Sam hit the button.

“Let me go first, sir,” Sam said, entering and scanning the room before waving his charges in.

“Jesus, Simon, we were in here five minutes ago,” General Mathis said, rolling his eyes as he entered the observation theatre. “I’m starting to think your boy is a little slow.”

“He does exactly what he’s been trained to do, without getting bored, or distracted, or assuming five minutes isn’t long enough to set up a trap,” Carl said.

“In the middle of the most secure facility in the world?” Mathis scoffed.

The general was graying, with a large-and-in-charge mustache above a chiseled jaw. You couldn’t get promoted to general with a weak chin, no matter how good you were, it was just how life worked. Carl Simon was the biologist that Sam was in charge of protecting. He’d played a role in unlocking the otherworlder genetic code, and the secrets in his head warranted a S4M escort. Simon was lean and smart, standing a little over six foot.

Not many people knew about Carl’s bald spot, Sam thought as he looked down at the PhD. Very few people were taller.

“Wait by the door, Sam,” Carl said.

Sam stood by the door, half-turned so he could watch the entrance and the observation theatre at the same time.

“They should be bringing in the subject now… Ah, here we go,” Carl said. Behind the glass, a man strapped to a table was wheeled in by a man in an environment suit. He was tilted to face the observers.

“From what we’ve gathered from these people’s mystical mumbo-jumbo, the thing that they call magic is some kind of poison that builds up in the body,” Carl said.

“Have you been able to isolate it?” General Mathis’s gray brows furrowed as he leaned toward the glass to get a better look. He probably needed glasses, but had too much machismo to wear them.

“Not yet. Although the others have similar biologic makeup, we haven’t been able to isolate the exact compound. My hypothesis is that whatever substance causes these changes decays rapidly outside of a living host. We are doing trials that will attempt to isolate the substance in an oxygen- and light-free environment.”

Carl leaned toward the intercom and said, “Start the procedure.”

The technician on the other side of the window nodded and retrieved a scalpel from the nearby table. Sam watched dispassionately as the hooded technician began peeling aside the skin covering the man’s chest, making him clench down on the bit between his teeth.

“Notice the faint blue glow from his tissues?” Carl said, pointing. “Stop for a moment, son.” Carl flicked the light in the operating room off, and observed the light coming from their victim’s organs. “That is the subject’s internal organs breaking the laws of physics, one sign that the subject is going through something called The Molt.”

“What, now?” Mathis asked, glancing at the doctor askance. “Are we dealing with lizard people?”

“No, General. From what we’ve gathered, the poison builds up in a subject’s body, until it reaches a resonance frequency unique to each subject.”

“What the hell does that have to do with Molting?”

Carl sighed. “Forget the word ‘Molt’. Imagine that a person’s body is like a cup with a hole in it, sitting out in the rain.”

“Yeah.”

“Humans are like shot glasses with big holes and practically no bottom, while Others are like buckets with one little hole in the bottom. The poison goes right through our system, but they chew on it awhile. And what do you think happens if a bucket gets shattered beside you?”

“You get splashed.”

“And some water falls into your cup. Well then, what happens if so much water falls into your cup at one time that you overflow?”

The general shrugged. “I thought you were going to tell me.”

“You die.”

The general stiffened. “So that’s why so many of my men and your researchers have been dropping like flies. Little fuckers have a defense mechanism. This is another good reason to keep them in their camps. One of ’em chokes on breakfast and winds up killing the neighbors.” Mathis snorted, a scowl on his face as he watched the vivisection.

“There’s more,” Carl said, shaking his head before indicating the technician should continue. “When one of the Others is overloaded with this poison, their entire being begins to resonate. It causes them to run a fever while their body goes into emergency mode, trying to figure out what to do with the excess energy. The solution is to build a bigger bucket. That’s what they call The Molt. As the size of the bucket increases, the relative size of the hole in the bottom shrinks, in essence making the Other more ‘magical’.” Carl made air quotes, eliciting a laugh from General Mathis.

Sam frowned, studying the sheen of sweat on the doctor’s brow, and his hands tucked into his pockets. Something was making his charge nervous. He scanned the room again, but didn’t see anything aside from the doctor, the general, and behind the glass, the technician and subject. The subject and the technician were unlikely to be making the doctor nervous--they had little power here--so it was most likely the General. But why?

So,” General Mathis said, leaning back from the window. “What was so important that I come in person? We already knew that people in the area when they die tend to follow, and you just told me why. What do you have to share that couldn’t be filed in a report on my desk?”

“Well,” Carl said, brushing a sweaty strand of hair behind his ear, “I’ve discovered that humans can go through The Molt as well.”

General Mathis’s brows rose. “Really?”

“Does Thomas Dietrich from SEAL ring a bell?”

“Yeah, that boy’s dropped a lot of owl-eyed rats that didn’t like the way we do things here.”

“Do you know what the other SEALs call him?”

“I’m afraid I don’t.”

“The Machine.”

“The Machine?” the general asked. “So?”

“Thomas has shown a remarkable resilience to the poison, despite being point blank at no less than three Other kills. I pulled up all the records I could find in regards to Thomas, and found something surprising. He’s shown a numerical increase in every measureable fitness and cognitive evaluation of about 1.95 times his starting capacity.”

General Mathis frowned. “So he benches four hundred now or something? What makes you think he’s… Molted? I hate that word. We’ll rebrand it if we have to.”

“It not just lifting, running, heart rate. Boy started with an I.Q. of 83. It’s 162 now. Damnit, he’s even luckier than before. I paid him a dollar every time a coin came up heads, and he averaged seventy-five percent out of a thousand.”

“Maybe he tried to affect the coin.”

“I was the one flipping the coin!”

“Huh.” General Mathis crossed his arms and tilted his head in thought. “An amazing soldier is now even more amazing. What’s the problem?”

“Would you take orders from a drooling idiot?”

General Mathis bristled. “Am I the drooling idiot in this scenario?”

The intercom blinked. “I’ll field that one,” another voice said, crackling through the speakers in the display in front of the doctor.

Sam’s attention returned to the technician, who had turned to face them. The man took off the hood of his environment suit. Sam didn’t recognize him, but the doctor took a step back towards the door as though threatened.

Sam changed his target to the technician. Was the glass bulletproof? Sam’s hands were out of sight of the operating theatre, and he drew his gun slowly, keeping the noise to an absolute minimum. Something told him he’d have to shoot someone in the next few seconds.

“You’re a drooling idiot if you expect me to believe all the world’s problems can be fixed by killing a few elves,” Thomas said, dropping his hood onto the floor. “The world was headed for the shitter before they arrived, I’ve done some digging. As a matter of fact, food and energy shortages have eased since they got here, owing to the adaption of their technology and integration of their workforce.”

Thomas unzipped the environment suit and stepped out of it. A pistol was holstered at his side. Thomas drew the pistol as Carl took another step back toward the door.

“And the biggest reason I’d call you a drooling idiot is that you haven’t bothered to wonder why Doctor Carl is still alive, having been exposed to so much of the elves’ magic himself.”

Sam’s eyes widened as he reevaluated the situation, but it was too late. As it turned out, Doctor Carl had taken three steps toward Sam, not the door. He spun and seized Sam’s gun with an iron grip, then began peeling the gun away from his fingers with strength rivaling that of a tow truck.

“What the hell is going on?” General Mathis roared.

“The president has been in power for thirty years, and everyone expects his son to inherit that title. The country has been under martial law for twenty-six of those years, and everyone just got used to it. The news is federally funded, and you are one of the major players in charge of maintaining the status quo,” Thomas said.

Sam knew he only had a few seconds to act. He had to keep Carl and the general alive--that was his mission. Carl’s lips were drawn back in a snarl as he pried the gun out of Sam’s fingers, his attention focused solely on its acquisition. Sam tried to knee the doctor in the groin, but the doctor blocked.

“Carl and I have been talking, and we think the world would be a better place without a few key people. We’re not arrogant enough to think we can fix everything, but we’re at least going to break the stranglehold you’ve imposed with your dynasty-making.”

“This is ridiculous!” General Mathis said. He bolted for the door, but the struggling men blocked his exit.

“Is it?” Thomas leveled his gun at the elf’s head.

Sam saw this and didn’t have time to coddle the doctor, who was unwrapping the last of Sam’s digits from the grip. He whipped his forehead down on the doctor’s nose, causing Carl to drop like a boned fish. Sam aimed the gun at Thomas’s head and squeezed the trigger six times in about a second and a half. Sam didn’t know if the glass was bulletproof, but ‘bulletproof’ had always been a misnomer.

Sam’s vision cleared of the stars from the head-butt, and he saw Thomas on the ground, his head a bloody mess. The observation window had indeed been merely bullet-resistant. A small hole had been punched through the glass, with white cracks spidering outward, obscuring their vision.

“General, you need to get to a safe distance while I--”

“Thought you could get one over on me, you little shit?” Mathis said, kicking Carl in the side. “I.Q. of one-sixty my ass. I’m going to make sure your wife and kids spend the rest of their short little lives finding out exactly how much--”

An explosive detonation sounded from the exam room, sending a shower of glass over Sam and General Mathis. As the noise died down, Sam stood and checked the doctor for wounds before reaching out to help the general to his feet. Mathis slapped Sam’s hand away as he got up.

Sam peered through the broken window. The Other had been cut in half by an explosive and painted across the bulletproof glass remaining around the now foot-wide hole. Carl moaned and chuckled from his position on the floor. Sam rolled him over and wrenched his hands behind his back.

“What the hell is this?” General Mathis asked, pointing at the dead Other.

“Dead man’s switch, General. Never put yourself in a situation where you might lose. Tonight you’ll have a fever, and you won’t wake up. Even if by some miracle you have a tolerance for magic, you’ll wake up a different man than you were before.” Carl began laughing, grunting as Sam pinned his arms behind his back.

“You’re already dead, General.”

General Mathis reached into his vest, and before Sam could object, he pointed a small pistol at Carl’s head and fired.

“General…” Sam said, unsure of what to do. There was no training for this. For a brief instant, he wished he were back with Ann and Tom in the training facility.

Then the general turned the gun on Sam and fired again.