It’s all she can say as her words turn to sobs. I know what she’s feeling; the unbearable cruelty of the machine’s Battery Project had left me wishing death would come for me day after day, praying that I would lose my mind so completely that I would no longer be aware of the agony. You don’t know what true pain is until the only thing you want is a way out of living.

“Can you move?” I ask, lifting Kina’s chin until her eyes meet mine. Her black hair has grown since the last time I saw her. A few strands fall on to her forehead.

She nods and pulls both the long needles out of her stomach, and then the thin one that is driven deep into her neck, and finally the one in her wrist.

“We have to release the others,” I tell her. She nods again.

I pull her to her feet, and she stumbles, her brain remembering how to command her limbs once more.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“Wait,” she says, and then kisses me without warning.

I feel a burst of joy inside me, like a million stars glowing bright in every fiber of who I am. The way her hand moves to the back of my head, the way her lips feel against mine. If I die right now, all this hell would have been worth it, and I would live through it a thousand times just to feel this for one more second.

She pulls away from me and smiles. “Let’s go.”

She’s moving to the door, and for a second I’m frozen. Staring at the spot where she had been.

“Now, moron. We’re escaped convicts again, remember how that goes?”

“Right, of course,” I say, snapping out of my stupor.

We move quickly into the corridor. I pick up Jacob’s USW rifle and hand it to Kina.

“Who else have they got?” she asks, her eyes scanning the doors.

I point to the cell beside mine. “That’s Wren,” I tell her, and then point to the two to the left of her cell. “That’s Malachai and the next one is Woods.”

“What’s the plan?” she asks.

“I don’t really have a plan so much as a ‘get out of the cell and make it up as we go’ sort of thing …”

“It’ll have to do,” Kina says, and tries Wren’s cell door. “It’s locked.”

“We need iris identification,” I tell her. “I have Jacob.”

I move back toward my cell, Kina follows. She laughs when she sees the guard slumped on my bed. “How in the hell did you pull that off?”

“He had too much empathy,” I reply. “Keep your gun aimed at him when I take him out of paralysis.”