I sit up. Black bars surround me, crisscrossing each other to form a metal prison from which there is no escape. I push myself to my feet, adrenaline rising in a dull pound as I step closer to the bars ahead. Something is awake inside me, something that didn't exist until I was forced to cut all those people down. Something restless, something that swoops through my head and leaves me dizzy. It makes me want to scream at the top of my lungs until I run out of air.

"Darwin."

I turn toward Sven's voice, sharp eyes trying to separate his body from the shadows just beyond my cell. I can't, until a row of orange overhead lights snap on, illuminating the remainder of the concrete floor. His shoes click as he walks it, hands clasped behind his back in a perfect mirror of the pose he held while I confronted him in his mahogany hall.

I wrap my hands around the bars and jerk them with all my might, but only succeed in making a deep clanging noise that echoes around the bare space.

"Your strength means nothing here," Sven says, coming to a stop just out of arm's reach.

"Traitor," I croak, my voice just as deep as I remember it. "I loved you."

He regards me with an unreadable expression, his blue eyes glinting in the dim light. "You are not capable of love, only logic."

"Then end me!" I shout, earning a tiny reprieve from the reeling rush inside.

"No," he murmurs, almost looking like he wants to reach out and brush away the wayward lock of hair that always falls across my forehead. "Then I'll never know what went wrong."

Another monster takes hold of my insides now, sending my heart jittering for a whole different reason. One thought pummels itself into my brain: I don't want to be alone down here. I can't be left to rot for eternity.

"Yes," Sven says, as if he hears my thoughts. "It's not a pleasant prospect, is it? But we both know the cost of science."

He takes one step backward, and I see him through a tinge of red now.

"Someone should have told you," he says before he turns to go. "Immortality is a scam."

I launch myself at the bars, shaking them like an angry lion kept in too small of a cage. I scream after him, even after I hear the slam of a heavy door, even after the row of lights goes out. As my lungs empty, I finally realize the source of their fuel.

This is rage.

*    *    *

As the lights come back on, I blink, and the desolate cell becomes the elevator once again, with Davis staring wide-eyed at me and complete silence surrounding us. The walls press close against my mind, like a trap I've somehow set for myself and forgotten, and now I'm stuck inside.

With a jolt, our descent starts. It's quicker than usual, plummeting as fast as my stomach. Is the prison in the vision what awaits us at the bottom of this ride? It might not be real, I remind myself, still clinging to the hope that my future isn't full of bodies and blood and betrayal.

"How did you know that was there?" Davis asks. "Where are you taking me? Ronnie, what's going on?"

The lift stops abruptly, sparing me from trying to explain. The doors open into darkness, but the intensity of Davis's gaze spurs me forward. I step out, trying to discern the shapes of cells in the inky black. I open my eyes wider, but without the dim glow of the elevator behind me still isn't enough to make anything out. Davis's shadow is still outlined in the square of light, and as I finally step beyond it, I think I hear a faint scuff.

I stop. Is it the echo of my own shoe? Davis's shoe? I look back, but he hasn't moved. What if there are people down here?

My heart pumps wildly, telling me to turn around and run. But I take another giant step forward. I have to prove myself wrong. I know who Sven is. Once I look around, we can go back upstairs and I can laugh at how crazy I am.

I hear a distinct footstep behind me, and then as Davis pulls even with me the row of orange lights click on, one by one, illuminating a concrete path. On either side, just beyond the orange pools thrown by the overheads, I see the shadow of a grid, rising from floor to ceiling.

No. I can't stop myself from marching on. Something magnetic is pulling me now.

"Ronnie, what the hell is going on?" Davis asks from behind me. I wince as his voice bounces off the walls, and I definitely hear rustles and scuffles ahead now.

Without thinking, I peer forward and call, "Darwin?"

"Ronnie, who is—?"

I'm midway through turning toward him when a new voice grunts, "What do you want with Darwin?"

I whirl back around, my breath catching in my throat. "Darwin is here?" I ask, moving toward the voice. The first cell comes into view, a woman leaning casually on the bars. Her arms are crossed, but she lets them hang at her sides as I come closer.

"Depends who's asking," she says.

"Ronnie," I offer without a second thought.

She takes a step to her left, closer to the light, and I gasp. A gash runs from just above her right eye to her chin, the skin hanging off like a loose shirt. The underside of it is lined with a thin red layer, something crusty that looks like it dried up long ago, and underneath that—

Wires. Gears. Circuits and connectors and cables and chips. But the rest of her face is so perfect, so human, that even as my brain understands, I can't bring myself to believe what she is.

"Maven," she returns.

It takes me a moment to process her remark as a name, and I stammer a quiet "Nice to meet you" before I seem rude.

"What do you want with Darwin?" she repeats.

"I want to ask him something," I mumble. The words fall from my lips without my consent, without me even knowing what to say. "I want to know if it's all real."

She takes a step back, the hint of a frown tugging at her lips. "You're too late for that," she says.

"Why?"

She jerks her chin across the concrete, and I slowly turn toward the cell on that side. My steps are hesitant as I try to prepare myself for what lives there. It's Darwin's eyes I've been seeing through, I realize now, and that means that whoever I'm about to meet is a violent killer with no morals.

I stop in front of Darwin's cell. "Was," I breathe.

The man inside can only be described as broken. He hangs on the wall, held up by the armpits, but his arms are bent at odd angles. His head tilts, not lolling but stiff as a board. His eyes are open and unblinking.

I tilt my own head so that I'm staring him in the eyes. They glitch every few seconds, the only sign of life. Once or twice, they flicker red.

As I watch the blips around his irises, fascinated, I feel something take hold of me from within. It's a snake, slithering into my gut, twisting its body around my lungs. It pumps adrenaline to my veins, their blood spilling red into my vision.

I raise my hand to my face, curling and uncurling my fingers. I lift my right leg, then my left, setting them down gently. They don't feel like they belong to me anymore; they're simply prosthetics, a freedom from my eternity.

I turn back to the woman in the cell across the room. I see other figures pushing closer to the cells further down, but my eyes zero in on her.

"Mavie."

It's my voice saying her name—her nickname—but I know that I haven't given consent for it to pass my lips. Nevertheless, I step toward her, and the crimson fades. Not completely, but enough. Her hands wrap around the bars as I approach, her forehead wrinkling as she searches my eyes.

I close the final distance, and then, finally, my hands are on either side of her face. I am touching her, and all I know is that I've wanted this for years.

"You're alive," she whispers, and I nod.

"What the ever-loving hell is going on, Ronnie? Ronnie!"

I've forgotten Davis's existence, still lingering just inside the row of cells, but his voice snaps me from my tiny dredge of freedom. I wheel toward him, one hand reaching for him and the other clenching around air.

"Human!" I shout as my fist slams into the bridge of his nose. The only thing that keeps him from falling is my other hand on the collar of his shirt, holding him close. I knee him in the stomach, relishing the pound in my head as he doubles over. I drop him, and he hovers on all fours, wheezing. I pull back and kick him in the jaw, flipping him onto his back. I know what this feeling is, even if only from my dreams.

It's pure, unstoppable rage.

"Darwin!" Maven's voice jolts me back. "Darwin, stop! We need him!"

I pause my assault, gazing at her through a red haze. Somewhere deep, below the monster roaring in my chest, I know she's right. But my fingernails dig into the palms of my hands as I yearn to pummel him into the ground.

"Ronnie?"

I turn back to Davis, staring down at him. The blinding hate is still there, but my rage has settled down to indifference.

"Ronnie, where are you?" he asks, squinting up at me, holding his stomach as he curls into a sitting position. He's still breathless, still bleeding.

I blink. Ronnie—Darwin—Ronnie? No, Darwin!

"Ronnie, it's me." He raises his free hand, palm out as if trying to calm an angry dog. "It's me. God, it's me. Where are you?"

I don't understand why he keeps repeating that question. I'm right here, standing over him, my hand bloody from the broken skin on his nose, like the beginning of my dreams.

"The Ronnie that loves fried pickles," Davis gasps. "For reasons that I will never understand. Ronnie, who has a dirty look for every dirty joke. Ronnie that never loses faith in people, even when you should, god dammit!"

Fried pickles. The bar. Letting Davis talk me into a night out. His stupid jokes about Adele.

"Where are you?!" he bellows. The echo of his voice bounces, each reverberation pushing new memories into my head—old memories, I realize as I recognize them. Davis, Carlos, the keynote.

And Sven.

I drop to my knees as the crimson fades, leaving room only for the crushing truth.

It's real. All of it. Which means that Sven knows about Darwin, and Sven knows about this place.

"They're all machines," I whisper to the floor, my head falling low between my shoulders.

"I'm fine, thanks for asking," Davis grunts as he pushes himself to his knees.

I glance up at him, then at what's left of Darwin, but I quickly look away at the first red flicker. There are cells beyond the first two, marching in rows toward the back of the room. I can see human silhouettes pressed up against them, watching, waiting.

"What happened?" I stand and cross the concrete, stopping in front of Maven. "What just happened?"

She just peers at me, her face unreadable. "You're one of us."

I reel backwards. No. There must be at least ten, caged like animals—I am not one of them. I'm human.

But everything makes sense now. The elusive emotions, the struggle of how to say something nice and sweet to make Sven feel good because I don't know what humans want from relationships.

And the single word that burst from my mouth as I attacked Davis. Human. As if he was an other. As I've been seeing through Darwin's eyes, in that moment, he saw through mine.

Because we are the same.

"He made us," Maven calls over my deafening thoughts. "All of us. All of you."

"Who?" I ask, desperately needing her to say any unfamiliar name, any name that won't make the ring on my finger weigh ten tons.

"You know who," she says.

I do. I do. Those two words are a cruel mirror of my fantasies, where Sven and I stood under a lattice arch and pledged our souls to a life of happiness.

He loves me. And I love him. Isn't that enough to know he'd never do something like this?

But I've seen Darwin's memories. They live inside me now, too—years of torture and experimentation, dissection to figure out what went wrong, why he was deemed "broken." Years of knowing that hunger and pain are just bits and bytes, and that food isn't necessary but that doesn't take away the constant gnawing. Years of being deemed "too dangerous," beaten into submission, broken until the power that once flowed through his body seeped away.

And Sven saying he loves me. Those memories echo now, their backdrops unfamiliar, but everything else about them is the same. The words, the little touches and texts and kisses, the apologies.

His lies sting, but nothing hurts more than realizing I'm not unique.

And yet still, underneath it all, I try to convince myself that he doesn't know. He doesn't know about the prison in the basement of the company he built from nothing. His appearances in Darwin's memories are fake. Maybe Darwin is crazy. Maybe he's lying.

Just as I turn to Davis, whether to give or seek comfort I don't know, the soft squeak of the elevator brings everything to a halt. I watch the slit of light expand, revealing the hulking shadow beyond, and pray to a god I've never believed in that it's not Sven.

But he steps forward, and now I'm sure God doesn't exist, because blue eyes topped by blond hair stare down at me and Davis, both crippled in our own ways. The weight of my ring glues my hand to the floor, even though I want nothing more than to get up and run away. He watches, eyes zeroing in on me and sinking into his skin, so that he looks more tired than I've ever seen him, even when he comes home in the early morning after working through the night.

"You were almost perfect," he says, his lips pressing together in regret.

And then, like a computer crashing, everything goes black.