The hybrid woman guided Mark’s hand to a tapered flaying knife, and the wobbling form of the man whose pain was about to become their food and their drug.

His eyes—full of confusion, disbelief, and question—pleaded with Mark.

This induced in him a shivering electricity that was pleasurable beyond anything he had imagined possible.

So much for the math of combat. He had not expected this, not out of his own heart.

His partner thrust the knife into his hand, and he raised it, and he moved toward the man—

—and in that moment saw other eyes watching him from across the room, familiar eyes.

Linda’s expression was so shocked that it instantly froze him.

He had been about to stab that man and, in so doing, join himself to the hybrids—to his sisters and his brothers.

An instant later, a flooding tide of compassion changed his vision of the situation yet again. Now he saw the human victims as vividly as he had a moment before seen their hybrid tormentors. Their faces, which had appeared wooden, were now filled with an anguish that broke his heart.

He heard their faltered prayer, “As we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we shall fear no evil,” and the children, too, praying in their spring-pure voices, clinging to the adults as they all watched the tortures of the selected, and waited, themselves, to be chosen.

He threw the flayer aside and drew his knife from its sheath, and with a sweeping thrust that involved precisely the needed strength, he cut the hybrid woman beside him in half. The torso went kicking away like a gandy dancer as the head and shoulders hit the floor, arms windmilling and teeth snapping.

He swung the knife again, and four more hybrids flew apart.

The music had stopped, and the rest of the hybrids took strange, springing leaps toward the door. Mark was in among them at once, slashing with a fury and a speed even beyond what he had previously done. The human captives now appeared motionless, eyes wide, lips parted with the distention of time-frozen screams.

He knew that he was once again in the state of extreme speed that was characteristic of hybrids, and of him.

The room appeared frozen to him, the hybrids moving in a deliberate mass, the faces of the people registering by slow degrees more and more surprise, their eyes beginning to shine, and Linda and Pete like statues, their faces sculpted by an angelic hand.

Soon only one hybrid was left alive, the boy who had been tormenting the children.