Try to fight through the disorientation and get to your feet.

You plant your palms against the concrete. The surface is gritty under your fingers, flecked with potting soil and something wet—your own blood, you realize distantly, dripping from a cut on your cheekbone where you hit the floor. Your arms shake. Your vision doubles, triples, collapses back into a single smeared image of boots and rifle barrels and the sickly green glow of grow-lights overhead.

You get one knee under you. The ringing in your ears is subsiding just enough to hear the low mechanical drone of the sonic emitters—a tooth-rattling hum that vibrates through the floor and up through your kneecap into your spine. The sound is everywhere, sourceless, like being inside the chest cavity of some enormous purring machine.

Your other foot finds the floor. You're almost upright—swaying, half-naked in your boxers, a twenty-four-year-old bio-engineer in the middle of a greenhouse full of killers—when a shape moves in your peripheral vision.

The stock of an **** rifle connects with the back of your skull.

The impact is a white nova behind your eyes. Not pain—not yet—just a catastrophic interruption of every signal your brain is trying to send. Your legs buckle. You pitch forward, and the concrete rushes up to meet your face with the inevitability of a closing door. Your forehead strikes the ground and the skin splits open above your right eyebrow—a clean, shallow gash that immediately begins weeping blood in a warm sheet down the side of your face, pooling in the hollow of your eye socket, blinding you on one side.

Through the red haze you see the guard who hit you—a thick-necked man with a shaved head and a jaw like a cinder block, wearing olive cargo pants and a black long-sleeve shirt rolled to the elbows. He steps back from you with the casual efficiency of someone who has done this many times before, the butt of his Kalashnikov still raised.

"Stay down," he says flatly. His accent is Polish, the consonants bitten off.

From somewhere above and to the left, Lina's voice tears through the drone of the emitters—raw, cracking, stripped of every shred of the diamond persona's composure.

"NO! Don't—please don't hit him! He's not—he has nothing to do with this! PLEASE!"

Her voice is wrong. It's her human voice bleeding through the diamond register, two frequencies overlapping, breaking apart. You can hear her struggling—the scrape of crystalline fingers against metal, the creak of the exoskeletal gauntlet tightening around her throat.

You try to lift your head. Blood runs into your mouth, copper and salt. The greenhouse tilts on its axis. You can see Marco's shoes—polished Italian leather, absurdly pristine on the dirty concrete—and beyond them, the flickering, dimming light of Lina's diamond form. She's still on her knees. Still held. Her prismatic surface gutters like a candle in a draft.

Marco's voice cuts through the noise. It's measured, unhurried, carrying the particular calm of a man who has never been refused anything that mattered.

"Interesting," he says. You hear the creak of his chair as he leans forward. "She brought us a guest. And she's very worried about him." A pause. The tap of a gold ring against the chair's armrest. "That's useful."

He raises his voice, addressing Lina directly. You can hear the smile in it—the satisfied curl of a man whose trap has worked better than he planned.

"Listen carefully, diamond slut. You're going to show me your real face. The human one. Right now." The ring taps again. "Or I have Tomasz here put the next one through your boyfriend's temple instead of across it."

Lina makes a sound—a choked, wretched noise that isn't a word in any language. It's pure anguish compressed into a single syllable.

"He's not my—"

"Don't insult me." Marco's tone doesn't change. It doesn't need to. "You teleported across the city to fetch him. You're screaming his name. I may be many things, but I am not stupid."

The drone of the emitters swells. Your vision narrows. The blood from your forehead is pooling beneath your cheek, warm and spreading. Lina's voice reaches you one more time—distant, dissolving, like hearing someone call your name from the far end of a collapsing tunnel.

"Sam... Sam, I'm sorry... I'm so sorry..."

Then the dark takes you, and you hear nothing at all.