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"You're a hard lady to get a hold of, you know that?" Wallace asks, a nervous laugh in his voice. He cards his hand through his hair. Nala huddles at his feet, muzzle resting on her paws.
Zilla looks around herself. She's inside a glass cylinder with a solid base beneath her. When she reaches out to touch the glass, her hand doesn't pass through it, and she frowns as she floats down to the base. She can't get her fingers between where the glass slots into a small groove around the outside.
Wallace sighs again. "It's vacuum-sealed. I figured that was the only way to stop you from escaping."
She crosses her arms over her chest. "I agreed to come here. What, you don't trust me?"
He offers a wry smile. "No, not really."
He walks to his desk and drops heavily into his desk chair. He runs his hand up his face, pinching and rubbing his nose before dragging it back down. Nala raises her head and watches him, the tip of her tail twitching as she lets out a low rumble.
"How have you been, since...destroying my lab?" he asks, looking up at Zilla again. She regards him coolly and his lips purse. "Are you still upset?"
She grits her teeth. "You lied to me. You said you could cure me."
"I needed you. You must understand—"
"All I need to understand is that you never wanted to help me."
His expression pinches with hurt. He gets to his feet again, bracing himself against the desk as he lets his head droop.
"I wanted to help you, but...the more research I did, the more I realized just how special you are. Even if I could cure you, to destroy a rare creature like you would be...criminal," he says. He looks up, pushing off the desk and approaching her glass cage. "After you left, the Dragons brought me some Kraang research files. The mutagen that created you was the last of the pure form. They intended to create mutants like you, but animals were far too volatile when used as the base. They scrapped the project before it ever reached human testing, but somehow, by some miracle...that mutagen found you."
Zilla lets herself sink to the bottom of the cage, hugging herself. The night she was mutated was rainy, thunder and lightning performing a symphony in the sky. Zilla always loved thunderstorms—she would go out on the roof of her building and shout at the sky, telling it to do more, rage more, revelling in the sensation of cold raindrops soaking her to the skin. It was a dark, cold night, and lightning struck the empty air. For a brief moment, Zilla saw a flash of silver and purple floating high above her, a burst of flame and the smell of smoke as something beyond her understanding careened out of control.
She didn't even have time to question what it was. A spot of white fell from the sky and struck her square in the chest. It burned. It burned so bad and she couldn't even scream, the breath stolen from her lungs, and she blacked out. It's so hard to remember. All she knew for sure was that when she awoke, she was no longer human, and nothing was ever the same again.
And he says that it was a miracle, that it found her? She was in the wrong place at the wrong time and the Kraang should have been smarter about their disposal. They should have waited for a clear night so that she wouldn't be cursed with this existence.
Wallace pushes his hair off his forehead again, fidgeting. "Do you remember when we found those articles from Dr. Bernard Moseley?"
Zilla rolls her eyes. "The physicist who did sleep trials? Sure."
He scoffs. "His research was far more than that. He focused on dreams and alternate dimensions, but his true brilliance lay in his discovery of the concept of a life force." His expression brightens, the light almost reaching his deadened blue eyes. "Every living being, every living thing, has this force behind them. Your abilities draw from that force, exerting your will on the things around you, and if—"
"You have to let this go, Wallace."
His smile falls. "I can't. Not now. It's been too long. I've spent too much time."
"For what? A bunch of animals that you can't control?" she asks. As if offended, a shriek echoes from the darkest parts of the warehouse.
"Ah, yes...so that was you the other day, listening in."
"You need to let them go. You need to let all of this go and try to live a life outside of Mutacorp and Louisa and Harriet—"
"Don't—" His voice hitches as he points at her, his hand shaking. "There is no life to live without them here, Zilla. I never even thought there was a chance I could have any of it back, until you, until..." He laughs a choked, desperate laugh as he grips his hair, tears welling up. "You remember, don't you? You remember the mouse?"
Of course, she remembers the mouse. It was the closest they got to true reanimation during the time they spent together working on his research. Nala brought the mouse to them, dead, and Wallace used it as a test subject. Zilla watched with her own eyes as it twitched, opened its pure white eyes, wiggled its nose, all as its body turned black and stayed cold.
It didn't live long after that. Its brain couldn't handle the transformation from such an unstable mutagen. It was volatile, violent, just like so many of Wallace's creations. So few that managed to remain intelligent and able to follow orders, although only Nala remains of the ones Zilla once knew. The hawk, the lynx, and the stag must be recent creations. They must be, because Zilla destroyed all the others.
"I know what we saw," she whispers, "but that doesn't mean anything. That mouse was freshly dead and tiny. Louisa is a completely different—"
"But what if she isn't?" he insists. "Now that you're back, I can try again. I can purify the mutagen and restore her life force by turning her into a shadow being. If that fails, then...then I'll use your life force to bring her back."
"Don't do that to her. If you loved her at all, you wouldn't want her to live like this." She hates the desperate pinch in her tone, but this is exactly what she feared, the same fears that pushed her to try and stop him the last time they spoke face to face. "She will never taste her favourite foods again or feel the sun on her skin. She won't know your touch. She won't even dream. Is that what you want for her?"
Wallace's pale blue eyes meet hers, lifeless. He shrugs lopsidedly. "At least nothing will hurt her ever again."
"You can't—"
"I CAN!" He slams his fist against the glass cylinder and the vibrations seem to rattle Zilla's non-existent bones. He breathes hard, two tears managing to escape and roll down his gaunt face. "She was eight years old. She was eight years old and she fought so, so hard, and I...I couldn't do a thing to save her. I owe this to her. I owe it to her mother."
He gasps for breath, his body shuddering, and Zilla can't bring herself to speak.
She respected him, once. She thought he was her friend, but he's lied so much that he's started to believe it. She looks at her hands, then back up at him. She can still see the pale, thin scar on his neck, a wound that would have killed him if she hadn't been there, if she hadn't figured out that she could help.
She almost wishes that she had let him die back then. It was that moment that sent him off the edge, spiralling further into his grief, and maybe if she hadn't cared for him, he would be back with his wife and daughter right now.
He wipes his face on the back of his sleeve and turns away. "I have work to do," he croaks.
Nala rises to her feet and plods off after him. Zilla lets her head fall back against the glass wall as she looks to the ceiling. Maybe she should have run away. Maybe she should have done a lot of things differently.
She thinks of Casey Jones and the breathless way he said her name.
Yeah, she should have done a lot of things differently.
YOU ARE READING
Shadow Mutation (Book Seven)
Fanfiction"Try not to be stupid next time, okay?" When he's told shortly after graduation that he didn't actually pass and, in order to truly earn his diploma, he must redo his senior year math credit, Casey Jones isn't sure how things could get worse. He kno...
