Warner thought he might just wait out the hours in his office, but even though he’d sent everyone away, he could never be sure someone wouldn’t barge in and then report to Lyssa. So, with some reluctance, he went home.

  He’d only been gone a couple of days but couldn’t shake the feeling like he was returning after weeks away. The lock read his biometric signature, a light turned green, and the door unlocked with a soft hiss, welcoming him back.

  Before he crossed the threshold, the loud, irritated meowing reached him. He cursed under his breath—how could he have forgotten? He swiped up his palm for his phone, and a notification he’d ignored told him what he already knew: the food dispenser had run empty.

  “I’m sorry, Bug,” he muttered as he made his way into the kitchen, to the cabinets that held the bag of premium cat food, the only kind suitable for a modded animal. “Okay?”

  The inky blotch of fur blinked its yellow eyes at him, but hunger won over his desire for vengeance—for now. He limped over to the dispenser and started to crunch the dry food.

  Bug was a modcat, the color described in the catalogue as void black. Or at least that had been the intention. Warner still remembered that day at the lab: the fourth-gen litter had a 99.3% success rate. He’d asked about the small containment unit at the other end of the room, blinking red.

  “That,” the tech had told him, “is the 0.7%.”

  The jet-black kitten had a too-short leg, they said, and wasn’t responding to the behavioral stimuli the way he was supposed to. Flagged for disposal. Warner had overridden the commands and opened the containment unit. The kitten hissed.

  “You and me both,” Warner had said. “Let’s see who bites harder, you little freak.”

  Since then, he’d had ample time to second-guess his decision. Like the previous gens, Bug was meant to be docile and good-humored, a therapy cat closely bonded with its humans and attuned to their emotions. But the short leg wasn’t the only thing that had gone haywire: Bug hated people. Almost as if he knew, with some mystical cat instinct, that they were responsible for his current condition. He purred at precisely the wrong times and seemed to derive great joy from it. And his sensory issues meant that his favorite thing in the world was shredding everything that could be shredded, the more expensive the better. Over the last year, Bug hadn’t exactly warmed up to him, but they’d learned to cautiously coexist.

  An empty food dispenser, however, violated the terms of the truce. And Warner knew payback was coming.

  He felt the need for another shower but decided to make himself earn it. The buttons on his shirt annoyed him, his hands slow as if to spite him. He hadn’t had phantom pains in years, but could feel them approaching, tingling in the nerve endings.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  He did some push-ups and chin-ups, but it did nothing to take his mind off the things he didn’t want to think about. A glance at the time told him how infuriatingly little of it passed. So, for lack of any better solution, he attacked the punching bag like it was the cause of all his problems.

  He pummeled the thing into oblivion, but within minutes, he knew he couldn’t keep going. Sweat ran in rivers down the groove of his spine and down his forehead into his eyes, despite the fact that a whole network of concealed fans and condensers regulated the temperature in the apartment and kept it as glacial as he liked it to the tenth of a degree. A set of controls displayed the data on air quality, always precisely balanced, yet Warner became convinced the oxygen was being siphoned out of the room. He couldn’t breathe. His vision began to swim with those black dots, warning of what was to come, and a ringing filled his ears until he could no longer hear even his own frenzied wheezing as he struggled to pull air into his lungs. He was marginally aware of hitting the floor, then the room flipped upside down, the punching bag still swinging from the ceiling on its chain, back and forth and back again like a pendulum. That was the last image to register in his mind before he blacked out.

  When he came to, his phone was beeping irritatingly. Bug sat on his chest, purring like a menace. Obviously disappointed to see Warner open his eyes, the cat bounded to the floor and crab-walked away.

  With a groan, he rolled over. He felt like he’d only blacked out for a few minutes but the time on his phone told him otherwise.

  Holy shit.

  Normally, the phone would pick up on the change in his heart rate, oxygen levels, and blood pressure, and send an automatic notification to the nearest emergency service. But Warner had disabled that function ages ago, which, had he not been a Vogel, would have put him in a legal gray area. As it stood, the biggest problem he faced in that moment was an irate Lyssa on the other end of the line.

  “Yeah.” He sounded, he realized, as crappy as he felt.

  “Where are you? Is everything okay?”

  “Fine. I lost track of time, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, no kidding. You need to leave your sensors on, Warner. How many times have I told you that?”

  “As many times as I told you that I value my privacy.”

  She sighed, a rustle of static in the phone. Indeed, privacy was by far the rarest and most expensive thing Warner could afford. A true luxury even by the standards of Keepers. The moment the doors of his “unit”—a five-thousand-square-foot loft—shut behind him, nothing and no one had access to what went on inside. He knew he risked getting a reputation, something Lyssa never failed to remind him, but he didn’t care. This one thing would never be negotiable.

  “What’s going on over there?” Warner asked. As darkness receded into the farther corners of his mind, clarity took its place, and the memory of everything that happened walloped him like a semi truck. “Do you need me?”

  She made a noise that was impossible to interpret. “Well, your lovely subject has done you proud. Didn’t utter so much as a peep. And they tried. They tried hard.”

  Warner gulped, happy that she couldn’t see him.

  “I guess my question is, do you want them to try even harder?”

  He wondered about the obliqueness. Lyssa was the kind of person to call things their proper names. Was someone listening in on their conversation?

  “No need. I’ll be right there.”

  He should have been looking forward to this. But he didn’t. Not even close.