Chapter 44: Stronger Than Expected

Dr. Elara's POV

I have been doing science for forty one years and the first thing science teaches you, if you are paying attention, is that projections are not outcomes, they are informed estimates, and the distance between an estimate and reality is where all the interesting information lives.

I adjusted.

The glow in her hands was not in my projections, I will acknowledge that plainly because there is no productive purpose in pretending otherwise, my models had accounted for the mate bond accelerating the blood activation but had not accounted for the specific rate of that acceleration combined with the emotional state she was presenting, which was considerably more stable than I had anticipated.

I had expected fear, fear was the standard response to this situation and fear was actually useful because fear suppressed the higher functions and made the blood reactive in ways that were manageable and predictable, the projections were built around a frightened subject with dormant power.

She was not frightened, or if she was, she was managing it with a quality of steadiness that was genuinely unexpected from someone who had spent the past months hiding in a servants' corridor and flinching from bond marks.

I kept advancing.

The syringe was in my hand and I had one clean window to administer the partial dose before the glow in her hands became something that required a different approach, and I was close enough now that the window was available, and I moved into it with the precise economy of motion that came from decades of practice.

"You should not do that," she said, and her voice was different from two minutes ago, steadier and coming from somewhere lower in her chest, and her hands were raised slightly in front of her, not in a fighting posture, in the posture of something trying to contain itself.

"I'm administering a partial dose," I said, "the full compound would produce the result I described, the partial simply accelerates what is already happening, think of it as a catalyst rather than an intervention."

"I know what a catalyst is."

"Then you know the reaction is coming regardless," I said, and reached for her arm.

She moved back and something happened in the space between us that I did not fully observe because it happened faster than observation was possible, a pressure, directional and sudden, like a door opening in a direction that had no door, and my two agents who had been positioned behind her stumbled backward hard and hit the wall with enough force that one of them went down and the other caught himself on a shelf and knocked half its contents to the floor.

I stopped.

Looked at my agents, one on the floor, one against the wall, both of them looking at Ava with the expression of people who had encountered something that didn't fit their framework and hadn't finished processing it.

Looked at Ava, who was looking at her own hands with an expression that was also processing, though hers had an element of recognition in it, like something she had been told was possible had just become something she had done.

I looked at the distance between the agents and where they had been standing and made a rapid calculation.

She had moved them without contact, eight feet, with force sufficient to put a trained adult against a wall, and she had apparently done it without intending to, which was in some ways more significant than the act itself because unintentional power was power without a ceiling because it hadn't found one yet.

I retreated three steps, which was not fear, it was repositioning, and placed myself behind Maren who was standing to my left and had the specific stillness of someone running their own rapid assessment.

"That was new," Maren said quietly.

"Yes." I kept my eyes on Ava and reached for the monitoring device in my coat pocket without looking at it, pulling it out and opening the compass face by feel, "the mate bond restructuring has progressed further than the compound I gave her at the dinner, the partial dose would have moved things forward but she may already be ahead of it."

"She threw two people without touching them."

"I have eyes, Maren."

Ava was looking between her hands and the two agents and back at me, and the glow in her palms was fluctuating, brighter and then dimmer and then brighter again, pulsing in a rhythm that I recognized after a moment as her breathing, the power was tied directly to her respiratory rate which meant it was tied to her emotional state which meant it was considerably more volatile than a contained sample because contained samples didn't have emotional states.

I made three rapid adjustments to my projections in the time it took Maren to help the downed agent to his feet.

The partial dose I had managed to administer during the window would interact with the existing blood chemistry in ways that were now harder to predict because the baseline had shifted past my models, I needed new readings to understand what was actually happening in her system and I needed them quickly because the situation was evolving faster than my prepared responses were built for.

I raised the monitoring device.

Looked at the face.

The needle was moving in a way needles were not supposed to move, past the calibrated range, pressing against the upper limit of the measurement scale with the insistence of something that had more to express than the instrument had range to capture.

I tapped the device.

The needle did not moderate.

I looked at the reading for a moment with the focused attention of someone whose entire professional framework was being asked to accommodate data it was not designed for, and then I looked at Maren because Maren's second opinion was the one I trusted when my own assessment needed a check.

"Maren."

"I see it."

"The signal has quintupled."

"In ninety seconds," she said, "yes."

The monitoring device began to shriek, the alert function activating because the reading had exceeded the maximum threshold, a sound I had heard in laboratory conditions twice in forty years and never in a field situation.

I looked at the reading and said the only accurate response available to me. "That's impossible."

"Doctor." Maren's voice had changed, stripped of its professional evenness, carrying something I recognized as the tone she used when she needed me to look at something immediately, "look at her hands."

I looked.

Ava's hands were no longer glowing violet, that soft pulsing light that the blood produced at activation, the color I had been studying in samples and readings for thirty years and had built an entire life's work around understanding.

They were glowing like a small, contained sun.