Would I let them take me apart in order to save Mandy? Yeah. I was pretty sure I would. I didn’t like people—had never liked people—but individuals who stuck around long enough for me to start giving a damn were rare enough that I wanted to protect the ones I had. Lucas and Graham were going to need her once they figured out I was never getting out of here.

Graham. My eyes, which had somehow drifted shut again, snapped open. Graham had tracked down Jeff; Graham had suggested they use Mandy to infiltrate the facility where I was being kept. Graham was here. Maybe not physically, but close enough that any ramifications Mandy faced were likely to spill over onto him as well.

“Can’t … No.” I mumbled, and pushed myself up onto my elbows. My head spun. My veins felt like they’d been hollowed out and filled with sand, shifting through my body, weakening and wearing me away. Even the green patch on my arm hurt, a sharp, stabbing pain that only got worse when I straightened my arms and pushed myself onto my palms. I risked a glance at it, expecting to see the green gone sallow, or cracking with dehydration.

Instead, I saw green lines, like lightning strikes or veins, radiating out from the edges of the patch, lancing through the still-human skin around it. I made a low moaning noise. I was in distress: my body was reacting the only way it knew how. By changing. My blood had still been red when they’d started taking it away. Had these people syphoned off some irreplaceable percentage of my humanity, forcing me to embrace the reality of my roots faster than I should have?

Chillingly, the thought was accompanied by a question: if they could force the change, how long before they would start cutting off strips of my skin to see whether they could observe the blossoming from peach to green?

I had to get out of here. I had to get out of here, and I had to get Mandy out of here, while there was still a chance I could pass for human. The chair I’d fallen out of was on its side, but that actually made it slightly better for my purposes. I gripped the edge of it, pushing it down against the floor as I pushed myself up. My head throbbed. The room spun. And just like that, I was standing.

My feet felt like they were rooted to the floor. I glanced down, almost afraid to find they had done exactly that: grown roots and anchored themselves fast, becoming immoveable. They were still just feet, human-seeming, with bare toes pressed flat against the linoleum. If there was a green tint around the edges of my toenails, I could ignore it for now. I needed to get out of here.