Good.
I move through the corridor, clearing it. Two more guards. A tech who presses himself flat against the wall and doesn’t move. I leave him. He’s not armed. He’s not a threat. Another guard at a junction, this one smarter, this one with body armor. He gets off two shots before I bring him down. One of them grazes my shoulder, but I barely feel it.
Tara’s cell is three doors from mine. I can smell her through the steel. I shift back to human because I need hands for the lock. The keypad is dead with the power out, but there’s a manual release underneath, a red lever behind a panel. I rip the panel off and pull.
The door opens. Tara is on her feet, pressed against the far wall, coiled to strike. Her collar hums. Her green eyes blaze in the dark.
“It’s me,” I tell her.
She doesn’t relax. Not yet. “The collar.”
“I know.” I cross to her, take the collar in both hands the way I did my own. “This is going to hurt.”
“Do it.”
I pull. It takes longer this time. My hands are already raw and burned from my own collar, and the metal bites into the torn skin. But I have leverage and fury, and my sister’s eyes staring into mine, and after three brutal seconds the thing cracks and falls away.
Tara sags. Just for a second. Then her wolf ripples through her, and she’s standing taller, straighter, her lip curling back from teeth that are sharper than they were a second ago.
“Where’s Zeke?” she asks.
“Upstairs. Fighting. We need to go.”
A sound behind us freezes me for one important moment. Footsteps. Not running, either, the way so many others are or were before I killed them. Whoever it is, they’re walking.
We turn.
Moore stands in the doorway. He’s not wearing his lab coat anymore. His shirt is untucked, his silver hair disheveled. He looks like a man whose world is falling apart around him, which it is.
In his hands is a rifle. Not a dart gun. An actual rifle. Matte black, bolt action. The kind that puts holes in things that don’t get back up.
He raises it. The barrel finds me.
“You’ve destroyed years of work,” he says. His voice is steady. Of course it is. Even now, even with his facility burning around him and two unshackled shifters ten feet away, his voice is steady. “Decades. Do you have any concept of what you’ve cost the world?”
“Put the gun down,” I reply.
“The advancement of the human species. The eradication of genetic diseases. The next step in evolution itself.” His finger moves to the trigger. “And you animals tore it apart because you couldn’t see past your own?—”
Tara moves.
She’s faster than me. Always has been, even as kids. She covers the distance between them in a blur, hitting him low, driving her shoulder into his midsection. The rifle goes off, and the sound is deafening in the enclosed space. The round punches into the ceiling and rains plaster down on us. Then the rifle clatters to the floor as Moore goes down hard, falling into the corridor.
They struggle. He’s wiry and desperate and fighting with the frantic strength of a man who knows he’s lost. Tara pins him, but he gets a hand free and claws at her face, and she rears back?—
Iris.
I don’t know how she got here. I told her to stay hidden. But she’s here, standing in the strobing red light in her hospital gown, and her eyes are locked on the rifle on the floor.
She picks it up.
Her hands are shaking. The gun is too big for her, awkward in her grip, the stock braced against her shoulder the wrong way. She’s never held a weapon in her life. It’s obvious from the way her arms tremble under the weight. But she’s holding it. And she’s pointing it at her father.
Moore sees her. He stops struggling beneath Tara. His eyes fix on Iris, and something shifts in his expression. Not fear, not yet. Calculation. Even now.
“Iris.” His voice changes. Softer. Probably the one he pulls out when he needs something from her. “Put that down. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I know exactly what I’m doing.” Her voice is small. Shaking. But she doesn’t lower the gun.
