She sat up in the tub, drew her legs back, and saw that they, too, were changed, fur-covered but still otherwise human, down to the human-shaped feet. No time to freak out, no time to stare or to run searching for a mirror. Dekka rose in a single effortless motion, held up her freed hands, furry palms out toward the wall, opened her mouth, and screamed.
MmmmmrowwwRRRRRR!
Then a second sound, less biological, as the world around her passed through that invisible blender.
Grrrraaaaaccckkk!
It was a noise like a hundred chain saws biting into a hundred trees all at once.
The wall exploded outward in a storm of shredded tile, wallboard, wood, steel, pipe, and wire. And suddenly she was looking at a large room full of office cubicles. A dozen faces covered in dust and debris stared ope
nmouthed at the space where a wall had once been and where now stood a naked, damp, furry, snake-haired . . . monster.
“Run!” Dekka yelled. “Run away!”
They did.
Something tugged at her, a hand on her shoulder. She spun, ready to do whatever she had to do, and found herself face-to-face with Ginger Green Eyes.
“I thought you might want this.” He handed her something rectangular wrapped hastily in a plastic bag. Dekka knew what it was.
“Remember,” he said.
Dekka nodded. “I owe you one. Maybe even two.”
Dekka raised her free hand, shrieked, and blew out the next wall. Now she was looking at a debris-strewn cafeteria and, finally, through the cafeteria windows: sunlight!
She exploded that final, exterior wall and ran toward daylight. She stopped on seeing a large, portly man lying quivering on the floor. “You,” she snapped. “Give me your clothes. Now!”
By the time he had stripped off a dress shirt and slacks and Dekka had put them on, the guards came rushing, weapons leveled.
Dekka aimed at the scattered chairs and tables, exploded them into shreds, and without thinking hurled the debris tornado at the guards. That last move was almost a flourish, a twist of her hands and a directed gaze.
Oh, there are tricks still to be discovered in this body, in this power!
Dekka gazed with intense, almost physical longing at the outside, the weak sunlight, the wedge of blue sky. But the courtyard was filling with armed men and Dekka did not want to hurt them, so she spun around and ran up the corridor, moving now beyond any place she’d explored. Behind her came armed men and women, boots clattering on floor tile, and now there were sirens everywhere and a loudspeaker announcing, Condition Yellow, Condition Yellow, this is not a drill in a flat computer voice.
Some part of Dekka vaguely resented the idea that she was only a Condition Yellow. Surely there was a Condition Red, and surely she deserved that designation.
Suddenly, she ran out of corridor, which was just as well since she was terribly out of shape and feeling it—a reality not helped by days locked down and cemented.
“Not as young as I used to be,” she panted, hands on knees, doubled over with a stitch in her side. Or else, she thought darkly, this body, this . . . this morph . . . this bizarre, terrifying body that seemed to incorporate elements of cat and Medusa wasn’t big on endurance. Behind her the guards yelled, “Freeze! Freeze!” and rushed. Ahead the corridor ended in what looked a lot like a bank safe’s vault door. There was a control pad, but she didn’t exactly have time to play around with guessing passwords.
Time to test the limits of her powers.
She shoved the precious wrapped rectangle into the back of her borrowed pants, raised her quasi-feline paws, and with a roar the massive steel door began to peel apart, layer after layer of steel shreds, revealing more steel just behind, and the guards were yelling, “Halt or we open fire!” in voices barely audible against Dekka’s howl.
Dekka tried what she had not yet attempted: as the steel shards come loose, she formed a cup with one of her hands, and the shards of steel formed obediently into a swirling ball two or three feet across and growing by the second. The swirling ball of steel shrapnel spun, and Dekka focused her thoughts on a simple thought: Hard but not too hard.
She sent the spinning shrapnel ball flying. It whirled away down the corridor, straight at the guards, who fired futilely into it and turned too late to flee. The steel shredded uniforms, gouged eye covers, cut exposed skin, lacerated exposed jaws and hands. Guards screamed and Dekka, feeling sick at the pain she had caused, turned back to ripping open the steel door. The last layer was coming apart and a familiar male voice yelled, “I don’t give a goddamn how hurt you are, shoot! Shoot! Kill her! Take her down!”
Bullets flew, but Dekka had raised her left hand and as the bullets neared they fell, torn into smaller bits.
The steel vault door collapsed, a hole big enough to step through formed, and Dekka wasted zero time doing just that. She leaped through into a very, very different place. The familiar, prosaic corridors of the Ranch—corridors that might as easily have belonged in any government office building—were not part of this vista. She stood now at the rail of a steel platform high above a vast open space carved from living rock. Parts of the dirt and rock walls were held in place by orange plastic webbing. At the corners of the cavern stood three-story steel towers, four of them, each a fortress, with weapons—recognizable things like machine guns, and less recognizable things that still, by their positioning, by the number of uniforms on or near them, and merely by their dangerous look, could only be weapons as well.
The towers were pierced by windows with glass so thick the men behind them were distorted and the light within shone a sickly green. There could be no question that these were guard towers, more massive and sophisticated versions of the guard towers at any maximum-security prison.
And there were prisoners.