The Alan stuttered toward me, heels first.
“Watch out,” my mother said. “It bites.”
The creature didn’t bite me. It came right up to me and nuzzled me, its skin so thin I could feel the contours of its bones.
I stepped back.
“You can kill it if you like,” Rena said. I wouldn’t think of her as my mother, not ever, not now. “I won’t mind.”
Can you say gun?
I thought of all the games, all the tests, and I dropped my knife arm to my side.
“Go back to sleep,” I told the thing in front of me, sidestepping it and closing the space between me and the real enemy here.
“You could kill me, too,” Rena said. “But right now, I’m the closest thing you have to a friend.”
Skylar’s face flashed into my mind. “You aren’t my friend,” I said sharply.
“No,” Rena agreed. “I suppose not. But I am your mother.”
Hearing her say that was worse than the feel of the Alan’s cheek against my own.
“It’s good to see you, Kali. If you wanted to see this, see me—all you had to do was ask.”
My fingers tightened around the blade in my hand, but I couldn’t make my arm move, because her voice, the way she said my name, the soft smile on her face—it was all exactly the same.
Like nothing had changed.
Like she hadn’t missed out on more than a decade of my life.
Like this was a house, not a laboratory.
Like her men hadn’t just killed Skylar.
Like I hadn’t killed her men.
“I didn’t know it was you until today,” she told me, like that made some kind of difference. “I didn’t know that the host was you, and now I do.”
Her words unlocked my frozen muscles. Claiming not to have ordered my death wasn’t enough—not when Skylar was ashes on the wind. In a single, fluid motion, I brought my knife down on the back of her head—hilt first.
She crumpled to the ground, and something threatened to give inside me. I pushed back against it.
Later, I thought.
I could break down later.
I could miss her and hate her and wish I’d never heard her say my name later.
Right now, I had to find Zev.
31
After the Alan, I’d expected Chimera’s lab to be a little shop of horrors, but beyond the final door, it looked like any other research lab in any other facility in the country: clean, sterile, organized. Workstations lined a center island filled with enough equipment to give research types a geekgasm: electron microscopes and mass spectrometers and machinery I didn’t even come close to recognizing. It was easy to picture the place bustling with men and women in white coats.
So why was it empty?
A company like Chimera had to have hundreds of employees, if not thousands. Even if most of those people worked on aboveboard projects, there had to be more people involved in this one than just She Who Shall Not Be Named and the men in suits.
Then again, I’d triggered some kind of alarm upstairs, and the only reason I’d been able to find this place was because the FBI had already gotten a lock on it.
They’re already evacuating and shutting things down, I thought, the silence echoing all around me. What if I’m too late?
You’re not. You need to leave, Kali. Please.
Zev had been silent for so long that the sound of his voice took me by surprise, and I clamped my lips into a straight line, refusing to show any external sign of weakness.
Where are you? I asked Zev silently, forcing myself to focus on the here and now.
Zev didn’t answer, but I quickly realized that he didn’t have to—hearing his voice had been enough, and now, I could feel his presence like a beacon, calling me home. My inner compass guided me toward the far wall.
Another door.
This place was such a labyrinth. Each time I thought I’d reached my destination, another door popped up, and I had to venture farther and farther into the belly of the beast.
Luckily, the card I’d swiped to get down here worked for access on this door, too, and I let myself into another hallway: one lined with metal doors. A tiny, slit-shaped window had been laid into each.
The smell of sulfur was overwhelming.
I walked down the hallway, trying not to look. I wasn’t here to hunt, but still, I felt them.
Closer, closer, just a little closer …
“No,” I said out loud, pushing down the urge to hunt. I was there for Zev. Everything else could wait. I forced myself to keep walking, and with each step, I felt a little warmer, a little more sure.
I caught sight of the clipboards hanging outside each door, but avoided reading the labels. I forcibly ignored the feeling of bugs crawling under my skin, the sound of scales scraping against concrete from behind one door, the near-human screams of some kind of primate, enraged, behind another.
Like clockwork, as I walked past each door, the beasts contained behind it came to life. They could smell me.
They wanted me dead.
My body quivered with the desire to return the favor, the ouroboros burning on my stomach, my chest, my back.
“Zev. Zev. Zev.” I said his name out loud, focusing on the reason I’d come here—the reason I’d risked my life and others’.
Finally, at the end of the hallway, there was a door.
Unlike the rest, it didn’t have a window. I couldn’t peek in to see what it was hiding, but I knew. I tested the handle, then swiped the identification card. The lock gave, and a second later, I was standing in another hallway.
This place was a nightmare. An endless nightmare, with door after door after door, and I was never going to find him, never going to get out.
“Kali.”
It took me a moment to realize that the voice wasn’t in my head.
“Zev?” I rushed toward the end of this hallway. Toward the last door. I pressed my hands flat against the metal. My eyes were level with the viewing slit.
On the other side of the slit, there were eyes.
Dark eyes, light skin, lashes that belonged on a softer, more delicate face. They framed his eyes in a thick, ink-black fringe.
“Zev,” I said, his name catching in my throat.
On the other side of the door, I could feel him placing his hands against the metal. I could almost feel his touch against mine, his breath against my skin.
I tried my card on this door, and the second I heard the lock give, the barrier holding back my emotions threatened to do the same.
I was so close now. So, so close.
Disbelief coloring his features, Zev pressed the door open, slowly, and stepped out into the hallway. He was taller than I’d thought he’d be, thinner than he’d looked in my dreams. He brought his hands to either side of my face, and I had one moment of utter peace, of feeling that this was how it was supposed to be.
He tilted his head to the side and looked at me like I was something precious. He ran his thumb over the skin of my cheek, and then he whispered, “I told you not to come here.” His voice was tender, and then it broke. “You should have listened.”
One second, his hands were on my cheeks. The next, they’d encircled my neck.
No.
My palms pressed back against his shoulders, but he didn’t move.
I was fast. Strong. Inhuman. He was faster, stronger, older.
No matter how hard I fought, his hands stayed around my neck, like a metal collar. He squeezed, squeezed hard enough that a normal girl’s head would have popped right off.
I can’t breathe, I realized. His hands are on my neck, and I can’t breathe.
This couldn’t be happening. After everything, after Skylar—
Behind us, the animal screams of the other test subjects built to a crescendo, and I struggled against Zev’s hold.
People like me didn’t get scared, I reminded myself. We couldn’t feel pain. But we could feel betrayal.
We needed to breathe.
“I told you not to come,” Zev said, his voice wrapping its way around my body, steady and warm. “I tried.”
The last thing I was conscious of before darkness claimed me—other than an incredible tightness in my lungs—was the sound of yet another door opening and closing. Footsteps crossing the hallway. And then, a pinch in my arm and a woman’s voice.