“Pilar!” The voice woke her again. It sounded harsher, angrier than it ever had before and was accompanied by a loud banging. “Pilar, open up!” The voice cracked.

It wasn’t the voice at all. It was a voice. Christof’s, to be exact.

“Pilar!”

As she stumbled from bed, her feet dragging toward the door, the voice whispered in her ear. “Admit nothing.” She shrugged it away. As if she would.

The door slid open with the press of the button revealing the man she knew it would, though he looked to be a shell of himself. His eyes were sunken, his hair a mess. Christof didn’t wait for an invitation before lurching into her room and gripping her shoulders.

“What did you do?” His eyes searched hers frantically, his fingers digging into her skin.

“You’re hurting me,” she said, attempting to squirm away from his grip, but he only held on tighter.

“The logs, Pilar. I know you came to our room last night,” he said through clenched teeth.

She furrowed her brow, fighting against the pain. She’d have his fingerprints written upon her flesh for a week. “What are you talking about? Of course I came to your room last night. You waved to me when I left.”

The man blinked, and his grip loosened. “What?”

Pilar was able to step away from him, his hands falling to his sides. “I came by after my shift. Florence and I talked for a bit then she said she was tired and going to bed. You were dozing on the couch, but you waved goodbye when I left. Don’t you remember?”

Christof stared at her, though his eyes were unfocused. “No,” he breathed. “So she was…she was alive when you left?”

Pilar let out a laugh. “Alive? Of course she was alive. What’s gotten into you?” She turned to fetch herself a robe, covering the scant pajamas she was wearing, avoiding the lab coat hanging next to it, the damning flask still in its pocket. She kept her movements measured and light, the small smile upon her lips. She only let it fall when she turned back and saw Christof’s silent tears.

“What’s going on, Christof?” she asked quietly, taking slow steps toward him and resting her hand upon his forearm. “Why are you here? Where is…wait, what did you mean by alive?”

The man slowly brought his eyes up to meet hers. “Pilar, Florence is dead.” Each word took a moment to get out, the effort of speaking them aloud apparent.

The woman dropped her hand, taking a step back. “Don’t be ridiculous, I just saw her,” she glanced at the time display, “not even eight hours ago.”

He didn’t respond, only cast his gaze back to the floor.

“Ridiculous,” she muttered again, pushing past him. Her intentional steps turned into a run as she followed the hallway to her friends’ room. The door was open, and she didn’t slow until she crossed inside and to the bedroom, but no one was there.

“You did well,” the voice said, surrounding her.

She ignored it, calling Florence’s name instead. For a moment, she actually believed it hadn’t happened. She imagined Florence stepping out of the bathroom, laughing at the misunderstanding.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Watching her friend’s chest rise and fall for the last time could have been the false narrative. But as Christof’s slow, heavy footsteps joined her, she knew.

Killing Florence, that was real.

Pilar whirled around to face him. “Where is she?” She didn’t have to feign the pain, confusion, hysterics. When he didn’t answer, she left him again.

Her robe billowed behind her, her bare feet slapping the metal floor as she ran. She knew the way. It was burned into her brain after the agonizing trek there when Rory died. But when she reached the morgue, the doors were closed.

“I want to see her!” she called, pounding the door with her open palm. “Let me see her!”

The door slid open, a man dressed in white with thin lips looked down on her, blocking her way. “Mrs. Armada,” he drawled, “surely you remember the protocol.”

She pushed her elbow into the crack between the man’s side and the doorframe. “Let…me…see…her.” Each word was punctuated with her efforts to squeeze through, though she was unsuccessful.

The man stared her down as he pressed the button to close the door. “This door does not have a safety block, so if you don’t want your arm chopped off, I suggest you remove it from its path.” The door began to slide shut and she pulled back. “Have a good day, Mrs. Armada,” he added just before the door sealed shut.

“It’s Miss!” she called, ripping her wedding band from her finger and throwing at the closed door, the metal-on-metal ting barely audible over her ragged breathing.

#

Three days passed and Pilar had heard nothing about Florence’s death. She hadn’t attempted to speak to Christof, and he hadn’t attempted to speak to her. She hadn’t even heard the voice. She kept her head down, spending all her time in her room or the lab. She’d even taken to working nights so she wouldn’t have to be around Nicola or any of the other techs.

“Abnormality detected,” the monotone feminine voice announced alongside a high-pitched ding. “Abnormality detected.”

The alarm continued as Pilar looked up from the sample she was prepping, pulling off her goggles and wiping the back of her hand across her forehead. She carefully placed the vial in the rack and walked across the room to the holoscreen that displayed the automatized program she ran each day, removing and tossing her gloves in a wastebin on her way. The program caught an abnormality in the sample DNA nearly once a month, but it was never anything of note. Usually something that could be explained away as a unique feature of that particular specimen. Still, she had to do her due diligence.

Pilar stood in front of the holoscreen, one hand on her hip, the other zooming and scrolling the screen. It was no wonder the alarm was triggered; this particular section of gene twenty on the X chromosome displayed multiple anomalies. She pulled up another sample and scrolled to the location, expecting to find the current sample’s mutation to be a one-off.

But there it was.

Pilar checked the identification. Specimen thirteen. The current sample was from specimen eleven. Curious. She pulled up another sample, this one specimen fourteen. The same mutation.

Her heart pounding, she opened a file for each specimen, thirty-two in all. Each one had the same mutation on the same section of gene twenty of the X chromosome. They weren’t as obvious as the one that had triggered the alarm–none had nearly as many anomalies, which is likely why she hadn’t noticed it before–but they were there.

She breathed out a laugh. “That’s it,” she whispered. “That’s it.”

She didn’t bother cleaning up or closing out as she turned on her heel and jogged toward the door, intending to pull Nicola from her bed to see for herself. She lined her eye up to the retinal scanner and pressed the button, and the door began to slide open.

Then stopped.

And slide shut.

Confused, Pilar pressed the button again. And again.

“Think.”

Pilar let out a frustrated growl. “You’re locking me in here? I’ve done it. Do you realize what this means?”

“More than you, it seems.”

Pilar thrust her palm on the button over and over in rapid succession, but the door remained shut.

“She’ll take the credit.”

“Well, she is the P.I.” Her palm continued its assault on the button.

“But you did the work.”

Her hand stilled.

“You could do so much more with that information. It would take years, decades, centuries to put it to good use. But you, Pilar, you could use it now.”

A cabinet door next to the mainframe opened, revealing canisters of glass and metal, all hooked up with wires connected to the computer.

And the syringes they fit into.

Pilar stared, knowing what the voice was suggesting. She stared, then took slow steps toward the computer.

And began coding.