The day after you invaded Basea, after you failed to shoot Talin and instead allowed your superior to get killed, you’d gone climbing in the woods outside Talin’s village to clear your head. You climbed and climbed, your limbs young and strong, pulling yourself up past broad leaves and thick branches until you’d reached the top. You looked down at the village to see Danna and Lei, taking bets on whether a villager would be taken back to Cardinia or shot dead right there. You saw stretchers carrying bodies away and laying them out in neat rows in the streets. Small children ran past lines of soldiers like you and wandered aimlessly in the streets’ bloody dirt. You stayed up in the tree for as long as you could, until you finally climbed back down and threw up everything in you behind the tree’s roots.

I shake my head, pushing the voice and memories aside, and make it onto the second ledge. It’s easier to see things for what they are from a higher vantage point. I look out toward the front of the hospital grounds, where the commotion Jeran started has escalated. Shouts come from below. More guards stream toward where Jeran and Adena stand, arguing with the soldiers.

I keep going. I pull myself higher until I finally reach the window leading into the corridor of the second floor.

Down below, I hear a shot fired.

I ignore it. Then I force one of my steel wings around, slicing through one of the bars of the window. I pull myself through, rolling as I hit the ground.

Inside, the hall is curiously lit with bright, artificial sconces against the walls that cast strange stripes of shadows across the corridor. It looks like a prison, except there are signs of a hospital here and there—the smell of poultices and herbs and medications in the air, the stench of steam burns, of blood and crushed limbs. It mixes with the smell of mint and sugar, creating something sickening.

I find myself instantly reminded of the two victims I’d seen rushed into the lab complex, burned almost beyond recognition.

I can hear the sounds of dozens of guards down this corridor. And at both ends, jaws clicking, claws scraping the floor, are Ghosts.

They sense me before anyone else does. Their eyes dart blindly down the corridor, searching, and their jaws grind, their long ears twitching as they sense the presence of someone who shouldn’t be here.

I narrow my eyes, and a smile creeps onto my lips. They had prepared them for someone to come for their valuable prisoner. But I am a Skyhunter. And in my chest, I feel the buildup of my rage, the way it courses into every limb of my body, sets my eyes alight. The way it feeds and fuels me.

This is what Constantine designed me to do, to be an unstoppable war machine.

But he had never intended for me to turn against him. That’s the thing about inventing new things. You can only control the genesis of it, not the evolution. And I have evolved.