Almost.

But not all of us had been trained strictly as soldiers, just as not all of us were unfeeling. There were a few who’d been created with more specific skills in mind—chameleons able to alter their flesh at will, and who’d been tasked with either seduction and intelligence gathering or assassination.

I was one such creation.

Of course, while humans might have designed us to be frontline soldiers in their battle with the shifters, they’d never entirely trusted us not to turn against them—even if they’d made that all but impossible through a mix of chemical and medical interventions. Which meant there’d been areas in this base that, as a déchet, I’d been banned from entering.

But as the sole survivor of the destruction that had hit this base at the war’s end 103 years ago, I’d made it my business to fully explore every available inch. The shifters had, in an effort to ensure the base could never be used again, blocked off all known access points into the base by pouring tons of concrete into them. While this had taken out sublevels one to three, it still left me with six others—and those six were huge. Which was hardly surprising since this had once been the home to not only a thousand-strong complement of déchet, but to all those who had been responsible for our creation and training.

I passed through several more security points—points that, like the one at the bunkhouse, were fixed and unalterable—and eventually made my way into the tight, circular stairwell that led to the surface level. These stairs had been one of two routes designed as emergency escapes for the humans in charge of the various sections of the Humanoid Development Project, so its presence had been unknown to all but a few, and it had been designed to withstand anything the shifters could throw at the base. As it turned out, it had also withstood the concrete.

It had taken me close to a year to find this tunnel, and a couple more to find the second one, but they gave me much-needed access points to the outside world. It might be a world I ventured into only once or twice a month—generally when food or equipment supplies were low or when the need for company that was flesh-and-blood rather than ghostly became too strong to ignore—but that didn’t assuage the need to know what was going on above me on a regular basis. Being able to venture out, to watch from shadows and distance, was all that had kept me sane in the long century since the war. That and the ghosts.