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CHAPTER ONE
Haina
Murder equaled freedom.
I had to keep reminding myself of that. If I wanted to be free, it would come at a cost. There would be bloodshed. People would die.
Some innocent … sort of.
Some not. Definitely not.
But even the innocent ones helped keep me locked away like a canary in a gilded cage, standing by as I was tested and tortured and treated more like an experiment than a human being.
So even the “innocent” would die if it meant I could finally be free.
Even then, with a heap of bodies at my feet, it could all end up being for naught, and I could wind up back in my cage before sunrise.
And if that was the case, they would beat me bloody until I begged for death. Punishment for my insurrection.
There was no guarantee this would work. That I could make it over the wall and into the woods before getting caught.
But I had to take the risk.
Guilt was for the weak.
If anybody died tonight, it was because they were part of the problem.
It would be because they were determined to keep me shackled to a life I didn’t choose. A life I was forced into. Born into. I would rather die than spend another moment training. Another moment alone.
But they’d never let me die.
I was too valuable.
If I got cornered, I had to be prepared to end it all myself.
I took a deep breath and dropped from the opened panel in the ceiling onto the floor below. My bare feet made no noise.
And just like in the air duct, I couldn’t see anything. Not a damn thing. I had to go by feel. By memory. I’d lived in this compound for eighteen months, had walked these halls multiple times a day, but never in such darkness.
The security alarm screamed overhead, threatening to burst my eardrums. But I had to keep moving.
This was my one and only shot.
I’d been planning my escape for months, meticulously studying the blueprints of the labyrinth compound, knowing that I’d need to make my way to freedom in total blackness since the compound was designed to go into complete darkness and lockdown if there was a security breach.
Even with my mercenary skills, my heightened senses, and my superior reflexes, I still wasn’t the cat whose mutated genes flowed through my veins. I couldn’t see in the dark. I didn’t always land on my feet, and I sure as hell didn’t have nine lives.
No. I wasn’tpartcat.
But I knew well enough that the Stratera Virus, developed with the intent to help control the population—and had succeeded more than it was supposed to—had been synthesized using a specific gene from thePantheragenus.
Almost every female born carried the gene.
But only a few survived to learn its true capacity.
Slowly, I slid my hands along the wall. I knew it was sixty paces to the door from where I’d dropped down.
I’d been upstairs in the training room when the alarm began to wail. Just as Neffers said it would. As he’d programmed it to. It was perfect, really. I was armed to the teeth right now, ready to kill anyone that got in my way.
