“You brought her here?”

  He really shouldn’t have been surprised. Lyssa looked like her evening had been only marginally more normal than his. He’d never seen her without heels and flattering makeup. Not in years, anyway. She paced the long, narrow anteroom on the lowest level of the VogelCorp building, her gait restless and jumpy. He guessed that Lyssa finally found a good enough reason to partake of the fake coffee. Maybe even something stronger. One of their products? Something to stay awake for days without consequences? Well, as Lyssa always said, nothing was really without consequences.

  “Oh, don’t you start, too,” she snapped. She was definitely on something. “I already had to deal with these government douchebags. Well, we have a contract with them. We’ll be the ones doing all the research for them anyway—the material might as well be at our facility.”

  “I’m sure they were thrilled,” he said.

  “Oh, sarcasm. They tried to spin it as a national security issue—”

  “Which it definitely is.”

  “Yes, but it’s our biotech research first,” Lyssa pressed. “I told them that was the priority.”

  “How’d our government watchdog take it?”

  She shrugged. “You mean Captain Ramirez? He tried to threaten me with god knows what, but I’ve dealt with worse. And so have VogelCorp’s lawyers.” She smiled. Warner guessed she’d gone for triumphant but she looked more tired than anything else. “The contract takes precedence, and according to the contract, she’s ours.”

  “Just as well,” Warner said. “The security is as good, possibly better. And on the off chance she escapes, I guess they’d rather we became collateral damage than them.”

  Lyssa shrugged.

  Warner threw a glance at the set of hydraulic doors at the end of the anteroom. “She’s in there?”

  “Yeah. We still have her in restraints, but we’re working on something more versatile as we speak.”

  He wondered what she meant by that.

  “Has anyone—”

  “Nope. No one’s gone in there, and no one’s going to, not if I have anything to say about it. Some of the government guys tried to talk to her through the comm system, but…” she trailed off. “I doubt she’ll talk to anyone. Anyway, that’s not what we need her for, so who gives a damn? She can swallow her tongue for all I care. As long as she’s alive.” She measured him with a look. “And what the hell’s going on with you?”

  His own shirt having vanished into the entrails of Club Lunatik, he had to make do with Quinn’s. It had pit stains and other stains he tried not to think about too much. And the shirt was a couple of sizes too big.

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  “We aren’t even going to try to get information from her?” Warner asked.

  He hoped that Lyssa, in her manic, wired state, would fall for his clumsy attempt to deflect. She did not. She quirked an eyebrow at him, her eyes narrowing.

  “You better not start down this path, Warner. And don’t evade the question. What the hell have you been doing? This is the breakthrough we’ve been waiting for. For years. It’s a completely, utterly unprecedented situation. And meanwhile, you’re out tripping balls at Club Lunatik with a government agent?”

  “Quinn told you?” He did a poor job hiding his dismay.

  “Quinn didn’t have to. You think I was just going to let you traipse around unsupervised, after everything that happened today? And it looks like I was right. You need to get your shit together.”

  A tide of anger rose within him, and with every passing second he was finding it harder to control. Maybe the fault lay with the neuros that, he supposed, still bummed around his system in spite of the electrolyte drink. But not only did he fail to control the anger, he found that he didn’t want to. “You can’t just have me followed. I’m not a teenager anymore, Lyssa.”

  “Exactly. And you shouldn’t be acting like one. You’re a Vogel. That means you have responsibilities.” She looked him over one more time. “I’m not even going to ask what happened to your shirt.”

  “Absolutely nothing happened,” he said through his teeth. “And if it did, I don’t see how it’s any of your business.”

  “I promised your parents I’d look out for you,” she said. “What do you think they’d say if they could see you? See what you’ve done to yourself?”

  “Is this the right moment to bring up my parents? Really, Lyssa?”

  “Yeah. I can’t think of a better moment, actually. Your parents, who were murdered by another Alliance terrorist, may I remind you. But then again, here you are trying to humanize a Unit Six berserker, of all things.”

  “I could have left her a vegetable,” he said, a little disconcerted to be repeating Quinn’s earlier spiel almost word for word. “But I think that would have made you mad.”

  Lyssa heaved a long sigh. She shut her eyelids, then rubbed her eyes in a way she never could have done with her makeup on. “Warner, do you think it might be better if you leave?”

  Her tone was calm. It took him aback.

  “I mean it. Leave. Go home. Or go back to Lunatik or some other equally unhinged place, get your freak on. Clearly, you’re not up for this.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Sure you are. I should have foreseen it—you’re not ready.”

  “You called me in,” he said. His hands curled into fists with him barely realizing it. “You didn’t have to. But you called me in because not only am I more suited for it than anyone else—I’m the best you’ve got. You could bring up some poor bastard who works for me, make him sign a heap of releases and forms, and dump him into a room with a live berserker. Go ahead and do it. I’ll be happy to stand back and watch.”

  A smile appeared on Lyssa’s tired face. “There he is. The Warner I know and love. Good to see him again.” She nodded at the doors. “There’s a control room that’s separate from the actual room with the live berserker, as you put it. That way, she can’t see us. You can try and talk to her through the comm, but I’m warning you, it’s a waste of time.”

  We’ll see about that, he thought. What he’d seen in that operating theater he couldn’t share with anyone, even Lyssa, and he wasn’t even sure he could find the words to express it if there had been anyone to tell.

  “So what do you suppose we do, then?” he asked, keeping his voice carefully controlled.

  Lyssa seemed to ponder it. Her eyes grew hard and cold, her mouth a thin line.

  “I say we vivisect the bitch,” she said at last.

  He didn’t make the comment that danced on the tip of his tongue, even though he really wanted to.

  “Let me in,” he said.