Page 283 of Immune

I frown at all of their faces. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

Ewan makes a sound. Not quite a laugh, and not really a sob either. More like a strange sound caught between the two. He reaches for me from where he’s kneeling, not scared of my hands and not scared of the blood that coats them. Scared I’m not seated behind my own eyes yet.

The bond pulls so hard toward him that I sway.

Kaito sees it and his hand tightens briefly on Ewan’s shoulder before he lets go.

“Easy,” Kaito says to me, not like an order. Like a cautious bridge he’s offering to me. “Come back slowly.”

My stomach turns and, slowly, I look down at myself again.

Blood.

So much blood.

Not mine.

Most of it’s not mine.

My stomach turns again, but not enough. Not the way it should. And that scares me more than Davis ever did.

Mercer pushes through behind Valeria. His face is gray by the time he takes in the bodies on the ground. When he looks at me, he stops dead. Not afraid of me exactly. No. This is worse. It’s like he’s realizing something very important.

“Kota,” he says gently. “Can you tell me what happened?”

I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. Because I know what happened, and yet I don’t.

Davis trapped us and his men grabbed me. Ewan got hurt and then the world became all clean and simple and red.

Kaito’s eyes are on mine now, and he understands first. I see it land inside him. Not the science of it, but the shape of the thing.

“She wasn’t just defending herself,” he says.

Mercer looks at him sharply.

Kaito’s jaw tightens. “Something triggered.”

Mercer grows incredibly still then, and a guard even shifts.

Valeria whispers from where she remains standing, “Triggered what?”

Kaito doesn’t look away from me. “The thing NOVAC built into her.”

My heart releases one awful beat.

Mercer’s face changes, all the color draining out of it so quickly I wonder if he might faint. He doesn’t. Instead, he mutters, “No.”

It’s not denial. It’s horror. Not at me, but at what was done to me.

His gaze drops to my bloody hands and clothes, then to Davis, and then back to me.

My bite pulses and the bond flickers. Ewan’s fear brushes against mine, warm and split open.

Mercer swallows harshly.

“She didn’t go feral,” he says, but no one speaks.

“She didn’t lose coordination. No random aggression. No infection behavior.” His voice goes thin, quick, and clinical, because apparently terror needs somewhere to sit back and relax. “Targeted response. Threat elimination. Accelerated physical output. Pain suppression. Scent alteration.”