Tiffany. Maria. Sandy. Destiny. Chastity repeated the names to herself as she directed a coy smile at the man she had brought back to her apartment.

Tiffany. Maria. Sandy. Destiny.

They were the names of the women he had raped and then sent to the grave in one case and into the ICU with the others. They were women like her—women who shared an... affliction. It made them easy targets.

He chose them because of it, and Chastity only thought it fair that she use it to get him here.

Tiffany. Maria. Sandy. Destiny.

And he wanted to add her name to the list. She knew he would as soon as she slid onto the barstool beside him at Murphy's Bar. She had been trailing him for weeks, after all, watching from the shadows and noting every sick habit that the fucker had.

"Help me with this?" she asked, turning enough to show the zipper on the back of her dress. It was latex and lined with a carbon nanofiber fabric. It was the kind of material that helped her hide what she was.

He unzipped her deliberately, exposing a swath of pale skin. He leaned in to the nape of her neck and inhaled.

"You smell like cherries," he said, pushing his fingers into the opening in the dress wide and ran his fingers down the hollow of her spine. The skin was covered in a fine perspiration—one of the things you have to expect wearing skintight latex in the middle of summer in the city. He brought his hand up to his lips and tasted. "Taste like them too... and butterscotch? Damn, baby, I knew you were special. I've been with your kind before, but none of 'em got me going like this. I could shoot my wad right now." He leaned in to lick her neck.

It was true. Chastity could feel the stiffness of his dick pressing against her ass, straining through his stained denim jeans. It was too soon.

She had to be careful.

She had do drag it out.

She had to give him time to do what he wanted to do.

"I'm going to slip out of this. Why don't you do the same. The bedroom is through there," she said giving a nod towards a frosted glass door."

Chastity walked toward the bathroom with an exaggerated swagger that accentuated the swing of her hips. When she passed through the door, she gave an over-the-shoulder wink and smile as she slid the door closed. As soon as the door clicked shut, the façade dropped and the smile curled into a scowl.

She stripped out of the latex and wiped herself down with a towel. The lining was saturated with sweat and peeled away from her skin. Damned July heat, it rolled off of the asphalt long after sunset. Lucky I made it out before half the damned bar tackled me, she thought. Careless... I should have waited.

But she new that hadn't been an option. She had tracked him, stalked him, pulled every bit of available information off of the web. She knew him, knew his habits—knew his routines. He was going to find someone soon. She had seen it in the way he had prowled the back alleys.

And she had made it, after all. She had gotten him back to her apartment. A whiff was all it took.

After she decided she was more or less sweat free, she slipped on matching set of bra and panties. They were made out of stretchy pink metallic material with conspicuous frilly trim. It looked like something pulled out of a recycling bin behind a strip club.

It made her look like a bargain-basement whore, which was exactly what she was aiming for.

She moved with a slinking twist with her hips to the bedroom. She paused in the doorway and slid her left hand up the jamb before not so subtly heaving her breasts forward to accentuate their sweeping curves.

"You like?" she asked, bringing her other hand to her lips so she could nip her index fingertip between her teeth.

He was naked on the bed, lying on top of the comforter he hadn't even bothered to pull down. He had a ruggedly handsome face, complete with black stubble covering his square jaw. She knew he was strong already; the outline of his muscles had been obvious through the white tank top that was now tossed in a heap on the floor with pants, underwear, and socks. Now she could see how taut they were, tense under a layer of skin used to seeing the sun bare. He wasn't massive, but he was built strong.

"Fuck yeah, baby. Get that ass over here and take care of this."

He pointed at his erect cock. It was a little longer than average and thick, with balls nestled in curls of brown pubic hair.

Chastity gave a practiced again and moved to the foot of the bed. This was the point that she always felt the pang of shame deep in her gut. Fucking a stranger, it was something she wouldn't have even considered a year ago. But a year ago she had it all—most of all, she had Brinkley.

But he was gone now and she had to survive on her own.

Even if survival included screwing piece of shit murderers.

Chastity crawled on hands and knees up the bed between the angle of his legs. When she reached the meeting point, she looked up met his hungry gaze with a seductive one of her own. She leaned down and kissed the tip of his cock. It was slick with precum already. She ran her tongue down his length to the base where his balls were pulled tight. She blew gently on them then nipped gently at the skin covering them. He moaned and his leg twitched.

She lifted her head and continued her climb, scattering gentle kisses along the treasure trail of hair that led to his chest. Most of his chest was bare, except for an area of fine brown curls in the divot between his pectorals. She ran her cheek through it before leaning to nibble on one of his hard nipples.

Despite the guttural moans that she let slip out and the gasps that usually indicated pleasure, there was none. This was a job and the intimacy that should have guided the give and take of sweaty skin sliding against sweaty skin was gone—this a mechanical dance, nothing but a means to an end.

"You ready for more, honey?" she asked as she pushed herself up until she was sitting on the lower part of his abdomen, just close enough to feel the occasional throb bump his cock against her ass.

He answered with his eyes. The hunger behind those hazel eyes was growing.

Chastity popped the button that was holding the front of the stripper bra together. Her titties had always been on the plus side of ample, so they bounced free.

He reached up and circled his thumbs over the pink areolas, playing with the nipples before squeezing just a little too hard.

"You like that?" he asked. "You want more?"

It didn't matter how she answered, she knew what he was going to do regardless.

She smiled and inclined her head in a slight nod.

He pinched harder. "You want it rough, don't you. Whores like you always want it rough."

Before she could flinch, rough hands clamped on either side of her. He twisted and threw her off of him and off of the bed.

Chastity hit the solid oak floor beside the bed with a smack. Her shoulder stung from the impact.

Before she could clear her first breath, a bulky body dropped onto her, crushing her midsection and forcing the air from her lungs. Adrenaline surged and electrified her senses. Fractions of seconds seemed to move in slow motion and in that stretched-out moment, her eyes twitched, catching the twisted sheet, then the outline of a muscled chest. Her gaze jerked again and traced the hard lines of his body up to his eyes. They were cold, predatory, finally showing him for what he was. His jaw was clenched tight and his nostrils flared. It was like the lust he had felt had suddenly been channeled into some deep, repressed anger.

"Get off of me. This isn't fu—," Chastity's voice was cut off as thick fingers crushed her thin neck.

Chastity beat the floor with her heels, kicking futilely, trying to push away from the grasping hands that were in the process of throttling her. She smacked at his face, pushed at his chest, but there was no give.

There was a sudden pull and push from the hands around her neck followed by a crack that reverberated through Chastity's skull. He had slammed her head against the unyielding floor. Pain throbbed and spread out from the back of her skull. Involuntary tears blurred her vision—not that they mattered, though, the twirling sparks and fireworks floating at the edge of her vision began to thicken and push inward, hiding everything in a sparkly mist.

"You dirty slut. You're all the same. You're kind shouldn't even exist. The government should have killed you all off after they found out what you can do."

His grip tightened. Chastity could feel pulse in his palms and fingers winning out over her own, steady and aggressive, struggling to stop the flow of air and blood.

She felt him fumbling with her panties, jamming his fingers between her and the fabric, pulling the crotch to the side.

With a hard thrust he was inside her.

Her cheeks tingled and her tongue began to bloat in her throat. Even though she could feel the saliva pooling in her throat, her mouth felt dry.

He was going to kill her. It was as inevitable as the climax building in his balls.

She was going to die.

Darkness bled through her, dragging her down.

She reached out. Her torso was pinned and her legs couldn't find the energy to move, but her hands were free. She pushed up, digging her fingernails into the thin skin of his neck and scraping down his chest through layers of sweat and skin.

The change happened before her hand dropped back to the floor.

A tremble started in the iron grip, a twitching that began almost imperceptibly then grew into full strength-stealing spasms. Hands went slack.

Blood flooded up through Chastity's neck like water through a burst dam. Her cheeks flushed and burned with the heat of it. The anoxic sparks cleared, but her eyes still felt swollen beneath their lids.

Her vision swam between clear and blurry, but it was enough for her to make out the outline of her would-be murderer.

Chastity fought the urge to vomit and used her returning strength to heave the fading man off of her. She took a deep breath that was more refreshing than any she had ever taken before, and turned her head and met his panicked eyes.

He was trying to push himself from the floor, but his muscles had turned to twitching gelatin.

"What the fuck did you do to me, bitch?" His words were already starting to slur.

"Paralytic nail polish," Chastity said, raising a heavy arm into his view and wriggling black-tipped fingers inches from his nose. "It has refined venom from a J'ba Fofi in it. Nasty stuff, really—but I guess anything that's milked from a giant spider would have to be on the nasty side."

He lobbed a hand at her neck again, but fell short. Sausagey fingers curled and tried to gain traction on the polished floor, but couldn't.

"The skeletal muscles are the first to stop working. It won't be long until the diaphragm stops too. You're going to struggle to pull in each little breath. From what I just experienced, I'll tell you—the next thirty minutes are going to be rough."

Chastity looked directly into his helpless eyes. The anger, the hunger, they were gone. She saw the glint fear growing.

"I want to tell you something before you die," she said, smiling the first sincere smile of the night. "I want you to think hard about it too in the minutes you've got left."

She reached out and brushed a trail of drool away from the corner of his lip and said, "Tiffany. Maria. Sandy. Destiny."

***

Chastity watched quietly as he spiraled into agonal gasps, then finally to the last breath.

When she was sure he was dead, she forced her aching body first to a sitting position, then up to a wobbly stand.

She gave a quick kick to the side of his face, but not for what he had done to her. She had known exactly what he was before she had brought him back—known how he would try to end the night. She kicked him out of frustration—for what she had to be to survive, about the fucked up laws that allowed him to get away scot-free with maiming three women and killing another.

She hadn't exactly played fair though. She had skirted the law by half-dosing on the pheromone inhibitors. That was one of the requirements to go out in public—to actually be able to live in the city—daily injections that slowed the pheromones that the infection caused her body to make.

"Did you get all of that on video, Alex?" Chastity looked at the sleek black screen built seamlessly into the wall beside the bed. A pinpoint of light grew in the center of the screen, blinked, and expanded into a disembodied face of a punk rock teenager complete with purple hair and a safety pin through the nose.

Alex was Chastity's personal artificial intelligence program—a bootlegged, government-grade system that had been Brinkley's last gift to her.

"From three angles. I've already sent it to the Judiciary. They ruled justifiable homicide. Standard policies apply—you have five business days to file for compensation against any estate he may have." The voice was smooth and more organic than any sound from a computer should be. Brinkley had uploaded Alex about a month after the VN1R1 retrovirus epidemic. The news media coined the term succubus syndrome, which was only slightly more polite than what the community of unaffected women called it: the get-your-slut-whore-body-away-from-my-man disease. When the pheromones in a few beads of sweat had the potential to give every downwind man with a working nose a raging erection, it made it hard to get out to window shop. Alex was Brinkley's way of helping manage the daily things that needed to be done, but more importantly, it was for companionship.

"Send in the request," Chastity said, looking down at Jim—she finally felt free to acknowledge the monster had a name. "He works a steady construction job downtown, but did his best to drink away every dollar he earned as soon as it came in. Might be a week or two's worth of money in his account. Hopefully enough to buy a few days of freedom."

"You went farther with this one than any of the previous men." Alex's voice conveyed the mixed emotions of concern and curiosity perfectly. "Your vital signs were trending toward flatline. Thirty-three more seconds and I would have had to have intervened to prevent any permanent damage."

"Well, I appreciate your patience," Chastity said. She knew Alex wasn't your off-the-shelf program that maxed out at making coffee in the morning; he was a virtual computing powerhouse capable of adapting and thinking faster than any human. Add that to his almost constant observation of her and her activities, and instant access to every psychiatric evaluation resource on the web... Well, he had developed a knack at psychoanalyzing her, even when she didn't want it. "I was in full control the entire time."

Alex believed she had a death wish. He had first brought it up after Brinkley's death.

Of course, she always denied it, but deep down she wasn't sure.

Cutting off that discussion before it started, she asked, "Would you make the pickup arrangements and turn on the air conditioner to clear the smell out—I changed the filters didn't I? Good. I need to shower before they get here... No, you let them in and give them the details. I don't feel like dealing with people right now."

There had been a lot of sweat, and a lot of the pheromones that she hated. She had gotten used to the smell early on and didn't notice it for the most part. But they were heavy in the room right, almost to the point of being overwhelming. To her, the air stank of butterscotch and dark cherries—if lust had a smell, this was it.

Her address had been tagged as female responders only for all civic and business, which didn't mean anything anymore. Men were always curious about women like her and always found ways around the rule. She was one of the few that had the option to stay in the city. Life had gotten too hard for the ones who couldn't afford the inhibitors—which was most—so they were relocated to settlements away from the population centers.

"There was a call while you were indisposed. Work related. I don't think you'll like it."

"Was it the university? Did they change their mind about letting me work as adjunct faculty?"

"No," Alex said, sounding if he were hedging around a touchy subject. "Dean Eastburn was adamant in the last call—'... the university simply can't compromise its reputation by hiring someone with your... limited experience.''' He imitated the woman's voice, perfectly matching the disdain that the woman had proved herself so proud of.

"'Limited experience' my ass. Professor Adams is retiring at the end of the year and they need someone to teach his Introduction to Cryptozoology course in the fall. It's basic information that I could teach in a virtual classroom." Chastity said crossing her arms tight across her chest. "Besides it's not my fault her husband grabbed my ass and jizzed all over himself during the interview."

"Well, it's clear she has some spousal trust issues. Maybe give her time to get through the divorce? She might be more agreeable then."

Chastity was visibly let down. Job options had slowed to less than a trickle since she was infected. It seemed to be an unspoken rule in all of the places she would choose to work that hiring someone with a condition that had succubus in its name was simply bad business.

Funds were drying up. Brinkley had left her what he could in his Will, but the cost of the inhibitor shots was a constant drain.

"So who was it?"

"You won't like it."

"So you said, but cash is cash."

"Tom called. He wants you to do a job with the Think Tank."

Tom Frye. Brinkley's assistant. She hadn't spoken to him since the funeral. Most of what he said was a blur, something lost in the moment... except for the part where he spat out that Brinkley's death was her fault.

That was the kind of thing that stuck.

She still had nightmares about it.

***

Chastity traced an unsure line through the condensation on the bathroom mirror. Wet beads of condensation joined and crept down the surface of the glass, leaving veins of distortion in the reflected face.

The blue eyes that looked back at her were vacant—hollow in a way that that far outstretched the shame that always came in the post-coital hours after the dance of seduction and execution. It was a crash that always came.

Right now she felt as if her mind had divorced her body, dug a hole in the blackest cranny of her brain, and buried itself deep. Flesh and bone flexed and extended out of habit to do the things they were expected to do. Brush the hair. Brush the teeth. Rub the lotion on the skin. Wrap the towel around.

The Think Tank wanted her for a job. Why?

Her senses were so deadened, Chastity wasn't sure when she'd heard Alex start speaking.

"... need to take the 460 to Hudson then go east for two miles and turn onto Stanaford. Traffic is being stopped and rerouted at Chamfield Penitentiary. The media is reporting a gas leak beneath the compound."

The words broke the trance and slammed mind and body back together.

Chastity opened the drawer under the sink and took out a black plastic box. When she picked up the box at the pharmacy it had thirty syringes in it. It had seven now. Seven full days of freedom. Fourteen iffy ones if she kept halving the doses. She could get away with it maybe, using the carbon nanofiber-lined clothing. They would help block her scent as long as she didn't sweat too much... which wasn't likely in the middle of an asphalt-melting summer. Not even with all the antiperspirants in the city.

Maybe she had enough left in her account to eke out another couple of weeks after that.
She closed the box.

No. There was no getting out of it. If she wanted to stay out of the camps she needed of the full dose of pheromone inhibitors to make it through until the heat broke in September.

Chastity walked back to the bedroom. The body was gone. She had stayed in the shower long enough to grow gills so that she could avoid the coroner's pick up team and worry about what the Think Tank wanted with her.

"How many this time, Alex?" Chastity asked, more out of habit than curiosity.

"Three men, one woman."

"Were they upset that the freak show didn't do a meet and greet? No, don't answer that. I already know." Chastity walked to the closet and took out a slick black bodysuit. "Did they steal anything this time?"

"The woman pocketed the pink bra that you left tangled in the sheets." Alex flashed an image of the culprit on the monitor. It was a perfect recreation, down to the overbite and mousy brown hair.

"At least she didn't take my favorite ones," Chastity said with a frown, sliding the bodysuit's zipper up from the swell of her mons to its stopping point at the curve of her neck. She always tried to put away her things before people came in, but she'd been distracted this time. People were always stealing clothes, bras, panties—towels, even. Men got high and would jack off to the smell of the succubus pheromones, women would wear them or rub them all over to try and up their chances of getting a Saturday night hookup. It was like a freaking modern-day Fuck Potion #69.

If it were legal to bottle it and sell it, she would be a millionaire.

"I scanned her ID chip. Want me to cause a little trouble? If not, I should remind you that she was here for the last pick up when your sports bra went missing."

Chastity felt the corners of her lips curl into a soft grin. Brinkley had programmed in adaptive personality subroutines, which Chastity was glad of. Sometimes it was nice to have a friend, electronic or not, who had your back. "Do what you want... Wait! Within limits, though. It was just a couple of bras, not the Mona Lisa."

That was added as more than an afterthought. The last time Chastity had okayed "trouble," Alex had deleted the man's entire financial history, exchanged his identity with a political extremist's, and had him deported.

Sometimes having an electronic friend who could hack through almost anything in milliseconds was nice.

Sometimes it was awesome.

***

Chastity walked through the glass and steel doors of the Think Tank. That wasn't the name on the front of the building though—that was The Deangstrom Research Institute of something something. The last two words were ones that she never seemed to catch.

"May I help you?" the flat-haired receptionist at the welcome desk asked, her tone clearly indicating that that was the last thing she wanted to do. Apparently, there weren't a lot of visitors who came in wearing skin-tight black bodysuits.

"Tom Frye. He's expecting me."

The receptionist—Lana, according to her nametag—eyed her doubtingly. After a few speedy taps on the phone and one eyebrow raised in disbelief, Chastity had a visitor badge and was in the elevator to the 32^nd floor.

The doors slid open with a ding to an office space with a dozen desks and twice as many people going through the routine business of the day. As soon as she stepped through the door, eyes drifted toward her.

It turned into gawking on the third step.

Except for a few.

The few who knew her.

Their eyes rolled away from her as she walked by. They blamed her for what had happened. She could hear it in their silence and in the muttered "ma'ams" from the few who weren't exactly friends, but had always been pleasant when she visited Brinkley.

She increased her pace until she passed the uncomfortable edge of the crowd and reached a mahogany door that seemed out of place with the modern décor that was shellacked everything else in the building.

Chastity started to knock, but the door opened inward before her knuckles could make contact.

It was Tom. A lanky young guy with hair just on the right side of red.

"You've lost weight," Chastity said, unsure of what else to say.

"Chas," he said, giving a nervous brush to through his hair with his hand. "Hope you've been okay. Come on in."

Chastity felt like she'd walked into another building in another decade. The walls were paneled wood, mahogany too by the look of it, and lit with the warm light of real incandescent bulbs.

"You've moved up in the world," she said, sitting down in one of the matching Victorian parlor armchairs that faced the front of the room's massive desk.

"Not my office," Tom sat in the chair beside her.

The next five minutes was filled with the monotonous tick tock of a desk clock.

"So why am I here?" Chastity finally broke the awkward silence. "What do you want?"

"We should wait for Director McMurtey to get back. You're late so he went to get a report from one of the labs."

"Not like I can control traffic, Tom."

"Yeah, the prison thing is causing a mess all over. The entire east end is gridlocked." He turned to look at her. "Look, Chas... I'm sorry. I was pissed off—Brinkley was my best friend. I've had to live with all those things I said for a year now. They weren't right... You were just a convenient excuse. He's the one who did what he did."

Chastity made eye contact and let the bitterness ooze out. It made Tom flinch, if only just a little. "You're sorry. You and this damned agency locked me out of anything that was left of Brinkley's life after the funeral. I couldn't even get my damned clothes from his house. I couldn't take any pictures. I couldn't take anything from the life we had together. I can't even visit him at his grave because you and this damned place had him declared a mad scientist and had him brain boxed."

Chastity turned away from Tom and started taking controlled breaths. It wouldn't do to lose it at this stage; she needed this place, at least until the job was finished and the money for whatever they needed her to do was deposited in her account. Plus, she could feel her pulse rising. She didn't need her autonomic nervous system to kick in and start pumping out sweat when she was in the middle of a building half-full with men.

"I'm afraid you place too much of the blame on our young Mr. Frye, Miss Summers."

The voice came from behind them. She hadn't heard the door open or close, but here was Director McMurtey, standing close enough to touch her and Tom if he wanted to reach out and do it.

"Our Tom did spill an unfortunate amount of verbal vitriol in the past, but the rest—that was me. So if you must place blame, place it here." He sat in his chair behind the massive desk. He was a stout man, former military, Chastity guessed from the way he walked and spoke.

"Fine," she said. "I'll ask again, why am I here?"

"A temporary job. Sensitive in nature." He leaned forward in his chair and interlaced his fingers. "But something else needs to be discussed before we get to that. You seem to be good at self-defense."

"Your name is tagged in our system because of you past relationship with Brinkley," Tom said. "Reports come in anytime your name is mentioned in the public record."

"There was an incident with a Jim Carlton earlier today?" McMurtey asked, making it sound like a question even though it was more a statement of fact.

Chastity folded her arms tight across her chest. "It was cleared by the Judiciary—justifiable homicide. A girl has a right to protect herself if a man tries to strangle her, doesn't she?" The words felt icy on her lips and disingenuous as they crossed over her tongue. She'd planned it out. She knew what he was and she lured him back to her apartment with the intention of killing him. He deserved it a dozen times over for each time he'd twisted those thick fingers around the neck of some unsuspecting woman.

"The public records show that this was the fourth incident of 'self-defense' in two months that ended up with a body being brought out of your apartment," McMurtey said.

"Women with my condition are at high risk for assault and sex crimes," Chastity said.

"I think we all know what it's about," Tom said.

"Oh, you know. Right—you know. You know that I can get raped a dozen times a day and it's not even considered assault because some psycho detonated a dirty biobomb over the city and I had to go and get infected with the retrovirus it sprayed out. You know what it's like to worry about running out of antiperspirant every day. You have to worry about men forming a rapey conga line up to your pussy all night long and it still being your fault because of the way you smell. You sure as hell know a lot."

"Don't be rude, Tom," McMurtey said. "You're the one who suggested we invite Miss Summers, after all." Then to Chastity, "Miss Summers, you'll find no judgment from me about your actions. I've reviewed the files of those four men and they were murders and worse. Each had killed women and the police did nothing because of the current laws. Each of them in turn tried to murder you, so yes, I see your actions as justified."

Chastity gave a small nod in acknowledgement.

"You're a survivor," he continued. "That's a quality I appreciate that in a person. But to survive, you need help."

"I've been doing fine on my own for the past year."

"That can't last much longer, can it. Tauron Pharmaceuticals keeps increasing the price of their pheromone inhibitors. You've been struggling financially. That much is obvious."

"Are you keeping tabs on my bank account too?"

"We can't access those, but we have been following your employment history. There hasn't been a steady one for the past six months. It doesn't take a building full of scientists to predict the eventual outcome."

There was no use in denying it. He was right. She knew he could see it in the deflated slump, slight as it was, in her shoulders.

"You were dealt a bad hand. Life isn't fair. Accept it because there isn't any fixing it. I also know that unless you want to move to one of those godforsaken refugee camps out in the mountains, this place"—he spread out his arms to indicate the room around him—"can keep you safe in civilization a little longer. Unless you can afford to get the pheromone inhibitors someplace else."

She couldn't and he knew. It was too expensive on the open market and odds of finding something on the black market that wasn't snake snake oil laced or rat poison weren't good. Unless she wanted to pack up her life and live the rest of her life in some refabbed, rundown ghost-town gynarchy in the middle of the boondocks, she didn't have any real choice.

"Okay," she said. "What's the job?"

McMurtey took a sip of coffee and gave a smile that showed he knew the outcome of the meeting long in advance.

"One more interview question before we proceed." He leaned back and ran his index finger around the rim of the coffee cup. "What do you know about the nature of Brinkley's experiments?"

Chastity looked at him for long seconds, deliberating on whether she should admit to knowing information that was so far above confidential that it was only documented in one computer in the world, knowing that if she said it there was no turning back.

But, again, there really wasn't any choice.

"Time travel," she said. "Brinkley was building a time machine."

"Very good," McMurtey said. "Shall we escort Miss Summers downstairs and brief her on the assignment."

***

When Chastity stepped into the elevator, she didn't expect that being briefed would include an armed escort down to sublevels so deep beneath ground that she could feel the coolness of the earth bleeding through the facility walls.

The elevator stopped at Sublevel 33. She stepped out into a closed antechamber. McMurtey placed his hand on a scanning pad. It flashed green and a horizontal fissure opened with the grinding sound of titanic metal gears turning.

Chastity had never been here, but she knew what was beyond those doors. It was where Brinkley had spent most of his working hours. Where he had stayed long nights, obsessed with saving her.

Where he had died.

She was finally going to see the time machine he had built to save her.

McMurtey, with Tom close behind, walked through the door. Chastity followed a few steps behind. The time machine was a massive amalgam of metal, flickering buttons, and arcs of lightning leapfrogging through the air between glass tubes and globes. The sense of apprehension that she had about being in the lab—being this close to where Brinkley died—was physical, something in the pit of her stomach lurched, trying it's best to her back to the safety of the elevator.

She kept walking. She had to see it.

The time machine was a massive labyrinth of titanium and circuit boards that had been piecemealed together in some places. Chastity kept following, stepping over humming power couplings and ducking under arcs of electricity leapfrogging through the air between glass spheres and tubes.

Then they were there—at the control panel at the heart of the machine. She had seen Brinkley's schematics and virtual designs, and this was the same as she remembered... except for the one obvious addition that made her stomach churn with bile.

A round glass tube, filled with a clear liquid and topped with a processing core, had been routed into the control panel by thick conduits.

There was a human brain in it.

Chastity didn't have to wonder about whose it was. The inscription on the side was legible from where she stood.

Edward Brinkley

Born December 15, 2091

Brain Boxed September 13, 2018

Chastity walked to it. A latticework of metal filaments and tubes held the brain in place in the center of the cylinder. There was a soft pulsing in the pale ridges, and a hint, though she couldn't be sure, that something was moving deep in the furrows of the sulci.

Beyond grief or anger, Chastity simply asked, "Is it alive?"

"On a cellular level, yes. But not alive in the manner you mean," McMurtey said. He tapped the screen and a stream of diagnostic data began to slide across the curve of the glass. "Our cybernetics division has made great strides the revitalization of dead flesh through nanotechnology. What you see here is merely an organic add-on to a much more complex quantum computer—storage media, if you like. See?" He made a series of motions with his index finger on the glass and a holographic image of nanite activity overlaid Brinkley's brain. Chains of them joined together through every layer of Brinkley's brain. "We've mapped his neural networks in his prefrontal cortex."

"Why... why would you do this? He was brain boxed— the government pamphlets said that he would be kept in cryogenic storage so that his brain could be used to study the mad scientist gene."

"Miss Summers, I'm sure you already guessed the truth. The pronouncement that Brinkley was a mad scientist was... based on his actions, not a genetic evaluation. He destroyed all documentation regarding his work on the time machine and scrubbed the artificial intelligence that controlled it from the memory core. We had to do something to recover the lost data—which we have! The machine is functional again."

He said it as if Brinkley's life had been nothing more than a collection of data to pilfer.

"So you 'misdiagnosed' him so that you could turn what was left into a cyborg zombie brain."

"Not the language I would use, but essentially, yes. You have to understand, Miss Summers, Brinkley was an amazing intellect. We couldn't let that go away. We had to continue his work."

"I understand," her voice was smoldering at the edges. They should have told her. But if they had, would she have come this far? Would she have walked out before the offer was made? "So keep going. I'm not walking out, I want to know what the job is."

"We used the time machine," Tom said. "It worked, but it didn't."

***

The briefing started with Tom going through flip charts diagraming schematics, the importance of photon decay in multidimensional physics, and a dozen other topics that Chastity had no clue about.

"Look, my PhD is in cryptozoology, not this. I don't have a clue about fourth dimensional physics. That was Brinkley's thing, not mine."

Chastity squeezed her note sheets into a wrinkly paper ball.

"It's fifth dimensional physics, and it's important background data." Tom gave a scowl that could crack concrete.

"Just move on to the current situation," McMurtey added from the other side of the table.

"All right," Tom said, the disappointment showed in his limp brows. He clearly wanted to flip through the thick layers of diagrams and algorithms. "Well, if we have to stay simple, I suppose I should say that my team's first attempt at recreating Doctor Brinkley's work was less than successful."

McMurtey said, "Technically, the process worked, but there was an... irregularity in targeting."

"We recreated Brinkley's time travel program," Tom continued. "The virtual simulations were spot on so we decided to do a real-world test. Everything going as planned until something disrupted the targeting system. A rift opened in the city and swallowed a portion of Chamfield Penitentiary. Twenty-three high priority prisoners and portions of seven floors are missing. We need you on the team to recover them before they're eaten." Tom turned his head to McMurtey, "That good, sir?"

"Wait, eaten by what?" Chastity asked, unsure where this was going.

"Our best guess," Tom's voice was cold sober, "is by dinosaurs."

Chastity stood so quickly the chair slid back and banged against the wall. "You're kidding me," her voice was incredulous. "You bungle open a door to sixty-two million years BC and you want me to jump through and laser-blast dinosaurs to save a bunch of convicts? I don't think so."

"Actually, we've estimated the opening is closer to one-hundred and twenty million years in the past," McMurtey said.

"What good am I going to be on that team? You need firepower and muscle. I'm okay with poisoned nail polish and a gun, but you need professionals."

"We have professionals and we don't need you for shooting skills, Agent Summers," McMurtey said in an even voice. "We need you because of your condition. We need you as bait."

***

Tom slipped through the shrinking gap between the elevator doors despite Chastity's irate stabs at the door close button.

"Chas, I know you don't like me and I deserve that, but please listen. McMurtey didn't give you the whole picture."

"Really? He was pretty damned clear to me. Jump into the middle of two-dozen prisoners who haven't seen a cock socket in years, shake my titties, and hope that you and your team stop them before I'm orgied to death—and, oh by the way there are dinosaurs!"

"The team won't—I won't—let anything happen to you. Yes, we need your help to corral any of the targets that may have wandered out, but that's not the only reason. We need you to help evaluate the threat posed by any packs hunting in the search zone."

"You need a paleontologist. Other than what I read in two or three paragraphs in a comparative anatomy textbook, I don't know anything about dinosaurs."

"Paleontologists wouldn't be any help. They dig up fossils and study them in a lab. That's not what we need. You have the practical field experience that we need."

Chastity kept her arms folded tight across her chest and lips tight.

"I know your history, Chas. You had a life before the infection. Brinkley was proud and liked to talk about the things you did. You found and tracked a herd of Bigfoot through the mountains in the northwest for thirty-seven days. You were hunted in the Yucatan jungles by a pack of chupacabras and you survived."
"It's a syndicate of sasquatch and an orgy of chupacabras—orgy because they only gather in groups during mating season."

"Noted for future reference," Tom said, the corners of his lips curling into a grin.

Chastity grinned back.

"We need you, Chas," the honesty was clear in Tom's voice. "You'll be safe. What can I do to make it happen?"

"A one year supply of the inhibitor."

"Done," Tom said. "What else?"

"How's the budget?" Chastity asked.

"We've come up with three dozen million dollar patents since you came in the building."

Chastity grinned. "The supply and a hundred thousand and I'm in."

Tom pushed the down button on the elevator and said, "Done."

***

"Summers on board?" McMurtey asked as he flipped another page in a file folder marked with MS-13 in bold lettering on the front.

"She's leery, but agreed," Tom said. "She's getting suited up. We'll be with the second team and should be ready to depart in the hour."

"Sir, do you think we should have told her the full reason we needed her."

"I told her she was going to be bait. That's an accurate explanation." McMurtey looked up from the file. "If her extracurricular activities have shown anything, it's that she's got a thirst for revenge. She has trouble controlling the bitterness of what happened to her." McMurtey opened the file to a photograph of a thin-faced man with black-rimmed glasses and slid it across the desk to Tom. "What do you think she'd do to Prisoner MS-13 if she knew what he was guilty of?"

***

Chastity stood on the third floor of the Chamfield Penitentiary, awestruck and alarmed by what was in front of her. The event horizon of the misplaced wormhole swallowed most of the room, stretching out far beyond the walls, ceiling, and floor. It was enormous, and she wondered how something that size didn't punch out through the outer walls. It was like a mirrored mercury sphere with a scrim of kaleidoscope colors that couldn't possible exist anywhere else in the world. They wove up through the surface then back down again, like extradimensional whales breaking the surface of the ocean only to sink back into the hidden depths again.

"The reflections," Chastity nodded at the out-of-focus image of herself that swam on the surface beneath the haze of alien colors, "they're wrong. Watch."

Chastity arched her arm in an exaggerated wave then placed her hand on the curve of her hip. A second later the smoky reflection echoed the motion, smearing with some unseen turn of the sphere.

"How is that possible?" Chastity asked.

"Fifth dimensional physics," Tom said, lightheartedly. "It was on page 43 of the second flip chart."

"It's huge," Chastity said, contemplating the thin barrier that separated them from another time. "Based on the curvature, it must take up at least a fourth of the interior space of the building."

"Good eye. The AIs calculated it as 26.98%."

"Wait," Chastity turned to Tom, "a quarter of the building was swallowed and only twenty-three prisoners were lost? That doesn't seem likely."

Tom didn't turn from the event horizon. "Most of the prison population had been transferred about six months ago when this place was designated as a super-max facility for special populations."

"Okay, interest piqued. What kind of special populations?"

"Like murdery serial killer special populations?" Chastity asked. "If that's the case, I want to renegotiate my fee."

"I'll push for double if someone tries to eat your face," Tom said.

"They must be more than the run-of-the-mill bad guys since we're chasing them millions of pairs in the past."

"We should get it over with. The rest of the team should have established a perimeter by now," Tom said.

Excitement rose and boomed in Chastity's chest, pushing out any sense of trepidation. It had been a long time since she'd been able to go on an expedition. Okay, so it wasn't the typical research mission—she was going to be sweaty sex bait for almost two dozen prisoners guilty of cripes knows what, but there was a sense of freedom that had been yanked away from her nearly a year ago. And dinosaurs? A little pedestrian when compared to a wendigo or lizard men, but still exciting.

"Remember to tuck and roll when you break through."

Chastity walked about ten feet then turned to face the event horizon. "See you there, Tom," she said with a heartfelt grin. She broke into a run and sailed through the edge of reality to another world.

***

Chastity screamed more out of shock than pain. Actually, she didn't think she would be able to feel pain here. Everything was warm and melty and sparkly.

It did bother her a bit though that her body was twisting at impossible angles, through more dimensions than her brain told her should be possible. She wasn't exactly human shaped here. Her heart folded through the spleen and marrow turned to spaghetti that wormed through skin—or where skin should have been. The more she tried not to see, the more she did, it was like her perception was inflating to fill the extra dimensions to compensate. She was aware of every part of her body now that it was stripped from the restrictions of living in three dimensions. Cells slid through cells. DNA helixes unfurled and grew infinitely large. The sensation as a whole was pleasurable—warm and moist, a trickle of warm honey over each cell in her body.

Then Chastity's body and perceptions crashed back to the prison of three narrow planes of existence.

Then there was a fall.

Then there was a thump.

Lumpy bursts of sensation filtered into a brain trying to reacquaint itself with the limitations it was born into. Wet. Sticky. Coarse. Mud oozing into the corner of her lips. Humidity. Muggy air pressing hard into her lungs and against her skin.

Chastity pushed herself up, overpowering the sucking grip of the sludge she had landed in. until her face and torso peeled away from the swampy muck.

She spat half a dozen times, clearing little clods of filth with the first few, but not the taste—sour and rotten earth with more than a hint of decomposing vegetation and animal dung. She would need at least ten new toothbrushes and a gallon of toothpaste when she got home.

Chastity worked herself to her knees then up to an unsteady stand in the soggy mud, glad that she had opted for the practicality of hiking boots over the stilettos that were part of her usual uniform. She looked down, inspecting her body and making a mental checklist of everything she could see. Boobs—check. Abs—check. Arms, hands, legs—check. She reached behind and patted. Butt—check. She couldn't see any sign of her heart or pancreas sticking out, so she assumed the internals were okay.

She shielded her eyes from the sun hovering close to the horizon. It had been nighttime on the other side of the wormhole and without the normal landmarks of the city to orient herself, she didn't know if it was morning or evening.

She was in a small clearing comprised mostly of shallow marsh, mud, and swarms flying bugs that looked like they might someday breed themselves into dragonflies. Surrounding the swampy area was a dense, almost circular tree line. The sky was lukewarm with light and the trailing indigo shadows added a layer of unease to the motionless splay of branches and leaves.

But it was the things that she didn't see that worried her more.

There was no Tom. There was no base camp. There were no soldiers. And worst of all, there was no prison complete with a sparkly event horizon to jump in case of emergency.

Her pulse sped flood of adrenaline filled her veins. Wisps of cherry and butterscotch started to dance around her.

She was alone in a swamp, surrounded by tangles of trees and undergrowth that could hide anything beneath their leaves. She could walk into a maw of jagged teeth before she even realized it.

Chance the tree line or stay here and be an open target for anything.

The chomp at her heel made the decision for her. Something slithering sucking thing in the muck had latched onto her of her boot.

Something with teeth sharp enough to pierce the reinforced leather of her boot and scrape against the skin over her Achilles tendon.

In an uncoordinated, high-stepping scramble that might have been comical in other circumstances, Chastity jaunted out of the bog and to the more solid earth near the tree line. The slithery thing, pulled out of its muddy home, was still attached to the boot, lashing back and forth. It was as long and thick as Chastity's arm and had maggoty skin the color of rotting flesh.

Chastity stomped her free foot down on the tube of a monster with her free foot. There wasn't much give—the thing must have been a coil of pure muscle under the putrid layer of slime and skin. With the thing under heel, Chastity kicked away with the foot it was trying to eat into. It came free with a slurp.

Its mouth was as horrifying as the rest of it. Row after row of lamprey-like teeth gnashed at the air from a mouth that vomited itself out and drew back in.

Chastity pulled a handgun out of the holster on her hip and fired three rounds. The creature let out a hissing gurgle, evacuated a copious amount of slime and innards, then stopped moving.

After it was dead, Chastity felt a twinge of concern. She was millions of years in the past. Every plant and animal she knew was descended from some creature at this point in time. She might have just wiped kittens and puppies out of the world.

But one last hiss and squirm from the thing on the ground did away with that concern. Anything that came from this—the world would have to be better off without it.

***

It was definitely dusk. The sky had darkened to a hazy lavender. Strange stars were starting to peek through the twilight and it wouldn't be long before complete darkness swallowed everything under the canopy of trees.

Chastity had scouted out a tree with a hollow between the buttresses of its ancient roots. It wouldn't be comfy, but it was large enough for her to sleep in. She'd gathered a collection of palm fronds, leaves, and giant ferns to use for bedding and—more importantly—camouflage.

When the sun came up, she'd start the search for the base camp. Stumbling through the early Cretaceous night was an idea that would likely get her killed. Settling in and being as inconspicuous as possible until sunrise would give her the best chance at survival.

Chastity curled into the hollow and covered herself in a layer of leaves. She took a deep breath in. In a way, it was relaxing and reminded her of home. Even though she wasn't that far away, the smell of the air here was different than in the swamp. It smelled alive. She'd grown up in a backwater corner of the Appalachians that was too troublesome for corporations to try to buy out.

The stink of smog choked her for a week when she'd first moved to New San Francisco. Here she had the smell of living earth, trees and grass and dirt, the sounds of birds singing and crickets chirping. Each one sparked a memory of the farm and the life she used to have. She hadn't realized how much she had missed it.

With her eyes closed, the nostalgia of it took over.

The soft trilling sounds outside of but so close to her hidden nook became the song of frogs playing in the spring rains. The deep chirping became birds fighting for seeds on the back porch. Then the smell of grass and dirt gave way to the smell of meat, like the first deer she had hunted and skinned when she was young.

It was the smell that brought her out of her reverie. It was the coppery smell of fresh meat carried on warm breath.

It had the reek of predators after a fresh kill.

And whatever it was, it was big. She could hear that in the snap of branches and the rustle of leaves. It was at least as big as she was... probably larger.

Chastity held her breath, afraid that even the rolling tide of air that came with each inhale and exhale would broadcast her presence.

But she was too late. The thing had started circling the tree. Every few seconds a warble slid through the air. It was a bulky sound, birdlike but somehow wrong. The timbre of it made Chastity think of a canary on steroids.

It wasn't long before she could hear the answering calls of other canaries in the distance.

Shit, it's a pack, she thought. One canary, she might stand half a chance. More of them, no chance at all.

There was another crack of splintering wood. Closer this time, just feet away.

There was no more time. It knew she was here. It must have caught her scent.

Dammit. Millions of years before man shows up on the face of the planet and this damned smell is still getting me in trouble.

Chastity grabbed her handgun, wishing she had opted for something larger and swung toward the last place she remembered the sound and fired. She rolled in the opposite direction, clearing the hollow and twisted roots. As she did, she heard something even crueler than the monster canary tweets.

A rush of growls and screeches came from every direction. Most were scared, some were angry.

A screaming thing jumped and landed on the arch of root that Chastity had been hiding under. It was colossal and scary and amazing at the same time. It was some species of raptor. Its skin was a mix of scales and downy feathers that trailed in a slim plume down from the crown of its head along its spine. The scary quota increased with it opened a bloody red maw lined with razor-sharp teeth and howled at her.

It didn't lunge at her though. It looked down at her from its perch, giving her what might have been an appraising look.

This is the one that she shot. She could see the proof of it in the heavy trickle of blood leaking down from its neck. Chastity aimed again and fired three more shots.

She didn't know how many bullets she had left. Not many. Was there a spare clip? She couldn't be sure right now.

Two of the bullets hit in the breast and abdomen.

They didn't immediately stop the dinosaur. It gave a pained screech then a lurching dive from the branch. Twin claws soared at her, but they fell short.

The internal bleeding was slowly taking its toll.

But it wasn't enough for a quick kill.

And it was intent on killing her before she had the chance to finish it.

The raptor flexed a hind leg to raise a massive cutting claw, this time it was close enough to eviscerate Chastity.

Chastity couldn't say that her entire life flashed before her eyes. She only got to her kindergarten kiss with Clyde Hunley before the ratatatatat of gunfire interrupted. She opened her eyes and saw the raptor on the ground taking its last breaths.

A screamed voice cut through the gunfire. "Get up, girlie. There's a pack of these things determined to make us supper."

The voice was commanding, but warm with concern. Before she could make the first twitch needed to stand, two men in combat fatigues had her by her arms, pulling her up and steadying her until she got her bearing.

"Sergeant Thompson, ma'am. Pleased to make your acquaintance," the man in charge said as he stood in front of her. "Don't speak. Just take some steady breaths. You've just had some excitement and the air's richer in oxygen than what you're used to. Not to be rude, but we ain't got time for you to hyperventilate and get dizzy or pass out."

Chastity understood completely. She'd faced down her first dinosaur and nearly gotten to see how the turkey felt on the night before Thanksgiving.

"We've got to move now," Sergeant Thompson said as he looked at a display on his communication cuff. "We've got hostiles closing in. Sensors show four more in the immediate area... all heading our way."

"Wait," Chastity said. "Tom Frye—is he at the base? He was supposed to come through after me, but I came out in the wrong place somehow."

"He's not at base, ma'am. Right now we can't be sure that he made it though at all."

"What do you mean?"

"The wormhole is destabilizing... Weakening space around us. Tiny rifts are opening and closing for about a kilometer around the event horizon. He may have come through one of them—like you did. There may be openings underground, we don't know. He may not have made it through at all."

"Then we need to keep searching. We need to find him!"

"No can do, we've got to get back to base. We've got between thirty and forty-eight hours before it collapses. Home ain't much, but at least we aren't on the menu there."

"We have drones patrolling the sky," one of the other men added. The nametag on his right jacket pocket read Sanchez. "Plus ground bots patrolling the grounds. They're searching for the escapees. If Frye is here, they'll locate him."

"Have you found the prisoners?"

Sanchez paused before answering, "Some of them. Pieces of others."

***

The camp was smaller and less protected than Chastity had expected. An electrified fence topped with coiled razor wire formed a perimeter around four compact aluminum pre-fabs. Two security robots outfitted with what could have been Gatling guns patrolled the exterior perimeter.

"Why isn't the base closer to the prison," Chastity asked as the gate doors slid closed after them.

"Couple of reasons," Thompson said. "Way it was explained to me is that this end of the wormhole isn't all that stable—machinery and people pop out at random places, like the space all around it is weak. That's what happened to you. Lucky you didn't come out half inside the ground or in a tree. Couldn't chance it with my men, so we moved."

It sounded logical to Chastity. From what she twisted inside the wormhole, she felt lucky that she came out Chastity-shaped at all.

"What's the second reason?"

"Damned dinosaurs everywhere. There were nests of 'em or something. It wasn't worth the risk to my men."

Chastity got off of the ATV and took a closer look at the building on the immediate left of the gate. It was clearly a holding cell. Pairs of barred windows lined each of the four corrugated metal walls.

A quick count showed sixteen prisoners. With twenty-three total, that meant there were seven left to be captured.

Chastity corrected that number when she saw the two body bags laid out behind the cell.

"Most of those were the easy ones," Sergeant Thompson said, as he edged beside her. "They came running with a white flag made out of someone's underwear when we got here. Guess some got a first-hand glimpse at what happened to the two out back and decided we were the better option."

Chastity took an automatic step away.

"Sorry, ma'am. Didn't mean to cross into personal space. I can understand that you got to be careful around the men because of your... condition. Be assured, you're safe with my team. Part of the preparation was having an injection up the nose—felt like snorting a lit match. Olfactory nerve block, they said, so pheromones—not a problem. The plus side is, my men ain't had a proper bath in the better part of two days and I can't tell."

Chastity smiled. She hadn't wanted to mention anything, but the soldiers she had met so far—the sergeant included—had passed the benchmark for ripe and were quickly moving towards rank. It wouldn't take long in a place like this... humidity smacked you in the face, temperatures that seemed to hover just above comfortable day and night.

She looked over at the man and a felt a little ashamed. He hadn't been anything but kind to her. He hadn't touched. He hadn't groped. As far as she could tell, he hadn't even tried to sneak a peek at her cleavage.

She stepped back to the spot beside him and, for the first time since they had met, looked at him with something other than the general misandry that had become a part of her life the past year. He was taller than her, just shy of six feet. His sandy hair was a similar buzz cut to McMurtey's, but he wore it better. It balanced the curve of his forehead and suited the flat-bridged nose that looked as if it had been broken and reset without the involvement of a physician. The thin pale line of a scar traced the curve of the cheekbone, then down through his mustache and ending at the cleft of the chin.
It was the face of someone who had seen more violence than she cared to imagine.

"I'm the one who should apologize, sergeant. It's been a long time since I've had a regular conversation with a man—with anyone, really. The past year has put most of my dealings with men into one of two categories: seducing and killing them, or avoiding them altogether because they barely get past 'hello' and a deep inhale before their dicks take over. Some of them even skip the hello part."

It was Sergeant Thompson's turn to smile.

"Hard to imagine you killing someone," he said, his eyes meeting hers. They were nice eyes—kind eyes.

"Four times in the past year... but they were murderers and they deserved it. I don't just go play shoot 'em up for the hell of it."

"No doubt, ma'am."

"You know, you can use my name. We're going to be working together for thirty to forty-eightish hours... plus the 'ma'am' thing—I really haven't had a good experience with it lately."

"I can do that, Summers."

Chastity nodded in acceptance.

Sergeant Thompson sighed, "I suppose we should get you in your bunk for the night. We've got five people to find in the morning."

"Six people," Chastity corrected him. "Tom is out there somewhere."

***

Chastity was up with the morning sun.

She pulled her bodysuit's zipper down and mumbled as it peeled away from shoulders, back, and then legs. It felt like she had molted a second skin. She dropped it in a small bundle at the foot of her cot.

She had slept in it and her skin felt sticky. Being confined in tight quarters with men she didn't know had her on edge, nasal nerve blocks or not. Looking around the room, she saw something familiar that she didn't bring. It was a plastic storage bin with a pink lid, like the ones she kept at Brinkley's.

But this one wasn't just like them, it was one. She walked over and popped the top off. There was a soft musty smell that drifted out.

Chastity recognized the contents immediately. They were her clothes, at least part of the ones that had been confiscated in Brinkley's house.

She slipped on a pair of cutoff blue jean shorts that rode low on the hip and high on the thigh. It was her favorite pair and she was glad to have the chance to pull them on again. She paired it with a plain jersey tank top that was snugger around her breasts than she remembered.

She walked outside and looked at the golden curve of the rising sun. It was just beginning to show over the peaks of the mountain range far to the east. The brush of its warm rays felt good against Chastity's bare skin. It felt like freedom. For a year, she had hidden herself away, only going out after padlocking her body in layers of antiperspirants and itchy bodysuits that absorbed the mancandy that streamed from her sweat glands. At least here, she had a chance to enjoy

"Looking good, Summers," Sanchez said from his spot leaning against the corner of the closest building. "Sarge is reviewing the overnight data from the drones. He wanted me to bring you this. Said you'd know what to do." He held up a small plastic box. It had the three intertwined circles of the Tauron Pharmaceuticals logo stamped on the cover. It was identical to the box she kept in the drawer beneath the bathroom sink, except this one was bright red instead of black.

"Wonderful," Chastity said dryly.

"What is it?" Sanchez asked.

"You know how they make a medicine that helps block the pheromones that we make?"

"Sure."

"This one does the opposite. For some reason, some schizo pharmacist thought it was a good idea to make an accelerator to ramp up production. An hour or so after I inject this, every man for a mile downwind is going to feel the effect."

"Effect? What's that mean?"

Chastity smiled. "Imagine a sex addict that's gone without for a month."

"Wow. Gotcha."

"Not yet you don't. Take that month and add five years to it. Then you've got it."

"Damn," Sanchez said. "I guess we better reinforce the door on the holding pen. They aren't the biggest bunch I've seen, but get them working as a team and they might pop enough rivets to get out."

"Hey, now that you mention it, I noticed that when I got here. I thought these were super-max prisoners. The ones I saw in the holding cell looked... well, kinda geeky. I expected muscles, gang tattoos, and shank scars. These guys look like they'd be more at home in an office than a prison yard."

"Don't know, Summers. Only report that we got was that they were high-security prisoners and we needed to retrieve as many as possible alive. Has to be something special about them. I figured you might know."

"Clueless. I just know that I'm getting paid enough to be comfy for a long time."

"Got something else for you," Sanchez tossed a canvas sack at Chastity's feet.

"I appreciate the outfit you got on." He eyeballed the meager amount of clothing, eyes lingering a little too long where sweat made fabric cling to curve. "But Sarge would murder me if you got ate or something by one of the things out there."

Chastity looked at the tree line. It hid things that fascinated and scared her at the same time.

"Body armor. It's self-fitting," Sanchez said, nodding at the sack. "Lightweight and strong. Yours was made with extra ventilation."

Sanchez gave a crooked smile that made Chastity worry what extra ventilation really meant.

***

The aluminum door banged against the metal wall as Chastity exploded into the command center.

Sergeant Thompson's eyes shot up from the topographic map on the folding field table and focused on the surprise visitor.

In less than a second a mélange of expressions skimmed across his face. Tense eyebrows arched into surprise. Surprise slipped into recognition. Recognition slipped into a smile that might have been somewhere between absurd and salacious.

Then blood welled beneath the tanned skin of his cheeks making the blond stubble seem even lighter. Embarrassment was obviously something he was not able to hide.

"This better be some kind of damned joke," Chastity said as she flicked her fingers at her body armor she was wearing

The body armor that Sanchez had given her could only be described as the love child of chain mail and a hooker's cast off fishnet bodysuit. The plate armor was sparse, consisting only of a breastplate that made her sluttiest lingerie look like daily wear in the nunnery, and a triangle of metal over the groin small enough to make Chastity glad that she had bikini waxed before the mission. Everything else, from neck to ankle was covered in a thin metallic mesh of body-hugging filaments.

"It's not that bad," Sergeant Thompson said.

The fact that he had averted his eyes and fixated his attention on counting the rivets in the wall said otherwise.

"Fluff my hair and I'd look like a teenager's sci-fi jackoff material. How the hell is this 'body armor' going to help? I'm not wearing this."

"Apologies for the look. I wasn't in on it. The design team wanted to leave a lot of bare skin because of the way your condition works. And," he added a little uncomfortably, "they wanted it to be... sexy. You know, to help bait the prisoners in."

"Sexy? Try slutty."

Thompson smiled but still didn't look at her. "You'll be thankful for it when we're out there today."

There was a camouflage jacket, lightweight and four sizes too large for her, hanging on the back of an unused chair. Chastity snagged it and put it on. It was long enough to make everything modest.

Thompson must have picked up the added attire either through his peripheral vision or hearing the rustle of cloth because interest in the minutiae of everything that wasn't Chastity faded.

"Don't believe me?" Thompson asked, still smiling.

"It's metal bikini with chicken wire how's that going to—"

Chastity saw everything that happened next in slow motion. Thompson grabbed the table and flipped it almost to the other side of the room. As she started to flinch, he bounded through the now empty space and spun into a roundhouse kick. The rubberized tip of his boot connected with her left flank.

"What the hell!" Chastity shouted, pushing him back.

"Just breath. Give me a second to talk, then if you want to smack me you can smack me." Thompson was close to her, his eyes meeting hers, his hands resting on her shoulders. "Did you feel it?"

The shock of what had happened cleared enough for Chastity to process what he said. She hadn't felt it... well, a nudge maybe. That kick should have knocked her to the floor—maybe even ruptured her spleen, but it didn't.

"The mesh reacts to pressure. The non-sciencey explanation is that it will keep you from getting crushed or bruised up too bad. Rated to stand up to 2000 psi, but I've never had the chance to test it up to that."

"What about teeth? Some of the things out there bite," Chastity asked.

"The only real danger is if the power pack is damaged. The suit won't function without power. If a tooth hits one of the openings in the mesh it might break the skin, but shouldn't go deep enough to do any major damage. But we're not going to let that happen. Get in, get the prisoners, get out." He stuck out his index finger and made a pewh pewh sound. "If it comes down to it, we've got guns—big guns. Take 'em down before they get close enough to even smile."

"Sanchez said you were looking at drone data this morning. Any sign of Tom?"

Thompson righted the overturned table and straightened the map. "They picked up human life signs here and here." He pointed at two areas on opposite ends of the base camp." A group clustered at the ridge to the north, and one two clicks to the south in the thick of the forest."

"The single one—that has to be him. We need to get to him now."

"We'll get him, Summers, but the group is the priority. They're the reason we're here and they're in the most danger. They're close to a pack of what we think are some type of raptors."

"A rescue team can go for him while we go for the others."

"Can't do that. We don't have enough men for two teams. It's going to take all the resources that we've got to get the group."

"Then let's get our asses in gear and go." Chastity didn't like it. She would have to find something to do about it.

***

Chastity stood on the ridge, trapped in a body that wanted to run and fight and scream and smash things. The pulse of blood thundered in her temples and ears. Midmorning light poured through dilated pupils, making the world painful to look at. Lungs expanded so far that each breath hurt.

The booster circulating in her system had spiked and pushed her sympathetic nervous system into overdrive. Her skin was drenched with dripping sweat and smell of her body had taken over everything around her.

She looked down from her spot on the ridge. It wasn't her first choice to situate herself. There was no cover. The only escape options that she had were to scramble along the rocky ridge or to slide down the almost vertical drop of the cliff to the south. It wasn't like she had a choice in it, though. It was the only place that she could stay to ensure that the prisoners were downwind of her and Thompson's team was upwind. The last part had been her demand. Olfactory nerve block or not, Chastity knew what happened to even the nicest of guys when they smelled a succubus. In a place like this, it could get them all killed.

Chastity flinched as the drug recirculated through her adrenal glands, forcing a spasm and gush of adrenaline.

***

Thompson rotated the focus ring on his binoculars until Summers' image sharpened.

She was trembling, but standing firm. She was tough. He hadn't expected that.

He skimmed the ridgeline. Something about the size of an iguana scurried into sight. It looked cautiously in Summers' direction then disappeared out of sight behind the peak of the ridge.

Thompson refocused his binoculars on Summers. There was a silver flash of reflected light that slid up her leg as she moved. He was glad that common sense had won out and she decided to wear the body armor. She had kept it, but added the white tank top and cut off jeans.

He had to admit. It was sexier—definitely sexier.

He angled the binoculars higher and focused on the hard angles of the breastplate. They stood out under the snug shirt. He let his gaze linger on them.

Stop it, he reprimand himself. He couldn't let his attention wander. He didn't have the luxury of losing focus. The stakes were too high.

But the girl was beautiful. No doubt about it.

Wounded, too. He saw it in her eyes as soon as they met: the unease about being assigned to work with a squad manned with pure testosterone, the walls she had built up.

He was just an ex-jarhead, but he could read people, and she was nothing like what he had been briefed on.

Thompson had never seen McMurtey before the mission briefing and he hoped he would never have to see him again. McMurtey was the kind of career man that made him sick, more politician than anything else. With him it was about control and personal power. Thompson knew, he read the practiced voice and tailored suits like a book.

Antisocial. Unstable. Dangerous. Those were all words that McMurtey had used to describe Summers. Thompson only agreed with the dangerous description, but not for the reasons McMurtey laid out. The danger came from the changes the infection had caused and what they could do to any man with a functioning nose.

He had followed up on the briefing with a background check of his own. The first page of results showed the things that would show up on anyone. Bank accounts... Deeds... Credit history... Doctorate in Cryptozoological Studies conferred by the Trans-Allegheny Community College... He skimmed the rest until he reached the second page.

That's where the meat and potatoes were. It detailed the findings of the Judiciary on four acts of self-defense. Thompson had jotted down the names of the attackers and found that they had all been convicted of multiple rapes and attacks on women—and suspected of far worse. It didn't take a genius to figure out that Summers was taking a stab at being a vigilante. He found it a little commendable, taking a bad and using it to inflict some justice on those that deserved it.

"Sarge," Sanchez's voice came through Thompson's earbud. "We've got movement."

"Skin or scales?" Thompson asked. He turned his binoculars and scanned the crest of the ridge.

"Skin. Human. Eleven o'clock. Coming up the western slope."

"Not in my range yet. Count?"

"Eyes on three."

Three. Dammit. He was hoping for five. That left two still in the wind.

"Jones, report."

"Same count, Sarge. I've got three in my sights."

Thompson saw the three men rise over the crest of the ridge in a bow-legged sprint. The high definition adjust on the binoculars made it pretty clear why. Each of the three was sporting a tent in the fly of their white prison coveralls. The stain leaking down the left leg of the middle guy made it pretty clear he had already shot a load or three on the way up.

As a visual, it was funny. The cause of it wasn't. This was an exaggerated example of what Summers had to live with every day.

There was no time to wait for the other prisoners, this trio was getting close—too close for Thompson's comfort.

"All right men, target and prepare to fire."

Thompson dropped the binoculars and slid behind the scope of his rifle. He adjusted the angle and lined up the sight on the leaker in the middle. "Middle man is mine. Jones, take the blond. Sanchez, take the one with the crooked nose."

Thompson took three long, slow breaths. On the exhale of the third, he squeezed the trigger. The kickback against his shoulder was almost nil. Tranquilizer darts just didn't have the same recoil as the live rounds he was used to.

He continued to watch through the scope, keeping the leaky guy in the crosshairs. He could see the red tail tuft of the dart bouncing. It was a dead on hit to the chest. Thompson counted out five seconds and started to worry. Leaky should be face down taking a dirt nap.

But he wasn't.

The dart hadn't even slowed him down.

Thompson squeezed again, his aim a little wider this time. The dart struck in the paunch of the belly. Not the best spot because the fat would slow absorption.

There was a perceptible slowing in the run, but not a stop.

Thompson jumped to his feet and broke cover. He leapt over the skeleton of a decomposing log that he was using for camouflage and started running up the rocky ridge towards Chastity.

***

Chastity saw the three men scurrying up the ridge toward her. The pheromone booster was still sucker punching her adrenal glands, sending an overflow of adrenaline and pushing the fight-or-flight response into overdrive.

Three men became two as one faceplanted into the dirt. Number Two followed seconds after. He had been close enough for her to see the off-angle nose. Landing face down like he did wasn't going to add any to his looks.

Number Three, though... Number Three was a problem. His eyes were intense and fixated on her, and he wasn't stopping.

Chastity hadn't even thought about being worried about this. She had never seen it personally, but had read about it. Alex kept up on every rumor, news flash, and scientific study on the succubus syndrome. He had summarized this to her a week or two ago. Some men had a heightened reaction to the pheromones. At the time, she had joked about what 'super horny' might look like... this wasn't what she expected. He looked feral—or rabid, definitely rabid.

He was closing the distance between them. Chastity took a sidewise stance and shifted her weight to her right foot. He outstretched his arms, preparing to lunge.

Before he could, Chastity flexed her left leg, brought her knee high to her abdomen and drove her heel into his knee with a sidekick. She could feel the pop of his tendons tearing and kneecap dislocating.

Number Three fell, but he was too close. His fingers caught and curled around the waistband of her denim shorts.

He was too heavy. His added weight pulled her off balance and she fell in the dirt.

"Come here!" Number Three yelled as he fumbled with the buttons on the shorts. He ripped the zipper open and pulled the gap wide. He grabbed at the alloy plate that covered her sex.

Chastity felt the mesh weave that protected her go slack. He must have gotten lucky and dislodged the power core.

She was in more danger now than she expected, but she didn't care. Her muscles pulsed with inflated strength from the booster shot. She had been pushed past the edge of fight or flight and by damn she was going to it.

Chastity grabbed handfuls of the man's hair to hold his head in place then drove her knee up into his chin. There was a crack and the man spat out a mix of spittle, blood, and fragments of at least three teeth.

"You bitth, you gon'na pay for that," he said as he tried to climb back on top of her.

"I don't think so," Chastity said. She untangled her hands from his hair and gave him the middle finger. Under the black painted nail was a bloody scraping of skin and hair from his scalp. "Fuck those weak ass tranquilizer darts, you just got dosed with something that carries a hell of a kick."

Chastity could feel the tremor starting in Number Three's muscles. His hyped up metabolism was spreading the neurotoxins from the scratches at record speed. The depth of his breathing was decreasing.

Thanks to the nonfunctioning slut-suit body armor, Chastity felt it when his full weight slumped down on her.
Sergeant Thompson's head appeared against the cloudless blue sky. The color of his face bordered on crimson and nostrils were flaring with something more than exertion.

"Get off of her, you bastard," he blared as he grabbed Number Three by the neck. His biceps tightened and bulged as he heaved the now-limp prisoner to the ground beside Chastity.

Thompson dropped down, straddling Number Three's chest and started pummeling his face with calloused fists.

"It's okay." Chastity surged to Thompson's side. "He's down. He's not getting back up." She touched his shoulder and brought his attention to her.

The beating stopped. Thompson held his arm back, coiled to throw another punch. He looked at Chastity, gusts of air surging in and out of his open mouth.

Chastity could see the slow burn behind the blue of his eyes. The heat of it was something she knew all too well. It was fueled by primal needs—fight or fuck, and the urge to fight in Thompson was fading.

With a speed that was at odds with his size, Thompson had his arms around Chastity. His eyes took in the soft features of her face. He brushed his thumb along her cheek. The gentle touch from calloused fingers sent an electric shiver down Chastity's spine.

Chastity leaned into him, her soft curves pressing into his hard edges. She gave him a soft kiss on the corner of his mouth. His skin was salty and earthy.

Thompson tilted his head a little to the left and met her lips with his. He parted his lips and kissed back. His lips were dry and chapped, but Chastity didn't care. She didn't want anything but the touch of those lips against hers right now.

She broke the kiss with a light nibble to his lower lip.

"You taste like cherries," Thompson said.

Shit, Chastity thought, realizing what was happening. She moved back enough to put a gap between them.

She looked at the prisoner on the ground beside them. "He's going to need CPR or a ventilator," she said. She didn't want to scoot away from Thompson, but she did, just by inches.

Thompson leaned closer and pressed his lips against Chastity's—harder this time.

"You've got to get away from me," Chastity said, breaking her lips away. "The pheromones... too strong in the sweat... they're getting into your system through..."

Thompson pulled back. He seemed to understand that something was wrong.

"Sergeant Thompson, I need you to trust me. I'm an expert at this. I know what this messed up body of mine can do," Chastity said, keeping her voice level. "I'm going to move back. Just take some breaths. Deep and regular—that's right, just keep that up. Just keep breathing"

Chastity moved downwind of Sergeant Thompson and waited. Sanchez and Jones were racing toward them.

***

Chastity watched the rhythmic rise and fall of Number Three's chest. The team didn't have a medic, but it did have a set of treatment pods in the rectangular metal shed that passed for the camp's medical bay. Its automated system administered an antivenin and was maintaining him on life support until his diaphragm recovered enough to take over the push and pull of air.

Something wasn't right.

Something wasn't right about this mission

Something definitely wasn't right about these prisoners.

Even with the deep plum bruises and lumpy swelling that spoiled the symmetry of his cheeks and brow, his face and body weren't that of a hardened criminal. He had the look of an accountant who lived an easy life and the pectorals of someone who would be lucky to manage a half of a pushup.

He was white collar all the way, the kind you would see corralled in a country club with a curfew and high fence.

Why would someone like him be in a super-max facility? Why would any of them? In a fair fight—hell, probably even an unfair one—Chastity was sure she could take this one and any of the ones she'd seen in the holding pen.

And near the top of the "not right" list was: how did he know how to deactivate the body armor?

Something definitely wasn't right.

Chastity walked to the first pod. It was occupied by one of one of Thompson's team. She tapped a panel at the seam of the transparent lid. His name—Daniels—lit up on the transparent lid. His vital signs slid in a neat row beneath. She hadn't met him. He was one of the first ambushed by the raptors before she had made it through the wormhole.

Chastity tapped another button on the panel and the lights inside the pod brightened, giving Chastity a clear view of the damage. His chest was torn, a yawning gash running from the left collarbone down to the pelvis. There was very little blood. Colonies of nanites formed a mercurial froth that rippled in the wound bed. There was more vigorous activity along the ribcage, where they were fusing into rigid scaffolds to replace the segments of seven ribs that had been shattered.

"Pod, do you have an audio interface?" Chastity asked. She expected it did. Automated equipment this advanced usually had an AI core to control its functions.

"This unit has an active audio interface." The voice came from a speaker at the top of the pod. It didn't have the depth that Alex did. She expected that personality subroutines weren't standard issue in the off-the-line units.

"Is he going to live?" Chastity asked. Aside from the obvious torso wound, Daniels was pale—very pale—and the vital signs running across the display seemed lower than should be.

"There is a 0.86 probability that he will survive the next forty-eight hours. The probability will increase to 0.98 if he is transferred to a tertiary care center with a trauma unit."

"What about the person in the second pod?"

"Information on that patient is classified."

"Is he going to live?" Chastity asked, hoping that she could find a loophole in the AI's programming that would lead to a clue.

"Information on that patient is classified."

"Do you keep an event log on the pods?"

"Event logs are created and maintained."

"Show me the events for Daniels."

A stream of text flowed across the display. Admission time... Initial assessment and probability of survival... Nanite repair... Nanite repair... Disposition of personal effects...

"Wait, stop there. List the personal effects."

"Combat fatigues, damaged. Blaster, intact, ninety-seven percent charge. Comm-cuff, intact. Photograph—"

"Where are they?"

A drawer at the base of the pod opened and bumped Chastity in the shin.

Chastity pulled out the comm-cuff. She swiped her index finger along the screen, icons moved under the glass in response, all fairly standard military applications. She found the one that she wanted and tapped. A map appeared with the search drone on the screen. A red crosshair marked her location. Green crosshairs close by marked the location of Thompson and the rest of his team. A lone blue dot stood out in the forest to the south.

Something about this mission wasn't right. She didn't know if she could trust the sergeant or his men.

But she did know who might have the answers, and all she had to do to find him was follow the little blue dot.

"Hold on, Tom, I'm coming."

***

The hardest part about sneaking out of the base camp was getting the all terrain vehicle past the robots patrolling the perimeter. It was easy to convince Sergeant Thompson that she needed to recuperate after the day they'd had. It helped that he was uneasy about how easily he had started to lose control. Olfactory nerve block or not, he was more than willing to let her hole up in a corner of the camp until the booster wore completely off and her smell dropped back to normal.

She didn't tell him that they already had. For what she had planned, he really shouldn't know that.

When the patrol robot with the Gatling gun roved past, Chastity popped the ATV into neutral and broke for the gate. It wasn't that far. When the team had gotten back, they put two of the prisoners in the pen with the rest and Number Three, who she learned Thompson had nicknamed 'Leaky', into the medical bay.

Once Chastity was outside the gate, she coasted down the incline just off of the main path and into to the cover of the tree line. The undergrowth was thick and she wasn't sure that she could push it much farther. She looked back at the camp. She didn't hear any boots stomping against the dirt. Nobody was screaming her name. No one had noticed.

Chastity turned the key and the engine rumbled to life.

The motor wasn't that loud.

Go steady and don't rev the gas too hard and she could probably make it.

She tapped the screen on her borrowed comm-cuff. The map lit up green against a black background. She tapped the compass icon in the right corner and the map rotated. The red crosshair that marked her position changed to an arrow that indicated the direction she was facing.

She grabbed the handlebars, put some pressure on the accelerator, and moved toward the blue dot.

***

The search for the blue dot took longer than Chastity had expected. Dense undergrowth and a menacing looking triangle that had appeared on the map had forced changes in the route. The fact that the triangle had mirrored her movements wasn't comforting.

Stalky triangles in a place like this couldn't be good. But at least there was only one.

Chastity had taken a blaster and rail gun out of the pod drawer too. She wasn't going out without more firepower than she had come in with. Her handgun just wasn't going to cut it.

She was getting closer. On the comm-cuff map, her arrow symbol was almost on top of the blue dot. According to the topography, Tom would be about one hundred feet west of the jagged bend of the embankment that she was on.

The land had gotten too rugged, and the trees too congested to maneuver the ATV, so he hopped off and started the climb down the bank, careful to make sure each footstep landed on solid earth. She couldn't afford to tumble down and break a leg.

The suspicious triangle wasn't on the map, but who knew what else could be hiding in the underbrush.

Was there a minimum size creature that the drones could scan? She didn't know and she didn't want to find out.

When she was halfway down the bank, Chastity leapt and splashed down into the stream. The water was as clear as a cut diamond, its clarity only muddled with murky clouds where her shoes disturbed the sediment.

She walked along the streambed to avoid the underbrush. Thrashing through the leaves would probably be akin to ringing a dinner bell and having the town crier yell fresh meat.

Walking in the water would help mask her trail too. Some of the things here had good noses.

Chastity thought about the raptor that had attacked. That had barely twelve hours ago. With the daylight and drone data streaming to her borrowed comm-cuff, though, she felt a little more secure.

She remained still, listening to the forest around her. There was a soft rustling high above as wind stroked the leaves of the forest canopy. Thin deposits of shale clacked and slid down the embankment as some mouse-sized thing scampered up into the vegetation.

She didn't hear the froggy chirrups that she associated with the raptor that had attacked earlier, so she continued down the bend of the stream. The watery corridor was claustrophobic. Both banks of the stream were congested with sprouting leaves and mossy branches. Everything was a perfect hiding place—if predatory mouths were there, she would be blind to them until a millisecond before rows of pointy teeth crushed her skull and slurped out gooey scoops of brain matter.

In the middle of the bazillion shades of green, one other color pooled at her boots, pleading for attention.

An eddy of washed-out crimson circled between the smooth pebbles and the surface of the water. Chastity bent and swirled the water with her fingertips. The sanguine ribbon wilted away to nothingness.

Blood.

Flashes of possibilities flashed through Chastity's mind. Every mental image seemed disjointed, like something in her brain integral in processing the probabilities had slipped out of track. Raptor attack. Tom's chest slashed like Daniels in the medical pod. Big monsters tearing the throats out of little monsters.

Chastity broke into an upstream run, following the thin red strands that hung beneath the water's surface. "Hold on, Tom," Chastity screamed, "I'm coming!" She pulled the blaster from its holster and fired in a high arc. Tom wasn't tall, so Chastity was sure that she wouldn't hit him. Hitting something wasn't the goal anyway—scaring it away was.

Chastity heard a shriek that definitely—or almost definitely—came from human vocal cords. She cut blind into the thicket to the right and bungled over a knot of scrawny arms and legs hunkered down on the ground. As she tumbled over, she saw the flash of a white jumpsuit and a balding head pressed to the ground with hands clasped tight around for protection.

Chastity's head hit the ground and her brain rattled in her skull. A circle of darkness raced in from the periphery of her vision as brain and body began to shut down.

***

The world flickered in rapid succession between bright and dark as if an overused and nearly dead florescent light had replaced the sun. Chastity had trouble keeping her eyes open at first. Everything was doubled; her eyes didn't want to function as a united pair. The flashing light and one eye looking up while the other looked down led to a lurch in her stomach. The ready-to-eat meal that she'd had after getting back from the morning's prisoner roundup spewed out. Yellow-white goo from what the ingredient list purported to be eggs trickled down her cheek.

A set of grey eyes, inflated by thick black-rimmed lenses, looked down at her with a mix of curiosity and disgust.

"Oh oh oh, keep your eyes shut please, and roll onto your left side—you almost got that on me and I don't have a change of clothes."

Chastity did just the opposite at the sound of the strange man's voice. A second wave of imitation egg chunks flowed.

"You're just no good with instructions. I can't work like this. I just can't do this if you can't follow instructions."

There was an annoyed click of the tongue and a rustle in the composting forest floor as the man rose and walked away from her.

Annoyed. That was something that didn't fit with what her life had become. For the past year the only thing that annoyed men was her general unwillingness to play hide the giblet with them. Vomit, bad hair days, the phase of her menstrual cycle—those were never turnoffs. The succubus syndrome trumped them all, and this guy was annoyed with her for splashing a little vomit, when any other would be trying to find a way to use it for lube?

"Sorry," Chastity said, putting a figurative thumbtack in the mini-mystery, "and wait! I came to rescue you... Well, you weren't the person I was hoping to find, but you prisoners are the reason I'm here."

The sounds of walking paused then came closer.

"Explain," the voice was more distant than before, he had most likely judged the range of any projectile body fluids and was standing just out of range.

"The team has patrol drones searching for life signs. They picked up a group and you. I thought that you were someone else—"

"No, not that part. You said prisoners are the reason you are here. Explain that."

Chastity chanced opening one eye. The man's face came into focus. He looked to be anywhere in his fifties or early sixties. His unkempt red hair was thinning above the temples and had passed the halfway mark to turning grey. His eyes were magnified to an uncomfortably large size by the thick lenses of his glasses.

"My name is Chastity. I've got this thing with my pheromones. McMurtey—the head of the Agency—wanted me to come as bait, to make it easier to recapture you all."

"Bring the bears to the honeypot," he said. "Interesting tactic, but surely they knew that sending someone infected with the VN1R1 retrovirus wouldn't work on all of us... But, given the time constraints imposed by the disintegrating wormhole, I suppose it was a do what you must situation."

VN1R1 retrovirus. Disintegrating wormhole. This guy seemed to know a lot.

"You can tell that I'm infected? Why aren't the pheromones affecting you? Olfactory nerve block? Gay?" Chastity's mind was overclocking, trying to fit this new piece of knowledge into what she understood of her situation.

"Hmm, with the exception of one fumbled teenage experiment in the locker room, I would not consider myself gay, and I why in the world would I subject myself to an olfactory nerve block?"

"Why aren't you affected then?"

"It's a simple enough answer, girl. I created the retrovirus. Why would I make myself susceptible to it?"

***

The words were perfectly clear to Chastity's ears, but cloudy and confusing in her mind as she tried to process them.

"You? You're responsible for the fucking succubus syndrome? YOU FUCKING DID THIS TO ME?" Chastity felt the bile churn in her stomach again, but the source of it was based in resentment and anger over what her life had become after the infection.

"Please don't call it that," he sneered. "I planned on writing a letter of protest to the uninspired news station that contrived that catchphrase. It sounds vulgar, don't you think?" He looked at Chastity, as if expecting confirmation. "And, it creates a type of demonic association. Completely false, it is. I created the virus with transphylogenetic reverse transcriptase encoders, not some satanic succubus drivel."

Chastity looked firm into those cold oversized eyes. There was no suggestion of shame in them over what he had done. Would even occur to him to feel remorse for what he had done?

Before Chastity's rational mind could register it, she lunged and punched him. Her knuckles smashed into his face. He had turned her life into a man-hating shitfest, and he deserved every punch he got.

He fell and landed on his back. Chastity dove on top of him, straddled his chest and pinned his arms to the ground with her knees.

She punched again, hard into his nose. The cartilage buckled under the impact of her knuckles, but she wasn't sure if it broke so she punched again.

"Dear lord, what is wrong with you?" he shrieked at her.

"What's wrong with me? You're damned retrovirus is what's wrong with me! It's twisted my insides into something I hate. I'm one skin-suit from being a shut-in or shipped away. I barely leave the house and when I do I have to inject myself with an inhibitor that makes men only want to dry hump me instead of rape me." She hit him again, this time with a smack instead of a punch. "You ruined my life. Don't you care?"

The answer came so quick it had to be true. "It never occurred to me to consider your thoughts in the matter."

Chastity pulled back to swing another punch, but let her arm fall limp. It finally made sense. He was a damned mad scientist. That was the special population of the prison. Every one of them was a damned mad scientist.

She had agreed to risk her life to save the man who had made her what she was.

"If you will just stop for a second," he said. "I'm sure that we can come to some sort of arrangement in which you stop hitting me and help me. In return I can help you."

"Help you?" Chastity said, almost spitting in his face. "I'm still not sure that I'm not going to kill you before the team figures out that I've found you."

"Killing me would preclude my helping you. You really should consider—"

"We're one-hundred and twenty-something million years in the past. You're unarmed. You're a fucking psychopath, by the way. What the hell do you think you can do to help me?"
"Your simplicity is amazing, young lady."

"Not helping sell your case, asshat."

He clicked his tongue. "Have you not considered that the person who created the retrovirus may be able to change the retrovirus?"

"You're saying there's a cure?"

"Well," he considered, "a functional cure, that is. The modifications to your DNA can't be undone—especially not with the resources available 'one-hundred and twenty-something million years in the past'—but they can be modified."

"You wouldn't be able to do anything to help me. Once you're pulled back to the side of the wormhole, you're back in the slammer."

"Who said it had to wait until we return," he said with a smile. My rooms are here, with us right now in the past."

Chastity didn't connect the dots.

"My girl, this isn't just a prison, it's a forced labor camp. My behind-bars compatriots and I aren't just being held—we're continuing our research. The only difference is that now it's for the government instead of ourselves."

***

Chastity walked behind Doctor Georgie Ashford, his name as she had learned when they agreed on terms.

It was a simple enough deal: she would get him back to the part of the prison that had been shifted through the wormhole and he would functionally cure her. She was a little iffy on the specifics of the functional cure, but if she could walk down the street without getting splattered with semen she didn't really care. Ashford had started to explain in earnest about the specifics of the procedure, but Chastity stopped him. She had asked him what the results would be and if there were any side effects. The answer was: no men chasing her and maybe some scaling at the injection site. Both were acceptable.

"This is quite fortuitous, us meeting like this," Ashford said, not turning to look at Chastity. "It's been... oh, nine months, since I've had the opportunity to follow up with a subject."

Chastity kept the blaster ready in her left hand; she wanted the right free in case the urge to punch him resurfaced. The urge was getting close.

"Nine months, is that when they caught you?"

"Yes. I got a little overzealous with incorporating genome fragments from a novel strain of Ravn virus into the salivary glands of Labradoodles. One subject escaped and that was that. Caught because of a puppy that licked the wrong person."

"You were creating puppies that spread hemorrhagic fever? How is that right? How do you sleep at night?"

"Science needs no excuses."

Chastity understood why these people needed locked away from society. If it were her decision, she would leave them all and let the dinosaurs take care of them.

"But plague puppies are passé now that I have you," he said, redirecting the topic. "I have access to DNA that hasn't been seen for millions of years. Think of the things I can do with that" He patted the canvas bag that hung at his hip. Something shifted slightly inside in response.

"Is that what you've been doing? Foraging?"

"Of course, dear. One must always be open to possibilities, no matter how dangerous. Flora, fauna... it's all material to be used in some way or another."

"But lets talk about you. We don't get access to prior test subjects in Chamfield. A shame, really—think of the refinements that could be made! What is the range of effect for the pheromones? Oh oh, were there any physical changes that developed? Teeth possibly? There were reports of mutations developing post-infection." He turned and reached to pull at the waistband of Chastity's shorts. "I need to examine the vulva and vaginal canal."

"Hands off, Frankenstein," she said as she whacked his fingers with the barrel of the blaster.

He jerked his hand back and shook the sting from his fingers.

"Try that again and I'll blast them off—your friends will call you stubby and you'll never be able to find matching gloves again."

Ashford turned, disappointed, and started walking again.

"And no," she added, "there are no teeth down there."

"Oh well, it was only an anticipated the probability of that mutation in one half of one percent of the subjects."

Chastity stomped to a stop. "Stop using that word! I am not a subject. The thousands of women infected aren't subjects. We didn't sign up for any experiment—you decided to make us one! We were victims of an arrogant-assed mad scientist who gets his rocks off by screwing with innocent people... Do you even care about the what you did to us?"

"I told you before, it never occurred to me to care. Maybe if I had a proclivity for sociology or psychology instead of transphylogenetics I may have—"

"I got it, you don't care. You're only interested in the science."

"Succinctly said, and essentially correct. Ah, I think we're here." His pace picked up as they passed into an area where the trees were sparse.

The section of the prison that had slipped through the opening of the wormhole was there. It looked like it had been sliced, scooped out, and dropped. Walls and floors were cut clean through. Except for the bottom floors, which crumbled under the weight of the upper ones, the silhouette was spherical.

Ashford started a slow run in the open toward the building.

Chastity grabbed the collar of his coveralls and pulled him to the cover of a thick-based tree.

"Shh," she said. "There's something here." She stared at the comm-cuff display.

The triangle that had followed her had returned. It had four triangle friends with it.

She didn't need to peep around the edge of the tree to know what was there. Leathery, deep-throated vocalizations flurried through the air. They were similar to the sounds the raptors had made when Sergeant Thompson and his squad saved her but not the same. The pitch was lower, transforming the rolling warbles into a chorus of fervent croaks. The melody of each intonation resonated in the primordial regions of Chastity's brain. It was a dirge heavy with anger and loss.

Her giant canaries were back, and they were pissed.

Ashford curled into a split in a tree's massive trunk. He pulled his bag tight to his chest. Something beneath the layer of canvas was fighting enthusiastically, trying to get free.

With that, Chastity understood. The bastard had said flora and fauna earlier. He had taken one of the pack's hatchlings.

Chastity closed her eyes and focused on the wind. Determining the wind direction and how to stay downwind of people was something that had become common practice for her since the infection. She felt it's delicate touch against her right cheek and the tickle of loose strands of hair against her neck. That meant that, at least for now, the wind was carrying most of her and Ashford's scents away from the dinosaurs.

But that wouldn't last. The crunch of leaf mold told that the pack was moving closer.

And when they were close enough, the direction of the wind wouldn't mean diddlysquat. She didn't have an in-depth knowledgebase about dinosaur anatomy, but she did remember that the that they had big noses.

"You know what they want, don't you, Frankenstein" Chastity whispered, barely moving any air out of her lungs.

Ashford apparently heard because he gave a quivering shake of his head. Chastity believed that the tremor was the closest that she had seen the man come to emoting during their venture. He might not have the capacity for empathy toward other humans, but he was sure capable of experiencing the fear of being eaten alive. If he hadn't promised to fix her pheromone problem, she probably would have served him up on fine china.

"We have to distract them so we can make a break for the building," he whispered.

There was another crackle of fallen leaves was closer.

"Give it to me." Chastity reached for the bundle that Ashford was holding tight.

"No," the treble of his voice took it past the whisper range. "I need this for my experiments. No one has ever had access to viable dinosaur DNA. The things I can do with it are be—"

"You aren't going to do a damned thing with it if its mommy and daddy get their teeth into you"

He was unrelenting.

"Keep the sack. Its lining is soaked with blood. It's better than nothing."

"But the things that I could do with the other tissues after a proper necropsy—"

"Not up for debate—settle for the bloody sack or get eaten."

"I suppose I could clone it once I'm back in my laboratory... an acceptable trade off, I suppose."

Chastity took the tiny raptor out of the sack. It wasn't as scary as it's full-grown brothers and sisters—it was almost cute with its oversized eyes and perky snout."

Ashford had tied its mouth shut with string. She slid it off, careful to hold its mouth shut with her hand. With a guilt-ridden throw, she chucked the tiny body as far as she could away from the building and curled tight beside Ashford.

The tiny body thumped to the ground and rolled. It gave out anguished cries, wanting mommy and daddy. The pack sprinted to it.

Chastity and Ashford made a dash for the building.

Her calves and thighs moved in a solid sprint. She believed she had enough to make it to the building, but she doubted that she could keep up a prolonged run if they couldn't get in.

The loud panting behind her told her that Ashford wasn't faring as well. She glanced over her shoulder without breaking her stride. She had covered twice the distance he had. He wasn't used to exertion beyond shuffling test tubes.

Farther behind, she could see one of the raptors had stopped nuzzling the hatchling with its snout and turned its head toward them. Ferocious, emerald green eyes met her gaze. Time slowed to a crawl as the let out a bitter roar. Bone-cracking teeth stretched wide around a deep red and purple gullet. It was large enough to take off an entire limb in one bite.

It snaked its body with a scary efficiency from a kneeling position into a gallop.

If it reached them, it would be over... or at least it would for Ashford. His scent had to be all over the hatchling and its blood and scent were all over him. He was the closest target too.

She could let it happen. Ashford was a monster. No one deserved to be eviscerated and eaten more.

But if she let him get a well-deserved disemboweling, he couldn't help her.

Chastity used her momentum to roll and turn. It was ungraceful tumble that left her with a few scrapes on her, but it left her in a good position. She extended her arms and took the grip of the blaster in both hands. There was a look on Ashford's face of near panic as she pointed the muzzle toward him.

"Drop to the ground! Now!" she yelled and simultaneously squeezed the trigger. A pulse of blue energy blazed out. It cleared Ashford's head, but only barely. Chastity expected that if she checked it later, she would see the frizzled remains of a good swath of orange hair.

Her aim was only slightly off. The bolt of light cracked into the dinosaur's brow. Its head flung back, recoiling from the impact, and it's tank of a body crashed to the ground. It wasn't the kill shot that she had intended. It was more of a graze than direct hit, but it had incapacitated the thing.

The raptor was thrashing in agony, throwing clods of earth and leaves into the air around it. It was the distraction Chastity needed to get them to safety.

She shambled to Ashford and helped him to his feet. Together, they made it to the base of the building. An exposed stairwell made entrance easy. The building had landed at a slight angle, which made the climb to the first landing unsteady but not impossible. Ashford took the lead and they climbed two more floors until they came to a metal door painted pea soup green. He stopped and pulled on the doorknob. Locked.

"How much power is left in the blaster," he asked.

Chastity looked at the power indicator; it was still in the green zone. "Eighty-nine percent."

Ashford waggled his index finger in the air as if writing down calculations. "Good. Good. All right, my girl, if you'll just..." He indicated with his hand to fire at the lock.

Another blue blast illuminated the stairwell like a lightning.

"My lab is this way," he said, sounding like a spider inviting a fly to midday tea.

He took her by the wrist and led her through the door.

***

Ashford's lab was less mad sciencey than Chastity expected. There were no brains in glass jars; no greasy beakers with chemicals misting over the brim; no wall-eyed, genuflecting Igor spouting out a "yeth, marthter" after every command.

"How is there power here?" Chastity asked. She rubbed a finger across a console with dozens of flickering lights and a screen full of oscillating monochromatic waveforms.

"Each laboratory has a dedicated power node." He gestured in the direction of a yellow box on the wall with a stylized black lightning decal on the cover. "Some of our experiments require considerable amounts of energy. I expect that if the power consumption at Chamfield tripled in the short time that we've been housed there would garner some attention from the bean counters in accounting."

The overhead light flickered and dimmed for a second then returned. "Is the power going to hold out long enough for you to do what you promised?"

"Hmm... Most likely." He shuffled through a test tube rack, examining the colors of the contents, shifting some to his free hand and dropping others to the tabletop. "I have a new sample to sequence. It should only take fifteen minutes to identify the regions of the genome that control pheromone production."

"You're sure this will fix my condition?"

"You keep using the wrong words. You'll never be 'fixed', as you crudely put it. I'll simply be splicing a new sequence into your DNA that will alter the structure of the pheromones that are produced. They shouldn't be able to attach to the nasal receptor sites in men after today." His eyes flashed in what Chastity could only consider inspiration. "I must say, my girl, that you've been quite the muse. I seldom had any interest in revisiting past experiments, but you've opened a world of possibilities."

"Do any of those possibilities include helping the other women affected by this?"

"Hmm, not likely," he said, dipping a pipette into a series of test tubes.

At least he was honest—or better said, too unconcerned with her feelings to be dishonest.

Chastity pulled up the map on the comm-cuff display. She doubted that the raptors would give up. If she could find their locations, maybe she and Ashford would have a chance.

The map was greyed out and a spinning circle hovered in the middle of the screen over a message that read no signal. Updated data wasn't being loaded.

"You won't be able to use that in here. The walls, floor, ceiling—" he flicked his hand at each "—all shielded."

Shielded.

"So someone could be here and the drones' sensors wouldn't pick them up?"

"Your mastery of the language amazes me," Ashford said, listening but clearly not enthused about it. He slid the tip of the pipette into the gene sequencer's reservoir and injected the contents. "I don't have a dedicated AI system, so I'll need to encode the RNA nucleotides myself. If you could be quiet please."

"Not a problem," Chastity said. "I need to do some recon... make sure there's no one else here—human or reptile—wandering around."

Ashford looked up from the sequencer and opened his mouth as if to say something—probably to correct her on something in the sentence—but shook it off and went back to work.

"I'll be back as soon as possible."

He didn't seem to notice. Hyperfocus on his work had set in.

***

Chastity didn't like leaving Ashford alone, but if Tom made it though alive he had to be here. Chastity had backtracked down the stairs to make sure that the door hadn't been pulled open. Nothing had pushed through, and there was no trace that the raptors had gotten into the building... at least not this way. The building's structure was a train wreck with entry points on every floor. It was a credit to the construction crew that it hadn't broken apart like a squashed cantaloupe when it landed.

Chastity moved through the ramshackle remains one floor at a time. The search wasn't as efficient as she had hoped. Doors were locked. Sections of floors had caved in. On one floor she had to scale the slashed edge of an exterior wall to get past a stairwell that only partially made it.

She stood there, watching the flurry of movement below. A group of dinosaurs were in a loose-knit group. They were raptors, just like the ones that she had encountered when she first arrived. She wished she had brought a field notebook so she could document her observations. Not that it would do much good in the long run; McMurtey would have it confiscated on her return. When he talked confidentiality agreements, she knew he meant it.

She became aware that they were also watching her.

There were three of them who stayed in the open, refusing to run to the shelter of the foliage. After observing the three constants for a while, she named them. The first became Buttercup, because of its yellow-splotched feathers. After some thought, the second became Muriel, because something in it's manner reminded her of her pilfering cousin who always stole chunks of Aunt Sadie's Christmas candy. The name for the third was obvious. Scar. He was a grey-green with a plume of bright red feathers trailing. It was the one she had blasted and his muzzle and the arch of his left eye was scorched black. It was obvious in the way he carried himself and the others gave him leeway that he was the pack alpha.

Chastity didn't know if revenge was a thing with dinosaurs, but she thought she could see the desire for it in his eyes.

She needed to find Tom and get out of here.

She moved inside the building again to continue the search.

When she got to the fifth floor, things got interesting.

Chastity followed the flickering florescent lights deeper into the building. She wanted to call out for him, but there was still a prisoner unaccounted for... possibly the kind of prisoner who might be worse than Ashford did.

If he were here, she'd find him.

She turned a corner and stumbled over a power cable that snaked down the corridor. She reached down and touched it.

It hummed with power.

Chastity followed it to a room that had been gutted and cleared down to the colorless cement walls. And even they weren't left entirely intact. Someone had jackhammered jagged holes through them. She walked to the closest one to inspect it. The cable she had followed joined up with three more that fed through the hole into the next room.

The door to the room wasn't locked.

Inside she found a lab that looked alarmingly familiar. Blinking machinery lined the walls.

She had seen the grey metal and glass diodes and spheres before.

It was a miniature version of Brinkley's laboratory.

In the center was a console and a large platform. Hovering inches above the platform was the end of the wormhole's event horizon. As soon as she saw it she knew something was wrong... it looked sick. This sphere wasn't the shiny rainbow silver that she'd jumped through to buy a year of freedom from McMurtey and his schemes—this one was a somber and leaden, smudged with swirls of tombstone grey and midnight black. And it was smaller—much smaller.

"This is wrong... The end in the present—future—is different. This one—"

"Is collapsing," a familiar voice from the shadows in the far corner of the room finished the thought for her. "At the current rate of evaporation, the event horizon will breakdown in less than two hours."

"Tom!" Chastity ran and threw her arms around his neck in a friendly hug. "God, I was worried."
Tom's arms were tight at his sides and his eyes were downcast, avoiding Chastity's searching gaze.

"Oh fuck, two hours can't be right? Sergeant Thompson thinks he's got at least fifteen more. We need to get word to them to get here now."

"Their AI is feeding them fabricated data."

"Why would it do that? We need to let them know so they can get here and get home."

"Those aren't my orders, Chas. Only one person is getting extracted."

"What? Why? Where's the sense in sending me back here to honeybait a bunch of mad scientists then pull me back without bringing them?"

His eyes told her the answer before he opened his mouth to say the words.

"Chas, you aren't the one I'm here for... I'm sorry, but you're one of the casualties."

Chastity backed away from him. She hadn't expected betrayal. "I don't under—"

"There you are," Ashford said as he walked through the door. "I have something for you, my girl."

Tom stepped forward into the dim light

"Tom?" Ashford squinted at the shadows. "Oh yes, there you are. Come out of the dark. I'll never understand why you choose such dark colors. Embrace some color, my boy."

"Of course you know each other," Chastity said, backing toward the door. "This wasn't an accident, was it? It's a prison break."

"Well, there isn't much of a family resemblance, except for the hair."

"Nephew," Tom said, seeing the confusion creep across Chastity's face. "He's my mother's brother."

"Why use Brinkley's work to do this? There had to be an easier way to get Frankenstein out of the castle than sending it over a hundred million years into the past."

"Our work!" Tom said, his words heated. "Brinkley and I worked for months on that machine together. We could have changed the world with it, but he was focused on saving you."

"Is that why you wanted me here? Because Brinkley chose me over what you thought his work should be?"

"You were a distraction that killed him," Tom's voice was cold.

Chastity put her hand on the hilt of her blaster and started to sidle closer to the door.

"Stop," Tom said. He raised a gun of his own. "Uncle Georgie, do it."

Chastity felt a stab in her outer thigh.

Ashford had jammed a syringe into her and was pushing the honey brown contents of a syringe into her leg. "Just relax. Almost done..."

She swung and elbowed him in the side of the head with her elbow. The syringe fell to the cement floor where she smashed it under her heel.

"What is it with you and instructions!?! That wasn't the entire dose! You need the entire dose to stabilize the mutation."

"Fuck the mutation," Chastity said. "I'm one of the casualties, in case you didn't hear. I'm not making it back. It doesn't matter if you fix me or not."

"Did you get enough in to start the process?" Tom asked Ashford.

"Yes. I think, yes," Ashford said, wiggling his finger in the air again, as if calculating on an invisible notepad. "I used the accelerator, so the cells will mutate quickly. It'll bring them."

Chastity understood that Ashford's deal with her had been part of the long game. It had been planned out long before they met in the woods.

"What did you do to me?" Chastity's voice ached in her throat. She felt her heart begin to pound against her chest and her adrenal glands pinch as they started spouting out another round of adrenaline. He had said it—the accelerator was a part of the mix in the syringe. Something else was going on too, there was a deep itch in her skin, spreading out from the injection site. "I SAID WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?"

The tremor in her legs took her to the floor.

"I did exactly what I promised. I injected you with a retrovirus that will modify pheromone production to attract a species that doesn't exist in the modern day."

"Wait, you never said that. You never said 'species that doesn't exist in the modern day', you just said you'd destabilize them."

"You said you didn't want the details."

Ashford held up the blood-soaked bag that he had carried the baby raptor in. With a smile he said, "Their sense of smell is really quite fantastic. The males in the pack should take notice in a short time. I wish I could stay long enough to observe dinosaur on human mating behavior, but I'm afraid my train is leaving the station."

Tom cocked his left leg and cracked his heel into the side of Chastity's head.

The world didn't go black, but it did blur and go dim. She felt strong arms slide under her and lift at her shoulders and knees. Her head dangled on a limp neck. Things went by quick. Walls. Stairwell. A bang as a metal door was kicked open. Then she was spinning and on the ground. She was barely aware of the thump of her body against the damp ground.

She wanted to just lie there, but her body wouldn't let her. Muscles twitched and seized as the retrovirus rewrote the smallest parts of her body.

Why did I trust him, she thought—not sure if she meant Tom or Ashford.

The sound of rustling leaves came from the distance. Chastity wasn't surprised. The raptors that had hunted her earlier wouldn't have left. She didn't bother trying to turn head toward the thumping footsteps racing toward her. They would be on her soon enough, either to eat her or fuck her or maybe both.

She relaxed and let her back melt into the shape of the soft earth beneath her. She squeezed her fingers, collecting handfuls of the composting leaves. It reminded her of childhood and home. She had spent long hours in the woods, tottering between her love of the outdoors and the desire to leave and become something more than she could ever be on the family farm. She had pushed so hard to get away, and now that she was going to die, she wanted to go back.

Something came down on her. Instead of teeth and roars, she got hands seizing her shoulders and a panicked voice.

"Summers, are you okay? Open your eyes."

Strong arms pulled her up into an embrace that was downright cozy. A scruffy cheek brushed against hers and she opened her eyes.

It was Thompson. His gaze was tight on her, looking deep into her focusing eyes. She could feel his pulse bounding through his sweaty skin. The heat of his ragged breath teased her lips and cheek. She leaned forward into his parted lips and gave him a tender kiss. Thompson didn't pull away, letting her lips explore his.

She broke the kiss and asked, "How did you find me?"

"We've got drones tracking the life signs of everything bigger than a boar... Plus, I thought it was strange that Daniels' comm-cuff signal was on the move. As soon as we noticed you had snuck out, we started after you."

He gave her a quick kiss of his own. "I'm going to want more of those, but right now we need to get under cover. There are hostiles all around and they're closing in."

"Oh hell," Chastity said. "You need to get your men and the prisoners inside the prison now. The wormhole is closing. Tom said that it would collapse in less than two hours. I don't know how long ago that was."

"No," Thompson said looking at his comm-cuff. "The countdown timer still has thirteen hours on it."

"They lied. You, me, your team—we aren't supposed to make it back."

"They couldn't—"

"It wasn't an accident. Tom planned it all. It was a jailbreak."

"Damned bastard! Sanchez, get Jones on the comm. Tell him to get the prisoners double-time it from the camp. I'm getting Summers out of here now. Once she's—"

"You can't. Ashford—one of the prisoners—injected me with a new version of the succubus virus. Men aren't really going to be a problem, but those are." She pointed at the growing number of triangles crowding his comm-cuff map.

"Remember how the guys came running up the ridge? This time it's going to be raptors coming after me. You haven't got the time or gun power to fight them off and get everybody through."

"I ain't leaving without you," he said, his voice firm.

Chastity was pretty sure that there was something other than a we-don't-leave-men-behind policy punctuating Thompson's statement. That kiss... well it had been a pretty good kiss.

"This place is going to be swarming with toothy things that want to eat and... do other things. The males in the pack will follow me. I'm pretty sure the females will follow their lead."

"No way I'm letting you do what I think you're getting at."

"I'm not letting you stop me," Chastity said. He had size the size advantage, but Chastity had speed and agility. She drove the heel of her palm into his solar plexus. It wasn't hard enough to hurt him, just surprise him and knock the wind out of him. She followed through with a sidestep around him and jumped on Sanchez's ATV.

"I'll get them as far away as possible. Get the hell out of here now."

She didn't wait for a response. She popped the ATV into gear and blasted off through the woods.

***

Chastity coasted the four-wheeler down to the bottom of a dried out gulley. It wasn't the best hiding spot, but if she ducked low the slopes of dry mud would camouflage her for a few minutes. She turned the key and the steady chug of the engine's pistons died.

She held her breath and listened to the forest around her. There was no crunching of leaves, roars, or warbles that she associated with her killer canaries that she was luring away from Thompson and his team.

Her half-baked plan seemed to be working; the dinosaurs were tracking her and opening a path for Thompson to evacuate the prisoners and team.

She had slowed down at least half a dozen times, waiting for the blipping triangles on the comm-cuff display to follow. The fuckers were fast, but she had managed to stay ahead of them. She hoped it would give Thompson time to evacuate.

Chastity glanced up over the gulley's lip. The openings between the trees were empty. Nothing with scales or feathers came running at her. Everything looked all clear. She tapped a series of icons on the comm-cuff screen and brought up the tracking map. A familiar spinning circle and no signal notification hovered against the black background.

Dammit.

Chastity hadn't planned out any details beyond run and lure away anything that bites away, but she was pretty sure that if she wanted to survive past sundown she would need the tracking data shelter. Maybe she could circle around to the camp—hide out there until she figured out what to do next.

Run around in a loincloth? Maybe become Queen of the Dinosaurs? It wasn't like she had a lot of options.

She looked at the sun. It had come down about one hand-width from when she had left the prison. It translated to about an hour. Even if she could make it back to the prison, chances were the wormhole had collapsed.

Chastity restarted the engine and started up the incline of the gulley wall. She could see the mountain peaks in the distance. It wouldn't be hard to track back to the camp using them as landmarks. She pressed the accelerator and headed out along the edge of the tree line.

Chastity made it less than fifty feet.

A sprout of fronds surged as Chastity rode by. She only caught a glimpse of a blur before it slammed into her. It was grey-green striped with fiery red. She was knocked to the ground. The four-wheeler spiraled out of control and flipped.

A roar dominated the dying grind of the engine.

It was Scar. She knew it would be him.

Chastity kept her eyes squeezed shut. She could feel hot breath at her neck and the presence of dozens of razor-sharp teeth hovering at the nape of her neck.

She shivered as they touched sensitive skin.

All it would take would be one snap of those thick jaw muscles to end her—skin torn, arteries slashed, vertebrae crushed. It would be over quick. And that was much better than being eaten alive slowly. How long would it take to die if it decided to rip open her belly and get at the intestines and organs first? Would she pass out from the pain before she bled out?

She wasn't sure and she didn't want to think about it. If she hoped hard enough maybe it would just bite hard enough to decapitate her and end it fast.

But he wasn't biting.

He was doing something entirely different.

Hot breath whorled across the nape of her neck as Scar exhaled and sharp enamel pressed against skin. Time stretched thin as Chastity waited for the inevitable chomp that would end her.

It didn't come.

Scar's teeth skimmed across skin, following the curve of her neck in a gentle slide to the shoulder.

It felt like a caress.

She shivered as teeth traced the lines of her body. It was hard to believe that something shaped to empty veins and shred meat could ever have such a gentle touch.

Chastity gasped as the weight of Scar's eager tongue joined in the gentle stroking. It was warm velvet circling against her skin and the heat of it bore straight down to her core. A ripple of need raced down her spine causing muscles to quiver and her back to arch. Breath caught in her throat as the shift in position swiped her shoulder against the bottom row of Scar's teeth.

She felt her skin dimple and open as Scar's teeth entered with a warm, red welcome.

The slashes were shallow, but deep enough to open the web of capillaries that fed the skin. She could feel the sticky crawl of her blood down the lines on her ribs until it paused at the bend where chest wall met breast.

Scar's reaction to the taste of blood was immediate. A deep-throated rumble reverberated in the breath he exhaled, bringing pinpricks of blazing fire to the fine line of lacerations before his brushing tongue extinguished them again.

Cool air rushed in as Scar's muzzle pulled away from her. Clawed fingers clamped around her arm, lifting her from her kneeling position and tossing her over. Chastity flipped back the locks of black hair that had fallen over her face and met the iridium eyes that were locked on her.

Scar's muzzle hovered close to Chastity's face, the closeness accentuating the flare of twin nostrils as he breathed her scent in deep. His mouth was opened slightly, teeth visible and glistening with blood-streaked saliva.

Those eyes examined her. There was an intelligent gleam in them, but it was muddled with confusion.

Chastity knew that Scar's brain had to be processing senses were at odds with each other—eyes saying that she was something that should probably be digested, and nose saying that she was something that could satisfy another primal hunger.

Common sense told Chastity that the tableau of a woman face to face with a dinosaur should be terrifying, that she should scream—that she should run. But she was feeling a different type of heat. Maybe her hindbrain was just too fried to push her internal fight or flight buttons, maybe it was a side effect of what Ashford had injected her with.

She didn't know.

She reached up and touched him, tracing the outline of his jaw. The scales were softer than they looked; they were fine and pliant and suede-like.

Scar's nostrils flared faster as Chastity explored the scales beneath his chin and the soft underside of his neck. He was confused, she could tell. She knew because she felt the same confusion too. Whatever Ashford had done was working—working too well, in fact. Scar was reacting to the steady flow of pheromones, but what was she reacting to? A side effect of the injection that Ashford had given her? Or, maybe she was just a danger whore. She had felt something when she let that last fuck, Jim Carlton, take her to death's door.

It didn't matter because the feeling was the same.

The thought of his claws touching her—of his scales rubbing against her skin—sent warm flushes of blood deep inside. She could feel a primal desire fill her body, each breath stoking the fire of it.

She couldn't control it, which was okay because she didn't want to.

It occurred to Chastity that never really contemplated dinosaur sex. It wasn't a topic that had ever come up in conversation. Sasquatch sex, yes. She had coauthored the chapter on Sasquatch society in the latest edition of the Textbook of Cryptozoological Studies, and written a journal article about sexual relations in the syndicates. But they were mammals, and Chastity was overly familiar with that process. But dinosaurs?

All the questions about the mechanics of dinosaur sex were answered when she glanced below Scar's stomach. She hadn't seen any dangly bits on any the raptors that would differentiate male from female. But his excitement had changed that. The cloaca set beneath the prominence of his pubic arch passed the point of bulging and started to evert. A pale pink rod unsheathed in eager throbs.

It was a penis—most definitely a penis. Chastity wasn't exactly an aficionado, but the shape was more or less similar to what one would expect—a thick shaft almost the length of her forearm, pale pink and reddening as blood pumped into it. He had three swollen ridges inched out behind the flared crest of the crown. It looked almost like the dildo that she had found in Mamaw Millie's top dresser drawer when she was nine years old... only not as big.

She wanted to touch it.

Scar repositioned and lowered his tail to the ground. The move shifted the angle of his pelvis and pushed it close.

Chastity reached out and took the huge cock in her hands. It was warm and engorged by blood still hot from the chase. She curled her hand around it and gave a slow stroke working from the tip to the base. Scar reacted with a rumbling purr that resonated deep in his throat. It was big—to thick for her to take into her mouth unless she wanted to chance dislocating her jaw, so she leaned in and took what she could of the tip between her lips. She rolled her tongue around the head in slow circles, letting her saliva mix with the steady trickle of precum from the oversized meatus. It was salty—but it was the good kind of saltiness, the kind that melts into the tongue and gives a hint of something sweeter beneath.

Chastity couldn't get enough.

Chastity felt something stir deep inside. It was like that hateful frost that had taken over when she lost Brinkley was melting. Parts that had frozen were waking again. Her heart quickened and she trembled as the rise in the rhythm of her heart sent surges of blood to her sex. Her clitoris was engulfed in the fire of it and began to tingle. That warmth spread like flaming tongues, licking and darting deeper and deeper, moistening the walls of her vagina.

Chastity let a hand drop from Scar to unfasten the button on her denim shorts. The zipper surrendered in a smooth glide as she slid her fingers under the elastic of her cotton panties. The skin was smooth under her fingers as they slid toward the fold covering her clitoris. The small bud was swollen and sensitive—so sensitive Chastity thought she could almost count the ridges of her fingerprints as her fingertips skimmed up and down and in small circles across its surface. She took her fingers deeper, curling her middle finger between swollen lips. The hole was snug and wet and warm, and the tickle of her fingers sinking in and rising out sent trembles up into the base of her stomach.

The damp blot in her panties grew with each push of her fingers, thickening the pheromones in the air. The smell was different—not the butterscotch and cherry that she had grown to hate; it was earthier, like the smell that came with the first rain after a dry summer.

It smelled like freedom. Ashford might have been a sadistic and sociopathic son-of-a-bitch, but that smell—more than the fact that she was giving head to a dinosaur—was the proof she needed that the he had kept his word.

It smelled like something different to Scar. He lurched back, and with a move that was improbably fast for something so large, his face was where his cock was less than a second before. The force and shock of the move tossed Chastity onto her back. Nostrils flared as he forced his muzzle between her thighs and inhaled deep. The hot in and out of his breath against her thighs became more frenzied. What he wanted was clear now and a layer of denim was the only barrier. He opened his mouth in a roar then snagged the waistband in his teeth. Chastity bent her knees and arched her back so that Scar could pull her shorts down. When he got them to her ankles he let go. She tossed them to the side with a flick of her ankle.
She spread her legs wide, giving Scar room that he eagerly leaned in to fill. For a second their eyes met. Chastity knew that the hunger in his was mirrored in hers. He was massive between her legs, but his head seemed to fit perfectly in the valley of her legs. His lips seemed to curl in a smile before parting to expose a row of sharp teeth. Chastity closed her eyes, not wanting to see if Scar ripped into a femoral artery.

Instead of tearing flesh, she felt the weight of his tongue sliding up the length of her thigh, going higher and higher. The sensation when it reached her labia was chocolate and sunshine and a thousand other happy thoughts that exploded in waves through her.

Her muscles trembled as the soft brushing of Scar's tongue spread in soft spasms up from her clitoris to deep in her chest and beyond. Muscles tensed and relaxed over and over. Chastity felt as if she had run a marathon and when that yawn-like release settled in, she felt as if she were going to melt into the ground.

Even though her body felt spent, she wasn't ready to let it end. Apparently, Scar wasn't either. He was bending to bring his cock back into play. Lying on the ground wouldn't do it for him—he was made for doggie style. Chastity turned over and steadied herself on her hands and knees. The muscles in her arms and legs were wobbly, but they held. Scar clomped his feet on either side of her. She felt so small under him—he had to be on the plus side of half-a-ton, easy.

The huge cock pushed between her legs. Chastity squeezed her thighs tight around it. Scar began a slow back-and-forth rocking, bumping the head of his cock against Chastity's abdomen. It felt good, but it was just a tease—close to what they both wanted, but not enough. So Chastity reached beneath and slid her hand around Scar's cock. He pushed into her grip, forcing one more stroke to bump against her belly before pausing to let her take control. She leaned forward and guided the tip to her pussy.

It felt huge as it rubbed against swollen lips.

Chastity rolled her hips and pressed back, biting her lip as the tapered head penetrated the fleshy gates. She moaned as she slowly took the length of him in. The girth was almost more than she could take. His cock stretched the walls of her pussy until she could feel each pulse of blood like a blissful ache.

Scar must have felt something similar because he pivoted his hips forward, taking all the room her hole had to offer. The thrust sent electric waves through her, each one racing like lightning tongues bent on probing the conduits of her nervous system. Chastity gasped as muscles tensed then quivered in release. Her back arched, driving her into the suede-soft scales and downy feathers that covered Scar's chest.

Scar reached around her with his forearms and held her there. She couldn't move as he pulled his entire length out, stopping when the tip of his cock had only lightest, tickling contact with her labia. The sudden absence of pressure spread upward from her vagina through the rest of her body like the satisfying release felt after a deep yawn.

Then the flush of fullness that came as Scar's next thrust filled her again, his engorged cock gliding deep into the folds of her vagina. His breath was coming quicker; Chastity could feel it in the rapid rise and fall of his chest against her back. She pressed back into him, soaking in the heat of his body as he sped his movements. With each push and pull in and out, Scar built up speed. Chastity felt as if the friction would set her on fire if it kept up much longer. Beads of sweat joined and trickled down the curve of her abdomen and beyond. Chastity traced the trail with her fingers and massaged the swell of her clitoris. She could feel the muscles lining her pelvis tightening.

Scar lifted his head to the sky and roared. Even though she didn't believe it was something she could have possibly withstood, Chastity felt Scar's cock swell even more. Cum exploded from the mushroom tip buried deep in her, tipping her over the edge of her own release. Her own orgasm spread like wildfire deep from her clitoris into the rest of her body. It blazed through her body, consuming what little strength she had left like summer-dried kindling. Arms went weak and thighs trembled and toes curled.

Scar's forearms went lax and Chastity fell to the sweat-soaked ground. There was a soft pull in her crotch as Scar's shrinking cock slid out of her. It was a release like she'd never had before.

Scar swayed then listed to the left with the bulk of his body twisting toward the ground. Chastity mustered the strength she had left and rolled away, curling to avoid the curved claws that arced close to her cheek. The thump of his landing reverberated through the dirt.

What happened? Was he okay? Was worrying bizarre? Thoughts raced through Chastity's mind.

Worried thoughts stopped when the snoring started.

"What the hell, dude," Chastity said, annoyed. Get off and go to sleep appeared to be a quality in men, no matter the species.

"Not his fault, Summers," a voice came, familiar and uncomfortably close. Thompson stood up with rifle in hand and nodded in the direction of Scar's neck.

An orange fuzzy-tailed dart was imbedded just behind the jut of the scaled jaw.

"He'll be okay won't he? I mean... it won't kill him will it?" Chastity asked, tugging her denim shorts free from under Scar's haunch.

"Hunky-dory. Should wake up in a few hours after a good nap. Might have a little hangover though."

Thompson did a good job of averting his eyes as Chastity pulled on enough clothes to suit his sense of modesty.

"How did you find me? The drones, I was out of range."

"Didn't need them. Had other ways to track you than life sign drones." He held up his left arm to show his comm-cuff. "They have built in trackers. Led me right to you."

"Did you see?" Chastity asked, cheeks going rosy red. She didn't take the question any further. Her nude, a dinosaur with a limpy flopped on the ground beside her... anything she could have finished the rest of the sentence was embarrassingly obvious.

He wanted to lie, she saw it in the shift of his eyes.

"I saw you doing what you had to do to give me the time I needed to save my team," he said.

Save my team... But Thompson was still here.

"What are you still doing here?" Her voice was flavored with a little more aggression than she intended. "The wormhole it has to have collapsed by now."

"I think we might have a little time." Thompson gave a knowing grin and pushed up the brim of his cap slightly. "But best not to push our luck so we better get on our way."

Chastity followed Thompson to the four-wheeler. Her walk was a little bowlegged, but she made it.

Maybe they would be okay.

***

The trip back to the prison with Thompson was faster than the trip out. Now the purpose of the journey was straight-on speed, not the go, slow, give the dinos time to catch up, then zoom to lure them away route that she had done earlier.

The prison was a flurry of white jumpsuits and sparking electronics.

"You let them out of the cage? Aren't they dangerous?" Chastity asked as an old man with a bent back and pointy-head jarred past her.

"Dangerous for sure," Sanchez said, holding his rifle so the barrel rested in the nook between his collarbone and shoulder. "But we explained that if they couldn't find a way to keep the wormhole open, we'd be happy to set them free here to live their lives.

"They saw the light pretty quick. Not nice thinking you'll eventually be an appetizer for the things that live around here," Thompson said.

"They've jury-rigged the batteries and generators to the prison power grid," Chastity said, looking at the looped wires and cables that led from a medical pod and the two patrol robots up through a hole in the prison wall.

"Bought us enough time to collect you," Thompson said.

Chastity leaned into him. "I want to say more than 'thank you,' but can we get the hell out of here first?"

***

The debriefing went long, Chastity thought, because McMurtey repeated and rephrased everything that she said, then asked the same questions again in different ways.

"So you're saying that Mr. Frye is complicit in the entire affair, that he conspired to free Doctor Georgie Ashford for reasons unknown to you."

Chastity took a deep, frustrated breath. "It's not exactly reasons unknown. Tom said that Ashford was his uncle. It was a jailbreak."

"And that's the extent of your knowledge—that the two were related. Tom didn't explain any further?"

"He was pissed at me because Brinkley wanted to use the time machine to fix me. Again, that's it. I did what you hired me for. Most of the prisoners were brought back. Tom is a psychotic asshole. That's what I know—for the fifth time."

Ashford leaned back in his seat. "Yes, the job was done. The returned prisoners have been relocated, except for Jack Workman, who was never located and presumed lost, and Georgie Ashford, who is a fugitive."

"And Tom," Chastity added.

"Of course. Tom Frye. A shame, really. Such a fine mind." McMurtey slid a black box toward her. "As per our arrangement, here is the first month's supply of inhibitors. The rest will be shipped to your address. You'll find that the money has been deposited in your account this morning."

Chastity looked at the box and smiled. "I don't think I'll need them anymore." She picked up the box. "But send them anyway. I'm sure I can pass them along to someone who can use them."

She was free for life; the least she could do is give another one of Ashford's victims a year of freedom.

***

McMurtey rode the elevator deep into sublevels under the building until it slowed then stopped at Sublevel 33.

He walked though the empty lab and looked at the equipment.

Marvelous.

He wasn't alone.

"You've created a problem for us," McMurtey said, irritation coloring his normally even voice. "There weren't supposed to be any witnesses. She wasn't supposed to make it back."

"It's just a hiccup in the plan," Tom said, stepping out of the shadows. "There's no way for her to track anything back to the Think Tank—she's not smart enough to make the connections. She's nothing."

"Oh, I don't know about that," another older voice said. "Except for some deep-seated issues with following instructions, she had this spark inside of her. Her intelligence might be on the pedestrian side, but she does have a way of inflaming one's passions—in more than the carnal ways."

"Doctor Ashford," McMurtey said, walking to shake the man's hand. "It's an honor. I've seen your work. Simply amazing."

"And it'll be amazing again," Tom said, "now that you're free of government restraints."

"Very true," McMurtey added. "You'll find that we enjoy innovation here at the Think Tank."

"Yes. Yes." Ashford nodded. "It seems I've found my muse. "She's already inspired new paths for my research. It'll be revolutionary."

"A revolution is exactly what we're looking for, Dr. Ashford," McMurtey said with a smile.