Dominic was the latter.

That didn’t make him a pawn.

It made him a good soldier.

He willed his body toward the van. But before he could climb in, the man held out a ziplock bag. “Phone, watch, anything that transmits data and isn’t hardwired to your body.”

Dominic had been careful—there were only a handful of numbers in his phone, and none of them named; Victor was boss man, Mitch was big man, Syd was tiny terror—but he still felt a nervous prickle as the bag disappeared and he was ushered into the van.

It wasn’t empty.

Four other people—three men and one woman—were already sitting inside, their backs against the windowless metal walls. Dom took a seat as the doors slammed and the van pulled away. No one spoke, but he could tell the others were military—or ex-military—by the set of their shoulders, their close-cropped or tightly wound hair, the steady blankness in their faces. One had a prosthetic arm—an elaborate piece of biotech from the elbow down—and Dom watched the man’s mechanical fingers tap absently on his leg.

There was one more pickup—a young black woman—and then the ground changed under the tires, the world outside drowned out by the engine as the van gained speed.

Dom had spent half his career in convoys like this, being transported from one base to another.

One of the men went to check his watch before remembering it had been confiscated. Dominic didn’t mind—he could wait.

* * *

TIME moved strangely for Dom.

Or at least, he moved strangely in time.

On paper he was only thirty-three, but he felt like he’d been alive for longer—and he guessed that, in a way, he had. Dom could step out of the flow of time, into the shadows, where the whole world became a painting in shades of gray, a dark between, a nowhere, where he was the only thing that moved.

Dom had never done the math, but he figured that he’d probably spent weeks—if not months—on the other side, the outside, his own timeline stretching out, losing shape.

Once, as an experiment, he had stepped into the shadows and stayed there, curious to know how long he could last out of time. It was like holding your breath, and at the same time it wasn’t—there was oxygen in the space between, but there was also weight, pressure—a pressure that had nearly broken him before, when every step was pain. A pressure that now registered as drag, challenging, but by no means impermeable.

Since then, every morning and every night, Dominic spent time out of time. Sometimes he only moved around his apartment, and sometimes he went further afield, measuring the ground he could cover, instead of the seconds that passed.

* * *

AS the transport van slowed, Dom’s attention was pulled back to the metal bench, the darkened hull, the other waiting bodies.

A few minutes later, it finally came to a stop. The doors opened, and they were ushered out onto smooth asphalt. Dominic squinted, disoriented by the sudden morning light. They were standing in front of a building that had to be EON.

From the outside, it looked . . . innocuous. Bland, even. There was a perimeter wall, but no barbed wire, no obvious gunner posts.

The group reached the front doors, which parted with the hiss of an airlock. The lobby—if you could call it a lobby—was sleek and open, but between the front doors and that space was a security port. One by one, the six were called forward by name and instructed to empty their pockets and step into the scanner.

Klinberg. Matthews. Linfield.

Dominic’s pulse quickened.

Bara. Plinetti.

Victor had said they couldn’t hold him, but he didn’t know that, not for sure. These people, their entire job was capturing people like him. Surely their technology had been adapted to that task. What if they’d found a way to measure the difference between a human and EOs? What if they could detect people like him?

“Rusher,” said an officer, ushering Dominic forward. He let out a low breath and stepped into the scan.

An error sound—a ringing alarm—echoed through the lobby.

Dom staggered backward out of the scan, braced for the walls to open and black-clad soldiers to come pouring in. He was ready to step out of the world and into the shadows, ready to forfeit his identity, his anonymity, the whole fucking thing, and face Victor’s wrath—but the officer only rolled his eyes. “You got parts?”

“What?” asked Dominic, dazed.

“Metal. In your body. You got to specify that kind of thing before you go in.”

The soldier briskly typed in a new set of commands. “Okay. Now go.”

Dom forced himself to step back in, praying the scan couldn’t pick up his panic.

“Hold still.”

He felt like he was being Xeroxed. A bright band of white light tracked up and then back down his body.

“Step out.”

Dominic did, fighting to stop the tremor from showing in his limbs.

One of the other guys—Bara—clamped a hand on his shoulder. “Jeez, man, how tight are you wound?”

Dom managed a nervous chuckle. “Not much for loud noises,” he said. “Blame an IED.”

“Bad luck, man.” The grip loosened. “But they put you back together well.”

Dom nodded. “Well enough.”

They were led to a room with no chairs, nowhere to sit, no signs of comfort at all. Just bare walls, empty floor. The door swung shut behind them. And locked.

“You think it’s a test?” asked one of the women—Plinetti—after thirty minutes.

“If so, it’s a shit one,” said Matthews, stretching out on the floor. “It’ll take more than a white box to fuck with me.”

Dom rocked on his heels, shoulders tipping back against the wall.

“Could use some coffee,” said Bara with a yawn.

The last guy—Klinberg—spoke up. “Hey,” he said in a mock whisper. “You ever seen one?”

“One what?” asked the other woman. Linfield.

“You know. What they keep here.”

What, he’d said. Not who. Dom resisted the urge to correct him as the door swung open and a female soldier walked in. She was tall and lean, with warm brown skin and short black hair. Most of the recruits sprang to their feet—attention was a hard habit to break—but the guy on the ground rose slowly, almost lazily.

“I’m Agent Rios,” said the soldier, “and I’ll be leading you through today’s orientation.” She strode the length of the room. “Some of you are wondering what we do here. EON is separated into Containment, Observation, and Neutralization. Containment teams are dedicated to the location, pursuit, and capture of EOs. Observation of those EOs is stationed here at the base.”

Klinberg raised his hand. “Which team gets to kill them?”

Dominic’s chest tightened, but Rios’s expression didn’t falter. “Neutralization is a last resort, and its teams are built from those who’ve proven themselves in other departments. Safe to say, Klinberg, you won’t be killing EOs any time soon. If that’s a deterrent for you, let me know so I can address the remaining five candidates without your distraction.”

Klinberg had the sense to shut up.

“Before we begin,” continued Rios, “you’re about to sign a nondisclosure agreement. If you break it, you will not be arrested. You will not be sued.” She smiled grimly. “You will simply disappear.”

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.”