Both rifles drop.
Not lowered. Dropped. The two agents' hands open at the same time and the rifles hit the white tile with a clatter and the two men go down to their knees on the floor of a Syndicate cold-storage room and they put their hands on the back of their heads without anybody telling them to.
I have not moved.
The closer agent is looking up at me, and the look in his face is the look I have seen on dogs in my yard at animal control when the dog has just realized the thing in the room is not what they came in expecting. His eyes find the top of my head. I watch the moment his brain registers what is there.
Thaw and Dean have opened the door of the cold-storage room — I hear the door — and Crull is behind him, and Harek, Fen and Daron are coming to, and all six of them arrive in the cold-storage room to find me standing with my back to a drawer labeled with my own name, two Syndicate retrieval agents on their knees in front of me, my hands black-clawed and slate-skinned, and two obsidian horns curving back from the top of my head.
They stop.
All six of them. At once.
They are looking at the horns first. I see the moment their eyes find the top of my head and register what is there.
Thaw's breath catches. Crull's eyes widen. Harek goes absolutely still. Daron breathes out a quiet curse.
Dean is the first to speak. His voice is flat. "Well. That's new."
And Fen.
Fen comes through the door behind Harek, sees me, sees the agents on the floor, sees the horns, and his body stops moving. The not-yet-thread lights. For one second I feel — through the line that is not yet sealed but is full — Fen recognizing me. This. The slate-skinned, black-clawed, horn-crowned this. He has seen this before. He has seen this in his own body, and he is no longer the only one.
He drops to his knees.
Not the way the agents dropped. They dropped because the voice put them down. Fen drops willingly. He goes from standing to kneeling in one slow controlled motion and his head tips forward and his hands come palm-up on his thighs.
His body saysyours.The not-yet-thread carries it.
The cold-storage room is silent.
My claws are still out. The patch under my skin is hot and the engine does not want to switch off.
I do not know how to switch it off.
That is the thing nobody told me. Coming up is one process. Coming down is a different process. The body that has been building toward this does not have an off-switch I have located yet. The claws are out and the slate is up and the layered-voice is sitting in my throat ready to be used again, and I do not have a procedure for putting it back.
I look at Thaw.
He is the first one of them I can look at without my chest splitting open.
"Thaw."
The layered voice is in it. I hear it. He hears it. He does not flinch.
"Yes."
"How?"
"Breathe with me. Same as the truck. Same as the corridor. We have done this before."
"Not this."
"Same principle. Your body did the thing. Now your body has to come down. Breathe with me. Slow. Deep. I am here."
I breathe.
The bond carries his rhythm down to mine. Slow, deep, the way he taught me on the truck floor when Fen was coming up the other side of a mesh wall. I match it. The patch on my chest eases a fraction. The heat drops a degree.
