Quinn handed over a small glass vial with a flourish. Warner held it up to the light. Within the vial, a pale blue powder shimmered faintly. He turned the vial until he could see the logo of VogelCorp the size of a grain of rice etched into the glass.

  “It’s legit,” he conceded.

  “Right? Say what you want about VogelCorp, you can’t fault them for the quality of their product. Bottoms up!”

  Warner winced as the younger man snapped the top of the vial off with his teeth. He hesitated. The club pulsed with a deep bass beat that couldn’t be called music. The lights throbbed. His head throbbed. All around them, nearly naked people writhed as if possessed by a strange hive mind.

  Warner brought the vial to his lips, snapped off the top with his teeth. The neuros slithered out almost at once, finding their way up his nostril. He felt a faint vibration as they burrowed themselves into his mucous membranes, and then it was like nothing happened. The only evidence was the vial he still held in the palm of his hand. Everything looked and felt the same.

  He knew it wouldn’t stay that way for long. When his father first developed the technology, fast acting was the biggest draw. Enough to compensate for the invasive nature of the thing.

  Quinn tossed the empty vial on the floor, and Warner thought he could hear it being ground to dust under Quinn’s shoe. He felt it in his bones, even though realistically, there was no way he could.

  I really should have asked what these specific ones do, he thought, but already his mind grew foggier, less sharp. His reliable inner monologue began to stammer and stutter before fading out altogether. Which disorder of the mind was this capsule meant to treat? Schizophrenia? Tourette’s? Conditions most people wouldn’t even have heard of, in part thanks to this product. And since the effects were only temporary, soon enough, neuros became popular for recreational use.

  VogelCorp could have made a permanent version, but it wouldn’t be good for the bottom line. The shareholders wouldn’t like it.

  Warner’s back broke out in sweat, and his shirt stuck to his skin. His mind became fixated on the sensation, unable to shake the discomfort or move on to something else. Recreational use of a treatment for a condition you didn’t have could have oddly random effects, and he figured this was one of them. He rolled his shoulders, stretched his arms. He managed to forget that his back was still held together with medical tape and some brand-new scar tissue.

  When he glanced over at Quinn, he wasn’t too surprised to see him stripping off the jacket and then the collared shirt. Now that he stood there naked to the waist, Warner could see the shimmering ink that covered his back. Scales, like a lizard or a snake, that rippled and glowed, following his every movement. The ink had to have cost a fortune, and now he was drawing looks. Warner, his mind not unpleasantly slowed down by the neuros, barely had time to blink, and already his accidental companion had a half-naked girl on one arm.

  Great. Just great. He could only hope that once the neuros wore off, the mental image would go along with their vanishing effects.

  Warner had no memory of getting up from the bar, yet he found himself wandering the club, unable to locate the exit—or the entrance. As his shit luck would have it, he wandered right into the playroom just as the neuros were reaching their full effect, and the cacophony of moans and screams turned into something physical and clingy like a clot of invisible spider web, a solid thing in which he became trapped. On the dais closest to him, a man was being flogged with what looked like a barbed metallic whip that glinted in the red light. The woman who was doing it had her feet modified into the shape of hooves.

  That’s how it is, Warner mused, his thoughts unraveling and rethreading together at leisure. The vast majority of the population had never even seen blood. And for the small percentage who had, it was just another way to get off, their imaginations as overfed and blasé as their ability to physically feel.

  Someone was tearing at the collar of his shirt. He tried to focus, but the human shape remained blurry, no features, no face, not even a distinctive silhouette. For a moment, he became devastatingly sure this was last night, and everything that happened since had been a figment of his imagination. A daydream in the haze of neuros. It wouldn’t surprise him if it turned out he’d just made up this whole elaborate dream in his head. The breakfast with Lyssa, the call. The woman from last night, the Unit Six operative he’d just saved from certain death. All of it, a hallucination his brain concocted, because that’s how he liked to torture himself. After all, he was the best at it. No whips required.

  Stitches popped on his shirt as his faceless companion ripped it away. The overheated air still felt strangely cooling on his bare skin. When he tried to look at the person in front of him, he knew in his bone marrow that it was not his mystery girl. His mystery girl who was, of course, a Unit Six berserker just like Nero.

  Maybe she, too had been a part of the illusion. How he’d like to believe that now, but his lacerated back tugged him back to reality.

  The round surgical lamp flickers on with a hum. Blinding. His body feels like a skin suit filled with cotton wool. He can’t move.

  “My name is Nero. It’s fitting, don’t you think?”

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  “The guy who watched Rome burn.”

  Warner has no idea what he’s in for. He thinks he does, but he has no idea.

  The ringing in his ears drowned out everything. He had to get out of here. Now. He began to move without knowing in what direction he needed to go, or even being sure he was actually moving.

  “Yes, the very same. I think we’re going to be friends, you and I. For the next little while. As much as I’d like to tell you your fairy godmother will have you out of here in no time, somehow, I doubt it.”

  That brings some clarity, or so he thinks. “What do you want, Nero?”

  That’s when Nero moves, so fast that Warner’s eyes can’t follow. Pain lances Warner’s left arm, cuts off his air. He doesn’t need to look to know Nero just snapped his radius like a matchstick.

  Nero patiently waits for his screams to subside. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have money, you have clout, you have everything, like every other Keeper out there. Except it’ll get you nowhere because you don’t have anything I want.” He paces. Warner tries to follow him with his gaze, but his vision still swims, and every move is too fast, too fluid. Hardly even human.

  “And just because I told you my name doesn’t mean you have permission to use it. Or ask me questions. That’s something you’ll have to earn.”

  Warner’s arm is throbbing with pain. He can’t move it because it’s secured in two places, and he feels it swelling because the straps cut into his flesh.

  “Anyway, no need to speak. I have a surprise for you—Unit Six berserkers can read minds! Don’t believe me?”

  Warner says nothing. He probably couldn’t even if he tried.

  “Well?”

  Terror wells in him. “I—I believe you.”

  This only gets a laugh from Nero. “Wow, rolled over so quickly. Let me prove it. Right now you’re thinking, fuck, there goes my future as a neurosurgeon. Hope he doesn’t go for my right…”

  Somehow, Warner now found himself in the restroom. Here at least, there was a real, white light. The effect of the neuros seemed to recede a bit. Warner found himself face to face with his mirror reflection and nearly recoiled. A smear of something red ran down the side of his face onto his neck and chest. The scars that started below his collarbone were an alien landscape in the light.

  “Are you okay, man?”

  God, he never in his life would have guessed he’d be so happy to see Quinn from Psyops. Quinn looked a little worse for wear, with a distinctive black eye, split lip, and a dreamy, self-satisfied grin.

  “Those neuros seem to have hit you like a sledgehammer. I turned around for one minute and you were gone.”

  He tried to explain that he hadn’t meant to go anywhere, but control of his own vocal cords proved elusive.

  “Anyway. Look, it’s nice, but I don’t think it’s for me. I like my action a little more—straight-forward, if you know what I mean—”

  Warner knew what he meant, or at least he thought he knew, but in that moment, the neuros surged through him once again, and he could no longer tell whether Quinn was real or another phantom conjured up by his imagination.

  Better him than fucking Nero, he had time to think before the shadow world swallowed him up again.

  This time, he found himself looking down at his hands. They seemed to belong to someone else, and when he flexed his fingers, they were slow to obey.

  A long time ago, someone—he’d forgotten who—looked at his palm and told him his lifeline was fractioned into three. This meant he would have three distinct lives. Warner had no idea what that meant and wouldn’t for some time.

  These are not my hands, he thought. In a sense, it was true. The bones in his right had been crushed to the point where they couldn’t be salvaged. So it was high-grade titanium, the fruits of his father’s years of work.

  Without it, there would have been no med school, and he wouldn’t have been able to save a life that afternoon. That had to count for something. No matter whose life it was.

  The irony of it.

  He would have liked to know the why of it all, why those threads of fate wove themselves into the pattern that they did. Nero effectively put an end to his first life fifteen years ago. So that now, years later, he could save the life of another Unit Six soldier? He spent a decade and a half wondering why they let him go. Why Nero didn’t just kill him. No one else had previously survived an encounter with Unit Six. Not until him, Warner Vogel.

  Was this the reason? Was this why he didn’t die back at Nero’s torture chamber?

  No. He refused to believe it. Lyssa was right, there was no such thing as fate. He stared into the lines on the palms of his hands, hands of which most of the bone and tissue were no longer his, and that fractured lifeline, those three lives, was nowhere to be found.

  “Okay, you earned your question now. You get only one, so think hard.”

  By then, he can barely speak. His mind is in the process of shutting down, collapsing in on itself. He’s surprised when the only question he can still hold in his thoughts somehow bubbles to the surface. Even then, he barely recognizes his own voice. Why? Why is this happening to me?

  He will never forget what Nero does next. He’ll manage to forget a lot of things over the years, but this is one of those moments that will remain in sharp focus. Nero circles the chair to which Warner is strapped. Warner doesn’t hear him move, although by then the rush of blood in his ears would have drowned out his steps anyway. Nero just appears in his field of vision once again. He leans close and cradles Warner’s face in his hands in a gesture that strikes him with its perverse tenderness. Nero smiles.

  “Because you’re you, of course.”

  The buzzing of his phone momentarily snapped him out of it. He flinched, determined to ignore it, and after a few seconds, it went away. Hell, maybe that had been his imagination too.

  “Warner,” called a familiar voice. “Warner! Here. Drink these electrolytes. They’ll speed up your metabolism, get you rid of these damn neuros.”

  He took the vial Quinn pushed into his hand and emptied it without thinking too much.

  “Sorry.” Quinn’s face hovered uncomfortably close. “My bad. Let me at least make it up to you.”

  “Hmm?” He hadn’t yet regained his ability to speak, but he could feel the electrolytes working. The brain fog slowly but surely began to recede.

  “I was gonna say the night is young, but I think it’s pointless, the bitch is showing her wrinkles. Let’s not waste what’s left of it. I’ll get a room at one of the one-nighters. It’s on me. I might not have the Vogel fortune at my fingertips, but I clean up. We get that room, and then we can do whatever the hell you want until morning. You with me?”

  “No thank you,” he choked out. “I’m very flattered, but I think you should find someone else.”

  The buzzing returned. It was a message this time, not a call, and he thought he just might be able to stomach looking at it. With a flick of his thumb, his screen appeared, shimmering.

  I don’t know where the hell you are, but you better get over here. She’s awake.