more humane than this Hannibal Lecter setup you’ve got here.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “A man of culture, I see. I thought all this pre-Split stuff was banned.”

  “Maybe you don’t know as much about the Coalition as you think.”

  “I know as much about it as you,” she said levelly. “Maybe more. I didn’t fall from the sky into the middle of your biggest metropolis. I was on a mission, you know. Which means I was properly prepared to blend in.”

  Warner wondered if he’d just won another small victory, or whether her telling him this was a part of some long game she was expertly playing out.

  “I suppose you were briefed about me as well.” He hoped whoever was listening in the other room didn’t get his real meaning.

  Freya sure did, though. She chuckled. “I was briefed, as you put it, only about what I needed to know. For my mission. The reason I know so much about you is the same you seem to know so much about us.”

  Once again, her gaze caught his, and Warner found himself utterly transfixed and deeply terrified at the same time, unable to break the eye contact even though he already knew what she was about to say.

  “Nero gets talkative when he’s in a good mood.”

  You know Nero. Of fucking course you fucking know Nero. He’d already figured it out, but having it said so bluntly took him unawares.

  “What’s your connection to Nero?” he asked, careful to keep his voice as neutral as he could.

  “Aw,” she said. “You don’t expect me to give everything away upfront like that, do you?

  “Maybe I should electrocute you a couple more times.”

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  “You,” she observed, licking her lips,” “have a funny way of building rapport.” A spark danced in the inky darkness of her pupils. Warner liked it less and less. He suspected that spark was enough to burn the world down, if someone let it.

  “And anyway, your people are amateurs.”

  “They’re not my people. They’re government agents.”

  She snorted. “Same shit. That’s what government-affiliated means, right? You basically dance to their fiddle, or make the shareholders very unhappy. Regardless. They’re amateurs, Warner. They had the power up way too high. Another jolt, and I pass out. Then they’d have to give me adrenaline to revive me, which would further increase my stamina. Counter-productive.”

  “I’m sure where you’re from, Nero’s methods are considered state of the art,” he said acidly.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Say what you want about his methods, he gets the job done.”

  “That’s it,” Warner said. “I’m finished here.”

  “You’re going to leave me all alone? I’ll be bored.”

  Don’t try that voice with me, sweetheart, he caught himself thinking with an intensity that bordered on violent. Humiliating as this whole thing had been from the start, in that moment, he hated her almost as much as he hated Nero. No, hated wasn’t quite the right word. He resented her. And he hated himself—for not seeing right through her, or for seeing but going along with her game anyway.

  “You’ll have those amateurs for company. I’m sure you won’t be that bored. And I’ll pass your message along, so they’ll turn the power down this time.”

  He turned around to leave. The doors of the decontamination chamber slid open.

  “What he did to your eye, though,” Freya said to his back, “that’s considered cruel and unusual, even for us. I give you that.”

  The doors slid shut behind him just in time. On the other side of the chamber, he was dismayed to find Lyssa hovering over the controls, with nervous-as-ever Russ as her faithful shadow.

  “That went well,” Warner said to defuse the tense atmosphere. And to pre-empt Lyssa’s look of displeasure. “Russ, can you leave us for a minute?”

  The assistant hurried out without so much as a word. He seemed more terrified of Warner than of their lethal test subject, and Warner would have to do something about it. He couldn’t work with people who feared him—he never thought it was a suitable alternative to respect. Lyssa, however…

  “How much did you hear?” Warner asked, to forestall what he suspected would be an unpleasant conversation.

  Lyssa gave him a look. “Enough of it,” she said. “You know I have the whole thing streamed straight to my phone, right?”

  Great.

  “And if you ever fucking turn the cameras off again, I’m removing you from the project, do you understand me?”

  He ignored her. “She knows Nero,” he said flatly. “Is what we say here also being recorded? Or streaming somewhere?”

  “I don’t like your tone,” Lyssa said.

  Oh well. He wasn’t seventeen anymore, or her ward. She’d have to save the stern mommy thing for someone who still gave a fuck.

  “Answer the question.”

  Lyssa sighed. She flicked her thumb and gave some commands to her phone. “We’re good,” she said, looking at him expectantly.

  In the harsh light of this small room with its walls the color of nausea, she looked her age, her eyes sunken and the surgically maintained contours of her face hard and harsh. Then again, he imagined he looked no better. Sweat had broken out along his spine and beaded on his forehead, threatening to run in rivulets down into his eyes any moment.

  “Does this mean I get to vivisect her now?” Lyssa asked.

  “I thought we agreed—”

  “How much of this are you going to put up with, exactly?” Lyssa interrupted. “You’re just going to let her taunt you like that?”

  “Well,” he said, “if I’m going to keep working on my project and get what I need from her, it looks like I have no choice.”

  “Sure you have a choice,” Lyssa hissed. “We make this cunt our lab rat. See what barbs she can come up with when we’re opening her sternum with a bone saw.”

  “She’s already our lab rat,” Warner replied. “And no bone saws are going to be involved until I say so.”

  “In that case, what’s the plan?”

  “I already told you. Well, I told her. But apparently, you were eavesdropping, so…”

  “Eavesdropping? Have you lost your mind? This isn’t just about your project. This is a matter of national security.”

  “As Ramirez never tires of reminding us. But for me, it changes nothing.”

  “You’re serious? You actually meant all that horseshit you told her? About knowing who she is before she dies?”

  Warner nodded. Lyssa’s expensive porcelain veneers ground as her jaw worked. The mask of the benevolent, well-mannered business lady slipped right off, and underneath he could glimpse the she-wolf he’d always known was there. Lyssa had a true gift of sweet-talking shareholders and charming investors, but anyone who ever got on her bad side found out quickly that to underestimate her would be a fatal mistake.

  “I know what this is about,” she said at last. He watched her inner conflict play out on her face as she struggled to maintain at least an appearance of calm. “This was about Nero all along. Of course. How stupid of me.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I had no idea she even knew who Nero was until now.”

  “Well, now you do.” Lyssa heaved a deep sigh. “And if I had any good sense, I’d take you off the project right now.”

  “I thought you already tried that,” he let slip. “Freya refused to talk to anyone else.”

  “What Freya doesn’t understand yet, or maybe she’s just pretending not to, is that I don’t need her to talk. That bone saw is sounding better and better.”

  “Oh? Is that what the Defense Ministry thinks?”

  He knew he’d won the argument before the words even left his mouth. Her face fell. A grimace of anger flashed over her features before dissolving without a trace.

  “They want her alive, don’t they? They want to get information out of her.” Warner glanced at the screen, where Freya had resumed staring into space with a blank expression. If she felt any worry or fear about another round with the amateurs as she’d called them, nothing about her showed any hint of it. “I’d say they have their work cut out for them. Wouldn’t it be better if she agreed to talk of her own free will?”

  Lyssa gritted her teeth again.

  “I’m here,” Warner concluded, “not so much because Freya wants me here but because the Defense Ministry does. Correct?”

  A long silence followed. Lyssa let go of a shuddering exhale.

  Warner raised his eyebrows. He cast a glance at Freya, displayed in high definition on the screen. “Have them rough her up a bit. Then leave her alone to marinate for a few hours.”

  Lyssa’s expression returned to a semblance of normalcy. He even thought she might be smirking. “What do you have in mind?”

  “What I need is to establish rapport. The normal methods aren’t working, but then again, this isn’t a normal situation. So I’m going to go about it in a different way.” His smile was beginning to feel like a rictus. “I'm going to turn off my phone for a few hours--I need to blow off some steam. Call Ramirez, and have him call the good folks the Defense Ministry sent for the purpose. I’m guessing they’re already on standby. Tell them not to hold back. And especially not to lower the voltage.”