It wasn’t just the whir of the processing machines, the hum of the medical refrigerators, the white-noise rush of the benchtop centrifuges, all of it amplified off the basement walls. Nor the smells, the sharp tang of rubbing alcohol, the nail-polish reek of iodine, the hospital-room whiff of PVC tubing and dried sweat. The sights weren’t what did it either—not the needles plunged into their flesh, the blood piping from their veins, their acquaintances laid out in neighboring beds, dead to the world. Not the scrape of the sanitized pillowcase at their nape. Not the taste, old pennies at the back of the tongue.

It was the vertiginous sense of dislocation.

They were no longer in the world as they knew it. No, this gave them a glimpse of The World As It Really Was.

Might is right. Eat or be eaten. Accrue resources or starve. Repeated again and again and again, because all ten thousand years of civilization had been built upon mankind’s desire to deny this fundamental truth.

René tried to protect them from reality. They were supposed to pass out full-bellied, drunk, and happy. Never know the difference. He was greedy, sure, but not inhumane.

No sense spooking the livestock on their way to the abattoir.

And yet now Joshua was certainly spooked.

He reared up from his gurney, tubes snaking around his bulging arms, IV poles crashing over.

René unhooked his own IV bag and dashed away, using Kendall’s gurney as a shield. He was too charged to feel fear, but a dark excitement gripped him. Tingling electrified his body—his gums, his arms, the skin of his lower back.

Joshua’s head pivoted, fixing on René. Even across the gurney, René registered the wounded rage and stripped-bare terror lurking behind the dilated pupils. It gave him a heady, almost sexual rush. He wondered if this is what his ancestors had felt charging through the fray, shrapnel grazing their cheeks.

Joshua lunged at René, sending the gurney skidding. Dead to the world, Kendall rolled to one side, smashed beneath Joshua’s weight. Scrambling toward them, Dr. Franklin tried to hit the kid with a syringe full of Versed, but with all the flailing he couldn’t get to the port. Joshua clawed across the unconscious girl, his churning legs propelling the gurney until René was backed to the wall, Joshua’s straining fingers inches from his face.

That was when Dex stepped in.

However big the boy was, he looked like a puppet in Dex’s hands. Dex lifted him in a choke hold. There was a crackling sound, and then Joshua poured limply from Dex’s arms onto the floor.

Silence reasserted itself in the basement.

Joshua lay still, one dead palm pressed to the concrete.