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During the cold war, agents from the Eastern and Western powers routinely met and exchanged high ranking spies at Glienicke Bridge in Berlin; at least, that's what I've seen on TV. Today the old TV shows had come true, and I was on my way to a meeting point in the industrial part of Oakenford with a pocketful of microfilm -six thin slivers of silver-laminated plastic that had cost a life and a leg, and now my sister and Bill Holman were in danger.

I inched the rental KIA past sleepy concrete warehouses until I passed Würtz Cargo, then drove on three hundred yards, before I parked the car and walked back.

What am I to do? I'm no spy.

I expected reality to slip from me like sand through neurons any moment, and for the voices in my head to burst out and comment on everything. But today they were silent, and for the first time in seven years, I was alone. This was all new to me, I felt exposed and vulnerable, and for once in those cursed seven years I wanted the voices to be there with me, to tell me something... anything.

Burris waited for me behind a wooden counter in the reception of_Wurtz Cargo_. It was covered with dust, and only a seventies rotary dial telephone had remained as the sole piece of office furniture. He greeted me with a smile, like some left-over receptionist.

"Welcome to Hotel Wurtz," he joked. "Do you have any reservations?"

"Funny," I grumbled.

"Old habits never die" he said, gently wiping the dust off the desk with the palm of his hand. "I can duck behind the counter if people show up with more friends than agreed upon."

"Plus, you can hide your own piece behind the desk?"

"You see a lot of things Mr. Wolf - for a civilian."

"You pick some strange places to conduct business, Dr Burris - for a professional."

Burris looked around, and a small smile formed around his mouth. He was completely at ease here, much more so than in the fake psychiatrist office. "This warehouse belongs to the agency. We've used it so many times for matters just like this." There was a tone of nostalgic longing in his voice.

"So how does this work?" I asked. "You're the expert around here."

"Just like any other trade, Mr. Wolf. You hand over the blueprints, and we release your sister."

"That simple, huh?"

Burris stretched out a hand and wiggled his fingers with an impatient come here movement. I felt nauseous and took a mental step back from reality. I wanted to curl up into foetal position and hide myself in some warm place deep within my mind, until all of this was over. I cursed the now silent voices that had been my faithful companions for better or for worse, always telling me what to do. I had rarely understood the images they had shown me, or their words of warning, but over the last days I had realised that they showed me the world, the way they saw it. They showed me true face of people, they told me of future events and warned me of danger - all in their own way.

Useless Parasites, I cursed. If you're really that all-knowing, why don't you take it from here? I closed my eyes and waited for my voices to jump in like a tag-team, but when I looked back up, Burris was still there with his hand outstretched; only increasingly impatient. Then I noticed that the skin on his hand turning grey and scaly, like that of a reptile.

I'm hallucinating again. I realised. Just great.

"That's it?" I asked. "I give you the microfilm and we walk away?"

"Sure", said Burris. "That's how people do businessss." The s'es hissed off a forked tongue like steam escaping a pipe and his lie was transparent. But they had Kamryn locked away somewhere, so I decided to play along.

I took out the car-keys from my jeans. "Here you go, then." I threw them at Burris, who caught them in mid-air, visibly annoyed.

"First holiday snapshots, now a set of car-keys," he sneered. "Your games are beginning to tire me, Mr Wolf."

"Likewise," I said. "The microfilm is locked in a rental car parked outside. You show me Kamryn, I tell you which car."

Burris shrugged, and I followed him through a short corridor. He stopped outside a door and hesitated a few seconds before he touched the handle."Before we go in, I must tell you that we've given your sister a mild sedative," he said. "Don't be alarmed if she's unresponsive."

I recognised Kamryn immediately. She lay unconscious on a seventies style couch, with her hands tied behind her back. I rushed to her and touched her neck to get a pulse. Her temperature was normal, but I got no response from her.

"Mild sedative, my ass. She's out cold."

There was a tall army-looking guy in the room, armed with an AK-101 automatic, which he kept pointing at me. Now that I saw him with my own eyes, I recognised him as the tall man I'd met in the fire escape. I had hallucinated him having the face of a zombie, but even with a clear head, I still recognised his facial features. His brown eyes were emotionless and his cheeks were hollow, almost to the point of being emaciated. So this was agent Bruckner? The one who had tried to save me from being kidnapped by the Russians.

Then I noticed another figure, across the room. It was Bill Holman. He sat slumped in a chair, hands tied to the armrests. He was dead, and trails of coagulated blood ran from his ears and his closed eyes. The rope had cut deep grooves into his wrists during his death throes.

"You killed him!"

"He would have made another set of schematics, only to sell them again, to God knows whom. Holman was brilliant, but greedy."

"So you tortured him with his own invention?"

"Not exactly; the schematics are for a Focused Accelerator Pulse. Without it, our existing sonics technology is much too slow to be of any practical value. It took Holman seven minutes to die without the accelerator. That's useless, and there's a lot of screaming involved."

"Seven minutes and twenty-two seconds," corrected Bruckner and checked his watch. He tapped the dial with two fingers and then held the watch to his ear. Automatic rifle and an automatic watch made good sense: both could be disassembled and repaired while on a mission.

I began to untie Kamryn and massaged her wrists to get the blood flowing. She opened her eyes for a moment and smiled when she saw me. "Hi Carter," she mumbled. "So sleepy", then she went back to sleep. I'd have to carry her back to the car, but I needed to get the car keys.

"It's the red KIA," I told Burris. "I parked it a couple of hundred yards down the road. The microfilm is in the glove compartment."

"Wait here," said Burris and left the building.

The silence was uncomfortable in Burris' absence. Bruckner kept aiming at me with the AK-101, and I was stuck with three people; one unconscious, one dead, and one silent.

"Thanks for trying to save me from the Russian". I tried to break the silence, but didn't want to bring up the fact that he had also put a bullet in my leg a few days earlier.

Bruckner shrugged. "Sometimes I save people, other times I kill them. It's all in a day's work."

Burris returned a few minutes later with the envelope. He tore it open and held the microfilm to the window. "It's beautiful!" he laughed. "So simple, and yet so efficient."

"Right," I said. "The deal's done, so if you hand me the keys, I'll get Kamryn back to the car."

Burris reached into his coat, but when he pulled his hand back out, he wasn't flashing the keys, but a P-32 semi-automatic.

"You must have known all along, that we couldn't let you go," he said.

"I did have my worries," I said. "But I had to save my sister."

Burris pointed the pistol downward and disengaged the thumb safety. "I hate to break this to you Mr. Wolf, but..."

"-she too is a liability to national safety?" I finished the sentence for him.

"Yeah, my apologies. But I want you to know that your efforts have been of great value to your country."

"Whatever happened to witness protection programmes and a new identity somewhere warm?"

"That was back in the good old seventies." Burris slipped into a state of nostalgic reverie. "Back then, civilians were offered compensation: money, a new life or maybe a dacha. Today, everything is about budget and efficiency. Identity programmes cost millions, but a .32 ACP shell is less than one euro."

"Those were the days, my friend." I quoted the only Mary Hopkin song I knew, in order to procrastinate the inevitable:

as long as I could keep Burris daydreaming about his past, he probably wouldn't shoot me. I looked around to find any means of escape, but the small room was windowless, and Bruckner had his 101 firmly aimed at my midriff.

Say something, damn you! I cursed at the silent voices in my head. This is where we die.

The response was immediate and powerful. A jet of mental wind erupted from a rift in a bottomless void and cleared my mind. My mind's eye looked into a vacuous abyss and a new confidence swept over me.

"We would never let you die," said the female voice. "We've always been your guardians."

"Guardian, my ass," I said. "What about all the remarks about them hating my guts, if they only knew?"

"Humans loathe and fear what they don't understand. If they knew that you are other, they will hate you."

"We've looked out for the humans on this side of the abyss for thousands of years," said the male. "Protected them from our own kind - and from themselves."

"And what part do I play in this?"

"We three are one. You are our physical part."

"So, what do I do now?" I asked, but I already knew the answer:

The human world was not ready for destructive technology of this magnitude.

Kendall Duran had realised the dangers of unleashing the knowledge too late and had tried to stop it. But he was only a human, and he was killed by his fellow humans.

I sighed, and nodded at Burris, who snapped out of his comfortable daydream. "I understand," I said. "And I'm not angry with you, but I can't allow you to kill Kamryn or myself."

Then I became.

My hands transformed into clawed monstrosities, my teeth extended into fangs and the entire length of my body sprouted a thick coat of grey fur. I gorged myself on the freely flowing energy from the dark side of the abyss and I grew to twice the size of my human form.

Bruckner and Burris stared at me in speechless horror. I expected them both to bolt and run, but they had been trained too well and they stood their ground.

Bruckner let out a sudden scream and emptied his entire clip into me at point-blank range. I was impossible to miss, and the bullets stung like angry bees as they burrowed into my fur. I grabbed the hand that wielded the rifle and clenched his fingers around it. Then I squeezed. His fingers exploded like sausages, and his mouth contracted into an "O". He began to make a long wailing sound that annoyed my ears, so I picked him up and held him close to my face.

"Oh GOD!" he cried. "Oh GOD!"

"Your God is not here," I bellowed. "Only I am." Then I tossed his sprawling body across the room. He sailed through the air like a wingless bird and crashed against the wall, where his body split down front and emptied itself onto the floor. The scent of human insides reached my nose and I breathed deeply, revelling in the fragrance.

I then turned to Burris, who stood paralysed. His lips quivered softly, and fear had made him incontinent. The acrid scent of urine stung my nose. Humans: they live in constant fear of death, yet it is the one thing they all have in common.

"You only die once," I said. "So feel it and embrace it." The confused look in his eyes made it obvious that he no longer understood my language, and I thought of a thousand worthwhile ways of making him die. Then I heard the sound of screeching tires on asphalt, and I knew that it was time to unbecome.

"I'm sorry", I said. "You deserved more than this," and I gently pulled the head off his body, like a ripe cherry off its stalk. It made a soft snap as it came off and blood poured freely from his neck.

---

Moments later, two police officers burst through the door. I recognised one of them as Lt. Amari Quinn, who had interrogated me at the station. The other one let out a "Holy SHIT! What the fuck happened in here?" He wore a badge reading Sgt O'Leary, and looked to be Quinn's junior by some ten years.

"I became," I explained. "-that's what happened. I was embraced by darkness, and then I became."

Sgt O'leary looked at Quinn and sighed. "There's no fucking way I can put that in a report!"

Quinn looked at me with a faint smile that I couldn't interpret. "I believe that Mr. Wolf is saying that he passed out when the shooting began. Isn't that right, Mr Wolf?"

"Whatever works for your report, Lieutenant."

Quinn pried the rifle from Bruckner's crushed hand. "The clip's empty. He fired quite a number of rounds before he died."

I checked myself. My clothes had torn when I transformed, but now I was back in human form and butt-naked. I was full of bruises, but otherwise unharmed; my fur had been too tough for the bullets to penetrate.

Sgt O'Leary staggered. The odour rising from the still pulsating body of Bruckner had gotten to him, and he made a series of retching noises, struggling not to puke. Quinn nodded at him. "I'll take it from here, sergeant" he said, and O'leary stormed outside. The sound of unsteady footsteps echoed down the hall, then disappeared.

"I'll put in my report that two rival gangs had a shootout... and we interrogated a couple of witnesses at the scene." He reached into his pocket and threw something at me in a slow arc - it was a box of matches.

"For the microfilm," he said. "Burn the damn thing."

"You knew about the microfilm?"

"Of course," smiled Lt. Quinn. "You're not the only one at work." He closed his notebook with a soft snap, then began walking towards the exit.

"What about ME!" I shouted at his back. "What am I in all of this? Witness, victim... criminal?"

He stopped by the door, then turned and smiled at me with an almost overbearing patience.

"Other, naturally... You're other." And his eyes flashed yellow for just a moment.

-- THE END --