Lyra woke up screaming. It wasn't her voice, though it did sound vaguely familiar, but that hardly registered because something else was much, much more wrong. Pan wasn't there. There was a daemon nearby, shivering on the edge of the bed, but it wasn't Pan, and Pan wasn't anywhere near that she could tell.
"Where is he?" she screamed. "Where'd you put him!"
Scientists in white lab coats surrounded the bed, started exclaiming over her, but they didn't explain anything. The pain wasn't any less than it had been a second ago either. Somehow, she shoved it down and tried to figure out what was going on.
To start, she wasn't her. Lyra stared down at what should have been her hands, but they were darker and slightly too large. Her neck was cold, like some of her hair was chopped off, and now she recognized the sound of her voice - the sound of the voice that came from her throat. Roger's.
The daemon on the end of the bed, the one that wasn't Pan, was also Roger's. Acaclea. She was a kitten, curled up and whimpering.
Lyra tried to calm down, but her breathe came quick and panicky. What did she remember? They'd been taken to the caught, and taken the horrible clean laboratory with the two cages. Her and Pan and Roger and Acaclea, each pair put in a cage, and weird wires attached to all their heads. There had been some sort of shot, a drug, so they stopped fighting. Then...then a lever was pulled, and a flash of light that she thought might have been only in her head, and waking up without Pan.