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Chapter 1

It was the whispering of the ghosts that woke me

I stretched the kinks out of lanced at the old metal clock on the far wall to confirht hadn’t fallen yet The ghosts ell used tofor them to wake me early

I swung s off the bed and sat up The tiled floor chilled htly stale Which probably ain It was a frustrating proble more often of late, thanks to the fact that parts for the decades-old machines just weren’t made anymore And while there was one place where I probably could scavenge the bits I needed to repair the of a last resort Chaos was not a place you entered willingly Not if you valued life and limb

But if one of the purifiers had gone down again, then I either had to risk going there or close off yet another level I ht be able to survive short-term on foul air, but I still needed to breathe

Gentle tendrils of energy trailed across my skin, a caress filled with the need to follow But it was a touch that held no fear Whatever disturbed the ghosts was not airound

I slipped on rabbedmy arms into the sleeves as I walked across to the door at the far end of the bunk rooht flashed as I neared it

“Naruff metallic voice said Over the years I’d named it Hank, simply because it reminded e He still haunted the lower floors, although he tended to avoid both me and the children

“Tiger C5, déchet, lure rank”

I pressed ainst the blood-work slot A small needle shot out and took the required sah I’d adjusted the power ratios and cut several levels out of the security net, it still took an inter time for the systeen-fueled generator and the banks of solar batteries powering the syste was slow And I couldn’t risk firing up a second generator when I needed at least two running at night to cope with the enerators in total and—with parts so scarce in the world above—I had to be careful Thatcontinual maintenance

The scanner finally kicked into gear After checkingopen The corridor beyond was cold and dark, thewith condensation Ghosts swirled, their little bodies wisps of fog that drifted along in blackness

The sounds ofat the vastness of this underground military bunker And yet this was the s the race war—a war that ht have lasted only five years but had forever altered the very fabric of our world

The shifters—with their greater strength, speed, and the capacity to heal almost any wound—should have wiped the stain of humanity fro up to the war, and the bioengineering labs, which had initially produced nothing one into full—and secret—production These labs had created not only an enzyave humans the saned humanoid Or déchet, as we’d become known

It said a lot about huiven a nickname that meant “waste product”

Most of us hadn’t come from human stock, but were rather a ths and few of their weaknesses We’d been huht and to die without thought or feeling—and we’d almost turned the tide of the war

Almost

But not all of us had been trained strictly as soldiers, just as not all of us were unfeeling There were a feho’d been created with more specific skills in mind—chameleons able to alter their flesh at will, and who’d been tasked with either seduction and intelligence gathering or assassination

I was one such creation

Of course, while huned us to be frontline soldiers in their battle with the shifters, they’d never entirely trusted us not to turn against theh a mix of chemical and medical interventions Which meant there’d been areas in this base that, as a déchet, I’d been banned fro

But as the sole survivor of the destruction that had hit this base at the war’s end 103 years ago, I’d made it my business to fully explore every available inch The shifters had, in an effort to ensure the base could never be used again, blocked off all known access points into the base by pouring tons of concrete into them While this had taken out sublevels one to three, it still left e Which was hardly surprising since this had once been the ho complement of déchet, but to all those who had been responsible for our creation and training

I passed through several more security points—points that, like the one at the bunkhouse, were fixed and unalterable—and eventually ht, circular stairwell that led to the surface level These stairs had been one of two routes designed as ee of the various sections of the Humanoid Development Project, so its presence had been unknown to all but a few and it had been designed to withstand anything the shifters could throw at the base As it turned out, it had also withstood the concrete

It had taken me close to a year to find this tunnel, and a couple ave ht be a world I ventured into only once or twice a enerally when food or equipment supplies were lohen the need for cohostly becae the need to knoas going on aboveable to venture out, to watch from shadows and distance, was all that had kept hosts

I reached the surface level and pried open the hidden escape panel Sunlight poured in through the do it from the elements and further decay This level had once contained the day-to-day operational center of the HDP, and the battered remnants had become part of a museum dedicated to the history of a war no one wanted to see repeated Of course, it was also a museum created by the shifters, so it emphasized both the foolishness and waste of war and also the evils of geneThe body-part industry and all the benefits it had once provided were now little more than bylines in history

And though fewer and feere visiting the museum these days, one of the most popular exhibits still see solar panels They y to those alive today, yet the panels continued to power not only the systems that had been preserved on this floor for demonstration purposes, but all of mine