He reached the next one in line. “My leg! He’s got my leg! He’s got—” CRUNCH.

One of the guards began shooting downward. Bullets ricocheted back up the shaft. One of the secretaries yelped when she got hit, lost her grip on the ladder, and fell. From the noise—panicked wailing and crashing—she took somebody else with her. The Nemesis soldier began to laugh, like that was the funniest damn thing he’d ever seen.

Heather reached the top. There was a metal hatch. “How do I open this thing? Stricken?” But the spymaster didn’t respond. “Stricken!”

“It locks on this side. Just turn the wheel I think,” Renfroe answered. “There’s a Nemesis soldier right on the other side waiting for you. The coded door is past her.” Somebody else died below them. “Hurry!”

Grasping the rusty wheel, she forced it to turn. The smell of blood and torn open bodies filled the shaft. Heather’s heart rate was increasing. The change was beginning. “I better get my damned exemption coin out of this! I’ll take the soldier, just get that door unlocked!” Heather shoved the hatch open.

The thing waiting on the other side grabbed her by the hair, yanked her out of the shaft, then threw Heather so hard that she hit the bunker’s ceiling, which hurt, but the really painful part was when she got kicked in the chest on the way back down.

Ribs broken, Heather bounced across the dusty floor until she struck the far wall. Damn. And she’d thought that Franks hit hard. That had knocked all the wind out of her. Luckily, her bones were used to breaking and immediately re-forming. Heather rolled over. The Nemesis soldier was a tall, Nordic-looking woman, and she had returned her attention to the shaft. As tempting as it was to let her murder Stricken, Heather really wanted to get out of here. Once her sternum wasn’t smashing her lungs flat, she gasped in a lungful of air and shouted, “Hey! I’m not done with you!”

The Nemesis woman looked over. “You’re alive?” She was wearing a slightly bemused expression as she left the shaft and walked over, casually dropping the handful of red hair she’d ripped out of Heather’s scalp on the way. “Then you’re not human either. What has Stricken sent to challenge me?”