The voices came again, closer now.
Ben said something sharp, almost breathless. Tobias replied with one word, too indistinct to understand, though that hardly mattered when the suspense had already closed around my throat.
My fingers tightened around the strap of my bag until the material bit into my palm, and as I reached the turn into the predator corridor, I hesitated.
That was the moment I should have stopped.
I should have backed away.
I should have remembered that Tobias’s house was full of cameras and security systems and strange, locked corridors and rooms I still had not been allowed to enter. I should have thought about the fact that Ben sounded wrong, and Tobias sounded worse, and perhaps there were reasons people did not walk quietly toward conversations they had not been invited into.
But I kept going.
When I looked around the corner, my gaze landed first on the box jelly tank—the largest curved kreisel-style system I had ever seen and one of my most frequent observation spots.
It was one of the quietest places in the wing.
One of the prettiest.
And one of the deadliest.
The jellies drifted in continuous, controlled motion, their translucent bodies catching the blue-white glow until they looked less like animals and more like pieces of moonlight suspended in water. Long, delicate tentacles trailed behind them in ribbons so fine they seemed imagined.
Beautiful things.
Impossible things.
Dangerous enough that every part of their care demanded respect.
Ben’s voice came again, a harshness to his tone that I had never heard from him before. “We need to move him higher first.”
Him?
The word caught in my head and stayed there.
For a second, my mind refused to go any further than that, but then something shifted near the tank platform.
A wet, heavy sound.
Not a splash.
The sound of something being dragged.
I took one more step, and the rest of the room opened into view.
At first, I saw Ben.
He was braced near the access platform, sleeves shoved past his elbows, blond hair damp at the temples. His posture was tense, both hands locked beneath the arms of something heavy.
Someoneheavy.
Tobias stood on the opposite side of the platform, his dark shirt damp where water had soaked through, rolled sleeves clinging to his forearms. His hair had fallen out of its usual immaculate shape, a few strands hanging near his forehead, his expression focused with the same terrible precision he brought to everything else.
Between them was a man’s body.
My mind rejected the whole image so completely that it broke it into fragments instead.
A drenched sleeve dragging over the platform edge.
