So I ran.

He pulled me alongside him, his arm at my waist.

“Keep going,” he said.

There were others with us. A girl. Three other guys. They were young, and I wondered, fleetingly, how old I was.

“Pulling her out like that was wrong,” another dark-haired guy said. He was shorter than the one who’d grabbed me first, less imposing. “I’m afraid of what the consequences will be.”

“We can worry about that later,” my boy said. Not knowing his name, I’d started to think of him as mine. He seemed to know me, anyway. “Right now we just need to get her out of here.”

Noises, not far off, pulled us to a stop. We huddled in an empty office and waited until it seemed safe.

“What is my name?” I asked the blond guy on my right.

“Elizabeth,” he said. He pointed at all the others, rattling off their names before his own, which he said was Cas.

I had thought my name was Blank. But that sounded less familiar than Elizabeth, so I believed this Cas, and decided Blank was a terrible name anyway.

“We are your friends,” Nick said. “Everyone else is an enemy. Remember that.”

“I will.”

We twisted and turned through walls that reached above my head, but did not reach the ceiling. They were all the same.

Somewhere in the distance someone yelled, “Find them!”

It was a woman’s voice. A voice that sounded familiar.

Shh. It’s our little secret.

“Don’t stop,” the boy said.

My legs ached and my shoulders burned and my head wouldn’t stop pounding, but slowing down didn’t seem like an option. So I kept moving.

When we rounded a corner, a man dressed in black charged toward us, and the girl in our group—Anna—brought up her gun. But she wasn’t quick enough. Someone else took out the man for us.

A group of men and women emerged from the hallway. I remembered what Nick had said, that everyone else was an enemy, and immediately stiffened in his protective hold.

Trev noticed and put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “These people are here to help. They are not our enemies.”

Our group of friends was growing too fast, and there were too many people to keep track of.

The new arrivals were dressed in nondescript clothing—jeans, flannel shirts, boots—but they all carried weapons and had matching looks of determination and desire for revenge etched across their faces.

“I’m glad you made it,” Trev said. “We can use the help.” He nodded at the tall man in front. “This is Dr. Sedwick, Elizabeth’s therapist.”

Nick’s expression turned to one of surprise, so I tried to look surprised, too.

“Elizabeth’s therapist is one of the Turncoats?” Anna said.

“Aggie was, too,” Trev added. “Just so we’re clear.”

“Talk about being well insulated.”

The therapist stepped forward and examined me with a quick sweep of his brown eyes. He had kind eyes. “Thank God you’re okay.”

“Yes,” I said simply.

The line of his thick brow furrowed deeply. He glanced at Trev. “Tell me you got here in time. Tell me they haven’t wiped her.”

Trev frowned. “We found her when she was halfway through the memory alteration.”

The therapist cursed, and tried to hide the wobbling of his bottom lip by clamping his mouth closed. He pulled in a breath through his nose. “I’m so sorry, Elizabeth. I will fix this. I swear it. They will pay for what they’ve done to you and Aggie.”

Voices picked up some twenty feet away, followed by the quick pounding of feet.

“We have to go,” Nick said.

“We’ll cover you.” The therapist waved his group ahead. “Good luck.”

Our groups separated. I glanced over my shoulder at the man as he retreated, something nagging at me as he disappeared behind a wall.

We wound our way through several more hallways, but were ambushed before long. The dark-haired boy with the green eyes killed a man with his bare hands. I sucked in a breath.

Anna shot another man, and he crumpled to the floor.

Another man barreled out of a hallway. This one was bigger than any of the others, with a scowl on his face and several scars running along his jaw.

Anna ran, dropped to her knees, and slid across the floor, whacking the man in the kneecap with the butt of her gun. He howled. Cas punched him in the face, then shot him in the foot.

Another down.

The walls that all looked the same, that had trapped us in their maze, disappeared. We turned to the left and went through an open door. Once inside, I realized it was a storage room, with mops and brooms and stuffed filing cabinets. The room—not the contents—felt vaguely familiar, like it was a place I’d dreamed about.

“I’ll go first,” Sam said. Sam, the one with the green eyes and the impenetrable expression. “I’ll pull the girls up.”

He jumped on top of a filing cabinet and pulled himself inside a hole in the ceiling. He shimmied around until he was able to poke his head back through.

“Elizabeth next,” Nick said, and he ushered me to the filing cabinet.

A shadow crossed the doorway. Anna shouted.

A gun went off.

The boy in the ceiling cursed beneath his breath, lost his hold, and fell through the opening, crashing into me and taking me down with him.

More bodies filled the room. More enemies dressed in black. Fighting broke out.