“Alright kids, it’s been way more than seven minutes, time to get moving.” Wilma chided mirthlessly as the heavy steel door clicked open.

“Are– are you fucking kidding me, Wilma!?” Liam tried to shout, but it came out as more of a whisper-yell. For whatever reason, he just didn’t seem to be capable of physically making himself reach a volume that felt as if it might wake the dozing girl on top of him. “You locked us in here! For…” he glanced at the window behind his former coworker “What, eighteen hours?”

“Give or take, yeah.” She said, her affect empty of both culpability and sympathy. “But apparently that part’s over. She’s got quarters to get moved into, and you… well, frankly I don’t give a shit where you go, but you obviously can’t stay here.”

With a resigned sigh, Liam gently nudged Amelia awake.

“Mmmhh…? Yeah, sorry…” she replied on instinct, shaking her head. “What?”

“Ms… er.. Amelia, they’re telling us to leave.” he whispered to her gently.

“Huh, wha?” she asked, still groggy. “Weren’t we gonna *yawn* sprint for the door or something?”

“I mean, I was talking about it, but then you fell asleep again, and I didn’t really feel like moving too much, so now my legs are kind of asleep.” he assured, trying not to make it sound as if she had bungled his (admittedly shakily conceived) plan.

“Oh, okay. That makes sense.” Amelia sighed. He had not, in fact, successfully made it sound as if she hadn’t bungled his escape plan. She reached up to grab the table to pull and pull herself up. How many hours had it been since she had actually properly stood up? Regardless of the answer, she managed to steady herself, and reached a hand down towards Liam.

“You said your legs were asleep?” she offered. “Do you need help up?”

“No, I should be…” as he attempted to brace against the wall, he realized that this was yet another lie. He could still barely feel his legs. He would, in fact, need help getting up.

“Yeah,” he admitted defeatedly, and grabbed her outstretched hand. As she helped him to his feet, he noted with a sort of tepid uneasiness that the girl who seemingly apologized for her very existence at every opportunity was now standing there seemingly utterly unconcerned with the fact that she was nude from the waist down.

He stumbled a bit before he managed to take a few lurching steps towards the door, not thinking to let go of her hand as he did so. In a matter of seconds, he had lost his balance again and accidentally pulled her down on top of himself, leaving them both a bit stunned and sprawled on the tabletop.

“Christ, are we going to need a fucking furniture dolly?” Wilma groused. “I really don’t want to have to do this all day.”

“Sorry.” They both reflexively responded in unison, before glancing at the other with warm amusement. Amelia had already managed to stand back up, and Liam found himself steady on his feet again. Somehow, blood and sensation seemed to have rapidly returned to his lower extremities…

They held onto each other as they exited the room. Wilma grabbed Amelia by her free hand and began pulling her deeper into the building.

“C’mon kiddo. My meal break was supposed to start 15 minutes ago.” she commanded apathetically.

When Amelia and Liam let go of each other, it felt like something physically unraveling. Amelia was so tired of crying. Why did she want to do it again the second she could no longer feel his skin against hers?

She knew why. She had no reason to believe that she would ever see him again. He had said it himself: He almost certainly didn’t have the authorization to go anywhere inside this building, and wherever her quarters were, she couldn’t imagine they would be open to the general public. Knowing what she knew now, she imagined she was probably going to spend the foreseeable future in an unadorned glorified terrarium, scraping at the walls with bloodied fingers until Jardinez and his gaggle of freaks had extracted every bit of data they could from her and toss her aside like so much medical waste.

She had at least kept herself from the keening, soul-shattered sobs of the previous night, but nothing would stand in the way of the tear rolling down her reddening cheeks. In Liam’s arms, she had almost felt like a future was possible. Not a glamorous or revolutionary future, but a life nonetheless, full of little miracles to one who cared to look. 

Now every step felt like the first mile of a new death march.

—

No one stopped Liam from going to the fire stairs and walking up to B1. They weren’t deranged enough to make that require a keycard, just negligent enough that there was no fire alarm connected to the door, which worked out nicely for him in this instance.

Exiting the stairwell, Liam rounded another identical corner. The administrative wing was located in the part of the building that had been the actual basement of the Rainforest Cafe, prior to all the labyrinthine subterranean additions that Fabacea had brought with it. Everything here smelled like ammonia and water damage, from the old concrete floors to the cheap, stained drywall hastily erected to transform a storage room into an office complex.

The contractors had definitely done a fine job of making the place a chore to navigate. By the time he actually found the Personnel Services offices, he could swear he had passed the same trash bin seventeen times. The door looked predictably newer and more spotless than the grimy hallway that surrounded it, like the back entrance of a high-class boutique that opens into a trash-strewn back alley. The door was visibly ajar, so Liam simply invited himself in.

The room was far more lavish than the spartan accommodations of the rest of the building. Liam had avoided the admin wing like the plague since his initial hiring, and hadn’t seen it in its post-renovation state. It looked as much like a divorced mafioso’s flophouse as the office of a biocomputronics executive, with floor-to-ceiling fish tanks illuminated by blacklights and a fringed chez lounge arranged next to an overstocked liquor cabinet. Jardinez sat on the far side of an overdesigned mahogany desk with the Fabacea company emblem engraved into the front of it. His chair was a preposterous, oversized movie-prop-looking geometric fever dream. The impression of serene, domineering opulence was undercut only by the posture of Jardinez himself, who rested his face frustratedly in one hand while impatiently tapping his fingers with the other.

“Comemierda comelón! It took you long enough!” he snapped as Liam entered.

“Listen, I…” Liam began his planned diatribe before getting sidetracked. “Is that a fucking nurse shark? How much did that cost! Tyrece quit because you told him you couldn’t afford a minifridge to keep his insulin in! Fuck, this place is such a snake pit. I can’t believe I ever overlooked… well, any of this! I can’t believe I did your fucking bidding! For this!” his head was pounding, and his skin felt clammy.

Jardinez relaxed back into his usual posture of measured intensity, the pitiless grin returning to his lips. “Ah, you see Dr. Kuchak, that’s precisely why I was hoping you’d stop by for a chat. It seems you’re under the impression that you no longer work here, or that you’ve been relieved of your position.”

“I mean, you revoked my authorization. I can’t get in or out of essential facilities anymore. What was I supposed to assume?” Liam retorted.

“Oh for pity sake, Kuchak. You’re supposed to be our best and brightest! You can put two and two together.” Jardinez’s grin widened with condescension. 

“You joined the Clinical Testing team here with little to no idea what that would actually entail. You tried to back out as soon as you realized that there would be human experimentation involved, only to find yourself trapped in this building with no clear future prospects. That really doesn’t remind you of anyone else?”

—

The residential suites on B5 weren’t what Amelia was expecting. She wasn’t really certain what to expect from the residential level of a shady corporate biolab, to be honest, but it certainly wasn’t for them to be virtually identical to the cheap hotel room she had just left the previous day: crackling oversized TV screen, foldout sofa, queen bed, and a positively tiny kitchenette that she doubted more than one person at a time could possibly fit into.

Her duffle bag was already next to the couch. She was still covered inTC1-A residue, and didn’t particularly want to have to clean her new living space immediately after moving in, so she made a beeline for the bathroom to get herself cleaned up. After a moment freshening up and finding an acceptable outfit from among the crumpled clothing she had managed to stuff into her bag, she dropped lethargically onto the couch. It was softer than the wall in TC1-A, she supposed, even if not by as much as one would hope.

It was not, however, softer than Liam’s lap.

With a heavy sigh, she began to remove a few other of her most important belongings: a couple of DVD boxed sets, a well-worn 2047 edition of the Audubon Society Insects, Spiders, and Crustaceans field guide, and a framed photograph of a spiny-devil katydid one of her college friends had gotten her for Christmas.

She cracked the thoroughly creased spine of the book once again, and aimed to lose herself in its pages like she had so many times before.

—

Liam struggled to make sense of what Jardinez was telling him.

“Okay, fine?” he sputtered. “So what, are you going to inject me with R-depricase so you can take notes on how my limbs atrophy in real time? Pump me full of those S5-semiosteroids to see if I’ll regenerate if you chop me in half?” 

His mouth felt like sandpaper, and while the only things he had eaten in the past 36 hours had been a weed gummy and a single order of Waffle House french fries, he still felt the urge to eject whatever was left of them all over the pristine office.

“See now, Dr. Kuchak, you’re talking irrationally. You’re likely already experiencing severe withdrawal systems, because your treatment has already started.” Jardinez sat back in his chair. This was clearly the part of the interaction he had been rehearsing.

“What!?” Liam growled at him through prismatic migraine vision. “How is that– I mean when would you have had time to–”

“God, Kuchak.” Liam couldn’t tell how much of the contempt in his expression was affected. “See, this is how arrogant you fucking lab rats can get. You never once consider that we have other prospects running outside the scope of your specialization field. Liam, honestly, do you even know how many floors this building has, let alone what we’re doing with all of them?”

Liam felt like he was being batted around by a tornado. He wanted to protest, but his larynx felt like it was trying to embalm itself as it spoke. 

“I’m certain you can’t afford to sit and talk much longer, as much as there is still to say. Rest assured, we will catch up later, but for now, keep this in mind:” he mused, sliding a map of the facility with Amelia’s quarters labeled in red marker. “You have been earmarked to see if we could use you in the formation of a neurochemical dyad for months now. You were no doubt an excellent chemist, but for Project: Golden Goose, we’ve decided that you are uniquely suited to the role of fatherhood as well.”

Liam wanted to curse him out. He wanted to demand answers. He didn’t have the strength. All he could do was grab the diagram with a withering glare, and try his best to get to the marked destination without collapsing.

—

Amelia sat for what felt like days trying to return to the place of absolute bug fandom that had long been her refuge in times of stress. She flipped through page after page of her favorite beetles, and where a dizzying gallery of natures most extraordinary designs had stood before, she could only see grubs; wriggling and burrowing into skin. It didn’t look to her like new life. It looked like death. The kind of death that comes after an empty, pointless, lonesome life. 

Page after page of her life’s passion passed in front of her, and all she could parse from it was waste and entropy and silence. How many of these species had gone extinct in the time since this book was published? How many more would join them in her lifetime?

She felt cold. Colder than she ever had in her life. She couldn’t remember the word that she went googoo-eyed for just hours ago. Where there had just recently been a gentle, comforting penumbra cast over her mind, now the void stood with terrible, frosty clarity. Her soul exposed to the elements, she didn’t think she was physically capable of producing more tears that day.

Then the door to the suite clicked, and a haggard figure stood in the door, doubled over in pain.

Hubby. The word she had been looking for was hubby.

Liam was, admittedly, not the most practiced at interpreting other people’s facial expressions, but he was fairly certain he had never seen an expression that so precisely and specifically displayed the barely-suppressed urge to vault across the back of a sofa and leap into someone else’s arms. And Amelia discovered that she did, in fact, a couple of tears left in her tear ducts for a special occasion.

Liam learned two very important things about Amelia that night.

First: her favorite tv show was and had been for a long time the critically panned long-running adult animated comedy Lizard Lickers. Liam had never really watched Lizard Lickers, but it was full of hacky pop-culture references in obvious places, and the characters were all deeply obnoxious cardboard cutouts, and he was rapidly coming to the conclusion that he absolutely hated it. Unfortunately, that was was rendered moot by the second thing:

The shy little giggles Amelia would let out when they were together in TC1-A were cute. Heart-melting, even. But when something truly, properly hit her funny bone the snorting, convulsive cackle that she let loose made every song Liam had ever heard sound like nails on a chalkboard in comparison. The sound was infectious. Just seeing and hearing her experience joy like that hit him like a narcotic. Lizard Lickers would’ve been borderline unwatchable without her, but with her punctuating every third misfired punchline with the lively music of her raucous laughter, Liam could easily see himself pavlovian conditioning himself into enjoying it by accident.

By the end of the show’s extremely late-to-the party Star Wars Episode XIX parody episode, they were both thoroughly exhausted. The wall clock read 4 AM.

Amelia looked over drowsily at the bed, and grinned the grin of a half-asleep lioness. That bed would absolutely come to regret the day it was assembled soon enough, but for tonight, the overpowering coziness of the couch had them totally in its clutches and, not for the first time that day, they were powerless to escape.