The girl was not here. Cole shook his head, moaning. No chains, no bones, no sign of her at all. One skull stared up at him, distended jaw hanging open as if preparing to laugh.

"I see your daddy," he said, "and I'm going to give him another one." Whether or not the girl sensed his words, Cole thoroughly enjoyed putting a bullet through the empty skull. It exploded into a shower of brittle bone. Nothing moist in there now, nothing preserved. Only in her. Of all the stupid things to do …

He climbed from the hole and set off in pursuit.

Cole had been the one to insist that the berserker girl Natasha should be alive when they buried her.

They had shot down the father and son with silver bullets, held their thrashing bodies while others cut off their heads with chain saws, and the little girl had stood and watched and cried just like a normal child. They all knew her by then—knew what she was—but still some of the soldiers had shown signs of pity. One of them even moved toward her, swinging his SA80 onto his shoulder and holding out his hands to pick her up. Natasha raised her head and stared at him with red-rimmed eyes, and it was Cole who saw the grin beneath the tears. She opened her mouth to say thank you, and to bite, and Cole put a silver bullet in her shoulder.

She fell back into the heather, thrashing, clawing at herself as silver burned into her flesh. Her tears turned to screams. The man standing before her seemed frozen to the spot, and Cole had to grab him and spin him around, shouting into his face to bring him to his senses.

"King! Don't let her get to you! Not now, not after all this! The others have got away, and we've been told to see to these, and that's what we're going to do."

"But—"King said.

"No buts. No fucking buts! We should have buried these things long before now, and you know it!" Still the girl was screeching, like a wounded pig awaiting the coup de grace. But Cole suddenly knew that he would not be the one to deliver it, and neither would any of the other men there. There was something better they could do for the little bitch. Something much more effective. More poetic.

They wrapped her in chains and secured them to the corpses of her parents and brother. It took six men to push the tangled bundle of living and dead into the hole they had dug. The three severed heads were thrown in after them, and Cole himself went down to make sure the chains were secure.

"Hey, Mister Wolf!" the girl shouted, and Cole winced at the fury in her voice.

"What is it Natasha?" he said.

"Please let me out, Mister Wolf! Please … I promise I'll be good." Her voice was suddenly weak, slurred, the silver acting as acid in her veins.

"Good like your friends? Good like Sophia and Lane?"

"That was them, not us! My mummy and daddy never did anything like that, never. We always just did what we were told."

"Is that all you did, Natasha?"

"Well …" her voice trailed off, sly and cool. "Well, maybe when we were taken away, sometimes we enjoyed ourselves a little … But never anything bad here." She was slurring again, doing the little girl act and adding her own pain to make it more realistic.

"I have my orders," Cole said, starting to climb from the hole.

"Kill me!" Natasha pleaded, quieter. "A silver bullet in the head. My mummy … Daddy … my brother Peter, my little baby brother! Why did you do that to them? Please let me be with them. Please Mister Wolf!"

Cole stood on the lip of the hole and glared at his men. They were terrified, enraged, pumped up by the day of violence. They had all seen so much—blood spilled, friends killed, chaos visiting the normally ordered atmosphere of Porton Down and polluting it forever—that they seemed to be dazed, stunned by the sudden visitation by death that none of them had ever dreamed they would witness. The autumn sun blazed down as if to burn the sights from their minds, but they would always remember this, all of them. They looked at Cole as if he could offer them answers.

He looked at the bodies piled in the back of the wagon. Men he had known, men who had been his friends. Flesh ripped from their bones. Bones chewed and broken. Skulls crushed. And not a bullet hole or knife wound among them.

He turned back to the grave and looked down into Natasha's pleading, pained eyes. She was as ugly and obscene as she had always been, and the tears inspired no pity in Cole. No pity at all. They only fueled the hatred that had been growing in him for years.

"You will be with them, Natasha. Always."

"Fuck you, Mister Wolf!" The words were shocking coming from such a young girl, such rage in a child's voice. But of course, Cole knew that she was no ordinary girl. She was a monster.

"Bury them," he said.

"I'll see you again," Natasha whispered as Cole turned and walked away. The words were a knife in his back, a promise that would haunt him forever.

As his men piled in the broken bodies of their friends and comrades, it took a long time for Natasha's screams to fade away to nothing.

Sometimes, years later, when he woke up sweating and shaking and feeling malevolent memories scurrying back into the underground depths of his mind, Cole wondered whether Natasha was still screaming, and what the mud tasted like in her mouth, and whether she would ever fall completely silent.

Chapter Four

Tom ducked down when he heard the single gunshot, dropping the body and falling to his hands and knees.

Shooting at me!

He turned and tried to see back the way he had come. But though he could still make out land from sky, it was now too dusky to discern any true detail on the landscape. Perhaps if it were daylight the grave would still be in sight from here; maybe the contours of the land had already hidden it away. Either way, the gun had sounded too far away to be firing at him.

Not that he had ever been shot at before.

He almost laughed, but it came out as a sob. What if he finds me and kills me? What will happen to Jo then? What will people think of me, found out here with a bullet in my skull and a dead little girl in my arms?

They wouldn't find us, the girl's voice muttered in his mind. Mister Wolf would put us back in the hole with my mummy and daddy and brother.

Tom gathered up the body once again, trying to pile the chains on top so that he could lift them all as one. They were heavy, and he did not think he would be able to move very far like this. Even as a young man he would have found it difficult. Now, older, having spent an afternoon digging and pulling out corpse after corpse from that hole, he was almost at the end of his reserves.

Not far to go, Natasha said.

"Stop it," Tom whined, "just stop talking in my head."

The girl fell silent and Tom was glad, though he could still feel her in there. Quiet, still, but waiting. Her presence was like a hollow in his mind that he had never noticed before, a place begging to be filled.

He was panting from exertion now, bent low with his burden. He had the feeling that without the chains the girl would have been incredibly light, but there seemed to be no way to separate her from the bindings right now. He could not do the same to her as he had done to her family.

Break us away, she had said. Tom had paused, uncertain, but Natasha insisted. I've been here for a long time, and they've been dead here with me. Break them away. They won't feel it anymore. Stamping, kicking, bending to grab bones and pull them from the twists of chain, tugging, snapping, until he could lift the chains clear of the other bodies and wrap them around Natasha …

As Tom left the hole, the little girl had exuded a deep sadness. He supposed it was a form of letting go. But he knew from experience that this would never be complete.