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My heart kicked.

“Want to wait for SWAT?” I asked.

“No heat signatures. No one’s here,” Nadine said.

The first step groaned under my weight.

It grew colder as I descended.

Even my suit’s air filter couldn’t remove the stench of mildew and wet stone.

Another SWAT officer said over the channel: “Main level is clear.”

As I reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped onto a dirt floor, I had the sinking feeling that Nadine was right. Maybe Soren had played us. As to why, I couldn’t imagine.

“You know,” Nadine said, “all Soren told us was that he handed his package to a guy at the front door. He never went inside.”

“What’s your point?”

“Maybe they’re just using this place as a drop site.”

“That would make more sense than someone running a sophisticated lab out of a quiet neighborhood,” I said, wondering if we’d wasted our time coming here.

Sure, we could hold Soren for seventy-two hours. Rattle his cage a bit more. But we had nothing on him. His luggage had come back clean.

I swung my pistol across the black expanse of the basement.

My exhalations steamed up the edges of my visor.

The walls were the original stone foundation of the house.

I saw a rusted boiler.

Dusty furniture.

And a curious black cube about a foot on each side, sitting on an antique dry sink.

“Logan.” There was something in Nadine’s voice that got my immediate attention.

I turned in her direction.

“Look,” she said.

I aimed my light, saw a camera sitting on a tripod.

Pointed at us.

A red light blinked on.

“It just started recording,” I said.

The SWAT team was coming down the stairs now.

I let my light sweep slowly across the basement again.

I wasn’t worried anymore that we’d wasted time coming. Something wasn’t right.

In the center of the room, my light passed over the cube I’d seen a moment ago.

It was in the process of splitting open.

“Nadine,” I said.

“I see it.”

As the sides of the cube fell away, my light shone through a sphere of what looked like ice. It was roughly the size of a bowling ball, and based on the quantity of vapor peeling off the surface, I suspected that it was supercold, or perhaps made of something other than H2O.

“There’s another one over here,” Nadine said.

I turned, saw that she was shining her light on an identical sphere of ice near the stairs.

“What the hell is this?” she asked.

I said, “I’m not really loving the vibe down—”

A buzzing sound interrupted me—it was coming from the dry sink.

I moved toward it. Saw the source of the vibration. Felt an explosion of panic.

Beside the sphere of ice, there was a phone with a touchscreen lighting up as a call came through. Two wires ran from the phone, through a hole in the table, and underneath the ice.

The ice spheres began to glow from a blue light embedded at their centers.

“Get out!” I screamed.

The SWAT team was already halfway up the stairs.

Nadine followed frantically behind them.

I saw everyone disappear onto the main floor, and I was several seconds from the bottom step when the basement went white.

I felt an immense pressure on my chest.

Then I was lying on my back on the floor, staring up at the exposed insulation under the main level.

The visor of my hood was cracked and scratched in numerous places, and there were tiny, clear fragments speared through the plastic. I didn’t understand what they were until one of the slivers of shrapnel dripped a freezing drop of water into my left eye.

I managed to raise my pistol and shine the light on my suit. It had been shredded and punctured in more places than I could count.

Writhing panic.

Pain flooding in.

My arms and legs—every surface of my skin not protected by body armor—suddenly burned as if I’d been stung a thousand times.





WHEN I TOOK A breath, a crushing agony constricted my chest.

I heard myself moan.

Opened my eyes.

I was lying in a hospital bed.

On a stand beside me, a vital-signs monitor beeped at regular intervals and an IV bag fed something into my vein through an intravenous needle taped to my heavily bandaged left arm. My other arm and my legs had been wrapped in gauze. More disturbing was the opaque plastic partition completely enclosing me and the bed. Beyond, I could only see silhouettes and vague shapes. The voices I heard were distant, muddled.

I tried to retrieve my last waking memory, and whether it was because of the drugs or my injuries, it took some effort to find it.

I’d been lying on the dirt floor in the basement of a Victorian we’d raided in Denver. There’d been an explosion. I had tried to get up, but the pain in my chest had been paralyzing.

And so I’d lain there in the dark, wondering where the rest of the team had gone.

Wondering if I was dying.

Pain distorts time, so I had no idea how much of it had passed when I finally heard the thunder of footsteps descending the stairs into the basement. A medical team in full hazmat gear had surrounded me, and seeing my extreme pain, one of them had mercifully loaded me up with some beautiful drug.