Ilya lay there thinking, remembering her father’s stories of Pudovkin’s secret police, the torture chambers, the political disappearances, the creative ways they pulled confessions out of dissidents these days in Russia. All the reasons they’d fled when she was thirteen.

Most of all, she remembered what her dissident father, who’d been taken by the police more than once, had told her about torture. Everyone breaks eventually, he’d said. Everyone.

Sharp pain lanced across her skull. Thousand-decibel static overwhelmed her. A roaring crackling filled her hearing. An overwhelming smell of fire was in her nose. Pain sizzled through every nerve cell in her body. Every muscle tensed and she screamed, arching away from the gurney that confined her.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

[aegis activated]

The defenses Rangan had built slid into place. The static receded to a dull roar. Her head ached like she’d been smashed by a twenty-pound sledge. Her heart was pounding in her chest. Her breath came fast.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Rangan.

Tears ran down her face.

Then the minds appeared.

Three of them. She looked up from the gurney, and there they were. Two women and a man in business attire, government IDs hanging around their necks.

They’d never tried this before.

She felt the agents’ minds, flush with Nexus, looked into their hard eyes, and then they were on her.

They pushed on her mind in unison. The back doors! The codes! Give them to us! Three strong healthy minds pushed against her tortured, abused, sedated one. Her will buckled under the first onslaught.

She felt her mouth open. Felt memories of those frantic hours on the plane start to rise.

Nyet!

Code structures started to flood into her memory. Her jaw moved. Three of them. Together, they were stronger than she was.

The back door! She could hack them, shut them down!

No. A trick. They want you to!

She used the other half of Rangan’s battle package instead.

[activate: nd*]

She sprayed all three of them with the Nexus disruptor they’d used on her, saw and felt them stagger.

She picked the weakest of them, the woman on the left, still dazed from the disruptor, and followed up with a push to her mind, grabbing for control of her hand with all she had, and punched the woman in the nose with her own fist.

The woman staggered back, a look of surprise on her face, blood beginning to flow. Ilya’s mouth began to open again as the other two pressed once more.

Nyet!

She grabbed control of the stunned woman’s leg and spine and kicked up and jerked back hard. The woman’s body threw her to the ground, backwards, and her head made a satisfying crack against the cold tile floor.