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“Yes,” said Soren. Hardly a day had gone by without his thinking about that meeting and everything it had led to.

“I wonder, Soren, do you remember what I said, how I gave you a choice?”

Soren wrinkled his forehead briefly, then the lines cleared. “You mean whether to come with you or stay on Dwarka? Or was there something else?”

“No, just that,” she said. “You were young enough that I didn’t know how well you’d remember. How do you feel about your choice?”

“I’m glad I made it,” he said. “It was the right choice, ma’am.”

“I thought we already talked about your calling me that,” she said, smiling. “I wondered at the time whether I was right to give you a choice. Lieutenant Keyes wondered too. Whether you weren’t too young to have that burden placed on you.”

“Burden?” he asked.

She waved the implied question aside. “Never mind,” she said. “The reason I’ve brought you here is to give you another choice.”

He waited for her to continue, but for a moment she simply stayed there, staring at him, the same unreadable expression on her face that he’d noticed before, when he had caught her watching him during exercises.

“You’re still very young,” she said.

Soren said nothing.

Dr. Halsey sighed. “You’ve trained well, all of you. But training is only the first step. We’re on the verge of the second step. Would you like to take it?”

“What is it exactly?”

“There’s only so much I can tell you,” said Dr. Halsey. “There’s only so much the bodies that we have can do, Soren. So we want to augment them. We want to modify your physical body and mind to push it beyond normal human capabilities. We want to toughen your bones, increase your growth, build your muscle mass, sharpen your vision, improve your reflexes. We want to make you into the perfect soldier.” The smile that had been building on her face slowly faded away. “However, there will be side effects. Some of these we know, some we probably can’t anticipate. There’s also considerable risk.”

“What sort of risk?”

“There’s a chance, a nontrivial one, that you could die during the augmentation. Even if you don’t die, there’s a strong risk of Parkinson’s, Fletcher’s syndrome, and Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, as well as potential problems with deformation or atrophy of the muscles and degenerative bone conditions.”

He didn’t understand everything she was saying, but had the gist of it. “And if it works?”

“If it works, you’ll be stronger and faster than you can imagine.” She tented her fingers in front of her, staring over them at him. “I’m giving you an option that the others won’t be given. I am offering you a choice, while your classmates will simply be told they are to report for the procedure.”

“Why me?” asked Soren.

“Pardon?”

“Why am I the one who gets to make a choice? Why not one of the others?”

She turned her gaze to the desk in front of her, her voice distant now, more as if she were speaking to herself than the boy. “What the Spartans are is an experiment,” she said. “In every controlled experiment you need one sample whose conditions are different so as to be able to judge the progress of the larger group. You’re that sample, Soren.”

“We’re an experiment,” he said, his voice flat.

“I won’t lie to you. That is precisely what you are, and you—an experiment within the experiment. An exception to a rule,” she said.

“Why me?” he asked again. “You could have chosen anyone.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, Soren. It just turned out that way.”

He was silent for a long time, staring straight in front of him, sorting it all out in his head. Finally he looked up.

“I want to do it,” he said.

“You do?” said Dr. Halsey. “Even knowing the risks?”

“Yes,” he said. And then added, “I don’t want to be left behind.”

STRANGE, DR. Halsey thought after he had left. What had he meant by not wanting to be left behind? Where had she heard that before?

She shook her head to clear it. “Déjà,” she said. “You were listening in, I take it?”

“Of course, Dr. Halsey,” said the AI’s smooth voice. Her hologram flickered into existence on the desk beside her. Created specifically