Words

Mike & El.

Mike and El.

"What's it mean?" The pale boy asks her. "Eleven?"

They're in a room at the bottom of his house. He's built her a place to sleep under a table with some blankets.

Eleven points at herself, poking her chest twice.

"That's your name?"

Eleven nods.

"Eleven... okay, um, well my name's Mike-"

Mike.

She likes that name. It sounds nice and soft and kind. Like him.

"-short for Michael," he tells her kindly, "maybe we can call you El — short for Eleven."

El. She likes that even better than Mike. It sounds human and real, so different from the three numbers stamped into her skin. A name with letters, something she'd never had before. She'd always just been a number, a thing for what ever Papa and the men at the lab wanted her to do. never a person with a name. Just a number. El sounds like the name of a child with a life, like Mike's.

She nods quickly, showing her enthusiasm.

"Um, well, okay... Night El," Mike says, to her standing up.

She likes it even better when he says it. Like he knows her.

"Night, Mike," she says, testing out the way his name feels. It feels good.

He drops the covers down, hiding her, and walks away, up the stairs. She lies down and listens to the storm outside. Her body shakes with each thunder clap, and she begins to cry as everything that as happened in the past day and everything before that comes tumbling down on her.

She'd touched the Thing. The strange, alive Thing.

She'd opened something up in the Lab. Something Bad.

She'd escaped the Lab. Escaped Papa and the men.

Benny had died.

She'd killed two men.

She wasn't going to let anything bad happen to Mike. Nice Mike with the sweet voice who gave her a human name and a bed. She wasn't going to let them find her.