MirrorWorld

His skin is thin, crisscrossed with severe stretch marks. He’s growing faster than his human skin can handle. The thin white fabric of his flesh is nearly translucent, revealing the thick red veins just beneath the surface, twitching like ravenous, burrowing leeches.

I realize that Lyons’s hungry glare and ongoing transformation should horrify me, but I’m just curious. What has he done to himself? How can he claim to be fighting for humanity when he is no longer human himself? Then again, the look in his eyes says he’s operating on instinct now. The human intellect and all its machinations and misguided planning are either gone or sitting in the backseat.

Beep, beep, beep. A high-pitched digital chime cuts through the air. It’s coming from my watch. The president’s deadline has passed. “I need more time!” I shout, looking past Lyons to the slowly undulating matriarch tendrils.

The reply comes as a whisper. “We will wait — on you.”

The message is clear. The Dread will stand down until the outcome of this battle is clear, meaning the president will stand down as well. But if I fail … if the matriarch and this colony fall, freeing Lyons to wipe out the Dread … the world will burn. All of us together, united at last, in the end.

Lyons reaches out for me, and I see his hands for what they’ve become — long, hooked claws pressed together to form one large curved blade, like a Dread mole’s. There are no knuckles remaining, and the red-vein-covered black flesh of a Dread has burst out of the limb, his old skin dangling like that of a molting snake.

I’m about to dive out of the way when he stops short, arcs his back, and screams in pain. A sound like tearing paper fills the air. His chest splits open. Stretch marks give way. The monster inside is emerging.

“What have you done?” I ask, not really expecting an answer.

“To defeat the enemy,” Lyons growls, “you must first become them.”

It’s a butchery of a Sun Tzu quote but reveals that this was, in fact, part of his plan all along. That’s how he intended to turn the Dread against themselves. The DNA coursing through his body must have come from a Dread mole. And his plan could work. The Dread crocs aren’t attacking him. Whether it’s because they see him as one of their own or because he’s radiating fear like a melting-down nuclear reactor emits radiation, I don’t know. But if he can bend the Dread to his will … Fear or not, I know that’s a scary idea.

But then there’s the bomb. He’s going to kill himself, too, unless … I glance at the two archways leading out of the chamber. With the countdown surely moving below nine minutes, he might be able to escape. The circular trip back to the surface would take me far too long, but Lyons, with a Dread body, might just make it, especially if he can climb straight out the way I came in.

“I need help,” I think, willing the matriarch to hear the words.

But it’s Lyons who replies. “I’ll be … with you … in a moment.”

I don’t know if the matriarch has heard me or not, but it remains silent. Could he already be controlling it, too?

Lyons lets out a roar, turning his head to the ceiling.

Skin explodes away from his body, bursting balloonlike. Gore splatters at his feet. Limbs thicken, claws extend, bright red light pulses hard. The remains of his body splits and falls away, his shed chest carrying away the two trench knives. But the cherry on top of this juicy hemoglobin sundae is what happens to his head.

His roar becomes garbled, and then muffled.

For a moment, I think he’s choking, but then small, jointless fingers reach out of his mouth. Tendrils. Ten of them. The digits wrap around his face, clinging to his cheeks, digging into the meat. His head bulges. The skull cracks. The tendrils pull. What remains of his voice turns high-pitched as the last of his humanity is torn away and dropped to the floor like yesterday’s slop.

When he turns his gaze back toward me, he’s transformed. His body is like a bull’s: dark, armored, and covered in veins but upright. His face resembles a matriarch’s with an arc of five black eyes rising up and over two more and a mass of tendrils, but there is also a mouth beneath all those squirming digits, wide and toothed like a croc’s. And that’s when I notice the tail now sliding back and forth behind him, a line of short tendrils wriggling over the top of the tail and tracing a line up his back. He didn’t just take DNA from one Dread, he took bits and pieces of them all.

He tries to speak, but it’s just a garbled mess.