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Leon sighed and shook his head. “Don’t apologize, Garrett. You don’t even know what’s happened yet.”
A knock sounded on the sheet metal door moments before it creaked open, and a different qesh that Garrett had only seen a handful of times before poked his head in. “I might have some information on that.”
Leon let Garrett go and jerked his head for Sazahk to join them. “Come in. What have you found out?”
Sazahk came in and closed the door behind him. “That body”—Garrett winced. That body. Maxwell’s body—“definitely had a torvar in it.”
“Fuck!” Garrett banged his fist against the wall. Fuck. He’d been finally coming to that conclusion, but to hear it confirmed crushed him. Spy. Traitor. No Maxwell. He’d lost Maxwell and might never even know when it had happened. “We need to get rid of it, Leon, before it gets loose. We—”
“And it always has,” Sazahk broke in smoothly.
Garrett paused, his first still braced against the wall. He glanced over his shoulder at Sazahk with a frown. “What?”
“That body never even had a human consciousness.” Sazahk shook his head, and the overly fascinated tone of his voice grated on Garrett’s raw nerves. “It doesn’t even have all the necessary brain structures for it. There’s a gaping hole where the torvar must have fit in perfectly. Probably developed inside of it.”
Garrett took his hand off the wall and rubbed it over his face. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that unless you have a ring of secret torvar spies moving through your ranks that have been taking turns wearing that body, which I find highly unlikely given the intactness of the body, and I’m not even sure would be possible because there would need to be anchor points—”
“Sazahk.” Leon fixed the scientist with a stern look as he started to ramble. “The point, please.”
Sazahk sighed. “I’m saying that the only plausible conclusion I can come to is that our dear Dr. Maxwell Terry is a torvar and always has been.”
Garrett’s knees shook, and he quickly sat back down on the desk chair before he could fall. A torvar. And always had been. Always. The whole time. Garrett had never…even considered the possibility. Even knowing Sebastian for as long as he had and knowing that he and Maxwell were friends, the idea had never even occurred to Garrett. Maxwell was like Garrett. He was from a small Southern Tava town. He was just… Garrett had never thought…
Sazahk shuffled closer, crouched, and then dipped his head until he met Garrett’s eyes. “And for what it’s worth, he’s still alive.”
Air suddenly flooded back into Garrett’s lungs as the realization hit him. He gasped and dug his fingers into the seat of the chair. He was alive. Maxwell, the same Maxwell, was alive.
Maxwell with the terrible secret he could never admit to.
“Shit.” Garrett leaped to his feet, his heart pounding. “Where is he? Where did you take him?”
But someone had known about it. Someone who had held it over his head and threatened him with it and who had been waiting for a moment like this.
“Leon.” Garrett grabbed Leon’s shoulders and shook him when Leon only stared at him in shock. “Where the fuck is he?”
* * *
Maxwell stared at his hands.
They’d been tied to the arms of his chair, just as his feet had been tied to its legs, but the multiple zip ties had been wrapped around his wrists, which left his hands free to clench and flex.
And change color.
Orange and green and gray and purple and a terrifying inky blackness, that only spread farther as Maxwell’s horror at it grew, raced and twisted across the backs of his hands over his new, pale skin. So many times, Maxwell squeezed his eyes shut so he didn’t have to look at them anymore, but every time, he couldn’t resist the temptation to stare at his own hands again.
He couldn’t bear to think about what his face must look like and what it must betray, and every time he did that, inky blackness rushed back out of his shirt cuffs.
And when he wasn’t staring at his hands, he was adjusting his claws and his hooks, truly conscious for the first time of his own anatomy and his own body that had carved its way into this one. For a moment, there had been someone else in here with him—someone terrifying and terrified—but before Maxwell had even known what he was doing, he’d sunk his claws in, and the person had been gone.
Maxwell clenched his new hands around the arms of the chair.
He couldn’t be sorry about that. He’d never forget the cruel smile on the qesh’s face as he’d leveled his pistol at Garrett, braced protectively over the old man. Maxwell would rip his claws through a thousand men like that. And a thousand more to protect Garrett.
Garrett.
Deep, dark maroon flooded down Maxwell’s wrists to the tips of his long fingers, and his eyes stung.
