Ishaan Thakkar

DROPPED

~

Carrie Liu

DROPPED

~

Lana Lopatin

0. NOVOKUZNETSK.

The air smells of hay and saltwater, a thousand miles from the nearest ocean. In her right hand dangles a half-chewed lobster tail, so raw that it still twitches, the dewey moisture on its exoskeleton collecting sediment and dirt and strands of loose, dying grass as it slaps against the ground. When she slaps it against the ground. The night sky is empty tonight because where there used to be a sky now hangs something else entirely, devoid of jets or clouds or stars, so dark that it renders distance meaningless. So dark that it feels immediately above her and completely non-existent at the same time. If she were to reach out her arm, what would she discover: the vacuum of space or the belly of an alien beast?

Elina Shishkin does not know it yet, but she is not dreaming.

She waits at the edge of the tall grass, striking the dirt with the lobster, her attention shifting between the five men in the open field in front of her and the skeletal silhouette of the radio tower beyond them made of metal so twisted and corroded that it can no longer reflect light. Of the five men in the field, only three are standing, and those three carry weapons that she can not immediately identify. The other two are below them, kneeling in the mud, their heads bowed. Completely still. Elina does not understand why she can see these things so clearly while the rest of the world has disappeared so completely around her. She does not understand why she knows that she can not run.

The creature in the sky twitches. Closer than it was before. Her father can feel it too, and that is why Elina knows she can not run, why she knows there is nothing left to return to even if she tried. She wonders if he is aware of her presence. He stands out in the field with one arm reaching to what was once the sky. She can not see his hand. Lost to the void.

When the light comes from the top of the withering radio tower, as bright and as sudden as a point-blank camera flash. It blinds her, paints the inside of her eyes white. Hopelessly sterile, she thinks, although it will be a long time before she hears that word for the first time. Above her, the creature thrashes furiously as if injured, and just as the last of the radio light dissipates into the summer air, she can feel it reach down through itself. Plunging. She does not move when she feels it land next to her, so unimaginably immense and heavy that it has no shape and so small that it is invisible. So quiet that when it whispers to her, it sounds like a gust of wind on an undiscovered planet. So unreal that it vanishes without ever having existed at all.

The first kneeling man dies without making a sound.

III. CATASTROPHE THEORY.

After he burned the newspaper, Milan stared blankly at its ashes, which he had arranged into a small, glowing pile on his carpet, and contemplated what to do next. The smoke detector of his motel room, which was nested on top of the ashes, still blinked every so often, and each time it did, a small spark would ooze out of the broken cables that had survived the short migration from the ceiling to the floor, floating in the smoke-saturated air for just a few seconds until it either winked out of existence or softly came to rest on the ash pile before turning to ash itself.

The other occupants of the motel hadn't shown up to complain – yet. He'd cracked his window open so he wouldn't suffocate when he lit the fire, which meant that anybody looking to complain about anything would be able to point to the steady stream of smoke pouring from the back of the building. The ash pile pulsed with living energy, shifting and moving at the mercy of the winter wind, which poured through the open window like fog entering a river valley.

The Rossiyskaya Gazeta. The defector's Bible, Milan thought. How had they fallen so far as to enable this kind of behavior? The article was hers, of course, and while the blame landed squarely on her for writing it, the fact of the matter was that it wouldn't exist without encouragement, however indirect. Had they approved it beforehand so she could alleviate any suspicion from her secondary employer? Had they meant to intervene but failed? The answer didn't matter. The article was rot.

They were all rot, but he was a redwood.

A knock on the door, and then on the open window. Both of no concern at all. When the people who needed him finally showed up, they wouldn't knock.

+++

The elevator stopped at Deck Seven suddenly and with great resistance as if it had failed to triumph over a larger mechanical force that Lana wasn't able to understand. When the doors opened, they did so slowly and deliberately, crawling on their polished tracks as if they were afraid of revealing what was on the other side yet aware that they had no choice in the matter.

Below her, so awfully far below her, the pale creature continued to glow, reminding her that whatever was behind any door she opened from now on had the possibility of being even worse.

But when the elevator doors finally finished their retreat, Lana found no monster, no deformity. The corridor in front her glistened, reveled in its sickly modernity in the same way the deck with the Dining Room oozed its kitschy horrors like pus from an infected wound. Again, there was no obvious source to the light that filled the space in front of her. The shiny off-white walls bore no wooden doors and the floor – well, there was something on the floor, but it wasn't a carpet. Not in the traditional sense, at least. She exited the elevator, abandoning Lincoln's suitcase and keycard. As she walked, the covering crinkled beneath her like plastic yet stuck to the soles of her shoes as if the entire thing was smeared with a kind of translucent adhesive. Slowly, she bent down to inspect it, stopping just short of touching it after realizing that the floor covering, whatever it was – she was having genuine trouble making sense of it in her head and giving it a name – was also wrapped around the bottom of the walls like a protective membrane. A contamination barrier.

She picked up her pace, unsure of what to do next. As acutely aware as she was of her situation – of all her situations – Lana was tired of telling herself she couldn't run. She'd been a bottomless pit of pathetic despair since she'd been caught in Saint Petersburg. For as long as she could remember. There were times in her life when it had helped her tremendously, especially during the first weeks of her acclimation into the new world she'd found herself lost in just a few years ago. And, of course, there were times when it debilitated her ability to function so completely that she had trouble remembering if those times even existed in the first place. As if the pit inside her had crawled out of her throat while she was sleeping and injected itself into her surroundings until there was nothing left but that unfathomable darkness, the great eraser, in all its glory and monstrosity.

Lana could feel it now, gnawing and churning desperately. Pulling through her like a bullet trapped in an unnamed organ, reaching for that achingly familiar white light.

If she had been seen entering the laboratory – and there was no doubt that they had – they would eventually find her. But the answer to the question of what form "they" would take escaped her. The Mariner, as far as Lana could tell, was adequately staffed with security at best. Any staff member of relative importance would have been assigned to deal with either the unknown situation in the convention center and any staff member of real importance would have been sent to the bottom of the ship. She could only imagine that would be the case – but it left yet another question unanswered: if the ship's puppet masters were sending their most qualified security personnel to monitor creatures that couldn't walk on their own, what would they send to stop her? State secrets were something she was familiar with, but only to a certain extent. After all, the world she inhabited was less of a secret and more like a hazy obstruction. A shadow that distorted the world it encompassed until what was once static and understandable became volatile and gray. Lana realized she had no way of immediately knowing whether or not what she saw in the laboratory was government-sanctioned, but understanding the difference was crucial to determining how much danger she'd put herself in. If she was detained or executed by an American agency, there was no telling how Moscow would respond. She was, for all intents and purposes, and depending on who you asked, either an innocent businesswoman or a foreign national who had gone missing under mysterious circumstances. An act against her could be considered an act of aggression against the Russian Federation.

Of course, that assumption rested on an incredibly unstable foundation: that somebody was looking for her in the first place. Unlikely.

And then there was Lincoln. The other side of the coin. There was no way to guarantee that he was unaware of what was happening. Lana had asked herself repeatedly if he knew too much about her business. Now it was beginning to seem like she had her arrow positioned for a bullseye, but had it pointed toward the wrong target. Was that it all along? Was there any other rational explanation for the behavior she'd observed from him? So eager. So young. So successful.

So dangerous, and she doubted he could even grasp the full extent of that. If the American government captured her, they would eventually figure out who she was even if Moscow had only been pretending to search for her. But she had given Lincoln a fake name – she'd given everyone on the boat a fake name. To employees of Helius Meditech, she was no missing foreign national. She was a security threat who happened to be traveling in international waters. If they were willing to break the laws of their country and of nature so horrifically in the name of science and entertainment, what would they be willing to do to her?

Would Milan be there with them when they found her?

If Lincoln knew about the lab, there was little doubt in Lana's mind that Milan knew as well, either as a result of Lincoln's excitability and willingness to overshare or Milan's own uncanny and seemingly unexplainable tendency to know more than he should at all times. But her discovering the lab was almost certainly not part of her superiors' plans, which meant that if it was part of Milan's, something had gone wrong. Disturbed the usual chain of command. She thought of the unfamiliar Russians that surrounded him in the Dining Room. Of Milan's eyes. Of a black car in Saint Petersburg.

If they wanted her dead, why didn't they kill her then and there?

Before her capture, Lana had never heard of Helius Meditech. The men who traveled with her to California were the same men who gave her Lincoln's information and the objectives of her mission. The same men who, after that mission was completed, were going to kill her. This didn't come as a surprise; Lana knew her position on their radar was somewhere in between "necessity" and "traitor," and they would act accordingly. Take her out for one last ride, a ride that only she could facilitate, before sending her to the junkyard to be crushed and melted into scrap metal. But they were, at the very least, familiar to her, not just from the trip from Russia, but from years past. Not that they would be gentle at the end. But they represented something concrete and certain. And despite the panic she felt when faced with that certainty, she was able to find some peace in it, too – at least until she boarded the ship, at which point the pit within her began to grow again. As if on queue. She'd seen it happen before in other people, but she had yet to find someone who let it manifest in the way she did. Who allowed it to consume them.

During that period of intermission in between Saint Petersburg and boarding, Milan existed solely in the periphery, appearing only once or twice in the building at which they stayed during those transitory weeks. Never speaking to Lana directly. Similar to the other men because he was familiar – but only for his actions – yet, in the end, irrelevant. He wouldn't be boarding the Sunlit Mariner with them. He wouldn't be there for the end.

And so when Lana finally did step foot onto the ship, she assumed the other men were following her from a distance and that she would never need to see Milan ever again. How was it that the opposite occurred?

Milan, the messenger. Milan, the conductor. Milan, who brought with him unfamiliar men and no clear purpose. But was it foolish of her to write off the other men as mere irregularities? Despite the lack of information she had on them, there was one clear link between the men in the Dining Room and the men in the apartment, and that was their connection with Milan, whatever it was. They were unfamiliar to Lana, but they were most likely already well acquainted with each other.

Milan, who was well-known for his determination and utter viciousness. For his solitude. Not for his ability to carry out coordinated missions.

The corridor seemed to stretch without end in front of her in a way that suggested it wasn't a part of the same structure as the ship. Like it was independent of the space and time that surrounded it. If she drilled a hole into the plastic sheen of the wallpaper, would she find drywall and concrete or discover that she was trapped in an infinite rectangular expanse hovering without logic over the Pacific ocean with no ship in sight?

That repeating pattern straight out of an over-the-counter night terror. Those off-white walls, blank. Infertile. A distinct lack of any kind of furniture: no couches, no decorative tables. No impressions on the plastic floor where those things should have been, suggesting that they either never existed or that they were removed before the plastic was laid down. She was unsure why, but Lana had the feeling that if she rounded the wrong corner – if a corner ever did appear – she would find them all piled against a door. Like a barricade.

Lana wondered how long she'd been walking. Not long at all, clearly, which meant that she'd be cornered by at least half a dozen security guards, weapons drawn, within the next half-minute at the very most. She didn't see any cameras in the lab or the elevator, but she also wasn't looking for any. There was no way that they simply didn't exist, not when both of those facilities could be easily accessed by any jackass with a stolen keycard. And if there were cameras in the hallway – which there definitely were – they were well-hidden. Embedded in the walls, maybe.

Then, as if it had always been there and she had just failed to notice, the corridor split. One sign, crooked, although new, plastered to the wall. Above it, an arrow, pointing: The Theater.

She hated the ship so fucking much.

The floor still crunched beneath her as she followed the sign. There it was, right as she turned the corner: a set of unassuming glass doors, nearly identical to the ones on the Deck Nine. No sign above them. Guarded by a man whose strongest weapon appeared to be the metal identification tag pinned to his jacket. Was he there to greet her, or was the event in the convention center that Lincoln fled from worse than she had originally presumed? Was the theater somehow an extension of the convention center?

The security guard was far from imposing, but he was large enough to block a significant portion of what was behind the glass – or, more accurately, that would have been the case had the doors not been tinted black in the first place. Couldn't have been any older than thirty. Dressed like somebody who knew their job description on paper but thought they would be able to have a night off while people either drunkenly waltzed around the ship or went to their rooms to get some extra sleep. Somebody who wasn't prepared to be pulled directly into the action, whatever that action was. What threw Lana off the most about him was that once they made eye contact as she continued down the hall, he didn't reach for a radio or pull out a hidden pistol. When he saw her, he twitched. Why?

"Ma'am, where did you come from?"

"The Dining Room," she responded with genuine confusion. "What's wrong? Has something happened?"

Lana immediately recognized the face he put on. The face of a man ready to parrot orders from his higher-ups without hesitation. The face of truly not understanding the world around you because it's grown too monstrous to recognize.

"We're moving all passengers to the theater until further notice."

Oh. "What's happened?"

"We can't go into detail at this time."

That was fine by her until the man opened the door, failing to hide how much he struggled with unlocking it. Revealed the staggering amount of movement behind it. A school of well-dressed fish trapped inside of a fish bowl that was slowly losing water.

When Lana walked through the door, she caught a glimpse of the man's belt. On his left hip was an empty clip meant for a radio.

The theater was as large as the convention center from what Lana could tell through the mass of people that instantly surrounded her, painted black and adorned with red curtains and seating. The room smelled as though it had been recently cleaned, perhaps in preparation for the cruise, but was now soaked with sweat and saliva. A hyper-sterilized environment interrupted by something brutally human. How had they managed to round up hundreds of people in the few minutes it had taken for Lana to leave the convention center and come back up the elevator after leaving the lab? The security guard's reaction made it seem like he hadn't expected to see another person outside of the theater. Like he thought everybody had already been contained.

Lana knew that the question she was asking herself was the wrong one. The how of the situation didn't matter, but now, trapped in the center of an enormous cruise ship after escaping the horrors it contained in its glowing nucleus, the why was too much to bear.

Was Milan waiting for her? If he was, did it matter? She doubted he would try and evade the ship's security to waltz around the Dining Room, but it wasn't as if she was safe if he was in the theater, either. If he had the chance, he would make an attempt on her life, witnesses or not.

But Lana was not dead yet, and that created its own set of questions.

The deal between Helius Meditech and her "construction company" was finished, but that didn't change the fact that the plan had been completely foreign to her in the first place when it was introduced to her. Not the way things are supposed to be done. Her work required time and contextualization, and her superiors understood this – she was the best at what she did for a reason. The living, breathing embodiment of the power of persuasion. She couldn't remember an instance when she'd been given less than two months to prepare for a mission. Milan gave her less than two weeks. Milan, who, under normal circumstances, executed people, not plans.

The only rational explanation for his sudden consolation of power was a disturbance in the hierarchy. But the only reason why things had turned south within her business was because she'd been the issue all along.

Did he go rogue?

The theater went silent for a moment as the ship rumbled from within. From below. Lana knew she was the only one who could see the white glow seeping through the carpet.

~

Akane

The ship, for once, was quiet.

Whispers wavered over the crowd on deck seven, panic and fear still trembling amongst the minds of all of the attendees. That hint of excitement that once danced along the edges of the crowd after the electrocution was now no longer. Instead, tension strung everyone together, their thoughts of the future being tainted by anxiety. It gripped them so tightly, suspending them in time as all they could do was wait in agony.

When the crowd had first heard the announcement that deck seven was going to be on lockdown, there were protests. Questions of why or who or how were flung into the air, either beckoning to be answered or simply just an expression of anger. The deck was a mess of confusion and trepidation and rage, but any answers were refused. The only statements returned were the cliché reassuring phrases of "don't worry" and "everything will be okay." They didn't seem to do much but further the outrage. No one even knew what was happening. Was there a threat that was endangering their lives? Was there an incident elsewhere on the ship that required them to stay put? The next day, would they still be alive and healthy? And that unknown was what terrified them all.

But for Akane, it wasn't what she didn't know that scared her—it was what she did.

Akane stood in front of the main elevator of the floor, surveying her surroundings and desperately trying to ease her frantic heart rate. As a security guard, she was immediately called to watch the elevator and guarantee that no one left the floor. But inside of her, a tornado raged. It was the whirlwind of so many emotions, wreaking destruction in every corner of her mind.

At the top layer of emotions, Akane felt sadness. The lives that she had discovered in that room once belonged to real people. People with hopes and ambitions, with the heartwrenching ability to feel pain and misery, with loved ones who cared about them. Who probably still do. Now, they lay there, a shell of their former selves, helpless to fight against the malicious manipulation. Now, they can do nothing but simply count their breaths, desperately waiting for their last one.

But even with that despair circling in Akane's mind, continually bringing up the lives of those humans being brutally drained away, it still couldn't remove that sense of guilt tumbling in her head. What Akane did was reckless, and she knew that. She had gone against all of her lessons and everything her brother had taught her, just to willingly thrust herself into the forefront of chaos. She could recall every single time it was drilled in her head to stick to the plan and aim for perfection, but she made the conscious decision to ignore it all. Akane could feel the disappointment of her brother weighing down on her shoulders, hearing his voice ask how she had fucked up so badly. She was the one who messed with the tides, and now, possibly, she would soon realize the consequences of her actions.

However, she felt something deeper than sorrow and guilt. There was something else, that burned brighter than all of that emotion, and Akane knew what it was: at the center of it all, the force that was catapulting her thoughts into demolition was anger. Simply thinking about the horrors she had found in that room made Akane want to curl up her fists and scream of the injustices of the world. Whoever was responsible, they were monsters.

But still, she stood here, powerless against the forces of those same monsters who controlled the ship. Akane glanced at her watch, more of a way to occupy her mind rather than check the time. She couldn't wipe those memories of the room from her mind, and now more than ever, they stained her thoughts. Whatever was happening, it had to be related to the room hidden away in the shadows of the Lower Deck. It had to do with those humans, slowly being destroyed from the inside out, their lives And at its very core, it all came back to Akane. It was her single action—pressing the button—that plummeted the ship straight into the flood.

A different version of the universe existed out there, one where the thought of exploring the Lower Decks never tempted her. Another one where the moment she saw the encompassing darkness, she turned around and forgot all about it. And yet another one where she entered the room, but made the conscious decision to leave before anything happened.

But this Akane wasn't in any of those universes. She was unable to reverse what she did. She pressed the button. End of story.

"Akane."

The hardness of her name voice jolted Akane from her thoughts, and she looked up to the eyes of another security guard. She recognized him on the first day of the training, when all the guards had met each other. His figure was strong and burly, like a stereotypical security guard. When she first met him, Akane had remembered thinking that his face showed proof of age. Akane could tell he had lived through a lot. She had also seen him a couple of times around the boat, talking to one of the featured speakers or higher-ups of the industry. He had close connections with BioTech, and Akane could tell they regarded him with just a little more respect, extending him a little more trust. So what was he doing, talking to her?

"Come with me," he said.

A pit formed at the bottom of Akane's stomach, beginning to gnaw its way into her worries. Those three words brought Akane back to that scene, what she had done. This had to be because of that.

"What's going on?" Akane asked calmly, disguising any panic in her voice with a thick veil of confusion. She tried to remember the trick she usually used when she started to panic—to center her focus on the task at hand. But now, that task was completely shredded in the turmoil, lost to the disorder unfolding in front of her. Akane's reality has become her worst fears: spontaneity.

The security guard remained silent but his eyes narrowed slightly, staring at Akane with a menacing gaze of stone. When she looked into his eyes, she was met with a mask of intimidation, one that blocked out anything else except his silent threats. He challenged her, begging for resistance: Don't come with me and you'll see what happens.

Akane nodded. Any opportunity to escape now was futile. She had to escape this situation by tackling it head on.

The security guard led Akane past the panic-ridden crowd, through the long hallway, and down a flight of stairs, but Akane couldn't focus on anything except her rapid thoughts. She was even more certain now that they knew. After all, how could they not? Realizations that Akane had never previously considered now flooded her mind, and she cursed inwardly and how careless she had been. There had to have been cameras. Especially inside such an important room. Hell, there were probably fingerprint defectors too. She was literally at a technology convention; no possibility was off the table. How could she be so careless? For the last 24 years of her life, every last move she took was planned out to perfection, and every single action was analyzed in all angles to guarantee its effectiveness. And within those 24 years, not once had she faltered in doing so. How was it that in this mission, out of all of them—one she took on as an easy cash grab—was the one where she finally slipped up? Just one misguided action, and her entire life's work was now at jeopardy. Akane knew by this point that they would interrogate her, but now there was an entirely different issue at hand. The debate between telling truth or fiction ricocheted back and forth inside of her mind.

Before she even realized she had reached the destination, Akane found herself standing in front of an office door. She tried peering through the tinted windows, but was simply met with a grim reflection of her own face. She made up her mind: lie until there was evidence not to.

The security guard turned around to face Akane, holding out his hand.

"Please hand me any electronics you may have before you enter."

Reluctantly, Akane dug out her phone and walkie-talkie. She hesitated, debating for a second whether or not she should give up the rest of the gadgets hidden in her belt. She decided against it—they could come in handy. The security guard didn't seem to question it. He simply nodded and opened the door in front of them, revealing a mahogany desk and two leather chairs, one which was occupied by a man who Akane had only previously seen in pictures. Everything about him seemed put-together: confident posture, freshly-ironed suit, and an unfaltering look of determination striking from his eyes. Akane stepped into the room and the security guard closed the door, leaving Akane and the man alone in the office.

"Good evening, Akane." His voice was smooth, calming even. He seemed to be inviting her in with his words, letting her know that everything was in control, that there was nothing to be worried about. "I'm Mr. Han."

Akane already knew that, of course. "Nice to meet you, Mr. Han."

"Please take a seat." He gestured towards the seat across from him. "I don't want to make this longer than it needs to be. Just answer my questions, be honest, and you'll be on your way in no time."

Akane nodded, making sure not to give anything away in her face. She had been questioned countless times before, and this would be no different, she tried telling herself. But Akane knew that those were lies. Usually, Akane knew she was the one with the upper hand, the information hidden beneath her sleeve granting her the leverage. After all, her entire job was to obtain information. But right now, Akane was the one in the dark. She was the one forced to analyze Mr. Han and deduce exactly what he knew that she knew.

"You were seen on the security cameras earlier today entering the elevator," Mr. Han started, his voice shifting slightly from his soothing timbre to a more direct, matter-of-fact tone. He paused, looking at Akane like he was gauging her reaction. Akane's face remained steady, and he moved on. "I wanted to ask you about it. As you know, that elevator is restricted to only a few select individuals. Can you explain what you were doing down there?"

"Of course," Akane nodded. He was starting off basic. "After that engineer got electrocuted, things on the boat were pretty hectic. I ran into Mr. Gardener, and he asked me to do him a favor. He gave me his key card to put a case in the storage room."

Mr. Han nodded knowingly, his expression remaining unchanged. His face was a mask. "Mr. Gardener told me the same thing earlier. I was wondering, did anything happen down there?"

Akane faltered. Did he know about what she had done? And if he did, that also meant he knew exactly what those winding corridors were disguising. Deep down, Akane knew what the answer was. She could feel it in her gut, nagging at her as an incessant warning. It was fanning the flames of fury within her, telling her to synthesize her pent-up anger and let it fuel her body. But a tiny part of her resisted it, refusing to believe it just yet. She didn't want to accept the fact that the man sitting in front of her was an utter piece of shit.

"Akane." Mr. Han interjected, his tone reminiscent of a warning. "Remember. Just be honest."

Akane opened her mouth to speak, uncertainty dotting her mind. Was she to tell the truth and risk getting punished, possibly sacrificing her entire mission? Or lie and hope they wouldn't uncover the truth beneath her crafted facade? Possibilities flew through her mind. Akane was fairly certain that Mr. Han knew the truth behind what had happened—by his body language, by his rigid tone, and by the way his words tugged at her in like they were tempting her to tell him the information he craved.

But even still, Akane didn't know for sure. That tiny sliver doubt was dangling on a thread, but it still remained, taunting her. "Nothing happened. I went down to the storage room, and I—"

"Akane." This time, when he said her name, his voice cut in like a blade. The edges to his tone were sharp and threatening, beginning to unearth his layers of hostility. His gaze turned icy as he stared straight into her eyes, harsh and unblinking. In a split second, any prior kindness he had displayed was now frozen in his antagonizing glare. Akane realized now that everything he chose to display on his face was intricately manufactured. He used his expression as a way of manipulation, exhibiting exactly what he wanted the audience to perceive in order to precisely manufacture their thoughts and emotions. "I've told you many times: just tell the truth. I guarantee you that nothing bad will come out of it. This is not for my sake, but yours. Believe me, I already know the truth."

Akane froze, the words she was about to say suspended on her tongue. There it was in words—he knew the truth. Akane simply sat there, the heavy truth weighing her down. She had known from the beginning that he was, and she forced herself to reject that idea. Of course, she was right. He knew about what had happened, and yet he was still here.

Mr. Han watched Akane carefully. When he saw her silence, he continued. "I simply care about the wellbeing of you and the other residents. This is all simply for safety precautions. I just ask that you don't tell anyone what you saw. Is that possible?"

And just by looking at that gaze in his eyes, Akane's stomach turned. Right then, he revealed his true persona that the walls he built around him shielded, a subtle glimpse into his cruel nature. Looking at him, Akane knew that he didn't care at all. Those lives that had been so ruthlessly clutched in the hands of evil, those humans beings suffering through the torture of each painful breath—he didn't care about it at all. He just wanted to hide his precious little secret so the world wouldn't think of him and the company he stood under as the monster he was. He and whoever was responsible could continue hiding under this facade, pretending to be kind, virutoustic people, claiming to care about humanity when behind closed doors, humanity was the one thing they lacked.

"Fury pulsed through Akane's blood and she stared at Mr. Han straight into his beady eyes. "No. No. Not for people like you."

Akane expected his face to morph into anger, astonishment, or even awe. Yet his face remained unchanged. He simply sat there, staring back at Akane, his gaze steadfast and relentless. Then, Mr. Han laughed.

Akane was the one who found herself taken aback. Laughter—she knew what it meant. She thought she had the upper hand, that she had flipped the switch on his carefully thought-out plan. But, he knew something that she didn't. His true ploy hadn't yet been unfolded. Chills ran down her spine as she awaited the next words that would be uttered.

Mr. Han shook his head, almost pityingly. "Akane, I know your secret. I know who you are and what you did."

Akane's blood turned cold.

She remembered what she had to do the last time someone had unearthed who she was behind this mask. That day, as it did so many times before, flooded back into her memory. The colors, the sounds, the feeling of being there: she was experceiving the same 30 seconds like she was standing there, that version of Akane that she was desperately trying to outrun. But it was impossible. Akane wanted nothing more than to close her eyes and scream, vexed that these 30 seconds continued to haunt over and over and over again. And then, only one question remained: how?

She looked up at Mr. Han's face. He wasn't smirking outright, but she could sense that smug sense of superiority mocking her, flaunting his victory in her face. He was laughing at her again, this time without a single sound. Look, he seemed to say. This is easy. I'm always going to be one step in front of you.

And by simply glancing at his expression, Akane knew he was telling the truth.

"Don't worry, I won't tell anyone." Mr. Han continued on, surveying Akane's face. He seemed to enjoy watching her guard crumble to pieces with every additional word that came out of his mouth. Walking in, he knew she had a hint of confidence to her, telling her that she would make it out unscathed. But this entire time, Mr. Han saw through that. He simply unraveled his own pieces of information, slowly revealing to Akane that in the end, he was the only one who ever held any real power. "Under one condition. If I keep your secret, do you promise to keep mine?"

In that moment, Akane wanted nothing more than to stand up, and prove that she wasn't just a weak pawn that he could manipulate. She wanted to let out those fiery words that had been slowly building up inside of her, the ones placed right on the tip of her tongue, and attack him with the anger that he made her feel. She wanted to reach out across the table, a venomous glare written in her eyes, and slap him straight across the face. She wanted her hand to sting with the impact, to burn red and to feel that biting pain like it was the rage that had been culminating in her heart.

And then, finally, she wanted to walk away. Away from Mr. Han, this ship, even this version of her life that she had spent so many years trying to perfect. It was all she knew, what she was raised knowing, but even so, everything inside of her wanted to leave it all behind. This life she lived would just become a distant memory, Maybe, one day, she would tell her children these stories, playing with their truth and forgetting, even herself, whether or not they were once real.

But she did none of those things.

In that moment, she felt as helpless as one of those patients, only able to lay there in misery and watch as those above them laughed in their faces.

"I promise."

~

Lindsay Ann Miller

MESSAGE SENT from [email protected] at 6:42PM EST.

"I bite your lip as you kiss me and pull away with a devilish smile. I reach for your pants and pull out your throbbing..."

MESSAGE RECEIVED from [email protected] at 6:43PM EST.

"U moan as I fuck u hard in the throat. My dick is so large that you are choking on it n I roughly pull it out and the..."

RESPOND?...

...

...

...

Ann didn't feel up for dealing with a horny middle-aged man sexting her during a ship emergency, but with the ship on lockdown and her stuck inside of deck seven with her hands shaking and her stomach reeling from everything she'd seen below, it was the best course of options. It was also convenient: If anyone asks where she's been or what she's been doing, she had gone down there to take a sexy picture of herself to send to John, the man she's cheating on her husband with. It was a good lie. She'd even taken an (albeit, terrible and somewhat blurry) picture of her underwear and bra before she ran back to the elevator and came up.

Whoever, whatever, she'd seen down there didn't exist. They didn't. They couldn't. They stopped moving seconds after she'd found them and she was left with a wet mess--which, she told herself, she could also explain. She'd cum for the man and she was a squirter.

Embarrassment was good.

It meant her red cheeks would fool people.

It meant the men walking her direction wouldn't stop and pull her out of a crowd, because look she's a white woman in her late forties, do you really want to deal with a Karen during a time like this? No. They didn't. She was covered. There was enough suspicious people around that no one would ever look twice at her--they already didn't. Ann was invisible.

Which, for the first time in her life, finally meant something good.

The others who mingled around with her were concerned, but she knew they didn't have a real reason to be. Sure, someone got hurt. Maybe they were dying. Who the fuck cared? None of them had any idea about what was down below, hiding in the hollow depths of the ship, waiting to be found. None of them knew about the people grown for purposes unknown. About the lives lost for the sake of...what? A mad scientist? None of them knew anything.

They were unassuming. But scared nonetheless, as though their momentary distraction was anything more than a mere slight inconvenience. Ann couldn't blame them though--normally she'd be just as in-arms about being stuck in a room full of strangers for an unspecified amount of time. Who knew just how long it would take to clear things?

Beyond that, they were on a boat. What happened to them if something, well, happened? Where would they go? Would everyone climb up seven sets of stairs? What about those disabled? What about those who, unlike Ann, couldn't climb stairs? Would they be stuck there, waiting to die until someone came and got them?

It was a mess. A nightmare.

Ann needed to breathe. She needed to move. To get up and run. To shake her head and scream and pull out her hair and rip off her clothes and shout and cry and and and and and

She needed to respond. Time was passing.

She sent another selfie of her, this time with her thumb in her mouth. A sultry look. No one was watching her. They were busy. She was alone in the middle of the conference area, sitting in a chair with her shoulders shoved down near the bottom and her shoes placed on the chair in front of her. It was a good thing that the chairs were sturdy. Tapping her phone against her prosthetic, Ann tried to focus her breathing. To do something. To--

"Who ya flirting with?"

A large head of brown hair fell over Ann's face and she nearly yelped.

She looked up to see two rows of perfect white teeth and an aged face grinning at her. "Oh, don't look so shocked! I was the same way when I was with my husband. Sometimes you just need a distraction, especially when you're away from home."

The older lady chuckled and ran a hand through her hair, then struggled her way across the back of the seat next to Ann until she'd climbed over it and sat down next to her.

"What--I mean, wait...what?" Ann shook her head. Too much was going on for her to focus on anything, let alone Marilyn's needless bothering. They'd already talked the entire way through dinner--wasn't that enough? The promise of going out for drinks afterward with the rest of the girls should have sated the woman.

"Well, sweetie, you're sitting here flirting with a man on Vixen, and unless you're a young sheltered Christian woman then you know what that site is known for," Marilyn said, winking. She wags her tongue towards Ann. "Oh, don't look shocked! Really! I'm not here to judge. Just wondering if you were flirting with a man or a woman. I used to be real into roleplay when I was your age, you know. Oh, the good old days."

"O..oh. Yeah. Um, it's just, you know. Roleplay, just stories, I like romance stories," Ann said, all her words coming out at once. None of them felt right. It wasn't much of a lie. She'd used Vixen a few times in the past, but it never led to much. The men there were awful at roleplay anyways. The only time she'd ever had a truly sexy time was with a user who turned out to be a woman, which shocked Ann to no end and made her leave the site. That is, leave the site until something else managed to shock her enough that she needed something, anything, to use as an excuse to get out of her predicament.

"Nice, nice. What's your user? You should add me, I'm a great roleplayer," Marilyn said. She held out her phone to Ann with the Find User page on display. "Don't be shy. I promise I won't include anything personal about you--strictly storytelling. You have my honor."

Ann couldn't find her brain. It didn't exist. Somehow, between the demonic alien-like people dying in tubes downstairs, the lockdown, and Marilyn's odd request, it had slipped out of her head and fallen out. Where? She wasn't certain. She'd find it later. A different time. Until then, she was on autopilot, and she took the phone in her hands, found her username, and send a sexybuddywriter request.

"Oh, nice! It says you like fantasy. Are you into elves? I had this story set up ages ago..."

As Marilyn prattled on about a roleplay set in the Forbidden Forest between two elf warriors who were on opposing tribes during a Blood Moon War, Ann found herself staring into the space between the woman's eyes and the wall behind her. Time had formed into something new, a creature of abandoned control. One with feet that slithered across the floor and wings that smacked into everything it passed. One with sharp teeth that bit into unsuspecting people, slowly infecting them until every second that passed, every fragment of time, every inch of life left in their clock turned into a fragment of dust and clotted together, molding into something new. Something large. Something wet. Something that dripped down and smothered her bones in cement, leaving her locked in place, trapped eternally, frozen solid in an uncomfortable position as the woman next to her opened and closed her mouth like it was her only job in the world.

No sound existed in this new time. It was quiet, everything little more than a whir of wind from a pipe that slowly leaked and whined.

Oh, this new time existed only to torture Ann.

It spoke to her loudly, shouting, "This is what we feel down there. What we spend. Each day is this silence, this scream, this torture. Each day we see those around us speak, their mouths open and close, and we hear no words. We are drowning in our own waters, kept alive only by these tubes, and yet you see us and you leave. You let us die in your arms and you ran. You opened the gates of hell and left."

~

Leif Takshou

Lost in Iivo's bed.

~

Aaron De Monte

Aaron had been in too many offices before to ever feel comfortable in one ever again. There was something about the stillness of it all that burrowed beneath his skin like worms crawling between his muscles and his flesh. Time didn't truly exist inside of a windowless office, nothing did. There were no cameras, no record of any interaction, only the word of one man against the word of another. And Aaron didn't like his odds.

His foot couldn't stop bouncing, feet pounding out the same rhythm as his racing heart as he stared straight ahead at the man in front of him. They've got Eros. Tension formed knots in his shoulder blades, begging his eyes to turn towards the door. The android was supposedly still on the other side. Waiting for him faithfully. But doubt and fear were a toxic mixture in his bloodstream and he pleaded that this would be quick. Just play it cool. You'll be free soon. It felt like a lie even as he thought it. Aaron hadn't been free in what felt like decades. Not since the people locked in the bottom of the ship had taken up new residence behind his eyelids. Even now, he could smell the decay in his nostrils, the way the walls reeked with human suffering. He would never be free of his choice.

Slowly, the folder on the dark wooden desk was closed as the man sitting behind it sighed. "Thank you for your patience," Dr. Han began, leaning back in his chair as his eyes finally found Aaron's. "I'm sure you can imagine what a busy day this has been for us." Aaron tried to relax, to let his arms stretch out to the rests on either side of him.

"Would you mind telling me what's going on?" His heart was throbbing through his skin, even as he tried desperately to control its incessant beating. "I'd like to get back to work." Each word was steadier than the last, innocence dripping through the syllables as he desperately tried to convince himself that he'd done nothing wrong. There was no reason he was wrestled here by security, nor why his phone and laptop had been confiscated. He was innocent. Innocent. And if he thought about it long enough, perhaps it would become true.

Dr. Han folded his hands in front of him, eyeing Aaron carefully as he spoke. "You were given a prototype by my colleague Mr. Lincoln, correct? And you delivered it to the lower storage decks." He could hear the accusation already. I never should have agreed to go down there. Time was running out, he could feel his body sinking lower and lower into the floor until he was up to his neck in concrete.

"Yes." Aaron wasn't sure how the word managed to break free of his lungs, nor the calmness behind it. He sat upward slowly, forcing his body into stillness as he matched Dr. Han's gaze. "Why? Is it missing?" Concern. It tasted like the sweetness of a lie, thick and rich as if he'd swiped buttercream across his tongue. You can make it through this, he told himself. You've done it before.

"No," Dr. Han shook his head, eyes narrowing, "but some of my private research is."

The words struck him hard in the chest, forcing the air from his lungs as he struggled to comprehend what had been said. What? He tried not to think of the room. The crushing weight of the darkness compared to the blinding white light. In the back of his mind, he could still feel their eyes on him, still hear their petrified wails as he left them behind. Those things...one of them made it out? It was agony to imagine. Even the strongest among them would have to drag its body across the floor. There would have been streaks of dark, thick blood each time it moved. It's not possible.

All at once, everything was too bright. Too loud. Even the sound of his own breath, forced into smooth, quiet movements, was an assault on his eardrums. "Our security cameras show that you were one of the last people to enter those elevators." Aaron barely registered that he was speaking, or that he had become hyperfocused on a spot in the corner. "I need to know, Mr. De Monte, if you went into my facility."

Time seemed to stand still as he forced his head to shake, refusing so much more than just the words being spoken. "I didn't even know you had a lab down there," he replied. The truth could be so much more deceptive than any lie would have been. He hadn't known who the lab belonged to. But now he did, and the blood on Dr. Han's hands seemed so much more visible than before. The rumors were right. He was sitting face to face with a monster. Now, all that mattered was trying not to be the next one forced down there into the dark.

A heavy sigh left the other man's lips as he sat forward, resting his elbows on the desk in front of him. "You have to understand that I find this difficult to believe. Especially after the..." Dr. Han's hand stretched out, fingertips running along the edge of the file, "issues you had with your former employer."

All of the moisture left Aaron's mouth as a chill settled over his body. "Excuse me?" Aaron's heart pounded out a painful beat as he struggled to keep himself composed.

He's threatening me. It was clear in his eyes, in the way his mouth curled upwards into something that could almost have been a smile. "It was a very difficult decision to allow you on this ship," he began, "another attack on your reputation would ruin you for good." With each word, Aaron became a nail struck down against the flat edge of a hammer. Dr. Han already knew everything about him. Everything he'd done. Why he would have been the one to set them free. This is different. We were doing different work. Not this. "And seeing as you brought an android onto the lower levels with you-"

Eros. "He doesn't have anything to do with this," Aaron snapped, regaining his voice as he got his feet beneath him. Worry began to settle in as he thought about the poor android waiting outside. He needed to get back to him. The glitches were getting worse. He was having difficulty following commands like he should have. Aaron needed to be there with him, but instead he was here, watching Dr. Han tuck his hands beneath his chin.

"Oh?" There was something in his quiet look that made Aaron's stomach turn. "From one researcher to another, Aaron, I think it would be in your best interest to be honest with me."

Something had changed in the doctor's voice. It was quieter now, more patient as if he was watching a laboratory mouse scramble for a piece of cheese without wanting to startle it. Aaron could feel his knuckles beginning to ache from how tightly he gripped the armrests, hands beginning to pale. Agonizingly, he forced himself to relax, heart pounding in his throat as he ducked his head.

"Nobody can know about this, please," he begged. The words felt fake even as they left his throat, but he forced himself to continue. "The android is my own project. I snuck him on board so that I could continue working on him." Aaron's heart was racing, his body betraying the story he was trying to tell. "But- but he's defective and he stayed with me the whole time" The pleading in his voice was pitiful. "We didn't see anything."

There was a pause, a moment of slow-burning agony, before Dr. Han settled back down into his chair. "Let's hope you're right," he replied. In one smooth movement, he gestured to the door. "You're free to go."

Nothing had ever sounded sweeter. Aaron was up and out of his chair before he could take another breath, a mumbled 'thanks' spoken so softly he almost didn't register it as his own. Each step he took out of the office felt so much longer than it should have, but freedom was close. The door slid open at his approach, beckoning him into the hallway.

But there was no sign of the android on the other side. Only empty white lights and pleasant, vapid music. No. Behind him, Dr. Han's chair started to squeak. "Eros?" Aaron called, stepping out into the middle of the hall. His head swiveled, heart plummeting into his stomach as he scanned the area for any sign of the boy. No. No, please no. A single firm hand clasped itself against Aaron's shoulder and he turned to see Dr. Han's face smiling back at him. "Where is he?" This time, the panic in his voice was unmistakable.

"They'll be taking him to someone a little more qualified." Steadily, the grip on his shoulder began to tighten. "We need to get a good look at those memory files."