My head hurts. And someone’s groaning. When I lift my hand to my forehead, the groaning sound changes, and I realize it’s coming from me.

What the hell?

I open my eyes and drop my hand, because my entire arm feels heavy, but instead of hitting the mattress, it lands with a soft thud on warm, bare flesh.

Carson. He must have fallen asleep with me. I roll toward him, then freeze. The arm on the sheet between us is bulging with muscle, as it should be, but it’s several shades darker than Carson’s skin.

Vaughn Coleman.

What the hell?

Pulse racing, I sit up and scoot across the bed, and the jostling of the mattress beneath me wakes him up.

Vaughn groans, blinking up at the ceiling while he rubs his forehead. He must have a headache too. “Damn it,” he mutters. But he doesn’t look surprised to find himself here—until he sits up and sees me. “Oh, fuck,” he whispers. “Lilli? You okay?”

“What’s happening?” I drag the sheet with me, covering myself until I spot my shirt draped over the bottom of the mattress. So I grab it and pull it over my head. “Why are you here?”

“Because this place is fucked up.” He stands, and I realize he’s wearing nothing but a snug pair of shorts. “Let me find my…” But after a quick scan of the room, he throws his hands up and huffs. “They took my clothes. Motherfuckers took my goddamn clothes.”

I don’t ask him why. I’m starting to understand. This is what Carson was trying to warn me about. What he was trying to prevent. “Where’s Carson?”

“My guess is that he’s in his cell, waking up with a dry mouth and a headache. From the gas.”

“They drugged us?”

Vaughn points up. “From the vents. That’s largely my fault. Tranquilizer darts won’t penetrate my skin.”

I squint at him as I feel around for my pants. But they’re gone. “Your skin looks normal.” There’s no sign of the thick armor Carson gets when he’s threatened.

“Feels normal too. But it’s not.” He turns and heads back toward me, and I scuttle away from him, pressing myself into the corner at the head of the bed. “Hey? What’s wrong?” Vaughn frowns. “I’m not going to hurt you, Lilli.”

“Carson said you might not be able to…help it.”

Vaughn frowns. “I heard what he said, but he’s wrong. If I wanted anything from you, I wouldn’t be looking for something to cover myself with, now would I?”

“I guess not.” But who knows how long we’ll be locked in here? And what all could change before they let us out.

“Maybe they at least gave us a deck of cards, or something…” Vaughn mumbles as he heads for the panel in the wall. “I’d never even seen an honest-to-god deck of cards until they locked us in here, with no electronics of any kind.” He pulls open the panel and curses. “Nothing but fresh bedding. Not even a change of clothes. Usually they at least give us clean clothes.”

“Usually?”

“Yeah.” He slams the panel shut in disgust. “When they lock us in here with Tirzah. Lieutenant Dreyer.”

I pull the sheet over my lap, hiding my bare legs while I watch Vaughn cross the room toward the bedside table. “You’ve been locked in here with her?”

He gives me an odd look, then he pulls open the drawer without answering. “Food.” He digs a couple of MRE packets from the drawer and sets them on the table. “At least there’s that.”

“I mean, Carson said they were trying to…breed her. But he didn’t say who with.” Vaughn glances at me, then looks away quickly. “Does she…like you?” I ask.

He sits on the edge of the bed with a sigh. “It’s not like that. Tirzah’s great, but I don’t feel like that about her. None of us do. She—” Vaughn takes a deep breath, then he meets my gaze. “She had a man. Love. She had love,” he amends. “He was one of us. But then she lost him. I mean, we all lost him, but it was especially hard for Tirzah. I don’t think she’ll ever look at anyone like that again. No matter who Brennan locks her in here with.”

“And the pheromones don’t…make that hard?”

“Pheromones?” Vaughn blinks at me. Then understanding crashes over him. “Oh, god. That’s what’s going on. Why Carson’s beast is being such a…beast. Brennan had this theory, but she’d never actually managed to elicit that theoretical pheromone production.”

“She didn’t elicit it this time either,” I tell him. “It just kind of happened. And that triggered the weird shit going on in my body, and Dr. Brennan said…” I shrug.

“She said that the signals your body’s sending out would turn the rest of us into…the Captain?”

Another nod. “Into the beast, anyway.”

“Well, either she was wrong, or she was lying. Because you’re awful damn cute, kiddo. But I have no urge to touch you. And even if I did, I wouldn’t do that to the captain. Or to you.”

Tears fill my eyes, and I blink them away. “Thank you.”

“No need. But we are stuck in here for a while, so why don’t we eat some—”

“Coleman!” Something thuds from my right, and I turn to see Carson pounding on the transparent front wall of the room, his face scarlet with fury. There’s a deep aggressive sound rumbling up from his throat. “Get the fuck over here.”

“Sotelo…” Vaughn approaches the wall as if he doesn’t think it’ll hold. As if he expects Carson to break through it and attack him. “You need to calm down. There’s nothing going—”

“Don’t you touch her!” His eyes are glowing. He throws his fist at the transparent metal wall, and I flinch at the impact, but the wall holds. There isn’t even a scratch, despite the fact that Carson’s knuckles spikes have just erupted from his hands.

“Carson…” I crawl off the bed and pad across the floor toward him, barefoot, but he starts growling again with one look at my bare legs. “Hey. Look at me. It’s okay.”

“It’s not okay,” he growls, as his face begins to…thicken. His eyes shine with a deep silver glow. Bone blades grow from the seams in his forearms and sharp spires erupt from his elbows. “It is not…fucking…okay!” He pounds on the wall again and again, knuckle spikes screeching against the transparent metal.

I flinch with every impact, backing slowly away from the wall. He looks…terrifying.

“Captain!” Tirzah appears in the hall to his right, and he spins to face her, chest puffed out, fists clenched.

“Stay back,” he growls. Then he turns back to the wall and starts pounding again. “Let me in!” he shouts, glaring over my head at where one of the cameras in the “breeding room” watches us all. “Open the goddamn door, Brennan!” He hits the wall again, and I jump, startled. Then I back farther away, staring at him in shock.

“Captain!” Tirzah shouts again. But she keeps her distance. “This isn’t helping. You’re scaring the shit out of her.”

“Sotelo, stand down.” Vaughn’s voice is calm, but he approaches the wall with tension in his frame. On alert. “There’s nothing going on in here. You know that. You can see that.”

“Then where the hell are your clothes?”

“They took them! That’s not on me, that’s on Brennan.”

“Brennan!” Carson backs up, then runs full speed at the wall, ramming it with his shoulder. “Let me in! You can’t do this to her!”

“Captain!” This time Tirzah darts in front of him, forcing him to skid to a stop to keep from smashing her into the wall. “Think about what you’re doing to her,” she whispers fiercely. “You can’t control what Brennan does, but you can control what you do.”

But I don’t think he can. Not without help. So I take a step forward and catch his gaze over her shoulder.

“Lilli.” He shoves Tirzah aside and plants both palms on the clear wall.

I move closer, breathing deeply to slow my heart rate, because he can sense my distress, and it feeds his. “It’s okay. Vaughn’s not interested in me, and I’m not interested in him. Locking us in here together won’t change that.”

“You don’t know that,” he growls softly, and on my left, Vaughn slowly backs away from the wall, obviously trying not to distract Carson with any sudden movements. “Brennan said—”

“She lied.” I hold his gaze. “Or she was wrong.”

“How do you know that’s true?”

“How do you know it isn’t?”

“What about the capsules? Did they inject you with a capsule? Check your arm.”

“What?”

Carson looks over my head at Vaughn. “Anything?”

I turn to see Vaughn feeling the fleshy part of his forearm, just to one side of the seam in his skin. He shakes his head, then checks the other arm. “Nope,” he says. “No lumps and no puncture marks.”

“What am I looking for, exactly?” I ask as I feel around on my own arm.

“When they lock us in there, they inject a time-release capsule into each of us. A stimulant, to keep us…aroused.”

“Oh my god.” Some sick clients gave my friend Mallory a stimulant, before she escaped forced prostitution into zone three. That shit is a nightmare. But I can’t see or feel any sign of an injection in my arm, other than where they took blood this morning. So I check my other arm. “There’s nothing there,” I tell Carson.

“I think they’re truly trying to test this biochemical thing,” Vaughn adds. “But we don’t seem have much of that in here either.”

I lay my hand flat on the wall, against Carson’s, as if there were nothing between us. “Vaughn doesn’t have this mating frenzy. I don’t smell good to him, and I can’t smell him at all, except for his soap and deodorant. I think she lied to you. Or, at the very most, she just threw us in here to test a theory. Or to piss you off. Either way, there is nothing going on in here.”

“But—”

“Stop it.” I stare up at him. “If you care about me, you’ll put the beast on a leash and stop enabling his fucking temper tantrums. Okay?”

“I’m trying,” he growls through clenched teeth.

“Put all your war toys away,” I say with a glance at his forearms.

“I can’t—”

“Try,” I insist. “There’s no one here to use them on. Everyone here cares about you.”

“Everyone?” His gaze bores into mine, and the vulnerability in it makes me ache deep inside.

“Everyone, Carson.”

And finally, he leans forward with his forehead pressed against the glass, above and between his palms. His eyes close, and I can see the effort this is costing him in the lines on his forehead. In the clench of his jaw.

Slowly, the weapons recede. Which is kind of fascinating to watch.

“Thank you. Now I want you to go eat something. Or take a nap. Or play cards with Tirzah and the guys.”

“I’m just going to stay here and hang out with you.” He sinks to the floor and sits crosslegged in front of me. Staring into the room. He’s not hanging out. He’s standing guard.

I glance at Tirzah over his shoulder, silently begging her for help, but she can only shrug. So I sink onto the floor facing Carson, my bent knees pressed to the transparent wall. “So, your plan is to watch us the whole time? You don’t trust us?”

“It’s not about trust. If something changes between the two of you—chemically—I want to be here to…help. To distract you from the urges.”

“Carson, even if later something changes, and there are urges, that doesn’t mean we have to act on them. I’m not interested in Vaughn. I only want you.”

“You… You want me?”

I lift one brow at him. “Is that not obvious?”

“Then why push me away?”

“That’s not because I don’t want you. It’s because I don’t want a baby. I can’t do that to myself again.”

He lowers his voice until I can hardly hear him, trying to keep the cameras from picking up his words. “But we won’t be in here forever. I swear on my life I would never let our child be born in a lab.”

I take a deep breath. Then I meet his gaze and try—again—to explain. “Eldon wasn’t born in a lab, and I still lost him. This isn’t about the lab. It’s about what I can survive. I can live on a prison planet. I can live without hot showers or cold drinks. I think I can live without ever seeing the sun again, if that’s what Brennan has in store for us in this fucking place. But I can’t survive losing another child. And the only way to make sure that doesn’t happen is not to have a child. That’s my decision. You have to decide whether or not you can live with that, if you want to be with me.”

Something flickers across his face. Behind his eyes. That’s a look I’ve started to associate with those moments when the beast is whispering in his ear, and this time, I’m glad I can’t hear it. Because I’m pretty sure the beast is telling him that I’ll change my mind. That if he just hangs in there, he’ll eventually get what he wants.

“You don’t have to decide now,” I tell him.

“I’ve already decided. I just want you, Lilli. Anything else that comes along is gravy.”

“Nothing else will come along,” I insist.

“Okay. But if it does…it’ll be gravy.”

I bite off a groan. “Fine. Now will you please go play cards and let me get some sleep?”

He hesitates for several seconds. Then he nods. We both stand, and he looks past me at Vaughn. “I’m trusting you.”

Vaughn huffs. “It’d be nice if that didn’t sound like a threat. You know you can trust me.”

Carson nods. He touches his hand to the transparent wall one more time, then he heads down the hall.

I catch Tirzah’s gaze before she can follow him, and I wave her forward. “Don’t let him come back here,” I whisper.

“Why? Do you think…?” She glances at Vaughn, then back at me.

“I don’t know. But if that happens, he sure as hell doesn’t need to see it.”

Tirzah nods. Then she follows Carson down the hall.

I spin around on my butt and let my head fall back against the wall. “Well, I guess that could have been worse.”

Vaughn shrugs. “Also could have been better.”

I push myself to my feet and head for the bed, where I straighten the covers, then prop the only pillow against the wall. “You mentioned something about food?” I say as I crawl across the mattress and lean against the pillow.

“Yeah. Vegetarian stew or spaghetti?” Vaughn asks, reading from the two MRE envelopes on the bedside table.

“Neither. But if there’s anything chocolate in there, I’ll take it. I swear, I miss coffee shops and bakeries worse than anything.”

“Games,” Vaughn says. “Immersive play. It’s weird to think that when we were on leave, I used to voluntarily immerse myself in shit like this, for fun. The kind of game where you’re trapped in some kind of building and have to figure a way out with nothing but a screwdriver and a melting cube of ice.”

“That does sound familiar...” I aim a pointed glance around the locked room. “Except for the ice. Oh! I also miss ice.”

Vaughn laughs. “Brownie or marble pound cake?”

“Brownie,” I say, and he rips into one of the envelopes, then pulls out a smaller packet and tosses it to me. “Do you mind if I join you? I promise to keep my distance. There’s just nowhere else to sit in here, except the toilet, and I draw the line at eating in the bathroom.”

“Make yourself comfortable. You have just as much right to the bed as I have.”

Vaughn settles onto the mattress and leans against the other wall, then he grabs the open MRE packet. “So, you really don’t want kids?”

My hand clenches around the brownie packet as I tear it open.

“Sorry if that’s too personal.” He pulls the spaghetti packet out and rips it open. “I couldn’t help overhearing.”

“That is personal. But no, I don’t want kids.”

“But you do want Sotelo?”

“That’s...complicated.” I break a chunk off of the corner of what I can only dubiously acknowledge as a brownie. “I like him. I’m attracted to him. And the chemistry is undeniable. But I worry that’s all this is. That once this mating frenzy passes, he’ll lose interest. If that’s the case…” I shrug. “What’s the point?”

Vaughn’s golden-eyed gaze focuses on me, his head slightly cocked to the side. As if I’m a riddle he can’t quite figure out. “Lilli, he won’t lose interest. In you, or in kids.”

“How do you know that? He said this has never happened before. This...mating frenzy. To any of you.” I break off another hunk of chocolate, but I can’t quite bring myself to eat it. “Once this is over, he might finally understand how crazy it is to meet some girl in the woods and decide you want to spend the rest of your life with her. Once I don’t smell so good.”

“It’s not the way you smell.” Vaughn sets his food down and turns to face me. “I mean, I can’t smell you, but I can see what your scent is doing to the Captain.”

“Really? You really can’t?”

“No. You can’t smell me either, right?” he asks, and I shake my head. “And that’s why I think Brennan’s theory is wrong. Whatever you two are...excreting, it’s only for each other. I don’t know why that is, or how it’s happening. But I think it’s entirely possible that you’ve got the cause and the effect mixed up. Like...reversed.”

“What do you mean?” I ask around another bite of my brownie.

“You’re assuming that the reason you two can’t keep your hands off each other is because of this pheromone he’s putting off. This mating frenzy. But neither of you seems to have considered that the pheromones and the frenzy could have been triggered by an initial attraction. That your bodies decided you should be together because your hearts, or your minds, or your souls, or whatever it is that makes that decision for us under normal circumstances, had already decided. That this mating frenzy is not the cause of your attraction, but a symptom of it.”

I frown, trying to wrap my mind around that possibility. “You think his drive to…mate is because he already liked me?”

“And because he received some kind of reciprocal signal—possibly subconsciously—from you. Also, I think ‘liked’ is putting it mildly.”

“So, we connected initially, and that triggered his pheromone production. Which sent my body into this mindless baby-making mode. It’s like one big cycle, feeding itself.”

“An ouroboros,” Vaughn says. “But to be fair, most natural processes are.”

“What’s an oror…?”

“Ouroboros. The snake devouring its own tail. It ends right where it begins again. Which means it never truly ends, nor did it ever have a true beginning. It’s a symbol for the cyclical nature of the universe. Also, for the concept of infinity. Of always and forever.”

“You think Carson and I are…always and forever?”

“I think that’s a distinct possibility. Especially if you believe in fate. Which I do.” Vaughn shrugs and digs in his envelope for another bite.

But his theory sends chills up my spine. “I don’t believe in fate. I can’t, because that would mean that everything that’s happened to me was meant to be. And I just can’t believe that.” Why would fate give me a son, only to rip him from my arms?

“I don’t believe that either. I believe that fate is the universe’s hope for us. What it wants for us. What it knows we need. But it can’t account for everything, because we’re individuals with our own thoughts and minds. Even those of us who think we have no choice are making decisions. And those sometimes work against us.”

“You think I lost my son because of some decision I made?” That chill digs deeper into me, sinking claws of ice into my soul, where that very fear—and crippling guilt—has lived for years.

“I don’t think it’s that simple. I can’t imagine you were the only one whose decisions affected your son.”

A bitter taste floods my mouth. “I wasn’t.”

“And that’s life’s true tragedy: the fact that other people have the power to affect our fate. To sort of…tug us off the path. But even then, fate has a way of correcting course, when we let it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that everything that’s ever happened to either of you—both the good and the bad—has led to you both winding up here. Finding each other. And the truth is that Sotelo’s been waiting for you his whole life.”

“What? How’s that?”

He picks up his packet again and digs out a bite of pasta with his spork. “How much do you know about Tethys?”

“I know that’s Carson’s homeworld. I assume you’re all from there?”

Vaughn nods as he chews. “What else?”

“It’s mostly water, right? Carson said something about skyscrapers and green seas.”

“Yeah.” Vaughn reaches for a water pouch to wash his bite down. “Less than five percent of the surface of Tethys is dry land. Because of that, we’ve had to build up. There are people born on our homeworld who live and die without ever touching the ground. Without ever even seeing it. Because the buildings are so tall and so densely packed, things on the ground level are...well, they’re not nice. There isn’t enough light for anything to grow, other than mold. The more credits you have, the higher up you live. And if you have enough credits, you can get a view of the ocean.”

“There’s only one?”

“Yes. One ocean. And it’s pretty much everywhere. But my point is that even with us building up, rather than out, Tethys has been at max capacity for generations. You have to have a license to have a kid, and to get a parenting license, you have to be married. Which also requires a license. And both of those licenses are only available with full citizenship, which requires a minimum of seven years of service to the government. Most men choose military service. Most women choose civilian government jobs. Dreyer is the exception, and she’s damn good at what she does. What she did, anyway. But we were all there for the same reason.”

“Citizenship?”

Vaughn nods. “Tethys hasn’t had planet-side war in more than a century, so it rents out its military for profit. To fight in other planets’ wars. Almost everyone who signs up is working toward citizenship, because that’s the only way you’re allowed to have a family.”

“Holy shit. But what if someone just…gets pregnant? What the hell could the government do about that?”

Vaughn’s golden eyes seem to darken. “Mostly, they stop it from happening in the first place. Everyone on Tethys is sterilized at puberty. If, as adults, you’re able to earn citizenship and afford marriage and parenting licenses, the government will reverse the procedure. But after the baby is born, they do a more permanent job of it, because every couple is only allowed one child.”

“Are there never…accidents? Procedures that don’t take?”

“Rarely. And when that happens, if the government finds out, they’ll terminate the pregnancy. Forcibly.”

“Oh my god. Why would anyone want to live there?”

Vaughn shrugs. “Most people don’t know any different. That’s all they’ve ever known, at least until they go off to war. And those of us who do go to war, well, we mostly see the worst the universe has to offer. Which only casts our homeworld in a brighter light.”

For several minutes, I can do nothing but chew my brownie and think about that. About the underlying horrors of Carson’s shiny, high-rise-covered, glittering green homeworld.

“So, he wants a baby.”

“No.” Vaughn’s focus on me intensifies. “He wants a family. We all do. And we got so damn close.”

“How close?”

“Most of us served six years. Five of those together, as a unit. Zamora and Lawrence are the youngest. They’d only been in for a couple of months when they were assigned to our unit. But Sotelo and Dreyer had been in nearly a year. That, plus six years in the field means they were just months from citizenship. Sotelo had already submitted his application for a marriage license.”

I blink at Vaughn, trying to interpret the bitter bolt of pain echoing through me at that thought. “He was…with someone? He was engaged?”

“No. In fact, I never saw him get serious about anyone. But the waiting list for a marriage license is long. Up to two years. Some guys jump the gun when they get near the end of their service, hoping they’ll have found someone by the time they get to the top of the list.”

“He must have wanted it pretty badly.” I frown at that realization. “What if…?”

Vaughn shakes his head as he finishes another bite. “I can see what you’re thinking.”

I lift one brow at him and force a smile. “You sure you didn’t get some of that empathy, like Burke?”

“I got other gifts. But you’re not hard to read, kiddo.”

“Oh yeah? Then what am I thinking?”

“You’re thinking that if Sotelo wanted a family so badly, you might just be the straw he’s grasping at. Like what he wants isn’t you, but what you represent. But that’s not it.”

“How do you know?”

“Because of your friend. That blond you were with, when you met him.”

“He told you about that?”

“He told us all the whole story. Back when you were still unconscious. And if he’d just been grasping at some fertile straw, why would he pick you over her?”

I can only shrug.

“He saw something in you. Something fierce. Something protective. Something he liked, even before the beast got a whiff of you. That’s how he tells it, anyway. So don’t take it lightly when I say you’re what he’s been looking for his whole life. Because I know what I’m talking about.”

I eat the rest of my brownie while I think about that. “So, what happened, in your war?” I ask as I fold up the empty wrapper. “How did you all wind up here?”

Vaughn’s gold eyes darken again. “We were set up. Framed for someone else’s fuckup. We got orders to go clean out a den of rebels reported to be assembling homemade explosives in this barn just outside the town we were stationed in. But when we got there, everyone was already dead. And there were no explosives. There were kids there. And women. They’d been hiding. They were just there trying to keep their families out of the fucking war zone, and someone killed them. We were sent in as scapegoats. Set up by leadership. At least, that’s what we thought at the time. We thought that’s why no one believed us.”

“And now?”

“Now, I think it was UA. I think they set us up, then sat back to wait until we were tried and convicted, so they could swoop in and take us.”

“Take you? Why would they do that? Why you guys? I mean, there must have been soldiers all over the universe who’d jump at the chance to have…what you guys have. At least, if they didn’t know about the whole prison planet aspect. Why would UA need to set you up?”

Vaughn folds up his empty pasta pouch and sets it on the bedside table, and when he turns back to me, there’s a new pride in his posture. In the straight length of his spine. “Because we weren’t just any soldiers, Lilli. We were Zeta 8.”

Why does that sound—?

And suddenly I remember. It happened before I was arrested. Right when my life was starting to fall apart. There was a time, in my tiny little home town, when the two big headlines were my tragedy of an existence, and the interstellar spectacle of the Zeta 8 slaughter.

According to the news, the members of Zeta 8, were seen selling weapons to rebels on Erebus, and they killed all of the witnesses. Men, women, and children. All civilians. All unarmed. They were quickly tried and convicted, and then—

“You were executed. It was all over the news.”

“That was a lie. We did get the death penalty, but then Brennan swooped in and offered us a deal. She said she could save our lives, if we agreed to become experimental subjects in a project designed to improve combat efficiency. She said we’d be on the forefront of a new era in combat. But that no one could ever know.” Vaughn shrugs. “We had no choice. She engineered it that way. So we took the deal and here we are. But Brennan didn’t save our lives, Lilli. She just extended our existence. Life is what we were fighting for. Love. Family.”

“You all got so close.” My heart breaks for the entire team.

“And it was all for nothing. Until Sotelo found you.”