They killed her.

Even in the worst of my nightmares the torturers had failed to inflict this much pain.

This room was white, not gray, but the doctors in their masks and their Hunter guards were all the same.

But I didn’t care.

For two days, all I saw were Zayda’s eyes widening with shock as the needle gun fired against her throat in the bazaar. Her fragile body collapsing to the deck. The spill of hair falling over her face.

Over and over, I watched her perish in my mind, as they cut and burned and prodded me, not realizing I’d already died.

“And here’s another fiasco.”

The voice taunted me with its familiarity. I knew it from somewhere.

“All we wanted you to do was go find the rest of your miserable pack.” A tall, thin man, face lined with age, paced into the room. He didn’t smell like a doctor. Didn’t smell like much of anything. “But no, you led us straight back to your den. The Daedalus. Obviously, we’ve already acquired that.”

A growl broke through my chest as I placed the voice from the comm booth. Stanton. Zayda’s trainer. Her savior.

Her betrayer.

He wandered to the front of the tilted slab I was strapped to, and I lunged at him, the thick restraints cutting into my forearms.

“You killed her!”

“Who, Zayda?” He raised one elegantly suited shoulder with indifference.

“You weren’t ever supposed to cross paths. Another one of Valsi’s screw-ups. I’ll be reporting him to the Compound, suggesting a replacement is found. Clearly, he’s no longer capable of being even nominally in control of this sector of operations.”

“The Hunters, the kidnappings… this is an Imperial operation?”

Stanton smirked. “Doctor Lyall didn’t build you creatures for smarts, did she? The Empire can’t handle its affairs next to its own heart, much less out here. Besides, the pay is lousy.”

I could only stare in disbelief. Zayda had believed in this man, in the job he’d recruited her for. And it had all been based on deception.

“By the way, she’s not dead. At least, not yet. Valsi thinks she’ll be useful for keeping you in line. I don’t really care.”

He circled around the table again, his cold eyes absorbing everything, discarding information deemed useless.

“I think your entire breed should be eradicated as uncontrollable, a futile experiment. You’re breed isn’t a valid research path.” He smiled, a mouth full of knives and lies. “And I have just the way to demonstrate it to the others at the Compound.”

Not dead yet.

“She’s not dead,” I whispered to myself.

“Not yet, but I expect she will be soon.”

Silently, I strained against the restraints until he passed in front of me again.

I lunged at him, the sudden force breaking my left arm free.

“You first.”

My fingers wrapped around his throat, but he just raised one hand and snapped his fingers.

Out of the shadow of the doorway a Hunter fired a small gun twice, the impact against my chest no more than an irritating pinch.

Stanton didn’t fight, didn’t claw at my hand, just stared calmly as the Hunter fired three more darts.

Waiting.

The first wave of vertigo hit, and my grip slipped.

Stanton stepped away, straightened his collar.

“Thank you. I’ve won a small bet with Valsi. All of his security is weak.”

“What is this?” I slumped back against the table.

A new team of doctors, faces covered with surgical masks, swarmed the room.

“We’ve made some interesting discoveries from your other “brothers” in the last few weeks. It turns out it's not that difficult to suppress your higher reasoning, such as it is, and enhance your more bestial traits.”

The room swam before me, the white uniformed doctors melting in and out of the walls.

“What did you do to them?” I thought I said the words, but everything was fuzzy. It might have only been in my mind, but Stanton answered.

“They refused to cooperate. Base Control decided it would be an amusing punishment to make them fight each other. Make the survivors watch.”

My stomach clenched, and not only from the drug raging in my veins. Flickers of memory, faces of men I would kill for. Had killed for. Now treated like puppets.

“They wouldn’t do it, would they?” I ground out the words. It wasn’t a question. I knew better.

“Annoyingly, they killed themselves, rather than fight.” His teeth flashed, and, for the first time, the smile reached his eyes. I wished it hadn’t.

“That’s why I had them double your dose.”

I sank back, eyes closed. “There’s no one here for me to fight. Unless you’re volunteering.”

His voice faded away as I fell under the dark waves of the drug. “There’s always Zayda.”