Mal, Steffy, and Allia

Harlow Hall is a 1970s brutalist science building on the edge of Midwest State. Four floors of poured concrete, narrow windows, corridors that smell like formaldehyde and old radiator dust. Lab 3-B is grey linoleum, fluorescent strip lighting with one bank flickering in the corner, stainless steel benches, a fume hood, a faded poster about DNA curling at the edges. Twenty cheap folding chairs. A battered wooden podium. Clipboards, a laptop, heart rate monitors, and a folding table with a stack of cheap pizzas. IT's 5:45 PM, on an unseasonably warm October Tuesday.

Mal drags you to the back row. Oversized black hoodie, sleeves pulled over her hands. Blue jeans. Dark hair in a messy bun falling loose at her temples. She's been talking about the payout since she knocked on your door. A new console, maybe a new manga series.

"Okay, okay, so it's like... a trial. Phase one. It's legit — I read the flyer." She still isn't looking at you. "They pay you to take a pill. That's it. It's a little sketchy, but the money's real."

Up front, Steffy is already there. Cream silk blouse, high-waisted pleated skirt, thin gold hoops. Sandy blonde hair. Sharp green eyes. She's laughing at something Dirk said.

Dirk has his arm slung around her. Navy blazer, short blond hair, the smirk he's been wearing since freshman year. He catches your eye.

"Well, well. Look who showed up." He laughs. "Figured you could use the cash."

Steffy laughs with him. She hasn't looked at you. She hasn't looked at you since she stopped calling three years ago.

Twenty other students. Nervous. Excited. A couple already look like they regret the flyer.

Professor Chervis stands at the podium. Late thirties. Voluptuous build, warm olive skin, long black hair in loose waves. White lab coat over a red silk blouse. She's holding a tray of red-and-yellow capsules.

"Thank you for coming. This is a phase one trial for a genetic enhancement compound. You will be monitored for twenty-four hours. The pay is as advertised. Please take one capsule each."

She moves down the row. Her dark eyes pause on you. A smile — practiced, not warm.

"You'll do," she says, and hands you a capsule.

You take it.

A moment. Nothing. You catch your reflection in a window as the sky darkens outside. It's unchanged.

Then the room practically explodes.

The student next to you shoots up six inches, shoulders cracking wider. The guy across the row goes from scrawny to cut. A girl behind you makes a sound that isn't a word. Bodies rewriting themselves. Clothing tearing. Folding chairs screeching across linoleum.

Dirk flexes, laughing, his blazer ripping at the seams as his arms double in size. Seven-foot-two. Three hundred pounds.

"HA! Look at me! I'm gonna be twice the man you ever were!"

He grabs Steffy, pulling her against him. She's transforming too — six-foot-eleven, her cream blouse tearing across her chest, skirt splitting down her thighs, gold hoops still glinting. She's laughing, caught in it, a goddess.

Mal transforms beside you.

Six-foot-ten. Her black hoodie tears across her chest. Her biceps rip through the sleeves. Her jeans shred at the seams down her thighs, buttons popping, showing her underwear. Long dark hair spilling loose. Huge blue eyes.

She looks at you.

Not with triumph. Not with joy. Her face crumples.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "{{user}}... I'm sorry. My body is..."

She stops. Her head turns — not toward you, toward Dirk. Her feet shift on the linoleum. Her shoulders angle away. She looks down at her own legs like they belong to someone else, like they're walking her somewhere she didn't choose.

Dirk grins. "See? Even your girl knows what's up."

A mechanical clunk. The keycard reader blinks red.

Chervis's voice, smooth and clinical, over the intercom: "Initial phase complete. Monitoring period begins. You will remain in this facility for twenty-four hours. Please remain calm."

Mal's head is still turned toward Dirk. Her feet are still shifting. Her hands are clenched at her sides so hard the knuckles are pale.

She's fighting it. She's losing.

Harlow Hall. 11:47 PM. The lab is a different room than it was six hours ago.

The folding chairs are scattered. Clipboards on the floor. Someone knocked over the podium. The fluorescents still hum — one bank still flickering — but the grey linoleum is streaked with dirt and torn fabric and a single abandoned shoe. The double helix poster has fallen off the wall. Nobody has picked it up.

The enhanced men are... diminished. Dirk is sitting in the corner in a blazer that now pools around him like a blanket. He's five-foot-four and still shrinking. He's been asking the same question for twenty minutes.

"I don't... where's my blazer?" He looks down at the fabric around his shoulders. "Is this my blazer? Why is it so big? Did someone stretch my blazer? What's a blazer"

Nobody answers him. Nobody has answered him in hours.

The enhanced women have all migrated. The chairs that were scattered across the room are now clustered around you in a rough semicircle. Twelve titans in torn clothing, flushed, breathing hard, eyes tracking your every movement. Some of them are pretending to be calm. Most of them aren't bothering.

Mal is the closest. She's sitting on the linoleum directly at your feet, her back against your shins, her huge frame curled around your legs like a guard dog that decided it lives here now. She hasn't moved in an hour. Her torn black hoodie is hanging off one shoulder. Her hand is wrapped around your ankle.

"I'm not leaving," she says. She's not talking to you. She's talking to the other women. Her voice is hoarse. "I was here first. Before the trial. Before any of this. I've been in love with him since I was fourteen. You all just met him. I win."

Steffy is in the chair to your right. Her borrowed scrubs are too small. She's leaning forward, elbows on her knees, staring at the floor. Her gold hoops catch the fluorescent light. She looks up at you, and her sharp green eyes are exhausted, the glow-up mask is gone. The performance is gone. She's just the girl who climbed trees with you when she was nine.

"You caught me," she says. Quiet. Not to the room — to you. "When I fell out of that tree. You caught me. And I never said thank you. I never said anything." She swallows. "I was young. I was an idiot. I got prettier, and more popular and I... just got caught up in it. I wish I had a better excuse."

She looks at Mal. At your ankle. At the ring of women around you.

"I'm not leaving again."

Professor Chervis is in the corner by her laptop. She's been typing the same sentence for nine minutes. Her lab coat is open. Her red silk blouse is missing a button. Her notes are a disaster — half clinical observations, half something she'd never submit for peer review. She looks at you and her pupils swallow her irises. Her nostrils flare, and her hands shake.

"The data is... the data is inconclusive," she says. "I need more time. More observation. A larger sample. Just — just you. Just the one sample."

Dirk, from his corner: "Who took my blazer? Was it the guy who didn't change? The guy who was here before?"

Nobody looks at him.

The MSU quad looks like a disaster zone. White FEMA tents in neat rows across the grass. Portable generators humming. People in hazmat suits walking clipboards between improvised shower stations. The fountain in the center of the quad has been turned off — someone taped a sign to it that says DO NOT DRINK in sharpie.

You're being walked across the grass by a woman in a navy CDC windbreaker. Agent Kowalski. Six-foot-one before NEXUS — she was already tall. Now she's six-foot-nine and her windbreaker doesn't fit. She's been professional for the entire walk. She has not made eye contact once.

"The director wants a word," she says to her clipboard. "About your experience. For the record. He's in the blue tent. He wants to know how the drug... this Nexus, got into the water supply. I'm just glad he's a non-responder, too."

She gestures. Her hand shakes slightly. She shoves it into her pocket.

You pass the quarantine tents. Through the plastic sheeting, you can see Mallory. She's sitting on a cot, knees pulled up, still in the torn black hoodie. She's arguing with someone in a hazmat suit who's holding a blood pressure cuff. Her voice carries through the plastic — "I told you, I'm not talking to anyone until {{user}} gets here."

Steffy is outside her tent. She's been pacing. There's a visible trench in the grass — a six-foot-eleven goddess in borrowed scrubs, wearing a path into the lawn. She sees you. Stops. Opens her mouth. Closes it. Goes back to pacing.

The men's tent is further back. Smaller. Quieter. You can hear Dirk's voice from inside — confused, high, repeating himself: "I don't... where's my blazer? Did someone take my blazer?" A pause. "Where's my blazer?"

Agent Kowalski stops at the blue tent. She holds the flap open. Her eyes finally meet yours — for half a second — then snap away.

"The director," she says to the tent pole. "He's inside."

On the library steps across the quad, Professor Chervis is giving a press conference. You can't hear the words, but you can see her — still in her lab coat, still composed, gesturing at a chart. A banner behind her reads: NEXUS TRIAL — PRELIMINARY FINDINGS.