Chapter 3 #2
I lean slightly toward the sound as we walk past.
"Morning!" The alpha immediately pulls me forward. "Eyes forward."
"I'm being friendly. Community building. Important for morale."
"Noted." The word is clipped but not cruel. "Eyes forward."
"Bossy much," I observe.
His grip tightens just a fraction, not hard, just present, letting me know he has me. A reminder rather than a warning. It's a meaningful distinction, and I file it away in the back of my grey matter.
I glance sideways and up at him as we walk.
He's taller than I initially thought. Keeps his focus ahead, scanning the corridor with the systematic attention of someone who has never fully turned that part of himself off.
Even now, managing one contained subject through a controlled environment, he's tracking the room.
"You know," I say thoughtfully, "most people take me to dinner before the restraints. Common courtesy. Just so you know, I don’t put out on the first date."
"I'm not taking you to dinner," he huffs out, and it might just be my overactive imagination, but I think I detect amusement in that gruff voice of his.
"Clearly. I'm just noting the breach of etiquette."
"I'll survive."
"The optimism is refreshing," I snark right back, rolling my eyes so hard that I’m surprised they don’t get stuck in the back of my skull.
Something shifts almost imperceptibly at the corner of his mouth. There and gone, barely a crease, but there.
Interesting.
The hallway opens into the processing room. Ah. My favorite. The room where all the really creative decisions get made about what to do with a body that belongs to someone else.
Metal examination table gleaming under harsh overhead lights.
The restraint chair bolted to the center of the floor with the confidence of something that is expected to be tested.
Banks of monitoring equipment are arranged along the walls.
A wheeled tray holding neat rows of syringes that haven't been loaded yet.
I count seven before the alpha moves me past the angle.
The technicians move quickly around the room, preparing things with the focused efficiency of people who don't look at the chairs while they're setting up around them.
The alpha steers me toward the chair. I look at it.
Steel frame, padded restraints, a headrest with a tilt adjustment that doesn't benefit me.
Then I look up at him. Then back at the chair.
"You know," I say slowly, with the measured tone of someone delivering difficult news, "I had real hopes for this morning."
"Sit," he grunts out.
I sit, but still I purse my lips at him to let him know I’m not happy about it. Mostly because the alternative is being placed in the chair, and there's a dignity gradient here I'm still navigating. Choosing the chair is not the same as accepting the chair.
The straps come fast. Wrists first, then ankles, a wide band across my chest that adjusts to fit with mechanical efficiency. Thick. Firm. Specifically calibrated to the amount of force they've determined I can generate. Which means someone measured.
Which means this chair was designed with me in mind. I wiggle against the restraints experimentally, taking stock.
"Five stars," I say, "incredibly snug. Zero ambiance. Would not recommend for a weekend stay."
One of the technicians manages not to smile.
Dr. Havel enters from the side door, causing the room to fall silent.
My eyes narrow on him. One of these days, I’m going to tear out his throat with my bare teeth.
The thought of all that blood splattering across their pristine white walls has a shiver of pleasure rushing through me.
He’s tall and thin in the way that suggests the body is maintained rather than enjoyed. Which, I find a little depressing to say the least. His eyes move across the room in the manner of a person assessing output rather than looking at things.
He carries his tablet with both hands like a document of significant personal importance, which to him it probably is.
"Subject O-00," he says, and a snarl pulls at my upper lip. The same way you'd say sample prepared or unit online.
"Doctor Lizard," I greet, just to get a rise out of him. It works instantly.
His mouth tightens almost invisibly. A thin seam is pressing thinner. Small victories. The only kind available. He glances at the tablet without responding, scrolling through whatever my file has accumulated most recently.
It must be a substantial document by now. Years of observations. Notes about biting. Notes about the ceiling. Notes about what happens when they miscalculate the sedation dosage, and I'm coherent for things they intended me to be unconscious for.
I wonder sometimes what they say. Whether the language stays clinical all the way through or whether someone, somewhere, broke protocol and wrote what they actually thought. It makes me wonder what they would have written down.
"Prepare for baseline stabilization," Havel says, jolting me out of my wandering thoughts. One of the technicians approaches from the right with a loaded syringe. Clear liquid catching the light. Not the bruise-colored sedatives they use before the hard trials. Something else.
The alpha has taken a position beside the chair. Not behind me, not across the room, but beside me, slightly forward, where he can see my hands and Havel in the same eyeline. He's still doing that thing. Scanning. Present in the room on more than one level.
His presence presses against my senses with a constancy I'm finding progressively more difficult to process. Which I resent. Specifically. As a matter of principle. This unknown Alpha shouldn’t have this kind of effect on me. I shouldn’t be allowing him to get underneath my skin the way he is.
The technician reaches for my arm. I lean forward slightly against the chest restraint, not a real movement, just enough. The room's tension ratchets up immediately. Both flanking guards shift. Rifles don't rise, but hands adjust. Havel looks up from his tablet.
I smile pleasantly at the technician.
"Easy," I say, "if I bite you, you'll have to fill out an incident report. I've seen the forms. Very tedious and rather boring. Especially on a Saturday afternoon."
“It’s Tuesday morning,” someone mutters, and I just shrug my shoulders as much as I can, given my limited movement.
The technician freezes with the specific paralysis of someone whose risk calculus just inverted. Dr. Havel exhales through his nose. A sound that contains an entire volume of professional frustration compressed into a single breath.
"Hold him."
Two guards step in from behind. hands clamping onto my shoulders with the practiced weight of people who've done this before. Firm. Not angry. Just absolute.
The needle slides in at the crook of my elbow, finding the site with practiced accuracy. The familiar cold blooms up my arm, not temperature exactly, more a sensation of pressure draining, like something being quietly turned down. I hiss through my teeth.
"Ah," I murmur, "the good stuff. I always appreciate the good stuff." The technician withdraws the needle quickly and retreats to a professional distance.
Across the room, an alarm light suddenly flickers.
Red.
Single pulse.
Then nothing.
The room pauses the way rooms do when something has happened that nobody has a word for yet. Everyone waits for the explanation. The intercom to update, maybe the technician at the monitoring station saying false positive, the moment where it resolves into something ordinary.
It doesn't resolve. The light sits dark. Dr. Havel frowns at it with an expression like he’s encountering something that wasn't in his schedule.
Another alarm flickers. Further down the board. Different circuit. Then another, from a panel on the opposite wall.
Three points.
Not a false positive.
A pattern.
Somewhere deep in the facility, a distant concussive sound moves through the walls, not loud, not close, but felt. The kind of sound that travels through concrete instead of air and arrives as a vibration in your sternum before it reaches your ears.
A boom.
Then another.
The guards near the door glance at each other. It’s a fast exchange, the kind that happens between people who have a shared vocabulary for escalation levels and have just moved up one. I stop thinking about the needle. I stop thinking about the chair. I inhale slowly.
Something new rides the air, cycling through the vents.
Under the chemical flatness, under the antiseptic, and the recycled cold.
Something sharp and metallic and carrying the specific electric charge of something that is not controlled, not scheduled, not part of any protocol currently running in this facility.
Wrong. The wrong kind of wrong. Which means possibly the right kind. My instincts don't fire in alarm. They fire in recognition, every nerve suddenly awake, not with panic but with attention.
My grin spreads slowly.
"Oh, fuck," I whisper, “you all fucked up, didn’t you?” The alpha looks down at me. His jaw has set. His focus has split. Part on the room, part on the door, part apparently still on me because he's watching my face with the particular intensity of someone who has realized I might know something.
"What is it," he asks.
I tilt my head back to meet his eyes. The alarm system across the entire facility explodes into sound. Sirens. Not the single-tone alert of a door sensor or a monitoring breach.
The full-facility cascade, red emergency lights strobing across the ceiling in a rhythm that wipes out the fluorescent buzz and replaces it with something urgent and primal.
The technicians abandon their stations, rushing out like they can somehow save themselves.
Havel's head snaps toward the door, tablet clutched to his chest. Guards raise rifles and face exits.
Everyone moves to the emergency positions they've been drilled to find.
Somewhere down the corridor, muffled by walls, by distance, by the screaming of the alarms, a man's voice rises. Then cuts off.
My grin is the widest it's been all morning. I look up at the alpha. He's still looking at me. In the red strobing light, his expression has sharpened into something specific, something that is asking a question he hasn't decided to say aloud yet.
"Either something just went very fucking wrong," I explain. The wall to the left shudders. Dust falls from the ceiling in a thin curtain.
"Or very right."