Zugzwang

Prologue

Georgia, on the outskirts of Tbilisi.

A thick, greasy wave of nausea rose in her throat, so dense she nearly choked on it. Then came the fear—ancient and blind—searing through her from the inside out, driving her heart into a frantic rhythm, like a bird hurled against a wall.

The world was burning beyond the walls, and every breath was poisoned. The air thickened into a hellish blend: the acrid bitterness of scorched earth, the sharp salt of melting metal and concrete, and that suffocating, cloying sweetness... the sweetish scent of death. It was nothing like she remembered from childhood. Death, she had learned, did not wear a single face. For some, it could be quiet and soft, like the fur of a dog asleep at your feet. For others, it was coarse and sour, like the stale breath of funeral workers arriving at dawn.

For Olivia, death tasted of foul bitterness—the tang of explosives and the ash of a life reduced to ruin.

It felt rough to the touch, like a shattered car window scattered into a thousand shards across the asphalt; it deafened her with the thunder, the cracking roar of collapsing concrete slabs; it revealed itself in the shape of the sky—low, leaden, stitched through with poisonous flashes.

Perhaps this was how a secret laboratory was meant to burn: a multicolored hell of chemical reagents, billowing clouds of suffocating black smoke. Olivia's future was ablaze in exactly the same way. She could feel it physically as her head reeled from concussion and terror, as a piercing white pain detonated in her ears, as her vision blurred with acrid tears.

The blades of a helicopter emerging from behind the mountains cut across the blinding disk of the Georgian sun for a fleeting second.

The sun seemed to burn out in an instant, surrendering its last warmth.

And Olivia burned with it.