Matt wore a shocked, shattered expression, like someone who’d come through a war zone. Priya, as always, was calm and professional. Only the slight tremor in her hands betrayed her.

“We’re down to three,” Hallam snapped behind me. “Do we call this contract officially botched or what?”

“That’s one word for it.” Priya passed her hand over her face. “So, Kenzie. Where the hell are your friends?”

It took a moment to process her question, but once I’d grasped the meaning, terror sent my heart into overdrive. Four holding cells filled the room, two on either side. And they were all empty. “They were here?” I managed. “I mean . . . ?”

“Yeah. This is where we left them thirty minutes ago.”

A slight smile touched Matt’s face. “I told you not to leave them on their own.” An undercurrent of something almost like pride ran through his voice.

Our eyes met, and he quickly looked away, his hands trembling around his weapon. “I thought you hated guns,” I said softly. Back on Sanctuary, Matt had been reluctant to even take a stun gun. Cage had mentioned something about a school shooting in his past.

Matt scowled. “They fried that section of my brain. Right, Priya?”

She arched an eyebrow. “Eliminating past trauma was part of the mental conditioning, yes. You think you would have been useful to me quivering in fear?”

Blood rushed to his cheeks, and he glanced away. “Sorry,” he muttered.

She nodded. “We’re all on edge. Get yourself together.”

I blinked. Mental conditioning? Omnistellar had only had Matt for three weeks. They must have dumped him on one of Legion’s superfast ships, blasted him into space, and set every medical nanobot they owned to work on his mental and physical refinement. How much had they changed his mind? Was he still himself? Sometimes he seemed to hate me and sometimes he didn’t. As for me, my emotions tangled in a knot of confusion: guilt over shooting him, anger over his betrayal, fear over his new cybernetic implants and what they might have done to his psyche. I took refuge in the fact that Legion seemed pretty stable, more so maybe than most of Omnistellar. I still wasn’t sure if they’d turn on me the second we escaped the aliens, but at this point I was willing to take that chance.

Hallam slapped his palm against the wall. “Finn’s dead, right?”

Priya nodded. “You saw what happened. No way he survived that.”

“How many of those things are in the hallway?” I demanded. An edge of hysteria tinged my voice, and I forced myself to close my eyes, count to five, bobbing my head along with the count. Slightly more controlled, I turned to Matt. “These aren’t the same creatures we saw on Sanctuary.”

Anger and fear warred in his expression when he looked at me, but the fear won out. “No,” he muttered, staring somewhere over my shoulder. “They’re . . . bigger. Longer claws. Faster, I think. And they were already plenty fast.”