The warbling whine of a siren seeped in through the gap.

Feeling as if she were trying to pet a sleeping tigermaul without waking it, Kira slowly pushed the door outward.

It swung open with a protesting squeal, but it did open.

She almost laughed. No boom.

Then Kira stepped forward. The wires warped around her as she passed through the doorway, and though the lines of electricity bent, they never broke.

Freedom!

The concourse had become a garish nightmare. Emergency lights painted the walls red, while rows of yellow arrows glowed in the floor and the ceiling. The arrows pointed spinward, and she knew if she followed them, they would lead her to the nearest storm shelter.

Now what?

“Don’t move!” shouted a man. “Hands on your head!”

Kira turned and saw two power troopers standing by a pillar over nine meters to her right. One of them held a blaster, the other a slug thrower. Behind them, a quartet of drones rose off the floor and hung whirring overhead.

“You’ve got five seconds to comply or I’m putting a bolt through your head!” shouted the trooper with the blaster.

Kira lifted her arms and took a single step away from her cell. Two thin tendrils still connected her to the bypass circuits the suit had formed across the doorway.

The troopers stiffened, and the buzzing from the drones increased as the machines flew out and took up positions in a broad, rotating circle around her.

She took another step.

Bang!

A gold slug flattened itself on the deck in front of her, and she felt a pinch in her left calf as a fragment struck her.

“I’m not shitting you, lady! We will ventilate you! On the floor, right now! I’m not saying it a—”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said in a sharp voice. “You’re not going to shoot me, Marine. Do you know how much trouble you’d be in with Colonel Stahl if you did? The UMC lost a lot of good people getting me here.”

“Fuck that noise. We’ve got orders to stop you if you try to escape, even if it means killing you. Now get on the goddamn floor!”

“Okay. Okay.”

Kira did the math. She was only about a meter and a half from the cell. Hopefully that was enough …

She bent, as if to kneel, and then tucked and allowed herself to stumble forward into a roll. As she did, she yanked the wires out of the cell, back toward herself.

A white-hot flash obliterated her sight, and a thunderclap slammed into her so hard, she felt it in the roots of her teeth.

2.

If not for her suit, the blast would have thrown Kira halfway across the concourse. As it was, the xeno kept her anchored against the deck, like a barnacle holding firm against a tsunami. A suffocating heat enveloped her—a heat too intense for even the Soft Blade to fully protect her.

Then cooler air washed over her and her vision cleared.