That is when another door at the far end of the cold-storage room opens and two men come through it.
They are not staff. They are not lab. They are two armed Syndicate retrieval agents in tactical gear with rifles up.
One of the rifles comes up. Trank, by the shape of the barrel.
The other one says, "Subject 47. Hold position."
He does not say Jen. He does not say Miss Griggson. He saysSubject 47the way you say a sample code. He is reading me the way the Syndicate has been reading me my whole life without my knowing — as a file number, as a body in a drawer with a label, as the thing they had in a vial and now have in a hallway.
My body decides something before I do.
The patch on my chest blooms.
The dark shape under my skin — the thing that has been building for three weeks — moves. Out. Up. Through. The five lines that map to my five sealed threads and the sixth line that aims at Fen all go bright at once, and the bright is not under my skin anymore, the bright is on my skin, the bright is coming through me.
My hands change first.
The slate-gray nails come the rest of the way to claws. Black, curved, sharp at the points. The skin of my forearms goes slate-gray under the surface to the elbow.
My teeth ache. The canines push against the inside of my upper lip, longer, sharp. My mouth tastes like iron.
Pressure builds in my skull.
Heat. Then release.
The retrieval agent's eyes go wide.
I reach up automatically.
Two small obsidian horns have sprouted from the top of my head, curving back. Smooth under my fingers. Obsidian-black. Three inches, maybe four.
I lower my hand.
The vision in my left eye does something — a doubling, then a sharpening, then the room is brighter than it should be in the cold-light of the fridge bulbs. The patch on my chest is hot, radiating heat down through my sternum and out into the bonds, and through the bonds I feel the pack registering it in real time — Thaw right outside the cold room struggling with the door, yelling at Dean to hurry, Crull turning fast, Harek at the loading bay going still, Fen and Daron feeling it and answering.
I am not afraid. I am interested. I am cornered in a Syndicate cold-storage room with two armed men with tranks and a drawer with my own genetic material in it, and the part of my body that has spent three weeks askingwhat am Ihas just decided to show me.
The agent fires.
The trank dart leaves the rifle with a small soft spit.
I see it coming.
I do not duck. I do not move sideways. I lift my left hand and the dart hits my palm and stops — does not bury, does not penetrate, stops against the slate-skin of my hand the way a stone stops on rock. The needle bends. The dart drops to the tile.
The agent stares at his rifle.
The second agent's trigger is twitching. The bonds are screaming and the agent with the twitching trigger has maybe two seconds before he decides to fire the second dart.
I open my mouth.
What comes out of it is not my voice.
It is — layered. My voice, and underneath it, thedownregister I used on Fen, and underneath that, a third register I have not used before, lower, slower, a vibration in my sternum that comes up through my throat and out of me as a sound that has weight in the air. I feel it land in the room. I feel it hit the two agents the way a wave hits a body.
The word is one word.
"Stop."
