I began experimenting.
Carefully. Methodically. The way the scientists in Rainbow would have, except I was the subject and the laboratory and the monster all at once. I needed to understand the rules before I killed someone else. Before I killed her .
I touched plants. Nothing happened. The black substance didn't stir. I held a leaf for ten minutes, waiting for the black veins to appear, for the life to drain out. Nothing.
I touched insects. Sometimes they twitched and died, black lines spreading across their carapaces like frost. Sometimes nothing happened. No pattern I could identify. A cockroach died instantly. A beetle lived. A spider seemed to thrive , moving faster, its eyes somehow more aware.
I tried to understand the rules. The syndrome—if that's what it was—didn't spread through touch alone. It required something more. Compatibility. A living organism capable of accepting it, hosting it, letting it take root. The black substance was selective. It was choosy . It didn't want just any host. It wanted the right host.
That realization brought back the memory of the laboratory. The glass tanks. The bodies. The files I'd barely understood. Genetic markers. Compatibility indices. Rejection rates.
0.03%.
I stared at my gloved hand. "How many people died trying to create you?"
I didn't expect an answer. There wasn't one. The black substance slept, silent and smug, digesting whatever it had taken from me during the fights.
But I knew something else now. The organism wasn't satisfied with one host. It wanted to replicate.
To integrate. To build more of itself in more bodies, spreading like a network, a colony, a civilization made of flesh and hunger.
And I had already exposed someone.
My thoughts immediately went to Mara. To the way she'd looked at me that morning. To the headaches.
To the vision. To the way she'd heard the birds before they arrived.
I found her sitting by a window in the pleasure house, watching the street below. When she looked at me, her eyes narrowed—not with suspicion, but with focus. She was seeing me differently now. Seeing through me.
"You look worried," she said.
"How have you been feeling?"
She laughed. "That's an unusual question. Most men ask that, then leave before I can answer."
"Mara."
She stopped smiling. "Fine. A little tired. The headaches come and go."
"Headaches?"
She hesitated. "Sometimes. And my eyesight has been strange." She rubbed her temples. "I can see things I shouldn't be able to see. Details. Distances. It's like the world got sharper while I wasn't looking."
I went silent.
"What?" she asked.
I looked at her carefully. At the way she held herself, straighter than before, her posture balanced in a way that suggested new muscle memory. At the way her eyes tracked movement in the street below with a predator's focus. At the way she sat so still, so aware .
"Nothing," I lied.
But everything suddenly made sense.
I had infected her.
And I hadn't even known I was capable of it.