It took a little while for my eyes to adjust, but when they did, I almost wished they hadn’t. The lab was huge, with towering ceilings that vanished up into the darkness, and shelves that housed rows and rows of the same type of cage I’d been trapped in. My heart was slamming violently against my ribcage as I started forward, trying to walk as quietly as I could on the tile floors. I realized my feet were bare then, and wondered if there’d be a way to get a hold of some shoes. And maybe clothes, actually, because to my surprise, my skin was suddenly covered in goosebumps.

I was cold.

The realization made me stop, even though I was in the middle of the long hallway and totally exposed if someone walked in and flicked the lights on. All my life, I’d been able to walk barefoot through the snow. The cold never affected me, ever. Of course, it wasn’t like my nerves were dead, I could still feel a variation in temperatures. When I got up in the morning I could tell if it was only mildly chilly, or if the little pond behind the servant’s quarters would be frozen enough for us to skate on.

But now…now it was different. I was hunching my shoulders, wrapping my arms around myself as if to try to warm myself up. And worst of all, I found myself shaking.

What’s happening to me?

There was a dull clunk and whirr from somewhere in the building, and I stiffened, then relaxed. It was the air conditioning or something, nobody was coming for me. Not yet.

Reminded of the urgency of my mission, I pushed myself forward, forcing the thoughts about the cold out of my head. There was no time for that now. Later, after Fiske and I got safely home, then I could go to the healers and they would figure out what was wrong with me. Maybe they could fix me. Bring my old power back.

Even though I knew how impossible that probably was, I kept lying to myself as I crept down the hallway.

I looked carefully into every plastic cage as I walked by, squinting until I was sure there was nobody inside. They were all empty.

Frustration made me walk faster, sure I had a limited amount of time before somebody discovered the mess I’d made of the man back there. The hallway seemed to stretch on forever, but I could see the orange exit sign at the end. It was hard not to fixate on that, tearing my eyes away from it every time I came to a cage. But again and again, they were empty.

It was beginning to be clear why the Jotun hadn’t noticed people missing. Because there weren’t many. Not yet. They hadn’t taken very many of us. Instead, it was like they were preparing for something. Maybe Kalda and I were the beginning of something, and now they would go after us and capture hundreds.

The thought was staggering.

How were they getting into Jotunheimr in the first place? It should have been impossible. Of course, from the way Cain had talked to the man in charge, it sounded like they themselves had some Jotun blood in them. That they were trying to find a way to purify themselves in some kind of sick experiment. But you had to be at least half blood to get into Jotunheimr, and it was clear that nobody here was. They were all too human.

It had to mean they had people on the inside. The idea made me feel like vomiting. To betray your own people was the ultimate low, it was looked at as the worst violation of the Jotun ways. You had to be desperate or truly evil, to do so.

I’d reached the end of the room, nearly at the exit sign, when I heard a dull, low whimper from one of the cages to my left. I jumped, then rushed over and pressed my face against the plastic. It was hard to see through, but there at the bottom of the cage was a long dark shape, lying low to the ground. The shape moved…raised its head.

“Fiske, is that you?” My voice was a tiny, dried up whisper.

The form shifted, whined again. “Vee?”

“Yes!” I pressed my hands eagerly against the plastic, smoothing my fingers over the wall, trying to find a way to open it. There was a hidden door in here. How had they opened mine? “Hold on, I’ll find a way to get you out.”

“No, just go.” Fiske staggering to his feet. “I’m weak, they haven’t fed me. I’ll slow you down.”

“No!” My whisper came out ragged and violent this time as my anger surged. “No, I lost Kalda already, I refuse to let them take you too.”

“Kalda…” Fiske hesitated. “Is she…?”

            “Dead.” The word felt like it was being ripped from my throat. I ground my teeth and continued searching for a latch of some kind. Relief flooded through me as my fingers slipped into a groove at the base of the cage. This was it.

I gave it a short, sharp tug, and the door slid slowly sideways, revealing the scruffy, thin-looking wolf inside. Fiske was right, he looked half starved.

The anger surged again, and stayed there this time, burning the backs of my eyes and my throat, making my chest feel tight. “Let’s get out of here. We have to report this to Queen Megan. She has to know what’s happening to her people.”

Fiske didn’t argue this time, he moved, stumbling forward, and I put out a hand to steady him. We made our way toward the exit door, and it was hard going, because I couldn’t exactly support him.

“I am sorry. I told you, I'd slow you down.”

“It’s fine.” I waited for him to catch up again, shifting from foot to foot, eyes flickering over the room again and again. There was no one coming, no alarms blaring, nothing but silence.

Didn’t they have cameras on this room? Weren’t there alarms on the cages?

Maybe there were, maybe there was a silent alarm going off now that I’d opened the door to Fiske’s cage. Anxiously I watched the wolf limp along, wishing he were small enough to pick up and carry. But that was ridiculous, he was a wolf, not a rat terrier, even if he was smaller than the other wolves.

At last we were at the door, and I placed one shaking hand on the metal bar, hesitating. I half expected an alarm to go off just for touching the door.

“This is it,” I said softly. “I’m going to throw this door open, and that’s when the alarms go off, I can guarantee it, if they’re not already going off now. We have to run when we get out there, do you think you can do that?”

            “Split up,” Fiske said, and I stared at him.

“What? No, we stay together.”

He glared at me, eyes glittering. “I mean it, Vee. You run one way, I’ll run the other, we’ll find one another later. It will give us an advantage.”

            I knew he was lying about that. He wasn’t suggesting we split up for strategy, he was suggesting it because he thought he would slow me down. Because he thought it was likely that he would be caught, that he was too weak to run fast enough, too weak to outrun humans.

He must barely be standing right now.

There was no time to argue, so I only nodded curtly. Maybe I could run after him, force us to stick together or something. Of course, it could all be over before it began. We could be running out into a secure compound, one that was paved with cement and fenced in with barbed wire. We wouldn’t get far that way. So there was no point in arguing escape plan details, we were running out of time.

I looked down at the wolf. “Ready?”

His tail swished and he fixed his eyes on the door, bearing his teeth. I could practically read the thoughts going through his head. If he was taken down, he would rip out a few throats beforehand.

Taking a deep breath, I threw my hip against the door, crashing down on the bar, sending the door flying open. We went from the dark, orange-lit insides of the laboratory, to more darkness. A wall of cold hit me, shocking my skin, sucking the breath from my lungs.

There was about three seconds of silence, in which I heard the distinct call of a bird – a night wren I thought – and then the aggressive blare of an alarm sent a rail road spike of fear through me, propelling me forward.

My bare feet hit the ground. I was running, pounding over flat cement, the impact sending shocks up both legs. Fiske was a dark blur beside me, shooting out of the doorway, keeping pace with me for now.

Behind us the lights came on, flooding the room with bright yellow electric light, light that poured out the windows and bathed the thick green forest around us, throwing up deep shadows, showing Fiske and I exactly where we should go.

Into the woods.

My relief at seeing we were surrounded by woods, and not cement and barbed wire, was fairly short lived. The alarm was sharp and pulsing, rising and falling eerily, the wail of an air raid siren. As Fiske and I shot forward, I could suddenly heard the sound of action in the building behind us, yelling, boots pounding, doors slamming.

They were coming.

The woods were just feet away from us, dark and deep, offering to hide us, to shield us in the thick greenery. Arms and legs pumping, I tried to breathe as I ran, but the air was sharp and fierce with the cold, making it feel like there were shards of ice in my lungs. I hated the feeling of cold, I decided. I wanted my power back, I didn’t want to feel the cold, like a human.

Why would anyone want to be human?

We entered the woods now, and to my relief, Fiske was still keeping pace with me. We were through the first line of trees when the spotlights came on, flooding the woods with light. Yelling behind us, cries carried on the cool wind that whipped my hair in front of my eyes.

“Find them, you idiots!”

“There, movement in the woods!”

They’d seen us.

I put on another burst of speed, fueled by the fear, and saw Fiske drop back a little bit. “Run!” I screamed at him. “Run faster!”

He didn’t answer. He put his head down, tongue rolling out the side of his mouth as he ran. He was nearly spent.

Frantically, I looked around for a hiding spot. We were too close though, there was still light filtering through the trees, they would be able to see our shadows flickering past the trunks. Realization set in, and I skidded to a halt, motioning wildly at Fisk, who did  the same, looking up at me in confusion.

“The light reveals where we are when we move,” I said, keeping my voice low. “Stay where we are, hide behind the bushes, and they can’t pick us out.”

We stayed where we were, obscured by a large tangle of blackberry bushes, both of us panting. The darkness was still being pierced by yellow search lights, but now they were sweeping back and forth instead of fixed on us.

“Shit! I lost them!”

I jumped, heart crowding up into my throat. That voice had been close, no more than twenty feet away. They had moved into the forest, they had followed us.

“The old man is getting everyone geared up anyways,” another voice said. “Come on, we’ll join the rest and pretend we didn’t see nothing. If he thinks we saw them and then let them get away, you know it won’t go good for us.”

I recognized one of the voices. It was one of the goons that had talked about disposing of me. It almost made me smile to think about how he must have reacted when he saw his buddy.

“Come on,” the goon said. “Let’s go back.”

The crackle of branches and leaves under their feet grew fainter, and I sagged against the nearest tree, shoulders sagging. Beside me, Fiske let his mouth drop open, and he began panting loudly. He must have been holding that in the entire time they’d been there. I felt suddenly horrible for him, he was so mangy and starved looking, struggling to breathe.

The sadness turned to anger quickly. They were putting together a search party for us, sending all their men into the woods after us. If we were smart, we would run as fast as we could right now, but Fiske was hardly standing. I had to give him a few minutes to recover. And besides, a part of me hoped that we would run into members of the search party. This new power, whatever it was, was horrible. I hated feeling the cold, and not being sure of what was happening to my own body. But still, the humans were mostly made up of water, and I seemed to have some strange new control over it, so they could come if they wanted to.

I’d be ready for them.