The two lab techs leapt back in alarm, then immediately reversed course, diving at me with shears and syringe. I seized their plunging hands before they could reach me, and their bones crumpled in my grip like clumps of granulated snow. Ignoring their agonized screams, I bashed their heads together over the table, then pushed off them, tearing my feet out of the restraints. I rolled off the table just as the third tech, the one who had bludgeoned Nev, came at me.
Nev was still conscious somehow. After staring at me in shock—shock I should have been feeling myself—he took a hand off his bleeding face long enough to swipe at the foot of the tech and try to trip him. But I didn’t need his help. I simply sidestepped the attack and shoved the tech into the wall with such force that he cracked the smooth, white surface. He fell to the floor like a broken doll.
Nev tried to say something through the blood in his mouth. I shouldn’t have been able to understand him, but with my heightened senses I made out the mangled words as if he were speaking them clearly in my ear: “Other one.”
I spun. There was a fourth and last tech in the corner. No, not a tech, I somehow sensed, but the one in charge of the lab—a scientist, maybe. I could tell by her stance, and my body recognized her as a greater threat than the others. She was sidling along the wall, trying to reach the alarm button. My hand seemed to move on its own, faster than I could think, catching up a fallen scalpel. The instrument left my grip just as quickly, pinning the shoulder of her lab coat to the wall.
It wouldn’t have held her for long. But it was enough time for me to vault over the operating table and smash her to the wall with my bare hands. One flexed on her throat, making her eyes roll back in her head.
I had to grope for words, remember how to speak. “Tell me,” I breathed. I wanted to say, Tell me what’s happening to me, but she looked just as shocked as everyone else had, so I went to the next most important thing. “Tell me what you want with me.”
I had a clue, now, since my body had just torn through a metal alloy that was probably used to build ships. But I still had to know for sure. I leaned in, my face only inches away from hers. Her expression was bordering on full panic.
My eyes probably looked pitch black to her, since I was still viewing the world through the dark pane of glass. Except now there were bright sparks in the corners, almost the reverse of what usually happened. But these sparks were brighter than the light of the normal world—something else. Something new. Something greater.
Or something worse.
As the sparks grew, shapes began to skitter around me, cracking across my hands, across the woman’s face. For a moment, we both seemed to shatter…but then we snapped back together again.
I was starting to hallucinate. This was the beginning of the end. It didn’t matter that I’d just developed some Shadow-related power that no one, to my knowledge, ever had before. Because I was also going crazy…which happened to everyone like me. This was the dark path that Onai, that my parents, had walked. A pulse of terror ripped through my fury, almost like a scream from inside me.
“Nev?” I said, my voice afraid, pleading, and it surprised me. I wasn’t even sure what I was asking him. To make it stop? To help me?
Why would I turn to him for help? He was the one who had gotten me into this. Then again, he’d tried to get me back out of it, and he was the only one helping me right now.
Maybe he thought I was only asking for tips on how to get answers from the woman, because he burbled, “Squeezing her neck too hard.”
I relaxed my grip on the woman’s throat long enough to let her suck in a wheezing breath.
“You have abilities we’ve never seen,” she rasped. “We want to understand your Shadow affinity. We need it—”
I choked her off again as I shook my head. “You…you want this? This…affinity…drove my parents mad. Killed them. Killed my grandparents. Killed almost my entire family.”
There was something else there, something I couldn’t quite place that was stoking my anger like a plasma furnace—no, like burning Shadow. The sparks crackled in my vision.
The woman shied away, but she was still stupid enough to open her mouth and gasp, “But…you must understand. Before now, we’ve only heard rumors of the heightened senses of those with Shadow affinity, but this strength is something else entirely. Your people, and others like you, have evolved an ability to use Shadow we don’t yet comprehend. You are evolved, like super-beings. If only you knew how to use it, we—”
“If only it didn’t kill us, you mean,” I spat, interrupting. And then I understood what was making me so angry. “This is my life. My death. My family’s tragedy. We’ve suffered for this for so long, and gained so little. How dare you try to just come in and take it?”
“Qole,” Nev grunted from the floor. “Don’t—”
“Well,” I laughed, and the sound was as black as my vision. As cracked and as crazy. “Over my dead body, you will.”
I’d always kept my distance, tried not to touch Shadow outside of what was already in my body. Tried to restrain myself, for my own sake, and only sense what was out there. This time, I lifted my hand—literally, there in the lab—and I reached for it like never before.
I sensed a greater pool of darkness, the way I often could when fishing: Shadow, a ways from me. It was the huge cache we had aboard the Kaitan. I wasn’t sure how I did it, but this time, for the first time across so great a distance, I seized onto it directly. I didn’t draw it toward myself, or into my body, but somehow I pulled my consciousness to it.
My vision exploded, fragmenting. In all of the fracturing swirls, I fell apart. I was truly outside myself, and I could hear Nev shouting at me from somewhere far away. But I was elsewhere…in the hold of my ship.
I was with the Shadow. I was a part of the Shadow.
I didn’t take all of it, but I took a lot of it. And then I was racing along the vents and plumbing of this ship, working my way into its cracks. The ship was so smooth, but the cracks were there. I was in its veins, its blood, infecting as I went.
And then I found the ship’s heart.
The massive explosion threw us all sideways. That snapped me back to my body, in the lab. That, and the alarm that went off, blaring in my ears. Red warning lights flared around the room.
I managed to stay upright and kept the woman standing with me by my grip on her neck.
“No need to go for the alarm, now,” I told her.
“What happened?” Nev slurred from the floor.
“I think I blew up the ship’s engine.” I didn’t like how far away my voice still sounded, as if I’d left it behind wherever I had gone. My words sounded insane, too. Manipulating Shadow from so far away should have been impossible, and yet I had somehow done it. But at what cost to myself??
He barked a laugh of disbelief. “This destroyer has three primary engines.”
“I think I blew them all up, then.”