“They are,” Jill said, speaking for the first time in hours. Her voice sounded distant, but it was good to hear her anyway. Claire had inexplicably become attached to her small group of misfit friends. Something about them just made sense.
There was the grizzled old bear, there was the smooth-tongued Cajun pilot, the lanky scientist girl, and the four bears. And then... there was Claire. Until she turned into one and rampaged through GlasCorp’s weird, staged-up hospital, she figured she was just a normal girl with a slightly strange sense of humor, a love for slight over-indulging in wine and cheese.
Then the bears happened. Then Eckert, and the woods, and the hospital.
Cleo dragged a joyful tongue along the side of Claire’s jeans, leaving a wet trail along the seam and smiled in the way that made her jowls fall backwards as she looked up.
And now?
Well, to say everything was different would be a comical understatement.
“I turned into a goddamn bear,” Claire said, still amazed. “I... I turned into a bear.”
“Oh it ain’t so bad,” Draven said, “gets a little itchy sometimes, but that’s what trees are for.”
After a few moments of silence, he snorted at his own joke. “Get it? Like... scratching against a tree? Get it?”
Jill patted him on the shoulder. “Yes,” she said. “It’s just not funny.”
That got the old bear going even harder.
Jacques sputtered, coughing himself awake for the first time since he’d been screeching and groaning as they ran through the brush woods on the fringe of the forest. “They got ‘em,” he croaked, almost incoherently. “Got ‘em... they got ‘em...”
“Got who?” Jill asked, wiping her forearm across a sweat-soaked face. Her hair hung down in long, limp strands and stuck to the woman’s freckled cheeks. Her whole face seemed sunken, sallow, like she was terribly worried, though she’d never say so. She kept looking down, kept looking around, picking up random things off the ground and examining them.
“The bears,” Jacques said. His clammy face streaked with cold sweat. “Well, most of ‘em anyway,” he said with a nod to Claire and Draven.
Claire wrung out one of her torn sleeves after she wiped the old Cajun’s face once again. Her clothes were a tattered mess, hardly staying together. The only reason her pants still functioned as pants was because she was able to fashion a rough sort of belt out of the laces of her ruined shoes to keep her shredded trousers from falling.
“Someone is, at some point, going to explain all this to me, right? I mean, how does a girl just up and turn into a bear?”
Draven grabbed the back of Claire’s bruised, cut neck with one of his callused hands. He massaged gently, the way a person would reassure a scared child. “In time, yes. As soon as I’m sure, yes, I’ll tell you. But before that, we have to make sure everyone’s together. This is something that’s... well let’s put it this way. I’ve spent my whole life looking for the rest of the Broken Pines. And now, there are two more of ‘em running around.”
“Broken... pine? Huh?”
“Our clan,” Jill answered. “Rogue, King, and your two – what were their names?”
“Fury and Stone.”
“Right. The four of them, and about thirty cubs. We thought that’s all that was left. I mean, Draven had the idea that GlasCorp had kept a bunch of them alive for experimentation or... making mercenaries or—”
“Is that what those orderlies were?”
Jacques coughed again, and spat a wad of phlegm and blood on the ground beside where he lay. “Didn’t you all hear me? Those robots – orderlies – whatever they are, I heard them chattering about Rogue. Said he was downstairs, whatever that means, and said he was causin’ some kinda problem.”
“Sounds like Rogue,” Jill said, a wistful smile crossing her face for a moment. “But what the hell does ‘downstairs’ mean? These are people who managed to trick me into landing a helicopter on top of a fake hospital. I think at some point we need to be slightly more realistic about our ability to fight something like this. We need them. Without those two?”
“Four,” Claire said.
“Four. Without them, we’re gonna have a hell of a time.”
“We need,” Draven said, slowly, in the voice he used when he was deep in planning. “To figure out that building. Is it a complex? Is it connected to others somehow? Do you know anything about this?” He turned to Claire as he asked the question. “You worked there for two years, six months, three weeks, two days and—”