The housing complex at the end of Surf Avenue, near Asser Levy Park, was a cluster of rundown, tightly packed apartment buildings that formed a maze of narrow alleys, though nobody ever felt like exploring them, except for the rats that scurried through in search of food. The rain had eased up a bit, and only a few drops now made it down to the ground between the towering buildings. Thick fog crept through the alleys instead. The visibility was so poor that Isaac was just a blurry figure lost in the mist.

All the trash from the residents piled up here. You could find abandoned sleeping spots of the Stranded alongside overflowing dumpsters, which would never be emptied again. The whole district had been forgotten.

Every step Isaac took was met with a squelching sound under his shoes. The ground felt like layers of decaying material stacked like sedimentary rock. Old cloth rags and cardboard lay underneath a soggy carpet of mold and discarded junk. A little bit of snow clung to the sides of the alley.

Every ground-floor window was boarded up with large wooden planks. Some still had the luxury of iron bars, but an unprotected—or worse, open—window was unthinkable in this neighborhood.

As they stood face to face, Billy let out a puff of warm air from his chest and hugged Isaac as tightly as he could. He was the only person Billy still trusted.

"Hey, are you nuts, man? What the hell’s wrong with you, you freakin’ moron?"

"You have no idea what’s happened to me in the last twenty minutes," Billy said.

"Actually, it's been twenty-five. You’re five minutes late."

"Are we safe here?"

"This place is as bad as it gets. It’s dirtier and more dangerous than anywhere else in the city. But no one should find us in the alleys, I think."

"You think?"

"Well, if I were a criminal, I wouldn’t hang out where nobody ever goes. We’re safer in the alleys than on the street. Especially with all this fog."

Billy took a deep breath of the rancid air, leaned his back against the filthy wall of the closed Santa Cruz shop, and slid down into the snow. His heart was still racing.

"You recognized me," he said. "Nobody’s done that before. Not even my own wife."

"Yeah, well, something about you seemed off... different from the last time at the factory. You looked pretty crazy before, but now... I don’t know, something told me it was you."

Billy shook his head. "Up until an hour ago, that was all I wanted. For someone to recognize me. But now... now it’s all coming back, everything that happened back in the apartment. X-3-19, or Emilia, she’s…"

"How did you know the scientist?" Isaac asked, sitting down next to him.

Billy looked at him. "She worked with us at the factory. Sometimes, anyway. She left me a message. It was about some secret documents. I didn’t know she was a researcher, though. You must’ve noticed her back then too. The prettiest girl in the zero-emissions factory."

Isaac shook his head, staring across at the opposite wall. "I only have eyes for one woman. My woman," he whispered.

After a while, he added, "I can’t believe... that Emilia was the one lying there. I barely knew her, but... she felt so familiar. We even...”

Billy did what he always did when he was sad, overwhelmed, or depressed. Or all three at once: he pulled out his old Rubik’s cube and tried to focus on it, to block out the world. Isaac rested his forearms on his knees, awkwardly fidgeting with his hands. After a moment, Billy glanced up from the cube and gave Isaac a sideways look.

"You didn’t... you know..."

Isaac frowned. "What? Have something to do with her death? Hell no!"

"Then what in the world were you doing there?"

"It’s a pretty long story."

"Make it as short as you can. If my creepy stalker’s to be believed, I’ve only got a few days left to live."

"What?"

"Long story."

Isaac gave him a sideways glance, but Billy didn’t meet his eyes. After a while, Isaac started talking. As Billy listened, trying to process the events that had led them both to the same place at the same time, he absentmindedly fiddled with the Rubik’s cube, turning it one way, then the other.

"So, you were ordered by the PROMISED LAND Pope to steal the secret research data from her—X-3-19, or Emilia—and you did it because that maniac promised you a clue to your wife’s whereabouts," Billy summed up.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Isaac sighed and shrugged. His breath puffed out in the chilly air. The cold ground, littered with trash and patches of snow, was starting to get to him. "How am I supposed to find my wife now? Zodiac is the only one who knows where Tabitha went."

"We’ll figure something out," Billy said, though he didn’t really believe it. He hadn’t even found his own way yet.

The rain lashed against the old walls of the alley, which felt suffocatingly close around them. Above, a few birds squawked and screeched as they darted across the gloomy sky. For a moment, both of them silently stared upward. It almost seemed like they were enjoying not being alone anymore. Both of them.

"And what about you?" Isaac asked, looking Billy up and down. "You don’t exactly look like you’ve been on vacation either."

Billy hesitated. He didn’t know what to say. His story had already been mocked by the cop, but this time he stuck to it. To his surprise, Isaac didn’t laugh. He just listened.

"What’s wrong?" Billy asked when he finished. "By the time I mentioned the android, you should’ve called me crazy."

"No time for that. I’m thinking."

"Right." Billy lowered his gaze and studied the Rubik’s cube. Somehow, while telling his story, he’d managed to solve three sides. And suddenly, he felt like he knew exactly what to do to finally solve the whole puzzle.

"I didn’t think you were the type to waste a single second thinking about anything," he said, focusing on the cube. Then he glanced at Isaac. His smile faded when he saw the thin, dark-skinned man still staring bleakly into the void, at the dirty wall three meters ahead of them.

"Well, man. Don’t be too quick to judge. Better not judge at all," Isaac said. "You never know what’s going on in someone’s head. You get me? Hell, I don’t even know what’s going on in mine." He sighed. "So you’re saying you’ve lost a whole week, attended your own funeral, and now some creepy stranger is following you around, telling you you’re gonna die soon?"

"He’s not hinting. He flat-out said it. I know it sounds—"

"It all sounds a bit too much like a conspiracy to me."

"That’s because—" Billy suddenly stopped talking. He only needed to twist the cube one more time, and all six sides would be solved.

Impossible, he thought, hesitating. Then he did it.

The puzzle was solved.

But another mystery followed when one of the cube’s pieces suddenly popped out.

Isaac flinched.

"Did you break it?"

"I don’t think so," Billy said, puzzled. "Looks like some kind of... mechanism." He pressed the button hidden behind the missing piece, and the cube split open in the middle, allowing Billy to shift its sides. He folded one side down until the cube took the shape of a T.

"This is... a puzzle box."

"Careful with those things," Isaac warned. "In Hellraiser, a guy with your name opened a gateway to hell with one of those."

"That’s not happening here. Look." Billy pressed another piece, and a small lens popped up on the top.

"Is that a...?"

The projector inside switched on, and a shimmering blue hologram appeared before them. Huddling closer, their breath mixing in the cold air, they stared at the image of a copied patient record.

"These are... the secret documents X-3-19 wanted to give me."

"They weren’t on the stick," Isaac said thoughtfully.

"No," Billy replied. "They’re here. Here on my cube."

----------------------------------------

Patient Documentation

GMO 44551 (Adler, Christian) Age: 14

Day 36

Symptoms: Blistering on the mucous membranes could not be reduced. Despite halting the experiment, further infection in the eyes and mouth became evident.

Test subject died on the same day, 22.12.2044, at 7:38 PM.

Dr. Emilia Steinbach

"What the…"

If these digital files didn’t look so incredibly real, and if they hadn’t gone to so much trouble to hide them inside a Rubik’s cube, Billy would’ve thought it was some kind of sick joke. The kind of joke that wasn’t funny at all. With a swipe of his hand, he flipped to the next page of the holo-document. He saw more names, read more diagnoses of severely ill people, all of whom were only referred to as "GMOs" or "test subjects."

Michael Anderson, twenty-four: Excessive sweating, vision impairment, and uncontrolled tumor growth… dead after just a few weeks.

His eyes kept drifting back to the files, hoping he was imagining it all. But the letters stubbornly revealed the same horrific story.

This can’t be real.

"These are all… human experiments?" Isaac asked, horrified. He had moved so close to Billy that Billy could smell his bad breath. Without answering, Billy swiped through more of the documents. Just under the letter A, there were over a hundred entries for different people—people Emilia Steinbach had secretly saved and smuggled out. From where? A research facility?

GMO 46439 (Barakzai, Zahid)… GMO 46884 (Bhalla, Ravi)… GMO 47497 (Bitar, Khaled)… GMO 47501 (Bloch, Irene).

What even is a GMO?

And more importantly, what kind of sick crap is this?

His heart was pounding so hard he could feel his pulse in his neck. The dizziness was overwhelming, and he braced his elbows on his knees, passing the Rubik’s cube holo-projector to Isaac, who silently continued scrolling through the test subjects:

GMO 51583 (Gbadebo, Amina)… GMO 52613 (Geng, Xiao)… GMO 52667 (Gichuru, Tijuana)… GMO 52709 (Gong, Mai)… GMO 52732 (Grant, Fenix)...

"The mayor?! Our mayor Grant? What the hell! He's one of these experiments, too? What kind of sick shit's goin' on here, Billy??"

"I don't know. No idea. The mayor’s really sick, right?"

"Lung cancer."

"My God. Now we know why."

Isaac’s dark brown eyes wandered aimlessly over the patient records. To them, they were just names, but they both knew these were real people, fathers, mothers, even children.

"These are all names of missing people," Isaac said thoughtfully. "When I was searching for Tabitha, I went through the missing persons reports every day. I even recognize a few of these names."

A sense of dread squeezed Billy’s chest as he stared at the shimmering hologram, knowing now that X-3-19 had lied to him. About everything. About who she was, or who she pretended to be.

She had a dark secret.

A terrible one.

One she had tried to share with him.

But for her, it had been too late.

"Billyboy?"

He had been so wrong about her. The face beneath her makeup was just another mask. Another layer of paint hiding her real self, one made of many small cubes, each representing a dark secret.

"Hey, buddy?"

"She was a scientist from some secret research base," Billy muttered, more to himself than to Isaac. His voice cracked, and he cleared his throat. He couldn’t help the tears welling up in his eyes. He couldn’t stop them.

Strangely, Billy didn’t even notice Isaac had gone quiet beside him until he saw him silently staring at the hologram. Isaac’s eyes were also wet, and he was shaking his head.

At some point, Isaac handed the cube back to him without a word. Billy took the still-running cube projector and his eyes skimmed the text. His face twisted in confusion as he looked from the document to Isaac.

"My God," Billy whispered. "Is that… your wife?"