Warner wished that knowing the pristine, crystal-clear glass that separated them was bulletproof several times over made it easier to just stand there, only a few feet away from a live, unrestrained berserker. His rational mind might know this, but something deeper, some instinct, begged to differ. The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. His extremities tingled. The phantom pains echoed up and down his limbs, into his spine, his jaw. He made it his mission not to give away his unease no matter what it took.
Freya felt along the glass with her palms. The cage, as Lyssa had fittingly put it, allowed her to make just three or four strides across. She barely had enough space to lie down on the floor to sleep. If she ever did sleep. He realized he hadn’t the slightest idea.
He watched her palm slide along the smooth surface. Then she let her hand drop at her side and smiled at him. “Not bad.”
He reminded himself to exhale. This was the first time he really saw all of her—and that meant literally all, because, on Lyssa’s or someone else’s orders, she didn’t have a shred of fabric anywhere on her person. Anyone else would have been intimidated—there’s a reason naked-in-public is a recurring nightmare, after all—but Freya didn’t seem to notice or care. He thought it would be harder to avoid staring at her body, yet he and everyone else in the room did their damnedest to look at literally anything else. Warner began to understand. Nakedness, for anyone else, might mean vulnerability, but for Freya, this was manifestly not the case.
“Could you leave us, please?” Warner asked without needing to raise his voice. His orders were obeyed with suspicious speed, as if the others couldn’t wait to get the hell out, as far as humanly possible from this room.
“Do you want some clothes?”
“What for?”
The indifference sounded too conspicuous to be genuine.
“You like government spooks ogling you?”
“I’m sure there’s nothing here they haven’t seen before, and besides, they’re not much of a threat to me.”
“Well, you’re getting clothes anyway,” Warner told her. A part of him had begun to find this game amusing. He took the things Lyssa brought earlier that morning out of the opaque shopper bag, a little dismayed to find out that Lyssa’s idea of an appropriate outfit for their guest looked flimsy and more like lingerie than clothes. He placed them into the small, isolated chamber attached to the side of the cage and entered some codes. The chamber sealed then opened on the other side.
Freya’s head swiveled as she considered the offering without making any attempt to pick it up. “Really?”
“We wouldn’t want you making ropes out of it, would we?” Warner said, barely able to hide his amusement at the dismay in her tone.
She finally reached over and unfolded the garment—not that there was much to unfold. It couldn’t possibly reach past her upper thighs and was so sheer it was practically see-through. Even Warner had to concede that Lyssa had gone overboard.
He watched Freya slip it on. She shook her head. “I guess underwear is something I have to earn.”
“Don’t take it personally. Will it make you feel better if I tell you I don’t see you that way?”
She measured him with such a look that it seemed to scorch his skin right through the bulletproof glass. You, Warner Vogel, are a liar, it said, and not a very good liar at that. Not only was he no longer sure of what he’d just said, he’d lost his train of thought entirely.
“I’m just wondering, why periwinkle? Whose idea was that? Yours?”
“We can get you something in your colors if you behave.”
She chuckled grimly. “I think we both realize my days of wearing gunmetal gray are over.”
“Oh, look at that. Acceptance. We’re making good progress.”
Freya rolled her shoulders, stretched her arms over her head—her palms touched the cage’s ceiling, and the periwinkle chemise rode way up. She watched Warner, dark amusement dancing in her eyes. “I do have something else to offer, so why don’t you go ahead and ask.”
This, Warner realized, was a trap if he’d ever seen one.
“Will you answer?”
“Oh, but that would kill the suspense.”
“All right,” he said, “I’ll bite. Where is he?”
His answer was her dreamy smile.
“We’ve got a good thing going,” she said at last. “Why ruin it? And if I keep at it, perhaps I can negotiate myself a pair of panties. Maybe even a bra. In a nice, solid fabric.”
“Either I still don’t get you, Freya no-last-name, or you’re not the kind of person to make such concessions for lingerie.”
“Look,” she said. She leaned close to the glass. Way close. There was something borderline psychotic about her wide grin. “Let me give you something. For free. As a sign of our budding friendship.”
“A cranial fracture?”
“Ha, ha. Here goes: you didn’t ask, but just FYI, my people didn’t murder your parents.”
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That came out of the blue, and try as he might, he struggled to hide his shock. She had to have noticed, because she tilted her head.
“You surprise me, Warner Vogel. You, of all people, still believe that transparent lie?”
“They were assassinated,” he said dryly.
“No they weren’t. Your mother drove a vintage car, one from your father’s prized collection, without preprogrammed speed limits. She was under the influence of neuros, or something like it, but what’s important is that she was high as a kite and drove that death trap on wheels at three times the maximum legal speed before crashing off the road into a ditch. But that would sound horrible on the evening news, I agree. Damage the reputation of the company and all that. This way, it’s a juicy bit of propaganda that not only stokes patriotic views, but also keeps the shareholders happy. After all, your government never met a piece of propaganda it didn’t love.”
A sudden spike of a headache drove itself into his right temple. It made him visibly wince—maybe the mental exhaustion made him less resilient, or maybe it just took him by surprise. It coalesced behind his right eye, his right eye made of fancy glass and nanotech, and throbbed there, pulsing like a dark heart. The worst part was that he believed her.
“If we had assassinated them, as you put it,” Freya went on, her voice strangely distant and just a little distorted, “it would have been in my briefing. It wasn’t.”
He managed to get a hold of himself and faced her.
“I have no reason to lie to you, Warner Vogel,” she said cheerfully. “Not about that, anyway.”
His parents—his parents were assassinated one stiflingly hot April night, and less than two weeks later, Warner was in the courtyard of the VogelCorp building when he blacked out. He barely had time to understand what was happening when he woke up to the sterile room and the surgical lights…
He always thought the two events had to be connected, and the zeal with which everyone, starting with Lyssa, tried to convince him it wasn’t the case only solidified the suspicion. Sadly, a suspicion was all it would ever be. He had no way of verifying his hypothesis.
Right until now, when this murderous bitch casually leveled it.
“Now, the question is,” Freya mused, seemingly unaware of his inner turmoil, “did she do this accidentally or on purpose? Perhaps accidentally, although there does seem to be a lot of suicide in this utopia of yours.”
“Here’s what, Freya,” he said. “Word of advice: if you’re trying to negotiate something here, be it underwear or maybe a few extra square inches of space, you might do well to keep my mother’s name out of your mouth.”
“Oh, is that an option?” she asked, livening up. “The extra space, I mean. If it’s true and you’re not just teasing me, then please, tell me what I need to do. I don’t guarantee I’ll actually do it, but—”
“What do you know about my parents?” he said bluntly.
“What I just told you.” The flirtatious tone was gone in a heartbeat like the absolute pretense it had been. “That, and the things everyone already knows.”
He knew the exact things she meant, the very mundane family history. Sidonie and Markus met at some midlevel club. Fooled around, she got pregnant. Normally there would have been a straightforward solution, but one of the people involved was a Vogel. Warner knew the story. Not the stuff of great romance, but then again, there was no such thing.
“So,” Freya said, “what about that underwear?”
“Tell me where Nero is.” The headache throbbed, thrummed, waxing and waning along with his heartbeat. He was done with her, with her bullshit games.
When he (predictably) got no answer, he spoke again. “If you’d rather stay in here half-naked, it’s your call, Freya.”
“I know how this sounds, but I’m not the beggar here.”
“I can make it so it’ll quickly change,” he said, realizing as well as she did the hollowness of the threat.
“It’s pathetic,” she mused. “Here you are, you’ve got a Unit Six soldier at your mercy. I’m in a goddamn six-by-six-foot cage, and yet somehow, I’m still the one in control.”
“You know what I think?” The clarity was sudden and sharp, sharper than the pain that did numbers on his skull. He felt the anger spark within him again, and that spark took to his mind like to spilled lighter fluid. Within a blink, it flared, bright, hot, and violent. The muscles in his jaw went tense. He was certain Freya could pick up on it all, but he no longer cared. This bitch was protecting Nero, and he was done with the kid gloves. He would make her pay. “I think you know perfectly well you’re not in control. I think you realize what utter shit your situation is. I can’t threaten you with torture, that’s true—but I expected as much. You deserve that uniform of yours, that uniform you’ll never wear again, as you just pointed out. But there’s still one thing. One fear I haven’t tapped into. You know what your fear is, Freya? You’re afraid you’ll spend the rest of your life, however much of it there is, in a six-by-six-foot cage. And you will never, ever get out of here. You’d much rather have an encounter with some jumper cables, isn’t that right?”
In the silence that descended the moment he finished talking, his head still rang with the echoes of his own voice. The silence lingered, a loaded gun pointing between his eyes. He already knew what was coming wouldn’t be pretty, but trying to brace himself felt pointless.
Except seconds ticked by one after another, and nothing happened. He blinked, feeling disoriented and hollow, and when his gaze refocused on her face, her expression had shifted.
“Turn off the cameras, Warner.”
She sounded different now. In fact, she sounded just like the stranger from the other night.
“I said, turn off the surveillance.”
“I’m not falling for that again, thanks.”
“I want to tell you something you might not want Lyssa to overhear. But… suit yourself.”
Groaning inwardly, he opened his phone and used his clearance to override the controls. The cameras and mics powered down—at least as far as he knew.
“You shithead,” Freya said, shaking her head. “I could have killed you. I should have killed you. Or taken you to Nero. Easiest capture of my career—I’ve never had a subject beg me to put him in handcuffs. I’d be a legend at the unit.”
“Okay. Can I turn the cameras back on?”
“I didn’t hold out under torture for hours because of my pride. And I sure as hell didn’t hold out because I’m protecting Nero, you idiot. I have zero fucking reasons to protect him. You said so yourself—if I go back, I’ll be killed, and he’ll be the one to pull the trigger. Talk about adding insult to injury.”
“You’re not making a whole lot of sense. Why not just tell me where he is, then?”
Once again he thought he glimpsed a mournful look pass through her eyes before it vanished. “Suppose I did tell you. What would you do with the information? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what you want with Nero, but what exactly is the brilliant plan? You’re going after him yourself? You might be an idiot, but you’re not that much of an idiot. Another option is to get your Defense Ministry friends to provide you with some kind of elite SWAT team. Except you know what’ll happen? Nothing. They won’t give you one. Nero would prove even more difficult to extract information from—they couldn’t even manage little old me. Then there’s the scientific interest—but they already have a live berserker in a cage she can never escape. Why risk lives in a dubious attempt to get another one? You’re out of options, Warner. You need someone on your side who hates Nero even more than you do.”
“And who might that be?”
“You’re talking to her.”
“Why do I feel healthy skepticism right now? The moment anyone is dumb enough to open that cage, you’re going to escape and murder everyone who gets in your way.”
“I don’t murder anyone without necessity, and I don’t act against my own interests either.”
“Forgive me, but my skepticism holds up.”
“Then there’s something you should know. Something I think you already began to figure out all by yourself.”
