She slowed, unsure of herself. King might need help. Their new alliance might be temporary, but leaving him behind in the facility didn’t sit well with her. She couldn’t be sure if he’d been caught, though.

  Mia hissed in frustration before continuing forward. She’d wait for him at the train and decide her next move when the time ticked closer to the train departure deadline.

  Shouts and heavy footsteps sounded from all around her when she arrived at an intersection. Armored, helmeted guards with rail rifles boiled around the corner on both sides, all pointing their weapons at her.

  The presence of the exact weapon she’d predicted amused her. The danger quashed that almost immediately as she tried to judge her tactical options. Panic was for amateurs, and she was not an amateur.

  “Drop the knife,” shouted a guard. “Or we drop you.”

  A handful of guards, even armed guards, would be vulnerable to her. Unfortunately, they’d thrown over twenty at her, all fully armored and armed. She wondered if she’d been the one who’d alerted their security and not King.

  Her gaze cut back and forth. She tried to visualize a run at a guard and the likely shot vectors of the others.

  Mia let the knife clatter to the ground. They didn’t shoot her on sight. That had to mean something. She could survive an interrogation, and it might put her in a better position to escape later without having twenty rifles pointed straight at her.

  “Take off the coat,” barked the guard.

  Mia slipped the coat off. The shivs inside rattled as they hit the ground.

  “Hands behind you,” the guard ordered.

  Mia complied. They slapped restraints on her and shoved her down the hallway.

  “Resist and die.”

  Mia nodded but didn’t say anything. She wasn’t sure if the warden’s first rule applied to this place. She hoped King was doing better than her.

  Mia expected to be taken to a cell or an interrogation room. Instead, she was brought to what appeared to be an operating theater, complete with a medical bed and life support equipment off to the side. A rolling stand with a tray filled with medical probes and instruments stood beside the bed.

  A gray-haired man wearing a lab coat stood near the bed, examining a datapad. He looked up when a guard shoved Mia inside. Two guards entered with her, both slinging their rifles over their shoulders and drawing pain batons. They stopped right behind her.

  “I am Dr. Icaryus,” the man in the lab coat greeted her. “I admit to slight disappointment that you were captured. That must be measured against my surprise that you made it this far, so I suppose in balance all things are equal, Miss Verick.”

  “How do you know who I am?” Mia didn’t care about rules about being spoken to. She was in a black-site experimental medical facility. Speaking was way down the risk list.

  He scoffed. “To be honest, I’d been expecting this once your DNA was flagged in the prison system. Once the breach in the facility was detected, I knew it was you. The timing was too perfect otherwise.”

  “I wouldn’t have let them take my blood if I’d known,” Mia replied.

  “Of course not. But it’s hard to be a prisoner and control everything without exposing your abilities. I’m sure that’s what you were thinking.”

  “Think what you want.”

  The doctor clucked his tongue. “Yet those incompetents at that glorified dungeon suggested you’d died in an avalanche, one involving you fighting another of this facility’s creations.” He shook his head. “As if any creation of mine would succumb so easily to such a mundane death. That earlier program failure haunts that place after so many years, and you’re far from the same mistake as him.”

  Mia didn’t think dying in an avalanche qualified as a mundane death. She was more annoyed by something else he’d said.

  “I’m not your creation,” Mia spat. “I never heard of you.”

  “Of course you haven’t. And consider me your indirect creator. All of this is a problem because our analysis indicates you have a large amount of untapped potential.” He set the datapad on the tray. “But I’m more curious about your father and origins. I want to know who you really are, not what the records tell me about Mia Verick. Tell me about yourself. I’m ever so curious. How did you come to be?”

  Mia looked away. She didn’t want to tell the bastard anything. She’d assumed he knew everything about her. The way he was talking proved he didn’t. That meant she held an advantage over him despite being a prisoner.

  Dr. Icaryus stood in front of her, his hands behind his back. “It’s inevitable that I’ll find out the complete truth. The body can’t lie. Now that I have you here, I can conduct proper tests with competent staff rather than relying on those dungeon fools. For expediency’s sake, I’d appreciate you sharing that information with me. It’ll help everything move along much faster.”

  “I’m not going to cooperate with a monster like you.” Mia bared her teeth. “I barely know you, and I can already tell I despise you.”

  “A monster?” He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not a monster. I’m a scientist, and my curiosity must be satisfied for the good of humanity. Don’t you agree we should do what’s best for the good of humanity?”

  “I don’t trust you to know what’s best for humanity.”

  Dr. Icaryus snapped his fingers and motioned to the bed. Mia noticed the straps for the first time.

  “Get her in there,” he instructed the guards. “And send someone in to take samples.” He smiled at Mia. “We’ll have an ever so interesting time exploring to find out what you really are.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Different voices overlapped. Man. Woman. Mia’s vision blurred together. It was hard to make anything out. When she opened her eyes, everything was too bright.

  Her arms and legs hurt. She’d lost track of time. Had it been minutes? Hours? Days? She wasn’t sure.

  She slid in and out of consciousness. Sometimes she woke to someone injecting her with something directly or through an IV. Sometimes they took blood samples or ran scanners over her. Other times she’d wake to an empty room. It didn’t matter what was there. She couldn’t stay awake long.

  Meals. She remembered them being offered, and she’d refused them twice. It didn’t help. They ran a line into her to feed her nutrition directly. It joined the web of other IVs pumping fluids into her. They’d injected her with countless substances and taken so much blood from her she was surprised she was alive.

  The doctor didn’t want to kill her. That much was obvious. It would have been easy to shoot her in the back of the head.

  What he wanted was much, much worse. King had warned her about these people, and now she was seeing them close-up in action as they prepared to tamper with her body just as they’d tampered with King’s and her father’s.

  Focusing on her father cleared Mia’s mind for brief moments. She’d honor him by defying Icaryus to the end. The problem was that every time she could think for a second without the world spinning around her, she felt weaker. She hated to admit it, but she was losing the war.

  Strapped onto the bed and drugged constantly, she couldn’t think long enough to come up with a coherent plan. No one knew she was there but King, and he had no reason to come back for her. She was the one who’d screwed up and gotten caught.

  They weren’t friends and they had tried to kill each other recently. They were allies of convenience, and it was no longer convenient.

  This couldn’t continue. It was like with King and his injuries. Mia might be special, but she wasn’t supernatural. She was wearing down. Her glance traveled to her coat lying in the corner. It was one of the only focusing aids available.

  They’d taken the knives but left the coat, as if mocking her. From what she knew, they hadn’t found the dataspike. That made sense. They’d given no indication they knew she’d infiltrated the facility.

  The mission wasn’t a failure as long as she could escape with the dataspike. An opportunity would present itself. She just had to take it.

  With a light knock on the door, Dr. Icaryus entered. He wore a cheerful smile. “Hello again.”

  Mia forced her head up to glare at him. She hated his cheerful and friendly demeanor. He acted like keeping her a prisoner and drugging her was doing her a favor. She couldn’t wait to get her hands around his throat and squeeze the life out of the bastard.

  He shook a finger. “You look so unpleasant most of the time. I’m only trying to help you.”

  “This is helping me?” she croaked.

  “Yes. More than you know. No one else in the KCAP can help you like I can, but to help you, you need to help me.”

  “I’d suggest an experiment. Throw yourself in front of the train and see if you can survive.”

  The doctor raised an eyebrow. “That wasn’t nice. Well, anyway, I’ve looked up your records, Miss Verick. The problem is they lead to dead ends and what I suspect are many altered records. Someone was very rude and went through trouble, I suspect to hide things from me. And I think some of those people are the very people who allegedly support my research. It’s greed.” He offered her a sad look. “It strikes at the heart of KCAP. It’ll be the death of it someday. I’ll admit I don’t mind taking advantage of it when it helps science, but that doesn’t make it any less disappointing to encounter.”

  “Too bad for you,” Mia managed.

  “But I’m a man of great potential, and the universe provides when a man of great potential is in need.” He spread out his arms. “Don’t you see? It’s provided you. We’re ever so close to unlocking your true potential. If you would cooperate, it wouldn’t take as long, as I’d better know how to target your treatments. Don’t you want to reach your full potential?”

  Mia shook her head. “Not if it involves making you happy. Let me out of these restraints, and I’ll show you how cooperative I can be. You can test my abilities that way. It’ll be fun.”

  He clucked his tongue. “Now, now, Miss Verick. I, better than anyone, know how lethal you are. There’d be no point to all my research if you weren’t. Of course, it goes beyond that, but clear and easily demonstrable modifications are the best way to push my overall research forward.” He considered for a moment. “That’s all a bit much to say that while I’m excited and enthusiastic about our work together, I’m not a fool nor do I harbor a death wish.”

  “You don’t care that I hate you?” Mia asked.

  “Of course not. As long as I can improve you, I don’t care what you feel or think. I suspect you’ll come to appreciate me as you grow older, but the thought doesn’t bother me.” He waved a hand. “No matter. I understand intransigence is inherent to your personality, and no scientific endeavor succeeds without at least some inefficiency. Fortunately, I’ve managed to narrow the possibilities down with my additional testing and initial experiments. Among other things, I’ve established that you’re descended from the first batch, though tampering not under my supervision must have been performed.”

  “Tampering?” As much as she hated the doctor, she still wanted information about her father’s past. Her own past might illuminate that. Asking a question wasn’t the same thing as cooperating with the scientist, though she cursed the curiosity in her voice.

  “Yes. Tampering.” He frowned, the first time he’d shown that expression rather than an infuriating smile. “Typically, the level of modification your father went through makes reproduction with normal humans impossible, and an extreme level of modification was required for the process to hold. I know it had to be a normal female. Direct modification of female subjects led to unfortunate results. Non-viable samples. Despite our best efforts, we couldn’t come up with a solution to the protein duplication and degradation problem. You have to understand our modifications rely on disruption of the hyperactivation of normal pathways, but the overall regulatory framework has proven elusive. This is both a science and an art, which is why it was useful to have good starting samples, like your father.”

  “I thought you didn’t know who my father was,” Mia muttered.

  “I’m closing in on that.” He shrugged. “It’s like they used to say. The blood will tell. What’s more interesting to me is you. Both your simple existence and the lack of trait decay. From what I believed, even if someone like you was possible, you should have inherited watered-down versions of your parental enhancements. It’s been a disappointing limitation of my research, even if some of my sponsors think it’s a useful one for control. But I think a particular combination of paternal and maternal genetics made it work in this case.”

  Mia looked away. This wasn’t useless information.

  “That is what complicates things,” Dr. Icaryus continued. “Because I can’t isolate the exact member of the first batch who was your parent. The listed name of your father leads me nowhere, which means he changed his name, or someone else did it for him.” He let out a melodramatic sigh. “And I don’t have the contacts I once did. Not everyone understands the necessity of my work, but it doesn’t matter.”

  “Sounds like it does,” Mia noted. “You’ve spent a bunch of time complaining about wanting me to tell you more.”

  “I have, but it doesn’t really matter because now that I have a better understanding of the regulatory framework of your genes, I know where to initiate the upgrades I’ve developed since that first batch.”

  “And that’s not what you’ve been doing this entire time?”

  The doctor shook his head. “No, no, no. Tests. Probes. Experiments. No true upgrades.” His breath caught. “Are you ready to cooperate now that you understand I’ll make you live up to your full potential?”

  This was the first time in a long time Mia had been able to think so coherently for so long. The doctor must have wanted it that way. She spat but her restrained angle made it impossible to hit him. “I’ll die before I cooperate.”

  “That would be inconvenient.” The doctor gestured to a nearby tray. Mia vaguely remembered a staffer bringing it earlier, though she’d thought it was a hallucination at the time.

  Dr. Icaryus picked up a syringe with a smile. “We will unlock all you can be. It will be glorious.” He pulled up her sleeve and shoved the injector into her arm. “You will be my crowning achievement. Something far more spectacular than the primitive samples I’d dealt with in the past, including your own father.”

  “Don’t talk about my father, you bastard,” Mia ground out.

  “All children should want to surpass their parents. Are you saying you don’t want to be better than your father?”

  “I’ll do one better than my father. I’ll kill you on my way out of this place.”

  “An interesting idea,” he conceded. “But I’m doubtful of its success.”

  The door opened and a red-faced guard holding a rifle stepped inside. “Sir. You weren’t answering your datapad.”

  “Because I muted all my comms, which I informed everyone of before coming to check on the sample.” The doctor gave the guard a blasé look. “I also recall I told security not to bother me until I was finished with the procedure. Don’t you understand? I’m on the verge of a scientific miracle, and everyone’s bothering me with the most mundane and irrelevant problems. Whatever you’re about to say can’t possibly be more important than what I’m about to do.”

  Mia stared at the guard. Panicked security could only mean one thing: another intrusion.

  Someone might have come to save her. The facility had been there for decades, and although it was unclear how much of it was sanctioned, she doubted the government was going to show up and save her.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but there’s an intruder,” the guard reported.

  Mia smiled. Icaryus’ arrogance would cost him. She’d get to deliver on her promise to kill him sooner than she’d planned. Part of her revenge would be against the monster who’d experimented on her father.

  “I’m sure you’re far more capable of handling an intruder than me,” Dr. Icaryus told the guard. “So handle it. Use lethal force. Now that I have this subject, I don’t care about others who might have returned. Ensure I’m not bothered until I’m finished with the procedure.”

  “Yes, sir.” The guard hurried out and closed the door.

  Dr. Icaryus picked up another syringe and injected Mia. Other than the coolness of the solution, she didn’t feel anything unusual.

  “Can you believe these fools?” He tsked. “Everyone has been trying to block my research my entire career. Not a single one of them truly understands. All they see are tools for their use. They don’t understand how we’re changing the paradigm of what it means to be human.”

  “Someone is coming,” Mia stated. “And they’re going to kill you.”

  “I’ve lived a long time. I think I’ll be fine. Besides, the important thing now isn’t me. It’s you.” The doctor chose another syringe. “We have to be careful, you know. Administering too much could have adverse effects, even when I’ve done as much as I have to keep things balanced.”

  “Adverse effects? What are you planning to do to me?”

  Mia didn’t want to satisfy his ego too much, but keeping him talking gave the intruder more time to make it to her. She couldn’t be sure they were there for her, but the timing was too lucky to ignore.

  He looked offended. “I plan to make you better. If this is successful, then you will achieve your true potential.”

  “And if you screw up? Give me too much, or you’ve got your formulations off?”

  “Cellular damage. Mitochondrial failure. Psychotic breakdown. Among other interesting side-effects. Don’t worry too much, though. We learn even from failures. I want this to succeed, but I’m monitoring you in every way possible. This will advance science one way or another.” He chuckled. “It’s painful. All our knowledge and progress, yet humanity still can’t reshape our forms at will. What good is science if we can’t control the most fundamental aspects of our existence? That’s not science. That’s children playing and pretending they know something about the world.”