Colter's massive hand sinks down onto my shoulder, gently pushing me into a crouch as the other soldiers around us getlow. We cover our ears seconds before the doorway is blasted into a jagged opening, sending dark smoke rolling up into the morning sky and making the birds in nearby trees flee for their lives.
Still, we wait, crouched, hearts pounding, eyes staring with unblinking, laser precision on that door. Waiting to see if someone comes out.
My left hand clenches repeatedly. Each swallow feels laced with lemon, sour and stinging, and the explosive remnants float through the air.
My foot has started to prickle by the time Ridge calls out over our headsets, "Team Blue. Go."
A team of five races forward and plunges into the dark abyss of that building. Part of me wishes I were with them because the agony of waiting feels unbearable. But another part of me is glad I'm not.
After three impatient minutes that make me think my head might explode like a firework from all the anxious pressure, Ridge gives the rest of the group the go-ahead.
"Stay with me, Your Highness," the grumpy alpha barks in my direction.
If I were capable of sarcasm or flirting right now, I'd give him a breathy, "Yes, sir," but I'm not. I'm absolutely not. The back of my neck is coated in sweat by the time we make it through the doorway into the shadows.
The lab’s a single cavernous space, gutted by violence and time. It smells of ozone, decay, and the acrid tang of chemicals.
A jagged hole, the size of a small car, has been ripped through the corrugated iron ceiling, and through it pours a merciless shaft of gray daylight, illuminating a swirling universe of dust motes and casting long, distorted shadows that make the wreckage seem to writhe.
The floor’s a treacherous landscape of shattered safety glass and buckled linoleum. In the center of the room, the main workbenches form a kind of metallic island, their stainless-steel surfaces scarred and pocked by shrapnel.
A complex web of thick, insulated cables, some as thick as a man's arm, snake across the floor from a bank of humming servers that have somehow survived this war. They pulse with a faint, intermittent green light, a mechanical heartbeat in a place of stillness. One server rack has been peeled open like a tin can, its circuit boards exposed and glittering cruelly in the shaft of light.
Along the far wall, a line of fume hoods stands like sentinels in a forgotten war. Most are shattered, but one remains intact, its reinforced glass marred with a thousand tiny cracks but somehow holding together.
Inside, a single beaker stands upright, filled not with liquid, but with a layer of fine, iridescent black dust that seems to drink the light. A handwritten label, curled and yellowed, is still barely legible:Specimen - DO NOT OPEN.
It’s there the virologist—Doctor Tamara—goes, her lips pursed in contemplation.
I wonder if it’s important.
I wonder if any of this is important.
Just what were the Noths working on here?
Terrifying sounds start to flit through my head, and I'm only ninety percent certain they are traumatic memories, not reality. But my eyes dart as though the noises are real.
I take in dusty workbenches, empty gloveboxes with cracked glass, a clean room that looks anything but since it’s strung with cobwebs and a layer of dirt coats the floor.
My memory flickers like a strobe light when I spot a chair that looks like it belongs in a dental office. It’s on the opposite side of the room from the fume hoods, with crumbling plaster and loose cement blocks half obscuring it from view. I almost wonder if it was in an entirely separate room before the building began to deteriorate.
In quick succession, I see white lab coats. Blue gloves. A bright light overhead.
What the fuck?
My pulse thunders, and my chest feels like a herd of wild horses have trampled through it. But my mind is sparking with that morbid curiosity that always seems to accompany fear.
What am I seeing and why? What happened to me?
Head tilted, I glide closer and realize that there are straps dangling from the arms of the dusty seat. Foreboding accompanies my steps, but I can't seem to stop walking.
This time, instead of an image, I'm bombarded with sounds. My own high-pitched shriek. Someone yells,Keep her still!
"You okay?" Luka asks, and as his face comes into focus, I realize that my hand is on my chest, my breathing frantic.
Panicked.
I swallow and try to shake away the visceral sensations coursing through me and make sense of the adrenaline crashing through my veins and the piecemeal flashes I’ve experienced.
