He stared at me, realizing I was telling the truth. “Oh. Well, in that case, no need to worry about cams or anyone storming the lab. They’ll be too occupied to bother with us for a while.” He winced, maybe at the pain, or maybe at how muddled he sounded, and muttered, “One second.”
All in all, he was taking the situation pretty calmly. Maybe he was trying to keep me calm. If I could do something like this…what else could I do with this power? Especially if I lost my mind?
He dragged himself to his knees and crawled over to the cabinets, holding his bleeding jaw as if it might fall off. He wrenched open a cupboard door with his other hand, then another door and another, until he pulled out a large, white box with a shiny red cross on it—a medi-kit.
The sparks were still threatening the corners of my vision, seemingly unraveling it at the edges, and maybe unraveling me. So I waited for Nev while he fumbled open the case, pulled out an injector tube, and jammed it into the side of his neck. He followed that with a tube of a different size and shape. The effects were immediate, like when he’d removed his disguise. The erupting bruises began to fade, the swelling went down, and the bleeding stopped. He gave his jaw an experimental wiggle and spat a mouthful of blood onto the floor.
“At least now I can talk,” he said, wincing as he hauled himself upright. “And hopefully move. Qole, we need to go, now.”
“No,” I said. I didn’t quite know why, but I couldn’t. I stared at the scientist, my hand still around her throat.
He scooped his blade up from the floor when he rose and kicked the still-unconscious Bladeguard’s farther away from him. He might have leaned on the counter as he made his way over to me, but the tip of his sword was steady as he held it up to the woman’s cheek. I stared at it. The red warning light flashed on the gleaming metal, and cracks that weren’t actually there moved up the blade and into his arm—more hallucinations. At least, I assumed Nev’s arm wasn’t really cracking apart.
I shuddered, another scream of fear spiking from deep inside. I hoped I wasn’t actually screaming. I couldn’t tell what was real anymore. Maybe if insane things hadn’t truly been happening around me, I could have simply assumed I’d lost my mind entirely. But no…I’d used my body like a weapon, seized control of a huge amount of Shadow, and directed it to do what several plasma missiles probably couldn’t.
Nev glanced at me, but not for long. I distantly wondered if it was because he wanted to keep his gaze on the woman or if he couldn’t meet the blackness of my eyes. A pang shot through me at the latter thought. Were they only startling, or disturbing?
What did he see when he looked at me? A scientific curiosity, like the woman saw? A monster? And why did I care?
“Qole, you can let go of her now,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically soft, like when he’d been trying to stop me from sending him out the airlock. It was in stark contrast to the ear-piercing whoops of the alarm system.
“But I need to know why.” My words sounded desperate, clinging to that hypothetical answer like I was trying to cling to myself. Both the answer and myself seemed to be slipping out of my grasp. “Why is she doing this to me? What does everyone want from me?”
Still, my hand fell away from her neck, and the woman gulped and gasped like I’d actually been drowning her in my rage.
Nev answered in the same soothing tone. “I’ll tell you soon, I promise. But first we need to—”
“No!” I shouted, and the volume was louder than the alarms. “We’re not going until I know!”
“Okay, okay,” Nev said. “I’ll interrogate her, but you need to focus on calming down. Here, sit on the counter.”
Something brushed the skin of my arm and I jumped, the sparks leaping in my shadowy vision—but it was only Nev’s free hand, scooting me behind him. My senses were so heightened that his touch drove through me like a knife, like pure terror…except it wasn’t painful or frightening. It was electric. I fell back more than sat against the edge of the counter.
Nev didn’t seem to notice as he refocused on the woman. “You’re working with the Treznor-Nirmana family, aren’t you?” There was no trace of anything soothing left in his voice. It was as sharp and cold as the blade he held against her throat. “Answer quickly.”
She jerked a nod and coughed. The movement made her graze the edge of the sword, and even that was enough to open a superficial slice in her skin. She gasped, but Nev didn’t pull back. “Yes!”
“How long have you been following my family’s research into Shadow? And how closely?”
She didn’t hesitate for a moment, the answer spilling out of her. “Two years and extremely closely thanks to several informants. We know of your work to bind Shadow with organic matter to make it a more stable and widely applicable fuel source. But we only recently realized why you wanted to study humans who have an affinity for it.”
My fingers tightened so hard on the edge of the counter that the synthetic material creaked. Would Nev, or the Dracortes, have tried to do the same thing to me as the Treznors? A pit of darkness opened up inside me at the thought, and my vision blackened further.
Nev blinked. “It’s a part of the same research, toward that one end, nothing more. If you think that cutting into Qole would give you the answers we’re seeking, you’re wrong. We would never hurt her,” he said with extra vehemence, as if he weren’t just telling the woman; he was telling me, too.
My hands relaxed their grip slightly. Nev hadn’t wanted to hurt me. Ever. Somehow I’d already sensed that, but now I knew. The relief, like the touch of his hand, nearly flattened me.
“How else could we get the results we need in so little time, before you get them yourself??” the woman insisted. “It was your research into Shadow’s affinity with living tissue that led the Treznors to realize the potential in them.” She glanced at me. “There were rumors, but no one believed them to be true until you went yourself, my lord—”
“Please don’t waste my time with formalities after one of your underlings nearly broke my jaw,” he interrupted, a sardonic note back in his tone.
“As you like, my—sir. We knew how important your mission was. The Treznors wished to make the breakthrough first.”
“What precisely is it you want to achieve? Because I’m sure our goals aren’t the same.”
She swallowed, glancing at me again in fear, the red-alert lights glowing in her eyes. Whether the rest of the ship was occupied or not, Nev was probably right—we needed to be moving now. But I couldn’t turn away. “Precision would take hours to explain. But, put quite simply, we want to discover what makes her work, how human beings can use Shadow, and then we want to modify it for the Treznor-Nirmanas’ own use.”
“You want widespread human application. You want super-soldiers.” Nev swore. “Qole, deep breaths,” he added over his shoulder, and I realized I was nearly hyperventilating.