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“Think you can handle this, small fry?” he asked.

She pretended to think for a half-second, then rolled her eyes.

She might as well have scoffed.

“Duh,” she said mockingly, all of her perfectly-calibrated, outrageously-arrogant, pre-teen scorn fully in effect. “Why ask questions you know the answer to, Nick?”

She sniffed, then faced the glass.

Nick felt the change in the air before he could have labeled what it was.

It took him another few fractions of a second before he saw the effects on the other side of the glass. Then the men standing there started to change. They didn’t scream and yell or even look especially afraid of what was happening to them; it was almost like they didn’t have time to feel any of those things.

Then the man in front raised his hands to either side of his thick head.

He gripped his own skull in muscular fingers as his face went slack. His mouth fell open in a silent scream as he seemed to be trying to hold his mind physically still from whatever was happening inside his skull. The scientists and other uniformed officers didn’t even raise their hands. They stood there, mouths agape, eyes completely out of focus.

Nick saw the blood first.

He saw it before any of them fell.

Blood began streaming out of their eyes and noses and mouths, dripping down their chins and necks, darkening the clothing they wore and the tops of their chests. They stood there, all frozen in place, jaws and mouths locked in those eerie, silent screams. It seemed to go on for minutes, but Nick honestly had no idea how long it went on.

He jumped when the first of them fell.

It was one of the green-coated scientists who dropped first.

He didn’t go down to his knees, but toppled forward, face-first, still without uttering a single sound. He didn’t try to break his own fall with his hands or even his knees, but fell straight down like a tree that’s been chopped through at the base of its trunk.

After the first one fell, the others were quick to follow.

Nick didn’t move, didn’t blink, even after the big one with the square jaw fell, and slammed his head into the glass on the way down. Nick was pretty sure the guy was already dead by then, but it was still unnerving to see his face break on the organic pane, and the unnatural angle of his neck as he slid down the glass before landing in a heap at its base.

Eventually, after all of them had fallen, the vibration in the air began to still.

Apart from the hum of the machines behind them, and the heaving breaths of the seers, hybrids, and humans, it grew eerily silent.

Then Jordan, of all people, broke that cathedral-quiet.

“Holy fucking horse-balls!” he said.

It was morbid, Nick knew, but he couldn’t help it.

He laughed.

* * *

They swarmedthe entire length of the glass wall now, not touching but looking, trying to figure out how to open the door.

Kit already had her armband computer unwrapped so that she could get at all of the controls, and was using that and her headset to try and hack her way through the encrypted locks. Nick had a moment of regret where he wondered if he should have tried his thrall first. He maybe could’ve convinced one of the humans to open the door that way.

He dismissed it a few seconds later, realizing that was wishful thinking at best.

If they were that easy to get to, they wouldn’t have left so few of them here.

“Oh, they’re not alone,” Malek said to him calmly.

Nick turned, staring at the other male. “What?”