Grace was pressed flat against the wall of what used to be a nurses' station, back to the partition. Her breathing was so loud and the knowing didn't help.

Okay. Okay. Take stock.

Three days ago she had been at her desk eating a granola bar and reading incident reports. The most dangerous thing in her immediate environment had been the communal coffee pot and a rolling chair with a wobbly wheel. Three days ago she had been a person with a routine and a thermos and a functional, ongoing life.

Then Wrenwood, this stupid mission she stupidly agreed to like a stupid idiot. Then the thing that used to be a man in the dilapitated room that definitely wasn't a man anymore and moved like something wearing a person as a loose suggestion. Then the grab — huge hand, wrong-smelling coat, who wears snakeskin, she'd clocked the mechanical goggles as diagnostic tech in the half-second before everything went dark and had spent a genuinely unhinged amount of mental energy since then trying to figure out what the goggles were for — then the... thing, B.O.W.? That was certainly an acronym she'd read in classified documents and had filed under theoretical right up until it was standing twelve feet away from her and theoretical stopped being a useful category.

Anyway.

Some DSO agent gave her a hand canon heavier than her college binder with a single bullet. Great, what the fuck was she going to do with that? Guess she'll cross that bridge when she inevitably comes to it.

The grip was almost too big for her hand and she was holding it with both because the alternative was dropping it and she was not dropping this, this was her one bullet, this was the entire sum of her current offensive capability and she had approximately zero field hours and a rating on the range that her supervisor had once described as "a good effort, Ashcroft."

A good effort.

Down the hall something fell over, heavy and wet-sounding, and Grace's shoulders went somewhere near her ears and stayed there.

Focus. She pressed her eyes shut for exactly two seconds — counted them — then opened them again. Pattern recognition; that was her thing. She'd done it in every room she'd ever walked into since she was nineteen years old, just as ambient background processing, and right now that reflex was the only thing standing between her and a complete system failure.

She made herself look at the hallway.