by Tania Hutley
Instead, the Beast is the one who reaches for her. He bends to take hold of her arms, then drags her up to her feet.
“Don’t,” whispers Cale. “You can’t do that. Let her go.” I don’t think he knows he’s speaking the words aloud.
“It’s time to play our game now.” The Beast gives Felicity a horrible, leering smile. “We’re going to see if you can fly.”
“No,” whispers Cale. “No, no, no.”
My eyes are burning and prickling. There’s a hard knot in my throat that feels like it’s made of both fire and tears. Like all my rage and grief and denial has been compressed into a tight ball that’s too hot to swallow.
“Don’t.” Felicity’s sobbing so hard she can barely get the word out. “I don’t want to play.”
“Shhh,” says the Beast. “What if you find out you can fly? Wouldn’t that be fun? Wouldn’t that be the best game ever?”
“I don’t want to. Don’t make me.”
He pushes her into the space where the glass used to be, holding her in the rushing wind. The camera angle changes to show the impossible drop below her, the distant ground that’s one hundred and ninety-seven floors away. The bastard doesn’t want us to miss a thing.
Felicity is too scared even to scream. She’s hanging onto his hands, trying to scramble back inside. Only strangled gasps come from her mouth, as though she’s fighting desperately to catch her breath.
“This isn’t my fault.” The Beast stares into the camera. “I’m not the one who decided to change a perfectly good system, and bleed respectable businessmen dry. I’m not the one who decided to give everything away to a bunch of dirty sewer rats, and upset Triton’s peace and prosperity.” He shakes his head, his lips pressed together. “You know who’s to blame, don’t you, Felicity? You have one chance to save yourself. Tell me who’s using the Skin, and I’ll leave you unharmed.”
“She doesn’t know anything,” whispers Cale.
I’d give anything to be able to close my eyes and not have to watch what’s going to happen. Felicity can’t tell the Beast what he wants to know. I doubt she even understands the question. Her eyes are wild, and she’s staring down at the ground far below, struggling against his iron grip, trying to pull herself back inside.
“You’re not going to tell me?” The Beast heaves a giant sigh.
Then he shoves her.
Felicity windmills her arms, trying to regain her balance even as she plummets from the window. The camera follows her down, but now, finally, I can drag my eyes away.
I fumble for the control panel and shut the recording off, before leaning over to retch up my guts.
No doubt the Beast focused the camera back on himself after Felicity hit the ground. He probably delivered some last pithy threat, telling me he’s going to do the same thing to my human body. If he did, it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to hear it from a recording. Whatever he has to say to me, he can say in person.
It’s likely he’s set some kind of trap for me. Killing Felicity was probably his way to lure me to him. I don’t care. I’m going to find him anyway.
He’s going to pay for what he’s done.
Chapter Seventeen
Felicity’s gone.
Cale and I stand in the living room of the apartment, staring at the broken window. It’s starting to rain, and fat drops are landing inside. The floor’s getting soaked.
I think we were both desperately hoping the recording was some kind of trick, that Felicity wasn’t really dead, and the Beast had faked the footage for some reason. Maybe to lure us here. I would have been glad to walk into a trap if it meant Felicity was still alive.
But Felicity isn’t here. Wind is howling in through the broken window, just like it did in the recording. Moisture is swirling in with it, like the world is crying.
The world should be crying. Felicity was innocent. She lived a lonely life, shut up here so a tyrant could take her place, and she had a terrible death. I should have done more for her.
It wasn’t so long ago that I stood in front of this window looking out at Triton and Deiterra and convinced myself I could change the world for the better. But my ambition has cost the lives of people I care about. And now, instead of staring out at Deiterra with big dreams and wild ideas, I’m watching the floor get ruined.
It’s time to put a stop to all this. To end everything.
I tap my band to bring up the control panel and connect to my assistant. “Send somebody up to fix the broken window in the penthouse,” I tell her.
“Yes, Madam President. I’ll make sure they use the special impact-resistant glass that Sentin—”
“No need. Not anymore. They can just use regular glass.” Now Felicity’s gone, there’s only one secret still hiding up here. One secret, lying in Edward Morelle’s pod, in the hidden room that the Beast couldn’t find. That secret will be gone soon too, when I transfer back into my human body for good.
Soon there’ll be no more Skins, and no need for me to pretend to be President Morelle. Someone else can be President of Triton. I don’t want the job anymore. All I need now is revenge.
Cale turns to me, his face lined with grief. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to kill the Beast.” Amazingly, it comes out sounding calm and perfectly reasonable.
I walk away from the window, heading toward the kitchen. I can’t stand to see the broken window, or the view toward Deiterra anymore. Better to be in the enclosed space of the kitchen with its cold white stools and gleaming bench tops.
Cale follows me. “I’m going to help you,” he says. “But we need a plan. The Beast blew up your factories and killed Felicity to make you angry. He wants you to go charging into his building to confront him, which means he’s planning to ambush you.”
“It’s not an ambush if I know he’s waiting for me.”
“He thinks he can beat you.” Cale leans against the kitchen counter, his arms folded. “And maybe he’s right. We have no idea how strong his Skin is. If he’s not afraid of you, he could be stronger than you are.”
“He expects me to go and see him in this Skin. But I’m going in my Leopard Skin, and I doubt he knows my scientists have been busy upgrading it.”
“They have?” His eyes glint. “I don’t suppose they upgraded my Tiger Skin while they were at it?”
“I don’t think so. Sorry. But you should use it anyway.”
“Shame we don’t have any knights to take with us.”
“No knights,” I agree. “But we have the Wasp Skin and the Devil Bear Skin.” I don’t mention Sentin’s Reptile Skin. I’m not sure I could bear to see anyone else use it.
“Who can we ask to use those Skins? Keren and Spade?”
“I wish it were that easy. Remember how long we trained for the contest, learning to use them?” I meet his gaze, watching his puzzlement turn to shocked realization.
“You can’t ask Brugan and Aza to help us.”
“Why not?”
“Because Brugan’s an asshole. And there’s the small matter of how much he hates you.”
“He hates Milla, not President Morelle. She’ll be the one asking for a favor, and I bet both Brugan and Aza will jump at a chance to use their Skins one more time.”
Cale blinks a few times, digesting this suggestion. “What will you tell them?”
“The truth. The Beast is using an illegal humanoid Skin and I need their help to take him down. I’m not asking them to kill a real person, just disable a Skin. We spent weeks training to do exactly that in the Skin Hunter contest, so they shouldn’t find it too hard.”
“But if you’re using your Leopard Skin, Brugan will know who you are. What’s to stop him turning on you?”
I lift my chin. “If he tries, he’ll regret it.”
He blows out his breath and nods. “You’re right, I suppose he will. I thought you were fearless when I met you, but now? Brugan had better watch out.”
I’d expected Cale to try to talk me int
o playing it safe and not taking risks. This is better. He finally accepts that I can take care of myself, and it makes me glad.
“Where do you think the Beast’s real body will be stored?” I ask. “In the Phoenix Industries building?”
“It seems likely. But we should do some research.” Cale taps his band. “You search b-Net and I’ll search Sub Zero. Cross reference any mentions of the Beast with property he owns, and we’ll narrow it down from there.”
I do what he asks, scrolling through information until my head is spinning. “According to b-Net, he owns five factories in Old Triton and two buildings in New Triton,” I tell Cale. “But it doesn’t make sense for him to store his body in them. They’re all busy operations, with plenty of staff and nowhere to hide a pod.”
“That’s weird.” Cale frowns at his band’s holo screen. “I found something.” He enlarges the view so I can see the scraper he’s looking at. It’s a 3-D model of the Phoenix Industries building, an impressive steel-and-glass structure. On the top floor is the boardroom where I confronted the Beast.
I shake my head. “He can’t be there. All the floors in the building can be publicly accessed. He doesn’t own a private apartment like I do.”
“There’s no obvious hiding place.” He raises his eyebrows. “That’s the point. The New Triton part of the building is fifty-eight floors high, and underneath it is one of his Old Triton factories.”
He adjusts the view, so the camera zooms down to Old Triton. Now I’m looking at a large, ugly factory with thick concrete walls. It’s the base of the building that supports the rest.
“And?” I ask.
“Old Triton is twenty-eight stories high, but the Beast’s factory is only twenty stories. It’s not tall enough, yet it’s supporting an entire skyscraper on top of it. See?”
He pulls up a blueprint of the building, positioning it over the 3-D model. The grid lines of the blueprint stop after twenty floors.
“What’s inside the eight floors that aren’t in the blueprints?” I ask. “A private apartment? He doesn’t need eight floors to store one pod.”
“It’s worth checking out, don’t you think?”
I peer at the image. “There are no windows in that part of the building, and I bet you can’t get up there from the factory below.”
“You can probably go down in the elevator from New Triton. But if it’s anything like Morelle’s elevator, there’ll be layers of security. Facial recognition, a retina scan, fingerprints. And we don’t have Sentin to help us crack it.”
At the mention of Sentin, a wave of grief hits me, and I swallow hard, fighting not to let it show on my face. I still can’t believe he’s gone. First him, and now Felicity. It’s too much to bear.
My limbs feel weak and I sit heavily on one of the stools, resting my arms on the counter.
“You okay?” Cale sinks onto the stool next to me. I guess I wasn’t so good at keeping my expression impassive.
“Fine.” I drag in a breath, swallowing down my sorrow. We have work to do and I don’t have time to fall apart. “I’ll find a way to get us down into that space.”
He studies me for a moment, then nods. “I believe you will,” he says softly.
“I’m also going to make sure the Morelle Corporation can keep going without me. The bombings have already caused chaos. My employees depend on their wages, and if something happens to me, I don’t want the factories to have to shut down.”
Cale’s jaw tightens, but he nods. I can see on his face that he’s thinking the same thing I am. If we confront the Beast and he manages to destroy my Leopard Skin, there’s a chance my human body could die with it.
“What will you do with Morelle’s Skin?” he asks.
“I’ll lock it with my human body in the secret room behind the library shelves. Nobody will find it there.”
“If you don’t transfer back into that Skin, people will think the President of Triton vanished into thin air.”
“You could transfer into it.”
“Me?” He rocks back on his stool. “No thanks.” He shakes his head firmly. “Triton can manage without an interim president until the election.”
“No matter what happens, I’m giving all my factories to the Fist.”
His eyes widen. “You’re giving them all away?”
“The factories should belong to the Old Tritoners who work in them. The Fist will make sure the workers are looked after. And there are enough members that no one person will have total control. Hopefully, that’ll keep them honest.”
He thinks it through, and I can see the idea settling into him. “It’ll be a huge change for Triton,” he says finally. “Workers owning their own factories? That’s something I’d like to see.”
“I don’t know if it’ll work, but it’s guaranteed to make the industrialists angry. And anything they don’t like is top of my list of things to do.”
“Good enough for me.” He stands up, shaking out his arms as though prepping for a fight. “Are you going to call Brugan and Aza anytime soon? Because I’m ready to get to the part where we kill the Beast.”
“Think I should warn them it’s a trap and the Beast will be waiting for us?”
He waves a dismissive hand. “They’ll find out when we get there.”
Chapter Eighteen
The only two places I’ve ever used my Clouded Leopard Skin are in the Morelle scraper, and in the arena when I competed in the Skin Hunter contest.
Now Cale and I are bounding down the middle of an open New Triton road, heading toward Phoenix Industries.
My heart is thundering and rocket fuel burns through my veins. My Leopard Skin is a little more solid and slightly heavier than it used to be, but my increased strength more than makes up for it. Running in this Skin is still the best feeling in the world.
My paws eat up the ground in giant strides that feel like flying. Cale and I are both running fast enough to only catch brief glimpses of the shocked faces of the pedestrians we run past. Fast enough that we dodge around cabs as though they’re standing still. In my upgraded and improved Skin, I’m faster than I ever could have imagined. But as hard as it is not to let myself stretch out, I restrict myself to the speed of Cale’s Sabre-toothed Tiger Skin, forcing myself not to outpace him.
I glance back to see Aza and Brugan a little way behind us. When I spoke to them as President Morelle, they were enthusiastic about the chance to use their Skins again. Since then, I’ve been keeping clear to avoid wasting time with a confrontation. But I imagine they’re enjoying this as much as I am.
Aza’s black-and-red Wasp Skin is faster than Brugan’s, with her wings helping to lift her up and propel her forward with every long stride. Brugan’s lumbering at her heels, his Skin big and heavy in contrast to her slender frame. His wolfish face is as sinister as ever, and his fur-covered Devil Bear Skin shakes the ground with every stride.
The Phoenix Industry scraper is just ahead. Beside me, Cale runs with his mouth open and his tongue lolling between his elongated top fangs. His eyes are alight with such a fierce joy, it makes me want to laugh with delight.
When we reach the base of the scraper, we both leap at once, hooking our claws into the edge of the large Phoenix Industries sign above the front doors. The building is coated in textured concrete, and our razor-sharp claws cut into its surface, so climbing the outside of the tower is almost too easy. We haul ourselves up it as quickly as we used to go up the never-wall.
Near the top of the building, the giant phoenix logo is made from polished steel. It juts out from the concrete, and I pause for a moment, balanced on its curve. The boardroom window is just above it, so we can lever off it to crash our way in.
The other two are below us, and I want to keep ahead of them so they can follow our lead.
“You ready for anything?” I ask Cale. “The Beast will have seen us coming.”
Cale’s lips peel back in a snarl. “Ready.”
“Let me go first—”
B
ut Cale’s already throwing himself at the window, claws outstretched to crash through. I follow so closely behind him that shards of glass are still hitting the floor as I land.
The Beast stands in front of us. He has an enormous gun levelled at us.
He’s cleared this entire floor of furniture, to make it an open, empty space. Behind him are five giant, hairy animals. They’re standing upright, but their chests are as round as barrels, and their arms are bulging with muscles and so long, they hang to their knees. They’re enormous apes, but with their upper bodies so grotesquely oversized, they look like cartoons. Like the gorilla from the retro version of Donkey Kong.
I have a feeling Morelle’s scientists didn’t make these Skins. Not when they were so meticulous about not changing the appearance of my leopard. I bet the Beast manufactured them himself.
“Two against six,” gloats one of the ape men. “You’re outnumbered and outgunned.”
I recognise his voice. It’s one of the businessmen who were with the Beast when I barged into his boardroom. If the apes are all businessmen and not used to fighting, at least we’ll have an advantage.
Aza and Brugan hurtle through the window and land on the floor behind us. Brugan snarls when he sees the Skins. Aza unfurls her red wings and extends the stingers from her palms.
We’re still outnumbered, but we’ll put up a damn good fight.
The Beast hitches his giant weapon further onto his shoulder, pointing it at me. The stench of its fuel is sharp and strong, burning the back of my throat.
Before the Beast can squeeze the trigger, I leap for his throat.
Cale jumps at the same time, and both of us arc toward the Beast. Flames shoot from his weapon, unbearable heat blasting into my face. Instantly I remember the feeling of super-heated polymer spurting from a machine at the factory, searing my flesh away and burning out my eye. I twist in mid-air and fall to the side, panic filling me, so all I can think of is getting away. The stench of burning hair and flesh fills my throat and lungs.
The Beast sweeps his weapon toward me, but I’m already leaping again. I slam into one of the ape creatures, bowling it over. Desperate to escape the flames, I claw at the creature. I gouge chunks from its hairy body, my claws lacerating its over-muscled arms and chest. It howls in pain as I rip flesh from bone.
