Trev went first, and the clang of our steps filled the room, bouncing off the back walls and hitting us on the comeback. Once on the floor, we stopped, unable to see across the span of space with the partition walls towering over us. We were mice in a maze.

“You know your way around?” Trev asked me.

“Not really.”

“Well, whatever data remains will be on the system. We just need to find a computer.”

We checked out the nearest exam room first. This one was enclosed, but the two metal exam chairs faced a wall of windows that looked out over a bank of workstations. No computers. The room was completely empty. There wasn’t even a used bandage in the garbage.

We kept looking and checked out a few more exam rooms. Finally we found a computer in a cubicle somewhere midway through the maze. It booted up quickly, but we were immediately blocked with a password screen.

“Tell me you know an override code for this, too,” I said.

Trev sat in the desk chair and ran a hand through his hair. “Unfortunately, no. But… there are a few things I can try.”

I watched over his shoulder for a good fifteen minutes, and everything he tried got him nowhere.

“I’m going exploring,” I said, feeling restless and impatient. “Yell if you get something.”

He grunted as I left.

Every exam room I checked out was almost exactly the same as the last. Some rooms had one exam chair, others two. Never more than that.

I made a right turn down one aisle of cubicles, then a left, and found myself in the back of the lab where a row of rooms had been installed against the concrete wall. Each room had a window that looked in on it. In the third room on the left, I paused, and an image flickered in my head.

A girl. A gun. And me.

I stepped over the threshold, and a feeling of déjà vu gripped me by the head and shook me till my vision tunneled.

There’d been a girl here, crouched on the floor, wavy dark hair hiding her face.

I slammed my eyes shut and tried to remember more.

She was sobbing. “Please don’t kill me,” she said.

My finger was already on the trigger.

I had orders. And the order was to kill.

“Please, Gabriel! I’m not what they say I am.”

“What do they say you are?” I asked.

She shifted, and her hair parted an inch. One gray-blue eye looked up at me. “They say I’m a monster.”

And then she was moving, moving so fast I barely blinked before a cloud of white snapped at my face, leaving split flesh in its wake. Blood trickled down my cheek.

She’d snapped the bedsheet at me, turning it into a whip. She snapped it again, breaking the skin above my eye. Blood clotted my vision. And then she kicked me in the balls.

My head hit the tiled floor with a whack, and everything went dark.

I braced myself on the doorjamb, sucking in air. It’d been a long time since I’d had a flashback that strong. I could still feel the blood running down my face, and I brought a hand up to check.

Nothing.

“Nick!” Trev called.

“Yeah?”

“I got in.”

I tried to shake off the ghost of the flashback as I stumbled through the maze toward his voice. I kept checking over my shoulder, the hair at the back of my neck standing on end, like the girl from the past was stalking me in the present.

Who was she? She had Elizabeth’s dark hair, but all I’d gotten of her face was one eye, and that hadn’t been enough.

When I found Trev ten minutes later—after a few wrong turns—he gave me a look like I really did have whip cuts on my face.

“What happened to you?”

“Nothing. What’d you find?”

“Got into the system and dug up the lead scientist’s logs. She made audios.”

“She got a name?”

“Dr. Turrow.”

That name had been mentioned in my files. Trev cued up a recording marked AUGUST 12. A female voice with a cold, clinical edge sounded through the speakers.

“Patient 2124 is reacting better to the Angel Serum than I ever could have imagined. We continue to monitor her progress. So far, there appear to be no adverse side effects. We have a test scheduled for August 16. It is my sincerest hope that she survives.”

The recording cut out, and Trev selected the one labeled AUGUST 16.

“The test was a success! Patient 2124’s results were everything I’d hoped for. Zero activity phase lasted six minutes. We’ll perform another test in one week, and increase the time frame.”

We listened to three more recordings, and in every one, Patient 2124 continued to outperform Dr. Turrow’s expectations. Her last zero activity phase—whatever that was—lasted thirty-two minutes. The doctor nearly squealed with excitement.

On the sixth audio, though, the doctor’s voice cracked and wavered. Trev and I looked at each other. Something had changed.

“Patient 2124 has grown uncontrollable. Defensive. Stubborn. Rebellious. I worry that there is a shelf life to the Angel Serum. I can see her degeneration with every test, as if her body is healing, but her mind is not.”

On the last clip, Dr. Turrow had a hard time speaking without sobbing. “Patient 2124, during today’s test, stole Agent Riker’s gun and shot herself in the head.”

Static filled the rest of the recording. That was the last one.

“Fucking hell,” I said. If Patient 2124 was dead, then it ruled out the possibility of Elizabeth being her. But why hadn’t Elizabeth been mentioned in the logs? Based on my files, I’d come here in October. Which meant she would have been in the lab in August.