Dr. Morgan hefted the big syringe and turned toward Kira; the others moved with her, spreading out around the table. The medical spider spun into place, grippers and pincers and lights and scalpels all hovering above her like a spiky metal nightmare. As the doctors left the wall panel, Kira saw the images they’d been looking at—recognized them immediately from her own study of Samm: a magnified picture of the Predator, the stage of RM that appeared in the newborn’s blood, and beside it the Lurker, the one she’d found in Samm that shared so much of the Predator’s structure.

Dr. Morgan pulled back the sheet, exposing the top of Kira’s chest. “We have reason to believe that this is going to make you very sick, very quickly.” She held the syringe over Kira’s heart. “We’ll be monitoring your vital signs, of course, but we need you to tell us anything else you may experience: pain in your joints, shortness of breath, loss of vision or hearing. Sensory details our instruments can’t detect or interpret.”

“You’re injecting me with the Lurker,” said Kira, already feeling her body starting to panic, and struggling to keep her breathing even and calm. “The particle you produce, the inert version of RM. What are you expecting it to do?”

“A version of RM? I told you your knowledge was useless to us.” She plunged the needle into Kira’s chest—she could feel it sliding in, pain and pressure and a horrifying sense of invasion. The anesthetic isn’t working! Dr. Morgan pressed down on the plunger, and Kira gasped at the sudden flood of fire in her chest, pumping directly to her heart and from there to the rest of her body, filling her in seconds. Her breath caught; her hands grasped involuntarily at the edge of the table, scrabbling for anything solid to hold on to. The injection seemed to take ages, and when Dr. Morgan finally pulled out the needle, Kira whimpered, imagining she could still feel the fluid as it coursed through her.

“No reaction yet,” said a masked doctor, her eyes fixed firmly on the wall. Another shined a light in Kira’s eyes, checking her dilation with one hand and her pulse with the other.

“Everything normal.”

“We’re not sure how quickly this works,” said Dr. Morgan, watching Kira closely. “We haven’t experimented on humans since just after the Partial War.”

Kira breathed deeply, summoning her control after the violation of the injection. The particle still rotated slowly on one of the screens. Am I going to die? She said the Lurker’s not a new version of RM—then what is it? And what are they expecting to see?