Jacin gestured to the holograph. “Have any of you gone into a lumber sector lately?”
Cinder pressed her lips.
“That’s what I thought. I doubt any of your political friends have, either. It’s probably a coincidence.”
“Actually,” said Cress, pulling her wide-eyed gaze away from her portscreen, “one of us has been there.” She input a new command, transferring the feed she was watching up to the holograph.
It was a collection of the queen’s surveillance videos, all labeled LW-12. They were dark and grainy, but as Cinder’s eyes adjusted she could see rows of trees in the outside shots and wood-paneled walls on the interiors. She focused on one of the more crowded feeds, which appeared to be inside a medical building, although it was nothing like the sleek, shiny laboratories of New Beijing.
There were so many people, taking up what few beds there were while others curled against walls or collapsed in corners.
Stepping closer to the image, Jacin enlarged one of the feeds, zooming in on a rash of blue-and-red rings across one patient’s throat, then to the bloodstained pillow beneath another patient’s head.
“It does look like letumosis,” Cinder said, gut spasming with instinctive fear.
“Are those what I think they are?” asked Iko, pointing.
“Lunar soldiers,” Cress confirmed, enlarging one of the outside feeds that showed dozens of mutant men standing among the citizens. Many seemed caught up in a fervent conversation. Cinder had never seen them when they weren’t in attack mode, and if it wasn’t for their deformed faces, they would have looked just like, well, really big, scary men.
Then she spotted someone who was even more shocking than the mutants. A girl with red hair and a hooded sweatshirt and hands settled stubbornly on her hips. “Scarlet!”
Very much alive and very much unafraid of the predators surrounding her. In fact, as she watched, Scarlet seemed to be bossing them around, pointing her finger toward the main doors of the clinic. Half a dozen of the soldiers nodded at her and left.
“I don’t compute,” said Iko.
Thorne laughed, as jovial as Cinder felt. “What’s to compute? They did say they were going to build an army.”
“Yes, but Scarlet wasn’t with us in the desert. How could she be a carrier of the new strain of the disease?”
Cinder started. “You’re right. She could have … picked it up from one of us?”
“None of you are sick.”
She had no answer. She wished Dr. Erland was here, but he had died from the same disease he’d been trying to eradicate.
“What’s that they’re carrying out of the clinic?” asked Thorne.
Jacin crossed his arms. “A suspended-animation tank.”
Four soldiers had the tank hefted between them, while others propped open the main doors of the med-clinic for them to pass through. Outside, hundreds of civilians had gathered—those who weren’t already sick. The soldiers pushed them back to make room for the tank.
Jacin inhaled sharply and stepped up beside the holograph, bringing the feed into focus. He paused. Scrolled back. Zoomed in closer.
“Oh, no,” Cinder whispered. Another familiar face was encapsulated beneath the tank’s glass lid. Princess Winter.
Sixty-Six
There were no mirrors in the lab, not even in the tiled room with the sterilizing shower Wolf had been taken to in order to wash the sticky gel out of his hair. He didn’t need a mirror, though, to know what they’d done. He could see the difference in his bone structure when he looked at his hands and feet. He could feel the difference in his protruding mouth, his enlarged teeth, his malformed jaw. They’d altered his facial bone structure, making way for the row of implanted canine teeth. There was a new curvature to his shoulders and an awkward flex of his feet, which looked more like paws now, made for running and bounding at great speeds. His hands were enormous, now fixed with reinforced, claw-shaped fingernails.
He could even smell it inside himself. New chemicals and hormones pumping through his veins. Testosterone. Adrenaline. Pheromones. He wondered when the new fur would start sprouting over his skin, completing the transformation.
He was miserable. He was everything he had never wanted to be.
He was also starving.
A uniform had been left for him, similar to the uniform he’d worn as a special operative. A formality for his role at the coronation. Most of the bioengineered soldiers received far less distinguished clothing, being more animal than man.
And now he was one of them. He tried to temper his disgust. After all, who was he to pass judgment on his brothers?
Yet his emotions continued to fluctuate. Furious and burning one moment. Devastated and full of self-loathing the next.
This was his fate. This had always been his fate. He couldn’t imagine how he had ever thought differently. Had he honestly believed he could be better? That he deserved more? He was destined to kill and eat and destroy. That was all he was entitled to.
Suddenly, his nose twitched.
Food.
Saliva rolled onto his tongue and he wicked it against his sharp teeth. Something in his stomach roiled, angry at its own hollowness.
He shuddered, remembering this hunger from back when he had first begun training as an operative. He had both craved and hated the slabs of barely cooked meat they were presented, and the way they had to fight for their own piece, confirming the pack’s pecking order in the process. Even then, the hunger had not been this bad.
He swallowed, hard, and finished dressing.
His body had begun to shake when he opened the door and the aroma of the food burst in his nostrils. He was almost panting.
Thaumaturge Bement and the lab technician were still there, though the unconscious man had been removed. The technician shrank back when she saw Wolf’s expression. She situated herself behind another suspension tank, filled with some other victim.
“That look must mean there’s food in the building,” she said.
“Indeed.” The thaumaturge was leaning against a wall, perusing her portscreen. “They are in the elevator with it now.”
“I didn’t realize you were going to have him eat here. Have you ever seen one of them when they’ve first eaten?”
“I will handle him. Go about your business.”
Casting one more hesitant glance at Wolf, the woman returned to checking the diagnostics screens on the tank.
There was a chime down the hallway and the aroma of food wafted a hundred times stronger still. Wolf gripped the door frame. His legs were weak with lust, his knees ready to give out beneath him.
A servant arrived, pushing a wooden cart draped with a white cloth. “Mistress,” he said, bowing to the thaumaturge. He was dismissed.
Wolf’s senses were being pummeled. His ears pricked at the hiss of steam. His stomach spasmed with desire. Lamb.
“Are you hungry?”
He snarled, growling at the thaumaturge. He could lunge at her now, have the woman torn to bits before she even knew what was happening. But something held him back. Some deep-seated fear. Memories of another thaumaturge breaking his will.
“I asked you a question. I know you’re nothing but an animal now, but I still think you’re smart enough to answer with a simple yes or no.”
“Yes,” Wolf grunted.
“Yes, what?”
Rage nearly blinded him, but it was shoved back down. Wolf grimaced against the uprise of hatred. “Yes, Mistress.”
“Good. We do not have time to get to know each other and build the relationship of understanding a thaumaturge would normally form with her pack. But I did want to illustrate for you two main principles, in a way that your little animal brain can understand.” She whisked off the white cloth, revealing a platter overflowing with seared meat and bones, cartilage and marrow.
Wolf shuddered with hunger, but also with disgust. Disgust at the meat, and disgust at his own cravings. An odd memory eclipsed this new urge. Something glossy and red and bursting with juice—tomatoes.