I dragged my fingertips through my wet hair, combing out the tangles and trying not to think about what, exactly, Zev might do once he got the upper hand. “How long have you been there?”
There was a long pause, and I could practically feel Zev deciding whether or not to tell me the truth.
Two years.
I literally stopped breathing.
It’s not such a long time, Zev said, his voice meditative and soft, for someone like us.
I couldn’t help the way that last word echoed through my own thoughts.
There was an us.
I’d never had that, never known for a fact that I wasn’t one of a kind.
“I’m going to get you out,” I said, my throat dry and my eyes tearing up. “You know that, right? I can’t just leave you there. I’m going to get you out.”
That’s not a good idea, he said sharply, each word more implacable than the last. There’s a lot about this place you don’t know. You can’t win, Kali, and you shouldn’t try.
“Wanna bet?” I asked, matching the steel in his tone with some of my own.
Zev paused, and when he finally replied, his words were deliberate, like he was used to doling out cruelty in measured doses.
You’re young, Kali, and you’re inexperienced, and if yesterday was any indication, you have an Achilles’ heel that I do not. Don’t let your Nibbler fool you into thinking you’re something you are not.
Zev’s words hit their target. In another twenty hours, I’d be human again—basilisk bait, breakable, a normal teenage girl. If Chimera caught me and put me in one of their little cells, I wouldn’t hold up nearly as well as Zev had.
I wouldn’t last two years.
I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans, staring myself down in the mirror. “I guess that means that whatever I’m going to do, I need to do it quick.”
Zev must have sensed that arguing was useless, because he stopped trying to tell me what to do. Good. Maybe I’d actually managed to keep him from realizing exactly how hard that last comment of his had hit me.
I’d only had a couple of seconds to marvel at the fact that there was someone else out there like me before that someone else had turned around and reminded me that even to our kind—his kind—I wasn’t quite right.
I was still out of place.
I was broken.
I tried not wonder if I would ever fit in anywhere—ever feel like a whole person instead of two broken, disconnected halves.
I looked away from my own reflection and picked up my toothbrush. I brushed my teeth—over and over again, until the only taste on my tongue was Aquafresh. I looped my hair back into a ponytail and then considered my options.
I’d meant what I’d said to Zev. Broken or not, outlier or not, I wasn’t just going to leave him there to rot. I wasn’t going to sit back and hope that Chimera wasn’t going to come for me next.
I needed to know where they were keeping Zev. Who was involved. What the company knew about me. I needed proof—the kind that could be used as insurance or taken to the police.
And I only had twenty hours to get it.
I thought my way through the situation, strangely alert now that the beast inside of me had fed. So far, I only had one real lead on Chimera—Bethany’s father. Since Beth was watching out for her own interests—and her mother’s—that left me with exactly one option for recon.
Paul Davis’s place of work.
Which—as it so happened—was also my father’s.
19
“Unlike the full spectrum of species in the animal kingdom, preternatural creatures share no common ancestry with humans—or any other natural species. Any similarities we see—say, between a dragon and a Komodo dragon, a kraken and a giant squid—appear to be the product of convergent, rather than divergent, evolution.”
My dad was a different person when he lectured: his eyes sparkled, his lips turned upward, and even from the back of the lecture hall, I could feel the energy he brought to the room. The students in his Introduction to Preternatural Biology class may or may not have understood what he was saying, but most of them appeared to be paying more attention to him than their inboxes, and I’d been hanging around college campuses long enough to know that that was something.
Come to think of it, I’d spent more mornings than I cared to remember like this growing up: hanging out at the back of a lecture hall whenever a babysitter canceled last minute, or my father forgot that we’d been given the day off from school. I’d seen him in college-professor mode enough that it shouldn’t have surprised me, but it always did.
In front of a class full of students, waxing on about evolution, he seemed so present. He seemed happy.
“Think what it must have been like for Darwin, two hundred years ago. He took that voyage on the Beagle expecting to document the natural world, and he stumbled across something … impossible. A creature who could defy the laws of physics—straight out of the pages of mythology, hidden from human discovery for thousands upon thousands of years. In that one moment, the entire landscape of scientific investigation was drastically and irrevocably changed. The impossible became a widespread scientific reality, as omnipresent as gravity and, in some cases, nearly as hard to see.”
I’d heard this lecture so often, I could have given it myself. Instead, I stuck to the shadows and moved my way toward the front of the auditorium. A couple of his students might have noticed me, but the professor went on, oblivious.
“What are the three key markers of preternatural evolution?” The question was rhetorical, and he went right into the answer—just as I went right for a chair near the front of the auditorium, where he’d left his briefcase and keys.
“It’s all right there in the DNA: preternaturality is typically marked by a triple, rather than double, helix structure; the presence of base pairs that themselves appear to have distinctly unnatural properties; and the secretion of amino acids—or, as they are more commonly called, preter-proteins—that defy our most basic natural laws, and in doing so, caused a resurgent interest in the pseudoscience of alchemy for a large part of the twentieth century.”
I slipped my hand into my father’s blazer jacket, which he’d left on his chair when he’d taken to the stage to lecture. As a kid, I’d completed the exact same motion searching for change for the vending machines, but this time, I was looking for something slightly less benign: his university ID card.
Got it.
My hand closed around its target, and I slipped back into the shadows and made for the exit.