***
She had just hit 35 years old, but three years of hard living had honed her senses and hardened her muscles to the point where a brisk jog shouldn’t have strained her, even with the heavy thrower pack riding her shoulders. Her accelerated heartbeat and the hot-cold flashes that shivered over her skin told her that what was coming soon: the thunderclap under her skull that would steal her vision - and any coherent thought - for as long as it stayed.
It meant that she would soon be helpless, caught out in the open with no shelter and no one to keep the beasts away. And if she was too long, if she was caught, if a pack gathered and Ben came looking for her…
No. She couldn’t let that happen. His healing had been progressing remarkably well, but he was still weak - and too new to the Free Quadrants to be roaming the streets and taking on packs by himself. If they both died because she had taken a stupid shortcut, it would be her fault.
The leaves above her blurred into a melted-butter swirl as she went into a sprint, slapping aside branches and bushes that seemed to rear up out of nowhere. Every ounce of concentration was focused on getting out of the park and into the nearest building, where she needed to find someplace to hide, to ride out the storm that was brewing in her brain. Fury at the thought of being caught by a beast while helpless aided in quenching the nausea that was now in her throat, making its presence known by filling her mouth with saliva and a trace of bile.
She didn’t know what made her fall. Whether it was a rock in loose soil or a humped root, all she knew was that suddenly she was falling, seeing leaf-littered ground become leaf-laced sky as it flew by in slow motion. She landed hard on her side, the pack pulling at her left shoulder as gravity claimed it, and simply lay there, trying to stop the spinning in her head. But it was too late. It wouldn’t stop, and now the ground had joined in beneath her, twirling lazily like a top losing its momentum. She dug her fingers into the loam and held on.
A minute passed. The thunderclap that she was waiting for didn’t come. But a rustle in the leaves only a few yards away told her that something else had. She held her breath and listened, cataloguing every sound she heard. The whisper of the breeze through the boughs. The faint, far-off hum of an aircar a few blocks over. And, conspicuously, no birds.
Predator, then.
She waited another minute, but the rustling didn’t come again. It made no sense. Atlas City was one of the orbiting worlds, artificially constructed and almost completely tame – as far as wildlife was concerned, at least. But if it really were a beast or a spore, it would have been on her already.
When she was certain that whatever she had heard was gone, she lay still for a moment longer. Finally, she was able to raise her head and struggle upwards to sit. It felt like swimming through tar, like the very air was resisting her. When she opened her eyes, she found herself instantly light-blind; the pain stabbed into her temples, making her bite her lip. But she kept them open - and found herself looking into the eyes of a young female beast, crouched not three yards away with a scrap of pink umbrella clutched in her hands.
When the shock of seeing one so close and so uncharacteristically motionless had subsided, Helen was hit with yet another shock.
The beast looked just like Ben. Same features, though feminine and with a twisted savagery. Same sandy hair, though long and stringy with dirt and blood. It couldn’t have been older than twenty. And with that, the beast was no longer an it; it was a she. And she was the first beast that Helen had allowed herself to recognize even in passing as human since her first kill, three years ago.
Helen blinked, unable to believe what she was seeing. The girl was a beast, there was no doubt about that. Her eyes were the correct pearlescent black, all trace of iris and whites erased. Her mouth was open in a half-snarl, her lips and chin dark with dried blood. It was all over her hands and forearms, as well, and under fingernails that were already starting to grow and harden into brutally sharp claws. There were unhealed cuts on her arms from running through trees and bushes, completely insensible to pain.
Most telling of all were the wounds just visible through ripped clothing that was well on its way to rags: deep, vicious wounds that revealed the barest gleam of a rib bone and extended down across one torn-open thigh. Any human with injuries like those wouldn’t have been able to stand, let alone survive the blood loss without immediate medical aid. But the beasts’ blood clotted almost instantly, an effect of the engineering that had created them; they barely bled, but they also never healed. Some were able to go for months before muscles that just wouldn’t work anymore took them down permanently.
She took in the details almost instantly while trying to think through pain that was already building again like a slow, unstoppable tidal wave. But maybe her perception of time had already gone askew; the beast hadn’t attacked, and she had had more than enough time to recognize Helen not only as potential prey, but as weak potential prey.
There was something electric and surreal about the way they studied each other, predator and prey, Helen fighting to keep her eyes open against the light, and the beast with her inscrutable black eyes. She felt a sudden urge to speak to it, but instinct and fear kept her still and silent. The beast began to shake slightly, the pink fabric fluttering in her hand like a captive butterfly.
Helen reached slowly for the knife she kept in her right boot. The beast followed her hand with her eyes and stood slowly, dropping the scrap of pink. Helen recognized the stance, and knew she wouldn’t be able to keep her at bay for long with the knife. It would be no more than a distraction, at best. But she had no other plan, and damned if she wasn’t going to try.
Or would have tried, if the blood hadn’t suddenly decided to leave her head in a rush. She swore viciously as darkness flooded her vision. Then she lost consciousness.
***
Previous installments:
Prologue: The Awakening
Part 1.1
***
Previous installments:
Prologue: The Awakening
Part 1.1
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