by Tania Hutley
“What do we do now?” I ask while he ties her up. “How are we going to escape?”
“We’re not escaping. It’s the end game, Milla. Our chance to stop President Morelle.”
“How will we do that?” My aching limbs are starting to work again, and his words fill me with hope. When I broke out of the Morelle Corporation, this is the moment I dreamed of. I finally have my Leopard Skin back, and I’m strong enough to do anything. “What exactly is the end game, Cale? Has Sentin figured out a way we can stop her?”
Cale tests the straps to make sure the doctor’s secure, then turns to cut the restraints from my human body.
“I can’t hurt President Morelle. Not while I’m in this Skin. But you can.” With his hands busy cutting the straps from around my body, Cale nods at Doctor James. “I wasn’t supposed to knock her out, but to convince her to help me take you up to the top floor.” His armored face shows no emotion. “Instead I bashed her head against the wall, and I had to force myself not to tear her throat open. I’m not sure if this Skin has anything to do with my rage, but I’m having all kinds of terrible thoughts.”
“If you hadn’t knocked her out, she would have warned Morelle.”
“I don’t trust myself in this Skin. I can’t decide whether I want to kill everyone in the building, or turn us both in to the president.”
“Thank you for coming for me.” The words aren’t enough to express how grateful I am, and I’m not sure if he can read my scent and the flick of my ears as well as he could when he was a tiger. To make it clear, I stumble to him on my still-stiff legs and nuzzle his arm. He smells cold and metallic, nothing like when he’s human or the tiger, and I can’t get any sense of his emotions.
In contrast, from the gurney, the stench of my human body is pungent. It smells of sweat with a lingering aroma of pain and fear.
He pauses from cutting the straps from my human body for long enough to stroke one armored hand over my leopard head. “We don’t have much time. Sentin said we decimated Morelle’s army, though she’s pretending we didn’t. But there’s still a squad of knights on duty in this building. If we give ourselves away, they’ll be on us in no time.”
“Where’s Sentin?”
“He’s going to meet us upstairs.”
“Upstairs?”
“We’re going all the way to the top, to Morelle’s private apartment. Sentin gave me the code to use her elevator. He said he had a different way to get up there, but it would only work for him.” Cale cuts the last strap from my body, pulls the electrodes off my skull, then nods to the gurney my leopard was tied to. “Get back on the bed and transfer into your real body.”
“Transfer back?” I flatten my ears back against my head, sitting onto my haunches. “Cale, my human body isn’t nearly as strong as my Leopard Skin. I need to be the leopard if we’re to have any chance—”
“We don’t have time to argue. You need to transfer now, but don’t worry, we’re taking the leopard with us.”
Every cell in my body rebels against the idea of transferring out of my leopard. But I know Cale wouldn’t ask me to do it if it weren’t necessary, and at the first sign of trouble, I can transfer back. Reluctantly, I lie back down on the hated gurney, roll onto my side, and squeeze my eyes shut. I take a deep breath, trying to force my mind back into my human body. Then I suck in another breath. And another one. My mind refuses to go.
“You need to do this.” Cale’s voice is gentle. “Trust me, Milla.”
I grab hold of his voice, forcing my mind to follow it sideways.
Landing back into my human body fills me with a familiar sense of being less than I was before. I don’t know which hurts more, the gunshot wound in my shoulder, or the cuts the doctor sliced into me. I’m cold, stiff, sore, and almost naked.
“Here.” Cale hands me the clothes he took from Doctor James. “Put these on.”
The doctor is taller and stockier than I am. Her trousers are so long, I have to roll them up, and they’re loose around my waist. Her lab coat reaches my calves and its sleeves swallow my hands. At least I’m covered, but my feet are still bare. Before I can bend to take the doctor’s shoes off, Cale stops me by taking my hand in his. His armor is cold and his hand so big it envelops mine.
“Milla.” He lifts my hand and turns it, pushing the sleeve of the lab coat up so he can see the cut above my wrist. “I’m sorry I didn’t get here before she hurt you. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“It’s not bleeding too much.” I wriggle both shoulders, testing how painful they are. “I can still move my arms.”
“It wasn’t just the influence of the Skin that made me want to kill the doctor. Even in my human body, I would have wanted to hurt her.” The knight’s eyes are bright yellow and chilling, but the way he dips his head to me is familiar, and his tone is soft. The hand that’s not holding mine comes up to my face, and he gently touches my chin. “This isn’t the form I wanted to be in when I told you this, but I can’t help the way I feel about you, Milla. I’d do anything to keep you safe.”
I force air into lungs that have forgotten how to breathe. Now isn’t the time to tell him that I’ve never been so terrified in my life as when I thought the knight was going to kill him, or how leaving him with Sentin felt like my heart was being ripped open.
Instead, I squeeze his hard, cold hand. “It never seems to be the right time for us, does it? When this is over, I want us to be together.” Though I mean them with all my heart, for some reason the words are so difficult to say, they all but burn my throat.
He nods. “It’s a promise.”
I drag in a shuddering breath. “Cale…” I stop. My heart is full of words and promises, but now, when there’s so much I want to tell him, my tongue feels too thick and clumsy to say anything at all.
Cale nods, like he understands. He gives my hand a final squeeze and lets it go. Then he bends to strip off Doctor James’ shoes, and hands them to me. “We’re going to take the leopard upstairs.” His tone has gone back to being business-like. “If anyone stops us, we’re following the president’s orders. A knight escorting a doctor, taking a tied-up Skin to the president so she can examine it. No big deal.”
While I lace on the doctor’s shoes that are a couple of sizes too big, he picks some straps off the floor to tie over my Leopard Skin. Though they look like they’re pulled tight, they’re only loosely fastened to the gurney. It’ll only take one good tug to break them free.
“What about my scars?” I ask. “I look nothing like a New Triton doctor.”
He picks up a surgical mask from the doctor’s tray of tools. “Put this on.” Once it’s in place, he fiddles with my hair, pulling it forward over the sides of my face. “Walk with your head down. Here, you can pretend you’re reading this.” He hands me the tablet from the table. “We only need to get to President Morelle’s private elevator. It’s down the hall, tucked out of sight behind the public elevators. I took a quick look on my way here, and I didn’t pass any knights.”
I check my lab coat is on straight. “Okay. I’m ready.”
He grabs the gurney with my leopard on it, and pushes it toward the door. “Stay behind me.”
Head down, I stride down the hall after him. He sets a fast pace and I concentrate on keeping up. When we pass some people in the hallway, I keep my face angled down and the tablet high. Nobody shouts after us.
Cale pushes the gurney around a corner, down another long hallway, then around another corner. He stops so abruptly I almost run into him, and I risk lowering the tablet for long enough to glance around. In front of us is an elevator door. We’ve made it.
The door glides open smoothly, but instead of walking in, Cale hesitates.
“What’s your business?” A hard, male voice comes from inside the elevator. It’s a knight. Morelle’s posted a guard inside it.
“President Morelle wants to see this Skin.” Cale motions to my leopard. “She sent me to bring it and the doctor up to the top floor.”
The knight draws his weapon. “That’s a lie,” he snarls. “Nobody’s allowed up there.”
“I’m following orders she gave me personally,” Cale’s voice stays calm. “You know how important it is that we obey her without question.” The elevator starts to close, and he puts his hand over the door to stop it.
The knight’s gun is trained on Cale, but his gaze flicks to me. “Come here, where I can see you,” the knight orders. “And both of you put your hands up.”
I pretend I’m too engrossed in what I’m reading on the tablet to have heard him, keeping it up to cover my face. Once the knight gets a look at my scars, he’ll realize I’m no doctor.
“The president’s expecting me.” Cale doesn’t raise his hands either. If you stop me from following her orders, she’ll—”
“Step back and put your hands up.” Keeping the gun trained on Cale, the knight activates the screen on his arm. A loud siren screams from the elevator, making me jump.
Cale lunges at the knight and it fires at him, the gunshots blasting over the noise of the siren, deafening inside the small elevator.
I close my eyes and transfer.
The instant my consciousness hits my leopard, I surge up from the gurney, tearing away the restraints. All I can hear is the blasting of the gun. Is Cale hurt? No time to look. I leap at the knight and slam into it, shoving its back against the elevator’s far wall. Its gun clatters to the floor. My jaw finds its neck.
As badly as I need to check Cale’s okay after being shot at such close range, I can’t let the knight go. I tighten my jaws, trying to force my fangs into the knight’s armor. There’s no way I can pierce it, but I’m bending it, slowly crushing its throat.
The knight wraps its strong hands around my neck, choking me as it tries to shove me away. I clamp my jaws together even harder. The only chance we have is if I don’t let go.
Then Cale’s voice comes from beside my ear, still perfectly calm in spite of the siren that’s still going off. “I’ll handle this one, Milla.”
He lifts a gun to the knight’s pointed ear, positioning it before the knight can jerk away. Then he pulls the trigger. The knight sags. With an effort, I let my jaws relax, and the knight crumples to the floor. I back up, stretching my aching neck.
“You okay?” Cale bends to run his fingers through my fur.
“I’m fine. What about you?”
“The bullets knocked me off my feet.” He straightens, jerking his head toward the hallway outside the elevator. “Hear that?”
Through the shriek of the siren, I catch the heavy footfalls of metal boots pounding toward us. More knights are coming.
My human body is lying just outside the elevator, and when the doors start closing, they bump against my feet and slide open again. Cale picks up my body and dumps it on the gurney. He shoves the gurney inside the elevator with me, then steps in to look at the panel beside the door. Instead of buttons to choose a floor, there’s a numeric keypad. As the elevator doors shut, he punches in a code. A wall panel slides open and a red display flashes.
With the doors closed and the siren still going off, I can’t hear how close the knights are. But I know we don’t have much time. If the elevator doesn’t start moving soon, we’ll be sitting ducks.
“What’s that?” I flick my ears at the flashing display.
“Face and voice recognition, and a retinal scan.” He activates the screen on the inside of his forearm and a holo image projects from it. It’s Morelle’s head, replicated in full size, the most lifelike holo I’ve ever seen. It’s like she’s in the elevator with us. “Sentin programmed it in.” He holds it in front of the screen. “Top floor,” the hologram says in Morelle’s voice.
The panel goes green, but the elevator still doesn’t move.
“What else does it need?” I ask.
Cale shakes his head. “That’s all he told me to do.”
“We must be missing something. Fingerprints? What’s that button below the scanner?”
He stares at the button for a moment, then hits it. There’s a jolt, then the elevator starts moving up.
I turn to Cale to ask what will happen when we get to the top floor, but he holds up one hand. “This Skin has communication functions built in, and I can access the main channel. They’ve figured out where we’re going. An alert’s just gone out for all the knights in the building to get as high as possible and cut us off.”
“At least they can’t get to us in here.”
The words are barely out of my mouth when the elevator jerks to a stop so suddenly, Cale staggers. On four paws I don’t lose my balance, but my stomach takes a second to feel like it’s part of my body again.
“As I was saying, they know where we’re going. They’re on their way to intercept us.”
I look up at the ceiling. As strong and capable as my leopard is, there are some things humanoid hands are better at. “Tear a hole up there. We can climb up the shaft.”
Cale’s hands transform into claws. He punches through the elevator ceiling, ripping chunks of it away. When the hole is big enough, we both stare up into the endless, unlit shaft. At least neither of us have any problem seeing in the dark.
“We can’t go up there without taking your human body with us.” Cale nods at the gurney. “But I don’t think I can climb and carry it. You’ll have to transfer back into it.”
“I’ll carry it,” I bunch the lab coat in my teeth, using it to lift my body so it hangs from my mouth. I’m still much faster and stronger as the leopard than I would be as a human, even with the extra burden.
“You can’t climb like that, can you?”
“Watch me,” I mutter through a mouthful of cloth. As dangerous as this is, I almost feel like we’re practising for the tower again, the two of us racing each other up and down the climbing wall until dawn. This feels like what we were really training for.
Without waiting for him, I leap up to what’s left of the elevator’s roof. My human body swings from my mouth so I have to make an extra effort to compensate for its weight. Good thing my body’s skinny and light.
There are metal struts running up the side of the elevator shaft at regular intervals. Jumping to each one will be easy, even carrying my body between my teeth. I just have to do it without thumping my body against the side of the elevator shaft. Last thing I want is to accidentally bash my own brains out.
“They’re going to follow us,” warns Cale, hauling himself slowly up the struts.
I want to reply, but if I do, I’ll drop my human body. Instead I leap again, up to the next level. There are doors at every level, and I count them as we go up, calculating which floor we must be on. One-thirty-one. One-thirty-two. One-thirty-three.
Cale is much slower than I am. While my Skin was designed to climb the tower, his is designed for combat. He hauls himself up the shaft with an effort. Every few levels I need to wait for him to catch up.
From below us comes a loud clanking. Three knights are climbing the shaft behind us, but they’re several floors below, and as slow as Cale.
“What’s that?” Cale points up the shaft. “Some kind of barrier?”
I stare up at it. I can’t reply, but he’s right. A metal security barrier must have been triggered when the alarm went off. It’s blocking the entire shaft, obviously designed to stop intruders from climbing all the way up. Morelle thought of everything.
A gunshot cracks, echoing through the shaft. I duck as it ricochets off the metal barrier above us. The knights are shooting at us.
“Use me as cover,” shouts Cale as more shots ring out.
That’s right, he’s bullet-proof. I jump in front of him, keeping him between me and the knights below us. Bullets hit his legs, making his feet slip off the metal slats, but he keeps dragging himself up while I shelter behind his bulk. I just hope that stopping to fire will slow the knights down even more.
Together we climb all the way to the barrier. Cale slams his armoured fist into the metal
. The crash is deafening, but when he draws back, the barrier isn’t even dented. He tries again with his claws extended, trying to rip through the metal. His hand bounces off it.
Finally he shakes his head. “There’s no way through. We need to get out of this shaft.”
With gunfire echoing around us, we move to the nearest door. Cale wrenches it open and we haul ourselves through.
The floor we’re on is one huge open office, full of desks with no partitions to separate them. Enormous windows line the far wall, flooding the room with light. But the glass in the windows is opaque. I can’t see through it, so there’s no way to tell how high up we are.
Surely we must be almost at the top, close to Morelle’s private apartment. We need to keep climbing before the knights make it to this floor. There’s no cover here, and we’re badly outnumbered. If they catch up to us, we’ll have no chance.
Cale scans the floor, then moves to a door marked Stairs. He tears it open, looks out, then slams it. “More knights are climbing the stairs, and there’s another metal barrier blocking us from going up. We can’t get out that way.”
I drop my human body and allow myself a moment to stretch my aching jaw. “This isn’t a good place to stand and fight.” I wish I’d left my human body behind in the lab. I can’t fight while I’m carrying it, and there’s no safe place to leave it here.
The clanking sounds from the elevator shaft are getting louder. The knights climbing behind us are almost here.
We’re out of time.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Leaving my body where it is, I cross to the opaque window. “Smash it,” I say.
Cale draws back his fist and punches it hard. Cracks splinter through the glass. One more punch and the pane shatters. It falls out of the frame and tumbles away.
Wind rushes in and I poke my head out into what feels like a gale. I’m on top of the world, and the view of Triton makes me dizzy. The city stretches below me, an endless expanse of scrapers, all much smaller than the one I’m in. But there’s no time for more than a quick glance down.