Warner was sure he had it. Part of him had tentatively, disbelievingly, begun to feel triumphant. He knew they had to be watching all this in the next room—Ramirez, Lyssa, Russ. God, to see Lyssa’s face right now—

  “I’ll be cooperative,” she said.

  “I need to have something to address you by.”

  “What on earth for?”

  It was a good question. “Well, there are people out there who refer to you as it. I’d rather not be one of them. Unless that’s what you’d prefer.”

  “Me? I thought this was your game, your rules.” The dark eyes lingered on him, unnerving. “Is that what you’d prefer? Do you think of me as an it?”

  She was messing with his head. And he deliberately let her.

  “Nope. I happen to know you, and your fellow Unit Six soldiers, are fully human, or at least were at some point. And I don’t refer to humans as it. Not even those I ideologically disagree with.”

  The silence went on for a few seconds.

  “Freya,” she said. “You can call me Freya.”

  “Nice to meet you, Freya.”

  “Happy now?” she asked.

  “Reasonably.”

  “At least I made you work for it,” she said, and to his utter humiliation, he felt blood rise to his face.

  Bottomless green eyes considered him with an opaque expression. “Uh-oh,” she said. “Warner, in the name of our fruitful future collaboration, do you mind turning all those mics and cameras off for just a moment?”

  “Not a chance.”

  He met her eye and could read in her gaze that she was laughing at him. Or, her expression plainly told him, I could just blurt what I have to say for everyone to hear.

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  He opened his phone, tapped away at the screen, and the cameras powered down. He could imagine what was happening on the other side of the wall. Lyssa in a panic trying to override the controls to get everything working again, right fucking now.

  “Wow,” she said. “No offense, but you looked way more into it when you were the one in chains. This isn’t doing anything for you.”

  “You made me turn off the cameras so you could rub it in my face?”

  She chuckled. “Don’t worry, I can keep a secret. Even under torture. And I will. I promise.”

  What’s a Unit Six promise worth, he found himself thinking.

  “Is that it? That’s what you had to tell me?”

  “No, that’s not it. No need to rush things.”

  “Those cameras aren’t going to stay off forever, Freya.”

  “And here I thought you were the big boss.” If she could have shrugged, she would have.

  “You keep saying how you’ll kill me at the first opportunity,” he said. “But you already had ample time to kill me.” Warner couldn’t help but cringe inwardly. That was a gross understatement. As much as he hated to admit it, Lyssa had been right, the security breach had been without precedent, and worst of all, it was all his own fault. “So why didn’t you?”

  “Because those weren’t my orders,” she said, disinterested. “But now my circumstances have changed.”

  “Not your orders,” he repeated, feeling stupid. “So what happened—those were orders.” He hated himself for it in that moment, but he couldn’t do a thing to stop his face from flushing with the heat of utter humiliation.

  She laughed.

  “Take a deep breath, Warner Vogel. Pick up meditation or something. It’s way too easy to get a rise out of you. My orders were simply to keep an eye on you, so I found a good way to do that… all night long.”

  When he said nothing, she spoke up again. “By the way, that glass of milk you got me was actually plant milk, and it was awful. The rest of it I found quite enjoyable. I’d be up for another round, but unfortunately, our paths have diverged.”

  Warner’s eye was starting to twitch. He could swear he heard, on the very edge of his senses, as the override finally worked, and the cameras started to come back online one after another. So Lyssa got everything working faster than he thought she would. Fuck, how much of that did she hear?

  Clearly, Freya picked up on it too. The shift in her was fluid yet impossible not to notice.

  “When I get out of here,” she said in a cloyingly sweet voice, “when, and not if, I’m going to rip your one good eye out of your head, you Keeper scum.”

  “Warner,” Lyssa’s voice burst from invisible speakers, nowhere and everywhere at the same time. “Get the fuck out of there! Right now!”

  Freya began to laugh. She threw her head back, the laughter hearty and loud. Warner felt rather than saw the doors at the end of the room hiss open. He wasn’t aware of moving, yet somehow, the next thing he knew, they were shutting behind him. He crossed the decontamination chamber back into the observation room, where, just like he’d guessed, the small space was crowded to bursting. Ramirez, Russ, Lyssa, and, to his consternation, Quinn from Psyops.

  “That was epic, man,” Quinn said, and tried to clap him on the back.

  He dislocated Quinn’s shoulder.