She grimaced, and I realized blood was dripping from her arm. My empty stomach turned over—nothing was funny if something was wrong with Maggie.

I looked more closely. Her right elbow had a nasty scrape, and the blood was dribbling down her freckled arm, curving around her knuckle and trickling off her ring finger and pinkie. A small puddle of it had collected on the granite beneath us—maybe two minutes’ worth, my brain somehow told me.

My brain also got around to noticing that my hands were cuffed behind my back. Thanks, brain. I swayed slightly and tried to stand up in front of the two men. Cuffs or no cuffs, a dozen ways to attack flashed through my mind. But I didn’t know how to take those guys on and protect Maggie. Offense and defense at the same time—that’s tough.

My first instinct was to rush Kappa, who stood to the left of me. I could see from the bulge in his jacket that he had a gun in a shoulder holster. If I used my defensive-lineman skills to plow him backward a few dozen feet, maybe I could plunge him down the fracture in the rock, that crevasse we’d had to jump over to get to the edge of the cliff.

But the other guy was too close to Maggie, which meant she was too close to whatever weapon he might have. She was vulnerable and could be used as a shield or target.

Too big a risk.

No one appeared to be paying attention to the duffel full of explosives, but that didn’t help me at that point—it’s not like there were grenades in there. Modern dynamite doesn’t have a simple fuse that you light and throw. Plus, we were all so close together that any attempt to blow them up would’ve blown us up, too, and any threats to take us all down would’ve been empty. Maggie and I were the ones with real lives at stake.

“You were hit in the head,” Maggie said, her voice cracking.

“Well, that would explain the pounding pain.”

“And you’re bleeding.”

I put my hands to my head and felt around. My face was wet, and my fingers came back all red. That’s the one color that looked right to me.

“Does everything appear weird to you?” I asked.

“Weird how?”

“The air’s a sick green, the clouds yellow, and there’s something like a haze of death over everything.”

Kappa interjected in an instructional-video tone of voice: “The implant has become dislodged from your perception center. What you are seeing now is reality.”

“Wait, what?” Maggie asked, whipping her head toward him.

“It was a simple alteration to ensure our specimens would be content to stay in our research area,” Kappa said.

“Specimens?” she asked.

I thought about how beautiful and green everything looked when we returned to town, how pleased Mom had been with the condition of the house and everything else. If they were messing with this basic perception, what else were they doing?