The beige foam mat didn't look comfortable.  The girl rolled onto her back in her fitful half-sleep.  An arm flopped over her face, blocking the light from her eyes.  A leg kicked out, and the thin blanket was yanked down to her waist.

Horus fought to regain the sensor connection, but her arm was in the way.  The tiny reticle on the monitor blurred along with his vision.  He was getting too old for these hours.  His body didn't bounce back like it used to.  He could feel it in his joints and in the way his brain felt like a dried-out sponge.  It didn't help that he couldn't sleep during the day.  Despite being up all last night, he'd only managed to get a couple of hours that afternoon.

He rubbed his burning eyes.

The girl stretched her neck and exposed her forehead enough to line up the crosshairs on it.  The EEG reading began coming in again.  The steady flow of jagged lines scrolled down the monitor recording her brain waves.

The fatigue was a strain, but overall it was easier tonight.  Horus was more familiar with the controls.  And more familiar with watching that poor girl in there.  It didn't comfort him in the least that he was getting used to the sight.

She was in the wolf room of the enclosure.  The reinforced steel box didn't have any official name, but someone had called it the wolf room last night and it stuck, even though the wolf never showed up.  Just the girl.

They watched her all night and for two hours past dawn, but there was no transformation.  Just about the entire team had been crammed into the OC waiting for the big show that never happened.

R.J. had worried that being so far underground may have affected the results. 

"Perhaps she needs to see the moon or at least be in closer contact to it," he had mused to Wiley, while the man sat there silently, looking like he hadn't gotten his money's worth and R.J. was to blame.

Secretly, Horus suspected most of the team was like him and didn't for a minute expect that it would actually happen.  There was that brief moment of anticipation last night, like at the start of a magic trick – where for a second he was willing to suspend disbelief.  They had built all this, gone to all that trouble, they must know something.  But then the magician stepped onto the stage and pulled fake flowers from his sleeve, and he knew it was all just hocus pocus.  And so did the others.  Well, most of them anyway.  R.J. still believed.  Or perhaps all his talk and theories were only to convince himself.

The only thing they got to see that night was some sad, abused girl screaming to be let out and slowly crying herself to sleep.

It was depressing and pitiful that her outburst went down in his notes as an improvement.  Sticking her in the stark, gray cage had snapped her out of her near-catatonic state.  The panic had replaced the unresponsive condition she had been left in by that sadistic witch.  Boy, had she ever done a number on that girl.

And here she still was, practically rubbing shoulders with him for the second night in a row.

Wiley had done nothing.

Thinking about it, a fire spread up from his belly to his chest helping him stay awake and focused.  What she had said — what she had done — and she was still here – it made him want to scream.  Just let out a primal yell to deafen the room.

"She's worse than when she arrived."  It wasn't easy, but Horus had held his cold stare, meeting Wiley's eyes without flinching.  He hated how much the sly agent knew about him.  Wiley, now there was an appropriate name if there ever was one.

"It's true."  R.J. seemed even more agitated than Horus.  He refused to sit and instead stood beside his chair.  "She's a lunatic.  She's completely out of control.  I can't believe you would have put someone with her background in here with us."

Wiley glanced from R.J. over to Horus to see what he was thinking.  He didn't say anything, he just dropped his gaze to the hands in his lap.

"She's a menace – a cold-blooded killer.  She doesn't even have a medical license."

"Enough."  Wiley held up a hand.  "Everyone here – I repeat, everyone got a clean slate when they joined this project."

"But a murderer."  R.J. persisted, although Wiley cut him off again. 

"I would point out that you do not know the details of her circumstances."

Horus sat there examining his nails – the small line of bloodless white cuticle before the dark brown of the rest finger.  Without raising his eyes, he tried to steer the conversation back to the damage done to his patient.  "I just can't imagine what she could possibly be thinking, saying that to a little girl. It was clinically sadistic behavior."

"I am not a sadist, Dr. Benning."  Even with her perfectly flat delivery, he picked up on the derision in her voice on the word doctor.  "I thought she was owed the truth.  What good is there in lying to her for the rest of her life?  You're holding her prisoner here; she deserves to know why."

"There are ways to do it.  Ways that wouldn't have been as upsetting to her.  You should have let a professional handle it."  Horus sounded like he was beseeching her to take back her actions as if that were even possible. 

Gracie rolled her eyes.

He didn't know what he hoped to accomplish by arguing with her, but he continued.  "Do you even understand how traumatized she was when she got here?  The military locked her in a steel cage and treated her like an animal.  It was our job to build trust." 

"Well, it's not my fault she was treated that way."  Gracie could have been talking about an old shoe rather than a person.  There wasn't the least measure of compassion in her voice.  "I'd want to be told.  She's better off being told, and it's best to do it fast – like ripping off a bandage."

"It was like ripping off the bandage five minutes after open-heart surgery.  You are not qualified to make those determinations."  Horus began to rise out of his seat, ready to join R.J. on his feet, united in outrage.  Wiley cocked his head watching him, and Horus dropped back down at the last moment and clutched the armrests in a nervous fidget.

She gauged every inch of his girth.  "Well, I suppose that is a subject you would know about."

"Alright, that's enough."  Wiley pinched the bridge of his nose between his clenched eyes.  "I don't care how it was done or what it did to the Subject.  I doubt emotional trauma is going to make much difference tonight when the moon comes out.  What matters is she wasn't supposed to be told.  Not gently.  And not quick, like a bandage."  His voice dropped to a mocking falsetto.  "The orders were to not inform the Subject of her family's status.  Period."  His voice had risen to shout, but he dropped it back to his normal tone.  "Barbara disobeyed those orders, and it will be dealt with."

Gracie began to interrupt, and he slammed his hand on his desk and then pointed at her.  "You, stay.  You two, get out."

Horus had no idea what was said to her, but she had been abnormally subdued ever since.  She barely spoke, at least not to him.  But she was still there working the overhead sensors, while he controlled the wall-mounted array.

Squeezed in on Horus's other side, Aikman's sat running diagnostics on the equipment.  They were close enough that he could smell the techie's coffee breath and body odor.  His pale stubbly head was bent down over his equipment.  He was lost in the world of bits and bytes.  He probably had forgotten that the girl was even in the enclosure just two feet away.

Enclosure.  That's what they called the girl's living space.  Just like it was a zoo.

Horus thought he could smell rain.  It was the memory of zoos that always filled his mind with the aroma of fresh rain.  Strange, since there had been no smell from the storm that night.

The palace was a hermetically sealed sanctuary, not a drop penetrated it. 

The rain splattered against the glass.  For the entire length of the walkway, all he could see through the windows was the streaked and blurred spotlights from the fence posts in the distance.  But the snaking corridor that led from the house to the zoo was dry as a bone.  And the only noise was his shoes against the tiles, as his footsteps bounced around in the harsh acoustics.

Horus Benning crept through the service tunnels in the middle of the night like the scullery maid, while the princeling was reclined on silk sheets with a look of pure bliss upon his face.  The great Kyle Silver was stoned out of his mind and blissfully unaware of the storm or Horus's clandestine activities.

When he reached the concrete dome, he took the fork to the left towards the maintenance area.  Only once had he been privileged enough to go down the other path. 

When he first arrived at the estate, Kyle had taken him on a tour of his private Xanadu.  The main building was an opulent but tacky version of a Tuscan villa.  The sort of place one could imagine Caligula living when not in Rome.  But the zoo was like nothing he had ever imagined.  It was truly Kyle's pleasure dome.

The whole ceiling of the circular room was glass to let in natural daylight and to help lure the animals to the front of their enclosures.  Dead center, there were two semi-circle bars creating a nucleus for parties to revolve around.  The floor was carpeted in lush Persian rugs overlapping one another.  Arabesque lanterns were suspended from gold and copper chains and were lit with electric firelight.  Couches and divans were scattered around the space, so he and his guest could lounge and watch the animals in a drug and alcohol-induced stupor. 

Not that Kyle did it much anymore.  The novelty had worn off.  So the animals were locked up for the amusement of the zookeepers and cage cleaners.  And his parties were usually held out by the pool or in the discotheque in the basement.

The maintenance tunnel was dark with just a dim light every twenty feet, small emergency nightlights placed to keep people from tripping.  There was a tropical bird off in the distance making a fuss, but the gibbons were quietly resting.  The funky smell of their cage bloomed in his nostrils.  Urine and fermenting fruit with overtones of animal musk wafted through the corridor making the air seem heavier.

The snow leopards were pacing restlessly around their pen.  They both were distressed by the storm, even though all that could be heard of it was a faint patter on the roof.

Horus couldn't see the koala.  Was it hiding in some dark corner?  Or had the poor creature died and its cage had been left empty?  It was easy to feel the neglect of the zoo.  Easier still, at four in the morning, when the place was deserted except for the animals.  They were there for people to watch.  What purpose did they have without an audience?

What purpose did he have?  He was there to help Kyle, but Kyle wasn't to be helped.  Psychiatrist to the stars seemed so glamorous when he took the job.  But a year ago, Kyle just seemed like a troubled youth with too much money.  His band had been called The Princes of Darkness.  It seemed like a lurid, juvenile name to appeal to suburban teenagers pretending to be rebels.  Horus never suspected how close to the mark that name was.

He reached the veterinary center and swiped the security pass through the lock.  The card had been taken from the pocket of the discarded black jeans on the floor at the foot of Kyle's bed.  The pants had smelled similar to the gibbons.

Horus slipped on a pair of leather driving gloves.  They had been a Father's Day gift.  The fussy contoured seams and ventilation holes, always made him think of little, old white men in little, old red sports cars.

After that, it was almost too easy.  The refrigerator was unlocked and contained enough tranquilizers to kill an elephant. 

He had buried the events of that night in the cemetery of his mind, but he had no idea how shallow that grave was until Wiley showed up at his door.

In her pen, the girl turned over again.  Horus cursed and tried to realign the sensors.  Why was she thrashing around so much?  She didn't do this last night.