Meanwhile, he was conscious of his human body still limply draped on Inga in the smaller boat. They were now being chased down by a speedboat from the ship. Luke was aware of the otherboat gaining on them, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He tried to will himself back to his body, but nothing happened.
He realized that he had stopped at the bottom of the stairs in the hallway and was currently blocking everyone from going in either direction. Even though people could walk through him, they didn’t seem to want to, which—okay, fair. He moved forward to follow the soldier, who unlocked a door that led into what looked like some kind of lab.
As with seeing Brockton, his response was visceral and unexpected, a cold rush of panic through his entire body that nearly sent him scrabbling out into the hallway. Several people in the room erupting into screams at the sight of him didn’t help.
With an effort, he managed to calm himself. This was not the lab complex of Black Rock Island, where he and others had been experimented on. It didn’t even look like it; the similarities were superficial.
While he was getting over his panic, the room’s occupants had all fled to the far side, including several people in disheveled civilian clothes and an armed soldier who was now pointing a gun at him.
“Hey, calm down,” said Johnson, the soldier who had come in ahead of him. “Orders from the boss. I know this looks weird?—”
“Weird? It’s a fucking bear, mate!”
“It’s a bear that’s sort of—not really here. I know, it doesn’t make much sense to me, either.”
“Huh?” the other soldier said.
While Johnson tried to explain—incoherently, since he had little idea what was going on either—Luke looked curiously at the civilians flattened against the wall behind the soldier. There were three women and a man. The older woman with gray hair must be the one Brockton had been talking about. She had glasses and wore a lab coat. The others were somewhat younger,and all had the slightly scruffy, rumpled look of people who had been in the same clothes for days. They looked fit and outdoorsy, but not dangerous in the slightest.
Prisoners, Brockton had said.These people are the researchers from the ship,Luke thought.They’ve hijacked it and taken it over.
He growled at the idea, which made the civilians start screaming again.
“Shut up!” Brockton yelled from behind him. Then, with a level of either fortitude or stubborn stupidity that Luke couldn’t help reluctantly being impressed by, he pushed through Luke’s mostly intangible bulk. There was once again that creepy and wrong sensation of someone else’s thoughts in Luke’s head, which Brockton must have felt too, because Luke was also aware of a sudden but mercifully brief flash of discomfort coming from the other man. Then Brockton was through.
Seeing him emerge from a bear did nothing for the level of panic in the room.
“Calm the fuck DOWN!” Brockton bellowed. The civilians shut up, apparently more afraid of him than of either the bear or Brockton’s recently manifested ability to appear out of nowhere. “Now,” he said more calmly, “Dr. Park, I’d like you to?—”
Luke never heard the rest of that sentence. He snapped back to his human body with a shock so abrupt that it left him dazed. He was wet, the boat was tipping, Inga was furiously yelling something, and they were being boarded.
INGA
Inga’spast few minutes had been miserable. She was sure Luke had been shot, but she couldn’t examine him without risking both of them falling out of the boat. Meanwhile, Tor had tried making a run for the shore, but the powerboat cut them off and herded them further out to sea.
The waves were staggering, washing over the gunwales and nearly swamping the boat. Inga could no longer see the shore as the storm closed in around them. As she clung to Luke’s limp weight, and Tor struggled to keep the boat from capsizing, the powerboat pulled alongside and matched their speed. One of the soldiers grappled the boats together with a metal device that clamped to the side of theirs.
“Hey!” Inga yelled as two of them began to climb into the smaller boat. The only thing on their side was that the soldiers were struggling with the waves as much as they were. The two boats, now clamped together, were being tossed around like a child’s toy on the pitching, heaving sea. One of the soldiers nearly fell overboard while trying to climb between the two boats, and had to scramble back into the powerboat as his comrades grabbed hold of him. Inga risked letting go of thegunwale to grab an oar one-handed and began trying to fend off the other, who had one foot in their boat.
Luke woke up with an all-over convulsive jerk. Before Inga could say or do anything, he sprang to his feet in the wildly tossing boat. Growling like a bear, he seized the soldier threatening Inga by the front of his tac vest and flung him overboard.
“We have to get this off!” Inga yelled, prying at the metal clamp.
“Got a better idea,” Luke growled, and before she could stop him, he leaped between the boats.
Tor was still struggling with the tiller. “We’re going to sink if this keeps up, and take them down with us,” he yelled at Inga.
Inga thought that the soldiers were in a lot more danger than the shifters in Tor’s boat. Still, she’d rather not lose yet another family boat if she could help it. She went back to struggling with the metal device clamping their boat to the other one.
Luke, meanwhile, was moving with incredible speed for someone she was still halfway convinced had been shot. He struggled with the remaining soldiers in the powerboat. The pilot was too busy to help. Luke tossed one overboard, and knocked the gun out of the hand of another. The fourth and last was trying to help the fifth guy, the original man that Luke had flung into the water.
Inga finally managed to get the clamp off. Their boat swung immediately away from the other one. With the waves flinging both vessels around, they couldn’t have stayed close if they’d wanted to. And suddenly she had the horrifying realization that they were now separated from Luke.
“Luke!” she screamed desperately.
The distance between the two boats grew by the second. Luke was badly outnumbered, unarmed, and in danger of beingoverwhelmed. If he would only shift—but he couldn’t, she recalled; he didn’t dare.
She stood up in the boat, spreading her legs, and shucked off her rain slicker.
