"Are you processing something right now?"
"About seven things simultaneously, yes."
His expression doesn't move, but his eyes do. A fractional scan, taking inventory. My wrist, my posture, the door behind him, and my face. The gun on the floor. Back to my face.
"You're not running," he observes.
"There's nowhere to run that you couldn't reach faster," I mutter, tilting my head, "I'm not scared of things I can't outrun. I save the fear for things I might actually be able to influence."
"You should be scared."
"Noted. I'm working on it." I pause.
"Also, and I want to be transparent about this because I think honesty is important in new relationships… I'm mildly turned on, which is inconvenient, and I'm not endorsing it. I'm simply reporting it."
A long silence. The kind of silence that could go several directions. He says, slowly, like he's reading a document in a language he didn't expect to encounter, "you're an omega."
"Gold star. Full marks."
His gaze sharpens. Something behind it recalibrates. "You're supposed to be contained."
"I was contained. Things changed. It was a whole thing." I gesture vaguely at the corridor behind him, the darkness, the distant sounds of a facility undergoing rapid unscheduled restructuring.
"You're one of the subjects. You were the one who was talking to the ceiling," he grunts out. Well, I guess I could be remembered for worse, I suppose.
"See, when you say it like that, it sounds reductive. I prefer aninvoluntary research participant." I watch his face. "Or you could use my name. I have one. Allegedly."
He studies me with the focused attention of a man trying to reconcile two different versions of a situation he walked into. Like he'd built a model of what this facility contained, and I'm not matching any of the data points.
"You're not afraid of me," he says.
"I'm afraid of the thing that made those claw marks in the wall back there. You're significantly preferable by comparison."
"That's a low bar."
"It's the bar available." I hold his gaze.
"You had time to make a different choice, and you didn't. That tells me something."
Something moves behind his eyes. Fast and gone.
"Don't make assumptions," he says quietly, "about what that means."
"I'm not assuming. I'm observing." I pause.
"There's a difference. I've had a lot of time to learn the difference."
The silence between us settles differently than it did a moment ago. Not gone, but shifted. A different weight. He's still blocking the exit. I'm still cornered. Both of those things are true. But the room feels less like a threat assessment and more like intimacy. My body aches to step closer to him, but I force myself to stay still.
Then-
From deep in the facility. Not close, not yet, but coming closer with the specific momentum of something that doesn't acknowledge obstacles. A roar. Not human. Not even in the neighborhood of human.
The sound of something that has never needed to act like anything, that has no use for the restraint of creatures who need other creatures tocooperate with them. His head snaps toward the sound. Every line of his body changes in a single breath, from contained to ready, the compression releasing into something alert and directed. His hand drops from the wall.
My stomach drops with it.
"Oh, fuck," I whisper, “this is fucking bad.” The roar reverberates through the corridor and dies. The silence after it is heavier than the one before.
