“There’s too much at stake,” Antares said.

“Chris!” Lookout’s voice was higher. “Don’t be a shit, you’re—”

And then they were out of earshot, the latter part of the sentence unfinished.

The path they traveled was a reverse one. Back to the single cell, where she was supposed to kill him.

The charade was over, and she didn’t even seem to care. She’d been seen. There would be witnesses. A cover-up was so much harder to manage. Impossible, even, because there were other cameras or devices tracking all of this, and now she knew.

And she was still going to kill him.

And Breakthrough wasn’t following, wasn’t taking action.

She had to work to shoulder her way through the door, and doors in the prison were larger than doors back home. Once free to stand tall, she tossed him. He was airborne for two heart stopping seconds before he crashed into floor and bars at roughly the same moment. The bars separated the last two thirds of the room from the front third, and there was no way through, no way to hide on the other side while the enraged changer dealt with him.

“If you do this,” he said, grunting as pain from the fall set in. “Everyone loses. If you don’t… you go back to the life you were living.”

She flexed one braid of an arm, and a lunging, eyeless maw, the closest thing to ‘crocodile’ about her, reached out in his direction.

It stopped, pulling short.

Ribbons and bands of flesh encircled part of the limb. More encircled part of her head.

Sveta. She had appeared through a closed door, or she’d been in the room all this time.

No, she was still slipping in under the door, more of her, more flat, razor-edged tendrils, that bound up Crock o’ Shit.

The changer lunged, charging forward blindly, to bludgeon him to death. He scrambled out of the way.

She crashed into bars with enough force to bend them.

More of her body unfolded, arcing overhead, set to crash down on top of him and on either side of him. He hurried to cover. A tendril gripped him, helping him slip past.

More of her opened up, until everything humanoid was gone. Her body was a pod, an installation that the changer mutations reached from. All ugly, all monstrous, eyeless, earless, fangs and teeth.

All ugliness she’d absorbed.

“Stop!” he shouted. “Fidelis! You’re better than this!”

But she wasn’t.

What followed was so frantic he couldn’t process it all. Lunging bites that he only avoided because he dodged them or because he was pulled out of the way.

Croc uttered a single word, drawn out as a roar, guttural. He could guess it was ‘Director’.