Odette gritted her teeth in preparation. Waiting for the moment when all three men had their backs turned was no easy task as they kept swaying between the tarp and her direction as they took in the fumes.

  But soon enough her hand was forced by the ticking clock.

  “Major Smirnov, look at this!”

  “What the hell?”

  “It appears to be coming from the specimen’s tarp, sir!”

  ‘Shit!’

  Odette cursed as she bolted from her spot in the shadows. She had been hidden, but all it would take was a flashlight pointed in her direction to uncover her. She wasn’t exactly the picture of stealth, wearing a hazmat suit shielded by reflective yellow rubber.

  FWISH FWISH FWISH FWISH

  ‘Oh come on! Be quiet!’

  Odette lamented her suit’s squeaking as she ran through the tent line. As if she was being punished for something, her misfortunes were starting to compound tonight.

  She hadn’t even slept since giving the tour for crying out loud!

  “What the hell was that!?”

  “Major?”

  The sound didn’t go unnoticed to the nearby soldiers. Smirnov shouted in her direction as Odette had just sprinted into the IDS tent.

  Quickly, she started stripping the suit off of her. The blood and the grime all over it was evidence of where she had been. She needed to hide it away somewhere in here.

  “Whoever’s out there, show yourself!”

  Odette’s heart was beating a million miles a minute as she peeled off the sealed protection from her underclothes. But her thoughts were only partially on the men outside the tent. More pressing was the ball of flesh she had hastily set on her old station’s desk.

  The Republic was generally critical against religion, and Odette hadn’t been raised to believe in anything like that for how little she and Lukas had actually been raised, but irregardless at that moment she prayed to whatever god may exist that she hadn’t just contaminated the camp’s men and women by extracting whatever this thing was.

  Her eyes were glued to it as her hands moved, until the last thing she had on was the gas mask of her suit.

  ‘If it were carrying something airborne, my exposed skin would be burning or numb by now…but it could still need to infiltrate my respiratory tract to kill me. Beyond that, even if it's not infectious like the other organs in its body, it might be carrying a lethal toxin that’s triggered on contact.’

  But for all of Odette’s hesitations and disaster scenarios she thought of in those moments, there was still a hole in them, or more like an instinct that she had that they were all wrong.

  In the same way she didn’t believe it was the beast’s offspring, she didn’t believe it was a weapon of the beast, either.

  The cords of flesh it had been connected to didn’t sit right with her. Given its central location in the creature’s body, Odette was starting to believe that she had discovered something else.

  ‘Something vital to this creature, but something we don’t know about yet, or can’t explain.’

  Odette thought as she ended her hesitation and lifted the gas mask from her face. Bundling the whole of the gory suit up into a pile save for the gloves, she stuffed it into the furthest locker in the tent from the flap. If she couldn’t get to it tomorrow in time to clean it for good, hopefully that would suffice to hide it.

  “Major Smirnov, it looks like that trail leads through the tents!”

  “Well, go over there then!”

  Odette quietly shut the locker as she heard a younger voice outside of the tent. They were getting even closer now, but had yet to find the tent she was in.

  Odette swiftly grabbed the ball up with a protected hand and dumped it into the pouch of the other. Tying the top of it into a knot then, she secured it on her person before looking to the tent’s sole exit flap.

  Just as a light came over the canvas.

  ‘...!’

  Odette stopped her hand inches from opening up the flap that would reveal her in yet another space she wasn’t supposed to be in, before backing away.

  The research tents were relatively opaque, but they were about to enter the same space Odette occupied. She had to figure out something fast.

  Odette looked around the tent. All the tents in camp were staked into the ground, then weighted with steel poles like rims. It was to prevent them from flying off into the Jejune, which was notoriously windy due to how flat it was, but it meant she couldn’t just slip underneath the tent’s side.

  ‘Escape or hide?’

  People were bound to be waking from the commotion soon, but it would be too late. For the first time in a while, Odette acted before thinking.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  …

  “Ferguson, what’s taking so long!?”

  Within the rows of tents in the early hours of the morning, a private in his early twenties blanched.

  “Looking for the trail, Major Smirnov! It appears to have run off somewhere by these tents!”

  Ferguson felt guilty shouting near the tents full of hard working service members and state researchers fast asleep, but nonetheless knew he needed to raise his voice back to the Major in order to answer.

  The husky man and the attendant by him confirmed his response, before going ahead to focus on the electricity issue. That left the young private alone, who once again found the trail of odd sludge against the shifty stones of the desert.

  Some were uneven, so the trail had run off into cracks at some parts, but he was able to follow it to a singular point: a wide tent with the insignia of an eye-bearing shield on its side.

  “This is the tent from IDS, right?”

  Ferguson shone his light over the flap, and the trail of blood that led up to it.

  He was no tracker, that was for sure. He could guess from the shine of the ground slick that it was probably gore from the innards of some beast, to be expected given the project going on here that he had loosely heard about, so he wasn’t filled with anything like trepidation or fear.

  At least not toward what he presumed to be a scientist pushing overtime. If anything he was more scared of Smirnov, and wanted to return as soon as possible.

  “Hello? I’m coming in–”

  The private called out as he pushed the tent’s flap aside with the flashlight, casually resting his other hand on his sidearm.

  “Anyone here…oh, what the hell is this?”

  Ferguson stepped back in disgust as his boots fell into a grimy puddle of gore much thicker than the stuff outside. Raising them to back up, residue clung to him like he had stepped in gum.

  The private looked around in bewilderment. Besides the gore, the tent was empty!

  All machines were off, everything was put away, all lockers were closed. The inside of the tent would have been perfectly unassuming if it weren’t for the trail of scarlet innards reaching here and suddenly stopping.

  The way the trail stopped was odd too. The private spun around with his light. The gore stopped here, but in a way that looked like someone had shook and fanned it out all over the place on purpose. Like a dog coming in from the rain.

  Not a single other surface was touched by the residue from what the private could tell…except for one.

  “It’s all over that desk over there too?”

  …

  Haaaaahhhh

  Smirnov sighed with his arms crossed. Next to him stood one of his attendants who gazed up at the camp’s mobile generator tower with a matching scowl.

  “I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve got no fucking idea how these things work, but if those eggheads in brass sent us here with defective equipment…!”

  The Major clenched a fist.

  “Well Major Smirnov, if it’s any consolation I don’t thi-”

  “Oh! Nevermind, look who’s finally here now!”

  The Major cut the attendant off as his third orderly who had gone to fetch the chief engineer walked up the hill to the generators. Behind him, and looking like someone had just poured a bucket of water on him to wake him up, the chief engineer dragged his feet.

  He was the first to speak with tired eyes, giving the Republic’s salute to the Major in slow motions.

  “Major Smirnov…how can I be of assistance?”

  “Hah! Well Bill, I don’t know if your eyes are receiving too much light or if your brains got too little oxygen, but in case you haven’t noticed the electricity’s out in camp! Now my battalion and I are here to provide you guys with the security you need, and it would appear to me that having electricity is a necessary requirement for that, wouldn’t you figure, Bill?”

  The older scientist just lazily wafted his hand like it was no big deal.

  “It’s not as critical as you are saying. The specimen’s containment has its own backup generators, and as for the equipment lodges, they can go a few hours without energy before critical failure. This could have waited, you know?”

  The baggy eyes of the engineer blinked slowly like a grazing deer.

  If one of his own officers had said that, the Major would have liked to give them a lead breakfast, but down here he very regretfully couldn’t pull rank over the researchers unless they were under direct attack. A provision made for the sake of researchers after years of men like Smirnov overseeing security in sites like this.

  “So that’s how it's going to be? Well god damn it, at least tell me if it's fixable or not! We’ve still got these neckties in camp and brass is supposed to radio in for their escort at 0600.”

  “Alright damn, give me a second.”

  The older man sighed as he slid past the three men.

  They watched as he began to flip through switches on the generator tower until the Major caught his last orderly returning in a much different state than before.

  “Oh, hell! If you’re about to tell me you’ve killed some paper pusher down there, Ferguson, then I’m going to have to court-martial you!”

  “I-I didn’t kill anyone sir.”

  The young soldier stopped at the top of the hill before saluting.

  “I followed the trail like you ordered, Sir. It ended inside the tent being used by IDS. I didn’t find anything else.”

  “Hmm. No trace of a person, but lots of blood, huh? IDS, what’s that stand for again?”

  The Major couldn’t be expected to tell apart all the techies in camp, could he?

  “Inquiry into Deterrent Solutions!”

  The voice of the engineer answered from a distance away. He had already ascended the ladder on the side of the generator tower and was currently looking through the knobs on the platform up there. Begrudgingly though, it was clear from his exasperation.

  “They’re one of the Republic’s highest departments, how can you not know that?”

  The Major scowled at Bill’s mocking amusement.

  “Get to the point! Can you tell me who uses that tent in camp or can you not?”

  “I won’t have to, here comes one of them now!”

  The Major turned, and sure enough two people were ascending the hill towards them. One of them, a woman with eye bags like the engineer, had an expression of uncertainty on her face while the other, a man with hair on the cusp of greying, looked more annoyed than he did anxious.

  Smirnov knew one of them, but hadn’t met the other. He hadn’t realized the man had been from IDS, or maybe he just hadn’t paid attention.

  He clicked his tongue. Great.

  This guy was a real pain to deal with.