Dom had never done the math, but he figured that he’d probably spent weeks—if not months—on the other side, the out side, his own timeline stretching out, losing shape.

Once, as an experiment, he had stepped into the shadows and stayed there, curious to know how long he could last out of time. It was like holding your breath, and at the same time it wasn’t—there was oxygen in the space between, but there was also weight, pressure—a pressure that had nearly broken him before, when every step was pain. A pressure that now registered as drag, challenging, but by no means impermeable.

Since then, every morning and every night, Dominic spent time out of time. Sometimes he only moved around his apartment, and sometimes he went further afield, measuring the ground he could cover, instead of the seconds that passed.

* * *

AS the transport van slowed, Dom’s attention was pulled back to the metal bench, the darkened hull, the other waiting bodies.

A few minutes later, it finally came to a stop. The doors opened, and they were ushered out onto smooth asphalt. Dominic squinted, disoriented by the sudden morning light. They were standing in front of a building that had to be EON.

From the outside, it looked . . . innocuous. Bland, even. There was a perimeter wall, but no barbed wire, no obvious gunner posts.

The group reached the front doors, which parted with the hiss of an airlock. The lobby—if you could call it a lobby—was sleek and open, but between the front doors and that space was a security port. One by one, the six were called forward by name and instructed to empty their pockets and step into the scanner.

Klinberg. Matthews. Linfield.

Dominic’s pulse quickened.

Bara. Plinetti.

Victor had said they couldn’t hold him, but he didn’t know that, not for sure. These people, their entire job was capturing people like him.

Surely their technology had been adapted to that task. What if they’d found a way to measure the difference between a human and EOs?

What if they could detect people like him?

“Rusher,” said an officer, ushering Dominic forward. He let out a low breath and stepped into the scan.

An error sound—a ringing alarm—echoed through the lobby.

Dom staggered backward out of the scan, braced for the walls to open and black-clad soldiers to come pouring in. He was ready to step out of the world and into the shadows, ready to forfeit his identity, his anonymity, the whole fucking thing, and face Victor’s wrath—but the officer only rolled his eyes. “You got parts?”

“What?” asked Dominic, dazed.

“Metal. In your body. You got to specify that kind of thing before you go in.”

The soldier briskly typed in a new set of commands. “Okay. Now go.”

Dom forced himself to step back in, praying the scan couldn’t pick up his panic.

“Hold still.”