He gestured vaguely at Eli and Park. “Big leagues, baby. I started planning that very night. It’s taken me months to get everything in place but shoot, I’m a born entrepreneur, man. Do you want to live on the top or die at the bottom? I mean, what do the killers you usually run into do it for? Revenge? Love?” Ryan laughed. “Here, maybe we can make it look like that, if you want. The Moon is out, after all.”

He yanked open the sliding metal drawers under the cart top, and a woman half fell out.

Cooper only had to hear the rage in Eli’s voice as he leapt to his feet and tore ineffectually at the fencing to know it was Alice. Even so, Cooper recognized the white-blond buzz cut, the blue-gray eyes half-closed but still clearly white-less, luminescent and as inhuman as the rest of her half-transformed face.

Both Eli and Park were snarling now. It sounded different than usual, lacking the guttural, vibrating edge Cooper would feel in his throat. There was nothing wolf-like about it. Just a noise made from muscle memory and something akin to human anguish.

Cooper felt a wrenching sadness for this woman, for Eli, for Park. Ryan wasn’t just a murderer; he’d stolen the very core of their identities, their control over their own bodies, forced them into the skin of strangers.

A cold, burning anger swelled inside of him as he stared into Alice’s unfocused eyes. There was nothing he wouldn’t do, he thought, to get them back their souls.

Alice’s eyes moved to look straight at him. Cooper inhaled sharply.

Ryan picked up a long electric animal prod and walked over to the cage fence, searching for what had caused the reaction, and Cooper hastened for a distraction. “You must have something pretty big planned for the finale,” he said.

“Mmhmm,” Ryan said, apparently bored with explaining himself. Behind his ankles, Alice’s fingers twitched, and her half-extended claws shrank almost imperceptibly.

The paralytic was wearing off. Sooner than Ryan expected, probably. It must have something to do with Eli and Alice’s uncommon relationships to shifting. Their bodies must be reacting to the toxin slightly differently than the others had. They needed time, though. And with Ryan standing right there with a zapper in one hand and a syringe full of more toxin in the other, the slightest mistake could set them back to square one. At any moment, he could decide to top Alice off. Or, you know, just move on to the killing stage.

“I mean, it’s a pretty good plan and everything,” Cooper said. “But don’t you think you’re missing a huge problem here?”

Ryan looked at him, interested once more. “What’s that?”