“You’ll want a chance to get settled in before we debrief.” Lance was all business.
“We’re fine. We survived,” Carol said—automatically, because she’d spent her whole adult life avoiding people probing abouthow she looked. “The bird shifters didn’t reappear, and though we can only theorize why they attacked in the first place—”
“We’ve got one of them in custody.”
Carol stared. At her shoulder, Moss went still. The shadows around him stretched. “You have one of the metal bird shifters in custody?”
“We’re calling them Stymphalian birds. Like the Greek legend. God knows we have no other leads.” Lance rubbed his head. “You’ll want to freshen up. Eat something.”
“No,” Carol burst out, surprising herself. But if Moss was that affected by the news too, then—
She straightened her shoulders. “I want to talk to the prisoner.”
Lance led her and Moss to the basement level beneath the main building. They passed laundry and storage facilities and even a wine cellar.
None of it seemed capable of keeping in someone who could cut through solid steel.
“Is this safe?” she asked.
Lance’s jaw set. “I like it as little as you do,” he said as they reached a solid door and he punched a code into a security interface. “But we can’t involve the authorities with this. I don’t have the right sort of connections here to make sure we wouldn’t wake up tomorrow to international news about a half-woman, half-bird existing. Or worse.”
“Worse” being the thing that all shifters feared: that their existence would be discovered by the human world. And that they wouldn’t just end up locked away—they would disappear, to be experimented on and exploited.
Carol touched her mouth absently, then pulled her hand away when she realized what she was doing.
“So you’re keeping her in the dungeon?” Moss asked, a strange undercurrent in his voice.
“An empty basement room. It’s heated. Ventilated. And it—”
“Comes with convenient shackles attached to the wall? The hell sort of a place is this?”
Carol’s stomach twisted as she saw what lay behind the security door. The room was bare concrete. The woman inside wasn’t shackled, but she was… defeated. Slumped against the wall.
There were manacles on her wrists, but what good would they be against her razor feathers?
Moss frowned, his displeasure clear. Lance sighed. “We can’t risk her escaping.”
“She doesn’t look like she wants to escape.” Carol crept closer. She recognized the woman. She had an eagle’s face, her bronze beak as dangerous and sharp as the tiny razor-edged feathers that merged into wild curls of human hair. Her shoulders were human, her tanned skin scarred by a thousand tiny cuts and several larger ones.
Carol’s stomach hollowed out.
She’d had to learn how not to bite her tongue or lips, but once she figured it out, it took barely any attention not to hurt herself with her shark teeth. This woman must live on a literal knife’s edge at all times.
She hadn’t shown any sign that she’d noticed them come in. Her shoulders were slumped, her head downcast, her wings arrayed like a heap of knives around her.
“Hello? Can you hear us?” Carol asked. There was no response. “My name is Carol Zhang. What’s yours?” She repeated the words telepathically.
The woman might as well have been a statue.
*It’s no use, Zhang. She hasn’t talked to any of us.*Lance’s voice was tired. *She’s not deaf. She can hear us. Whether she can’t understand us or just refuses to speak, we don’t know.*
“You tore a hole in our plane and almost killed us and three innocent children. Don’t you think we at least deserve to know why?” The hardness in her own voice surprised her. She knelt in front of the cage. Crouching still like this made her nerves twang, but she forced herself to hold in place. “Why did you do it?”
The woman’s eyes snapped to hers. They were a dull gray-brown, sunk into deep hollows of exhaustion.
Carol’s head buzzed with static.
Just like on the plane. She’s trying to talk to me.
