His eye fell on her hand.

Changer. They tended to trigger from crises of identity. Once triggered, those crises tended to stick with them. They were, in PRT parlance, very hard to hold onto, beause they were most likely to leave and try to go another route. Movers tended to change departments often, blasters, strikers and brutes tended to bear heavier weights of post-traumatic stress. But changer—

If there was something about her he could get at, figure out, or use to avert this march to execution, it was her identity.

And he couldn’t even begin to fathom the puzzle of a woman who was force-marching him forward.

The claw at his left shoulder tightened as they reached a door.

“Here’s good,” she said.

She was supposed to take him to Sveta. She took him to an empty chamber instead.

“You were military,” he said, talking despite the fear that gripped him. He stepped forward, but she stood in the doorway.

She was taller, her face slumping down at one side, so the lower row of sharp teeth were perpetually visible. One of her arms was longer than the other, twisted up like a braid. The same arm that had been resting a hand on his shoulder. The tattoo with the corps motto on it was stretched out and distorted.

“Marine,” she said, with slurred speech.

“What happened out there?” he asked. “Where did Fidelis come from?”

“Fidelis came and went a long time ago,” she said. “You can’t talk your way out of this.”

“I’m only partially trying to talk my way out of this. Part of it is that I hate unanswered questions and unfinished stories. I want to know the full story behind what kills me.”

“You’re telling the truth,” she said. She smirked, leering. Her face was stretching out, long. “Not knowing is going to be the least agonizing part of this. I can’t eat you, that’s too obviously me, but I can break you. If I break every last one of your ribs and pelvis, how long does it take you to die?”

“This isn’t you.”

She snickered. “Can’t breathe so easy without your ribs. Can’t move your arms, can’t move your legs. Do you stop breathing? Do you drown in your fluids? Do you go into shock? You’re a doctor type. Don’t you know?”

“No,” he said.

She was a changer. Her change was tied to prerequisites, and prerequisites were commonly tied to specific kinds of trigger event. There was the theory that it was drugs and altered mental states that did it, that there was something small but ‘breaker’ in the trigger that added a bigger on-off switch or component, tied to something external. Lung in Brockton Bay had been in his files as an example.