Croft wasn’t wrong, though. The morning had started with a dusting of snow that had picked up strength with the falling night, piling on the ground and weighing down the tree branches. Now, the darkness around them had an eerie white cast to it, with thick clouds overhead and ceaseless snow blurring the view like static on an old television.
“Stupid to make us come out,” Croft went on. “What are we even watching for?”
“That guy we took down,” Dane said, against his better judgment.
“What, Agent Grayson?” Croft scoffed. “Did you see how deep into this hellhole they took him? He’s not getting out of that lab.”
“He ain’t normal.”
“No shit he ain’t normal,” said Croft. “He’s the one they call the Dead Man.”
Dane knew that—they’d gotten the same fucking briefing on the target. “Yeah, and he’s the only Dead Man in the fucking world. Someone might want him back.”
“You see this fucking snow? And this fucking mountain?” Croft gestured to the sky and then the steep mountainside, the snow dense enough to block the view of the chain link and barbed wire fence below. “There are no plows because there’s no fucking roads here. No fucking towns. Even if someone managed to find us—big fucking if—you’d have to be a world-class driver with an all-terrain vehicle to make it up the mountain. No one is coming for the Dead Man.”
They fell silent. Gusts of snow blew across their path as the wind howled between them, deep and powerful and rumbling like a supercharged V-8.
Dane paused. “Did you hear something?”
The table beneath him was cold against his bare back. Grayson registered it distantly, the way he would have registered the clouds in the sky—or the way he registered the bite of metal on his wrists and ankles. The air was cold too; there was the low, persistent hum of a generator somewhere, but whatever power it provided sure wasn’t being used for heat. In his nosewere the scents of strong antiseptics and an unpleasant earthy smell of damp underground.
He opened his eyes to overly bright fluorescent lights on a low ceiling and stark white walls. Whatever table he was on seemed to be in the middle of a good-sized room. The wall to his right had windows in the top half, the better to observe him with, maybe. On the wall to his left was a metal cabinet and a desk, only the back of a monitor visible, and above his head was the telltale red dot of a camera. Everything had a hazy sort of quality, which he was gonna blame on whatever was coming through the IV hooked into his left arm, and he was cold because they’d taken everything except his boxer briefs.
Whatever was coming, it wasn’t gonna be a good time.
He flexed experimentally, not surprised when the metal on his wrists and ankles refused to budge. He hadn’t been captured by amateurs. They knew how strong he was.
Grayson looked up at the camera. “Can I have my clothes back, please?” he said dryly.
A moment later, a door in the wall at his feet swung open. In walked Victor Nichols, in a lab coat and carrying a tablet, his pale blue eyes eager behind the glasses. “Agent Grayson. You woke earlier than expected.”
More people in lab coats were following Nichols into the room, four of them. They were spreading across the room like efficient robots, never meeting Grayson’s gaze.
His eyes went back to Nichols, whose edges seemed blurred in the too-bright lights. “How about you put me back to sleep?” Grayson said. “And I wake up in a bed, in a room that isn’t forty below?”
“Your sense of humor is lacking.” Nichols was typing into the tablet. “But given your circumstances, I suppose it is remarkable that you kept it all.”
One of the scientists had stepped up to the desk on his left and seemed to be booting up the computer. Grayson watched as Nichols strode over to the desk and set the tablet carelessly on the surface. “What are we doing here, Doctor?”
“Tests. Obviously,” Nichols said, like Grayson was stupid, as he made his way from the desk to the metal cabinet, which was being unlocked by a second scientist.
“What kind oftestsrequire me to be chained to a table?”
“Did your brother destroy your imagination along with your feelings?” Nichols snapped.
The metal cabinet door swung open, blocking what little view Grayson had from the table. A moment later he heard wheels behind him, rolling along the smooth floor.
Nichols was suddenly leaning over him. “We’re going to spend significant time together over the next few months, so I want to make something clear: You are not unique.”
Grayson pushed the wordmonthsout of his mind. “What’re you talking about?”
“You are not the precious snowflake so many in our field believe,” Nichols said with a nasty sort of smile. “You are simply an experiment. And experiments can be duplicated.”
Grayson squinted against lights beyond Nichols, too-bright and oddly haloed through the drugs. “You think you can make more Dead Men?”
“Iwillmake more Dead Men,” Nichols said. “In this lab I’ll have all of the materials I need.”
“Materials.”Grayson pulled uselessly against the restraints. “What’s that code for? Empaths?”
