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And I mean anyone.
The cacophony of men’s voices yelling, combined with the wailing siren, messed with my head, but I couldn’t let it distract me.
I could practically taste the fresh night air. Could practically smell the acidic and piney scent of the forest just yards away.
But I’d need to make it through a wall of highly trained soldiers to get there. If I wanted to feel tree bark beneath my fingertips and the wet spongy earth against the soles of my bare feet.
I’d kill a thousand soldiers just to feel those things for a moment. Just to gulp the air that hadn’t been pre-treated and purified before it entered my lungs. Just to feel the night air sweep across my shoulders.
Tickling the wall, I paused when I found the door.
Footsteps thundered on the other side, and I held my breath.
They would all be wearing night-vision goggles, putting me at a significant disadvantage.
But I was trained for this.
My senses were heightened. And although it was still pitch-black in the hallway, I could already smell that there were exactly six men on the other side of the door. Six distinct heartbeats—one with a murmur—and six unique odors. Six unique scents of fear.
Because they were afraid.
As trained as they were, they knew what they were up against.
Who they were up against?
They’d all watched me train.
They knew it would takeat leastsix of them to even stand a remote chance of taking me down. And even then, they knew not all of them would survive.
They were whispering. They knew I was here. But I steadied my breathing and let their whispers become loud in my head.
“On my mark. B-team go left, C-team go right. I’ll hold center. They want her alive. Stun guns only. Understand?”
Ah, so there were seven of them.
I inhaled deep.
Felt another heartbeat.
Yep. The seventh was new. I hadn’t smelled him a second ago. But I felt his pulse now. He’d just come from outside and was slightly out of breath. He’d also just pissed his pants a little.
“We know you’re there, Haina,” came the voice from before. “We don’t want to hurt you. We don’t want to kill you.”
I said nothing.
“You can’t tell me you’d have any idea how to survive on your own if you actually did get beyond the perimeter. You’ve never been outside the walls. This is your home, Haina. You haven’t been trained in wilderness survival yet. But we can do that if that’s what you want. We can give you whatever you want if you just stand down and stay here. Stay home.”
Home?
This place wasn’t my home.
It was my prison.
It was my cage.
I was no better than a dog being raised to fight other dogs. I was starved, beaten, and they’d tried so hard to break me. But that’d only made me stronger and my will to escape rock-solid.
Nobody deserved to be kept in a cage. Not even someone like me who was created in a lab, birthed by a woman I never met, and raised by artificial intelligence, emotionless scientists and mercenaries.
