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Luke nodded. He’d never put much thought into the academies before—they were only for the most powerful abnorms—but after the other night, he had a new appreciation of the dread they inspired.

“Your boys can relax, I’m not gonna fight. I don’t have much food, but if you want to fill your canteens, be my guest.”

Luke smiled. “Poisoned the supply, huh?”

“Worth a shot.” The old man grinned back, fillings glinting in his teeth. “So now what?”

“Well, if you lay down that weapon and surrender, we’ll let you go.”

“Yeah? While you chase after my boy and his family?”

“You know,” Luke said, “I had sons too. Your people burned them alive two weeks ago.”

“Sorry for your loss,” the guy said. The wind picked up off the high desert, whistling between the spindles of the porch rail. There was a gunshot from somewhere in the mid-distance. Another resident of Cloud Ridge, Luke supposed. “Last chance. Why don’t you put the gun down and start walking?”

“Why don’t you come on up here, unzip me, and—”

Luke pulled his sidearm and made a clean shot through the man’s skull. The blast echoed off the gray belly of the sky. For a moment the grandfather remained sitting. Then as his muscles relaxed, his body slumped, slipping off the chair and thumping the boards of the porch. The shotgun clattered beside him.

One of the New Sons started to laugh. It was high-pitched and ragged, an edge of the hysterical in it.

“Pass it down that Miller’s order not to drink the water stands,” Luke said to no one in particular. “Check the houses as you move. No fresh food, just canned goods, ammunition, blankets.”

The laughing soldier kept going, hinged at the knees and looking miserable. Luke glanced at him, then at the man standing beside him, a young guy with a patchy beard. “Then burn it.”

“His house?”

“The town. Burn it to the ground.”

CHAPTER 24

Soren woke.

Hips aching and back stiff from the metal bunk, he began the slow process of sitting up. As ever, his mind ranged ahead of his muscles, processing the sound that had awakened him. It was the door to his cage opening. Normally his captors just flooded the room with gas and did with his unconscious body as they liked.

So little changed in his tiny kingdom. Whatever this was, it would not be pleasant. He focused on calm, centering himself in nothingness.

The men who came had the broad shoulders and beefy necks of wrestlers. They wore dull uniforms marked with the rising blue sun of Epstein Industries, and leveled Tasers. In the leisure of his perception, Soren watched one squeeze the trigger, saw the pop of gas as the metal probes flew, cable looping through the air like a striking snake, and then the fangs hit his naked chest and tens of thousands of volts surged through him, washing away conscious thought and control. His muscles spasmed and a guttural sound wrenched from his throat.

The guards moved forward and wrestled his twitching body into a garment he was too scrambled to recognize at first. It wasn’t until one of them used a length of steel chain to lash him to the wall that Soren realized he wore a straitjacket.

Torture, then. They evidently didn’t understand him after all. He supposed they imagined his lingering perceptions of the agony would make it worse. From a certain perspective, they were right, but the results wouldn’t be what they wished. He would simply retreat into nothingness and let them destroy him. Better than an eternity spent counting.

There was even room for victory of a sort, he realized. Simply not revealing the things they wanted to know would be the foundation. But the triumph would be in rising above. He would not scream. He had spent his whole life in pain. There was nothing they could do that he could not endure.

Once the guards had him bound to their satisfaction, they left. A stranger entered. Slender and unremarkable, with dark eyes and prominent cheekbones. He carried a chair in one hand and pushed a rolling tray laden with shiny instruments. Soren almost laughed at the theatricality of it.

Until Nick Cooper walked in, dragging a woman behind him, his fingers clenched around her arm. Pale and perfect. Samantha. She gasped when she saw him, then jerked free and ran to him, and he watched her come, slow, so slow, her brown eyes broad with horror, golden hair drifting behind, arms flung wide, and then she was on him, hugging him, her lips on his, the warmth and scent of her filling his world. Samantha was trembling, her mouth forming sounds more like whimpers than words.

“That’s enough.” Cooper yanked her away.

Soren lunged, but the straitjacket held his arms uselessly to his sides, and the chain snapped taut when he’d gone no more than an inch. He strained, the muscles of his legs knotting and locking fruitlessly as the only woman he’d ever loved, the only one who understood him, was forced into a chair, her arms and legs cuffed to it, a belt lashed around her narrow waist and duct tape stretched across her perfect mouth.

Cooper said, “I offered you a better way.”