by Jeff Sampson
12:32 AM: I’m alive.
Attached was a photo he’d snapped of himself, his palm next to his face and the date written on it in marker. To prove it was him who’d sent it, apparently. Good idea—I’m not sure I’d have been able to sleep wondering if it had been his mother fake texting me.
I was tempted to call him back, but when I checked the time on my phone, my eyes went wide—it was after three a.m. I’d been a wolf for hours. I sent him a text instead.
Exhaustion rushed over me, and superstrength or no, the muscles in my legs ached. Sneaking in through the back door, I made my way silently up to my room, kicked off my shoes, and tore off my jacket. I set my alarm for nine a.m., then climbed fully clothed into bed and under my covers.
Seconds later, I was passed out.
My alarm screamed at me much too soon. Eyes snapping open, I smacked the off button and then lay in bed, staring at the ceiling.
Saturday. I had four hours until the big meeting at BioZenith.
I lay there for five minutes, then forced myself out of bed. I had work to do.
First off: Contact my team and make sure we were all ready. Texts went out to Spencer, Tracie, and Nikki, and one by one they all texted back to confirm our plans.
Spencer, Tracie, and I were all going to wear the stretchiest pants and shirts we owned so we could transform without worrying about the need to take off our clothes. Just in case.
Spencer had a small recording device he’d put together so we could play back what the parents told us later. He told me he rigged it up so it could call out—meaning we could have the cheerleaders listen in on someone’s phone.
I was in total love with this guy’s tech prowess, I have to say.
Tracie told me she’d spent the night practicing hybrid and, true to her A-type perfectionist self, thought she’d already mastered it. I could only hope she was right.
And Nikki agreed to all my plans. She and the triplets would hide in the minivan and listen in. If we needed help, they’d know it.
I felt like I was in some crazy heist movie and we were about to try and get the perfect score.
As twelve thirty rolled around, I took a shower and put on fresh clothes: my stretched-out black sweater and the patched-up sweatpants that so often acted as my prowling gear. They’d kept me safe so far.
Wiping my hand across the steamed-up mirror, I looked myself in the eye and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. Then, I placed my hands on either side of the sink and leaned in close.
“You’re ready for this,” I said. “It’s time to face our makers.”
I had questions. They had lies.
I was going to make them give me answers.
“All right, ladies, time to duck down.”
From the crowded backseat of the minivan, Brittany whined, “Ew, Spencer, you really need to vacuum in here.”
“My mom always tells me the same thing,” he said as he turned down the street that led into the industrial district. “But blame Mikey and the guys. I’m not the one who’s eating back there.”
Spencer had picked me up last after getting the cheerleaders and Tracie. They were crammed in the back, where they’d be waiting for our signal. Like us, they’d dressed all in black. Only their clothes were a lot nicer—and more expensive—than mine. I’m talking matching designer leather jackets and perfectly tailored yoga pants to go with their knit hats. They looked like a team of cat burglars.
I looked back over the front seat. “You comfortable back there?”
A chorus of nos.
“Not in the least,” Tracie grumbled. She was crushed against the door while the others tried to arrange themselves.
“It’s only until we’re inside,” I said as I looked back to the street. “Then just make sure none of the patrolling guards see you and we’ll be good.”
Spencer pulled to a stop at the giant fenced gate topped with barbed wire that was the entrance to the BioZenith facilities. To his left was a small guardhouse. He cranked open the window, then leaned out and grinned at the serious-looking man standing inside.
“Hi,” Spencer said. “We’re guests. We should be on a list or something.”
“Your names,” the guard barked.
“Spencer Holt, Emily Webb, and Tracie Townsend.”
The guard looked down and pressed a touch screen on his desk. Nodding at Spencer, he pressed a button and the fenced gate started to slide open with a whir of gears and a clang of metal smacking metal.
As Spencer rolled up his window, I took in a deep breath and looked up at the two-story, two-building BioZenith facility in front of us. The place suddenly seemed much bigger than I remembered.
“Here we go,” I whispered.
The parking lot was half full, and though there were a few guards walking around, none had guns. At least not the big rifles Spencer and I had seen them carry the other night when we’d scoped the place out.
Completely normal-looking people wearing business casual left the building in pairs and groups, laughing with each other before waving good-bye and heading to their cars. Through the windows I could see others at their desks, talking on phones or typing away on their computers. The building on the right—which had the main entrance—could have been any normal office building on the block.
Spencer pulled into a guest parking spot near the entrance, but not so close that anyone exiting the building would see the cheerleaders. Shutting off the car, he looked back and down at Nikki.
“Got your phone on?” he asked her.
Struggling from her position, she dug into her jacket pocket and produced a smartphone, tapped the screen a few times, then held it up for us to see. She’d loaded up some basic-looking app that I guess Spencer had sent her.
Grabbing a piece of his sweatshirt, Spencer held it close to his face and said, “Testing.” His voice echoed out of the phone—he must have been grabbing the hidden microphone that was taped to his chest.
“It works,” Nikki said simply.
“Great,” Amy said beside her, wedged between the backset and the driver’s seat. “Now can you guys go? This isn’t comfortable.”
“Yeah,” I said, nodding to Tracie and Spencer. “We’re ready.”
As we opened the doors and jumped out, Casey called out, “Good luck!” I offered her a smile, then slammed the door closed.
Side by side, Spencer, Tracie, and I walked past the trees planted in little spots of green on the front walkway to the big glass entryway. We hefted open the doors and walked into the lobby, which had tan tile floors, an unoccupied receptionist desk next to the elevator bay, and a big section with plush couches and tables strewn with magazines.
That’s where the parents were waiting for us.
They rose as we entered, and the three of us stopped.
There was an attractive blond couple with lined, somber faces that I recognized from Emily Cooke’s funeral. Her parents.
Mr. McKinney, alone, standing in front of everyone with his arms crossed and a fake smile on his face.
A short white man with unkempt hair and a doughy, white woman, both in ill-fitting brown suits. Spencer’s parents, the professors.
A black woman in a flowy, tropical-patterned dress, with hair pulled back by a kerchief and her hands and face overwhelmed by homemade earrings and bracelets and rings. Tracie’s mom, the artist.
And there was my dad, still sitting, clutching and wrenching in his lap the fishing cap he sometimes wore to cover up his baldness.
My stepmom wasn’t there. She probably didn’t know about me, then. At least one adult in my life hadn’t lied to me.
For a long moment, we all stood there staring at one another awkwardly. My dad wouldn’t look at us, but Mr. McKinney, Spencer’s parents, and Tracie’s mom all offered smiles that we were unable to return. Mr. Cooke coughed, and the sound echoed through lobby, making the place feel all the more empty.
A ding rang out as an elevator reached the main floor. A pair of women walked out, ta
lking and laughing loudly, clutches and jackets in hand. Catching sight of our group, they went silent, lowered their heads, and rushed out the front doors.
Mr. McKinney sighed, then walked up to us. “All right, might as well get started. You three are hungry, right? You’re hungry. Come, we had our chef put together a great lunch.”
Spencer and Tracie both looked to me and I shrugged. We stayed side by side as we followed Mr. McKinney past the seating area. Tracie’s mom reached out to try and touch her arm, but Tracie pulled away. After that, the parents followed us in silence.
The cafeteria was through double doors behind the receptionist’s desk. It was pretty big, about the same size as the school cafeteria, only much nicer. The tables were real wood, for one, and the seating was wooden chairs with plush upholstery. In lieu of windows on the back wall, giant photographs of flowers and grass and trees were displayed on screens that kept fading to show new scenery, like that boring screen-saver pack that always comes with new computers.
The three of us sat down on one side of a table while the parents went opposite—all of them. As we were served salads topped with rare duck and some sort of fancy root mash, Mr. McKinney talked.
And talked.
A lot of it was what he’d already told me at my house and that I’d already relayed to Spencer and Tracie: that they made us in test tubes, that they were observing us, that they want to help us now. Mr. McKinney dominated the conversation, but occasionally Mrs. Cooke would jump in, or Mr. Holt.
But it was nothing new. Nothing about what the shadowmen were really like—in fact, they never even mentioned the name “Akhakhu” that was all over the HAVOC files and that Evan had told me about.
Finally, Spencer interrupted and asked what was on all our minds, “Okay, I get that you made us this way. But why? And how?”
The parents that I was guessing were the scientists in the group—Mr. McKinney, Mrs. Cooke, both Mr. and Mrs. Holt—looked at one another. The latter three seemed concerned, worried. Mr. McKinney, as usual, refused to act any way but in complete control. He was the one who answered.
“Let’s start with the how,” he said. “You are aware of the other dimension. Twenty years ago, the company that BioZenith was once a part of managed to breach into that world. That is when we first made contact with the other side. With the…shadowmen.”
I’d been fidgeting with my duck, not having eaten anything. I wasn’t going to trust any food they served me. At the mention of the shadowmen, I set the fork down and met Mr. McKinney’s eye across the table.
“You mean the Akhakhu.”
For a sliver of a second, Dalton’s dad seemed flustered. Regaining his composure, he nodded and said, “Yes, the Akhakhu is what they called themselves. They are a race far more advanced than us. When we entered their world, we discovered them living in vast, technologically superior palaces. They didn’t fear us, and in fact they were able to use their technology to communicate with us. We weren’t the first other-dimensional beings to find the way there.
“They supplied us with technology that we could use to enhance our race, to improve the mistakes in our biology, to eradicate birth defects, to make us more than human.” He laughed. “Well, not us, unfortunately. But our children. And theirs.”
“So the technology they had was to mix humans and animals?” Tracie asked. “That’s how they got ahead? That seems weird.”
Spencer’s mom leaned forward excitedly. “Oh no, it was so much more than that. They had all sorts of improvements! We could make it so someone could move things with their minds or—”
“Viv,” Spencer’s dad interrupted. She met his eye and he shook his head. Her enthusiastic smile faltered and she leaned back.
Clearing his throat, Mr. McKinney looked from Mrs. Holt back to me. “As Vivian was saying, there was more to their technology. But we at this branch of the corporation were given this particular bit of technology to experiment with. Your mother”—he nodded at me—“was the one who dubbed it HAVOC.”
“‘Human-Animal Vespers, Original Crossbreeds,’” I said. “Yeah, I saw that in the files. But what’s a ‘vesper’ and why do the files refer to us that way?”
“‘Envisioning the brightest stars, to lead our way,’” Tracie’s mom muttered, then popped a bit of salad in her mouth. The three of us teens all looked at her, and her hand fluttered to her chest, surprised. Swallowing the bite she’d just taken, she looked nervously over at Mr. McKinney, then said, “I always saw that on the letterhead. I thought it was nice.”
“It was just a name for the kids who were enhanced,” Mrs. Cooke said softly. “We didn’t come up with it. It’s what we were told to call you. All of you, all of the vespers, were viewed as the new, greater generation. The ones who would take humanity into the future.” She let out a quick, rueful laugh.
Standing up, Mrs. Cooke dabbed her mouth with her napkin, then shoved back her chair. “I’m sorry, Harrison,” she said to Mr. McKinney. “I don’t see why we need to be here. We’re no longer a part of this.” Nodding cordially at us, she grabbed her husband’s arm to get him to stand up and said to us, “Nice meeting you. I’m sorry about…” Shaking her head, she sighed. “Good luck to you.”
Everyone went quiet and watched as the Cookes left the cafeteria, their footsteps echoing throughout the room before they disappeared through the double doors. The door hinges squeaked, then went silent.
Mr. McKinney cleared his throat. Looking at my dad and Tracie’s mom next to him, he apologetically said, “You’ll have to forgive them. They recently lost their daughter.”
“Of course,” my dad said. Trying to catch my eye, he added, “I don’t even want to think about what that would be like.”
I looked down at my uneaten food. It was cold by now.
“All right, so the tech stuff makes sense, I guess,” Spencer said next to me. “I mean, I’ve been wondering how any of this is even possible, but alien science works for me. Just, why wolves? What’s the point? You made it sound like there were all sorts of genetic engineering options, but you chose the werewolf program for your kids?”
Spencer’s mom put her hand to her mouth. Her eyes glistened. “Oh, sweetie. My poor baby. It wasn’t supposed to be werewolves at all. You poor thing.”
Spencer rolled his eyes and, in a “you’re embarrassing me!” tone said, “Mom!”
Hand still over her mouth, Mrs. Holt leaned into her husband.
“We wanted to give you the abilities we felt would make you the strongest,” Mr. McKinney said. “We wanted to improve all of your senses without any of the drawbacks. But when we tested the five of you after your births, using the genetic markers we put in place so that we could activate you remotely, your shifts were erratic. Monstrous. You weren’t meant to turn into half-human, half-wolf hybrids, but that’s what you became. We couldn’t bear seeing you when you…weren’t yourselves. So we deactivated you, struck your names from our records so that only those who worked directly on the project would know who you were, and chose to let you live normal lives.”
Except that wasn’t the end of HAVOC. They messed up with us five. And I remembered Mr. McKinney mentioning other potential Emilys, little genetically mutated fetuses in glass vials that didn’t make it. We were just the batch that got closest.
Until they made Evan.
I wanted to throw this fact in Mr. McKinney’s face and expose his lie. But I didn’t want to tip my hand just yet. I still had questions.
“So why wolves?” I asked. “If you weren’t intentionally going for the whole werewolf thing, why not, I dunno. Bears. Or lions. Birds or dolphins or…anything, really.”
Pushing his now-empty plate forward, Mr. McKinney stood and smiled down at me. “How about we ask the woman who was in charge of the project?”
“Who’s that?” Tracie asked.
Finally meeting my father’s sad, pleading eyes, I answered. “My mother.”
10
I FIGURED IT OUT
; Now two people short, Mr. McKinney led our party out of the cafeteria, into the elevators, and up to the second floor where all the offices were.
I already knew the layout of the building from the last time I was there. But this time I made a point of scanning the corners to see where the guards were stationed, to look in the cubicles to see what presumably innocent sales team member or customer service rep was still working that Saturday afternoon.
Mr. McKinney took us through the doors that led to the glass walkway connecting the two buildings. The window I shattered was fixed—no one would have known a werewolf had broken it a week before.
And then, we were in the labs. At least, the labs they wanted us to see. Something told me our tour wouldn’t be taking us past the security door where we’d seen the vats of failed genetic experiments.
Holding a keycard over a pad on the wall, Mr. McKinney waited for the light on it to go from red to green, then slid open the glass door that led into a spacious computer lab. Unlike some of the other labs we’d passed, which were filled with plants and Pyrex containers and other equipment, this room was nothing but computer bays and giant, heat-emitting servers on three sides of the room.
Directly across from the door, a flat-screen monitor the size of a giant TV was mounted on the wall. Walking purposefully toward it, Mr. McKinney leaned over and pressed a button on a black box. Speaking into it, he said, “Jones, fire up the rings and the camera.”
“Got it,” a voice responded.
Turning back toward us, Mr. McKinney clasped his hands behind his back. “I understand that you three have been here before,” he said. “And judging by the destruction of some of our equipment in the facility below us, you saw the ringed apparatus, yes?”
I nodded. “That has something to do with the other dimension, right?”
“Yes. You’ll forgive me if I don’t take you down there. The shareholders would have my head.” He waved a hand at the monitor. “But we’ve put together this setup so you can still speak to someone on the other side.”