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way around with no signs of a break, he discovered as he ran his fingers slowly along them, high and low. But his captors had managed to place him inside, so there must be a way out; there had to be.
    Kane peered up then, the thought occurring to him with slow inevitability. An oubliette—that could be it. A dungeon with its access point in the ceiling, out of reach of the prisoner. He had seen them before and admired the simplicity of the design, imprisoning a man merely by removing the ladder that led to his freedom.
    But no. As far as he could see in the gloom of the cavern, there was nothing up there, just more rock running across the ceiling, like clouds on an overcast day. He reached up, found that if he stretched he could just scrape the tips of his fingers against the stone. It seemed solid enough, not a hologram or an optical illusion. Bending his knees, Kane sprang into the air, slapping his palm against the ceiling. It was solid, giving back no echo to suggest any hollowness beyond.
    For the moment, at least, he was trapped.
    Kane moved to a corner of the room, unzipped his fly and relieved himself, the pressure in his bladder finally insisting upon release. The stench of his own urine came to him, stronger than he expected. After he was done, he covered the puddle of urine with sand like a cat. He wondered if he was being foolish, if this was the only liquid he would get here, and that, no matter how repellent the thought, he would need to salvage it to combat dehydration.
    No, Kane told himself. If they wanted to kill me theywould have done so. I’m alive because someone wanted me to stay alive.
    But the thought didn’t ring entirely true. To end up here, he had been defeated, and it was possible that his foe, whoever that was, had such a callous disregard of his opponents that he had locked Kane here to starve, a slow ordeal that would lead to madness and death.
    Kane’s nose wrinkled at the acrid stench of urine, and he sat as far from the damp sand as he could, resting his back against the cold rock wall. With no way in or out, he let his thoughts drift, struggling to recall what had happened, to piece together how he had ended up in this pitiful predicament.
    They had returned from Louisiana, he remembered that much….
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    T HE FOG AROUND THEM was beginning to clear, and Kane, Grant and Brigid found themselves standing within the mat-trans unit in the Cerberus ops center in Montana, the familiar brown-tinted armaglass materializing behind the swirling transport mist.
    â€œGood to be home,” Kane said, brushing back his wet hair.
    Brigid Baptiste nodded as she tapped in the code that would release the lock and allow them to exit the mat-trans chamber. The Cerberus redoubt had served as the hub of teleportation research and development for over two hundred years.
    Brigid’s hair clung to her face, still damp from her encounter with the queen of all things dead in the Louisiana redoubt. “I need a shower,” she told Kane as the door slid open before her. “A warm one this time, with soap.”
    â€œSounds good,” Grant agreed as he rubbed his aching shoulder.
    A few years older than Kane, Grant was a behemoth of a man, tall with wide shoulders and ebony skin. His muscles strained at the weave of his shadow suit. A Kevlar trench coat hugged his shoulders and draped down like a bat’s wings over his legs. His dark hair was cropped close to his scalp and he wore a gunslinger’s drooping mustache over his top lip. Like Kane, Grant was an ex-Magistrate from Cobaltville. In fact, he had been Kane’s partner in the Magistrate Division, and over the years the two had fallen into an uncanny simpatico relationship during combat. Grant had been recruited into the Cerberus operation along with Kane when the two of them had gone rogue from the barony, after learning it threatened the well-being and natural progression of humankind. They seemed to be somehow