Luke took a deep breath and continued. “So I knew my test scores weren’t good enough. But they were pretty damn good. Finally I hit a point when I could tell I wasn’t going to make it. And that was when the man you met, Brockton, came down to the testing area. He picked a few people from the losing candidates, including me. And we were in, just like that. It was great at first. There was a big signing bonus, which I later realized none of us would actually see. We got our first look at Black Rock Island. The extra group of us, the washouts, were taken to our own part of the facility. And that was when things started to go wrong.”
He was quiet for a minute, staring down at the table. Inga gently rubbed the back of his hand, slow swipes of her thumb. Abruptly he felt a cold, wet nose push into the palm of his other hand where it rested loose and open on his knee. Rogue had come up beside him and was sitting with his big head lowered, resting gently against Luke’s leg.
Luke scratched the dog’s ears and continued.
“They confiscated our phones and put us in a special barracks. We were told we were part of a test group to create soldiers who can run faster, leap higher, and endure longer marches. There were daily injections and more tests. At least the food was good. They gave us all we could eat and then some. We were also working out for hours a day. In spite of shoveling food into my face three times a day, I was in the best shape of my life, at least for a while.
“But my memories start to get hazy here. Everything just kind of runs together. Some of the guys didn’t make it through the new program, and—this time, when you washed out, you left on a stretcher. Sometimes their heart would give out or they’d have a stroke. But there were also ways to fail that were worse than that. Much worse.
“I didn’t understand at first what was being done to us. But slowly, over time, I started to realize when it started working on some of us. They were making artificial shifters.”
He fell silent again, lost in that terrible place, hearing the screams and the echoing clang of the doors being closed and locked up at night. The snap of a burning stick in the fire made him jump, pulling him back to reality.
Inga held his hand tightly. Rogue continued to press against him, and he realized the dog was shivering a little, as if catching Luke’s mood. Luke dug his fingers into Rogue’s big, soft ears.
“You might already have guessed this, but I met Rogue there, too. Some of the test subjects were animals. They had to test it on something before us, so they didn’t lose expensive, well-trained human subjects. Like me, Rogue made it through all the early tests. We were teamed up in some of our training and kind of, I guess, bonded with each other.”
He stopped again. Inga was now holding his hand in both of hers. He couldn’t remember when that had happened.
“You can take a break if you need to,” Inga said. Luke realized he was breathing hard, as if he had run a race. “In fact, I need to stir the fire. Do you, uh—do you want a cup of coffee?”
Luke took his hand off Rogue’s head and swiped at his eyes, finding them damp. He hadn’t noticed that either. “Uh, yeah. That’d be good.”
Inga got up and made coffee. The warm, rich smell filled the small cabin, and when she came back with two cups and pressed one into his chilled hands, he had himself a little more under control. “Thanks,” he said, smiling shakily at her.
The smile she gave him back was warm and full of sympathy. “I grew up with a dad and two brothers. I know that sometimes you just need to take a break from the emotions. I’ll listen if you want to keep talking, but we can also stop for the night if you need to.”
Luke shook his head. “No. I want to get it out.”
“All right,” she said quietly. “Whenever you’re ready.”
He took a too-hot drink of the coffee. It scorched his tongue, but it washed away the taste of old blood, the smell of the cages.
“I honestly don’t know what happened to some of those guys. A lot of us died during testing. But once we started to get people who made it, came through it intact, they started sending those guys out with the regular shifter mercenary squads who were trained in the other part of the facility. It didn’t work out as they’d hoped, though. Us made shifters are different from born shifters, it turns out. We can’t control our shifts as well. I only went on one mission, spent most of it as a bear, got tranqed and woke up in a cage.” He let out a long, shuddering breath. “And before I could find out what would’ve happened to me next, there was a huge commotion, someone opened all the cages, and the next thing I knew, everything was blowing up and people were setting fire to the facility and escaping on anything that was vaguely boat-shaped.”
“Wow,” Inga breathed. “Okay, so ... that part I knew about. Sort of. One of my brother’s friends was there for it. Did you, uh, did you get away in all of that?”
Luke nodded. “Rogue and I escaped together.” Rogue was laying on the floor under the table now, still shivering a little, as if he too had gone back into whatever memory a dog had. But he raised his head at his name. Luke reached down to pet him again. “He was my buddy. I had to find him, make sure he was okay. We got away together, and ... not gonna sugar-coat it ... I basically spent the winter as a bear, living on the tundra and then on an ice floe. We hunted, I helped him, he helped me. I haven’t been human in almost a year, I think.”
“My God,” Inga whispered reverently. Her eyes were huge and soft, but not pitying. “I can’t imagine it. No wonder you don’t want to be a bear.”
“Yeah.” He swallowed. “I—I think I’m done.”
They both fell silent. Luke swallowed the coffee, and slowly started to feel a little less peeled raw, especially when Inga reached out to touch his hand again with one of her square, capable ones, callused from her work on the boats.
He turned his hand over and immediately she laced her fingers through his, holding it.
“I’m glad you told me,” Inga said quietly. Her gaze was direct and honest. “Thank you for trusting me.”
Luke could only nod and take another slug of coffee to wash the bitter taste out of his mouth.
He wondered how she would react, whether her eyes would still be so open and soft, or slam shut against him for good, if she knew how much he was still holding back about the danger pursuing him.
INGA
Inga didn’t wantLuke to know it, but after they finished talking and he went to bed, she lay awake, crying softly, trying to make sure he couldn’t hear her. Inga wasn’t a weepy person, but everything he had told her seemed to have cut straight into her heart. She couldn’t bear thinking of him like this, and others like him, and dogs like Rogue, all imprisoned by terrible people and being made to suffer.
It took her a long while to fall asleep, and when she woke to early sunlight, her eyes had an unpleasant sticky, puffy feeling. But she no longer felt like weeping. What she wanted to do was find some people and kick their asses from here to the mainland and back. She wished she’d known this yesterday. She would have loved to have shifted into a bear and gotten her teeth on that Brockton guy.
