There was an infernal nagging sound somewhere far off in the distance.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Like someone had turned the faucet, but not quite far enough. Where was I?
Drip. Drip. Drip.
I wanted to shout at Luce to turn the water off. That noise was so grating. Like it was crawling my skin.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
I pulled to the side when I realized it was actually hitting my skin, at least part of it was. It was asynchronous— the sound of the drip and the feel of it hitting and then sliding down my bicep. And it wasn’t water. At least what was hitting me wasn’t. It was too thick. It felt more like oil.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Luce.
Reality didn’t slip back into my grasp; it thrust its considerable heaviness upon me and strained at my bones. All at once. Like a terrible onslaught of truth.
I focused on my breathing and left my eyes closed. Wherever I was, I wasn’t alone. I felt like everything my body did naturally had been set to manual operation. Breathe in. Breathe out. Think.
“God, you are a terrible actress. Open your eyes, this is stupid.”
I did as my sister commanded, but I instantly wished that I hadn’t. My heart raced as I took in my surroundings. The damp draft and the smell of chemicals and blood rushed my system, and I wondered how I’d ever noticed the sound with such an assault to my senses.
The smell wasn’t even half of the horror. In front of where I lay, hands and feet bound, was a floor-to-ceiling wall of tanks that stretched forever through the space. Each container housed something deformed and putrid but alive. There were fish with multiple heads or extra teeth where there should be eyes, eels with appendages that looked like membranous wings, something that might be a frog that oozed when it breathed—dozens of ghastly creatures I couldn’t begin to name.
I startled when a muffled thud sounded above me.
It was Todd.
He, too, was bound, though by heavy chains secured to the wall rather than the zip ties that were cutting into my wrists and ankles.
He thrashed wildly for a moment and then became subdued. More viscous drops of oily blood fell, sliding across my arm, nearly setting me over the edge.
“You hurt him,” Luce said.
I pulled my eyes away from the monster above me and focused on the one in front of me. There was a pained softness in her eyes as she watched him rotate for a moment. When her eyes returned to me, all softness was gone. There was nothing but cool, calculated hatred. It was as much a transformation as his had been.
A lump caught in my throat. In that moment, the fact that I was her little sister meant less than nothing. Danger radiated off of her.
“You hurt him,” she repeated.
This time it was a condemnation. Something for which I would have to pay.
“Luce, I, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. He was going to kill…me.”
I stopped before I said “us”. The way she looked at Doc in the stairwell was proof enough that I was safer keeping the issue to just me.
She contorted her face in to what could almost be called a smile.
“He was going to kill him.” She said, taking a step closer. “He was going to kill that filthy plant scum bastard.”
I wanted to object. Reason with her. Tell her that no one deserved to die for doing their job.
“He’s one of them. A monster. They poisoned our town. They locked us away. They killed our Mother, Eva!” Her voice climbed to a fever pitch. “And worst of all, he turned you into one of them. Just another lacky out for blood.”
She ran her fingers down the strip of grey skin that was exposed on the creature’s leg in a gentle caress.
Reason had left the building. I changed tactics.
“Luce, what is all of this?”
“Not even going to deny it. Typical.” She flicked her hand as if waving me off, “This is my lab. These are all the babies that that plant you love so much created, and then tried to destroy.”
“I don’t understand. When did you start this… collection?”
“It’s not a fucking collection! I rescued these animals!”
“I’m sorry, listen.” I tried to put up my hands, forgetting they were tied. “I’m sorry, I am just trying to understand.”
She was pacing now. I could see Doc’s sidearm on the edge of the table, but it was empty. My best bet was to keep her talking.
“Do you remember when Mama took us to that protest?” I nodded, and she continued, “Okay, do you remember why they were protesting?”
“The haze. The silver haze above the town. It was making people sick.”
For a brief moment her cold features gave way to something like pity, but she covered it so fast I wasn’t sure it was really there.
“Yeah, well, it turns out it was a helluva lot more than that. They’ve been dumping shit into our water for decades. Did you know they made six other enclaves when they made Charon?”
I didn’t. I thought we were the only one. She didn’t wait for an answer.
“That was their fucking answer. They took the six most contaminated spots in the whole damn country and wrapped them up in a bow and called it independence. If you look at Charon on their maps, it has the third-highest cancer rate per capita. The death rate is twenty times the national average. We are the American Chornobyl. Their own little boiled frog.”
“Boiled frog?” I asked.
“You know, that analogy where if you put a frog in boiling water it will jump out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly heat it up it will boil alive before it realizes what has happened? We are the frogs. The haze was the boiling water. They had to clean that up. So everything they had been releasing up there got shifted to a water operation. No one sees it till people get sick. Babies are born deformed. Animals start dying off. And by the time we started asking questions, it was too late. We’d signed on the line. Nothing to do but trust that they take blood as a cautionary measure, that they are keeping us safe.”
She stopped pacing and stared through me.
“You know what’s better than a complacent frog? A frog you never had to trick in the first place.” Tears streamed down her face. “You remember Mr. Webber? The old guy with the dog I stole and hid from Mama? He was the first one arrested after the deal. I did such a good job ruining his reputation around town that everyone was suspicious of him. When I almost got busted for knocking off the bar on court street, it was nothing to throw the blame on him. I didn’t know. God. I had no idea.”
Nothing was any clearer.
“What didn’t you know, Luce?”
Her watery eyes focused back to my face, and their steel had returned.
“I didn’t know he never saw jail, or even the light of day, again. He only saw the inside of a brand new laboratory.”
