Part IV: Anastasis

Chapter 33

Many people believe that instinct gives us only two choices: fight or flight. They are wrong. There is a third option, a useless impulse, but no less powerful. It was this instinct I obeyed as I stared at the hand on the gun.

Freeze.

Dr. Topher took a step towards me.

“Don’t worry, Millie,” she said. “I didn’t load it with silver bullets. Those pharmacists have been barbaric to you with those cages, haven’t they? I always kept the silver to a minimum.”

She advanced another step. She looked different. But her voice was exactly the same.

“Look at you,” she breathed. “You’re not a little girl anymore. Come with me, Millie. Before someone takes you away again.”

I looked at my hands. They were bare. As soon as I moved my eyes, Dr. Topher closed the distance between us. No one else was in the parking garage. Even if I screamed and someone happened to be close by, I would only get them shot.

With her free hand, Dr. Topher patted me down. I didn’t have my phone with me. Satisfied that I posed no threat, Dr. Topher reached inside her jacket, which was far too bulky for the autumn heat. She brought forth a shining needle and held it to my throat.

“I just want you to know,” she said softly, “that if you hope to stall me, I can complete my experiment right here. I would prefer to take much greater care. There are preparations to be made that we should not skip. Scientific research is at its best when all the proper procedures are followed. But I will bypass the safety measures if you make me. I will not waste this chance.”

I knew that.

Dr. Topher arranged my hair over the syringe and took my arm. My mind flowed away and gathered in the point where the needle touched my throat.

“One more thing,” she said.

She tucked the gun into her belt and pulled a new device out of her jacket. It looked a little like a vegetable peeler with a very thin blade. She pressed a button and the blade began to whir with a quiet, high-pitched whine.

“Hold still,” she said.

She held the blade against the outside of the wristband. My skin grew warmer and warmer as the metal parted. Dr. Topher pulled the instrument back just before it reached my flesh and started another incision on the opposite side. She pulled the wristband off in two clean pieces. Hundreds of old and new puncture wounds ringed my wrist in a livid bracelet.

“They wouldn’t have let you out of their sight without this, my marvel,” Dr. Topher said. “I wish it hadn’t been necessary.”

I stared at the newly exposed perforations in my skin. There was something important about the wristband. Something I couldn’t remember. I was too small against the needle to hold my thoughts; my memories spilled out of my mind and evaporated.

Dr. Topher gripped my sleeve and pulled me to the passenger’s side of her car. She had always been stronger than she looked.

“Open the door, please,” she said.

Her voice sounded far away. She was always dimmer when my mind was elsewhere in my body. After all these years, that strategy still worked. It was just like being in the lab again.

You’re not in the lab anymore. The words bubbled sluggishly to the surface of my thoughts; my fingers were on the door handle before I remembered it was Luc who’d spoken them. My awareness sharpened a little. Luc would grieve to see me in the arms of my adaptationist. So would all of them, but they could do nothing to help. I’d taken that choice away from them, after all they had done to protect me.

I remembered why the wristband mattered.

My knees buckled. Dr. Topher’s cool, pale hand tightened on my sleeve. The needle dragged across my throat but did not break the skin. My consciousness scraped along with it.

I sat on the rough ground, staring at Dr. Topher’s car. It was faded blue, nondescript. My mind fluttered against the needle, threatening to expand back out of that tiny spot, but it was safer to stay small in Dr. Topher’s presence. Besides, why did I need to think? I had made my decision to abandon myself to Dr. Topher’s violence — made and unmade and remade. Even if I’d been on the verge of unmaking that choice again, what did it matter now? Dr. Topher had come for me. I was hers. Couldn’t I finally let myself go?

A small voice cried out from the center of the pinprick that was me. No.

Dr. Topher hauled upward on my sleeve, but I slumped forward against the front tire. My teeth sank into the inside of my lip. She seized me under the arm and I gasped through the blood in my mouth. The work of her hands had always been violent, but never the touch.

“Get. Up,” she hissed.

I spat bright blood onto the tire. I pressed my hand against it as I rose, grinding it into the rubber. I closed my fist around my gritty, sticky palm and let Dr. Topher throw me into the car. The smell of her surrounded me, bringing the ache of remembered pain to my bones. No new pain rose to take its place. My body remained stubbornly intact.

Dr. Topher pulled out of the garage and into the sunlight. Buildings and supplicant trees flashed by, silent and unconcerned. The strangers outside might as well have been on the moon. Dr. Topher did not speak until we were at the edge of town.

“That was a risk I’d hoped to avoid,” she said quietly. The needle was still in her hand, pressed against the steering wheel. “But that conversation you had with Bicks was worrying. You didn’t sound like yourself. I was afraid you would do something drastic.” She glanced at me. “There’s blood on your lip. Did you hurt yourself when you fell?”

She sounded genuinely concerned, the sheer absurdity of which finally brought my eyes to her face. Dr. Topher had changed herself, but not through adaptation. All of her features had been surgically altered: eyes, nose, chin. Her hair was gray now, instead of light brown, but the new face beneath it was young, the pale skin creamy and unblemished. Nobody but me would ever recognize her.

It was impossible to operate on one’s own face. Someone had helped Dr. Topher, someone who must have known who she was. Luc was right: even if Dr. Topher had disposed of her helpers along the way, she had received plenty of knowing aid over the last ten years.

A tiny red spark ignited in the cold void inside of me. It wasn’t a plan or even a desire; it was just plain hatred. It burned, but at least it thawed the numbness. 

The desert sun fell slantwise across Dr. Topher’s new face. My teeth were still blunt, but I didn’t have to use a weapon she had made. Thousands of people died in car crashes every year.

I leaned forward, and in a flash, Dr. Topher’s hand came off the steering wheel. She pressed the needle against my arm.

“I always knew I’d succeeded in instilling some fighting instincts in you,” she said conversationally. “My apprentices doubted it, even when they saw that exceptional scene after your first complete transformation. They said you had just been trying to escape, that you were a mindless animal. You were so quiet after that, and those idiots thought you would never be a warrior. But I knew you had it in you.”

My lip was still bleeding. I swallowed, and the metallic taste coated my mouth and throat.

“Your Mr. Bicks agreed with the apprentices. He believed you meek and pliable. I think that was why he decided it was safe to help me. But I guess you showed him, didn’t you? I knew that fighter I’d created was still there, even when no one else did. Do you remember, just a couple transformations ago, how you stared down that camera and said, ‘Enjoy the show’ — you do remember, don’t you? Oh, marvel! I don’t mind telling you that I cried. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed you.”

She’s a fool, I thought, shocked to the core. I had never thought of her that way, not in my time in the lab or all the years since. She was still everything I had known her to be: obsessed, relentless, brilliant. But also? A complete fool. Dr. Topher knew my rage was aimed at her, but she spoke of it with pride and affection. She still believed I could be the weapon she’d designed. She thought she could make me do whatever she wanted again.

Dr. Topher didn’t know me. Not anymore.

I glanced out the window. As usual, there were no other cars on the road. If I grabbed the steering wheel now, I would hurt no one but the two of us. But the needle still pressed against my arm. I did not know what it contained or how it would change me.

What does it matter if we die together? I thought. I’d accepted that risk when I made my plan, and again when I said “yes” to Mr. Bicks, but at no point had I accepted the risk of that needle. As long as Dr. Topher held it against me, my body refused to move.

When we reached the Petrified Forest, Dr. Topher veered off the road and drove along the Forest’s western edge for so long that I was sure all traces of my blood would be gone from the tire. Finally, she began to weave in and out of the frozen trees, the car jolting and shuddering. The needle poked at my skin, but Dr. Topher had removed her thumb from the plunger. Whatever serum the syringe held stayed where it was. For now.

We trundled into the heart of the Petrified Forest, down a steep hill to the bottom of a little valley. I didn’t see the small group of sand-colored tents until we were practically on top of them. We couldn’t have been more than four or five miles from the compound.

Dr. Topher stopped the car and smiled. “I’ve traveled far and wide since you saw me last, my marvel, but I could never stay away from you for long.”

She got out and opened my door, drawing me from my seat with her hand on my wrist and the needle at my throat. A foul stench engulfed us as we walked towards one of the tents. Dr. Topher threw back the flap.

For the first time, I tried to run.

The needle clattered to the ground as Dr. Topher threw her sinewy arms around my waist. I bucked and kicked and scratched. Dr. Topher laughed in my ear.

“That’s what I’ve been waiting for!” she cried.

Dr. Topher was in late middle age now, but no one had ever broken her body, and a decade on the run had kept her spry. She wrestled me to the ground with ease.

“No! No!” I screamed.

Dr. Topher grunted as my knee collided with her hip. She pressed her body onto mine and reached into the tent. A second later, my wrist was on fire.

Dr. Topher flipped me over and closed the second ring of the handcuffs around my other arm. The silver stole my breath and my strength. She mashed my face into the ground while I choked and sobbed, blood and tears forming dusty pools in the dirt.

Dr. Topher hauled me up and pushed me into the tent. I kicked her again, but she caught my leg, and a second pair of cuffs clapped around my ankles, which she hooked to a heavy weight. She left me there. I turned my head away from the body next to me, but I could not block out his voice.

“Look at me,” Mr. Bicks said, his voice thick. “Look at me, you bitch!”

I looked.

Mr. Bicks was cuffed like I was. He’d been stripped to his underwear. Patchy black fur had erupted over his entire body and face. One of his legs was crooked. The joints were in all the wrong places, and his foot had crumpled like a crushed flower. Claws split the pads of his fingers. Blood dripped from his mouth.

He was stuck.

“I didn’t know I could do that,” I pleaded.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Mr. Bicks said, spitting next to my head. “It’s not all you. At first, your filthy bite just made me sick. I could — smell things different. And taste things. Then it —started spreading — I could feel my muscles stretching …” I didn’t want to listen to this, but Mr. Bicks couldn’t seem to stop talking. His eyes were unchanged but wild. “I thought it was just an infection until I picked up the cuffs and my hands started burning … so I told her. She said she could fix it. She said now that you’d started it, she could turn me all the way.”

“Why would you believe her?” The silver reduced my voice to a ragged whimper. “You’ve seen me! You’ve known me for years!”

Dr. Topher’s voice spoke from outside the tent. “Raymond isn’t like everyone else. They only saw the errors, but he could see the potential.” She opened the flap and crouched next to us, holding a leather bag in her lap. “The government caved too early. If they’d just ignored me a little longer, I would have gotten it right. Do you know how close to perfect you are, Millie? One more trial, that was all I needed. I already had the next subjects picked out. With them, Stasis would be over. We’d no longer be trapped in this endless monotony, this absence of purpose. How long has it been since our species has truly strived for anything? Since we’ve truly thrived? We are the absolute peak of evolution, and those of us who are intelligent enough to understand that deserve to live like it. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. It’s certainly what dear Raymond wanted.” She looked at him, her new face wrinkling in consternation. “Maybe you were just too old for this, despite Millie’s helpful intervention. We started them young for a reason. Her bite will surely work better on children. The results are still valuable, though. I assure you, Raymond, your data will lead to further advances.”

I expected Mr. Bicks to hurl abuse at Dr. Topher, but he looked too afraid to speak. Dr. Topher turned back to me.

“As for you, my marvel … you’re already so close.”

She reached into her bag and brought out the clamp.

Chapter 34

I reared away from Dr. Topher with all my strength. My ankle nearly snapped against the cuff, but the weight did not budge.

“But the safety procedures!” I protested desperately, fear forcing me to speak to her. “You have preparations! You said!”

“Oh, marvel, your poor voice!” Dr. Topher said. “Werewolf vocal cords are built to withstand wear and tear, but yours must have sustained some damage over the years. Hopefully this will fix that. In answer to your concerns, the preparations are included.” She tapped the first three syringes on the left side of the clamp. “I admit this instrument’s initial inception was a bit of a flight of fancy, but it does allow me to get everything done at once.”

The metal jaw grinned at me as she checked each syringe. Beside me, Mr. Bicks cowered with his clawed hands over his head.

“I was able to save some of the old samples, and I’ve updated my formulae over the years,” Dr. Topher explained. “I’ve made great strides this past decade, despite my obstacles. But I never knew if my greatest innovation had worked, not until I saw what you did to Raymond. You know, I had to laugh when everyone started calling you ‘synthetics.’ It’s hardly an accurate name for the rest of you. My colleagues, such as they were, lacked the imagination to do more than simply transplant adaptations. You wouldn’t call a person with a transplanted heart ‘synthetic,’ would you? But you, Millie — you are unlike anyone who has ever lived. I became an adaptationist through my studies, but you hold that power in your very body. Like a spirit of change.”

Too fast. This wasn’t at all like my plan, vague though it had been. I thought if Dr. Topher took me when it wasn’t time to transform, I could count on blood tests, urine samples, and a real lab, not a tent in the desert. I’d assumed I could bide my time, and that the wolf would eventually surface and take care of everything itself. I knew what to expect from Dr. Topher. I’d learned.

But exile had made her impatient. She opened the mouth of the clamp.

My instinct still said freeze, but I didn’t have to do what instinct told me. Yet with Mr. Bicks lying half-formed beside me, I knew the consequences of choosing a different way.

Still. Still. I chose.

I slammed my wrists together and swung the handcuffs as hard as I could at Dr. Topher’s head. The impact of metal on jawbone cracked like a gunshot. She dropped the clamp as her head snapped backward, revealing a thin white line beneath her chin: the seam of her new face. Red bloomed where the silver struck.

I swung back my arms to hit her again, but Dr. Topher lunged forward and seized the chain between the cuffs. She yanked me down to the dirt. I doubled over, my feet still weighted to the ground. My shoulders jarred against their sockets. Dr. Topher struggled to keep me pinned with one hand as she reached again for the clamp. I slammed the crown of my skull into her nose.

Blood sprayed over both of us. I knew this blood, the purest essence of Dr. Topher, always flowing just beneath the surface of her hands. While her life force pumped safe and steady through her body, she had spilled our blood like libations to an ancient god. She’d reduced us to parts: red disks, viscous plasma, sticky white protector cells that uselessly strove to save our little bodies from infection. But we could not be saved, because she was the infection, and she was stronger than us all.

I couldn’t mourn my first, forgotten pack like they deserved, but I could fight for them.

I beat my body against Dr. Topher in whatever way I could. She hit me back. The violence reverberated in my ribs, but I did not try to protect myself until Dr. Topher managed to take up the fallen clamp. I wrestled her for it. The exposed needles shook, and one began to slip from its post. Dr. Topher yelped and pushed it back into place.

Her upturned wrist thrust between the jaws.

We both saw what she had done at the same time. Finally, she was at the mercy of her own experiments. With one movement, I could do to her what she had done to me. My hands twitched on the clamp.

I did not close it.

Dr. Topher pulled a needle from its post and stabbed me in the leg.

I screamed and tore the needle out, but it was too late. Dr. Topher had already depressed the plunger. Heat pooled in my thigh muscle, igniting every filament. Dr. Topher pushed my hands out of the way and locked the rest of the clamp over my scars, punching the needles through the hardened tissue. The pain was intimate and familiar, like no time at all had passed since the first day she had bitten me.

Dr. Topher leaned back, panting and smiling through her blood. My body sent frantic signals to my brain: I’m in danger. I twitched and retched. As the pain mounted, it changed. I had never felt quite this way before, but in the most primal part of my brain, the neural pathway that all mortal creatures shared, I understood.

Dr. Topher leaned forward, as though to soothe me. She thought me incapacitated. She didn’t know how accustomed to agony I had become over the last ten years. As long as my bones weren’t breaking and my organs weren’t failing, I could still —

Dr. Topher yelped as I threw my body onto hers. I drove my elbow into her stomach, tore the gun from her waistband, and pointed it at her heart.

“Marvel?” she whispered.

“Take the silver off!” I screamed. “Get it off me!”

Dr. Topher’s eyes fell from my face to her gun. She slowly produced a key from her pocket as I pushed the barrel into her sternum. She visibly weighed her options — methodical as ever — then reached under the gun to unlock the handcuffs. They fell away.

I shifted the aim of the gun to her head. “Ankles.”

Dr. Topher bent over my legs. The only sounds in the tent were the click of the key and the labored breaths of three sets of lungs.

I shuddered when my ankles were set free. I never wanted silver on my skin again.

The new hair on my palms cushioned the gun against my skin, but the weapon was growing heavier by the second. I wouldn’t be able to hold it much longer. Dr. Topher stared down the barrel, her eyes wide.

“Cuff yourself,” I said, while my tongue could still form words.

“Marvel —”

“Do it!”

Still moving slowly and deliberately, Dr. Topher closed the handcuffs around her own wrists, and then, when I didn’t lower the gun, around her ankles, as well. I reached forward and pulled the little blade from her pocket and threw it across the tent, then jerked my chin down at the key by my feet.

“Swallow it,” I commanded.

“Marvel, what are you hoping to accomplish?” Dr. Topher asked. Her voice was calm, but her lips were pale.

“You’re the one who said I’m a fighter,” I said. “Do you think I won’t pull the trigger?”

Dr. Topher’s eyes swept over me. She’d changed their color from blue to hazel, but I recognized the look in them. She was making observations, searching for results. The fur crept up my arms, but I was still girl-shaped. I didn’t know how much longer I could hold onto this cliff, but neither did Dr. Topher. Moving her manacled arms awkwardly, she picked up the key and put it in her mouth. She choked on the first try, but on the second, she forced the key down her throat. Her face went even paler.

“Now what?” she whispered.

The pain redoubled. It was time. The gun thudded to the ground, and I fell on top of it. Dr. Topher moved towards me, but I bared my still-blunt teeth and she drew back.

I didn’t have much time for last words. I said the first thing that came to mind, and I felt the truth as I spoke it: “I won’t make your changes.”

Dr. Topher smiled sadly with bloody lips. “I know they made you hate me, marvel, but you’ll thank me when you’re strong. Just try for me.”

The only answer she got was a crunching sound as my body spasmed into a new shape. Dr. Topher flinched, something I had never seen her do before. She half-slid, half-crawled from the tent. I couldn’t stop her, but I didn’t want her near me anyway. Not for this.

I changed.

Of course it hurt. Do I need to describe it? I’ve explained my pain so many times.

I let go of the cliff. I couldn’t fight the transformation anymore, if transformation was truly what this was. Time stretched and folded like my muscles and nerves. I had no way to mark its passage, but I still knew when the changing should have ended. It didn’t.

I was stuck again.

I howled and screamed and made sounds that were neither or somehow both. Beside me, Mr. Bicks, my captor-predator-victim, made sounds of his own. Dying sounds. I knew by his scent that he didn’t have long.

Neither did I.

As my agony crescendoed, I instinctively tried to locate a point of pain on my shifting body, but my boundaries were moving too fast. I couldn’t keep up with myself. The only real shape was the gun beneath my back.

I stopped trying to be smaller. That was a survival tactic, and I wasn’t going to survive.

I opened my mind to the whole of my body. I wasn’t a wolf and I wasn’t a girl, but I wasn’t nothing, either. I was my brutal conscience, my beastly other will, and the dead and unwept-for children. I was the synthetic survivors underground. I was the forsaken runaways of Supplicants Grove.

I was a bite in a cage. I was a kiss in an abandoned house.

The brink of death was an honest place. Dr. Topher told me to try, and once I had obeyed her. That first day Dr. Topher closed the clamp on me, I was ready and willing. Had her experiment succeeded, I would have destroyed whatever she wanted and never questioned anything. I would have bitten for her. I would have turned more children into her marvels.

But that wasn’t what happened. That never happened. I didn’t do those things!

I was a weapon, but not the one Dr. Topher fashioned. I was not what I had been born, and neither was I what I had been made.

I had nothing to offer but myself, and there was no one but me to accept the offering. It was my last chance to do so. So finally I did.

Sleep was just unconsciousness. My hip wrenched and tore me awake again in the night. The light illuminating the thin cloth of the tent had changed from the harsh sun to the cool moon. I was thirsty. Dr. Topher had not given me any water.

I took as deep a breath as I could manage. My left lung seemed to be punctured at the moment, but I still brought in enough air to taste the change in its quality.

Slowly, I turned my shapeless head towards Mr. Bicks. His half-changed limbs were motionless. My stomach heaved with more than just the unfinished transformation. The corpse’s form blurred as either tears or blood filled my eyes.

At least Dr. Topher was bound and ready to be captured. When the others came, they would take her away. I hadn’t completely failed in my mission, though soon I would follow my victim into the stench of death.

My ribs shifted. Tissue knitted. My lung reinflated. I took a gulp of air, and I howled until my voice died. No one answered, but I was used to that. I just hoped that maybe a last lingering spirit might be listening, and that she would protect the next girl.

A tarantula crawled under the flap of the tent. Curiously, it inspected my half-changed hand. It rested two of its hairy, delicate feet on my palm. I hoped my hand would not change and scare it away. I didn’t want to be alone.

The tarantula’s form dimmed. At first I thought the moon was setting, but it was just my sight.

Beat, I begged my heart. Just for a little longer.

When I heard the howling, I thought that I’d died, but that couldn’t be true. I was still in too much pain.

The howl came again, louder this time. I realized I must be hallucinating. I’d never actually done that. Then again, I’d never died before, either.

At the next howl, the tarantula twitched and ran. I stared blearily at the empty space where it had stood.

Another howl.

Gret?

Come find me.

I could barely see, but I heard Gret enter the tent. She made a sound, half-snort and half-sneeze, three times in a row, as she tried to breathe Mr. Bicks’s death out of her nose, out of her lungs. The whole tent was rancid with it.

A snout nuzzled my hairy half-girl throat. I focused my eyes as well as I could. The wolf crouched in front of me, her gaze frightened. She sniffed all over my body. When she got to my thigh, she jumped back, then approached again cautiously. The sight in one of my eyes sharpened for a moment, and I saw that all of Gret’s fur stood on end. She growled at the oozing wounds where the metallic jaw had punctured my flesh.

Her teeth reflected the dim light. I began to laugh.

Gret’s head snapped up. I couldn’t speak, but I felt something like a smile on the ruins of my face. I found her eyes.

Do it. Do it, do it, do it. I stared at her, willing her to understand. Gret tilted her head to the side.

I opened my mouth as wide as I could and crashed my broken teeth together.

Gret stood still for a moment. Then, so carefully, she bent down and opened her jaws around my leg. The ends of her teeth aligned with my reopened scars.

She looked up at me. A question.

I nodded, and Gret bit me.

I threw my head back and screamed. Gret sank her teeth deeper into my flesh, locking me in place, holding me together. All the pain in my body flowed away and pooled into those sharp points.

It hurt so much. I never wanted it to stop. She didn’t let go.

My bones broke anew, and I didn’t fight it for a second. Gret held on until everything was over. Only then did she release me, my blood dark on her teeth. Breathing hard, I stood. I was small and shaky, but I was a wolf, and so was Gret. We left the tent together.