My eyes snapped open to the cold, hard floor beneath my fingers—tangled in coarse fur I couldn’t place and the shrill alarm hammering inside my skull. I drew in a ragged breath and forced myself upright, recognizing the sterile white walls of the corridor. The same hallway. My hallway… the one I'd torn thr… or dreamed I'd torn through, or…how long ago was that? Red emergency lights swept the corridor in slow rotations, painting the walls in pulses of crimson. My palm was flat against the linoleum. Blood beneath it, still warm. I pulled my hand back and stared at it. No feathers. His damn feathers were gone now. No trace of anything that could explain what I was remembering.
I wobbled to my feet, pain lancing through my abdomen where a jagged wound lay now neatly wired shut with coarse black sutures. I should have been clothed, draped in a hospital gown at most—but I stood shirtless, crooked stitches glinting in the harsh light. My hand trembled; nausea curled in my gut as if I’d swallowed acid. The alarm kept blaring, yet every other sound was deathly still.
I turned and froze. Clinical staff, I realized with a lurch, bodies strewn along the walls in grotesque disarray. Had I done this? Had something in me slipped loose and gone feral? The guilt landed before I could even finish the thought. I pushed past the corpses, heart hammering, until I nearly stepped on a Sun Jin soldier crumpled at the base of the wall. Bethian. Feline. Sun Jin Imperial uniform, local issue too, the same ones from my dream, down to the last detail. Not similar. Identical. He was bleeding from a deep laceration across his lightly armored belly. I looked down at my right hand. My claws… these short, small, Amber Krowen claws… throbbing at their base. The soldier's assault rifle lay beside him, muzzle still warm. My fingers closed around it before I'd decided to reach for it.
Each new corner revealed more carnage. Whoever did this… me or them… had left a trail of broken bodies in my own footprints. I forced myself to keep moving. I had spent years as someone's instrument of slaughter, put to use against people who never had a chance, and I had told myself, no… promised myself… that it was over. That I would never again be the thing that walked out of a village left quiet. The bodies on this floor wore the same stillness. If I had done this, if the Bloodtiger had slipped its leash again while I was somewhere else inside my own head, I didn't know what was left on the other side of that truth. And Shiinx was somewhere in this building. I kept moving and tried not to finish the thought. I couldn't finish the thought. If she was on this floor, if I had… no. There were options a man could take, if he was the kind of danger that didn't sleep, that couldn't be reasoned with, that hurt people every time the lights went out inside him. I knew what those options were. I moved faster.
My rifle felt impossibly heavy as I crept around the corner, the only illumination coming from the rotating red-and-white emergency lights slashing across the walls. Radio static and distant footsteps thumped through my ears, each beat echoing in my skull. My pulse throbbed as I braced for whatever waited in the flickering shadows.
A sudden gleam, another rifle trained on me. For a heart-stopping moment, their muzzles followed my every twitch, until I heard voices I knew. The few Asuya guards lowered their weapons, relief softening their grip, and Shiinx, with them, did the same. Through the strobing lights, she stepped forward, her face pale but intense, relief melting into something sharper.
“Shiinx, thank Varuna,” I exhaled, tension leaking from my shoulders as she rushed in close.
She pressed a trembling hand to my arm, her fingers digging in. “Forza, are you okay?” Her eyes… they sunk uncomfortably deep into my own.
I tried to force a smile, but the lights cast shadows that made me doubt. “I’m… good enough. What’s going-”
Her voice cut me off, steady and worried. “No, Forza. Are you really okay? Are you here with me?”
Her gaze pinned me under those revolving lights, and I willed my vision to clear. “Yeah… I mean, yeah,” I stammered, adrenaline still coursing through me.
She said nothing, but her grip tightened until I felt the bones in my arm protest. Concern deepened in her eyes… more than she let on. After a breath, she spoke quietly. “We came back for you.”
My brows shot up. “Why would you come back for me? And why the Sun Jin soldiers? They traced us?”
Shiinx nodded toward a guard tapping on a comm unit. “They did. Two dozen slipped into the lab. They wanted you.”
A cold knot formed in my gut. “Wanted me? Is that why I was lying in that hallway?”
She paused, studying me in the shifting red glare. “Forza, are you sure you’re alright?”
I ran a hand through my hair, half in thought, half needing to feel something physical under my fingers to make sure this was real. "I don't know. Why do you keep asking? What happened?" But even as I said it, I saw the hallway again. The bodies. The blood still warm under my palm. The Sun Jin soldier, but the others, the clinical staff strewn against the walls. Not Sun Jin. Not enemies. I looked down at my claws. "Shiinx." My voice came out wrong.
Her jaw clenched, and she met my eyes like she knew secrets I’d rather forget. “You happened, Forza,” she whispered, voice low.
Confusion and a flicker of dread washed over me. “I… what? I don’t remember doing anything.” A half lie, I remember the nightmare.