by Natalie Grey
“Maybe I could try to get him to bring me back here. Go out with him, you know? Then I’ll watch him while I look around and see if he gets nervous when I’m close to anything.” Arisha was waving her hands with excitement. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I don’t know. Don’t you think Stoyan is going to be a little jealous?” Jennifer crossed her arms and grinned.
“He’s not—he doesn’t—wait, do you really think—not important. I’m not going to sleep with the guy! I’m just going to, you know, check out his room.” Arisha was blushing a fiery red.
“Do you really think Stoyan would be jealous?”
Jennifer nodded, “He might kill Gerard before you could get any useful information out of him.” She smiled and held up the laptop. “Okay, let’s get ADAM working on this so we can return it before Gerard comes back to the room.”
—
Hsu woke to darkness and the stars spread above her gloriously. For a moment she was transported back to her childhood in a little village, before she’d been tested by the government and sent away to boarding school.
They always told her how lucky she was that she was able to serve the Party, what an honor it was—and how she was also lucky not to be living in mud, in the village she’d grown up in.
All of the people at the facility had grown up in similar circumstances, so the party officials said things like that a lot. They didn’t even consider that someone might want to go back, see their family, do some honest work.
Even before she left China and was captured, Hsu had been disturbed by the experiments she worked on. Maybe that was why she had done everything to resist her captors, but hadn’t tried to escape.
She knew she was going back to something just as bad—especially because Tsai would tell the Party what they’d been working on in Bulgaria, and the Party would try to have them replicate the experiments.
Hsu realized with a chill that not only was she going to die when Gerard found her, but she also didn’t even have anything to live for. What could she go home to? Her parents had died years ago, and she hadn’t been able to go to the funeral.
She barely remembered her younger brother and sister—the second daughter the family was not supposed to have, the blackmail the party officials had used to get her family to give them Hsu. No. She did not want to go back home.
That thought made tears come to her eyes again.
She’d thought well of home because it was all she had when she was in captivity. She thought of her mother’s home-cooked noodles and the games she played with her cousins. Now she realized that world was lost to her.
She steadied herself by looking around. The night was still. She made out the wolf lying nearby. It was awake, head picked up, looking into the distance.
After a moment of indecision, Hsu got up and walked over. Her muscles screamed at the effort, and her feet had gone to sleep, but she knew she had to keep moving. Even a fire would only help so much here. The wolf looked over briefly, but its attention returned to the landscape outside.
It was watching something in particular. Hsu squinted into the darkness, trying to understand what she was supposed to be seeing.
Then she made out a tiny pinprick of light, something she had assumed was a guidepost or roadside hut, was moving erratically.
Hsu leaned forward, willing her eyes to work better than they were capable of. She turned her head to the side, trying to see the object out of her peripheral vision. The more sensitive black-and-white cells picked up the movement more strongly, though she couldn’t understand what it was. A lantern? Who would be walking through the forest near….?
“A rescue party!” She turned to look at the wolf. “If they’ve heard there was trouble at the facility, maybe someone is coming to rescue you!” For a moment, the look in the wolf’s eyes was so human and so hopeful that Hsu wanted to cry. Then the wolf pushed itself up without a sound and started to scuff snow and ice over the fire.
It nosed at Hsu’s pack.
“We’re … going to find out if your family came for you, right?” Hsu knew they had tried to get entire families before, tracing the lineage of the shifter powers over the years. They’d never found this one’s family, though, and Hsu had always hoped they would stay away. Now it was different.
Now her family actually could save her.
But she knew, somehow, that the wolf wasn’t going to head back to the facility, no matter who might be there. And when the wolf set off again, it was, indeed, into the darkness, heading to the other facility and leaving any rescuers far behind.
“Wait.” Hsu kept her voice quiet as she struggled through the snow after the wolf. “Please. Won’t you tell me why you don’t want to go back?”
The wolf ... did not answer.
—
The light from the Maglite bobbed as Gerard made his way up the slope, carefully skirting the watch points. He was counting infractions as he went, each adding to his anticipation. He could only assume that the guards had decided to abandon the practice of round-the-clock shifts because the lights were out in the guard huts. Hugo would be in a towering rage when he heard about it. He might even demand to witness their executions.
The lights in the facility were out as well. The place looked truly eerie, a black blot against the sky. Gerard looked up at it occasionally as he climbed.
They were supposed to be working around the clock, they had promised Hugo that they would unlock the secrets of the bloodlines for him to make his own soldiers.
Every facility had run into the same problem, the inability to understand what made changers different from other humans. Their DNA seemed normal. There were no obvious birthmarks or skeletal differences.
No, whatever it was lay deeper, but it was there. Otherwise, why would it run in families? Each facility of the several scattered across the former Eastern Bloc, and the one in Spain as well, had taken to finding and abducting whole families to discover the secrets of what made a shifter, a shifter.
None of the efforts, so far, had been successful.
But this facility had discovered something almost as good. They had discovered how to manipulate the powers of those they had captured. The implications were incredible: shifters gathered from every country on earth and set on any enemy that resisted Hugo’s control.
He would first become indispensable to the governments of the world, and then he would rule them. Who would say no to him when his pets could rip their throats out, heal from bullet wounds in record time, and cause abject terror in the soldiers who faced them?
No one.
No one would resist Hugo, and Gerard would be at Hugo’s right hand, dispensing punishments, sharing the glory of the world they had created. And when that bitch realized what she’d let slip through her fingers and came back to try to win earth, her own army would be turned against her.
Gerard was still smiling as he punched the security codes into the terminal outside the main doors. He waited for them to begin sliding open, and smiled at the thought of the panic inside. The doors opening, someone coming in … the guards would wake up in terror. They would know they had been caught. The doors didn’t make a sound, however, and Gerard looked over in confusion.
Then he saw what he should have noticed first. The doors were ajar and blackened on the inside as if fire had eaten away at them. He shone his light over and swallowed hard. The locks were broken as if something had battered the doors open.
Something from the inside.
There was, he realized now, another possible reason that the facility had not been in contact: whatever had happened here, the facility had been completely destroyed. And that was when he realized he was smelling blood on the cold wind.
CHAPTER FIVE
Gerard walked slowly through the destroyed facility. Panic was rising in his chest. Half the hallways were scorched from a fire that had never entirely caught on the stone and concrete walls. The scent of gasoline hung heavy in the air, and bodies lay maule
d in the hallways. There were chunks of fur and chunks of….
Gerard took a moment to calm his stomach. He was not usually squeamish, but to be completely surrounded by carnage was entirely different from causing someone pain.
Some of these wounds would not have killed their owners quickly, and in a few of the rooms, burned bodies were huddled by the doors. The mainframes were almost sure to be destroyed.
The research was gone.
When Hugo heard about this, he would be furious. Gerard’s breath was coming shallow in his own terror.
He had seen Hugo annoyed many times before, but he had seen Hugo angry only once, and he went out of his way never to recall that memory. It was the day Gerard had taken his father’s place in service to Hugo’s father.
He remembered the two identical pairs of black eyes as Hugo and his father regarded him. He remembered having to step over his father’s body to kneel before his lord, and his lord’s heir. He remembered forcing himself to hate his own father and blame him for forcing their lord’s hand. If Gerard’s father had not failed the Marcaris?
He would not be dead.
Now Gerard remembered a different moment: his father’s expression when he returned from the failed mission. He had known what was coming, Gerard knew that now. Had he been equally faultless?
Had he found himself in a place like this, surrounded by death, knowing that others’ failure would be put on his head and he would never find a good enough defense?
He stopped, gripping a door frame to steady himself. Hugo wouldn’t kill him. Hugo knew he had no more loyal servant than Gerard. Hugo was merciful and just.
The words did not calm him.
Gerard tried to catch his breath, and then, with a yell of fury, picked up a piece of debris and dashed it against the wall. How dare they fail like this? How dare they lose control of the experiments?
He was not going to die just because others had failed. That meant he needed to find something useful in this burned out husk of a facility. Then he was going to go back to the hotel and find that woman.
She could try to make up for the rest of his night, and God help her if she didn’t do well enough.
—
Lights flickered on the side of the laptop as ADAM worked his way through the encryptions. Jennifer had called to initiate the decryption, and reported that ADAM was having fun with what he called “inventive” protections on both the laptop and the main system.
“Any progress?” Arisha looked over at Jennifer.
“Nyet.” Jennifer’s voice was bored. She looked annoyed. “What do you want to bet they’re setting the whole facility free right now?” She was speaking in Russian, apparently a difficult task even with the implant. Given Arisha’s own difficulty with English, she understood. The two of them had been testing their language skills on each other while they waited for ADAM to be done with the computer, and Jennifer was clearly disgruntled, even though she was enjoying Arisha’s company.
“They said they would not attack.” Arisha pronounced the words carefully. “None of your words are pronounced how they are spelled, do you know that? It is very annoying.”
Jennifer laughed. “I’ve heard that English is a bitch to learn.”
“It is.” Arisha was a little annoyed that Jennifer, whatever trouble she might have with the pronunciation, nevertheless had the entire Russian vocabulary at her fingertips. If she joined the Queen’s organization, she decided she would do pretty much anything to be on the team that got the language implants.
She had often dreamed of traveling the world, speaking with locals.
Thinking of the stories she could learn made her want to laugh aloud. Jennifer noticed her companion’s good mood, “What are you so happy about?”
“So many things….” Arisha gave up on English and switched back to Russian. Her English was not good enough to convey these ideas. “So much of the world has opened up to me in the past day. I learned that what I saw when I was a child was real, that all the stories I have collected are real, but that they were so much more than anyone knew! I have been tracking these stories all my life, I have heard things you wouldn’t believe. The world is amazing, and I want to document all of it. If I were to serve your Queen, do you think she would let me do that?”
To Arisha’s surprise, Jennifer did not answer immediately. She considered for a long time before she spoke, “You should consider if you really want to give up life on Earth.”
Arisha felt her smile fade. “What does that mean?”
“It means that at some point we’re going to go through the gate—a portal to another part of space. We don’t know what’s going to happen there. We don’t know what awaits us beyond Earth. That’s what serving Bethany Anne means for almost all of us. There are a couple of people staying behind, but they’re going to be alone here, and for the rest of us who are going, there’s no more … views of the Rockies. No more mountain climbing. No more diner breakfasts at 3 AM. You won’t get to see your nieces and nephews grow up.”
She sounded like she was going to cry.
“I can’t imagine what that must be like. I … hadn’t ever thought of that part of it.” Arisha had no idea what to do. The woman was a shifter, and probably a more than capable warrior, but right now she was also scared and alone, and so after a hesitation, Arisha went to sit next to her on the floor. She reached out to take the other woman’s hand. “Are you alright? Do you want to talk about it?”
Jennifer gave a weak laugh. “I, uh … thanks, but not right now. I don’t know why I brought it up.”
The answer to that seemed obvious to Arisha. “You brought it up because it’s important to you.”
“Well, when you put it that way.” Jennifer wiped at her eyes with her free hand. “I just don’t want people to make this choice without understanding what it means. Bethany Anne doesn’t want that, either, she gives a good talk to everyone who wants to join. I guess I just didn’t listen—or maybe it’s impossible to understand the choice before you make it. I wanted to do amazing things and work with amazing people, and I am. I just didn’t think about what I was giving up.”
There was a beep from the computer, and a voice buzzed faintly in Jennifer’s earpiece. She tapped it. “Got it, thanks ADAM.” Then she wiped a tear and looked at Arisha. “Looks like we have some information to go through. It’ll be on my computer when we get back to the room. And, one other thing.”
“Yeah?” Arisha began shutting down the laptop.
“Thanks for offering to talk. Maybe I’ll take you up on that someday. But for now—don’t tell Stephen about this, alright?”
“You and Stephen are together,” Arisha guessed.
“Yeah. And he’s kind of … Bethany Anne’s second in command. One of them. I just want to figure out what I’m thinking before I talk to him, okay?”
Arisha nodded. “Okay. Just, you’d better figure it out before you end up on some other planet.”
Jennifer gave an involuntary laugh. “That’s the plan.”
—
“Let me out!” Filip had been banging the bed frame against the door for what felt like hours. He twitched his arm again, and the metal frame bumped into the door again. “Can anyone hear me?”
“I can hear you,” a man’s voice snapped. “For the love of God, shut up.”
Finally. Filip felt a wave of relief, followed by a wave of anger. Someone was there after all, but they’d been listening to him yell for ages and they weren’t planning to let him out. “Come on! Let me out!”
“Stoyan said not to.” That, in the guard’s opinion, seemed to solve everything.
“Is he going to kill me?” Filip called out to the guard.
Filip jumped as the guard banged his way into the room, and only just missed Filip with the door.
“No,” the guard said. He was clearly not the patient type. “He is not going to kill you, despite the fact that all of us have pointed out that killing you is clearly smarter than not.”
“Stoyan wants to keep you safe.” The guard talked over Filip without even waiting for him to stop. “There are people out there who would do anything to get their hands on the information you have—and they aren’t going to play nice.”
“Oh.” Filip sat down on the bed frame. “Now I understand. Thank you.”
The guard looked at him suspiciously. “That’s it?”
“That’s it. I woke up handcuffed to a bed and locked in here, can you blame me for wanting to know why?”