Page 40 of The Girl Who Only Died Once

“Do you want out?” Chloe asks, back at the other being. “Or do you want to stay in there?”

The rumbling goes silent, like they’re holding their breath.

“I don’t need the cage—I might do a scan on it to help track my friend—but I can leave the cage as it is,” Chloe babbles on, the silence deeply unnerving. “And then I can let you out or leave you alone or whatever you want, I have no problem doing either.”

She’s not about to kill something in a cage, after being in a prison herself.

“Bring me a human and leave me the body,” they command, “and maybe I’ll let you live.”

“Okay, that’s a no,” Chloe says, her heart pounding. “Not gonna do that, sorry, not my style.”

The creature—Chloe’s about ninety percent sure it’s a demon after that comment—sinks further back in the cage, next to the backpack.

Wordless, Chloe thumps the light against her thigh, transforming it into a lamp, and the entire room glows with sudden brightness.

The demon inside cringes away from the sudden light, and now that she can see more, even without a body for them to inhabit there are deep gashes, deep grooves in their form, scabs of some sort. Old, horrid injuries healed wrong.

She sets the lamp down on the ground, and the cage bars cast shadows across the walls, reaching up to the ceiling.

Chloe takes a few steps back, and even though it’s a trap, even though it’s the wrong thing to do, she grabs her gun.

It’s pleasantly cool against the palm of her hand, and a quick check of the magazine shows it’s still loaded.

“Is there a reason you want the backpack?” Chloe asks, after a long stretch of sullen silence, before she steps into the room.

It’s warm, surprisingly so, a puff of temperate air hitting Chloe’s face and ruffling her hair, and the cage only takes up one corner.

“Were you locked up here by the college?” Chloe asks. “I can recognize the traps, I’m not working with them.”

The demon shakes his head, furiously so, his eyes tracking Chloe’s every motion deeper inside the room.

“They were here,” the demon says, “then they abandoned it. One of the assistants shot the other in the head, then burned the body so I couldn’t take it.”

“How long ago did they abandon it?” Chloe asks, scuffing her feet on the floor, desperately hoping to appear idle.

For such an elaborate bunker, there must be other rooms, but Chloe’s not terribly interested in finding the other secretdoors. Not when her research—and possibly another trail to her friend—is in the room with her.

She tugs the compass out of her pocket, pacing to the other side of the room, and sure enough the needle points towards the cage, staying locked in on that one point.

Chloe avoids the corner that the other demon—Killian—must’ve been standing in when he got struck.

“Three weeks ago,” the demon answers, and it’s right around when Gurlien came back, when another base had fallen, so it tracks. “They won’t get this place back.”

“If you give me the backpack we will leave you alone,” Chloe says, as calmly and as authoritatively as she can. Which isn’t much, her voice is notoriously wobbly when she tries. “We will leave you alone and lock the door behind us if you want.”

“Killian said that,” the demon says surly, “then he tried to take my home.”

Chloe’s woefully out of her depth, the logic of the monster completely content in his rusted cage sitting poorly with her.

“Did this Killian scan it?” Chloe asks. “Your home?”

A surly nod from the demon.

So the key to the next step in the search lies with him. Of course.

“Killian was locked up,” the demon whispers, as if they weren’t the only two people in the dusty room. “He’s been locked up for experimentation for years, he’s insane.”

“You sure about that?” Chloe asks skeptically. “Look, I won’t hurt you, I’ll just —” She reaches towards the backpack, skirting along the edges of the cage, outside the trap.

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