Phoebe’s hands are small and slim. My gaze is drawn to them because she keeps fidgeting, as if she’d like to reach out and touch me again. If my hands were that small, I could slip right out of—
Reshape, the beast whispers, deep in my head.
My hands begin to burn. Suddenly, out of nowhere, they burn, from the inside out, as if they’re going to sleep, but instead of pins and needles, I feel like my hands are being stabbed by hundreds of tiny fireplace pokers, fresh out of the blaze. Pain flares in a million points of fire, deep inside every joint and vein.
I curl my hands into fists, trying to diffuse the sensation, but it only gets stronger. I stare at them, expecting my skin to be splotched with some kind of weird rash. Or blistered. Because that’s what this feels like—a searing pain blazing in every single bone and each muscle. In every ligament. Hell, in every fucking cell, from my wrists to the tips of my fingers.
“Settle down, Sotelo,” the guard to my left says. He thinks my fists are a sign of aggression, but they’re…
Smaller. My fists are much smaller than they should be. I uncurl them, and my hands look odd. Petite. My fingers are slim and straight. My wrists are narrow. My hands look…feminine.
They’re Phoebe’s hands. My nails are still short and un-manicured, and I’m not wearing her rings, but those are her small, delicate hands growing from the ends of my thick forearms. These are her middle-aged veins and starter-wrinkles.
“What the hell…?” I mumble.
Then, suddenly I understand, because the beast understands. Because my body comprehends what my mind does not. I’ve “reshaped” my hands using Phoebe’s genetic code. Complete with her age markers.
The burning eases. No one else seems to have noticed the change, but I can’t stop staring. My hands are so small now that they might just…
Gazes turn my way as I jerk my oddly petite hands free from wire cuffs that were tightened around my wrists when I had a much larger bone structure. The wires scrape my thumbs and outer knuckles raw, but my arms are free.
Holy shit.
The guard blinks at me, shocked, and I throw my elbow into his chest as fast and as hard as I can. The instant my arm makes contact, the skin at the tip of my elbow splits open along a small, X-shaped seam and a six-inch spike of bone shoots out. The dense weave of the guard’s riot gear gives a split-second of resistance, but the tip of my bone spike is so sharp and narrow that it slides through the tight weave of protective fabric, and a sharp edge along the back side slices through the material to impale the guard.
What stops a blunt-nosed bullet will not stop a needle-pointed bone spike.
I jerk my arm free, then drive the spike into him again. And again. Blood spurts everywhere, spraying my arm, my hand and the side of my face.
Passengers start screaming as Dr. Brennan fights with her seat belt. The pilot glances back at us. The guard gasps, weakly pushing on my triceps, trying to protect his torso.
The pilot returns to his instruments, and over the crescendo of panic rising all around me, I hear him radio for help.
“Sotelo!” Dr. Brennan lurches across the aisle and snatches the guard’s pistol from his holster. It won’t do her any good—it’ll only respond to his fingerprints.
I grab the guard’s left arm and pull his com device off, then I slide it onto my own left arm. I lift his right hand and press his index finger against the screen, which is also print-protected, and he’s too weak to stop me.
“Sotelo!” Brennan is on her feet in the aisle, aiming the pistol at me, as if she can fire it. “Hands up!”
Using the guard’s finger on his own device like a stylus, I remotely unlock the shackles holding my legs to the base of my seat, and they thunk onto the floor of the shuttle. I stand, swimming in a rush of adrenaline when I tower over both the passengers and the gasping guard, who’s trying to hold his blood in with both hands.
“Captain Sotelo.” Dr. Brennan sounds almost as pissed as she sounds scared. “Sit. Down.”
Instead, I step past the guard into the aisle, ignoring the passengers as they cower away from me. Blood drips from my bone spike as it recedes into my forearm, which should reassure Brennan. The spike would still be extended if I expected to have to use it again.
She’s still aiming the gun, but she can’t fire it, and she’s much too small to be any threat to me, even with my strangely petite—
As soon as I’ve thought about my hands, my fingers begin to burn again, as if my arms suddenly end in two fiery torches. The burning spreads as I wipe a splatter of the guard’s blood from my mouth. Some of it landed on my tongue. I can taste it. The beast has already analyzed it.
The guard is young—mid-twenties—and healthy, but a distinctive degradation pattern in his DNA says that he drinks too much. Who can blame him, with a job like this?
“Sotelo. Carson. Think it through,” Brennan says, and though I can hear what she’s saying, I can’t process the words, because the burning is spreading beyond my hands. It’s all over me now—a million pinpoints of pain—and it’s vicious. All-consuming. All I can do is ride out the agony. I’m being roasted alive, on the cellular level, while the beast chants “reshape” in my mind.
My hybrid genes have taken over.
I fight to remain on my feet, consumed by so much pain.
“This isn’t going to work,” Brennan insists, and I realize she hasn’t noticed whatever is happening to me, either because she’s near panic, or because it isn’t yet visible on the outside of my body. “You’re not getting off this planet.”
I shove her into her seat. Let her keep the gun; it’s not like she can use it. “Stay,” I order, and though that internal fire is finally fading, my voice, sounds…wrong.
Brennan looks up at me and gasps, just as my own hands catch my gaze. They’re big again, but they’re not mine. The knuckles are too small, and the skin is too pale.
I shove my sleeve up and discover that my entire arm is pasty white, with a covering of light brown hair so fine I can hardly see it. My forearm is leaner than it should be; the muscles are defined, but not thick. And that seam along the underside is gone. I run my fingers over my elbow, and the seam there is gone as well.
The beast’s “reshaping” has stolen my built-in defenses.
My heart hammering against my sternum, I glance at the shiny metal wall at the back of the shuttle, and though my reflection is distorted, I recognize the face staring back at me.
It belongs to the guard.
I glance down to see that the man whose face I’ve stolen has finally managed to unbuckle his belt with slick, bloody hands. He’s weak. Without emergency care, he’ll be dead in minutes.
“Sotelo?” Brennan’s eyes narrow on me. “What the hell is happening?” Her shock has morphed into intellectual curiosity as fear for her own life takes a backseat to her drive to document and understand. Because this never happened in the lab.
Fuck her intellectual curiosity. Someday it’s going to get her killed.
I snatch the gun from her grip, with the sudden realization that I’m now wearing an exact replica of the only hands authorized to use it. “Sit,” I order as I aim it at her. “If he can fire this—” I nod at the unconscious guard. “—I can fire this.”
“Captain Sotelo, I need you to—”
I aim at her chest and pull the trigger, because it’s only set to stun, and I’m tired of hearing her talk.
Nothing happens. Somehow, I look just like the guard, but I lack his fingerprints. Damn it.
“DNA blueprint duplication,” she mumbles, her gaze roaming over me as if she’s trying to memorize every single thing she’s seeing. “But DNA isn’t the only factor in the development of fingerprints. There are environmental influences. Mostly in utero. Fascinating…”
Disgusted with this useless new ability, I drop the gun in the middle of the aisle and spin to face the rest of the shuttle as the pilot, who keeps twisting in his chair to look at me, speaks to someone through his earpiece.
Passengers gasp as I head down the aisle, prepared to subdue the pilot and take control of the shuttle. “Everyone stay calm. I don’t want to hurt anyone,” I tell them. Soldiers don’t engage with civilians. There’s a code of honor. “This is just—”
“Abrams! Do something!” Brennan snaps from behind me, trying to rouse the dying guard. I hear the slap of her hand against flesh, and I spin in the aisle just as he shoves himself to his feet. His eyes widen when he sees my—his own—face. He presses his left palm to one of the holes in his chest, then with his right, he takes the gun Brennan’s shoving at him.
Abrams aims at me.
Fuck! I drop to the ground and a streak of red light zips silently over my head. More screams echo through the cabin.
“Shit, he shot the pilot!” someone shouts, and screams from the passengers swell into a stretched, exaggerated cacophony as the shuttle beings to dip toward the surface of the planet.
I lurch down the aisle and jerk the guard’s left foot out from under him. He goes down in a heap right in front of me, and I snatch the pistol from his weakened, bloody grip. “Stay down,” I growl as I tuck the gun into my waistband.
The shuttle pitches forward, plummeting toward the ground. People scream. The pilot hangs over the side of his chair, limp, so I race down the aisle, trying to figure out how to rouse someone who’s been stunned by a laser pistol.
But there’s a neat hole in the pilot’s back, as well as a corresponding one through the rear of his chair. He’s not stunned; he’s dead.
Abrams was trying to kill me!
I pull the dead pilot from his seat, then I sink into it. Which is when I realize that the laser round had just enough energy to go through him and into the instrument panel.
Shit. I’m not sure whether the laser fried something or the controls are print-protected, but either way, the shuttle won’t respond to a damn thing I do.
Screams intensify behind me as the ground races up to meet us, and I make one last, desperate attempt to keep the ship intact. To keep from killing an entire shuttle full of civilians. I grab the pilot’s hand and use his index finger to press the auto-land button.
The control panel recognizes his print, and the shuttle rights itself almost immediately. Then it begins leveling out as its descent slows.
“Calm down!” I shout, but no one hears me, so I turn toward the cabin and try again. “Hey! We’re landing!” But my plan to kick the passengers out and take off with the shuttle is dead in the water. The only man authorized to operate what’s left of the control panel is dead. Once his body cools, his fingerprints will be of no use to me, even if there were some way I could pilot this thing, using his hand on the controls. If they work like the guns work, they aren’t just fingerprint-protected, they’re also temperature sensitive.
“Shut the fuck up!” I shout, and finally the passengers go silent. “You’re all perfectly safe, so listen up. This shuttle is going to land itself.” It’s just feet from the ground now. “And I’m going to get off. Then you’re going to seal the door and wait here for your rescue. Do you understand?”
“Sotelo.” Dr. Brennan steps over the guard’s unconscious body and gives me a silent, solemn shake of her head. A sick feeling churns in my stomach. “This isn’t going to work out the way you think it will.”
Son of a bitch. Project Vetus is classified. I’m not supposed to exist. And these civilians certainly aren’t supposed to know I exist. Or that I’m no longer entirely human. Which might not have been obvious, if not for the fact that I stabbed a guard with a bone spike no human elbow comes equipped with. And that I’m currently wearing that guard’s face.
The armed guards who descend upon this shuttle won’t rescue the passengers—they’ll execute them. The news will say all these people died in the crash. I know, because that’s how I would have cleaned up a mess like this, when I was in charge of Zeta 8.
But that’s on Dr. Brennan, not on me. I tried to save the civilians. Just like last time.
“Where are you going to go, Captain?” Brennan crosses her arms as she watches me. “They will never stop looking for you.” Because Universal Authority stands to make a hundred times what they’ve spent creating me, once they can sell entire armies of men and women like me.
I owe Brennan nothing, and staying to get recaptured won’t help the passengers on this shuttle. The people who have earned my loyalty are still locked up in a lab in zone X, and I’m the only one who can change that.
“Good luck,” I tell the passengers as I punch the button on the wall to lower the ramp. Then I leave them there with Brennan. Waiting to die, whether they know it or not.
I run for the woods wearing a prison guard’s face, with his com device on my wrist and his pistol tucked into my waistband. I have no idea where to go, or how I’m going to get my hands on a shuttle I can actually fly. One with enough range to get far away from the fucking Red Rock. But this is the first taste of freedom I’ve had in nearly two years, and I won’t waste it.
The only thing stronger than that drive to get my hands on a shuttle is…hunger. I’m so ravenous that my limbs feel weak and my thoughts are starting to fray on the edges, like a worn shirt. Whatever alien biological phenomenon allowed me to take the guard’s form—what Brennan called DNA duplication—evidently uses an extraordinary amount of energy, which I will have to replace very, very soon.
Sounds echo through the forest, and I hear them better than I ever could have two years ago. Before the procedure. Beneath the calls of a couple of nocturnal birds, I hear a symphony of…heartbeats. Soft, rhythmic whooshing sounds, in a variety of speeds and strengths.
Prey, the beast announces. Food.
I’ve felt this urge before—this baseless certainty that I can flush my own quarry from the underbrush—but I’ve never been hungry enough to act on that impulse. Until now.
My eyes close, and my focus zeros in on a cluster of soft heartbeats pulsing to the west. They’re fast, but even. My prey doesn’t yet realize it’s being hunted. Eyes open again, I follow the sound.
The forest seems to sharpen around me, each tree coming into clear focus, my eyes suddenly able to make better use of what little moonlight filters through the canopy overhead. My feet are silent on the forest floor, a skill honed by years in combat, yet still fresh, even though I haven’t been in the field in nearly two years, aside from Brennan’s “challenges.” This stealth comes as much from an instinct I don’t understand as from formal training.
The heartbeats grow stronger, and I sink onto my knees in the fragrant dirt. There’s a hole. No, a burrow. Four distinct cardiovascular rhythms echo from it, and now they’re faster. They’re racing with the realization that I am near.
I shove my hand into the hole and it clenches around a handful of soft fur. The rabbit screams as I pull it from its burrow, and the sound screeches against my ear canals like a fork across a plate. Yet there’s a satisfied growl coming from deep in my throat. The beast is happy with what I’ve caught.
My fist clenches. Bone crunches, and the rabbit goes limp.
I watch in horror as my own hands tear into the poor creature, ripping fur and skin from the meat beneath. I’m disgusted. I’m appalled. Yet I’m also starving, and it smells so good.
My hands shove the raw carcass toward my face, and my mouth opens. Saliva pools around my tongue. I tear into the meat, ripping through raw flesh and crunching through small bones. In less than a minute, the meat is gone, and I’m left holding a small, gruesome skeleton held together by nothing but ligaments and the memory of the form it once held.
I dip into the burrow for two more rabbits before my stomach finally sends signals to my brain that it is satisfied. Until my thoughts finally begin to make sense again. And now I’m left with a sad little pile of shredded fur and bloody bones.
Unnerved by what I’
ve just done, I head deeper into the woods, hoping that putting distance between myself and the rabbit corpses will help fade them from my memory.
I want to shed the guard’s shape, but I don’t know how to undo what I did on the shuttle, and I’m afraid that even if I figured it out, the energy needed to reverse my transformation would lead to the decimation of half the rabbit population of zone three.
So I walk on feet that feel foreign, in shoes that no longer fit correctly.
My plan is to head back to the wreckage of the yacht, once UA has rescued the passengers and abandoned the hull to scavengers. If there’s anything useful to be found in zone three, it will be there.
Until then…it’s nice to be wandering outside with no restrictions, for the first time since I woke up on a lab table wrestling with features and impulses I didn’t recognize. I feel free, despite the fact that I’m stuck on a prison planet.
I wander for most of the night, until the scent of blood brings me to a halt. I follow it and find a body lying at the base of a tree trunk, blood and gray matter spilling through a gash in his head. I’m starving again, so I search his pockets, but they’re empty. He has no bag. No supplies. No doubt whoever killed him also looted the corpse. Which means it’s of no use to me. Unless…
There’s a smear of blood on my finger. I don’t know how to reclaim my own form, but I know what happened the last time I sampled someone else’s DNA. I lick the blood from my finger, and almost instantly, that vicious burning takes over my entire body. Again.
My vision begins to warp as the pain crests inside me. I haven’t eaten enough to put my body through this transformation again, but it’s too late to account for that. I don’t know how to stop this.
Darkness closes around me, and my legs give out. I land on a bed of dead leaves. Seconds later, I pass out on the forest floor with a dead man’s blood on my hand.
Days pass in a blur, and I lose count. I can’t think through the pain in my head. I keep misplacing the beginning of one thought before I can get to the end of it, and the result is a thick fog of forgotten goals and muffled focus. Something is terribly wrong.
Escape (Project Vetus Book 1) Page 3