Zurich Institute of Molecular Pathology
Secure Containment Wing 3B
Day 91 of the Outbreak
The steel gurney was chilled to regulation temperature. The creature strapped to it twitched once as rigor loosened then settled.
Yun stood over the corpse, scalpel trembling in gloved fingers. Across from her, Mariel tightened the straps on her mask and brought up the camera drone.
This wasn't a fox anymore.
Not really.
Not after what it had become.
They had seen hours of viral videos.
Misshapen alley cats with knotted muscle bulges.
Rats with secondary mouths under their chins.
Dogs whose skin shifted independently of their movement.
In one clip, a chimp in rural Brazil had split its own jaw open with its thumbs and let it reform as something else.
But this the one they'd secured from the Slovenian lake town this was worse.
Because it had structure.
Purpose.
The creature still held a fox-like silhouette, but its limbs were elongated, digits multiplied, some jointed in opposite directions.
It had eight toes on each paw some clawed, some fused into hooks, as if for climbing or anchoring.
Quill-like fur spiked along the spine, each quill not hollow like a porcupine's, but filled with marrow suggesting blood production or venom delivery.
Its skin was patched with black, armor-like plates, thickened with dense calcium layers. Beneath those plates, Yun could see soft pulses, like organs moving independently beneath armor.
Then she spotted the eyes.
Four of them.
Two normal.
Two smaller ones just above, tilted at an odd vertical angle, still glossy, still wet.
"Beginning incision," Yun said, though her voice had dropped to a whisper.
The skin resisted like high-tension rubber. She cut deeper.
Instead of fat or familiar muscle, she found layered tissue bands, like someone had woven cables through meat.
The muscle fibers spiraled outward from the sternum not functional, just decorative.
Or symbolic?
The ribs were quadruple-joined, with overlapping cartilage frames and extra ligaments forming a cage within a cage.
"There's something under the heart," Yun muttered.
Mariel leaned closer, her breath audible through the mask.
"It's… not a heart."
In the place where the heart should have been sat a twisting, coiled organ, smooth like a sea creature, pulsing in regular rhythm. No arteries. No veins.
Instead, it had radial filaments, webbing out into every direction not to feed blood, but signal.
The lungs had split lobes and one had finger-like extensions reaching into the throat. When Yun tugged gently on them, the tongue shot out forked, twice as long as it should be.
She stumbled back.
"That's not a mutation," Mariel said softly. "That's a re-design."
It took them nearly three hours to navigate past the strange spine jointed at five points, some vertebrae tessellated into interlocking triangles Yun found it at the base of the brainstem.
The core.
A spherical node, matte black, no larger than a golf ball. It was suspended in an almost gelatinous sheath of nerves and tendrils like it had grown there intentionally, nestled like a pearl.
But it was wrong.
It didn't throb like tissue. It hummed, soundless but present the biosensor flickered. Glitched.
Then displayed a series of symbols that resembled language not human, but measured. Intentional.
Mariel crouched down beside the operating table and angled her tablet's scanner into the creature's eye.
There was a faint layer of protein film not decomposition, but a sort of protective membrane.
"Still structurally functional," she said, brows furrowed. "Retina's intact."
"Check this." Yun gently parted the jaws. "Look at the bite pattern."
The teeth weren't just sharp they were filed down, unevenly but deliberately. Some removed entirely. As if the creature had been modifying itself.
The vocal cords were fused, but the larynx had expanded branches like a bird's syrinx.
"Mariel…" Yun's voice had lost its calm. "I don't think this thing mimicked sounds like a parrot. I think it chose not to speak."
Yun replayed the field footage taken just before the specimen was captured. No one else had reviewed it in full the creature hadn't attacked when cornered. It had waited. It had led the containment team into a narrower space, boxed itself in and only then turned to face them.
Mariel watched the video in silence. The creature had looked at the officer. Then at the stun gun. Then at the drone camera.
Its gaze lingered on the drone for just a moment too long.
Then it snarled not at the humans, but at the camera.
"It knew what was watching it," Mariel whispered.
Yun turned toward the body. The eyes, though glossy and filmed, still reflected a focused, feral awareness.
This wasn't just infection.
This was a return to wildness but not without understanding.
Not without recognition.
Mariel stood behind the observation glass while the containment chamber powered down. Yun began sealing the samples.
"This isn't evolution," Mariel said. "It's subtraction. Stripping away everything unnatural. Replacing it with something… ancient. But smart."
"Wild," Yun murmured. "But not blind."
They didn't speak for a moment.
Inside the autopsy chamber, the creature's second pair of eyelids once presumed to be inert tensed.
A slow spasm.
One flicker.
Then stillness again.
Like it had heard them.