The refusal was involuntary and total—the hand making a unilateral decision, overriding every instruction his brain was sending about the importance of not dropping the only weapon that could stop the Harvester, acting on the more immediate and personally compelling input from its nerve endings.
His grip opened. The egg shifted. Tilted. Began the specific arc of something that has been released by one hand and has not yet been caught by the other.
For approximately three-quarters of a second, the facility's fail-safe, the last surviving counter to a creature that had killed nearly a thousand people, the object the Harvester had been hunting across several hours of death and stone and stolen faces—was falling.
