It takes every ounce of my self-control to keep from screaming.

Kenji.

Anderson shot Kenji.

Kenji, and this man’s daughter. He must be talking about Nazeera. Oh my God. Anderson shot Kenji and Nazeera. Which would make this man—

“Ibrahim, it was for the best.” Tatiana’s heels click against the floor. “I’m sure she’s fine. They’ve got those healer girls, you know.”

Supreme Commander Ibrahim ignores her.

“If my daughter is not returned to me alive,” he says angrily, “I will personally remove your brain from your skull.”

The door slams shut behind him.

“Wake her up,” Anderson says.

“It’s not that simple— There’s a process—”

“I won’t say it again, Tatiana.” Anderson is shouting now, his temperature spiking without warning. “Wake her up now. I want this over with.”

“Paris, you have to calm d—”

“I tried to kill her months ago.” Metal slams against metal. “I told all of you to finish the job. If we’re in this position right now—if Evie is dead—it’s because no one listened to me when they should have.”

“You are unbelievable.” Tatiana laughs, but the sound is flat. “That you ever assumed you had the authority to murder Evie’s daughter tells me everything I need to know about you, Paris. You’re an idiot.”

“Get out,” he says, seething. “I don’t need you breathing down my neck. Go check in on your own insipid daughter. I’ll take care of this one.”

“Feeling fatherly?”

“Get. Out.”

Tatiana says nothing more. I hear the sound of a door opening and closing. The soft, distant clangs and chimes of metal and glass. I have no idea what Anderson is doing, but my heart is beating wildly. Angry, indignant Anderson is nothing to take lightly.

I would know.

And when I feel a sudden, ruthless spike of pain, I scream. Panic forces my eyes open.

“I had a feeling you were faking it,” he says.

Roughly, he yanks the scalpel out of my thigh. I choke back another scream. I’ve hardly had a chance to catch my breath when, again, he buries the scalpel in my flesh—deeper this time. I cry out in agony, my lungs constricting. When he finally wrenches the tool free I nearly pass out from the pain. I’m making labored, gasping sounds, my chest so tightly bound I can’t breathe properly.

“I was hoping you’d hear that conversation,” Anderson says calmly, pausing to wipe the scalpel on his lab coat. The blood is dark. Thick. My vision fades in and out. “I wanted you to know that your mother wasn’t stupid. I wanted you to know that she was aware that something had gone wrong. She didn’t know the exact failings of the procedure—but she suspected the injections hadn’t done everything they were meant to do. And when she suspected foul play, she made a contingency plan.”

I’m still gasping for air, my head spinning. The pain in my leg is searing, clouding my mind.

“You didn’t think she was that stupid, did you? Evie Sommers?” Anderson almost laughs. “Evie Sommers hasn’t been stupid a day in her life. Even on the day she died, she died with a plan in place to save The Reestablishment, because she’d dedicated her life to this cause. This was it,” he says, prodding at my wound. “You.

“You and your sister. You were her life’s work, and she wasn’t about to let it all go up in flames without a fight.”

I don’t understand, I try to say.

“I know you don’t understand,” he says. “Of course you don’t understand. You never did inherit your mother’s genius, did you? You never had her mind. No, you were only ever meant to be a tool, from the very beginning. So here’s everything you need to understand: you now belong to me.”

“No,” I gasp. I struggle, uselessly, against the restraints. “No—”

I feel the sting and the fire at the same time. Anderson has stuck me with something, something that blazes through me with a pain so excruciating my heart hardly remembers to beat. My skin breaks out in an all-consuming sweat. My hair begins to stick to my face. I feel at once paralyzed and as if I’m falling, free-falling, sinking into the coldest depths of hell.

Emmaline, I cry.

My eyelids flutter. I see Anderson, flashes of Anderson, his eyes dark and troubled. He looks at me like he’s finally got me exactly where he wants me, where he’s always wanted me, and I understand then, without understanding why, exactly, that he’s excited. I sense his happiness. I don’t know how I know. I can just tell from the way he stands, the way he stares. He’s feeling joyous.

It terrifies me.

My body makes another effort to move but the action is futile. There’s no point in moving, no point in struggle.

This is over, something tells me.

I have lost.

I’ve lost the battle and the war. I’ve lost the boy. I’ve lost my friends. I’ve lost my will to live, the voice says to me.

And then I understand: Anderson is in my head.

My eyes are not open. My eyes might never again open. Wherever I am is not in my control. I belong to Anderson now. I belong to The Reestablishment, where I’ve always belonged, where you’ve always belonged, he says to me, where you will remain forever. I’ve been waiting for this moment for a very, very long time, he says to me, and now, finally, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Nothing.

Even then, I don’t understand. Not right away. I don’t understand even as I hear the machines roar to life. I don’t understand even as I see the flash of light behind my eyelids. I hear my own breath, loud and strange and reverberating in my skull. I can feel my hands shaking. I can feel the metal sinking into the soft flesh of my body. I am here, strapped into steel against my will and there is no one to save me.

Emmaline, I cry.

A whisper of heat moves through me in response, a whisper so subtle, so quickly extinguished, I fear I might’ve imagined it.

Emmaline is nearly dead, Anderson says. Once her body is removed from the tank, you will take her place. Until then, this is where you’ll live. Until then, this is where you’ll exist. This is all you were ever meant for, he says to me.

This is all you will ever be.

KENJI

No one comes to the funeral.

It took two days to bury all the bodies. Castle tired his mind nearly to sickness digging up so much dirt. The rest of us used shovels. But there weren’t many of us to do the work then, and there aren’t enough of us to attend a funeral now.

Still, I sit here at dawn, perched atop a boulder, sitting high above the valley where we buried our friends. Teammates. My left arm is in a sling, my head hurts like a bitch, my heart is permanently broken.

I’m okay, otherwise.

Alia comes up behind me, so quiet I hardly even notice her. I hardly ever notice her. But there are too few bodies for her to hide behind now. I scoot over on the rock and she settles down beside me, the two of us staring out at the sea of graves below. She’s holding two dandelions. Offers one to me. I take it.

Together, we drop the flowers, watching them as they float gently into the chasm. Alia sighs.