Avanti's readings were off the charts. Her instrument panels had not been designed to display the measurements she was now receiving from her Agent. On the ground, she wondered if Katya had any idea what she was walking into.
In the cleanroom, Katya had felt a slight, constant pulse against the front of her head. She’d wondered if she had imagined it, but Avanti let her know that she had not. But as she stepped past the door -- the thick, sliding, acrylic glass pane with the dampening magnetic latticework -- as it closed behind her, she began to feel something she had not felt in years: sheer panic and utter terror.
As she began to venture forward, she began to realize that this was likely further into the containment cell and nearer to patient A32 than anybody else had been since the deaths of the monitoring staff. After the incident, they had not bothered to even relocate him. The bed, the equipment, the materials that surrounded him had been entirely untouched. They had simply thrown the cube up around him. For days now, they had left him unfed and unwashed, hoping that fatigue would finally get the better of him; that his energies would literally evacuate him over time. And yet, the psychic tempest continued unabated.
It took a tremendous effort for Katya to take each step forward. She had never felt this kind of acute stress before. Her body, it seemed, was turning against her. The muscles in her chest tightened and constricted her lungs so that she felt like she could not inhale fast enough. Blood rushed to her face so that she felt hot in her forehead, but simultaneously frigid around her eyes as her peripheral vision narrowed to a single point directly ahead.
Only now did she notice that her mind was refusing to process sensory input -- the sensations of raw colors, lights, and sounds were being left uncategorized and unlinked to any coherent external experience; simply being, simply accumulating in her mind as assaulting phenomena without connection or orientation. The world was releasing her and she thought now that this was what it would be like to die, her senses in disarray and her consciousness aware of nothing except her own retreating sanity. Not even Avanti's screaming instructions coming through her inner ear implant registered in Katya's conscious brain now. And so she dropped forward to one knee, the energy to move one way or another entirely drained from her.
Thus, began his onslaught.
"Three. Five. Five," he said, continuing to call the Agent number -- her number. His voice now filling the mind that her own consciousness had evacuated, he uttered with straining concentration, "Finally. You arrive."
Her head felt heavy, as if the voice itself was the densest, blackest ink that she now drowned into.
---
She -- she knew she was. She felt wet. And sticky. She knew, suddenly and shockingly, that she was underwater and instinctively she sat up, gasping, coughing, spitting. It was thick, this liquid that was in her mouth and lungs. As she expelled it, she noticed suddenly that her arms looked different, foreign. Completely hairless, they were sinewy and swollen with muscle and blood. She liked it. She had desired it and even expected it, but how could she have known until now how it would really feel? She reached forward and grabbed the edge of the wooden pod and with just a twitch, ripped it open in two. As the amniotic fluid she had been bathed in gushed out onto the dirt and rock floor around her, she noticed the other pods around her. They had not opened yet. She was the first. She felt proud of this. And in the distance, she heard a hoarse howl echo through the cave.
---
When next she opened her eyes, she was running -- flying, even. There were others around her, and their presence gave her excitement. She looked at them, their backs arched, necks bent low, and all four limbs pounding against the hard frozen ground. She could feel the power in her thigh. With each thrust of her leg she bounded forward in meters. She smelled him before she saw him -- the man. She recognized him. But now, he was not her neighbor anymore; he was just a man who had not joined them. He was a man with a shotgun in his hands. She swiped at him and felt her claws impulsively extend forward. The shotgun snapped and in the next instant she had already leapt at him and torn him apart from the belly where she had drawn him open. Under the strength of her arms his vertebrae folded like a twig. She felt intoxicated. Behind her, a door opened and she heard a woman and her child's screams.
---
This time, it was dark. Entirely black. But she could still see with her tremendous olfactory acuity. Blood. Pools of it. Her skin stood rigid with excitement. She had been shot at, but the wounds had of course closed immediately around the bullets, which she would expel later when she was safe. This, she had earned. She could not wait any longer. Yet she had to. She had to first smash his skull, and then reaching in, she scattered the brain matter so that he could not attempt to pierce into her mind anymore. But then, then there was nothing stopping her. She leaned her mouth down and tore into the flesh and blood and it tasted good. It felt nourishing, this human flesh, and she could tell that it would bond to her and she would gain the inoculation against these mind-howlers -- she turned around suddenly. But it was too late -- a hand! against her head, and then nothing more.
---
She awoke again. She couldn't move. She tried to heave free, but she was chained and confined. She could see the others; they wore the iron masks. They were speaking and conferring. She felt groggy. How long had she been -- dreaming? About a man. A human man in a black cell. Blindfolded, his ears and nose plugged to deprive him of sensation. So that his mind would wander. Was this a mind-howler? Were these the memories of a psionic? She could remember things. She remembered the assignment. Reconnaissance. Infiltrate the Fringelands. Infiltrate Pikevale. She couldn't understand it. It didn't make sense to her, even though she remembered it as if it were her own memory.
But she heard them now. What they were saying. That she'd been mind-linked. Impossible! No, the hand! She tried to yell but her lips were sewn together. Father, she thought. Save me. And so she heard his voice. She felt it stir her heart to hear him again. Her creator. The creator of them all. Save me. But there was only silence. He said nothing. She remembered something else now, or was she experiencing it as it happened? A face. A human woman's face, with long, raven hair. And then he croaked, in that low, gravelly voice, a command. And at once, she felt the burning; intense, insane burning as she watched them empty the enormous acid vat over her body. There was nothing left for her. Only pain. And then, that too melted.
---
Only now did Katya realize she had been conscious for all of this. The memories, the dreams, and the memories of the dreams that patient A32 had projected into her mind, the experiences that he had himself absorbed from the beast he had found at the Pikevale Psychiatric Sanitarium, they had played over and over: Birth -- hunt -- feed -- die. She lost count of how many times she lived and relived that life that wasn't hers.
It was Avanti's voice that had found her drifting in her Hindu eternity. "Wake up," she said, "Please wake up." Repeatedly without quit or fatigue, her pleas dangled into Katya's awareness--a thin silver thread swaying breezily before her, daring her to leap at it, again and again, until she finally found it and grabbed it and tugged at it, following it until it led her through the tunnel of her mind, until she was awake again in the real world, finally out of the labyrinth of lifetimes that she had nearly lost herself to.
As she blinked her eyes, Katya felt the winds in her head dying. The rhythmic incantation of her Agent call-number was slowing and lightening. She looked now, seeing clearly for the first time since she had stepped into the containment cell. Patient A32 sat on his bed, his thin frame barely holding the wispy medical gown upon his body.
She was panting; she was still catching her breath. The chant of "Three. Five. Five." was now gone entirely -- the fog lifting from her head. She stood up with a nervous ease, as patient A32 toppled backward lifelessly across the bed.
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She walked over to his limp body and, for a moment, she felt sad. For even though they had only been connected for a brief amount of time, they had shared experiences together more intimately than she had ever felt with any other individual. And in a very real way, she felt as if a part of herself were lying dead there in front of her.
But the expression on his face was of utter serenity, of fulfillment, as if he had completed a great work and now he could finally rest and retire from the burdens he had faced all his life -- and this made her happy, and in a small way, perhaps, envious, as well.
She turned back to the passageway and glanced over at the cleanroom behind the one-way mirror. Had they witnessed it all? Surely it'd been recorded. What would they want now, with their prize possession expired, having revealed his secrets to no one except her.
"Wait!" said Avanti, suddenly.
It came as a shock to Katya, who was still trying to organize her internal thoughts.
"Katya, I'm tracking something," her Operator said. "I think it's them."
Before she had even said it, Katya began to feel a sense of light-headedness. In an instant, the lights blew out, and the entire cell was dark.
"I was so focused on you; I--" Avanti poured out. "They knew where the power source was. There's a backup generator but it's only connected to life support systems."
Katya could see a dim light coming through the observation panels of the cleanroom. Now that her enclosure was darker than the outside room, the mirror had reversed, and now she was the one looking in.
By now, a few guards had finally made it into the room. They were still checking the bodies of their comrades and Dr. Gelemen, but she could sense their panic now.
"Get out of here!" she said, pounding mutely against the window. "Get out!" she screamed. "Avanti, you have to tell them to leave!"
She pitched forward, dizzily, steadying herself against the wall. She had experienced this vertigo before, in that underground tunnel. A beast had been there too. Was her sensation connected to their presence?
A thud sounded out from the other side of the window beside her. It was a hairy, distorted mass, sticking, disembodied, against the window, slowly sliding, leaving a trail of red, chunky blood against the glass. In the dim light, it was impossible to make out anything beyond two feet. A few shapes moved, there was a flash or two -- perhaps gunshots, which briefly lit the room like a strobe, and then shadows that split and fell in muted silence to the ground.
What pounded against the glass next startled her. Pressed against the window, staring straight at her, or through her, was the iron face of a wolf. For a moment, it lingered there, and a pang of familiarity ran through her. She had seen this mask before, in a dream of a memory that had threatened to engulf her forever. But beyond the mask, or within it, she saw something else.
"No," she whispered.
A loud clang interrupted her. They were trying to smash the steel security doors.
The unmatched DNA. The vault labs. Their cave systems....
Memories of her powerful arms came to Katya now, emerging out of her vault, seeing moonlight for the first time as this new being, slowly joined by others from the caves around her. Then, hunting with her pack on all four, standing upright to tower over the enemy before finishing him; consuming him. Finally, the command, from the one she had most loved. Wearily, perhaps even sadly, she had heard him say, "Dissolve her." And she had experienced death, then.
Aloud -- for Avanti’s benefit, she told herself -- she said, "They don't have handlers for the beasts. They are...."
She cowered mutely, as she had been trained to do, as the steel door crashed down. Instantly, the muffled pounding of their strong, heavy paws -- she felt the memory of them in her own hands -- escorted the smell of blood into the cell.
A bone cracked in the center of the room, where she now remembered the bed to be, and the sound of a sopping sponge dully splattering against the floor reverberated from somewhere across the darkness. The smell grew nauseatingly stronger.
For a moment, she heard nothing as she concentrated on keeping her own breathing slow and steady. In the black silence, she could hear only her heart gently pumping against her chest, and for some odd, infantile reason she wondered if Director Revner would be proud of her right now.
Limbs -- arms -- sinewy and hairless wrapped around her from behind and crossed her chest, pulling her tightly against a wall of rhinoceros flesh. Instinctively she formed the wire in her hand into a needle and stabbed behind her. She felt its subtle penetration. But before she could stir it, rip it through whatever part of her assailant’s flesh was behind her, a vice came across her elbows, crushing her tendons and bones and involuntarily jolting her hands open.
Something whipped along her shoulder, up her neck, and then stopped at the entrance of her ear before it slithered inside. She could not even recoil, the strength of the paws -- no, hands -- pressing against her capturing her and freezing her entirely.
She held her scream the entire time, silent until she felt the cochlear implant being torn out. A hand moved up quickly to muffle her mouth and nose. Another went down her arm and crushed the omni-device around her wrist. With a swift tug it came off, its implanted sensors ripping away from the veins and nerve ends that it had directly fused to. She inhaled to scream again, but only drew in the black stench of blood from the hand covering her face, and wretched against it.
"Shh," it said. "Shh. Be still."
She didn't know how, but she knew it was smiling behind her.
"We've been watching you, Agent. Katya. Tursyn. We've been watching." It labored between the words, its voice hoarse and low, echoing densely throughout the cell. "You have impressed us. You have understood us."
"Who are you," she mouthed torpidly, knowing that it could hear and sense everything she did now.
"Who are we? We are your children, Katya Tursyn. We are the children of your G.C.N., and the children of your Agency. We are the fallout from your wretched society."
It hissed.
"I was a colonel. I was in your army. I fought in your wars. Did you believe the unification of the Confederacy came freely? No... not free. They made me into this. They taught me this.
"But I see the truth now. And now I atone. I am a savior, you see. You saw that in Warrentown. I am the liberator now. I gave them the choice to join my pack. To have my gift. To become like me. Some did. And the others...."
"You're... monsters," she painfully exhaled, her head splitting from within.
"Ignorant. Misguided. Some will always be this way. But, it is not murder to kill livestock. Or to hunt fleeing pigs. They serve us anyway by feeding us with their bodies and their sport. We teach the new ones this way.
"Nooo," the colonel hissed. “The abominations are you. You and all your creations. Your newest mutants. Your psychics -- your perverse mind-howlers. Your government is stupid, Agent Tursyn. Careless. Stripping life from their own people. They don't even bother to teach them how to... turn off. So they broadcast, endlessly, incessantly. Until we find them, like a beacon in the black sky. That is how we came here. To liberate them through destruction -- your psychic idolaters.
“But we knew you would come to this one,” he said. “We knew you would come. So we waited. You see? We go another path. We bonded our bodies with the beast. Because the body is infinite. Infinite, it adapts. Infinitely, we can become more...."
She coughed, weakly, struggling to stay conscious. She knew she was only standing because he was holding her up.
A vibration from her throat, "Your experiments are crude. You failed. You are still... just... human."
She felt him tense up, and she knew he wished to crush her at that moment.
But he relaxed; he was trained in discipline, too.
"You are still naive, young Agent. The evidence of our ascension is in front of you. We are no longer just the masters of the beast. We have become them." He let loose a gravelly howl, and was joined by roars and shrieks from every corner of the cell. "You see? We are more than 'just' human, Agent Tursyn."
He inched his mouth closer to her ear. His whip-like tongue lapping at the blood that trickled out of it. He whispered, again, "We feel it. And now, Katya Tursyn -- you understand us. You more than any we’ve watched before, are already one of us. Don’t deny it anymore. Join us. I will save you. I will make you... transcend...."
She shook.
Your very existence offends me. You're an alien, an imitation, a fraud. I am allergic to you like a foreign body. I reject you like a parasite, for hiding amongst us, for feeding on us, for using us, and then luring others into joining you and doing the same. For you are a mimic and a mockery of humanity. I reject you precisely for being not-human, like I reject Gelemen, like I reject the G.C.N., like I reject the Agency that everyone I have ever cared about has already given their lives to...
Deliriously, her thoughts turned now to Thaniel again, the boy she had used up and then left to die alone.
Because it’s true, isn’t it? I do understand you.
To do whatever it takes. To cross every bridge and step over every body.
I do understand you. I don’t just understand you. I’m already....
NO!
I don’t want this anymore. I want it back! Dad. Revner. I understand now. I don't want to give up anymore. Not this. Not me. Not what makes me me. I want that back. Give me another chance. I’ll choose! I’ll choose now! I choose to be human. To be 'just' Human...
But, she didn't say any of this.
She couldn’t.
All she could offer was a single, moist droplet that dribbled, languidly, down her cheek and off the curl of her lip, as the cold, black, emptiness rushed up to embrace her.