"Subject O-00," he says, and a snarl pulls at my upper lip. The same way you'd saysample preparedorunit online.
"Doctor Lizard," I greet, just to get a rise out of him. It works instantly.
His mouth tightens almost invisibly. A thin seam is pressing thinner. Small victories. The only kind available. He glances at the tablet without responding, scrolling through whatever my file has accumulated most recently.
It must be a substantial document by now. Years of observations. Notes about biting. Notes about the ceiling. Notes about what happens when they miscalculate the sedation dosage, and I'm coherent for things they intended me to be unconscious for.
I wonder sometimes what they say. Whether the language stays clinical all the way through or whether someone, somewhere, broke protocol and wrote what they actually thought. It makes me wonder what they would have written down.
"Prepare for baseline stabilization," Havel says, jolting me out of my wandering thoughts. One of the technicians approaches from the right with a loaded syringe. Clear liquid catching the light. Not the bruise-colored sedatives they use before the hard trials. Something else.
The alpha has taken a position beside the chair. Not behind me, not across the room, but beside me, slightly forward, where he can see my hands and Havel in the same eyeline. He's still doing that thing. Scanning. Present in the room on more than one level.
His presence presses against my senses with a constancy I'm finding progressively more difficult to process. Which I resent. Specifically. As a matter of principle. This unknown Alpha shouldn’t have this kind of effect on me. I shouldn’t be allowing him to get underneath my skin the way he is.
The technician reaches for my arm. I lean forward slightly against the chest restraint, not a real movement, just enough. The room's tension ratchets up immediately. Both flanking guards shift. Rifles don't rise, but hands adjust. Havel looks up from his tablet.
I smile pleasantly at the technician.
"Easy," I say, "if I bite you, you'll have to fill out an incident report. I've seen the forms. Very tedious and rather boring. Especially on a Saturday afternoon."
“It’s Tuesday morning,” someone mutters, and I just shrug my shoulders as much as I can, given my limited movement.
The technician freezes with the specific paralysis of someone whose risk calculus just inverted. Dr. Havel exhales through his nose. A sound thatcontains an entire volume of professional frustration compressed into a single breath.
"Hold him."
Two guards step in from behind. hands clamping onto my shoulders with the practiced weight of people who've done this before. Firm. Not angry. Just absolute.
The needle slides in at the crook of my elbow, finding the site with practiced accuracy. The familiar cold blooms up my arm, not temperature exactly, more a sensation of pressure draining, like something being quietly turned down. I hiss through my teeth.
"Ah," I murmur, "the good stuff. I always appreciate the good stuff." The technician withdraws the needle quickly and retreats to a professional distance.
Across the room, an alarm light suddenly flickers.
Red.
Single pulse.
Then nothing.
The room pauses the way rooms do when something has happened that nobody has a word for yet. Everyone waits for the explanation. The intercom to update, maybe the technician at the monitoring station sayingfalse positive, the moment where it resolves into something ordinary.
It doesn't resolve. The light sits dark. Dr. Havel frowns at it with an expression like he’s encountering something that wasn't in his schedule.
Another alarm flickers. Further down the board. Different circuit. Then another, from a panel on the opposite wall.
Three points.
Not a false positive.
A pattern.
Somewhere deep in the facility, a distant concussive sound moves through the walls, not loud, not close, but felt. The kind of sound that travels through concrete instead of air and arrives as a vibration in your sternum before it reaches your ears.
A boom.
Then another.
