This time Dominic tried, rose a couple of inches, only to slip back to the floor. His mouth moved, the words lost, but Victor understood.

Sorry.

“Sorry,” said the ex-soldier—and Victor realized that he could hear Dominic’s voice this time. The shadows were crumbling around them, color and life sweeping in through the cracks. Victor tensed, tightened his hold on Dominic’s arm. But it wasn’t his grip that was slipping.

It was Dom’s.

“Hold on,” ordered Victor, but Dom’s head lolled to the side, and the colorless, soundless space between time collapsed back into chaos and noise, gas and gunfire.

Blood slicked Victor’s palms, streaked the floor, stretched behind them in a vivid breadcrumb trail, shockingly red against the sterile white surfaces.

Victor started to draw Dominic to his feet, but the ex-soldier was dead weight now, his skin gray, waxy, his eyes open, but unseeing.

Victor let go, easing the body back against the wall as soldiers barreled around the corner.

This time Victor moved first.

No hesitation, no calculation, just blunt and brutal force.

He dropped them like stones in deep water.

Victor stepped over their limp bodies.

The facility’s front doors came into sight, one long, empty hall standing between him and freedom.

And then a soldier stepped through the wall in front of him.

There was no sliding door, no hidden hall. She came straight out of the wall, as if it were an open door. She stood before him, unmasked, dark eyes sharp and a cattle prod hanging from one hand.

An EO, working for EON.

Victor didn’t have time to be surprised.

The soldier lunged for him, blue light crackling across the top of the

baton. Victor leapt backward, reaching for her nerves, but before he could get a grip on them, she cut sideways, vanished again through the wall.

An instant later, she was behind him.

Victor spun, catching her wrist just before the electric baton found bare skin.

“You’re troublesome,” he said, the words swallowed up by the wailing alarms.

He wrenched her nerves, and the soldier gasped in pain, but didn’t crumple.

Instead, she slammed her boot into Victor’s wounded side.

He went down hard on the white floor, and she was on top of him—

or would have been, if his hand hadn’t shot out at the last second, dragging her body to a stop.

The soldier fought his hold, even as he forced her hand to turn the cattle prod back on herself. Her eyes narrowed in concentration as her will warred with his, but Eli was loose, and Sydney was lost, and those two things made Victor immovable.

He flexed one hand, drove it toward his chest, and in a mirror motion, the soldier drove the cattle prod into her own.

Blue light, the crackle of energy, and the EO collapsed, unconscious.