For a moment after Ted woke up, the night before lingered fuzzily as a delirious, scary, wonderful dream, about things he should never be dreaming of, things that—
Things that he had done. That had all happened. He was in bed, in a motel somewhere on the far side of the Sierras, with a woman he’d met two days ago. A mouse woman, sleeping against him, arms and one leg wrapped around him possessively.
God. How had he let her—what kind of idiot was he—had he led her—
Closing his eyes, he took a deep, steady breath. Get ahold of yourself, Ted. While he couldn’t help but worry there was a kind of Nightingale Effect thing happening, what had happened had been decidedly mutual.
Making love to a seven-foot tall, fur-covered woman was, to put it lightly, an experience. At first she’d been hesitant, tentative, letting him lead. He’d been gentle to the point of awkwardness.
But boy, was she a fast learner, and yes, bigger and stronger than he was. He hadn’t been the one leading for long at all. Toward the end, he’d been—what was it that he’d said yesterday, in a markedly different context? Thrilled to be serving a mouse.
Feeling himself blush, he tried to glance at the room’s clock without disturbing Aurora. A few minutes past five.
As much as he’d been looking forward to stopping at the little coffee shop they’d seen yesterday, to be safe they should get on the road before sunrise, going to…well, wherever they ended up next. Maybe down along the back side of the Sierras toward the Mojave. Aurora had never seen the high desert in person, of course, and he hadn’t truly seen it other than through the windshield on road trips.
Without warning, the mouse sat bolt upright in bed, eyes wide and alert.
Ted blinked, rolling over and staring up at her. “What—”
She put a hand over his mouth. “Someone’s outside,” she whispered.
What? He didn’t hear anything, but he didn’t doubt her. He slipped out of bed, hurrying to get into clothes. It might be nice if, like Aurora, he simply didn’t worry about that, but even setting aside social norms, he felt really damn exposed this way.
He’d just pulled his jeans on, still sans shirt and socks, when the door smashed open. “Down!” someone shouted. “Down!”
Aurora leapt to her paws beside Ted, both on the far side of the bed. The black-suited guys rushing into the room sure as hell looked like a stereotypical SWAT team, from the body armor to the military-looking pistols. Pistols with silencers. That seemed especially ominous.
“Holy shit.” One of them stared up at Aurora, rifle held loosely. “They didn’t say she’d be that big!”
“Both of you grab her!” the first one who’d come through the door commanded. “She’s what we’re after.” The other two—okay, there were three of them total—charged around the bed.
Ted moved toward the mouse protectively, even though part of him knew that was absurd. “You can’t just—”
One of them grabbed Ted and hurled him, hard, to the ground. “What about him?”
The first guy stared out the door, as if checking to make sure no one was coming to the rescue. “You know what he did to those cops. He’s resisting capture, isn’t he? You have no choice.”
Ted wheezed. “What the fuck, I’m not—”
One of the two to either side of Aurora had grabbed her arm with both hands. The other one shrugged, grabbing her arm with one hand while pointing the rifle at Ted.
Ted raised his hands reflexively, squeezing his eyes shut. A round of shots went off, he screamed—
Nothing hit him. The other men were screaming, too.
He opened his eyes, sitting up and gaping. Aurora had hauled both of the commandos into the air, disrupting the shooter’s aim, but that wasn’t the scary part. The scary part was the way all her fur was rippling, almost…solidifying?
I’d need a few seconds to form armor.
But this wasn’t mere armor. She’d become a living metal sculpture, like that Silver Surfer character from comic books—and her fingers rapidly elongated, snaking around the men she held up, less finger than tentacles binding and constricting.
“Drop them! Drop them!” the one at the door screamed, terrified. He emptied a clip into Aurora, spraying wildly. Maybe that could have stopped her about sixty seconds ago; now the bullets just bounced off, except where they tore into one of his own men.
It was possible that guy was the lucky one, though. He wasn’t alive when she pulled him into her. For a few moments, she was barely a mouse at all, liquid metal rapidly consuming two men, their forms sinking into her with a hair-raising sizzling sound as her form rapidly grew. She threw her head back, looking disturbingly ecstatic.
The survivor turned, trying to flee, but barely made it two steps before a giant, predatory silver mouse launched herself across the bed at him, one hand out to grab him. She landed with a crash, cracking the bed frame under her legs, one hand wrapping around his torso and pulling him back toward her.
That last one, Aurora didn’t absorb. She straight up ate him. She shoved his head into her mouth and swallowed him whole, just like the sandwich. This time, Ted was pretty sure her jaw had unhinged.
She rolled onto her side, taking a deep, ragged breath, and looked back at Ted. “Are you all right?”
“You—you—” He could still hear the man she’d just eaten screaming. His futile, rapidly weakening struggles visibly distended her stomach. Was she growing, slowly?
Ted squeezed his eyes shut. “Oh, my God, Aurora.” Okay, she was back to absolutely terrifying and she’d also unquestionably just saved his life and probably saved her own and he was kind of stuck on that “absolutely terrifying” part. He wasn’t sure which sound was more disturbing: the acid sizzle of her consuming the first two, or the wetly reverberating swallow of consuming the third.
A giant, gentle hand touched his back. “Ted, you know I won’t hurt you.”
“I know, but those men…” He opened his eyes partway, staring at her stomach. Yep. Still distended. Still visibly squirming. “You didn’t…have to…”
“They were going to kill you.”
“I know. But you—we—just killed three…” He got to his feet, wobbling. Three cops, he was going to say, but were they cops? Maybe federal agents. Maybe…
Trying to steady himself, he lurched past the giantess, looking out the broken door. A big black SUV sat right behind his car, blocking it. No lights, no government or LEO plates, no insignia.
A crunching noise came from behind him. He looked back to watch Aurora wriggling her way out of the hotel room, damaging the door frame even more in the process.
Well, it was too late to worry about attracting attention. Fortunately, it was still dark, barely five-thirty in the morning; nobody was around, although lights were on in one of the hotel rooms facing the parking lot. Somebody was watching. Possibly, calling the real police.
He tried one of the Expedition’s doors. Unlocked. Was there anything in here that might show who these guys were? There was no radio, no police computer stuck to the dashboard.
Wait. There were parking garage stickers stuck to the inside of the windshield. He got back out and looked at them. Both bar codes. One was cryptically labeled “CDIS.”
The other was for Nanolab Science.
He turned toward Aurora. “Those weren’t—” He stopped, gawking up at the towering mouse.
“Hmm?” She looked down. Straight down.
“Sorry, I’m, uh, distracted by realizing I’m barely as tall as one of your legs.”
She grinned, crouching. “Does this help?”
“No.” He cleared his throat. “I was saying, those men weren’t actually cops after all. They were working directly with Nanolab.”
“Is that better or worse than being cops?”
“I don’t know. It’s probably a little better that we haven’t killed police officers, but the implication Nanolab wants you back by any means necessary might be a little worse.” He ran a hand through his hair, finding himself staring at her stomach again. “Why…why did you swallow that last one, instead of, you know…?”
Her expression darkened. “He ordered the other one to shoot you. I wanted to leave him time to think about dying as mouse food.”
Ted nodded slightly, mouth dry. My new alien girlfriend is possibly the scariest being on the planet. “I…uh. Okay. We need to get out of here, fast. Can you move that car?”
She looked at the SUV, and straightened up, leaning over—and lay across the top, arms wrapping around the sides.
He knew what she was about to do a moment before she did it. “No, not—”
The Expedition dissolved, flowing into the mouse as she sank over it. And grew. And grew. The moan she made as she absorbed it was, no two ways about it, decidedly sexual. Some part of him wondered if he should report it to Torgensen as a bug. Hey, did you know that the Dynamice are turned on by converting mass into more of themselves? Was that intentional? It seems like a little bit of an existential risk to humanity.
She took a deep breath, and sat up, looking down at Ted, now barely knee-high to her. “If no one can find that SUV, it might be harder to trace it.”
“Yeah, except for other hotel guests who might be watching and reporting on the giant alien mouse woman absorbing cars.”
Aurora crossed her arms, glowering down at him. “I won’t apologize because I don’t think I was wrong.”
He rubbed his face. “I’m just…this is scary as shit, Aurora.”
“I know I must be scary, too. I’m a monster.” She leaned over. “But I’m your monster.”
“You are scary.” He sighed, stretching an arm up to touch her muzzle. “But I’m your human.”
She smiled at that, massive teeth close overhead.
“Although,” he added, “your human humbly requests you figure out how to fit in his car again so we can get the hell out of here.”
She sighed, standing up and stretching. “Fine.” She nudged him with one of her paws, making him stumble. “But I’m still going to get big enough to hold you in one of my hands.”
He stared up, feeling himself blush for reasons he didn’t quite understand.
Aurora walked to the back of the parking lot and down a hillside. She almost disappeared from view—then dropped completely out of sight, with the noise of a low, rolling thunderclap. A blast of hot wind blew up the hill, bringing a cloud of leaves and twigs.
Ted hurried over, in time to find her at her “mere” seven foot height climbing back up the hill. The creek below glittered in the stray bits of morning light striking its surface.
“I was expecting an SUV-sized cylinder of metal.”
She shook her head as she jogged toward the car. “I let more of my mass than usual go as energy, and tried to spread the rest out more. It shouldn’t hurt the water or any animals.”
Keeping up with her required him to jog. “So, uh, does that metal have any special properties? It has your nanotech in it, doesn’t it?” He headed into the hotel room to grab the suitcase.
“Some, but the nanobots aren’t functional once they’re taken out of from me. They’re just more little pieces of metal.” As they got into the car, she grinned impishly. “Were you worried it could form itself into another version of me and terrorize passersby?”
He pressed the car’s ignition button, backed up, and pulled out. “No, but it’s not like I could entirely rule it out. I’m not at all sure what you’re capable of at this point.” After checking the map app briefly, he turned north. The road was still closed southbound, so they’d have to head toward Gardnerville, crossing into Nevada, to reach US-395. Then they could head south toward Mono Lake.
She shook her head, looking thoughtful. “I’m not, either.”