The waiter skipped toward the table and set the sizzling entrées in front of Professor Collins and Doctor Stevenson, who had come to discuss the recent successes in the experiment.
"Looks yummy! Don't you think, Beonica?"
Stevenson thanked the waiter then closed her eyes to say grace.
Collins stopped cutting up her meal and held still until she was finished.
"Do you always do that before eating?"
She cut a portion of her salmon and nodded yes as she nibbled at it.
"You're more subdued than usual. What's going on?"
"I can't do this anymore, Cara," she whispered.
"You can't do what anymore? Eat? What are you talking about?"
Collins was thrown off by the left-field comment and awaited her answer. But Stevenson didn't know what else to say.
"You wouldn't understand."
Collins dropped her utensils on her plate.
"Look, I don't know what's going on with you. Or what's going on in your head, but I'm here for you. I can help you with whatever you're going through."
Can you?
Stevenson put her utensils down and started to leave.
"So you're just going to walk away, Beonica?"
"Yes," she replied calmly.
Cara stared at her, baffled, as she continued to leave the room.
"So you think it was me?" Collins shouted.
Stevenson stopped in her tracks with the door in hand. Tears swelled and began to fall to the ground.
The night before, a silent alarm had triggered the security system and caused a panic in the lab. The guards scurried to the scene to apprehend the culprit, but they arrived only to see no one. They dusted for prints. Checked the security footage. But the most they found was a shadowy figure in one clip.
"I've been with you since the beginning! I helped you handpick the first subjects. Raising them with you for eighteen years. And when the first two died, I held you as you mourned! I wasted countless hours perfecting and researching the piths! You think I'd do all of that just to sabotage the entire operation. I'm a human being! Same as you!"
The air of the dining hall cafeteria grew immensely tense.
"No one said you were disloyal. It's not always about you, Cara," Beonica replied as she left the area. Wiping the tears from her eyes as she made her way to the lab.
I'm the mendacious one. But I have a mission to complete. I have to take care of—
She emerged through the laboratory doors and peered over the ledge at C's pod.
Him.
YOU ARE READING
Cautious
Fiksi IlmiahCongratulations! You have been selected to attend Timber Creek University's 15th Annual S.A.M.S Summer Program! Quincy Love overhears his mother shouting from the kitchen. "Are you opening my mail again..." "You got in! Wait till I tell my mom!" R...
