I reached the surface level and pried open the hidden escape panel. Sunlight poured in through the dome over the building’s remains, shielding it from the elements and further decay. This level had once contained the day-to-day operational center of the HDP, and the battered remnants had become part of a museum dedicated to the history of a war no one wanted to see repeated. Of course, it was also a museum created by the shifters, so it emphasized both the foolishness and waste of war and also the evils of gene manipulation and bioengineering. The body-part industry and all the benefits it had once provided were now little more than bylines in history.

And though fewer and fewer were visiting the museum these days, one of the most popular exhibits still seemed to be the old tower that held all the remaining solar panels. They might be an antiquated and curiously inadequate technology to those alive today, yet the panels continued to power not only the systems that had been preserved on this floor for demonstration purposes, but all of mine.

The ghosts surrounded me as I walked across the foyer, their ethereal bodies seeming to glow in the fading streams of sunlight bathing the vast open area. As ever, it was little Cat who kept closest, while Bear surged forward, leading the way.

Both he and Cat had always considered me something of a big sister, even though we déchet shouldn’t have even understood the concept. Our closeness was primarily due to the amount of time I’d spent in the nursery unit in the years leading up to the war. Even during the war, those lures not out on assignment or in a recovery period were put to use in the nurseries; our task had been to teach and to protect the next generation of fighters.

Because despite what the shifters had believed, there’d been only a finite supply of us. Our creators had discovered early on that while the use of accelerant increased the speed of physical growth, it did not enhance mental growth. Déchet might have been designed to be nothing more than superhuman soldiers able to match the strength and speed of shifters, but sending your rifle fodder out with the body of an adult and the mind of a child really defeated the purpose of their creation. So while they’d halved our development time, they hadn’t been able to erase it completely.