A tablet was passed around, and one by one they pressed their thumbs against the screen. Once it was back in Rios’s hands, the soldier continued speaking. “Most of you have heard the term EO. And most of you are probably skeptical. But the fastest way to disabuse you of doubt is through a demonstration.”

The doors opened at her back.

“Follow me.”

* * *

“KEEP your hands inside the ride,” whispered Klinberg as they filed into the hall.

Remember this place, thought Dominic as he fell in line. Remember everything. But it was a maze of white, sterile and uniform and disorienting. They passed through several sets of doors, each sealed, requiring a swipe from Agent Rios’s key card.

“Hey,” whispered Bara. “I heard they have that killer here. The one that offed, like, a hundred other EOs. You think it’s true?”

Dom didn’t answer. Was Eli really somewhere in this building?

Agent Rios tapped a comm on her shoulder. “Cell Eight, status?”

“Irritable,” answered the person on the other end.

A grim smile crossed her lips. “Perfect.”

She swiped them through a final door, and Dominic felt his heart lurch. They were in a hangar, empty except for a freestanding cell in the center of the room. It was a cube made of fiberglass, and trapped inside, like a firefly in a jar, was a woman.

She knelt in the middle of the floor, wearing a kind of jumpsuit, its fabric glossy, as if coated.

“Tabitha,” said Agent Rios, her voice even.

“Let me out.”

The recruits moved around the cube, as if she were a piece of art, or a specimen, something to be considered from every side.

Matthews even rapped his knuckles on the glass, as if he were at a zoo. “Don’t feed the animals,” he muttered under his breath.

Dominic felt sick.

The prisoner rose to her feet. “Let me out.”

“Ask nicely,” said Rios.

The prisoner was beginning to glow, the light coming from beneath her skin, a deep red-orange like heated metal. “Let me out! ” she screamed, her voice crackling.

And then, she ignited.

Flame licked up her skin, engulfing her from head to toe, her hair standing up in a plume of blue-white light, like the tip of a match.

Several of the recruits recoiled. One covered his mouth. Others stared in fascination. Surprise. Fear.

Dominic feigned shock, but the fear was real. It crept through his limbs, a warning, that old gut feeling that said wrong wrong wrong—

just like it had the second before Dom’s foot hit the IED, the instant before his world changed forever. A fear that had less to do with the woman on fire, and more to do with the cell holding her, the heat that didn’t even penetrate the foot-thick fiberglass.