22 Deborah didn’t think she could be any more terrified than when she’d watched Lukas and the two strangers with him fighting for their lives, then fleeing the new swarm of Unclean soldiers that had quickly filled the lab. She was wrong. Lukas was alive—he’d somehow survived the compound’s destruction—and the fact that she’d been right to hope for such an unlikely thing brought a silent prayer of thanksgiving to her lips. But now, surrounded by so many vicious men in black uniforms, red stars on the backs of their hands, she realized just how true it was that hope only made despair that much crueler. It was impossible to tell which was more paralyzing—the fact that she’d almost seen her cousin destroyed by the army that had abducted and brutally caged her and Ben, or the fact that she di

