“Who—” he started.
The corridor went quiet.
The silence was worse than the screams.
I heard footsteps. Measured footsteps, approaching from the left, the familiar click of boot heels on linoleum.
The guard raised his weapon and pointed it in the direction from which the sounds were coming. His arms were locked, elbows rigid, but his hands were shaking.
Yazzie came around the corner, walking with the same unhurried stride I’d seen when she arrived at the safe house with food and medical supplies. Her expression was calm and composed.
It had learned. It had watched Yazzie carefully enough to replicate the particular way she carried herself, the way her hand rested near her holster, the casualness of her movements.
“Put your gun down.” Her voice wasn’t quite Yazzie’s, but it was close enough, and I doubted the guard had met Yazzie anyway. “I’m a federal park ranger. The girl is mentally ill.”
The guard wavered. His weapon stayed up, but the angle softened by a degree, the muzzle drifting slightly off-center as his brain fought with itself. I couldn’t blame the poor guy. She had a uniform, a badge, credentials he could see from fifteen feet. But we’d both heard the screams thirty seconds ago, and the girl behind him was pounding on the window hard enough to rattle the frame.
“SHOOT HER!” I screamed through the glass. “It’s not her! It’s not Yazzie! SHOOT IT!”
“Stand down,” the thing wearing Yazzie’s face said. “That woman is experiencing a psychotic episode. Lower your weapon, officer.”
“Don’t listen to it! Look at me! LOOK AT ME!” I hammered the glass. The guard half-turned, his eyes darting between me and the approaching figure, and in his face I could see the war. Her calm tone versus the raw animal certainty in my voice and the screams that were still echoing in the corridors of his memory.
“Ma’am, I need you to stop where you are,” he said. His voice cracked on the last word. His weapon was still raised for now but the commitment behind it was eroding and every second “she” kept talking was a second his finger moved further from the trigger.
“It’s okay,” the thing said, stopping ten feet from him with its hands visible at its sides, palms out, the universal gesture ofI am not a threat. “I know this is confusing. There was an incident and I’m here to assist. If you’ll radio your supervisor?—”
“Don’t radio anyone. Don’t take your eyes off her. SHOOT HER.”
The guard’s jaw clenched. He looked at Yazzie, then looked at me.
He lowered his weapon.
“Thank you,” the thing said. “Now, if you’ll step aside, I need to?—”
Its right hand moved. The motion was smooth and fast, nothing like the mechanical wrongness of Mark’s borrowed mannerisms.
The gun cleared the holster before the guard’s brain registered what was happening. He started to raise his own weapon again and got it halfway up before the shot hit him in the chest. The report was deafening in the narrow corridor, a flat, concussive bark that punched through the air and left my ears ringing.
He dropped.
Not dramatically, not slowly, justdown, his legs folding and his weapon clattering to the ground, his body following half a second later.
The skinwalker stepped over him without looking down, then opened the door.
I was backed against the far wall of the interrogation room with the metal chair raised over my head, ready to defend myself as best I could. The thing looked at me and its mouth made a shape that was adjacent to a smile.
“You’re resourceful,” it said with a perfect Yazzie voice. “I like that.”
Its other hand came up. Something metal glinted in it, not a firearm, but something smaller.
A tranquilizer gun.
The realization hit me just as the dart did, pumping its sedative into my neck. My legs went first, the strength draining from them as if someone had pulled a plug, and I slid down the wall and sat on the cold floor with my back against the cinder block.
The room was tilting.
The thing crouched in front of me, and through the rapidly narrowing tunnel of my vision I saw it studying me with those borrowed eyes. The charred-sage smell was everywhere now.
