The words on the bathroom wall flashed back to her: They take our skin.

Charles stared at Robin, her mouth open but incapable of making a noise. Robin’s face was splitting in half. A crack had started over her nose and spread up to her hairline and down to her neck. The crazed smile slid farther and farther around her cheeks as the centre of her face opened like a book.

Inside was something unnatural. Something inky black, writhing and squirming to break free. Something alive.

Charles tried to scream, but her throat was frozen. She stumbled backwards, tripped over a broken desk, and landed on a stack of papers with a loud thud. Robin’s body was continuing to split, the two halves curling around behind her to free the dozens of thick black tendrils inside. They stretched out, poking at the air, tasting and testing, moving closer to Charles.

They take our skin.

Robin had encountered the monster. She hadn’t been lying about that. She’d just neglected to mention where it was hiding—beneath her skin.

Charles’s hand tightened around the gun. She raised it, aimed at the writhing black mess, and opened fire. The thick platinum rounds blasted holes through the place where Robin’s head had been. The tendrils jerked and thrashed, and little bits of them flew about the room as the bullets separated them from their body. One of the largest arms shot towards Charles and snatched at her ankle. She kicked at it, scrambled backwards, and closed her eyes as she emptied her clip into the beast looming over her.

Silence rushed in to fill the room as Charles’s gun ran empty. Gasping, trying not to hyperventilate, she opened her eyes to see Robin’s crumpled remains lying on the ground.

It was half human, half monster. What remained of Robin’s body was limp, strangely deflated, inexplicably fused to the stilled black creature that had hidden inside her. The black tendrils lay in a tangle, many of them torn in half by the gunfire. A pool of dark blood inched out from the body, dyeing the scattered papers black.

Ellan was probably the first to be taken, Charles thought, dragging herself away from her superior’s body, unable to avert her eyes. I bet she didn’t stay at the control panel like she said. They’d have needed their scientist to help identify the new lifeform. And it got her and took over her body, but her companions wouldn’t have known that, so they let her back into the station, and by the time they realised something was wrong, it was too late.

A loud thump echoed through the building, and Charles gasped. “Jay!”

Robin had divided the teams carefully, she realised. She’d kept Charles for herself and put Jay with Ellan. Jay had trusted the girl. Charles cursed and kicked herself to her feet, slipped on the scattered papers, caught herself on a bench, and ran through the door to the kitchen.

Food, stacked tidily, none of it eaten, no empty packets in the bin, Charles noticed as she tore through the room. Of course. She wasn’t alive, so she didn’t need to eat.