Chapter Six: Sarah Interrogates with Tentacles

         Opinions in the Haven camp were mixed.

        “Kill her,” Space Belisarius said.

        “Kill her,” Sexy Napoleon said.

        “Kill her!” Kellen Grant said.

        “Yeah, I’m going to have to go with kill her too,” Texas Dallas added.

        Sarah, her arms crossed over her chest, looked over at the Haven leaders. Annie was cracking her knuckles, her head spines flaring out around her narrow, angular scalp. “Kill the bitch,” she said. “She’s got a direct line to the galaxy eating evil.”

        Sarah threw up her arms. “ I had a direct line to the Eye, you know?” She shook her head. “What about you, Lisa?”

        Lisa, the incumbent head of the DSA, opened her mouth to respond, before a tiny chime came from nowhere. Each of them shared Sarah’s biocomp, which was what Sarah had decided to term the computer-like features of her augmented head. It replicated a lot of the features of their old HUDs – including communication systems and augmented reality projections. In this case, it was a gauzy collection of rapid fire statistics, blurring past Lisa’s gaze. She blinked, then scowled. “Oh, dang. Rose beat me in the general election.”

        “What?” Sarah asked

        “I’m not the head of the DSA anymore, Rose is,” Lisa said as the door to the room slurped open with a disgusting squelch of bone and muscle. Rose, a smaller, darker woman than Lisa, smiled at her shyly.

        “Sorry, Lisa,” she said, shrugging. “but the Alliance has spoken...I didn’t even want to run.”

        Lisa sighed, brushing her palms through her head spine. “It’s fine-”

        “Are you going to be doing that in combat ?” Sexy Napoleon asked.

        “Yes, why?” Lisa asked.

        “We’re not about to give up on being the Demarchist-Socialist Alliance just because we’re in a war ,” Rose said, lifting her chin. “Our ideals aren’t just empty words. They’re the guiding principles for why and how we wish to operate – not now, but in the future. Even in a time of war.” She grinned. “You might actually find our system works better than antiquated ideas of hierarchy.”

        Lisa’s eyes shone. “That’s why they elected her...” She whispered.

        Sarah nodded. “W-Well. Okay. Cool!” She paused. “We’re deciding what to do about her?”

        She jerked her thumb at the large sheet of clear crystal that separated them from the isolation chamber that they had jammed Spez into. Sarah didn’t like looking at Spez. While she was surrounded by other... hers , Spez felt like something different. Each Havener, though they were all green-gray skinned and had short stubby head-spines that flexed in time with their thoughts, and they all had the same biomorphic powers that she had, still felt like they were a person, a solitary shard of self that was given free reign to just walk around. Spez? Spez radiated the presence of…

        The Eye.

        Just looking at Sarah made the edges of her perception crawl with faint hissing and chittering. It was like the chorus of noise that her own army could make – but amplified and deepened, spread across light years and wrested from her control. It was how her army sounded to her enemies.

        It horrified her.

        Spez herself was sitting in the center of the fleshy room, looking up at the ceiling, then at the walls, then at the ceiling again. She never even glanced at the one way mirror that Sarah had put into the room in the frantic half hour they had had between capturing Spez and getting her on the station.

        “I say we study her,” Rose said. “Then kill her once we figure out how to best hit the Eye as hard as we can.”

        Sarah scowled. “Come on, why is everyone so in favor of killing her?” She asked, her shoulders hunching up slightly.

        Rose pursed her lips. “Why aren’t you in favor of killing her?” she asked.

        “Because she’s been captured and enslaved by the Eye!” Sarah said, flinging her arm at the glass. “She’s gone through the exact same shit I went through. If I didn’t have some sympathy for her, I’d be...be...” She fumbled. “I’d be a...a...”

        “CEO?” Rose asked.

        “Eyyy!” Annie held out her hand for a low-five. Rose smacked it. “I like her more than you.” Annie looked right at Lisa as she spoke. “Way more. It’s good she won the election.”

        Lisa glared.

        Sarah shook her head. “Okay, fine. But if we’re going to kill Spez, I want to talk to her first. Does anyone have any problems with that?” She glared at them – and she felt the faintest of tingling connections. She knew it was illusory – each and every single Havener had demanded that she cut any ‘command connection’ that might have tied them to her mind. But in the same way that a human being who had lost an arm might still feel that arm begin to itch during a rainstorm, she felt that severed connection. Sarah gritted her teeth and took the sudden surge of angry, bitter grumbling that tried to well out of her heart and tried to jam it out of her mental airlock.

        The rest of the Commanders shook their heads.

        “Okay,” Sarah said, then looked at the crystal membrane that stretched between her and Spez. “I’m going in.”

        Spez snapped her head around as the wall that Sarah approached opened with a slurping noise and closed with the same sound that a human made while smacking their lips after a good meal. Sarah stood in the small, enclosed room and felt a sympathetic pang in her bones. She had been in a small room like this, not so long before, with labtechs deciding her fate. She smiled, gently. “Hey,” she said.

        “Suppers,” Spez said.

        She had a high, nasal voice – one that went with a body that made Sarah feel as if she was standing in a twisted, fun house mirror. She could still remember being a chunky, short, dork before she had been transformed into a walking goddess. By comparison, it seemed the Eye had skipped some of the cosmetic changes – since Spez looked too tall, too gangly, too stork like. Her neck was narrow and stretched and her eyes were huge and staring, looking almost elfin when set into her narrow face. She cocked her head slowly, her head spines rippling out. “Hey, Eyebo, why didn’t I get the knockers?”

        She paused, then scowled.

        “Oh, waste of time? I see! I see how it is! You turn El Dorko into the Fucksauce Goddess, and keep me all gangly.” She shrugged, then spread her thighs wider, crooking her knees to hook her feet behind her head, her toes wriggling near her ears. “Forch, I’m still hot no matter what. Cause of confidence .” She grinned, then slowly slid out her tongue. It was as long and segmented as the body of a snake, coming to a narrow tip, which flicked against one of her nipples. Her eyes almost glowed as she looked right at Sarah. Sarah felt a slow, coiling loop of interest flicking through her body, tightening around her gut. She thrust out her chin, trying to shake it off.

        “Is the Eye talking in your head?”

        “He tells me to say no ,” Spez said, retracting her tongue with a faint slurp . “You’re fuckin hot by the way. Mind conducting this interview while twerking?”

        “I- what?” Sarah asked.

        “Some sline you are,” Spez rolled her eyes, her head spines flicking out. “I thought slines love twerking and doing drugs and shit. Has TV lied to me?” She shook her head, then whispered. “For this, they must all pay.”

        “I-” Sarah put her hands over her face, blushing. “I know what twerking is, don’t you want that fucking thing out of your head?”

        “And lose my dental plan?” Spez asked, as if it was the most rational rebuttal in the universe.

        Sarah gaped at her. “You’re an immortal demigod with biomorphic powers, who the fuck cares about-” She blinked.

        Spez was putting her feet against her head, her toes hooking against her scalp. She grinned, slightly, as she covered her ears with her feet, her palms pressed against the ground, contorting her body with a queasy ease. The lack of joint popping and muscles straining only made it more eerie. “Eyebo figured out the way to a woman’s heart, Sexgod: Capitalism. I. Love . Capitalism.  I love the markets, I love the exploitation. I love the pyramids.” Her tongue slid along her lips, slowly, the very tip of it beading with an emerald droplet, which touched the floor and hissed. Blood welled from the organic carpeting, then scabbed around the wound as the entire room convulsed slightly. “I love being a completely unnecessarily evil bitch at all times.”

        “Jesus Christ!” Sarah held her hands out. “Don’t do that!”

        “Do what?” Spez asked. “This?”

        She flicked her long tongue. This time, several spattering droplets of acid struck the ground. This time, the room didn’t squirm. The entire station  did. Muscles tightened and contracted, putting immense, groaning stressors on the metal components. The glassy mirror in the side of the room creaked and Sarah grabbed onto Spez’s tongue without thinking. Her tongue wrapped around and around her wrist, squeezing her tightly as Spez’s voice spoke in her head, as if she was standing right beside her ear. “I’m your girlfriend now, Sarah.”

        “What?!” Sarah asked, then yelped as Spez unfolded and stood in a single crackling movement. Her arms wrapped around her back as her tongue slurped free, then licked from Sarah’s armpit to her shoulder to her cheek, slathering her with a gleaming spittle that left Sarah’s skin tingling and buzzing. Lust began to throb between her legs, her nipples coming to eager tightness. She grabbed onto Spez’s hips as the lankier girl pressed her up against the wall. Sarah could feel the wall behind her convulsing – the muscles tightened up against the pain of the acid beads that were still buzzing and hissing through the floor.

        She realized, suddenly, that Spez had just locked the entire room up – tight as a man groaning on the ground after a gut punch.

        Spez’s tongue slipped back into her mouth and she whispered. “Do I have to S P E L L it out for Y O U, my little Sexgod?” Her eyes glittered. “I. Love. Capitalism. I love  pyramids.” She leaned forward, her breath hot and warm against Sarah’s lips. “I adore being the boot .”

        Sarah’s mind reeled.

        And then…

        She got it.

        Spez’s tongue slipped from between her lips. The tip gleamed like a shimmering spike of bone, beading with acid. Her voice growled inside of Sarah’s ears. “Hey, eyeball. Say bye bye to the skull! Scoopico!”

        Her tongue drew back, like a snake about to strike.

        Sarah twisted out of the way as it plunged into the wall. Blood spurted from the muscular structure as the bone spear penetrated deep. It coated Spez’s face, splashing into her eyes. She drew back, clapping her hands to her face. “Ack! I have been blinded in an unforseen, unexpected way!” She wailed, stepping backwards. Sarah kicked out – catching Spez in the back of the leg. Spez fell to her knees, her hands grabbing onto the wall as she flung her head back, arching her spine. “Ack! My one weak spot! My frail, human knees!”

        In an instant, Sarah saw a change come over Spez. She had, for the entire interrogation, been loose. Lanky. Flexible. But right after she spoke that sentence, her muscles tightened. They strained and her bones creaked as her fingernails gutted the wall. Her claws had sprung out, and blood spurted between her fingertips as she pushed her hands into the wall. Her neck strained and her whole body trembled. A bone cracked in her forearm with a sound that was both shockingly sharp and queasily slippery – made all the worse when the jagged white tip of it punched through her bicep, leaving a dragging, flappy bit of skin in the air.

        Sarah had to act.

        She grabbed onto Spez’s head, pushed her head back, then pressed her mouth up against the other woman’s ear. Her tongue plunged into Spez’s ear, wriggling, squirming. She closed her eyes and focused not on the strangely erotic edge of ear-fucking a stranger. No. She focused, instead, entirely on the brain structures that she was feeling. The similarities. The differences. And there it was, deep inside of Spez’s core. There was a nodule of hardened structures, more akin to a bone than to part of the brain. It was wired into nearly every nerve cluster Spez had, from her deepest, lizard brain to the more recently added portions that were only a few million years old.

        That nodule of tissue was currently slamming Spez with enough electrical energy to fry a normal human.

        Sarah wrapped her tongue around it, then jerked backwards without much care for the damage she was causing. Spez screamed, out loud, and then Sarah fell flat onto her back, hacking and coughing and spitting. The crystal skittered along the ground, then came to a rest in the corner, hissing and smoking and glowing faintly. Spez sagged, clutching her hand to her ear. “Fuckin’ ow !” She snarled as her bone retracted into her body, the wound healing with terrifying speed. “How many times did I have to say I fucking...”

        “I’m sorry!” Sarah said, wiping her mouth off – it was coated in substances that she did not want to think about.

        “No one likes capitalism...” Spez wriggled her fingers as she drew them away from her head, her ear already repaired. She grinned at Sarah. “Ahh. The boss is now outta my head. God. It’s worse than running freight for Disney, I fuckin’ swear.”

        Sarah shook her head.

        “So, what finally got through your thicko skullo, Sexgod?” Spez asked, shaking her head slowly.

        “Well, uh, the capitalism thing, the ear covering thing, the tongue thing,” Sarah said, nodding. “The boot.”

        “...the ear covering thing?” Spez asked.

        “Yeah. I mean, we’ve both been head fucked, so, like, I figured you were trying to remind me of that. So, I’d then, uh, I’d just have to go in there and get the Eye out of your head!” Sarha grinned.

        “Nah,” Spez said. “I just like stretching.”

        Silence stretched between them, nearly as limber and length as Spez.

        “Oh.” Sarah said, finally.

        Spez stuck her finger into her ear, wriggling it like she was trying to scoop out some earwax. As she did so, she closed her left eye and cocked her head. “So, like, whatcha do to get the doorbies opened in this meatsack?”

        “Uh,” Sarah said, slowly, trying to process what the fuck Spez had just said. “You, uh...well, the muscles have to relax from the tension they were put under.” She stood, looking at the gory ruin that Spez had made of the wall and the floor. “I’m seeing a downside to our biomatter based constru- where’s the gemstone?”

        “The gemwhat?” Spez asked.

        The entire room plunged into darkness. The floor pitched underneath Sarah’s feet. Her arms flailed and Spez stumbled into her with a scream. Then a tearing, ripping, squelching sound filled the air and the floor became the ceiling. The two women slammed into what had been the roof with wet splatting noises, rather like throwing meat against a sidewalk. Then the acceleration increased – then dropped to nothing as the room began to tumble in an infinite blackness. Other than the sensation of touch, she felt as if she had been dropped into a void.

        “What the fuckery is happening?” Spez asked.

        “Uh, I think the room just...spat itself out of the station,” Sarah whispered.

        “It can do that?” Spez yelped. “Why would you do that?”

        “It was in case the space station started, like, exploding or burning or something.”

OR SOMETHING INDEED

         Sarah’s blood froze in her veins.

        She recognized that voice. She had heard it in the occasional nightmare, the nightmare that ripped her from sleep and shivering in Aiden’s arms. It was that deep, ever present, all consuming voice that had told her to submit. To bend the knee. To lower her head and to accept . To decay into a dusty nothingness, alongside her entire insignificant species.

YOU ARE PROVING QUITE TROUBLESOME, DR. KAPPEL.

         Sarah, her arms drawing tighter around Spez, tried to not shake. But she was. She was quivering , like a terrified rabbit underneath the shadow of a massive hawk. Spez clung to her, and her fingernails dug into Sarah’s side with the same desperate fear. She felt Spez leaning her forehead against the side of her head, her face mashing against her neck, her shoulder as she tucked in close. Sarah wanted to be brave for the other woman – who had needed to live with this terrifying voice for who knows how long.

I THINK THAT IF I REMOVED YOU, THEN I WOULD BE ABLE TO SUCCESSFULLY DECAPITATE THIS LITTLE PROBLEM. YOU HAVE ONLY THREE MINUTES TO LIVE

        Sarah, who had begun to float away from the side of the wall, felt the wall again. Had she been drifting? No. Her ears perked and in the increasingly stale air of the room, through the vacuum outside, she could hear a slow, grinding creak . Suddenly, her mind filled with an image of the room tightening on her and Spez like a fist. The room had chucked them out into an erratic orbit, and she was certain that it had done so in a way that had caused as much debris, as much confusion, as possible. In the aftermath, she had no idea if the rest of the Commanders would know which chunk to chase.

        She reached out with her free arm and her tendrils slammed into the wall. But it was like connecting with a stone – no, worse. A stone wouldn’t have throbbed with such intense hate. She felt her tendrils quivering, and biomorphic commands and impulses began to trickle from the wall to her arm. She jerked her wrist back before the symptoms got too bad – but her heart still felt as if it was beating a mile a minute. She gasped for air that she didn’t need and said: “You absolute bastard. Why are you even doing this? Did he tell you, Spez?”

        “Nopesauce,” Spez hissed. “We’re going to fucking die, though.”

I DO NOT NEED TO EXPLAIN MYSELF TO FEEDSTOCK.

         “Except you fucking do!” Sarah snapped. “Because I’m the last person who knows where the surviving Pro-Tas are.”

        The silence that filled the room was palpable. But the walls had stopped contracting – she could hear their stillness.

HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT NAME?

         “You’re not used to hearing about species you’ve exterminated coming back. Well, you missed a few. There are hundreds of them – and they’re our allies. And with their help, we’re going to do more than just kick your ass around Earth. We’re going to absolutely demolish  your entire galactic terraforming project. We’re going to-”

TERRAFORMING? IS THAT WHAT YOU THINK THIS IS ABOUT?

         Sarah pursed her lips. Was that effrontery she heard in its voice?

        It was. It was . She grinned, slightly.

        “And what else could you be doing by making all those Dyson Spheres? You don’t need to live on them - it’s almost like you’re building something for someone else-”

I SERVE NO ONE ELSE

         The irritation in his tone was crystal clear. “You almost sound human, Eye…” Sarah said.

I HAVE BEEN ASSIMILATING INFORMATION FROM YOU. BY THE END OF THE CONSUMPTION OF THE PRO-TAS, I COULD HAVE DEBATED WITH THE BEST OF THEM AS WELL. YOU ARE NO MORE COMPLEX. NO MORE SUPERIOR. NO MORE UNIQUE .

         Sarah shook her head. “Fine, then. Debate me. Tell me why I should lay down and let you mulch me. Do it. Come on. Convince me! I’m a fucking scientist and I’m halfway to being a communist – it’s not like I’m in a particularly philanthropic! I’m like, two good sentences away from writing humanity off as a bad idea and a dead end and fucking off with Aiden to the Magellanic Clouds to see if we can build something better. So tell me what it is you fucking want and maybe I’ll switch sides! You don’t know! ”

        The sound the Eye made was not quite a laugh, not quite a chuckle, not quite a sigh. It was a boulder-like chimera of all three human noises, made by a throat that had never known flesh, transmitted through a medium unlike air. The juxtaposition of the noise and the source almost made Sarah giggle with hysteria. But then the Eye began to speak – and as it spoke, the center of the room glowed with a light so sudden that it was shocking. Spez and Sarah, floating near what had once been a ceiling, watched as the glow flared outwards, coalescing into an image of an galaxy that seemed at once familiar and strange. As the galaxy began to bead with tiny gemstones of light and symbols that turned into legible words to the two Commanders, the Eye began to tell them about the War.

***

        The War had not started in the Milky Way. It had started in the chaos and the wild flurries of a different, more energetic galaxy – one that was the Milky Way’s younger sibling. The Andromeda Galaxy had birthed just as many early civilizations as the Milky Way. It simply did so  far  earlier. The fact was that while the Milky Way was stable and sedate, the Andromeda Galaxy was a positively rowdy hothouse. More massive, with more stars, the Andromeda Galaxy had seen the stellar cycles of birth, growth, and death flash by at a lighting pace.

        The simple fact was that intelligent, tool using, space exploring life could not exist without metals and chemical components that were formed in the hearts of dying stars. These stellar furnaces baked the elements out of hydrogen and helium and scattered them to the cosmic winds with their death blossoms – the supernovae that made a star shine brighter than their entire galaxy. In Andromeda, such processes led to the blooming of life far sooner than in the Milky Way. These lifeforms had made contact with one another and penetrated the laws of physics that cloaked faster than light travel under a caul of seeming impossibility. With contact had come peace and understanding. Multi-species confederations. Alliances of friendship, even love.

        It had also brought war.

        A lot of war.

        The very same solar furnaces that made the Andromeda galaxy so prone to life also made it terribly hostile, in both the long and short term. Intense radiation busts, gamma ray sweeps, crushing black holes, and worse scoured through the narrow habitable ring that surrounded the edges of the galaxy. As worlds were sterilized, and new habitable worlds were found, the rush to claim land was intense. Confederations and alliances fell upon one another like a pack of wolves. What had begun and dozens of separate conflicts had transcended, in the blink of an eye, into a singular, galaxy spanning war, fought by two distinct sides, composed of hundreds of species each.

        The final political and moral breakdown had shook out with remarkable regularity.

        On one side, there had been the species that valued life, artistry, compassion, kindness, genteelness, co-existence.

        On the other?

        ...not so much.

        Maybe at the beginning, there had been some measure of moral equivalency. After all, no species evolved to be evil. It was counterproductive in the long term, in the singular planet, singular sentient species environment that most sentient life evolved in. But in the new environment of the War, with the new evolutionary pressures of galactic Armageddon and battlefields that could consume entire solar systems in orgies of violence, new trends came forth. The first faction, whose name could only be translated into English as ‘The Forces of Good’, found themselves evolving to be more cooperative, more empathetic, more understanding. The evolution was primarily artificial, driven by engineering programs and social systems. Meanwhile, the second faction, whose name translates roughly to ‘The Forces of Evil’, had a similar recursive spiral. To counter the understanding and cooperation of their enemies, they became more brutal. More vicious. More evil.

        Locked into this spiral, the Andromeda Galaxy reached its terminal phase with the deployment of weapons that didn’t just wipe out planets. They didn’t just wipe out stars. The D-Iron Bombs wiped out galactic sectors  – by shunting pseudo-iron from several dozen nearby universes via the manipulation of high level quantum mechanics, the DIBs could cause a normal sun to go supernova with an incredible intensity. Spraying deadly radiation across the light-years, DIBs sterilized vast swaths of the Good half of the galaxy. In response, the Forces of Good used gravitic accelerators to ram neutron stars into one another and set off even more powerful busts of gamma rays, some of which even reached the Milky Way – unnoticed by the relatively scarce, relatively primitive species there.

        In the end, the Andromedians were left with a smoldering cinder – a minuscule chunk of galactic civilizations left, standing among the corpses of trillions of sentient creatures. A sliver of the Forces of Good approached the Forces of Evil and peace talks began. They were delicate and they were slow, but they, at last, came to an agreement.

        The Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil would split. Observations were taken of deep space, and the Forces of Good spotted a galaxy that was in the midst of being sterilized by the X-ray laser of a perpendicular neighboring galaxy – the supermassive black hole at the core of the neighboring galaxy literally sweeping each star clean of life. It was a natural tragedy on an immense scale, happening many millions of years in the past due to the vast distances between that pair of galaxies and the Andromedians. But the end result would be a galaxy that had no sentient life to displace. The Forces of Good could rebuild it, and maybe see if they could find any survivors who had escaped the natural purge.

        The Forces of Evil, meanwhile, found a galaxy that was smaller and denser than either Andromeda or the Milky Way – one that would have never evolved life, not with the amount of radiation bathing the scant millions of stars that ringed the distant core. They would settle in this desolate, blasted wasteland, and they would build themselves a new empire, far from the Forces of Good.

        The agreement was set.

        The Forces of Good entered into vast portals, constructed out of the corpses of dismantled gas giants and powdered by the explosions of small stars, and vanished.

        The Forces of Evil…

        Smirked.

        And said: “What a bunch of fucking morons.”

        And immediately set course for the Milky Way.

***

        Sarah blinked, slowly. “So, you’re...a vanguard?”

NO, SARAH.

         Sarah gulped. “You’re...”

EVOLUTION HONED ME – HONED US . LIKE A KNIFE PARING AWAY THE DROSS AND THE WEAKNESS AND THE PETTY CONCERNS. WE TOOK HOLD OF THAT NATURAL IMPULSE AND DROVE IT, FASTER AND FASTER, AS YOUR SPECIES DID. WE CUT OURSELVES AND WE BLED OUT ALL THE SIMPERING, ALL THE FOOLISHNESS. ONCE WE WERE DONE, WE WERE LEFT WITH A UNITY OF VISION. A UNITY OF PURPOSE. A UNITY OF THOUGHT. THERE WAS NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN K’LUL AND VOSS, BETWEEN ZI’RAN AND KYOSS. NO DISTINCTION BETWEEN I AND WE.

         Sarah felt her entire body going chill. The walls began to tighten, then. They clenched, slowly. Terribly slowly – like the paw of a cat, batting a mouse back and forth, back and forth, claws playing along fur, teasing muscle and skin. Sarah and Spez clung to one another as the room – the  hand  of the Eye - tightened more and more around them.

I AM EVIL, SARAH. PURE. AND. SIMPLE.

         Sarah clenched her jaw. She wanted to scream as the wall-flesh pressed against her back and the wall-flesh pressed against her face. Her nose flared, uselessly. She didn’t need to breathe. She wouldn’t be suffocated by the flesh tightening around her. She would be crushed. Her bones would be turned to powder, her muscles turned to a red ruin. Her friends, if they ever found her, would have to separate her from Spez with a soup strainer, and identify them with a genetic screen.

        But Sarah still found something inside her.

        It was a part of her...that was comforting.

        She grinned, slowly, her teeth pressing against the gummy tightness of the wall. Slime dripped against her body and her hand released itself from Spez’s hip as she put her palm against the skin of the wall.

        “Hey...Evil...” She whispered, her voice muffled in the cloying deepness.

        There was no response – but the wall did pause.

        “You’ve been in our heads for months now, and you think you understand us. But you still haven’t fucking grasped one. Simple. Thing.” She wished she could lick her lips. As it was, it felt like she was talking into a pillow – but her words were more thoughts than actual vocalizations. “Humans have been waiting for you for our entire fucking evolutionary history.” She grinned. “We know what to do when it comes to evil.”

        Her fingers tightened against the wall. Her claws popped free.

        “Rip and tear.”

        For the entire time the Eye – that Evil –  had been speaking, Sarah had been subtly altering her body. Laying muscle on top of muscle on top of muscles, in disastrously short term structures. The biologist in her cringed at the design. But unlike a natural creature, her muscle in her arm and her shoulder, the bones underneath both, didn’t have to survive year in and year out.

        They just needed one push.

        She shoved.

        Her hand punched through the tissue of the clenching room, which suddenly went slack as her claws razored through tendons and veins. Her hand punched into the blinding clarity of space and then wind roared around her. She and Spez pushed through a tight, dragging mass of gore, and then tumbled away from the compacted lump of flesh that hung above the surface of Haven. They clung to one another as they flipped away, blood-crystals glittering around them.

        In the howling silence of vacuum, Spez was the first to speak.

        “Well. He’s going on the R slash ShittyBosses.”