Lee reached over to the table that held surgical instruments and then cut through Hughes’s bonds. Hughes pulled the blindfold over her head and looked at her naked lieutenant, blinking.

“This was not what I was expecting the first thing I would see to be,” Hughes said, to Lee.

“Knock it off,” Lee said, and pointed toward the corpse of the man she’d flung through the door. “Check him for a sidearm and let’s get out of here.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hughes said, and moved to the corpse.

“What did this one call himself?” Lee said, pointing to the man who held the shotgun.

“One,” Hughes said. “But he never called himself it. I didn’t even know he was a he until right now. Someone calling himself Two called him that.” She found the sidearm, checked its load.

“Right,” Lee said. “I killed three more, including that one and one called Six. So that’s four dead and at least two still alive.”

“Are we going to wait around to meet them?” Hughes asked. “Because I’d prefer not.”

“We agree,” Lee said. “Come on.” They went to the door; Hughes took point. The two of them made their way back down the hall, toward the direction Lee had come from. Another door lay five meters past the door of her room; they opened it and found it empty except for a chair and a spray of gray matter and fluid on the bar floor.

“Jefferson,” Lee said. Hughes nodded, unhappy, and they continued onward.

A final door stood near a stairwell. The two banged through and found a small office with a PDA on a desk and very little else.

“This was Two’s room,” Lee said.

“Where did the son of a bitch get to?” Hughes asked

“I think I scared him off when I set a friend of his on fire,” Lee said. She picked up the PDA. “Watch the door,” she said to Hughes.

On the PDA were a series of video files of Lee, Hughes and Jefferson as well as other documents Lee didn’t bother with. She swiped past all of them to look for the PDA’s file system for a specific program. “Here it is,” she said, and pressed the button that appeared on the screen.

Lee’s BrainPal suddenly came alive with a long queue of increasingly urgent messages from her sergeant, her captain and the Tubingen itself.

Hughes, who apparently received a similar queue of urgent messages, smiled. “Nice to know we were missed.”

“Make sure they know where we are,” Lee said. “And make sure that if I tell them to, they’ll flatten this place into the ground.”

“You got it, ma’am,” Hughes said.