It’s the taste that does it—a taste that reminds her of turned mushrooms and the smell of sour milk.

When she feels the head strap slide away, she realizes she jerked her head before she could stop herself. Did Mattingly see it on that little black camera of his? He’ll spot the broken strap eventually, but he doesn’t have to know how she broke it. Not yet.

With the smallest motion she can muster, she jerks her hand free of the cable attached to the divider, but she still pulls one half of the divider free from the cube and sends it slamming to the floor. She reaches up, pulls the tube from her mouth, and rolls her head to one side. When she spits the rat out of her mouth, the force of her supercharged breath sends the thing hurtling into the stack of crates nearby with a loud crack before it slaps to the floor with deadweight.

Oops.

But by then she’s feeling the brush, brush, brush of the other rats landing on her shoulder and streaming down her body, hears them hitting the container’s metal floor with similar thuds, heading out in a dozen different directions. If she yanks her other hand free of the cable with a single tug, that will reveal her powers for sure, so instead, she rolls to the side facing away from the camera until the strap across her stomach gives way with a soft pop of leather.

The gurney slams to the floor with a thundering crash, kicking one leg out from the Lucite contraption and toppling it. The impact would have knocked the wind out of a normal victim, but she’s fine, more concerned with keeping her fetal position so she can make it look like the straps around each ankle snapped when the gurney turned over and not because she’s gently pressing upward on each one.

She’s free. Slowly, she rises to all fours, coughing with great drama, pretending to be stunned.

“Showtime,” Shannon’s voice says in Luke’s ear.

“Already?”

“Yeah,” she answers curtly.

Shannon’s job isn’t to assess the situation, but she sounds disappointed, and he wonders if it’s a feeling shared inside Kansas Command. More importantly, he wonders what horrors inside that damn truck triggered Charlotte this soon in the process.

These are wonders for a later hour.

His only order of business now is to pull the stopwatch hanging around his neck from inside of his shirt and hit one of the two tiny buttons on top.

“Son of a bitch,” Cyrus whispers.

Sure, he’s got backup straps, a whole box of them, but in all his years of doing this a seedling’s never gotten free during a ride. It’s always been a possibility, of course, and he’s rehearsed responses countless times on his own.

The ride is not without some risk. It’s not supposed to be. It requires practice and calculation. That’s the point. Mother invented this challenge to keep their minds sharp, their appetites focused, so their impulses would be effectively purged by the end of it.

Eyes flitting back and forth between the monitor mounted on his dash and the empty roadway in front of him, Cyrus eases his foot off the gas. He’s driven this route enough to know where all the exits are. If the shit has to hit the fan, this isn’t the worst spot to pull over and clean the blades. Mostly vast farmland with isolated back roads and some hard-packed earth. Not a lot of brush or cover, so he might stick out like a sore thumb during the day. But that’s just one more reason they all ride at night.

Cyrus finds the exit. Once his speed drops to thirty on the off-ramp, he gives another look at the monitor. In compliance with Mother’s rules—nothing that uses Wi-Fi—the camera’s hardwired to the monitor. If he ever gets pulled over for any reason, he can just unplug the thing and drop it into the space behind the passenger seat. But he’s never been pulled over. And technically, he isn’t being pulled over now. There’s just been a little accident. That’s all.

As for the Head Slayer, their collective nickname for the Lucite device designed to slowly erode a seedling’s hard outer shell, well, they’re easy enough to reassemble. That’s part of their beauty. And he’s got plenty of sedatives to knock the ungrateful little bitch out with again.

This is an annoyance, that’s all.

An accident and annoyance.

He should relax. Which means he should stop whispering both words under his breath in a singsongy mantra.

And look at her, he thinks, down on all fours, coughing like the tube was down her throat when it wasn’t really because it doesn’t go that far. She’s a mess. Looks like the Head Slayer’s done at least part of the work. She may not be all the way there yet, not quite as broken as Mother would like, but she’s pretty damn close. Hopefully this strange turn of events hasn’t emboldened her. Hopefully for her sake. The fate of those who reach Mother’s threshold with their egos intact is far worse than what awaits the already broken ones.

The truck starts to rattle as he enters a rough, isolated road heading into empty fields.

Quickly, he turns off the road, wheels bouncing over the rutted dirt. He’d rather keep driving, but he could have trouble getting the truck free if the ground under the tires turns hostile.

He stops.

Relieved to be able to keep his eyes on the monitor now, he reaches into the glove compartment and removes his Taser, the strongest weapon he’s allowed to use on a noncompliant seedling. Another one of Mother’s rules. Fear is, of course, the strongest weapon of all, she reminds them, but if a seedling arrives with grievous physical injuries, then there are consequences for them all.

That won’t be necessary, he assures himself now.

The stupid bitch still can’t manage to stand up. If she had any real brains left, she’d be frantically searching for an exit. Then he sees she’s gripping the sides of the crates intended for phases two and three of their little road trip. Is she peering inside? Can’t tell. She’s still heaving with desperate breaths, another sign she’s barely sane.

The divider’s locked from the other side, but she hasn’t even tried it, and that’s what tells him he’s already managed to do a lot of damage to her, the kind Mother wants.

But when he steps from the parked truck, he wishes Mother would revisit, or maybe relax a little, her rules about internet usage. It annoys him to lose sight of his seedling for even the few seconds it takes him to reach the container’s cargo door. If he had one of those wireless security cameras, he could keep an eye on her through his phone. But then he imagines the sight of her—down on all fours, surrounded by scattering rats—streaming through the servers of some massive company and suddenly Mother’s rule seems very wise.

Taser in one hand, he unlatches and opens the cargo door, then pulls it shut behind him quickly so that the dim security lights inside don’t spill out into the dark field for more than a few seconds.

Ridiculous that the hairs are standing up on the back of his neck, but it’s reflex, he guesses. Just the result of not being able to see what’s on the other side of the divider. But he knows what’s there. One stunned and traumatized woman who still has an opportunity to be freed of her delusions.

He unlocks the divider. He’s barely opened it a few inches when suddenly a snake comes nosing through the opening.

When did the snakes get free? The serpent—charcoal colored and about three feet long—doubles back, recoiling from the heat of Cyrus’s legs. He saw her peering in the crate, but she didn’t open any of them, and they were both standing and still in good shape even after the gurney went over. The retreating snake slides past the body of one of its brothers. Cyrus expects the second snake to start moving away, too. But it doesn’t.