The Manager's bone blade passed millimeters from my nose. The air displacement was so violent it burst the blood vessels in my left eye.

  There was no time for bravado. I threw myself backward, skidding on the waxed floor, while the steel table I had been leaning on was sliced in half as if made of Styrofoam.

  "Luna! Barriers!" I shouted, rolling to avoid a second strike that punctured the concrete floor.

  "Salt and Ash Barrier!" Luna screamed, throwing a handful of white powder into the air.

  A translucent wall of violet light rose between us and the creature. The Manager slammed into it. The barrier cracked instantly, emitting the sound of shattering glass, but buying us two seconds.

  [THREAT ANALYSIS IN PROGRESS]

  The Parasite projected frantic diagrams into my vision.

  [TARGET: BIOMECHANICAL HYBRID.]

  [STRUCTURE: TITANIUM ENDOSKELETON COATED WITH REGENERATIVE TROLL MUSCLE TISSUE.]

  [WEAK POINT: NONEXISTENT IN CURRENT CONFIGURATION.]

  "Great," I grumbled, wiping the blood leaking from my eye. "She's a Terminator made of Troll meat. Her regeneration will outpace any physical damage we deal."

  The Manager smiled with that ripped mouth. With a casual movement, she shattered the rest of Luna's barrier.

  "Resistance is futile, Doctor. My reflexes are thirty times superior to a human's. I can see your muscles contract before you even move."

  She advanced.

  I didn't try to run. I didn't try to fight.

  I did the only thing a pathologist knows how to do better than a soldier: I observed.

  If she has Troll muscles, she has a Troll's metabolism.

  Trolls are biological furnaces. They burn calories at an insane rate to maintain their regeneration and super-strength. And this room...

  I looked around. Tanks. Hundreds of tanks.

  Most contained preserved organs. But the tubes feeding the tanks...

  "Luna!" I yelled, dodging a lateral strike that sliced the tip of my lab coat. "The ghosts! Wake them up!"

  "What?" Luna was huddled behind a server rack. "Arthur, they're pieces of meat! They don't have consciousness!"

  "They have cellular memory! Scream! Make spiritual noise! Agitate them!"

  The Manager prepared the final blow. She was going to impale me.

  Luna, in an act of desperation, closed her eyes and let out a piercing scream—not with her throat, but with her soul. A psychic shockwave.

  The effect was immediate and grotesque.

  The tanks around us began to bubble. The hearts, eyes, and livers floating in the preservative fluid started to thrash, reacting to the spiritual energy. The entire lab began to shake with the "crying" of a thousand amputated organs.

  This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

  The Manager hesitated. For a fraction of a second, her sensors were overloaded by the supernatural static noise.

  It was the window I needed.

  I ran. Not for the exit, but for the nearest tank, labeled "Hyper-Caloric Nutrient Solution - Type O+."

  "Hey, meat doll!" I called out.

  She turned her head, cybernetic eyes locking onto me.

  "Primitive tactic."

  She advanced in a blur.

  I didn't dodge. I held my ground in front of the tempered glass tank.

  I waited until I could smell the ozone from her blade. I waited until I saw the reflection of my own death in her eyes.

  And then, I dropped to my knees.

  The blade passed over my head and buried itself deep into the tank behind me.

  CRASH!

  The glass exploded.

  Three hundred liters of nutrient fluid, dense as glucose syrup and loaded with growth stimulants, gushed over her with the pressure of a fire hose.

  The Manager tried to retreat, but the liquid was viscous. She was drenched.

  "Now, the surgery," I whispered.

  I activated the improvised magnetic boots on my soles so I wouldn't slip in the slime. I stepped into the flood.

  The Manager tried to cut me, but the fluid hampered her sensors and made the floor slippery.

  I jumped onto her back.

  I didn't use a sword. I used my favorite scalpel: The Mithril Scalpel No. 10, dipped in Accelerator Fungus Spores.

  I didn't try to cut the metal of her skeleton. I aimed for where the Troll flesh met the titanium. At the junction of the neck.

  I made a precise incision, only three centimeters long.

  "What are you..." she began to say, but her voice faltered.

  The nutrient fluid covering her seeped into the open wound.

  Troll Flesh + Accelerated Growth Fluid + Fungus Spores.

  The reaction was instantaneous. And horrific.

  Her regenerative biology kicked into overdrive, but without control. The muscle tissue in her neck began to swell, doubling in size in seconds, then tripling. Tumors of flesh began to sprout from the wound, swallowing the metal, choking the hydraulic pistons.

  "CRITICAL ERROR," her voice became robotic, distorted. "TISSUE EXPANSION EXCEEDING PARAMETERS."

  "Hyper-accelerated cancer," I explained, leaping off her back and landing next to Luna. "Her body is trying to heal itself so fast it's suffocating itself. The flesh is crushing the machinery."

  The Manager fell to her knees, clawing at her own neck. The mass of meat continued to grow, exploding her fake face, deforming her into a grotesque blob of muscle and skin pulsating uncontrollably.

  The building's alarm went off. Rotating red lights.

  [BIOHAZARD CONTAINMENT ACTIVATED. SECTOR INCINERATION IN 60 SECONDS.]

  "Time for discharge!" I grabbed Luna's arm and the hard drive with the stolen data.

  We ran.

  Behind us, the creature that was once the Manager let out screeches that were neither human nor animal, as she was consumed by her own rampant growth.

  We burst through the back door into the rainy alley.

  The spiritual barrier on the outer wall had already fallen. We hopped the barbed wire fence, tearing our clothes, and threw ourselves into the van.

  "Drive! Drive!" I shouted.

  Luna turned the key. The engine sputtered, protested, but caught.

  We sped off, tires screeching on the wet asphalt, seconds before a dull explosion shook the warehouse behind us. Orange flames licked the broken windows. Helix Pharma was burning the evidence.

  We drove in silence for ten minutes until we were safe in the traffic of Marginal Tietê.

  Luna was shaking. She was looking at her own hands.

  "Arthur... that thing... what we did to her..."

  "We survived," I replied dryly. I pulled a crumpled cigarette from my pocket but didn't light it. My fingers were trembling too. "She wasn't human, Luna. Not anymore."

  "But the organs in the tanks..." she swallowed hard. "When I screamed... I heard voices. Children's voices, Arthur. So many of them."

  I closed my eyes. The weight of the revelation crashed down on me.

  The Beta Strain. The accelerated growth. The attempt to fuse monster and human.

  Helix wasn't making weapons. They were trying to create the forced "evolution" of humanity. And they were using Rift War orphans as raw material.

  I looked at the hard drive on my lap.

  "We have the names," I said, cold fury replacing the fear. "We have the records of who funded this."

  "And now?" asked Luna, wiping away a tear. "Do we turn it over to the police?"

  I let out a humorless laugh.

  "The police work for the Sovereignty Guild. And Sovereignty funds Helix. If we hand this over, we're dead men."

  The Parasite inside me vibrated. It could smell a war coming. And for the first time, it wasn't hungry for meat. It was hungry for revenge.

  "Let's go home," I said. "I need to make some calls. If they want to play God with biology, it's time to show them what happens when the Devil performs the autopsy."