The last time Elara was this hungover, she’d been crammed into a vending machine, and at least then she’d had the comfort of synthetic nacho cheese.

  This time, her head throbbed so violently it threatened to shake her teeth loose, her mouth tasted like blood, and someone had—oh, for fuck’s sake—handcuffed her to a gurney. And the gurney was moving.

  She cracked one eyelid open. White ceiling tiles stuttered past overhead, the cheap kind that always reeked of bleach and sadness. But the air was ice-cold and faintly stale, and the overhead PA blared a cheerful corporate jingle that only made her want to retch. She tried to lift her head, then regretted it instantly as pain ricocheted down her spine.

  The gurney hit a bump. She grunted, which attracted the attention of a pair of boots keeping pace beside the bed—no, not boots— lacquered black hooves, attached to a uniformed minotaur with biceps as thick as her legs.

  The minotaur didn’t look at her. She could feel his presence anyway, like a hot radiator on a winter day.

  The gurney took a sharp right, into a glass-walled security airlock, and finally stopped moving. The lock hissed and the minotaur reached over, thumbed a button on the rail, and the handcuffs released with a polite chime. Elara sat up, immediately cupped her temples, and tried to blink away the fireworks in her vision.

  “You alive?” The minotaur’s voice was exactly what she expected: gravelly, bored, unwilling to participate in her bullshit.

  “Define alive.” Elara managed to focus on him, then on her own hands. No blood, no broken fingers, though her right sleeve was missing and there was something sticky in her hair.

  “Good enough.” He jerked his head at the glass doors. “Interview room’s through there. Don’t touch anything you don’t want traced.”

  “Please, Karn,” she croaked, “I haven’t left a clean sig since nursery school.”

  The agent smirked and pressed his ID badge onto a reader. The glass dissolved away. She staggered to her feet, wiped her hands on her pants, and shuffled through before the doors could reconstitute and trap her like a gnat.

  The interview room was the classic SoulCorp layout: bare metal, one-way mirror, two chairs bolted to the floor, a table so thin she could snap it in half if she had half her strength back. There was already a suit waiting for her: tall, pale, sallow faced, with a logo tie and the sort of hair that cost more than most people’s monthly rent. She knew his type. Probably had a name like Seven or Cashmere or Pyloric Reflux.

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  “Elara Szanto, please sit,” the suit said, not looking up from his data-slate.

  She did, and it creaked loud enough to make her wince. “You’ll have to forgive my lack of shoes. Your goons were aggressive.”

  The suit ignored her and swiped through a handful of files. “Ms. Szanto, you’re aware this is your third incident in as many quarters?”

  “I’m flattered you’re keeping score.”

  He didn’t smile. “Did you, or did you not, attempt to sabotage the Central Vault’s perimeter defenses last night?”

  Elara snorted. “Attempt? Check your logs. They’re still offline. You’re welcome for the free audit, by the way.”

  He drummed his fingers against the data-slate. “We’re less concerned with our perimeter and more with the… collateral.”

  That brought her up short. Her memory was a throbbing bruise, mostly smeared with the taste of mana grenades and the scent of singed polyester. But something had happened after she’d pulled the plug on the mainframe—she’d seen a flash, and… fuck, what was it?

  She must’ve made a face, because the suit’s mouth lifted at the corners. “You don’t remember? That’s not surprising, given the nature of the discharge.”

  “I didn’t sign up for any discharge,” Elara muttered, but he was already opening a holo-feed above the table. Footage spun up: Elara herself, sprinting down a corridor, lobbing mana bombs behind her like she was in a cartoon. Something monstrous and multi-limbed arced after her, claws scraping the walls, mouth full of blue fire. She ducked, rolled, and the thing collided with a security door, bursting into a riot of sparks and screaming.

  The footage paused, zoomed in. The creature’s face—her own face, or at least, the face of something that had borrowed her DNA and a lot of bad hair dye. It howled at the camera, the holo flickered, then vanished in a cloud of static.

  “That… isn’t me.”

  The suit folded his arms. “It’s not, anymore. But it was. We have a containment breach. And a mole. SoulCorp requires remediation.”

  She stared at the screen, mind suddenly too sharp, too clear. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth.

  “I didn’t do this,” she whispered.

  The suit shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. You’re the only one who can fix it. Consider this your offer of re-employment.”

  He slid a contract across the table. The top line read: INDEPENDENT CONTRACTOR, AAAC RISK MANAGEMENT. A shit-ton of legal jargon followed, but what she was searching for was in the last line: “Remuneration: Full Clemency, plus hazard bonuses.”

  Elara looked him in the eye, then at her own hollow reflection in the mirror. She’d never been much for heroics, but she was even less keen on a new bio-ware breaking out.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” she asked with a raised eyebrow.

  A mana pistol and shield dropped to the table with a heavy thud. Words Elara never thought she’d read again loomed at her in runed letters: SOULCORP SPECIAL AGENT.

  She picked up the stylus and signed.