MOTHERS

◙eight◙

Back at her desk, back at her job, and sans promotion, Elle munched on the bag of off-brand chips included in her lunch, the rest of which she'd tossed into a trash. The lab was thorough in its experimental capabilities, but it hadn't done much research on decent food.

Dr. Price assured her he'd promote her, he'd basically promised it... but he needed time to work on a new spot for her, and hiring someone to take her current position. He'd sent word a few minutes prior, via one of his lab-coat wearing messengers that always looked smug and never answered any of Elle's questions.

And oh, Elle had a lot of those.

"Those children aren't human, and these results show that the experiment on them is working."

Despite having left the meeting in good spirits, she now frowned. She couldn't get Dr. Price's words out of her head, no matter how real, no matter how they made sense.

The children's metabolisms were abnormal, she'd known that from the get-go. They looked human, spoke like humans—albeit with a bit of a robotic tint to their voices and the proper vocabulary they used—but many of their reactions and bodily functions did have a slight twist to them. They were bit too strong, a bit too intelligent, and a bit too... different.

It's because they're not human. Like... at all.

Elle thought that working at Price Laboratories, that by living at the lab, she'd uncover deeper details, eventually. She'd get information on what sort of project everyone worked on. And by manning the cameras, being on security duty, she'd sooner or later stumble upon something to give her an idea of what she'd signed up for.

But in all those months, she'd still not figured out what the children were, and what had been injected into their mother's bodies during pregnancy to make them this way. She'd never met or seen the mothers, but heard much about them. They were women plucked from the streets or from inside prisons or from hide-outs away from Dictator D's reach. Women who were in need of help that only Price Laboratories could provide. They'd been brought in, given the spiel of secrecy and what their roles would be, then confined to bed for a month. One month to give birth—Elle had been fascinated and flabbergasted all at once by that notion. And yet, it hadn't hit her until now how sinister it was.

Not human.

How had Dr. Price done it? Enabled women to be pregnant for only a month and give birth to children who were already adults? Super-powered, non-human adults?

It should have ticked her off—all of it. There'd been nothing normal about this lab, from the beginning. But she wasn't one to believe in magic, preferring to go for the scientific option all the way. So she'd assumed there was a formula, a set of ingredients that were behind all this, and she'd been desperate to get a promotion to move on and see where that formula and those ingredients were located.

"Could you imagine?" She finished her chips and crumbled the bag to toss it into the trash. "If I could get my hands on that stuff... and hand it over to the protesters... fuck, I could be looking at some serious, serious money."

She covered her mouth; though she was the one doing the watching, no one ever said she wasn't being watched, too. Price Laboratories had strict protocols and kept its employees on a tight schedule, and Elle never strayed, not once. After all, she'd been hoping for a raise the whole time, and knew better than to shine a negative light on herself by going rogue too soon, and too openly.

But she never intended to stay at this place, to continue whatever fucked-up experiments it was holding. Yes, it pleased her to be associated with such scientific breaks—lowering the months of pregnancy and enhancing the baby's outcome into possibly being inhuman with superpowers—but these breaks were for the government. The same government that removed all her rights and forced her to live in the shadows and scour the dark web for a way to survive.