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body. Kurtz reeled as a residual charge grounded through him.
    “Kurtz, you OK?” called Aleks, still covering the stairs to the upper level.
    “No,” Kurtz moaned. “I Tasered myself!” He pushed Gusztáv’s limp body onto the floor of the cellar and secured his hands with a set of plasticuffs.
    “And they call me the clumsy one. Is the girl there?”
    Kurtz tilted his NVGs up, activated the light on the side of his helmet, and scanned the room. The beam fell on the naked flesh of a woman lying on the ground, tied to a chair that had been tipped over. Kurtz dashed across the room. She appeared unconscious and barely recognizable.
    “Aurelia!” He pulled out a pair of medical shears, sliced through the rope on the chair, and laid her naked body gently on the side. Aurelia’s face was a bloodied mess. A rubber tie remained wrapped around her arm and a syringe lay next to her. He shone the helmet light directly into her eyes: The pupils were fixed and dilated. Her breathing was almost nonexistent, a flutter, her heartbeat the same. He ripped his medical kit from the pouch on his belt. “Stay with me, Aurelia, stay with me.” He stuck a miniature heart rate sensor to her chest, synching it with the iPRIMAL on his wrist.
    It started beeping angrily. She was flatlining. He pulled an auto-injector from the med pouch and punched it directly into her chest.
    The sensor didn’t change.
    He waited, hoping for a beat as the life-saving chemical stimulated her heart muscles.
    Five seconds passed—nothing.
    Then ten.
    It was too late; the flatline on his combat interface never even flickered. She died on the cold stone floor, clearly a victim of a forced overdose.
    Kurtz reacted calmly, taking off his glove and closing her eyes with a gentle hand. He picked his gun off the ground, inserted a new magazine, and slung it on his vest.
    Gusztáv regained consciousness when Kurtz’s helmet light shone directly into his face. Blood ran down his face into his beard.
    “Where are the girls?” Kurtz demanded as he forced the Hungarian up onto his knees.
    “Who the fuck are you?” Gusztáv responded in accented English as he squinted into the bright light.
    “Where are the girls?” Kurtz repeated himself, his voice devoid of emotion.
    “Gone. There’s no one here.”
    Kurtz lifted Gusztáv up and slammed him into the cellar wall. “You’re fucking lying. Where’s the wounded girl?”
    “Dog-food girl?” He grunted. “She’s as good as dead.” He squinted into the bright helmet light. “Look, if you’re police, you’re going to get into shit for this. My boss is a big deal around here.”
    “I’m going to ask you one last time, where are the girls?” Kurtz’s voice was hoarse.
    “You’re already dead, pig. You don’t know it yet, but you’ve fucked with the wrong people. You’re going to end up deader than that bitch over there.” He spat in the direction of Aurelia’s corpse.
    Kurtz stared directly into the man’s face for a long moment. Then he snapped.
    His forefinger went through the handle loop of his Benchmade dagger and he drew it from its sheath behind the pouches on his chest. His other hand reached out and grabbed the flesh-trader by the face.
    He punched the knife into Gusztáv’s throat, stabbing furiously, driving the blade in and out again and again. The cold steel severed all his major arteries, the point hacking into his spinal cord. Kurtz rammed the blade home one last time, all the way through his spine and out the back of his neck. He wrenched it free and let the body collapse onto the floor.
    Gusztáv flopped around on his side like a dying fish. Blood gurgled from his mouth as his legs spasmed. Kurtz left him there in the darkness, dying alongside Aurelia’s body.
    “Did you find her?” Aleks asked when he returned to the top of the stairs. “Where is she?”
    Kurtz continued up the stairs to the second floor. “They killed her,” was all he said.
    Working as a pair, it took