All of the girls had discussed trying to break free before Whitney added them to his disgusting program to give him more babies to experiment on. The thought of leaving the only life they’d ever known was terrifying. But this. Leaving her to die in a foreign country because she was late through no fault of her own. She had the information Whitney needed, but because he insisted on injecting her with a killer virus before she went on her mission, she might never get that information to him. He liked playing god. He was willing to lose one of them in order to scare the others into compliance.

Something hit the water hard, startling her. She nearly jerked off the wall, blinking in protest against the bright lights shining into the tank. Her sanctuary was no longer that. The environment had gone from cool, dark water—a place of safety—to one of overwhelmingly intense brilliant light illuminating the water nearly to the bottom of the tank. The hook dragged viciously along the floor and she shuddered in reaction.

A second hook entered the water with an ominous splash as the first was pulled back up. The next few minutes were a nightmare as the tank was thoroughly searched with hooks along the bottom. Had a diver with scuba gear been hiding there, he would have been torn to pieces.

She relaxed a bit as they pulled the hooks back up to the top. They would leave soon and she could make the climb out of the tank and across the roof. Already she could tell she was weaker, but she knew she could still climb down the side of the building and get to the van where Whitney’s supersoldiers waited to administer the antidote to the poisonous virus, reducing it to a mere illness instead of something lethal.

The hook plunged back into the water, startling her. She nearly detached from the wall as the iron dragged up the side of the tank while the second hook entered the water. This was . . . bad. She had nowhere to go. If she moved fast to avoid the hook, she would be spotted. If she didn’t, the hook could tear her apart. Either way, she was dead.

The sound, magnified underwater, was horrendous to her ears. She wanted to cover them against the terrible scraping and grinding as the point of the hook dug into the side of the tank. She watched it come closer and closer as it crawled up from the bottom. The other hook came up almost beside it, covering more territory as they ripped long gouges in the wall.