You only get one life - unless you can afford a second.

  ~Hernan Cortes, Conquistador. 1542

  The master bedroom was huge, with an enormous bed, vaulted ceilings, and a full sitting area. Tereza stood near the bed, behind a reclined chair upon which lay the fat old client.

  Tereza’s eyes blazed like amethysts, and purple fire rimmed her hands as she drove burning fingers into the skin along the old man’s jaw. His expression looked serene, his body slumped absolutely still. She had already severed the soul points linking him to the host body and begun removing his soulmask.

  The client’s face began pulling away at the jaw. Skin sloughed off to either side as it leveraged higher, revealing the shimmering soulmask underneath that slowly separated from the underlying bone structure. It came free abruptly with a wet, sucking sound like a boot lifting out of the mud.

  The soulmask of the old man was the tangible manifestation of his soul. It was shaped like his face, but as it rose above his skull, it flattened somewhat. The translucent soulmask shimmered with internal light. Streamers of rainbow smoke floated below it, dangling in wispy coils.

  Tereza threw her head back in silent ecstasy, embracing that moment experienced only by facetakers taking another’s soul.

  The skin of the client’s skull settled into a smooth sheet, like a shopping store mannequin. It stretched in a blank canvas but for a tiny slit where the nose should be. The bone structure remained in place, although a little less pronounced than before. When embedded into the skull, the soulmask meshed into the bones, shaping them to fit its profile.

  Like Eirene, Tereza possessed the rare ability to embrace her nevra core, the active power source of her soul, and direct the energy generated by it, known as nevron, to overpower the soul of simple mortals. Removing another’s soul by extracting their soulmask was the heart of the facetaker powers, and a service that wealthy clients had paid handsomely for throughout the ages.

  On the bed lay the body of a fit young man, the transfer vehicle, its mannequin-blank face revealing that its previous owner’s soul had already been removed. Tereza would fuse the client’s soulmask into that host, restoring the client to mortality to enjoy a new life, a new youth. It was a good match. The client would look quite natural there. At least some aspects of the modern day operation still ran smoothly.

  Tereza blinked a couple times and the glow of her eyes faded. She noticed Eirene standing in the doorway, but instead of looking surprised, the mousy little woman greeted her with a curt nod.

  “I’ll be with you in a moment.” Tereza glanced at Eirene’s weapons. “You won’t interfere with council-sanctioned work, will you?”

  That was not the response Eirene expected.

  She didn’t need centuries of finely-honed instincts to recognize that her carefully planned surprise had been expected. The most galling part was that the woman was still grounded in her first life, for love of the gods.

  Eirene squashed her surprise. “By all means, finish what you’ve started.”

  As Tereza turned toward the bed to complete the transfer process, Eirene nearly triggered the Taser. It would have felt good, but if Tereza really was working on a council-sanctioned transfer, Eirene couldn’t afford to incur any more of their wrath.

  So she turned and bolted for the exit. She would plan a different interrogation scenario later, but first she had to extract. Tereza must have back-up ready to counter her surprise and she didn’t want to meet them.

  Eirene crossed the suite without encountering resistance, but the two guards she had left outside near the elevator were gone.

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  Not good.

  The elevator chimed.

  Before the doors opened, Eirene sprinted for the stairs. She caught a glimpse of several armed men piling out of the elevator before she crashed through the door into the stairwell. Voices shouted an alarm, and she plunged down the stairs at a full sprint. At least two of the newcomers wore tactical vests that left their muscular arms bare. The dark runes tattooed there had shone against their pale skin.

  Eirene felt flickers of fear. The entire situation had been a trap and she had walked right into it. Maybe her long absence from the real world had left her rustier than she thought.

  She could beat herself up about the mistake later. The enhanced warriors were most likely enforcers. It wasn’t a surprise she hadn’t recognized any of them, but she knew all too well their deadly skills. They’d have Body ranks in the C’s, minimum, possibly into the B’s.

  Had Tereza played her hand with a little more care, Eirene would have lingered a few more fatal seconds in the suite. Eirene reached the security gate separating the top-floor suite from the rest of the stairwell and burst through just as the fire door above crashed open and heavy bodies began thundering down the steps.

  Eirene left them far behind. They might perform way above normal F-rank mortals, but she was a facetaker and she’d been investing in her new body. It had recently evolved to a low A Body rank, and she knew how to squeeze every advantage from the significant upgrade.

  Enforcers did not give up, though, and they started shooting. Bullets ricocheted off steel and concrete, and the painful echoes reverberated through the stairwell. None of the shots came close, and the security gate slammed shut behind her, blocking their aim.

  The enforcers continued down, shouting loudly, and started shooting as soon as they passed through the security gate. They couldn’t hope to hit her.

  They were herding her.

  If she could just reach the fifth floor, she could implement the primary escape plan. Getting that far would be the challenge. The stairwell door below her flew open and three armed men rushed inside, guns up.

  With less than a full flight of stairs between them, Eirene launched herself, every ounce of momentum focused on the heel of her foot. She flew across the distance in a blur of deadly motion, and her foot drove into the first man’s head hard enough to crack even an enhanced skull. The impact even rattled her.

  It also knocked the enforcer into his two companions. Eirene tucked her body tight and hit them like a cannon ball. The brutal impact jarred her to a halt and left her grinning with the thrill of battle. One of the men tumbled right over the rail, barely catching himself and hanging over the open drop eighteen floors down.

  The other two landed beneath her and cushioned her fall. Only one of them tried to move, so she kicked him in the head. After the second kick, he collapsed beside his unconscious partner. They’d recover fast, but not fast enough.

  Eirene took off down the stairs again, delayed exactly three seconds by the encounter. That was pretty good, even for her.

  For the next fifteen seconds she flew down the steps, every muscle attuned to the need to run faster. Nothing mattered but the blur of steps, the pounding of her heart, and the thrill of the downward plunge at the very cusp of losing control.

  Stray bullets ricocheting down the stairwell, but frustrated shouts faded to silence. Even the hollow thudding of her feet on steel and concrete barely registered.

  Eirene almost ran right past the door to the fifth floor. With a grin she flung it open and leaped through.

  She skidded to a halt and her confidence shattered.

  Waiting for her in the hallway, barely ten feet away, stood eight black-clad men with silenced pistols already aimed in her direction. Mai Luan stood to one side, a pleasant smile on her lovely face.

  Even as Eirene snapped her weapons up toward the hated woman, the men fired. Sixteen darts drove into Eirene’s abdomen and chest. Pain rippled through her torso in disproportionate magnitude to the tiny impacts, and she rocked back with the agony.

  As soon as the initial electric shock subsided, Eirene embraced her nevra core and severed sensory input from her body, but she had taken too much damage, even wearing an A-rank body. If it had been less powerful, she would have already fallen. Still, her arms became numb, dead weights and her weapons slipped from her fingers despite her efforts to pull the trigger just once.

  Eirene focused all her nevron on maintaining a single nerve connection and blocking the effects of the paralytic drug. Her body wobbled like a newborn and her vision turned fuzzy. Her chin fell forward, but none of that mattered.

  Through the growing haze, and with agonizing slowness, she pulled the sleeve of her right arm up past her watch to reveal a second device strapped to her forearm. It looked a lot like a watch, but with no face. Simplicity itself, it sported only three buttons.

  She tried to push the red one.

  She failed.

  Her body collapsed to the floor and that last vibrant connection snapped. If she had worn a body with more bulk, of if she’d managed to push the rank into the high A’s, it would have withstood the drugs long enough to send the signal.

  As the fast-acting tranquilizers shut her body down, Mai Luan leaned over her.

  “By all means, let’s send for Gregorios.”

  Mai Luan pushed the yellow button.