MOTHERS

◙ten◙

The pages of the book were sticky from the chocolate candy she'd just eaten, but Elle didn't care. She didn't have time to wipe them down, because she only had a fifteen minute window to read before she had to have her eyes on the screens again.

It was feeding time—good God, she hated that the lab-workers called it that. This wasn't a freaking zoo, for crying out loud. But feeding time meant she could distract herself for a spell while the children ate.

She cringed; why was she still calling them children when in fact they were anything but? In terms of age, they were only a few months old, but their bodies were fully formed, fully grown—they were adults.

And they're not human.

But that was what Dr. Price had labeled them, and if she was caught calling them anything else, she'd be reprimanded. So far, she had a pristine record of never stepping out of line, of never getting called into Dr. Price's office. Rumor had it, anyone who was summoned in there after having done something questionable, didn't return. But where would they go? Was there some secret passage in Dr. Price's office that could lead to another section of the lab, where he locked up rebellious lab workers?

Elle didn't want to find out.

She shuddered, turning another page, devouring the words on the paper to camouflage the eerie thoughts soaring through her mind like shooting stars. Or more like meteorites, a shower of them plummeting onto her brain, destabilizing it, ripping through it.

She still couldn't process Dr. Price's confessions—if they could be called confessions, because in his mind, he was only stating the truth, wasn't hiding anything, and definitely wasn't ashamed. Hours had passed since that meeting where she'd told him of the children's volatility, and where he'd smiled. He'd smiled. He'd wanted their violence, and had implied it was a natural course of this experiment. That this experiment, unlike others before it, hadn't failed.

The children were the experiment. It hadn't been clear to Elle right away, as she'd been under the impression their birth was the experiment. Dr. Price's magic formula to accelerate a pregnancy, to help women give birth faster and in a safer way—that was what Price Laboratories was working on, she'd believed.

Then she'd started to think the experiment was to birth superheroes, modified humans who'd make the world a better place. But now? After her discussion with Dr. Price, after witnessing his reaction? She had no idea what the end goal was. But the experiment was to create someone, something, with enhanced abilities and with little ties to humanity.

The children.

She looked up at the screens, in time to start hearing strange clicking sounds.

Click, click, click. Click, click. Click.

"The fuck?" She scanned a few of the screens, searching for the source of the sound.

She put her book down, thinking the screens themselves were the culprit, that they needed an adjustment, that some static had started clogging the feed. But within a few seconds, she localized the origin of the issue; the clicking wasn't coming from the equipment at all. It was coming from only one of the feeds, and was persistent, click-clicking at a curious cadence. Not like a piece of machinery failing, but more like a sort of code, a means of communicating.

It came from room one—Lola's room. And Lola was the one making the clicking sound with her mouth.

"Huh?" Elle squinted at her. Lola had stood up from her earlier seated position, and was peering straight into the camera in the corner of her room, closest to the door—the one producing the feed for Elle to monitor. It was high up where Lola couldn't reach it, but there was no mistaking her gaze fixed on it. Focused, unblinking—her electric blue eyes were eerily and completely transfixed. Her arms were stuck to her sides and she looked like she wasn't even breathing. "What the fuck?"