Trixie didn’t speak right away.
His eyes tracked the corridor—not idly, not distractedly, but with intention. He was thinking. Calculating. Past the thick-glass partition and the reinforced steel doors waited something unspoken. Something classified. And dangerous. The inner lab breathed with machines, blinked with sensors, and hummed like something alive.
When he finally turned back to Debbie, the air seemed to shift.
"Wait here," he said.
No tenderness. Just a directive, clipped and final.
"Radiation levels spike past the second corridor."
He didn’t wait for her response. He was already walking, already gone. The door groaned open, mechanical and reluctant, before sealing him inside with a sound that seemed too close to a coffin lid.
Then Debbie moved.
Whatever softness she had been wearing—the fluttery concern, the careful gestures around her belly, the light cadence of her voice—shed off her like a snake peeling out of old skin. Her posture shifted in increments: first the tilt of her neck, then the arch of her spine. Her eyes lost their fog. She blinked once, slow. Intentional.
Her face no longer held a mask of warmth. She looked at me like a surgeon might look at a body on a slab.
"You look like hell," she said, the smile gone, her voice stripped down to its bones. "Must be hard, carrying the weight of miracles."
I didn’t answer. My stare stayed fixed on a point just beyond her shoulder, cold and focused, the only resistance I still owned.
She closed the distance between us.
"No comeback? No defiance today?" Her voice dripped condescension. "Thought so."
I could feel the heat of her breath now. It smelled sweet—artificial, rotted fruit sweetness, like something trying too hard to be alive. She tilted her head, mock-curious.
"They’re draining you like an old well, and you just keep giving. That has to be exhausting."
From her coat, she pulled a glass vial, opaque and black as ink. She turned it in her fingers, letting it catch the lab light.
"It doesn’t matter how many times you crawl back from the brink, Selena. Eventually, even gods run out."
I blinked slowly. She mistook it for fear.
"Want to make it interesting?" she whispered. "A wager. If he saves you, I disappear. If he saves me... you? You're erased. No resurrection. No echoes."
She leaned in until her lips nearly grazed my ear. "Spoiler alert: He won’t pick you."
Then she moved fast.
Grabbed my hand. Slammed it against her throat.
And in the same breath, she uncorked the vial and swallowed its contents whole.
Her body reacted instantly.
A strangled gasp cut through the air as she collapsed to the ground, her limbs seizing violently. Foam gathered at her lips, thick and white. Her back arched off the tile like she was being lifted by invisible strings.
My heart slammed into my ribs, legs frozen in place, mind blank with a sharp, animal panic.
Then I heard it.
Trixie’s voice.
It wasn’t a shout. It wasn’t concern.
It was a command ripped from something deeper.
"Debbie?!"
The clang of boots hit the metal floor in a rhythm that was both furious and inevitable. He burst through the lab door, eyes scanning, not breathing, already seeing too much.
He dropped beside her, knees hitting the tile with a hollow thud. His hands, usually steady, trembled as they found her face.
"Debbie? Debbie! No, no, stay with me—"
Her eyes were rolling. Her chest convulsed. Her fingers clawed at her swollen stomach, smearing sweat and blood across the fabric.
He turned to me.
And something in him cracked open.
"What the hell did you do?!"
I couldn’t even form a sentence.
Dr. Hemlock stormed in behind him, took one look, and dropped his clipboard. It hit the floor like a gunshot.
"Alpha—the fetus is losing oxygen. We either harvest now or lose everything."
Trixie’s head snapped toward me. There was no time left in his face. Only decision.
"Then use her. Now."
Steel cuffs clamped around my wrists before I could even scream.
