ATLAS'S POV
The alarm screamed through my skull like a knife.
I was already running before my brain caught up. Something was wrong in the xenobiology lab. Something was wrong with Kira.
My boots hammered against the metal floor. Three security guards ran beside me, plasma rifles charged. We'd drilled for containment breaches a hundred times. Standard procedure: seal the area, eliminate the threat, save whoever we could.
But this wasn't standard. This was Kira's lab. Kira, who kissed me goodbye six hours ago. Kira, who promised she'd be careful.
"Commander, the biological sensors are going crazy," Martinez panted beside me. "Whatever broke loose—"
"I don't care what it is," I snarled. "Dr. Chen is in there."
We rounded the corner. The lab door had been blown outward, twisted metal hanging like broken teeth. Emergency lights bathed everything in red. And the smell—God, the smell hit me like a punch. Burning plastic mixed with something organic and wrong.
"Kira!" I shouted into the darkness.
A clicking sound answered me. Not human. Not anything I'd ever heard.
I raised my rifle and stepped through the doorway. The lab was destroyed. Equipment sparking. Specimen containers shattered. And on the floor, three bodies in security uniforms, torn apart like paper dolls.
My stomach lurched. No. Please, no.
Then I saw her.
She was curled against the far wall, shaking violently. Her back was to me, but I'd know that posture anywhere—the way she hugged her knees when she was scared, making herself small.
"Kira?" My voice cracked. "Baby, are you hurt?"
She went completely still.
"Dr. Chen?" Martinez whispered behind me. "Sir, is she—"
Kira turned around.
I stopped breathing.
Her face was melting. That's what it looked like. Her beautiful face was sliding off like wax, replaced by something black and shiny. Her eyes—her warm brown eyes that crinkled when she laughed—were too big now, too dark, reflecting light like an insect's.
"No," I whispered. "No, that's not—"
She opened her mouth. Four different voices came out at once, all screaming. Her jaw unhinged like a snake's, and I saw rows and rows of teeth that definitely weren't human.
"GET BACK!" someone yelled.
Kira's body convulsed. Her spine arched backward with a sound like breaking wood. I watched in horror as her arms split down the middle, becoming four limbs instead of two. Black claws erupted from her fingertips, each one a foot long and dripping with something that sizzled when it hit the floor.
"Kira, listen to me!" I dropped my rifle and held up my hands. "It's me. It's Atlas. I know you're scared, but I can help you. Just—"
She looked right at me. For one second, I saw her in those alien eyes. Recognition. Love. Terror.
Then she screamed again—that awful multi-voiced sound—and lunged forward.
Not at me. At Martinez.
Everything happened too fast. Martinez fired. The plasma bolt hit Kira's shoulder, burning through flesh that turned out to be armored plating. She didn't even slow down. Her claws caught Martinez across the chest, ripping through his body armor like tissue paper.
He dropped. Dead before he hit the ground.
"SHOOT IT!" someone screamed.
The other two guards opened fire. Plasma bolts lit up the room like lightning. But Kira moved like water, too fast to track. She bounded off the walls, the ceiling, moving on four legs like an animal. Her claws flashed. Another guard fell, his throat opened to the spine.
"CEASE FIRE!" I roared. "STAND DOWN!"
But the third guard was panicking, firing wildly. A bolt caught Kira in the leg. She hissed—that terrible clicking hiss—and turned on him.
I saw her face shift. Saw something human flicker across those monstrous features. She was trying to stop herself. Fighting whatever she'd become.
She lost.
The guard's scream cut off abruptly.
Then there was silence. Just the sparking of broken equipment and my own ragged breathing. Three bodies on the floor. And Kira—or what used to be Kira—crouched in the center of the carnage, covered in blood that wasn't hers.
She looked at her claws like she'd never seen them before. Made a sound that might have been a sob.
"Kira," I whispered. "It's okay. We'll figure this out. I promise, we'll—"
She raised her head. Our eyes met.
And I saw her make a decision.
She ran. Not like a human runs—like a spider scuttling up a wall. She tore the ventilation grate off with one hand and squeezed her impossible body into a space that should have been too small. In seconds, she was gone, the sound of her movement fading into the ship's walls.
I stood frozen, my rifle hanging useless in my hands.
Something glinted on the floor near my boot. I bent down, hands shaking, and picked it up.
Her engagement ring. The one I'd spent three months' salary on. The one she wore every single day and said she'd never take off.
It was splattered with blood.
The ship's alarm shifted to a different pitch—the code for a loose hostile specimen. Through the walls, I heard the creature that used to be Kira moving through the ventilation system. Fast. Purposeful. Hunting.
"Commander?" A voice crackled in my earpiece. Captain Cross. "Report. What's the situation?"
I looked at the three dead guards. At the destroyed lab. At the ring in my palm.
"The specimen has escaped," I said, my voice flat and dead. "Dr. Chen is..." I couldn't finish the sentence.
"Understood. Implement Protocol Seven. Hunt it down and terminate with extreme prejudice."
"Captain, I—"
"That's an order, Commander. Whatever that thing is, it killed your fiancée. Now it's loose on my ship with fifty thousand sleeping colonists. I want it dead within the hour."
The channel clicked off.
I closed my fist around the ring so hard the diamond cut into my palm. Somewhere in the walls, Kira was hiding. Scared. Alone. Changed.
I'd promised to protect her. To love her no matter what.
But the woman I loved was gone. And the monster wearing her face had just slaughtered three of my men.
I picked up my rifle and checked the charge. Full power. Enough to burn through reinforced steel.
Enough to kill whatever Kira had become.
A sound echoed through the vents above my head—wet and hungry, like something chewing. Then a voice, garbled and broken, barely recognizable:
"At...las... help... me..."
My blood turned to ice.
Because that monster could talk. It knew my name.
And somewhere in my chest, the part of me that still loved Kira Chen answered.