“You don’t need shoes,” he snaps, impatient—I’m running out of ways to stall him. He knows I’m trying to stall him.

“You don’t think manhandling a barefoot girl through the lobby will look suspicious?” I gasp for air, trying to regulate my voice—trying to sound like I’m calm.

“Fine.” The man’s getting angrier by the second. But he steps aside so that he can follow me into the bedroom, his companion heading out to the living room. “Make it quick. First pair you find.”

I nod, dropping to one knee in the closet, blessing the fact that I’ve been just tossing stuff onto the floor—the bags and shoes and items of clothing are all jumbled together. I keep one foot under me so I can move when I need to. My hands are shaking so much I almost can’t work the clasp of my handbag, and when I do, the plas-pistol falls out onto the floor. I catch my breath, grabbing at it with one hand and using the other to toss a scarf over it, making sure it’s not visible from where the man’s standing.

The plastene pistol is beyond illegal—its sole purpose is to beat the cutting-edge security nets that test for energy signatures, for metal alloys, for anything that might betray the presence of a weapon. It fires an old-fashioned bullet, it’s nearly impossible to aim straight, and it’s only good for one shot—firing it makes the chamber melt, and half the time it explodes upon firing, seriously injuring its user.

But I got it inside LRI Headquarters without causing so much as a blip on their state-of-the-art security scanners. After all, even though I didn’t plan on meeting LaRoux himself there yet, I might’ve gotten lucky—and I’d regret it forever if I was unprepared. An ordinary weapon, even a low-tech military gun like the Gleidels they used on Avon, would’ve brought every security guard in the place down on my head. But this little beauty of a weapon is my constant companion.

Now, I curl my hand around it so tightly my arm cramps, sending fire shooting up my shoulder. The pain cuts through my fear, a white-hot ribbon of clarity steadying my thoughts. My mind runs through the steps, over and over, rehearsing them like a recipe, like one of my memorized floor plans.

Shift weight. Turn. Aim for his chest. Fire. Grab his gun. Wait for the others to come through. Fire. Use bed for cover. Fire. Fire. Run.

“Time’s up, we’re leaving now,” orders the man, his voice rising in volume as he comes toward me.

Shift weight. Turn. Aim for his chest.…

Tears obscure my vision, but I know where he is; I can hear his voice, feel his presence. I whirl, and my eyes focus for a tiny, strange instant on the droplets of water that fly from my wet hair to spatter against his shirt. He’s close. Too close.

I gasp—he sees the gun—I swing it toward him—he shouts—something explodes, and I see fire. His arms wrap around me, hauling me back. He’s not dead. I missed, or else the gun didn’t fire, and what I heard was my own heartbeat, my own fear. He yanks me backward and I scream, fighting his grip wildly for a handful of seconds that stretch and twist and crush against my lungs. Then instinct returns and I jerk my head back, catching his chin with the back of my skull. I step down as hard as I can on his instep in my bare feet, making him howl. I drive my elbow back into the soft part of his torso. His grip loosens, and I see the plas-pistol, intact—I never did fire it—a few feet away. With a sobbing breath, I lunge for it only to feel a hand wrap around my arm and tear me back, making my shoulder scream. He throws me facedown on my bed, shoving my head into my sateen comforter so that it presses against my lips and my nose like a plastic bag, suffocating me. I try to lift my head, try to breathe, and try one more time to slip free, to reach for the gun, for my only chance. I graze it with the tips of my fingers.

Then something hard slams into the back of my head and I slide to the floor, stunned, vision clouding. “Bitch,” mutters a voice high above me, far away. It’s the last thing I hear.

The young man, who is not quite so young anymore, is holding something in his arms. “We can’t stay here,” the young man says to the thing. “Rose was already miserable with no one to talk to, and I can’t imagine you’ll be happy here either. I’ll leave some of the staff here, people I trust not to talk.”

The man waits a few moments, as though expecting the thing to talk back. “I know you won’t remember this, but I wanted you to see it.” He draws closer to the thin spot, until its blue light falls upon the thing in his arms. The little thing has eyes as blue as his, and wisps of peach-colored hair, and it blinks at the thin spot and yawns.

“Well, Lilac?” the man murmurs to the little thing. “What do you think? You’re the third person in all the galaxy to meet them.”

The thin spot flashes, and the little thing laughs with such delight that the agony dims for just a moment. The man’s face has changed—the guilt is gone, and the terrible gleam in his eyes when he runs his experiments. Instead his features are soft, showing something new.

Something we want to learn.

We will watch.

We will wait.

I’M THINKING SERIOUSLY ABOUT SOME KHAO PHAT. On one hand, it would involve getting off my butt—but on the other, when I checked the street cams before, Mama Samorn was behind the wok, and that means there’ll be some fine cooking coming up.

I’m in my den, chair folded around my body, wall of screens spread out before me. There’s something comforting about their symphony of soft chimes and whirs and beeps—it’s the sound of home. On the screens to my right, I can see my bots spidering all over the forums I host. Conspiracy theorists are a nervy bunch, but sift through enough of what they say, and occasionally you find a grain of something to work with. My friend Mae—or at least, she’s closer than anyone else to being my friend—is my general for those. She has an amazing knack for dropping a comment here, an idea there, sending them scurrying toward whatever we want investigated.

Straight in front of me is my tracking program for Antje Towers, and that’s what has my attention right now. She resigned her commission and vanished from Avon after the broadcast, with a paper-thin story about going off the grid, retiring to a pastoral colony. Enough death, she said.

Not enough for me, Commander Towers. When they went into the hidden facility after the broadcast, every hint of LaRoux’s presence was gone. That cleansing happened on her watch, and she looked the other way. I know she’ll have the dirt I need—the public testimony, if I have to choke it out of her myself—to expose LaRoux for what he really is. She’s been running and hiding for a year, now, switching IDs every few weeks—she’s been Lucy Palmer, Taya Astin, Anya Griffin, Natalie Harmon.…The list goes on and on. She’s always jumping to somewhere new, leaving me with ghost trails, and occasional reports of a blonde switching to a new ship, a different planet. From what I’ve dug up from their databases, even LaRoux Industries doesn’t know where she is—which makes her perfect for my purposes. LRI keeps such close tabs on its employees that I can’t even get close to any of them. But Towers—she’s not under the umbrella of LaRoux’s protection anymore.

Her trail went cold when she hit Corinth months ago, and more than ever, my pulse is pounding with the urgency of finding her. I’ve had a thousand imagined conversations with her, hurled a thousand accusations her way. If I can find her, maybe I’ll learn more about what Alexis and I saw at LaRoux Headquarters.