Maya half-dragged, half-carried Eva back through the sterile, silent corridors. Eva was a dead weight, her body moving but her spirit utterly gone. Her arm was slung over Maya's shoulder, her feet shuffling, her head bowed. The only sound was the ragged echo of their footsteps and the faint, wet drip of something Maya didn't want to identify from the cell behind them.
They entered the central chamber, the abattoir where they had left Wolfen. The scene had changed.
Wolfen was on one knee, his body trembling with a fine, constant vibration. His skin, usually pale, was now a sickly, bloodless grey. Beads of cold sweat dotted his forehead. But the most horrifying sight was behind him. A thick, organic-looking tentacle, slick with a clear bio-slime, had erupted from a grille in the floor. It was coiled around his back, and its tip, a needle-like syringe of bone, was buried deep between his shoulder blades, pumping an unknown, shimmering fluid into his system. He was not fighting it; he was enduring it, his jaw clenched so tight Maya feared his teeth would powder.
Prime 4 stood before him, his black mask still dripping with the blood of his subordinates. He watched their entrance with detached interest.
"And as for the whereabouts of your sister, Wolfen," Prime 4 said, his synthesized voice dripping with false sympathy, "unfortunately, I don't have her anymore. A pity. If I did, I would have experimented on her. I would have made her suffer in ways far more… creative… than hers." He gestured with his blood-caked hand towards the catatonic Eva.
Wolfen's head, heavy with whatever toxin was coursing through him, lifted. His eyes, clouded with pain, found Eva. He saw the absolute void in her expression, the way her body was a hollow shell. He didn't need the details. He saw the utter extinction of hope in her, and in that instant, he knew. He knew her sister was not just dead, but that her death had been a masterpiece of cruelty. He just didn't know the horrific canvas on which it had been painted.
Then, Prime 4 looked at a non-existent watch on his wrist. "Well, will you look at the time? It's late, and I really must be going. Oh, and Eva," he added, his tone light, conversational, as if asking about the weather, "did you see her? Your sister? She's beautiful, isn't she?"
The words were the final key, turning in the lock of Eva's annihilated soul.
She stopped shuffling. She let her arm slide from Maya's shoulder.
She took a slow, deliberate step forward. Then another.
Something was happening. The air in the chamber began to hum, a low frequency that made the metal walls vibrate. Maya's own inner monster, the predatory consciousness that lived within her, recoiled and then screamed a silent, primal warning. It wasn't a cry of challenge, but of sheer, instinctual terror. RELEASE HIM! the instinct shrieked. LET THE APEX OUT!
Wolfen, through the chemical fog paralyzing his body and severing his connection to the power that defined him, felt it too. A pressure building, a wrongness in the fabric of reality. He couldn't access his strength, his fire, his ash—but he could feel the void where Eva had been now filling with something else. Something ancient and ravenous.
Eva's back arched. There was a sound of tearing fabric and wet, cracking bone. Four appendages, not large like wings, but like grotesque, fleshy spikes, erupted from her spine. They were sharp, pointed, and glistening with a black, tar-like fluid, strands of raw meat and sinew still clinging to them. Her eyes, already vacant, were swallowed by an absolute, light-devouring blackness. Veins, now carrying not blood but the same viscous black fluid, rose to the surface of her skin, mapping her body in a web of corruption. Her hands twisted, elongating, becoming claws sheathed in a scale-like material that was a horrifying mix of black and deep, arterial red. Her teeth sharpened into needle points, and smaller, sharpened spines pushed through the skin along her shoulders and back. Her clothes ripped, but the transformation was contained, focused, a weapon being forged in the heart of a supernova.
She did not scream. She roared.
It was not a single sound. It was a chorus of agony, a layered cry of three, maybe four different voices—a little girl's terror, a woman's shattered heart, and the birth-cry of something that should never have been born—all fused into one deafening, soul-rending wave of sound that shook the very foundations of the laboratory.
Then, she moved.
She didn't run at Prime 4; she unmade the distance between them. The fight was not a contest. It was an erasure. Prime 4, for all his cold intellect, was utterly unprepared. This was not the calculated power of Wolfen. This was a force of nature, a grief so profound it had become a physical law: Destroy.
Eva's claws tore through his defensive stance, shredding his reinforced coat. She slammed him through a bank of computer consoles, which exploded in showers of sparks and flame. She picked up a half-ton piece of machinery and hurled it at him, not to hit him, but to collapse the entire section of the ceiling above him. The laboratory, a monument to the Architect's cold order, began to come apart. Support beams shrieked, walls buckled, and fire spread in hungry waves. She was not just fighting him; she was dismantling his entire world, brick by bloody brick.
Maya, acting on an instinct deeper than thought, rushed to Wolfen. She grabbed the organic tentacle and, with a scream of effort and revulsion, ripped it from his back, the bone needle tearing free with a sickening pop. He collapsed forward, gasping, his body his own again but utterly powerless.
For twenty minutes, the cavernous room was a blender of destruction. Prime 4, his black mask now cracked, his body battered and bleeding, was on the defensive, his own considerable enhancements barely keeping him ahead of Eva's world-ending rage. Then, the sound they had heard before—the thrum of a helicopter—returned, growing louder. A large transport craft descended, its searchlight piercing the dust and smoke.
Seeing his escape, Prime 4 gathered the last of his strength and leaped, a desperate, soaring jump through the collapsing wreckage of the ceiling towards the helicopter's open bay.
Eva saw him. With another ground-shaking roar, she launched herself after him, a scarlet and black comet of vengeance.
"Maya!" Wolfen croaked, his voice raw. He was leaning heavily on her, his body useless. "Half-transform! Stop her! Get her on the ground, then revert. Get low. Make no sound."
Maya didn't question it. She willed the change, her arms and legs scaling over, giving her the strength and spring. As Eva was in mid-air, focused solely on her prey, Maya leaped, tackling her around the waist. They crashed back down onto the buckled floor in a tangle of limbs, a few dozen feet from Wolfen.
Instantly, Maya forced the transformation to recede, becoming human again. She flattened herself against the ground, holding her breath, making herself as small and silent as possible, as Wolfen had commanded.
Inside her, the monster was in a frenzy. LET HIM OUT! it screamed, a psychic vibration of pure terror. THE MONSTER OUTSIDE IS AN ALPHA!
Alpha? Maya thought, bewildered. The word meant nothing and everything.
Above them, the helicopter, with a bleeding Prime 4 hauled inside, banked sharply and shot away into the night sky.
The sound of its rotors faded, replaced by the crackle of fire and the groan of dying metal.
Eva slowly pushed herself to her hands and knees. She was still fully transformed, a nightmare creature of grief and scale. Her head turned, her completely black, depthless eyes scanning the ruins.
They stopped.
They locked directly onto Maya.
The Alpha had lost its prey. And now it was looking for a new one.