Violet’s eyes opened and the last few seconds of her life flashed before them. Something was wrong, but she couldn’t figure out what. And then it hit her—she wasn’t breathing.

With great effort, she forced her lungs to take a breath. Air came rushing in in great heaping gulps. Sweet, cool, refreshing air.

A second later her heart started beating again. The first violent jolt startled Violet as she felt her heart kickstart. Warmth worked its way back into Violet’s cold, pale limbs, and she helped it along by rubbing her stiff muscles.

How long had she been lying dead on the floor?

Panic began to swell in her chest. She searched for her comm and found it lying face down on the other side of the corridor.

The red numbers of the timer counted down on the screen. She let out a sigh of relief. There was still time before the station passed the point of no return.

Just over ten minutes remained. She did some quick mental calculations. She’d been dead for over fifteen minutes.

She gently probed her tender neck, surprised to find that the pain had mostly faded already.

Then the defensive scrapes and gashes on her hands and arms began to heal right before her eyes. What was she? What had she become?

In the back of her mind, she already knew. She’d become just like him somehow—a monster.

She pushed the revelation deep down in her mind and forced herself to focus. There would be plenty of time to unravel what she’d become, but only if she managed to save the station and everyone else aboard it. She may be a monster, but she was a monster with a second chance.

She raced toward the relay station, noticing something was different. The hallways blurred by her as she ran. She felt a strength and grace in her limbs that she’d never felt before. It was how she imagined a professional athlete must feel. But this was on a different level altogether. She had to be running close to thirty miles an hour.

The door to the relay station lay ahead and Violet skidded to stop before she consciously realized why.

Something was waiting inside for her. She could smell it.

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It was him. Zane.

With all of her senses now heightened, she not only smelled him, she could smell the different blood types that were dried on his skin.

“I know you’re there,” he called out. “Whoever you are… Might as well come on in and meet your end.”

Violet strode in with more confidence than she felt. It seemed her physiology had gotten over its brush with death more quickly than her psyche had.

Inside, the monster stood waiting, hunched over a control panel, bathed in the red lights of the emergency signal.

“You—” he said, surprised. But then his expression changed from shock to a strange grin. “Pretty cool, huh?”

Violet frowned. “What are you—?”

“I know I killed you. You were lying dead on the metal grating when I left you. But yet, here you are, just like me.”

Violet’s stomach sank as her earlier suspicions were confirmed. She had undergone some sort of transformation, just like he had. She wondered if the murder and the psychopathy went along with the transformation or if he had always been that way.

“I’ll never be just like you.” Violet decided.

“But you already are… you just don’t realize it yet. I’ve merely accepted the fact that I’m the most powerful person on this station, and in time you’ll come to the same conclusion—if you survive, that is.”

Violet didn’t buy the overconfident act. “You seem pretty sure that you won’t be destroyed along with the rest of the station. What’s your plan? Float through open space until someone comes along and pulls you from the wreckage? You got a vac suit stashed somewhere that I can’t see?”

The monster tilted his head back and laughed. “I don’t need to breathe. And the cold of space can’t harm me either.”

“Is that right?” Violet challenged.

“How did you get here?”

Violet frowned, not sure what he was getting at.

“You took the long way around, didn’t you?”

Violet thought about the construction on the station corridor that was open to space. “You went through corridor 236?” Violet asked, eyebrows raised.

The monster shrugged with a cocky smirk on his face. “What can I say? After I got locked out of the rest of the station, I wanted to be sure that I’d survive if I blew it up. Besides, I wasn’t about to wait for them to find some way to trap me and lock me up. I’d rather die than spend another minute on this god forsaken prison of a space station.”

“Clearly you have some issues to work out,” Violet said. “But I can’t let you kill everyone on this station.”

The monster cracked his knuckles and smiled. “You don’t have a choice.”

Violet loosened her neck and shoulders before pounding a closed fist into her other palm. “We’ll see about that.”