She wasn’t entirely sure how much of that the manager had believed, but Megan was pretty impressed with To-Soren either way. She seemed to really care about her employees, and about getting Megan back. Maybe it wasn’t a good thing; maybe she wanted to be the one to kill Megan. Or maybe she thought that getting Megan back would mean getting the chip back.

She took the chip out of its slot to look at it. As soon as she did, a timer started counting down from five minutes for her to ...