“Get those out of her face, she’s waking up.” Samm’s voice. She opened her mouth, suddenly aware of a plastic tube stretching past her tongue and down her throat. She gagged, coughing, trying not to retch, and the tube slid out like a long, slick snake. She coughed again, swallowed, cracked one eye the tiniest fraction.

Samm was standing over her.

“You,” she coughed, “bloody bastard.”

“We have to begin,” said a voice.

“Stop,” said Samm. “She’s awake!”

“Then we sedate her again. With a bigger dose this time.”

“You bloody”—she coughed again—“bastard.”

She could see better now, her eyes adjusting to the light. She was surrounded by women in hospital robes and surgical masks. She was in some kind of operating room, but it wasn’t like any operating room she’d ever seen. Metal arms hung from the ceiling like the limbs of a giant insect, scalpels and syringes and a dozen other instruments poised mere inches from Kira’s face. The walls were glowing with a muted, multicolored light—computer screens, the walls were computer screens, alive with graphs and charts and scrolling numbers. She saw her heartbeat, the thin line spiking in perfect unison with the pounding in her chest; she saw her temperature, her blood oxygen level, her height and weight in precise thousandths of a measurement. She turned her head again and saw her own face, scrubbed and topped with a plastic hat, her body stripped and bare, strapped down to the flat metal table. Her eyes were wide with terror. She gasped and the image gasped with her, the wall-size face twisting into a rictus of fear, a live camera feed of her dying moments filling the room like a horror show. She panicked; her breathing accelerated; her heart pumped; the graphs scrawled mad, thumping lines three feet high across the walls.

“I’m sorry,” said Samm. “I tried to tell them you came willingly—”

“You were not asked to bring a volunteer,” said a stern voice. A woman stepped forward. Her blue mask hid her face, but her eyes were the color of polished gunmetal, cold and unfeeling. “You have succeeded where your entire squadron failed. Do not risk your commendation now by interfering.”

Samm turned back to Kira. “They’ve asked me to be here, to talk to you, so you’d have someone you trusted—”

“I don’t trust you!” she shouted. Her voice echoed through the operating room, raw and ragged. “I helped you! I rescued you! I believed everything you said! Every word about surviving together or not surviving at all—and it was all a lie?”

“I was telling the truth,” said Samm. “When we reached the mainland, I was trying to keep you away from them until I could explain things—that you’d come to try to help us.”