He turned the surveillance back on, embarrassed at the slight tremor in his hands. As he did so, he already knew Lyssa was about to beat him to it. He only hoped she hadn’t.

  As the cameras went online, he watched the shift in Freya out of the corner if his eye, and he could only marvel. The glass shook from the impact, and he flinched away out of sheer lifesaving instinct. Her face, on the other side of it, remained the same at first glance, its expression mocking him with its blankness. But the sheer rage in her eyes, in the curve of her nostrils and the corners of her mouth—it could melt metal, a terrifying force barely controlled by the thin layer of reinforced glass.

  “Motherfucker,” Freya growled through gritted teeth.

  In that moment, he felt more than saw the pneumatic doors open. If he’d expected a special-ops team, he was mildly disappointed to see only Lyssa with Ramirez and Quinn on her heels.

  “What the hell was that?” she demanded.

  “Everything’s fine,” Warner said.

  “Yes, Lyssa,” Freya answered in her most unnervingly cheerful voice. “Everything is absolutely fine. Just trading barbs between friends.”

  Lyssa, to her credit, didn’t spare Freya a glance. Instead, she fixed her glare on Warner. “Alarms went off.”

  “As you can see, they were false alarms. Or I’d be missing some limbs by now.”

  Ramirez looked glum. Poor Quinn stared studiously straight ahead, avoiding glancing at Freya’s body at all cost.

  “Why are you smirking like an idiot?” Lyssa hissed. “Do we need additional security or not?”

  “This is more than enough to keep her contained,” he said, but his attempts to stop smirking like an idiot fell short of their goal.

  He followed her to the control room, the doors sliding shut behind them. He glanced at the screen: Freya sat on the floor, her back against the wall of the cage.

  Lyssa sighed. “Could you at least try to remember what this is about? Not your suicidal revenge quest. What we need from her is the technology that made her. And there are ways to get it without her needing to talk at all.”

  “If this is about that vivisection business—”

  “I thought I’d give you a rundown of what we have on her so far.”

  Warner quirked an eyebrow.

  “Oh, did you think I called you in without taking the time to study her first? We did some scans.”

  “On a still-living berserker? Was that sanctioned by the Defense Ministry, or was it your initiative?”

  “At least when I studied her, she was comatose,” Lyssa shot back. “And I thought you’d like to know. Her brain had been altered.”

  “Altered?”

  “Yes. Her amygdala and prefrontal cortex—you still remember from your med school years, don’t you? I know you do. You remember everything. You really should have finished that degree. Anyway—it all looks very neat, probably done with a high-precision laser. But basically, whatever feeling or emotion you think she’s showing, rest assured, it’s all fake. She doesn’t feel. Not just remorse or sadness or the like, but joy and anger are pale echoes of what a normal human being might experience. She fakes these things expertly. That outburst was probably calculated down to the last twitch of an eyelid.”

  For a few moments, Warner was deep in thought.

  “So before that,” he said at last, “she was an ordinary person?”

  “I have no idea,” Lyssa said, exasperation lightly creasing her forehead. “It doesn’t matter because that person is long gone.”

  “And the device? The one I extracted. Do you know what it’s for?”

  Now, Warner could tell, she faltered. Lyssa hated to admit defeat, suffering from overachiever syndrome at least as bad as his own. “We’re piecing it together,” she said. “Literally. It’s a lot more complicated than I thought, and I’d never seen such technology before. But I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

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  “I think, in light of all this, we should issue you a security detail. As well as for all the high-ranking VogelCorp officials, as well as—”

  “What’s going on?”

  Lyssa looked uncomfortable. “You’ve made the questionable decision to humanize her, but you need to stop thinking of her as a person. What she is is a military asset. A top-secret, expensive military asset that we now have in our possession, and it won’t be long before—”

  “Shut up.”

  “What? What the hell—”

  Then she noticed what he was looking at. She turned to face the screen on the opposite wall. Out of the corner of his eye, Warner saw her face grow ashen. “What the fuck?”

  Oh, wouldn’t he like to know. As he watched, overcome with growing alarm, Freya pulled the periwinkle number over her head. She ripped it in half with nary an effort.

  “Fuck,” Lyssa said under her breath. Her phone flickered above her palm as she barked short, angry commands into it. Without waiting, Warner headed for the pneumatic door.

  By the time he made it back to the cage, Freya had blocked off the second of the two vents in the lower corners. Within seconds, the operating panel began to blink red.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Warner snapped. He knew exactly what she was doing and why. The back of his neck prickled. He felt lightheaded, with a hollowness in the pit of his stomach, like on a roller coaster right before the big drop. The headache dissolved, or maybe he just forgot about it.

  Freya only now seemed to notice he was there. She held his gaze, saying nothing.

  So she made her move. Now was his turn.

  “Make her stop, Vogel.”

  Only now did he remember that the two of them, Ramirez and Quinn, were still in the room. Shit. That complicated things. He could risk his own life, but to make that kind of decision for them?…

  “Make her stop,” Ramirez repeated in a growl.

  And how the fuck am I supposed to do that, Warner thought. “Freya, this isn’t the answer.”

  The sadness in her eyes struck him, the absolute last emotion he expected to see. She held his gaze and shrugged.

  Inwardly, Warner cursed himself out with every word he could think of. He’d been right, of course, she had nothing to lose, no other way out. She would die in that cage.

  “Listen, we can work something out. Unplug the vents. Suffocation isn’t a nice death.”

  He felt stupider with every inane fucking word that left his mouth. A nice death? A nice fucking death? What nicer death did he have to offer her?

  “Vogel,” Ramirez snapped. Warner wished he’d shut the fuck up before he did something they’d both regret. “We need her alive. We have orders from the Defense Ministry.”

  “To hell with your orders,” Warner muttered.

  “Oh, yeah? I don’t fucking answer to you, no matter what you or Lyssa think. We need her alive, so make it happen!”

  “What do you want me to do? Go in there?”

  “Or I will.”

  That’s not the threat you think it is, Warner thought. The control panel was now lit up redder than the party district. He watched the oxygen levels inside the cage drop—fast, way faster than he imagined they would. He should have made that damn cage bigger.

  “Freya,” he said, “don’t do this.” Was he pleading with her now? Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

  He watched, helpless, as she slid down the glass wall to the floor. Her eyelids fluttered. The oxygen level had now reached a critical low.

  “Don’t do this,” he repeated.

  With the last of her energy, she raised her hand and flipped him off.

  On the periphery of his vision, Quinn made a few hesitant steps forward. Freya now lay slumped in the corner of the cage.

  “I need her alive as much as you do,” Warner said. “But this is suicide.”

  “I don’t care who—somebody is going in there.”

  “Are all of you out of your fucking minds?” Lyssa’s voice erupted from the speakers. “This is a trap! You open that door—you’re as good as corpses. Just let the bitch suffocate.”

  “It makes no difference to you,” Ramirez snarled. “But we need information. It’s crucial. The things she knows—”

  “She’s not going to talk anyway!”

  “I was starting to get through to her,” Warner muttered. “You need her alive, I need her alive. That’s two out of three.”

  “Hey!” Quinn protested feebly, but Ramirez’s glare shut him up.

  What happened next registered with him in snapshots. Not just because it happened so fast—on the contrary, to him it felt like time had slowed beyond a crawl.

  It was Ramirez who unlocked the cage using his government ID. Warner only made it as far as the entrance. She moved so fast that Warner didn’t actually see her do anything—one moment she was slumped on the floor, and the next, she wasn’t. Quinn hadn’t even had time to react or make a sound. He hit the wall and collapsed like there wasn’t a single muscle in his body. Another snapshot—Ramirez followed suit. Unlike Quinn, he’d had time to reach for his weapon, but that time hadn’t been enough. Another heartbeat later, he lay crumpled at her feet, and she shrugged into his jacket, slipping the gun into the pocket as she did.

  That left just the two of them, the last two people standing in the room. She advanced towards him at a normal pace. There was no mistaking her for anything close to normal, though, her every move smooth and calculated, fluid, like an ethereal being.

  He thought he might say something, maybe some last words of his own. But it seemed pointless. Her dark gaze locked onto his once again, but this time, there was nothing between them, no glass. She came closer.

  He felt a kind of giddy relief knowing that this, finally, was how he would die. He’d always known, deep down, that it would be like this. His whole life led him to this moment, his whole fucking life with all its ironic plot twists, all the shit he wished he could forget. He should have known that ever since the room with the bright surgical lights, he’d been living on borrowed time, and that time had just run out. All this, for this. Death by berserker. Inevitable.

  She came close, stopping just inches from him. He wondered why she wasted time like this—in the control room, Lyssa had to have summoned a special ops team or something worse by now. Freya looked at him and smiled. He couldn’t make himself look away from her face. Her face, the last thing he’d ever see.

  She winked.

  Next thing he knew, the heel of her hand connected with his sternum. Pain exploded outward from his chest, and he was barely aware of flying backwards until he hit the wall. By the time the red haze cleared from his vision, she was long gone.