“Oh, for fuck’s sake, sister, skip the bullshit,” I said. “I’m not the audience for that crap, and you’re not the type to peddle it.”

She dropped the act, and for a moment I saw the real her. Cold, calculating, and vicious. Then fear crept back and clouded that.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I want two things,” I said. “The first is the code for the wire transfer. No, don’t look surprised. Don’t play dumb and don’t lie to me, either, because you won’t like how that works out.”

She stared at me, trying so hard not to cry.

“I’ll only ask this once,” I said. “The code.” Something in my voice reached her, and she suddenly rattled off the code. I punched it into the burner and then, once the deposit was underway, fed the target account number to MindReader. The funds would go to an account I set up called WC—shorthand for War Chest. Whatever I didn’t need for my hunt would eventually be donated to FreeTech.

“Good,” I said to the woman. “That’s very good. You’re earning brownie points. You’ll need them. Next question is what’s in the bag you were going to hand off?”

“I—”

I cut her off by holding up a single finger. “If the next two words out of your mouth are don’t know, you won’t like what happens next.”

“Don’t hurt me,” she said in a much more fragile voice than she probably wanted to use.

“That will depend on how you finish that sentence, won’t it?” I asked calmly. Or at least my voice sounded calm. Inside my head, though, a furnace was burning toward overload. It scared me how easily I could joke, and function, and sit here having a chat while the Darkness inside of me was so damned hungry.

She kept trying to look away, and each time, I snapped my fingers, loud as a gunshot, to bring her back to focus. To me.

“Do I need to ask again?” I murmured. “Right now, we’re having a conversation, but if you’d rather play Truth or Consequences, say so. I can work with that. Hell, I could have fun with that.”

Despite her toughness, there were tears in her eyes, and her breath was shallow and rapid. Panic breathing. It took her a few tries to get her voice.

“It’s a chemical agent. R-33. That’s what they call it.”

I thought the word aha. I’d seen references to that all through the files I’d been stealing.

“What does R-33 do? What’s it for?”

“I … I’m not—”

“Remember the rules,” I cautioned.