Page 26 of Dragon’s Rebel

But she hadn’t. She’d stuck with the job.

For him. To make him human again.

Tyr had picked up the red vial and was tilting it this way and that, examining the liquid inside. “Toxin DRA-4269,” he murmured. “DRA for dragon?”

“It seemed like a strong possibility. I downloaded a file about it, but I didn’t read it. I was kind of in a hurry.”

Tyr nodded. “I’ll compare it to my sample. Hopefully it’s the same. Then at least we’ll know where it came from, and that there’s a limited supply.”

He turned his attention to the other vial. “So this is it, huh? The famous serum?”

Rebel stared at the green vial along with everyone else. It looked so small and innocuous—a tiny portion of light-green liquid, barely a sip or two.

But for Thorne, that liquid could give his human form back to him. He could talk to his contacts; he’d have full access to his databases and hacked backdoors into secret government files. He could use all that to track down Rebel’s and Tempest’s missing past for clues to the Seals.

“So how does it work, exactly?” Zane asked.

“I got the information off their computer system,” Rebel said. She pulled out a thumb drive. “Where should I plug it in, Lizard?”

Thorne indicated a computer console with a flick of his claw. That one. It’s firewalled, just in case anything snuck onto the thumb drive that we don’t want in our system. And stop making me sound like that ridiculous green creature that sells insurance on the television.

“That’s a gecko,” Rebel said absently, going over to the computer. “And it’s green, not blue.”

Tyr rolled his eyes. “Everybody knows that, bro.” Thorne raised his middle claw at him.

Rebel stuck the drive in the computer and information scrolled up onto the screen. Then she moved her chair to the side so Thorne could get his dragon head up near the monitor and tell her what he wanted to look at.

They skipped over the security files and found the UN-8825 file. Rebel sent the information to one of the big plasma screens so they could all see, and then paged through it slowly. Chemical composition. Manufacturing process.

Biological properties.

It apparently worked by suppressing the neural pathways that fixed a shifter’s body in its current form, and activating the opposite set that initiated the change to the other form, fixing that in place.

Then they read the results of the live shifter experiments.

The serum had worked on 94% of the shifters it had been given to. They’d immediately changed form—whether they wanted to or not.

Rebel felt anger slicing through her at the thought of captive shifters being painfully forced to shift against their will.

Then it got worse.

76% of those who’d shifted as a result of taking the serum had been unable to shift back. Only 26% of those had regained the ability to shift at will within three months of the experiment.

74% had not. 88% of those who happened to get stuck in human form lost all awareness of the animal inside them.

There were no notes past three months—apparently the experimenters had either stopped monitoring the subjects, or concluded their ability to shift at will had been permanently destroyed.

Some of them remained in animal form. And for the others, their animal, their other half, was gone forever.