MOTHERS

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A job is a job.

Elle kept repeating the mantra as she waited in the fountain-lined, sinisterly silent lobby of Price Laboratories. The pristine, glass-coated reception desk and its fancy seat were vacant. No one had welcomed her, though she'd been given instructions in her hiring letter to wait here. A bouquet of fake flowers in a space-themed vase stared at her. The blue and purple petals had been her only interaction so far as she sat on one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs in the deserted vestibule serving as a waiting room.

The desk was empty last time, too. Maybe it was decorative, and only acted as a barrier before one entered the world behind it—the world behind the wall that slid sideways to grant entry to the actual lab.

She'd been in there, of course, for her first interview. Upon texting yes to the number provided at the time of picking a date and time, she'd gotten a ping letting her know how things would unfold. Uniformed dudes wearing masks had picked up at her hotel and shoved her into a van. They blindfolded her to get to the location—as they had this time, too—but once inside the building, the blindfold came off, and the truth behind the country's most secretive yet successful laboratory was revealed.

It was... just a lab. A main hallway of boring gray tiles and matching gray walls, though everything was clean and there was none of that ominous scientific smell—chemicals and eerie mixtures and concoctions like those from a science classroom. She hadn't been allowed to go to the lower levels, where all the action was, but the ground floor gave her enough of an idea of what sort of place this was. Ominous, working behind the scenes, government-operated—she hadn't liked that part, but, a job was a job.

The wall-door beeped and slid open to reveal her new employer, Dr. Price himself. A man in his fifties, with few lines on his face, skin so white it looked like he'd never seen the sun before, and black eyes that held something strange in them, something Elle couldn't piece together. And she was usually good at reading people, but she couldn't read Dr. Price. Whatever his backstory was, she'd have to look it up on the dark web, like she did for everything else.

"Elle," he said, walking towards her, his hand outstretched towards hers. Friendly, familiar as if they'd been acquainted for decades, and not introduced about a month ago. "I'm glad you accepted our offer. We need someone like you around here."

She stood up, brushing off the crumbs of the cereal bar she'd scoffed down a few minutes prior; waiting made her nervous, which made her hungry. "I appreciated how quickly you got back to me," she said, exchanging a brief but firm handshake with Dr. Price.

A text with a threatening message, "be ready at noon." Fast and to the point.

What she should have said was that she appreciated the money he was offering, but she didn't think it'd be a good look on her first day to talk about paychecks. He didn't need to know that that was the main—and only—reason she'd accepted the position.

Working for the government, her? Never. She'd be one of the women screaming at the protests she'd attended just a few weeks before, demanding that their rights be reinstated, begging for them to be better protected.

There were protective programs out there, she'd been told, but all of them came with a hefty price, and she'd declined them. She hadn't needed the protection; not at first, when the country's chaos began. Her family was wealthy and unfortunately associated with the government, which provided her a layer of security.

That was, until a hurricane blew their beautiful mansion to smithereens, and the government they loved so much wouldn't help them rebuild it. Elle would have snorted at their demise—she hated her family, though she'd accepted their assistance from time to time, if only for the health insurance she couldn't afford. But she'd lost everything in that storm, too. So instead of pointing fingers at them, she packed up whatever she still owned that hadn't been destroyed, and drove her non-robot operated car west.