The first one barrels into the lead, claws outstretched and shrieking a pitch so wrong it vibrates the fillings in my molars. Sloane drops flat, dragoon style, but I don't even think before I level the Glock and empty half a mag into the thing's chest. The sound isn't gunshot, not really—it's wet, like shooting at an overripe pumpkin. The hybrid's torso blossoms, spraying the wall with black-pink slurry, but it keeps coming until the legs fold out from under and the corpse skids, bowling Sloane into the baseboards. I catch the muzzle flash mirrored in its eyes, two shiny black olives that keep locking on, even as the rest of it turns to paste.
The second hybrid is smarter, or at least luckier. It comes from the ceiling, crab-walking inverted and angling for Jenkins on the left flank. He has a shotgun up, blaring birdshot into the drywall, but it's too late: the thing wraps its arms around him and drags him up, legs flailing, into the aluminum ductwork. There's a sound like suitcase latches popping in sequence—and then nothing but the slow, hot drip of blood hitting the tile.
I scream "JENKINS!" but the only answer is the echo, the stink of copper and burnt hair. I put two shots through the vent, make myself believe I can change the story, then stop when I hear the hybrid's claws getting further away, further, until the only sound is the panic-breath of my own team.
Sloane punches the wall, hard, then wipes his face with the back of his hand and lets out a sound like a rusty screen door. We form up, backs to each other, and limp through the next corridor, every square foot now a crime scene, every footfall the metronome for dying hope.
The third floor is a crypt. We make a quick sweep—two more dead hybrids, one curled up like a dog gone to sleep, the other split open at the pelvis with what looks like human teeth marks. I don't linger. If they can die, great. If they're faking, let someone else play the hero.
We ditch the main stairs, favor the service crawl that runs around the elevator shaft—a habit born of too many body traps in old drug houses. Sloane leads this time, teeth gritted, and I drag what's left of my team behind, all of us hopping from safe square to safe square like kids who know the floor is lava.
Fourth floor. The architecture changes. Here everything is clean: floors polished, doors intact, windows not even scuffed. The tang of bleach hangs so thick it coats my soft palate, stings my eyes. For a second it feels like we've tripped into another building, one where hybrid monsters are someone else's urban legend.
Tran checks the first room: empty, except for neat piles of office supplies, a row of fresh white binders, and a desktop calendar, all squares blank but one, circled in red. I check the date—yesterday. I have a tight, mean laugh, then move on.
Fa'amasino clears a door marked with triple biohazard symbols. Inside is a holding pen, three cages welded from surgical steel. In each, a dead body, but not any breed I know: they're hairless, skin white-yellow and stretched crazy tight, eyes closed, mouths sewn shut with carbon filament. Needles bristle from the arms and legs. The floor below each cage is spotless, except for a faint pink stain the janitors either missed or gave up on. Sloane edges past me, nudges the nearest cage with the barrel of his gun. The body doesn't move. I kick the leg, half hoping to stir trouble, but nothing. If they're playing dead, they deserve an Oscar.
"Fan out," I tell them. "Pull hard drives, take samples, look for anything that explains the last thirty minutes." I hang back in the hall, watch the corners for movement.
It's an old trick—make yourself bait, see what bites. I feel the eyes before I see them, a flicker at the edge of the security glass. It's the blue-eyed hybrid, the one from before, hands pressed to the frame and mouth working like it's trying to cough up a message. I step closer, keep the gun low, and wait.
It tries to speak. What comes out is a wheeze, then a string of numbers, then my name. "Kamen." The lips are too thin for consonants, but it gets the point across. It taps the glass, then points—not to me, but to the next room, and then, with something like pleading, to the elevator shaft.
I back away and call to the team: "We're not alone. Keep security up, top tier."
Fa'amasino yells, "Sheriff, check this!" I step into the far lab: the walls are papered with print-outs, all photos of animal bones, human X-rays, diagrams that show long strings of code annotated in red. It's not science, it's obsession. In the middle of the room is a gurney, and on it, a laptop open to a video chat. The camera's live, but the feed is dark, ruined by static and motion blur.
"Sheriff Mitchell," says a voice—not a hybrid, but a man's, familiar and slick with the kind of confidence that never learned to feel shame. "Congratulations on making it this far." I recognize the voice from one of the old after-action tapes, a guy they called Mr. North. Nobody ever saw his face twice.
"You set us up," I say, though my throat is so dry it comes out a croak.
"In a word, yes," he replies. "You were the best variable for the scenario. The hybrids need a predator. You are the control."
The feed flickers, then resolves into a shape vaguely human, hunched in a blackout suit and laughing with its mouth closed. Anger suddenly blossoms inside and I haul off and punch the tv and shatter it so hard the casing caves in with a plastic concussive snap, the sound echoing down the hall like a shell going off underwater. My hand comes away bleeding, knuckles flayed open by the web of shatter lines, but it feels good to hurt something, even if it's just a machine. Sloane stares at me like I've come untethered, but it's not like I was ever faking sanity to begin with.
A static pop on the wall speakers: the blue-eyed hybrid again, its voice caught between a child's whine and the hiss of steam. "Turn around," it says. "They are coming." Then the lights die, everything plunging to a gray so deep my pupils panic. Inside the blackout, I feel the rattle more than I hear it, like something too big for the corridor is stampeding up the pipe chase behind us.
Fa'amasino and Tran are already booking it for the stairwell, stepping wide over the blood trails and the half-dissolved hybrid paste. Sloane braces the hall, barrel tight to his cheek, and says, "On your go, Sheriff." My words are gone—rage and fear and something else boil up, and all I can do is jerk my chin forward and pray to every god that ever loved bad odds.
We run, the way animals do when the only metric is distance from what wants you dead. There's a sound behind us like a helicopter crash made out of bone and metal and wet rags, and I know without seeing that the next wave isn't going to waste time on ambush. Ahead, the corridor narrows, then splits left and right; I turn by instinct, hoping my blind guess is better than fate's.
We hit a security threshold, steel bars locked down tight except for a single gap at the bottom, maybe eighteen inches of clearance. There's no way through for grown humans, but the hybrids are children of the loophole—we hear them flatten and squirm, a wet snake-laugh, as they start pushing under the gate. Sloane jams his shotgun through the bars and fires, the recoil nearly breaking his wrist as shot ricochets off bars, into the gap, thickening the air with bits of hybrid and clotted mist. It buys us a second, maybe less.
Fa'amasino shows up with a fire axe, red paint chipped to the core, and starts hacking at the hinges. Each swing is a drumbeat, each impact a promise. Behind us, the hybrids jam together at the threshold, arms and faces smeared with gore, all of them pushing and tripling up, eager to find the weakest link in meat or metal.
My hands keep working even while my brain stops making sense—I grab a busted credenza, drag it over, and start piling whatever I can against the gate, giving the axe man another five seconds of head start. Tran is sobbing, or maybe that's me, but we don't slow, not until Fa'amasino breaks the lock with a scream and the door swings wide enough that we can all squeeze through.
We collapse on the far side, backs pressed to the concrete, each of us holding our weapon like the only friend left at the end of the world. I blink and see black spots, fingerprints of dead monitors and ruined faces, pasted to my corneas.
Silence, for three breaths. Then: "They stopped," says Tran, voice papery. I risk a look back, just enough to see the hybrids massed at the threshold, bodies layered six deep, staring with their bright nothing eyes. They could crawl under, but they don't. They just wait, teeth bared, as if the chase is only fun when you can see the fear in the prey. Sloane spits on the tile and mutters, "Fuckers want to herd us." He's right. We're not being hunted. We're being moved.
We limp up the corridor, and after a hundred feet the smell changes—less bleach, more wild rot, like a flooded barn in October. Past another pair of doors, we find a room lit by a row of grow lamps, casting the walls green. In the center, a table set for a meal: five chairs, crystal glasses, linen napkins folded with monastic precision. There's food on the table, too, but it's not food for people. Just racks of marrow bones, cracked open and steaming, a puddle of red in the fine china.
A place setting for each of us.
On the table is a note, hand-written, in the same crabby scrawl as the message in the sub-basement. I recognize the handwriting—Anna's, twisted by someone else's hand. The message is simple. "Please stay here. Help is coming."
That's when I realize—she's alive. Or at least, she was, long enough to bait the room. Sloane catches the meaning, too; the look he gives me is prep for a whole new kind of pain.
We don't sit. We press on.
The rest of the floor is a straight line shot to the "executive" suite, which is less gilded than advertised; just a long rectangular office with the windows blacked out by duct tape and a state flag folded in the corner. I bar the door behind us and scan the room. There's a photo on the desk—Anna and me, the week before the wedding, standing under a sky so blue it looks like we're on another planet. I pick it up, thumb the edge, and wonder if she's the reason the hybrids were made, or just the last witness left alive.
Tran finds the hidden compartment in the credenza, pulls out a sealed evidence tube and a stack of binders. "Offsite protocol," he reads, eyes wide. "They were prepping to ship out the whole line. Even the failed models."
Fa'amasino flips through another folder, pauses. His voice is small: "There's a back way out. They kept a tunnel for VIP extraction."
I pocket the photo, scoop up the binders, and gesture to the far wall, where the cherry wood paneling is warped around a false door. We crack it, and for a second the cold air rushes in so hard my sinuses burn.
The tunnel is pitch dark except for hazard strobes every fifty feet, painting everything with a sick, arterial glow. We walk single file, Sloane covering point, Fa'amasino on rear guard, the rest of us clinging to the narrow edge of hope. The tunnel doesn't feel like salvation. It feels like a slide to hell.
We make it three hundred yards before the passage splits. One branch spirals up, toward the surface. The other slopes down and away, the colder of the two by far. I vote for up—always up, always out—but Sloane grabs my wrist and points to the red smears on the concrete. "She went that way," he says, and doesn't add the rest: so will we.
We take the downward path.
After a hundred feet it opens into a vault, the size of a swimming pool, lined floor to ceiling with stacked cages. Each cage holds a hybrid, or the corpse of one, or something in between. The closer they are to the center, the more human they look. Even through the glass, you can see the blue eyes, the tension in every muscle, the way they pace and snarl at nothing.
I check my watch. Five floors in. Only. The way my legs shake, you'd think we'd run fifty. "God damn it," I snarl to no one, or maybe to the ghosts collecting in my inner ear, "why is this taking so long?"
The concrete stairs yawn ahead, endless and echoing, but a voice stops me cold. Not one of my own—I can tell the difference, most days. It's a woman's voice: clear, young, almost gentle. I spin, gun first, and track the sound to a side passage lined with dusty Plexi cages. Movement. Slender shape behind the bars. The others hang back, probably thinking what I am: bait, or worse.
I inch forward, breath cut to slivers. The girl sits on her knees, hands wrapped around the bars. Skin porcelain pale, eyes huge and blue, red hair trailing in ropes down her hoodie. Something about her face feels off—child's bone structure welded to an adult's wreckage.
She looks up, tears in her eyes. "Please," she says. "It's so cold here. Can you let me out?"
Sloane whispers, "Sheriff…"
I nod, not sure if I'm warning him or myself. I keep the Glock leveled, left hand fumbling for the emergency cage release. It screams as it cycles. The door hitches, then springs. The girl doesn't move. She just stares at me, eyes wide and wet, and for a split second I see something inside the iris—concentric rings, a camera's aperture ratcheting down to nothing.
Instinct is the oldest cop's trick. I jump back, aim center mass, and fire until the world goes dull with noise. The girl arches, mouth splitting in a hiss that vibrates my teeth, then slumps forward, blood painting her knees black. I keep firing until there's no one left to kill. My hands shake; the gun is slick.
"Jesus Christ," whispers Sloane, but he stays back, like whatever faith he had in me is now radioactive.
I wipe my mouth with my sleeve and step over the body, fighting the urge to check for a pulse. Instead I look for evidence—a note, a card, anything. The cage has a cot, a pile of spiral-bound notebooks, and a tray of empty beakers, each labeled with a taper of masking tape and a string of numbers. I flip through the notebooks; most are random digits, scrawled in that frantic tic you see on the wall of solitary cells. But the last page is different:
MITCHELL: YOU ARE THE LAST FLOOR
The handwriting is neat, deliberate—a teacher's script. I pocket the sheet and call for the others.
Fa'amasino is doubled over, hands on his knees, breathing through a sieve of panic. Tran's just staring at the corpse, eyes gone wide. Only Sloane looks at me, and not in a way that suggests he'll ever forgive what I just did.
We move. Up. Always up. The stairs are narrower now, the concrete worn bare by a million panicked feet. At the sixth floor landing, the door is propped open by a yellow legal pad, pages flapping in the recirculated air. The sign above reads: TESTING OBSERVATION.
The stink inside is the worst yet. Someone's mixed ammonia, bleach, and whatever passes for failure's aftertaste, stewing it until it burns the inside of your head. There are rows of gurneys, each with a restraint system welded into the frame. Some are empty. The others hold shapes under stained tarps.
I scan the room. The feed of blue-eyed hybrid from before is piped into a corner monitor, looping the phrase, "End of the line. End of the line," in a warbling, manipulated falsetto. Above the monitor, a light flashes red to green and back—heartbeat, siege rhythm, a metronome counting down the moments until everything looses.
We clear the lab. I nearly slip on a puddle, not water but some kind of viscous gel, thick as congealed honey. The main chamber is packed with racks of vials, red and gold and turquoise, each with a barcode and a date. I run my hand along them, not sure what I'm hoping to find.
Then I see it: a file folder, thicker than my wrist, stamped "PROJECT: FALCONER" in the same font as every government black-box initiative. I rip it open, paper flying, and the photographs inside hit me like a collapsing lung—pictures of Anna, looking younger, sharper, in a sterile room with a whiteboard behind her. She's got a pointer, a smile that looks forced, and on the board behind her: a diagram of Whispering Pine, bisected by red lines, each labeled PHASE I, II, III.
I want to sit down, but the floor is sticky with death. I flip deep into the report. There's a memo, dated three months ago:
—
MITCHELL IS CONTROL. IF HE REACHES EXTRACTION, INITIATE FINAL SEQUENCE.
ALL HYBRIDS DEFER TO MATRONLY. DO NOT ALLOW EXTERNAL CONTACT.
Below, handwritten: "He will come for her."
—
I squeeze the paper, remember every night Anna went cold and rigid in my arms, every morning she stared out the window past me as if seeing some tomorrow I'd never reach.
The rage comes back. I want to smash something, but there's nothing left to break but rules. I pocket the whole goddamn file and push for the stairs, the others trailing like ghosts.
We hit the next level—seven? Eight? I've lost count, and the air is thin and static-loaded, crackling my hair upright. The walls are unfinished, plywood and conduit, and the only light comes from a string of bare bulbs, each flickering on its own insane cycle.
We don't get ten feet before something drops from the ceiling, lands between us, and for a moment it just hovers, arms out, as if inviting a dance. Then it is moving, faster than hunger. Fa'amasino yelps, takes a round through the shoulder, then crumples and skids down the hallway, leaving a red flag in his wake.
I hear Sloane curse, but then the thing is on him, and the only sound is the shriek of metal, bone, and something else, a gnashing wet joy that's part scream, part laugh, part birth noise from a universe that specializes in bad endings.
I don't shoot. I run. I run because I see the signs, now, the arrows painted in glow-in-the-dark pigment, all pointing to a single, receding vanishing point at the end of the corridor. It's not survival. It's gravity.
I barrel down, turn a corner, and come into a room so white it stuns. The air is humming with electricity, the walls pulsing with the same blue as the hybrid's eyes. At the far end: glass. A glass room, and inside, a woman sitting cross-legged on the floor, wrapped in a hospital blanket, head down, hair hanging loose.
Anna.
She looks up. Her gaze is blank, but then she smiles, and it's real, and it's for me. I want to cry, but I'm empty.
I edge forward, gun held loose, not sure what to do with it now.
"I knew you'd come," she says, voice whetted by weeks of silence, but still her own. "They made me wait."
I step to the glass. "Are you—"
She nods. "It's me baby. Please let me out, it's been so long since I've held you in my arms."
I rest my head against the glass, cheek hot, pulse thudding in my ears. I can see her hand trembling even as she smiles. For a second, I don't remember the trick of the world, don't care about the whispers and blood and whatever's hunting behind the walls. There's just Anna, and the electric sting of wanting.
But the glass is locked. I scan for a release, some kind of patch or pad. There's a mag-locked entry next to the portal, blinking yellow, and my hands fumble for a code or a bar or a goddamn suggestion. It hurts to think, but eventually my thumb lands on the override pad and the panel shunts green. The seal hisses, just loud enough to make my heart freeze.
The door slides. Anna steps out, barefoot, hospital blanket draped like a shroud, hair matted and eyes shining with something feral and bright. She walks to me. I drop the gun and she throws her arms around my neck. I bury my face in her shoulder, breathe the sweat and static, and think maybe, maybe, she's still the Anna I remembered.
Sloane's panting behind me, but I don't let go. Anna's grip is iron. Too tight. There's a heat to her, wild and raw, that never used to be there. I try to step back, to get a better look, but her arms clamp down, and for a second I can't breathe at all.
I hear Sloane. "Kamen—"
He's staring at Anna's feet. Her left heel is dusted with something black, a patch of bristle-fur climbing almost to the ankle. I look up, meet Sloane's wide, animal eyes, and time bends: in one fluid motion, Anna's grip pivots, her hands—Christ, the bones in her hands are longer than before—slide up, fingers splaying into claws, the skin at her wrists splitting open like fruit going bad.
Sloane lunges. He hits me hard, knocking my ribs together, and the impact cracks Anna's grip just enough for us both to tumble sideways. There's a sound I'll never unhear—a wet, meaty slash as Anna's fingers rake through the meat of Sloane's vest, catching him high on the shoulder, then again, lower, where the armor doesn't cover. He gasps, blood fountaining through his uniform, and drops out of sight, leaving me alone with the thing I let out.
Anna's face is inches from mine. She smiles. I can see the old her, underneath—the candlelight, the studied patience, the lips I used to swear I'd never forget. Then I see the new her: teeth doubled and tripled in rows, irises blown wide and gleaming as headlights. Her jaw splits, not just at the hinge but up through the cheekbones, opening in a rictus that keeps going, keeps going, until her whole head is a wound of teeth and salt-pink meat.
She speaks, but the sound isn't speech—it's a howl, layered with every bad night terror I ever had in the woods as a child, every time dad said not to look out the windows after dark. I stumble back, hands up, but Anna's already on top of me, claws pinning my wrists to the tile. She doesn't cut me yet. She just holds me there, a second too long, face shivering with the effort to keep from eating me alive.
There's a gunshot, point blank. Tran, of all people, has the scattergun up, barrel against Anna's temple. He doesn't hesitate. He fires. The head comes apart, and for a second it's just noise and hair and a fine red spray painting my eyes shut.
When I open them, Anna's body is still twitching, the head a ruin, the blood hissing as it drains through the grout. I am deaf, blind, cold. My hands are still up, still asking for mercy, but there's none left in the world.
Tran is sobbing. Sloane is down, clutching his ribs, blood pumping through his fingers. Fa'amasino is gone, just teeth marks on the floor tile and a blood trail headed to the dark.
The hybrids in the cages begin to wail. It's not noise, not exactly—it's like the whole building is mourning, every pipe and vent and filament howling in harmony with the lost. The walls start to shake. The lights go out. There's only the smell of ozone and copper and the metallic old love that never quite dies even after you murder it twice over.
I pull Anna's body off of me, cradle it like it matters, and for a second, I rock her the way you would a broken animal after the mercy shot, say I'm sorry, say her name. My shirt is soaked, and so is my hair, and there's nothing left but the echo in my teeth.
Sloane crawls to me, dragging one leg. "We have to go," he says, urgent and small. "They know she's… they know now."
I nod. I stand. Everything from here on out is autopilot, a zombie shuffle through the bad dream of endings.
We limp to the end of the hall, where the glass office is already crawling with hybrids, hands and teeth gnawing the frames. The blue-eyed one is there, at the head—its face wet with what I hope is only Anna's blood.
I ease Anna's limp body down, cradling her broken skull in my lap for one last second before I let her wrists fall free. The blood is everywhere, hot and syrupy, pooling in the trench of my elbow and painting the trigger guard of my Glock. The hybrids behind the glass grow louder, their shrieks bending into a single, low-frequency wail that sets my brain shivering in its case.
The blue-eyed one—ringmaster, mother, or just the best mimic—stands at the vanguard, smile welded to the split of its mouth. I want to shoot it so bad my finger jerks involuntarily. I line it up, squeeze, but the only sound is a flat metallic click. The slide locks back, dry and useless. I thumb the mag release, knowing it's empty, knowing I have nothing left.
"Fuck," I say, real and full-throated, then louder for the gods and Sloane and whatever's left of Anna to hear: "Fuck!"
I dig through my kit. No spare mags, only the bowie knife I keep sheathed at my ankle for last rites and true believers. I palm it, the weight awkward in my blood-slick hand, and look up at Sloane and Tran, both of them staring hollow-eyed at the mob accumulating on the other side of the glass wall.
Sloane sees the knife, nods once, his face pale but committed. Tran shakes so hard I worry he'll rip clean in two, but he clutches the scattergun like a rosary and points the barrel at the floor to keep from aiming it at his own jaw.
"We go," I say. "There's got to be another way down." I spit blood from the back of my throat, try to summon the old sheriff voice, but it comes out all gravel and panic. "Sixty-five floors, right?" I can't remember anymore if it was a floor plan or a fever dream. "That's where this ends."
Sloane grits his teeth, puts a hand on Anna's shoulder as he passes. Tran won't look at her body. I close her eyes with my thumb, just for the ritual of it, but one lid sticks open, blue and milked over, already glassy.
"We move," I say. "Now."
Out in the corridor, the hybrids are boiling up from every hatch and vent, dozens—no, hundreds by the sound—crawling in heaps, clawing one another for the right to take the lead. The blue-eyed matron is still at the glass, voice now in a keening falsetto: "End of the line, end of the line, end of the line." I want to believe it's a bluff, but my bones know better.
The only way forward is through.
"Go left!" I scream, and Sloane takes point, barreling forward with his good leg and a borrowed courage. Tran follows, sweat streaking down his face in globs. I bring up the rear, left hand clamped on my side, right hand white-knuckling the knife, slicing the air in dumb warning.
First intersection: two hybrids block the hall, hunched and dog-legged, teeth chattering in wet anticipation. Sloane fires the shotgun, the sound compressed to a thunderclap against the cinderblock. One hybrid stumbles, half its jaw gone. The other charges, leaps at Tran, claws extended. Time slows. I watch as Tran jukes, sidesteps, brings the gun up like he's done this a thousand times in training drills—then pulls the trigger.
It just clicks.
The hybrid hits him full in the chest, gnarled arms wrapping around his ribs, and they roll. Tran screams, a sound so high and bright it flays my sense of self to the root. I'm moving before I have the thought, knife arcing down, splitting the first hybrid's shoulder while Sloane tackles the other, pinning it to the tile and beating its skull to jelly with the butt of his shotgun.
Tran's face is a mask of pain and snot, but he's alive. I wedge my boot into the hybrid's mouth, hear the teeth crack, and drive the knife through the orbital socket to the hilt. It writhes for a second, then goes still.
We stagger. Sloane is pale and blood-drenched; Tran's shirt is raked open, purple bruises blooming across the gut. My own hands won't stop shaking. I hear a new sound now—a mechanical whine, deep and throaty, echoing up the stairwell like an elevator running past its design speed.
"Next junction, left," I say, but it's guesswork.
We barrel down the corridor, hybrids in pursuit but slow, tripping over the corpses of their sisters. We hit a heavy steel door, yellow stripes, a keypad oozing the residue of a dozen failed attempts. Sloane tries the handle; locked. Tran is clutching his chest, breath coming shallow, but he still has the presence to drag a fire extinguisher off the wall and hand it to me. I bash the keypad, glass and sparks and bone-dull impact, until the door shrieks open and we fall into the stairwell.
Inside: darkness and vertigo. The stairs drop away, a negative spiral into black. No rails, just open void, the kind you dream of falling through. All the power is out now, emergency strobes flickering every few flights, making the shadows strobe and bleed. It's cold. The hybrids howl up the well but don't follow. It's not part of their code, or maybe something worse is waiting down there. For us.
Sloane leads. He does it with a limp, favoring the leg but never slowing. Tran and I follow, me dragging the knife for ballast, Tran cradling the bruises and trying not to vomit with every step. We descend. Each landing amplifies the drone from below, a new frequency vibrating the fillings in my teeth. I lose track of the turns, the floors, only know we're going deeper, deeper, into the bowel of the world.
At the next landing the steps open onto a balcony, overlooking a pit filled with cages. Some empty, some full. The blue-eyed hybrid is there again, waiting. It's on the far side, perched atop a red-lit console, fingers drumming a perfect 4/4 against metal. It smiles when it sees me.
Sloane stops. "We go around," he whispers, but the hybrid hears and shakes its head, slow and mocking.
"Sheriff," it says, voice clear as a bell. "You are expected."
It stands and opens its arms, like an evil Christ. Behind it, a glass wall gives way to a laboratory, lights flickering through racks of gene sequencers and bio-tanks. And in the biggest tank, a figure—human, for once, or at least pretending—a woman in a white coat, eyes open and staring into the blue-lit water.
Anna again. Not dead, but floating, hair billowed like seaweed, the line of her jaw unbroken.