well enough to hide the gun holstered under his left arm. Tall, athletically built, and pale, he had the look of an ex-cop or soldier who had been busted down to desk detail. “Is he still awake?” the man asked one of the guards.
“Yes,” Cole replied. “He is. What the hell did you do to him?”
The man spoke to the guard posted at the door in a clipped whisper. He then turned to Cole, smiled in condescendingly lukewarm fashion and approached the guard who stood closest to the bed. “You’ve been entrusted to this facility by your friend, Paige Strobel.”
“She told me to go with you guys back in Denver, so I did.”
“You didn’t have much choice, now did you?”
“There were choices,” Cole assured him. “I could have left like the others who got away from that warehouse.”
“How many others?”
Cole took no small amount of comfort from that question, since it meant that Rico, Prophet, and the Amriany had made it away from there. Changing the subject quickly enough for him to hear gears grinding, he asked, “What did you do to me?”
“We tried to do you a favor, Mr. Warnecki, and had a look at those tendrils that remain inside of you after the Nymar spore attached itself to your heart.”
It was a constant act of willpower for Cole to not dwell on the memory of when that thing was inside of him. Like a presence that never grew tired of trying to break his sanity, those thoughts lingered and whispered no matter how he tried to shut them out. The spore had been removed. He could only remind himself of that. He didn’t need to remind himself of what had been left behind. The constant pain of his body being garroted from the inside did that well enough.
“You cut me open?” he asked. No matter how obvious it had become, he still couldn’t quite wrap his mind around it.
“Nothing worse than what was already done to you when the spore was removed,” the man replied. “And much more sterile.”
“If anything’s gonna kill me, infection is the least of my worries.”
“But that’s all that separates a human from a Nymar. A very aggressive infection. Also, as we’ve discovered over the last two weeks, very stubborn.”
“Two weeks?”
The man nodded. “We didn’t exactly want you to wake up yet, but at least that murderer didn’t get to you before your stitches healed. I suppose we’ve got a more traditional kind of medicine to thank for that, huh? I think you’ve been in this game long enough to be of some use to us while you’re awake. Excellent.”
Cole sat up again, ignoring the pain that came from it. “Paige wouldn’t have signed on for this.”
“That doesn’t matter. She was kind enough to hand you over under the implication that we would do what we could to get those tendrils out of you. In return, we could study what was happening to you and why you were able to be seeded when something like that should be impossible.”
“So . . . you’re a Skinner?”
The man merely smiled curtly and walked forward to peel the gown away from Cole’s body so he could get a look at the fresh scar. With a few inquisitive prods of his finger against the incision, he brought Cole’s focus right back to where he wanted it to be. “The tendrils can’t be removed,” he said. as if he was talking about a mole on Cole’s leg. “We opened you up . . . several times and from several angles. You’re quite a healer, by the way. Those tendrils are wrapped around your major organs. Stomach, kidneys, and of course the intestines. Those are the nasty ones. We managed to remove a few sections here and there, but the rest are wrapped around you so tightly in spots that they’ve cut you. The only thing keeping you from bleeding out is that the tendrils also hold you together. That is, until they get hungry.
“You see, like any simple organism, these things develop ways of communicating. Theirs is to cinch in tighter to provoke an anger response that leads to pain and eventually to the conclusion that you need to feed them. Either that or they just tighten as some sort of reflex. I won’t be certain about that until we do some more studying. Of course, we may have to stop feeding them as a way to gauge how their reactions change. Since we seem to have a problem