My head felt as if a gorani bull in its prime was charging at the insides of it. I opened my eyes, and my vision was blurred. A male voice echoed in the distance.

“The Stargazer feline is too valuable a genetic specimen to lose in this time of conflict.”

Kai.

Cold panic filled me, more terrifying than any other fear I had ever had. A flash of sharp blades and roomfuls of circuitry, wires and blood barged into my mind.

I knew what they were capable of doing to “genetic specimens.”

The thought of losing Kai…No, no, it was not going to happen. I would not let it happen. This was all my fault. I was going to get Kai out of here.

“Agreed,” another voice said, metallic from the speaker of a sphere. “I have use for his DNA.”

“It’s not like you’ll need the whole body.”

“No,” said the metal voice. “Just parts of it.”

I blinked as fast as I could, trying to clear my vision. It was as if there were weights on my eyelids, trying to keep them closed.

Darkness pooled around me, threatening to pull me into its warm undertow. But I kept flailing, trying to keep my head high.

I tried to speak, but my mouth felt like it was full of grit. All I could manage was a beast-like sound. “Kaaaa…”

In my mind, I seized on to his name like an anchor.

I had to get Kai out of here.

“It’s wearing off,” said a voice.

“Let it.”

Annatu’s voice. I would have known it anywhere. Anger fueled my struggles and I opened my eyes to the glare of the light around me. To my surprise, they had simply left me slumped on a metal chair. Eight round silver spheres hovered around me, each the size of my head.

I tried to stand up.

Two spheres pressed into me, their surprisingly heavy weight forcing me back. One deposited itself in my lap with a cold warning hum, the prelude to being shocked into submission.

I remained still. In moments it flew up again, and resumed the same pattern of orbit. I was in a strange lab of a room. There were medical monitors on the walls, panels that indicated where medical supplies were stored, even a motionless surgery-bot in the corner.

But the table next to me had metal restraints.

My gaze flickered downward to the heavy-looking, ancient chains that wrapped around me.

A cold fist of confusion punched me in the stomach.

A door slid open and Annatu stepped through. I tightened my grip on the armrest of my chair. She glanced at a nearby sphere, probably displaying my vitals, monitoring my spike in heartbeat.

“I am sorry that you were subjected to that. We determined that it would be the best course of action.”

Had the functionaries of the Library hurt him? Conviction settled cold and sure in my soul. If they had, I would tear this place apart. Literally. I kept my voice cool and even. “Where is he?”

She reached forward to brush the curly hair surrounding my face like a cloud. “Contained. In his true form.”

“His true form?” I repeated dumbly.

She stopped before the wall and swiped. It went transparent becoming a screen, revealing a massive white tiger, even larger than what Kai had turned himself into. Two tusk-like front teeth protruded downward from his jaws. Claws the size of daggers gouged holes into the floor.

“That’s not Kai,” I said. “I know what he looks like in his tiger form.”

Annatu shook her head. “Then you truly don’t know him at all.”

My mind flashed back to the momentary thing he had become when killing zombie Rish.

I looked at the beast. Massive jaws that could snap a human in half opened, roaring silently on the screen.

Blood dripped from his mouth. The carcass of some kind of bovine was sprawled across the floor.

With a sinking, horrified feeling, I knew Annatu’s words were true.

The monster tiger that was Kai saw the sphere which held the camera that was trained on it.

His mouth stretched into a wide bloody grimace and then the screen went dark.

There were stories of shifters who had a third, more primitive form. The stories always said that they were even stronger and faster than the first form. But they were always insane.

“We have a method of controlling the shape of a shifter. I wasn’t quite sure it would work on him, but it seems to be working just fine for now.”

If Kai wasn’t out of his mind, he would be now. Forcing a shifter to remain in one shape drove them crazy. Everyone in the universe knew that much. So much so, it was almost a stereotype; shifters who couldn’t be trusted because they had stayed in their animal form for too long, losing touch with their intelligence, their memories, their humanity.

Annatu’s voice was so calm. “Shifters lead such fleeting lives. In time, you will forget about him.”

I struggled trying to find the words to respond but my throat felt as parched as burnt paper.

I looked at Annatu, really looked at her. The Ealen were said to have been luminous beings, immortal perfection in human form.

But history often became legend, becoming myths of impossibility.

I looked at Annatu, the faint age lines that had remained unchanged in all the years I had known her. And yet, I could still see how once she had been beautiful.

“You are Ealen,” I said.

She waved her hand. The spheres orbiting me stopped and floated back. Limbs ached as I stood up.

“I’ve been around for too long,” she said, quietly. “They said our descendants would live on. But I’ve watched too many of my descendants live the lives of speck worms. Blinking in and out of existence, overcome by inferior genetics.”

She looked at me. “I’m tired of outliving my children. I’m tired of being alone. Though the fraction of you that is non-Ealen overwhelms that which is. Even so, you are the last of my line, many, many, many times removed.”

I don’t know why that revelation didn’t shock me. It was rather stating a truth that I had somehow always known.

“With your mother, she always knew what she was, what she was meant to do. After she vanished and we found you, I knew I would not make the same mistakes.”

“That’s why you hid my heritage from me,” I said, slowly realizing her logic. “You hid what the true purpose of the Library was.”

She smiled a beatific smile as if I was a child who had just written her first word. “Yes. You had to be prepared for a proper understanding.”

I stood up, my muscles and joints screaming from disuse, and walked over to her slowly. The screen flickered back on, and we saw the massive white saber-toothed tiger digging huge gashes into the wall. I stood next to her, watching the screen. “I understand, grandmother,” I said in classical Ealen, as she had taught me.

She looked at me, and in that moment I saw Annatu, truly saw her. Forged by loss and sorrow, she was someone who had lost everything she cared about over and over again.

In short, she was me. Or the me that I could see myself becoming.

“Annatu actually means ‘grandmother’ in one of the many dead languages of the Ealen.” Her laugh was a harsh thing. “They call us Ealen now, as if we were one people, but we were not.”

I took her hand and squeezed it but she seemed unaware, her gaze at the screen, yet focused on something only she could see. Her voice took on a faraway quality, as if she were speaking from the other side of time. “The Library is doing momentous things. We are making a new universe, where death has no place. I want you to be a part of it, working by my side. It’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

She knew. She had always known.

“I would have given anything for this opportunity,” I said.

She shook her head, smiled at me. “I knew you would make the right decision,” she said. “That’s what I told the Circle.”

I rubbed my thumb to my forefinger, feeling a buttonlike disc between my fingers. I couldn’t even remember taking it off my sleeves. I pondered the path I was about to choose. I would live with regrets for the rest of my life.

But I wouldn’t live otherwise.

I tried to pull her into a hug. It was awkward because Annatu resisted at first, and then she realized what I was trying to do. She gave me a funny little nervous laugh as I patted her on the shoulder.

I released her and stepped back.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Confusion, then incredulity as the fine mesh exploded from the disc on her shoulder. In seconds it encased her in a cocoon. I could hear her fury, so hot it seemed as if it were going to burn through the threads from her screams of anger alone. But those discs were designed for the giant salamander birds of Mazolin who could ignite into flames at will.

I could hear her muffled voice in the cocoon. “You will die, Seria!”

I stopped. It wasn’t a cry for revenge, rather the horrified sob of someone who actually cared.

I dropped to my knees, my hand outstretched to the cocoon, tears filling my eyes. I felt a strange hollowness within my chest.

Even now, I could remember sitting on the other side of a roughly-hewn stone table, a sand storm roaring outside the tent on Kjarn, and taking her hand as she told me I had been chosen.

She had taken me from Kjarn, where I surely would have died, and given me another life.

She was my grandmother.

I touched the strands of the cocoon and it rocked back and forth as the filament threads thickened, silencing her cries.

“I love you,” I said, slowly, knowing she would never be able to hear.

After a moment, the cocoon stopped rocking, as the threads secreted a dose of tranquilizer.

I looked up at the blank wall, imagining Kai watching me with those golden eyes, then back at the cocoon.

It would hold her for at least an hour. Barely enough time for me to get Kai and get out of here.

“I’m sorry,” I said again and left.