She rode floor to floor as men got off to sweep each, making certain that all personnel did as the siren demanded and went immediately to the dormitory where they would be searched.

The last of the soldiers went to the roof. She knew this would be her biggest danger point. She had to exit the elevator right behind the last soldier. It was imperative that all of them were looking outward and not back toward the closing doors. She was a mimic, a chameleon, and no one would be able to see her, but once again it would take precious seconds to complete the change in a new environment.

She crawled down to the floor and eased out behind the last man, her gaze sweeping the roof to find the water tanks. There were six banks of them, each feeding the sprinklers on several floors. She stayed very still, right up against the wall until her skin and hair adjusted fully to the new background. Only then did she begin her slow crawl across the roof, making for the nearest tank while the soldiers spread out and swept the large space.

Up so high the wind was a menace, blowing hard and continuously at the men. They stumbled as it hit them in gusts. She stayed low to the ground, almost on her belly. She stopped once when one of the soldiers cursed in a mixture of Mandarin and Shanghainese. He cursed the weather, not Cheng. No one would dare curse Cheng, afraid it would get back to him.

Cheng considered himself a businessman. He’d inherited his empire and his intellect from his Chinese father and his good looks and charm from his American movie star mother. Both parents had opened doors for him, in China as well as the United States. He had expanded those doors to nearly every country in the world. He’d doubled his father’s empire, making him one of the wealthiest men on the planet, but he’d done so by providing to terrorists, rebels and governments classified information, weapons and anything else they needed. He sold secrets to the highest bidder, and no one ever touched him.

Bellisia didn’t understand what it was that drove people to do the terrible things they did. Greed. Power. She knew she didn’t live the way others did, but she didn’t see that the outside world was any better than her world. Maybe worse. Hers was one of discipline and service. It wasn’t always comfortable and she couldn’t trust very many people, but then outside her world, the majority didn’t seem to have it much better.

The cursing soldier stopped just before he tripped over her. She actually felt the brush of the leather of his boot. Bellisia eased her body away from him. Holding her breath. Keeping her movements infinitely slow. She inched her way across the roof, the movements so controlled her muscles cramped in protest. It hurt to move that slowly. All the while her heart pounded and she had to work to keep her breathing steady and calm.

She was right under their noses. All they had to do was look down and see her, if they could penetrate her disguise. She watched them carefully, looking out of the corners of her eyes, listening for them as well, but all the while measuring the distance to the water tanks. It seemed to take forever until she reached the base of the nearest one. Forever.

She reached a hand up and slid her fingers forward using the setae on the tips of her fingers to stick. Setae – single microscopic hairs split into hundreds of tiny bristles – were so tiny they were impossible to see, so tiny Dr. Whitney hadn’t realized she actually had them, in spite of his enhancements. Pushing the setae onto the surface and dragging them forward allowed her to stick to the surface easily. Each seta could hold enormous amounts of weight, so having them on the pads of her fingers and toes allowed her to climb or hang upside down on a ceiling easily. The larger the creature, the smaller the setae, and no seta had ever been recorded that was small enough to hold a human being – until Dr. Whitney had managed unwittingly to create one.

Her plan was to climb into the water tank and wait until things settled down and then climb down the side of the building and get far away from Cheng. She was very aware of time ticking away, and the virus beginning to take hold in her body. Already her temperature was rising. The cold water in the tank would help. She cursed Whitney and his schemes for keeping the women in line.

The girls had been taken from orphanages. No one knew or cared about them. That allowed Whitney to conduct his experiments on the female children without fearing repercussions. He named them after flowers or seasons, and trained them as soldiers, assassins and spies. To keep them returning to him, he would inject a substance he called Zenith, a lethal drug that needed an antidote, or a virus that spread and eventually killed. Sometimes he used their friendships with one another, so they’d learned to be extremely careful not to show feelings for one another.

She started up the tank, allowing her body to change once again to blend in with the dirty background. The wind tore at her, trying to rip her from the tank. She was cold, although she could feel her internal temperature rising from the virus, her body beginning to go numb in the vicious wind. Still, she forced herself to go slow, all the while watching the guards moving around the roof, thoroughly inspecting every single place that someone could hide. That told her they would be looking in the water tanks as well.

A siren went off abruptly, a loud jarring blare that set nerves on edge. It wasn’t the same sound as the first siren indicating to the workers to go immediately to the dorms. This was one of jangling outrage. A scream of fury. They had found her wig, mask and lab clothes. They would be combing the building for her. Every duct, every vent. Anywhere a human being could possibly hide.

She had researched Cheng meticulously before she’d ever entered his world. It was narrow, rigid, autocratic, with constant inspections and living under the surveillance of cameras and guards. Cheng didn’t trust anyone, not his closest allies. Not his workers. Not even his guards. He had watchers observing the watchers.

Bellisia was used to such an environment. She’d grown up in one and was familiar with it. She also knew all the ways to get around surveillance and cameras. She was a perfect mimic, blending into her environment, picking up nuances of her surroundings, the language, the idioms, the culture. Whitney thought that was her gift. He had no idea of her other abilities, the ones far more important to the missions he sent her off on. All the girls learned to hide abilities from him. It was so much safer.

The guards reacted to the blaring siren with a rush of bodies and the sound of boots hitting the rooftop as they renewed their frenzied searching. She kept climbing, using that same slow, inch-by-inch movement. It took discipline to continue slowly instead of moving quickly, as every self-preservation cell in her body urged her to do.

She relied heavily on her ability to change color and skin texture to blend into her surroundings, but that didn’t guarantee that a sharp-eyed soldier wouldn’t spot her. The pigment cells in her skin allowed her to change color in seconds. She’d hated that at first, until she realized it gave her an advantage. Whitney needed her to be a spy. He sent her out on missions when so many of the other women had been locked up again.

She gained the top of the tank just as one of the soldiers put his boot on the ladder. Slipping into the water soundlessly, she swam to the very bottom of the tank and anchored herself to the wall, making herself as flat as possible. Once again she changed color so that she blended with tank and water.