I wake with morning sunlight glaring on my face, and it takes an extraordinary amount of effort to remember where I am and how I got here. Staring at the building in the distance doesn’t jog my memory. I can’t remember why I’m lying just inside the woods, my head resting on a backpack I’m pretty sure I stole from a dead man.

Then the front door of the building opens, and a woman steps out. It’s the woman from the holo-vid. The lesser woman the large man was staring at. And just like that, I remember the other woman. My woman.

Lilliana Marie Malone.

A man follows the lesser woman out of the building and into the woods. They pass by without noticing me, and I follow them from a distance while they chat. But once I realize they’re not talking about Lilliana, my thoughts refuse to focus and I can’t concentrate on what they’re saying.

I need that man’s form. He came from Lilliana’s building, which means he likely knows her. She probably trusts him. And he looks healthy. If he won’t take me to her—give me a proper, non-threatening introduction—I will take his form and get to her on my own. That’s less than ideal. But so is waiting.

With adrenaline fueling my actions, in place of actual energy, I carefully circle the pair and approach them head-on. The man goes still when he sees me, his words frozen in his throat. He and the lesser woman chat in soft voices about my identity, and vaguely I realize the woman recognizes the form I’m wearing. Though she seems surprised to see it in such rough shape.

“Are you okay?” she asks, but I don’t know how to answer her question. And the answer doesn’t matter. What matters is finding Lilliana.

“What’s your name, man?” her companion asks, and their lack of aggression—even though they’re clearly wary—eases a little of my tension.

“Carson,” I tell them. “Who’re you?”

“What do you want, Carson?” he asks, instead of answering my question.

“The woman.” My head is spinning. It’s difficult to concentrate, but as I try to sort through his reply, I realize he thinks I want the woman he’s traveling with. That I want to buy her.

I try to explain that I want Lilliana, but that I don’t want to buy her. That she belongs with me, and I just need to find her. Because I can no longer remember where I saw her. And at some point, I realize that it isn’t this man who knows Lilliana—it’s the woman. Which makes sense, because they are in the catalogue together.

Yet no matter what I say, they both look at me as if I’m making no sense.

“Take me to her!” I finally demand. I have no more energy for conversation, and my thoughts are so muddled I can’t concentrate on anything but the face haunting my memory and the name dancing on the end of my tongue. “You know her!”

I lunge toward the woman, determined to make her take me to Lilliana, but the man steps between us. I hit him full force, and he stumbles backward, but keeps the woman out of my reach.

I grasp for her, desperate, because every single cell in my body feels pulled toward Lilliana, and the only thought I can hold onto is that this woman can take me to her.

The man shoves me backward, and I rebound, my fist flying out of desperation. Out of training so ingrained that intent doesn’t even enter into the equation. It’s not a real blow. My bone spikes don’t break through my un-seamed skin, nor does my plating emerge. Yet I hear a soft crack from the man’s side. I’ve broken his rib.

“Warren!” the woman shouts.

“Run!” he yells at her, and after a moment’s hesitation, she takes off in the direction opposite the building where my Lilliana is being kept from me.

The man is hurt, but I recognize the determination in his eyes as he puts himself between me and the fleeing woman. He will protect her with his life if he needs to, not out of lust, but out of…honor. Because I had no right to lunge for her. To make demands of a woman I don’t even know.

He’s right about that. Desperate as I am, I’m in the wrong. So I stand down.

“Apologies,” I murmur, hoping the man can hear me, because there isn’t much strength left in my voice. Then I turn and head into the woods. Only hours later, after I’ve found both food and drink and have taken a little rest, do I remember that I was supposed to assume that man’s healthy form.

I wander the woods again, silently cursing my own muddled thoughts, and every step eats up valuable energy I can’t replace, short of finding another burrow of rabbits. Thinking feels like wading through waist-deep water, each idea dragging in the current. Trying to pull me down.

As the sun sinks toward the horizon, I hear a familiar voice. “This way. The only reason they wouldn’t be at the shelter is if he got to them. Come on!” Shielded by a thick tree trunk, I watch as the man I met earlier today—Warren—leads another man and a woman through the woods, clutching his side, where I cracked one of his ribs.

The familiarity of his face and voice are enough to draw me in. I can’t remember what I needed from him earlier today, but I remember that I didn’t get it. That I still need it. So I follow them through the woods and watch as they head through the tree line toward a building, the back half of which has been…crushed. As near as I can tell, there’s only one entrance.

For a while, I watch from the edge of the woods. The building is too far away for me to hear what’s going on inside, but I can tell they went in looking for a fight.

If Warren dies—or even just leaves blood behind—I can…

Yes, that’s what I needed from him. Blood. Or some other substance that carries DNA. Because I need a new, healthy form. Any new, healthy form. So I can go get Lilliana.

Just as I start to step out of the woods, the front door opens. Warren and his friends come out, followed by the man I saw with the holo-disk yesterday and the woman I met this afternoon, whose image is on that holo-disk, along with Lilliana’s. They look relieved. They look…pleased, emerging from the building with the confident gait of victors. And the large, silent man is splattered with blood, which means someone in that building is shedding DNA, free for the taking.

When they step into the woods, heading back the direction they came from, I sneak toward the building as quickly as my unsteady legs will carry me. My nose—the beast’s nose—leads me toward a room on the left side of the entry. Toward the scent of blood.

Inside, I find five corpses. They’ve all shed blood, but I kneel next to a man whose brains are literally leaking through a large crack in his skull. Both of his arms are broken and bleeding, where bones have pierced his skin. His form looks the least physically threatening.

I take a finger full of his blood and taste it. Beneath the coppery tang, I can taste…health. Maybe if I’d thought to examine the sample last time, I could have avoided taking on a sick form. Maybe I could have avoided wandering around in the woods for days, struggling to remember my own damn name. To remember to eat and bathe.

But this sample is good. This form is healthy. It’s clean, on a cellular level. Yet I have no idea how to…assume it. I’ve never done that intentionally. Before, when I needed a new form and had a sample of DNA, the beast just kind of…took over.

Right now, I really need a new form, and—

The burning begins, deep inside, like an attack on every cell in my body. But rather than clenching my fists or fighting the pain, this time I embrace it. This is what I wanted. What I needed.

Less than a minute later, the fire fades and I look down to see that my hands are…new. My arms are pale, with dark hair and the occasional mole. I can’t see my face, except for the end of my own nose, but I know that I look exactly like the man lying on the floor in front of me, only without the cracked skull and broken arms. Without the tattoo on his right palm. I hope no one notices that.

My thoughts are clearing up already, as dark clouds recede from my mind. I’m ravenous from the transformation. And probably from my irregular eating patterns, over the past few days. Or weeks. I could have been wandering around in zone three, in a total mental fog, for two or three weeks, for all I know.

Kneeling again, I search the man’s pockets, hoping to find food, and I come up with a sealed protein brick and a familiar flat, round object. I pull out the holo-disk, both confused and delighted to have found it in a dead man’s pocket.

Surely, it’s the same disk I saw Lilliana Marie Morgan on. What are the chances of there being two different holo-disks in this one area of zone three?

I race out the front door and into the woods, following the people who just left the building. In this new, healthy body, I can easily hear both their footsteps and their voices, as they chat. They’re exuberant over their victory.

One of the men sees me coming and warns his friends. They turn, and tension pulls their frames tight. It tugs their smiles into aggressive scowls. The large, silent man grabs a steel rod and approaches me with murder in his eyes. “Barrett, wait!” His woman—the one from the disk—grabs his arm.

“Please. Where is the woman?” I ask her. Through the fog that is my recent memory, I recall that I scared her earlier, and I don’t want to do that again, so I keep my distance.

She exhales, staring at me with wide, shocked eyes. Which is when I remember that I look like a man she and her friends just killed. She must think she’s seeing a ghost. But before I can try to explain, a hesitant sort of comprehension washes over her features. “Carson?” she asks, and I nod. Something about either my voice or my bearing has clued her in. She’s very perceptive. “How are you... What are you?”

Barrett pulls her away from me, scowling.

“The woman.” I turn to him. “From your disk. In the woods. I need to find the woman.” In my desperation, I’m not stating my case very well.

“How do you look like Varian?” his woman asks me. “When you looked like Cody earlier today?”

“That form—your Cody—was…damaged. On the cellular level. Cancer, originating in the brain. The mutation is normally slow to progress, but when I reproduced his DNA to clone his form, it...accelerated. That form was unsustainable in the long term. When I was following your trail, I found this one, and its DNA was readily available. Leaking everywhere, in fact. So I took a sample and assumed this form to replace the damaged one.”

“What the hell did he just say?” one of the other men leans forward to whisper.

“Who are you?” the smaller woman asks again. And she deserves an answer. Surely UA wouldn’t bother hunting down convicts because they know too much. It’s not like they can leak classified information from a prison planet…

“Captain Carson Sotelo. 112th Infantry.” I frown at the words that rolled off my tongue out of habit. I’m no longer that man. “At least, I used to be. I am asking for your help.” I pull the holo-disk from my pocket and set it on the ground, then I press my thumb to it.

The small woman gasps as her image appears, stark naked, and I feel bad about that. I didn’t intend to embarrass her. I tap the disk until I reach the image I need. “That woman.” I stand. “I need to find her.”

The other woman in their group—her toned physique reminds me of Dreyer—crosses her arms over her chest. “And just who—or what—are you? And I’m looking for something more informative than your name, rank, and serial number, if you don’t mind.”

I blink at her, and just as I realize that I’d rather be wearing my own skin for this conversation, that brutal burning begins again. It flows over me from the inside out, lighting me on fire in every single cell. The woman in front of me gasps as she studies my new face. Which is really my old face. I recognize my own hands and arms, and for the first time in a long time, I feel…right.

Evidently all it took to reacquire my own form was clarity of thought.

“I told you. I am Captain Carson Sotelo. Formerly of the 112th Infantry, from the planet Tethys. My team and I are now sentenced to Rhodon, zone X. And I need to find this woman. Lilliana Marie Malone belongs to me.” Though there was probably a better way for me to say that.

“Whoa. What the hell just happened?” Warren demands, staring at my face as Barrett, the silent man, pulls his woman away from me. As if she might catch whatever’s wrong with me. “How did you do that?”

“Wait a minute,” the dark-haired man says, and I gather from his resemblance to the toned woman that they’re siblings. “There’s a zone x? Are you sure that’s not zone ten? As in, Roman numerals?”

“Sebastian.” His sister elbows him, still staring at my face. Her frame is tense, as if she hasn’t yet decided I’m not a threat.

“Sylvie,” he mimics her. “I’m just trying to find some humor in the fact that this weird fucker who can change his face as easily as I change my underwear is basically asking us to help him kidnap Lilli.”

His casual use of a nickname for her raises the hair on my arms. Just how well does he know my Lilliana?

I kneel to turn off the disk, then I pocket it. “I know you’re all Lilliana’s friends. Neighbors. I know she trusts you, and that you want to protect her. Please understand that I don’t mean her any harm. I’m not sick anymore, and I want to meet her properly.” The human part of me understands how strange that must sound. Yet the rest of me—the part that can hear rabbit hearts beating from within their burrows and knows how to alter my physical form on a cellular level—feels a pull toward her so strong that I can’t seem to think about anything else. Now that I can think.

“Yeah, first we’re going to need to hear about this face-changing thing,” Warren says, clutching his cracked rib. “How’s that work?” Despite the casual phrasing of his question, his stiff posture belies tension, though he doesn’t seem to have realized yet that I’m the one who injured him.

Barrett grips his steel rod with white-knuckled fists, and Sylvie’s hand is in her pocket, where I can tell she’s clutching some kind of small weapon. Probably a blade.

They are all on edge, and I can’t blame them. They’ve just seen me do something that shouldn’t be possible.

“It’s a long story, and it’s not really relevant. I just…” Say something normal. But that’s a tall order, considering how long it’s been since I was normal. “I met Lilliana—Lilli—yesterday, in the woods, but I was sick, and I didn’t represent myself well. I’d really like a second chance to make a first impression. If that makes sense.”

“You met her?” Sylvie, the well-toned woman, turns to her friends. “He’s the man Lilli and Danna…saw. Lying in the stream.”

“Yes, that was me. The shock of the cold water helped me focus my thoughts. But like I said, I’m afraid I scared her, and that wasn’t my intent. I just couldn’t think clearly, in that other form.” And my foggy brain seems to have given the beast more liberty than he should have had over my impulses.

“She definitely found you…interesting,” Warren says.

“How did this happen to you? UA got ahold of you, didn’t they?” Sylvie studies my face, as if answers might be written there. “Not the prison, but the scientists.”

“Universal Authority has scientists?” the smaller woman glances at her in surprise, and Barrett keeps himself close, where he can pull her out of harm’s way, should I suddenly attack.

“Their prison business is just one head of the hydra,” Sylvie explains. “There was an article a few years ago about a breakthrough they made in genetic editing. It caught my attention for obvious reasons. I was a science teacher before…prison,” she adds, evidently for my benefit.

And that’s interesting, because she looks like a soldier. A fighter.

“The story was pretty vague,” Sylvie continues. “More of a public relations puff piece than anything. But that’s what they did to you, isn’t it? Genetic editing?”

I nod. “Not just me; my entire team. And we’re only the latest iteration. There were evidently hundreds before us, while they were ‘perfecting’ the process.” I’m not here to talk about myself, but if that helps them trust me…

“If you’re a research subject, how did you get into zone three?” the smaller woman asks. “Were you on the blimp when it crashed?”

My brows rise. “Do you mean the party yacht?”

“That was six weeks ago, Mallory,” Sebastian says, and I blink at him in shock. Six weeks? I’ve been wandering out here in a mental fog for six weeks? How can it possibly have been that long? My team must think I’m dead!

Mallory—the small woman—shrugs. “That’s the night Cody died, so I figured if Carson used Cody’s DNA, he must have gotten it around then.”

She’s right. But I still can’t wrap my head around that.

“I wasn’t on the yacht,” I tell her. “I was on a shuttle that got diverted to the rescue effort, then had to make an emergency landing.” But again, we’re veering from the subject. “Please, will you introduce me to Lilliana? I want to apologize—”

But the moment I mention her name again, tension rises in the group. They’re obviously very protective of her, and they don’t trust me. They don’t even know me. And what I’ve shown them of myself so far probably hasn’t helped my case.

They’re not going to let me see her, and if I insist, this will come to blows. I could probably take them, but I’m not going to repair Lilliana’s first impression of me by hurting her friends.

Dreyer’s advice comes back to me—this is a puzzle to solve, not a bone to break. I’m going to have to come at this from another direction.

“Okay, I understand that you need to think about that. Maybe we could meet up tomorrow, somewhere? After you’ve had time to speak to Lilliana?”

My suggestion eases some of their tension, though Barrett still looks skeptical.

“Sure,” Warren says, one hand pressed to his cracked rib. “Let’s meet here tomorrow afternoon. I’m not sure we’ll have an answer for you, but I’d love to hear more about…whatever UA has done to you. And I suspect a few of the others will say the same,” he adds with a glance at his friends. Several of them nod. “Especially if any of those experimental subjects have come from the rank-and-file prisoner population.”

“Thank you. I’ll be here.”

As they head off into the woods, I follow at a distance, my steps silent, hoping to overhear their private reaction to what they’ve just seen and heard.

“Did that really just happen?” Sebastian says, and his lowered voice tells me they’re not sure they’re out of earshot. Or what that might mean, for someone who isn’t entirely human.

“Unless we all just had the same delusion,” Warren replies. “Thoughts?”

“Well, Mallory, I assume you still want to pick up your things from the shelter?” Sylvie asks the other woman.

Mallory nods. “That’s everything I own. Assuming there’s anything left.”

“Ok, but we also need to tell Lilli that some walking science experiment is looking for her, and I’m not sure we can make it back from the shelter tonight. So we should probably split up.”

“You guys head on to the shelter,” Warren offers, still clutching his side. “I’ll go to the Sorority and fill everyone in. My ribs are killing me, and I could really use a night in my own bed. Er…on my vinyl mat.”

“Will you be okay on your own?” Sebastian asks.

“Yeah. It’s not that far.”

“Okay. Please be careful.” Mallory leans in to give him a hug, and everyone else says their goodbyes. Then Warren parts from the rest of his friends.

I feel guilty as I follow him from a distance. I’ve already injured this man once. But this is the best chance I’m going to get, and my Lilliana knows this man. Presumably she’ll trust me if I look like him.

So I sneak up behind Warren. I’m two paces behind him when he finally hears me, and I take a swing at him as he turns. I see recognition in his eyes as my fist makes contact with the side of his skull.

I pulled my punch, unsure how much damage an unaltered human can take, but he drops to the forest floor with one blow. I kneel next to him to make sure he’s still breathing. He is. But my fist split the skin just inside his hairline, so I dip my finger in his blood, then I wipe a smear of it onto his tongue.

Eyes closed, I concentrate on the new DNA sample. It feels healthy, so I let the beast take over, and that now-familiar fire spreads throughout my body again.

This time, the pain is worse than usual, and I find myself curled up on the forest floor next to poor Warren, trying to ride out the system-wide agony. By the time it’s over, I’m drained. Famished and light-headed. Which is no surprise, considering that I’ve put my body through this bizarre transformation twice in the span of half an hour. But there’s no time to rest.

I head back into the half-crushed building, where several corpses still lie on the floor. I have no idea what they did to deserve such violent ends—zone three seems to be more of a war zone than a prison zone—but they’ve left behind a collection of backpacks and some random gear. I dump all their things onto the floor, and as I sort through the small pile, I rip open a protein brick with my teeth and devour it in two bites.

But that isn’t enough, so I dig another one from my own pack and shove half of it into my mouth.

The victors of this fight must have already claimed their spoils, because there isn’t much left that I can use in this sad little pile, other than a bottle of water purification tablets, a couple of books of waterproof matches, and two unopened MREs, of the vegetarian variety. All of which came from the same bag, which must have been overlooked in the scavenging effort.

I shove everything I can use into my pack, then I take off again, headed in the direction of the building I followed Barrett to yesterday, where Lilliana lives with the friends who’re so protective of her. The sun sinks below the horizon while I walk, but there’s plenty of moonlight tonight, and my eyes make better use of it than they did before Dr. Brennan’s procedure. I’m astonished by how much clearer my thoughts are now, but most of the past six weeks are a blur. It still doesn’t seem possible that I’ve been out here that long.

And as badly as I want to get back to my men—to get them off this rock—I can’t leave without Lilliana Marie Malone.

I don’t understand my almost desperate need to be near her, but I can’t deny it. Nor can I resist it. Though the thought of trying to explain all of this to her triggers a panicky pressure deep in my chest. The only way to convince her that I’m not crazy will be to show her what Brennan’s team did to me. Which will likely scare the shit out of her.

After a couple hours of hiking, the pair of buildings I’m looking for comes into view, uphill from the patch of woods where I hid yesterday. The one on the right appears to be unoccupied. Lilliana lives in the one on the left. The one boasting several fire pits dug into the ground and lined with stone, as well as a laundry line strung between two trees out back.

Most of the windows are covered with homemade drapes, but a couple of them are lit up with flickering candlelight, shining through the material. As I approach the front door, someone walks past one of those lit windows, a woman’s silhouette clearly visible through the thin drapes.

I start to knock on the door, but then my hand stills before my knuckles can make contact. Warren lives in this building. He probably wouldn’t knock. So I open the door and step inside.