Sam did his best to dodge, but his reflexes were no better than a regular person’s without the ability to slow time. He did his best to drop to the ground to avoid the incoming fire, but found himself flying off of his feet as a net enveloped him.

  “Loki! Run and get help!” He shouted in the void. Looking over, he saw that Fiona had been entangled as well.

  The men fired nets at Loki, but his agility let him dodge their shots with almost supernatural skill. On the defensive rather than offensive, Loki was well beyond human reaction speed or predictability. Even with the augmented skill the gunmen showed, Loki was simply too fast and immediately bounded off the field.

  Sam looked up and found the gunmen hard to look at. Each one shimmered with semi-transparency. When they weren’t moving they were all but invisible.

  “You bastards don’t know what you’re messing with!” Fiona shouted.

  “Knock them out,” one of them said, voice filter muffling his identity.

  They were shot with darts next, and Sam felt a sharp impact on his head. Rather than struggle, he decided to watch Fiona and imitate her as she lost strength and passed out.

  Try as he might, he couldn't think of a way to get out of the net. It seemed to be made out of a flexible type of metal, and he didn’t have so much as a knife on him.

  Fortunately neither the drug nor the knock to the head seemed to knock him out thanks to his nervous system augment. They quickly stuffed his head in a black bag and deployed some kind of self-tying cuffs around his hands and feet before grabbing the net. They were carted off like a sack of flour to a nearby vehicle, and set upright before being strapped in.

  Thinking quickly, Sam pulled up a simulated map of the city in the white room, then paid attention as they made their turns. He felt a jolt as they passed through the tunnel to the other cylinder, the sounds of the city suddenly becoming clear.

  He paid attention, using timing and the sensation of turning to estimate where he was. He didn’t like the answer he came to. By the time the vehicle came to a stop his best guess was that they were deep inside the red light district.

  He considered his options, and the best one he could think of would be trying to put his thumbs into the eyesockets of whoever took the hood off him.

  They picked him up and carted him inside of a building, with the internal air conditioning telling him they didn’t like it hot. It was chilly, and if he hadn’t been wearing a heavy jacket he’d have been freezing.

  When they loaded him into an elevator he listened carefully for breathing. Other than Fiona, there were four men with him. He was still in a net with his hands and feet bound. Still no good options. He tried running a real time scenario, but it just ended with him getting beaten again. Whoever these people were, they were professional.

  He thought of infiltrators for a moment but discarded it. These men didn’t move like the people in the stadium. They clearly had training and practice, but it didn’t give the same vibe as people who had years of virtual training for a particular mission. They were quiet but he could hear them cough, move to scratch an itch, or complain softly when lugging him around.

  They felt too human to be the Emperor’s slaves. No undertone of fear like Ian, or fanaticism. The body language was all wrong.

  They’d moved up four stories before being hauled out and thrown into wide, metal chairs. When the hood came off, Sam realized that the two of them were alone in the room. None of the human guards remained with them. Instead a single bright light shone down and a voice spoke from a speaker below a one-way mirror. The hood had been pulled off by a mechanical arm.

  “Sam Wharton, we know you’ve been awake, so be quick with your answers. You received augs from the SIA not long ago. What are they?”

  “I’m not telling you a damn thing,” He growled.

  “Wrong answer.” The distorted voice said with a snarl.

  The mechanical arm descended and the fingers opened, revealing two metallic prongs. A spark of electricity danced between them. He tried to evade, but it struck him in the chest. He screamed, with it holding on him for nearly half a minute.

  His skin was burned and peeling where the arc of electricity had struck him. This was no mere taser, he realized with horror. It was a true live wire that could electrocute him.

  “We’re going to figure out how they work one way or another. Talk or get the shock.”

  Sam decided that however high his pain tolerance was, he wasn’t going to just endure torture and turned down his pain receptors. He found the virtual representation of his body in the white void and adjusted his senses.

  “Go screw yourself, asshole.” He growled. The arm came back down again, and he did his best to imitate the scream he made earlier. A perfect memory helped with that.

  “So a pain blocker is one of the things you have, is it?” The voice came over the speaker once the shock was over. “You can pretend to scream, but your vitals don’t lie and we can see them. You might not care if we hurt you, but we’ve got other methods to make you talk.”

  In the chair next to him, Fiona began to stir.

  “Wha… what the hell?” She said, coming to awareness with furious rage. “You bastards are in way over your heads. Don't think those stealth suits are going to save you from my boss.”

  “Fiona McLane, military intelligence asset. You will list off your augs and tell us how they work.”

  “No,” She said calmly. “I won’t.”

  The mechanical arm came down and struck her with the same arc of electricity. Sam gritted his teeth, only to find her expression completely unchanged.

  She looked into the mirror. “I’ve stared the Machine Emperor in the eye. You amateurs don’t hold a candle to it.”

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  “Interesting. You don’t have a pain resistance aug. Definite interrogation resistance training, though. We have been able to map out several other enhancements. Other than a few unknown brain implants yours are standard high-end espionage work. Valuable. Once we’ve mapped out the last few we’ll strip you for parts, lobotomize you, and put you to work on the streets.”

  “Typical errand boys for arrogant rich kids,” She sneered. “Nobody is going to come to your funeral, which I guarantee will be soon.”

  “As for the boy, our sensors are telling us your entire nervous system is augmented somehow. Bad luck. A new nervous system aug is worth more than the ransom money from selling you back. Once we’ve got you figured out you’re going out an airlock.”

  “I’m not going to tell you anything!” He shouted.

  “We’ll see how tough you are when we start peeling off fingers and toes. Pain aug or not knowing you’ll have less digits has an impact. I wouldn’t be too secure in that pain aug, either. We’ve cracked better before. By the time we’re through you’ll be begging for us to kill you.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “We’ll talk later. For now, lights out.”

  Soon they were enveloped in darkness.

  —

  Loki panted heavily as he tried to keep himself from cooking. Dodging those humans had been very, very hard. Some of them were faster than Ian, and if he had been trying to fight them rather than escape he knew he’d be joining his family.

  He bolted back to the hotel, paws slapping into the dirt as he zoomed across the landscape. As he came to the entrance he felt a chilling eerie sensation.

  Once, after he first ran away from the mansion he first called home, he fell asleep in the wilderness. The same sensation overtook him just moments before a rattlesnake appeared and tried to eat him. He dove into a bush, feeling outward not with his eyesight, but the feeling of his whiskers. When he truly focused he could get an almost perfect sense of his surroundings.

  “...ign of … no… thought I saw…”

  The sound was muffled, but if he truly focused he could pinpoint it just inside the doorway. Focusing on his senses, he could tell that there was someone in there, almost invisible, like the people in the field. He hadn’t noticed them until they opened fire either, and now Sam was gone. He wasn’t dead though, they carted him off like animal control took out one of the pride that got too bold. In a net. He’d be alive, but maybe not for long. Some of those overly-bold cats never returned or escaped. One of them had been another male named Hercule, who had gotten caught trying to steal from a supermarket. He said that animals would disappear into a backroom and then never be seen again. He’d escaped from that very room by attacking a person with a needle, as Loki decided to copy later on.

  That story had haunted Loki, who had come to think that needles were something that would always kill. Especially after his own experience in the airport. The thought of Sam being taken into a backroom and disappearing haunted him.

  He crept along the outside of the hotel, hopping from windowsill to windowsill until he came to the outside of their room. He listened carefully. No sound.

  He started to reach over to the window to push it open when he heard the subtle, muffled crackle of static.

  “...ighted, continue look…”

  Slowly and carefully Loki made his way down the wall. The hotel room was completely sealed off. There was someone in there waiting for him.

  There was no way for him to access a phone and call the scary old man. He knew no one else here, and there were cameras everywhere.

  He only knew one person in the entire colony. Turning around, he darted down the river looking for a yacht.

  —

  Sam felt a deepening horror as one of the overwhelmingly strong augs held him down, a pair of exaggerated garden shears in hand. Even with the sensation of pain turned off, he screamed as his pinkie was severed. Blood spurted out and a throbbing numbness pounded. He carefully checked the menu to see if he could stop the bleeding somehow, finding a vein-constriction setting. He immediately turned it on and the bleeding slowed.

  “Not long now, prince.” The man said.

  That word caused him to perk up. “Are you the freaking shuttle driver?” No one else here had called him that.

  The man stiffened for a minute before looking at the observation window, then back at him.

  “Well, you’re gonna die anyway so sure, I’ll admit it. You shoulda kept your mouth shut.”

  He looked over at Fiona, who had a watcher of her own. His eyes flicked up at the man, settling on his pistol.

  His time had partially come back. It wasn’t much - only a few days worth of virtual time at most - but it was more than the nothing he had before. He didn’t want to get her killed, but at this rate they’d both die before they could get rescued.

  His hands and feet were still bound, with the shuttle driver in a stealth suit sitting across from him. The stealth field was down now, revealing a black bodysuit with a number of cameras that greatly exceeded the number of human eyes. It made the men resemble large black spiders.

  He could think of only one option. He’d have to defeat this man while bound. He started running through scenarios in the white room, but gave up after a few hours. While the man was calm and in control, he was destined to lose.

  “You weren’t kidding when you said you had to take a worse job up here. Going from CEO to henchman must have really sucked.”

  “Shut up.” The man growled.

  “Or what, you’ll fire me? Oh wait, you don’t have that kind of pull anymore, do you? Think you’ll have to ask your boss?”

  “You little bastard!” The man shouted.

  “Hey, calm down-” The other guard started.

  “This spoiled little bastard doesn’t deserve to talk shit!” He tried to snip another finger, but Sam managed to roll his wrist out through the thumb of the larger man’s hand. After making a few unsuccessful swipes with the clippers the man unholstered his pistol before stopping himself, then he reached forward and backhanded him.

  “Gotcha.” Sam smiled.

  He kicked his feet at the guard’s belt, knocking it into the air. The next blow was one Sam never would have used in the ring, instead going for his crotch.

  The other guard started to move to attack Sam before Fiona moved, wrapping her arms around his neck and pulling backward. She might not have been too heavy, but a sleeper hold takes little weight to work.

  Sam spent another few hours practicing to make sure he’d catch the gun on the way down, having it land in his hands and pulling the trigger.

  Even though he’d seen it in the simulations several times by now, the impact of seeing a man’s head explode was very different in real life. Sam froze, staring at the bloodied remains of what had once been a person. He’d talked with the man, shared stories with him, and been betrayed by him, yet he felt an overwhelming sense of numb horror at the sight.

  Another shot rang out moments later and broke him from his reverie.

  “Hey! Are you there? I know it’s hard but don’t just stare at him!” Fiona shouted.

  “Sorry… I’ve never killed someone before.”

  “Well you’re gonna have to get over it fast because you’re going to have to do more of it soon! Here, catch!”

  Sam caught the small shockbox that disabled the nanocuffs. With a touch they fell away and he could move his hands and feet again.

  Fiona was already robbing the corpse of the other guard, his own head half splattered on the wall.

  “I hope you’re ready to be a real cowboy, country boy, because we’re about to have a shootout!”

  Sam said nothing, taking a moment in the void to remember the man he’d just killed.