HIM

  The hose hit at full pressure.

  Cold. They always ran it cold. Something about core temperature regulation, which was a clinical way of saying they liked watching a man flinch.

  I didn’t flinch.

  The technician—new, by the way he kept his distance from the drain grate, like the runoff might reach up and grab his ankle—adjusted the nozzle and swept it across my shoulders, my back, the places where the skin was still knitting together from the shift three hours prior. The water ran pink. Then clear. Twelve minutes. They always ran the full twelve.

  White room. White tile. White lights. A drain in the center of the floor, stainless steel, the kind you see in industrial kitchens and veterinary clinics and places where the mess is expected and the thing making the mess is not consulted about its preferences.

  I stood on the grate and counted tiles. Two hundred and fourteen. Same as last time. Same as every time. There was something in that. Something that held.

  The hose shut off. The technician hung it on the bracket without looking at me. Smart. The last one had looked. I’d watched the movement of his throat when he swallowed—the specific swallow of a man standing three feet from something that used to be in a cage and wondering if the cage still meant anything.

  It didn’t. But he didn’t need to know that.

  “Vitals,” the intercom said.

  A different tech stepped in. Older. Steadier. Wearing the expression of a woman who had done this long enough to stop filing the thing on the grate under “person” and start filing it under “process.” She took my arm without asking. Blood pressure cuff. Thermometer. Her fingers were dry and efficient, and she touched me the way a mechanic touches an engine—assessing function, not acknowledging the thing that functioned.

  “Core temp: 39.8. Still elevated.”

  Always elevated. My body ran hot the way a furnace ran hot. As a fact of engineering. Three degrees above baseline on a good day. Higher after a shift. Higher still when the compound was wearing off and the thing in my blood started pressing against the walls.

  I could feel it now. Not the shift itself—the shift was hours away still, if I was lucky, if the dosing schedule held. But the awareness of it. The low hum beneath the skin, like a second pulse, like something sleeping with one eye open. It was always there. Seven years, and it was always there. You don’t get used to it. You just get better at not reacting to the sound of your own body reminding you that it belongs to something else.

  The tech wrapped the cuff. Pumped. Read the numbers and didn’t comment, which meant they fell inside the range the Lycaon Group considered acceptable for an asset in year seven of a nine-year trial.

  Acceptable. Their word. Not mine.

  “Baseline cognitive?”

  She held up a tablet. “Subject. State your designation.”

  “Designation: Enforcer. Trial Series: Arcadian. Year: seven. Current status: post-shift. Cognitive function: intact.”

  The words were rote. A script I’d recited enough times that the meaning had been sanded off, leaving only the shape. Which was, I suspected, the point. Say it enough and it stops being a description and starts being an identity. I am what they say I am. I function as designed.

  She left. The room was quiet. I stood on the drain grate and let the water evaporate off my skin in patches—faster than it should, the heat cooking it away—and I waited for the part that came next.

  The part always came next.

  The intercom clicked. “Debriefing. Sector C. Twelve minutes.”

  I dressed. Standard issue—dark, utilitarian, cut for a body that ran too hot and moved in ways that put seams in the wrong place under structural stress. The shirt buttons were reinforced. Small detail. The kind of detail that told you everything about what the Lycaon Group expected from the bodies they dressed.

  The scars on my hands caught the fluorescent light as I fastened the cuffs. Faint lines, pale against the knuckles, where the skin had split and healed and split and healed over seven years until the tissue had stopped trying for smooth and settled for holding together. My hands looked like a map of a country that kept having its borders redrawn. Every shift left new lines. Every return erased some and added others.

  I flexed them. They worked. That was enough.

  The door opened. My handler stood in the corridor—a man whose name I knew and whose name I had never used, because names were for people and this man was a function. A leash with a lanyard.

  Behind him, leaning against the wall with the specific slouch of someone who had decided that looking comfortable in a Lycaon facility was its own form of warfare, was the woman who was going to get herself killed.

  She was holding a coffee. The coffee was a provocation. Everything about her was a provocation—the slouch, the raised eyebrow, the way she occupied space in this building like she was doing it a favor by showing up.

  “You look like a man who just got pressure-washed in a room with a drain,” she said. “Which, I realize as I say it, is exactly what happened, so I suppose that tracks. They should really invest in better lighting down here. The fluorescents have that particular shade of institutional misery that makes a person miss the concept of sunlight. Or a window. Even a painting of a window. Is that too much to ask?”

  I said nothing.

  “And he’s chatty today,” she said to my handler. My handler also said nothing. She sipped the coffee. “Two conversationalists. I’m truly blessed. This is the highlight of my week.”

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  I walked. She followed. This was the arrangement.

  Her name was Lena. Her classification was “data analyst,” which was accurate in the way that calling a locksmith “someone who works with doors” was accurate. She analyzed data the way a surgeon analyzed a body—looking for the specific thing she needed, cutting to reach it, taking it, leaving. The Lycaon Group kept her because she was useful. She stayed because the alternative was a shallow grave, and she preferred breathing to the alternative.

  She also talked too much, noticed too much, and cared too much, and all three of those things were going to get her killed, and I had decided approximately four years ago that this was not my problem.

  It was becoming my problem.

  We walked. White corridor, white floor, recycled air stripped of anything that might remind a person they lived on a planet instead of inside a machine.

  “They’re calling it a syndrome now,” she said. Like she was commenting on the weather. “The new press materials. ‘Werewolf Syndrome.’ Market-tested and everything. Focus groups loved the word syndrome. Makes it sound manageable. Treatable. Like acid reflux or tennis elbow. Something you live with.” She paused. “As if naming a thing gives you power over it.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “My grandmother named her cancer,” she said. Quieter now. The humor gone from her voice the way the pink water had gone from the drain—slowly, and then all at once. “Named it Margaret, after a woman at church she didn’t like. Used to say, Margaret’s acting up today. She thought if she gave it a name and a personality, she could negotiate with it.”

  A beat. She looked at the ceiling.

  “It still killed her.”

  Sector C. Two keycards, one biometric. The lock clicked. Inside: a table, two chairs, a screen, and the persistent smell of disinfectant that never quite covered what it was trying to cover. Every debriefing room in every Lycaon facility smelled exactly like this. Clinical. Controlled. The olfactory equivalent of a pressed white shirt hiding a bruise.

  A man sat behind the table. Not a handler. Higher. The kind of higher that wore authority like tailoring—so well-fitted you almost didn’t notice it was armor. Tablet open. Smile that cost about the same as the suit.

  “Sit down.”

  I sat.

  “Your shift metrics from this evening were exceptional. The board is pleased.” He said the board the way other people said God. With the reverence and the implicit suggestion that questioning it was blasphemy. “However. We have a situation that requires your particular skill set.”

  He turned the tablet toward me.

  A photograph. Surveillance footage, grainy, pulled from distance. A woman. Dark hair pulled back from a face that looked like it hadn’t slept in a week, standing in a makeshift laboratory, gloved hands steady over equipment, eyes focused on something just out of frame with an intensity that bordered on devotion.

  I looked at the photograph. I noticed what I noticed. Filed it. Moved on.

  “Dr. Maren Vosse,” the suit said. “Toxicologist. Pharmaceutical chemist. Younger sister of the late Dr. Tobias Vosse, who was—”

  “I know who Tobias Vosse was.”

  Everyone in the program knew. The man who made the counter-drug. The man whose formula kept people like me from going permanently feral. The man who died, and whose death meant that every remaining dose was borrowed time ticking down to a clock face none of us could see.

  “Then you understand the urgency.” The suit’s smile thinned. Sharpened. “Dr. Vosse has been reconstructing her brother’s formula from stolen notes. We believe she’s achieved a viable synthesis. Your assignment is retrieval.”

  “Retrieval.”

  “The research. The compound. And—” He paused. The pause was rehearsed. “The chemist herself, if operationally viable. If not—” Another pause. Shorter. “Clean resolution.”

  Clean resolution.

  A corporate term for a dirty thing.

  I looked at the photograph again. The woman in it was not looking at the camera. She didn’t know it existed. She was looking at the work in front of her, and the expression on her face was one I recognized because I’d seen it in enough mirrors—not hope, not fear, but the grim, focused endurance of someone who had one thing left to do and intended to finish it before the world finished them.

  Something shifted. Low in my chest. Below the hum.

  I filed that, too.

  “Timeline?”

  “Immediate. She’s in the city. Transport in thirty minutes.”

  I stood. Left the room. The suit was still smiling behind me. The smile would be there when I got back, or it wouldn’t. Either way, it wasn’t my concern.

  Lena was in the corridor. She’d heard everything. She always heard everything.

  She looked at me. I looked at her.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You were going to.”

  She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. Something moved behind her eyes—the specific calculation of a woman deciding how much truth she could spend without going bankrupt.

  “Just—be clean about it,” she said. “If you can.”

  If I can. As if clean were something I had any say in. As if the thing in my blood cared about clean.

  I walked to the transport bay. Thirty minutes. Fourteen miles. A woman in a lab who thought she was hiding.

  The compound—my last dose, administered nine hours ago—was already thinning. I could feel it the way you feel a tide pulling out: the slow recession of the thing that keeps you on the shore, the gradual exposure of everything that lives underneath. The heat was building in the marrow. My pulse was getting louder than it should have been. The edges of my vision were sharpening—not focus, something older, something that measured distances and angles and the soft places on a body where teeth would find purchase.

  Fourteen miles.

  I needed to arrive before the compound burned through. I needed to arrive while I was still the version of myself that opened doors with hands. That followed orders. That understood the word clean.

  The transport door opened. I climbed in. The metal bench was cold against the heat rolling off my skin, and in the dark of the armored van, with the engine vibrating through my teeth and the night sliding past outside, I thought about the photograph.

  The woman’s hands. Steady. Working.

  Her brother’s hands had been steady too, in the footage I’d seen. Right up until the end.

  I stopped thinking about the photograph.

  Fourteen miles. A woman. A syringe.

  Clean resolution.