For two days, Ciro, Adan, and Reyer waited out in the garden, trying to stave off boredom and nervousness. Jane had insisted that during her first experiments only she and Lynx were to be in the building. The bot had been given strict instructions to shoot both her and the xeno matter if anything went wrong. She worked mostly in silence, but occasionally her anxious audience could hear her mutter a swear word or give Lynx an instruction. As the sun was setting on the second day, Jane came out and made her first pronouncement.

“I think I can handle them safely. And it requires at least point-six liters of xeno matter for a transformation.” She put a forearm up to her brow. “But it’s more complicated than that.”

“Complicated how?” Reyer asked.

“Come inside,” Jane jerked her head to indicate the room behind her. “I can show you.”

Reyer and the captain displayed no squeamishness when they saw the dead mouse in the plastiglass container, but Ciro mumbled, “Why is everyone I hang out with disturbingly good at killing things?” He pointed to the live mouse that was crawling around the corpse of what could have been its identical twin. “Is that—?”

“Yes, that’s a xeno. And the start of an interesting relationship.” Dr. Jane turned from the mouse to another plastiglass container. This one held several beakers full of untransformed xeno material and one mug, which looked very out of place. She replaced the container’s heavy lid with one that had a set of thick rubber gloves built-in to allow access to the box’s contents. She put her hands in the gloves and picked up a beaker. “Watch this.”

She poured some of the xeno material into the empty mug, pulling the beaker upright before it had finished draining. Rather than the flow stopping as expected, the rest of the of the silver-white matter oozed across the gap and into the mug.

Seeing her audience’s disbelieving expressions, Jane poured the matter back and forth, again and again, to prove their eyes weren’t tricking them. “They’re cohesive,” she explained. “It took me a while to figure it out. It was always sliding off my instruments, so I decided to use a syringe.”

She picked up the syringe from the bottom of the container, dipped it into the mug, and pulled a few milliliters of xeno matter into it. When she lifted the syringe away from the mug, all of the contents followed as a bulbous, gelatinous glob. Jane held perfectly still and fixed her eyes on the goo, drawing their attention to its almost imperceptible motion. It was moving—flowing—up toward her hand.

She put it over the empty beaker, lowered the greater part of the matter down, then squirted the rest out from her syringe.

“Ugh,” she whispered. “That still creeps me out.” She put the syringe down and pulled her hands out from the gloves.

“So when you say it takes at least half a liter—” Ciro said.

“Point-six liters,” Jane corrected. “That’s the smallest one we’ve found so far. Their sizes vary.”

“But when they’re all together in the pool…” Reyer didn’t know how to finish her sentence.

Jane shrugged. “I know. I couldn’t tell they were separate either, but it looks like they are.”

“What would happen if you cut one in half?” Vas asked. He lowered his flat hand in a slicing motion. “If you divided the—the stuff.”

Jane frowned. “I don’t know for sure, but I think I killed it.”

Ciro watched, horrified, as Jane once again put her hands in the gloves. “You’ve already tried it?” he asked.

The doctor held up another beaker and the mug. “Yes, and I had to be fast to do it. They slide to the side if they can.” This time the matter inside poured like oil from one container to the other, dribbling slightly when she stopped the flow, but separating easily. She returned the goo to the beaker and put the mug down. When she had extracted her hands, she went to switch the lids.

“What does it mean, Doctor?” Vas asked.

“Nothing much to you, I suppose, but it’s very interesting to me.” She pointed to the water container sitting in the corner. “I don’t think that’s just a bunch of xeno material, I think that’s a specific number of individual xenos.”

“These are you notes?” Ciro asked. He spun the open notebook around so he could try to read it.

There were already seventeen pages filled with her rough script. Despite the prolific amount of writing she knew she would produce, she had insisted on pen and paper. (She had insisted on a lot of things.)

“Don’t touch—” The doctor stopped herself. “Be careful with those. Can I trust you to scan them into a tablet? I have to finishing dating and labeling all my specimens.”

Ciro grinned as he picked up the notebook. “Of course you can trust me.”

“I’m watching you, hacker.”

Every day for over two weeks, Ciro scanned her work into his tablet—if he wasn’t sitting beside her, typing them in as Jane wrote. Not only did she produce five to fifteen pages of regular notes, but she also kept a list at the back of the book. Ciro would have called them conclusions, but Jane had scribbled a question mark at the top of the page hard enough to indent the paper three pages down. On a good day, she might add two points to it.

- Safe in a container made of metal, glass, plastiglass, and rubber - 3mm or thicker. (Test later - how thin can I go?)

- Can move within liquid. Cannot jump or move outside of liquid. Won’t jump or move outside of liquid until attached to a creature. (Test later - what kind of liquid can it survive in?)

Side note: How does it survive before taking a body?

- It’s attracted to mammals faster than any other type of creature. Based on body heat? Exhalation of CO2? Isolate variables.

- Changes into any creature for first transformation.

- Prefers to change to larger or stronger creatures for following transformations. No threat needed.

- Time required for transformation is longer for first transformation and varies depending on the type of body.

- Will transfer to weaker creature if current body is threatened or dying.

- Will not try to transform into a body already occupied by a xeno. (How do they know? How do they recognize?)

- Slow death will not cause them to revert back to goo. (Does this mean they can’t change back?) And they DO know. They become more frantic to reach a new body as their health deteriorates.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

- There is no easy or obvious way to find a xeno by looking at them. Xenos taking over a body will not have the scars the original body had. (Presumably works for tattoos? Bone breaks and mending?)

- They last longer in critical condition than non-xeno creatures under the same stress. Tougher.

- A xeno that dies without another body to take over dies. Decomposition is accelerated (Note: check corpses every three days). Decomposition results in goo with different texture than untransformed or transforming goo. Dead xeno goo remains inert, even when exposed to water, a new body, or untransformed xenos.

- DNA markers appear for every manifestation of a xeno.

Jane threw down the pen and folded her arms, glaring at her notes.

“That’s good work,” Reyer said, coming up behind her.

“That’s incomplete work.” She swore. “What I wouldn’t give for a microscope. A microscope.” She put a hand to her head. “My god, I sound like an undergrad.” She dropped back onto an armchair. “Lynx, how many mice do we have left?”

“None, Dr. Jane.”

“Rats?”

“Three remaining specimens.”

“Any lizards?”

“There are no other animals purchased for experimentation, Dr. Jane.”

“Three rats.” Jane shook her head. “Lynx can you write by hand?”

“Yes, Dr. Jane.”

“Label the last specimen—be sure to include the date—and put it with the others.”

“Tired?” Ciro asked from over by his side table of technology.

Jane grunted and looked up at Reyer. “Alix, I don’t know how much more I can do.”

Captain Vas called out from the kitchen area where he was preparing dinner. “Can you explain that, Doctor?”

“Not only am I limited by money, but I’m limited to studying their behavior. Without better tools, I can’t look into the nitty-gritty of their biology and answer the real questions—What are they made out of? How can they transform? How do they reproduce?”

“You don’t know how they reproduce?”

Jane let out a frustrated sigh. “I have Lynx weigh the container every day. It’s gone down as expected with every extraction of material. It hasn’t gone up in weight at all. I know they have to reproduce somehow—everything does—but I’ll be damned if I can work it out. Considering their theoretical longevity, they wouldn’t have to reproduce often.” She scratched her head. “I haven’t tried putting on soft music and dimming the lights. Maybe I should.”

Reyer sat down in a nearby armchair. “Can they reproduce when they’re in a body?”

“Do you mean will a rat-xeno have sex with a rat?”

“Yes.”

“I have no idea. They appear to lose all interest in sexual activities.”

“What a miserable existence,” Ciro said, flicking over to the last pages of her notes. “That observation isn’t on your conclusion page.”

“That’s because there’s nothing to conclude!” Jane said. “I’m doing some pretty traumatic things to these creatures. It’s not surprising they lose the drive to get it on.”

Vas motioned for Reyer and Jane to come over and join him. Whatever was sizzling in the skillet in his hand smelled good enough to overpower the scent of Jane’s equipment and various lab animals. Either that, or Reyer was getting used to tuning out those particular odors.

“Ciro, join us or eat cold food,” Adan said.

“I’ll be there the minute I can.” Ciro made certain to put Jane’s notes back in their appointed spot. The first time he’d moved them was a memorable experience. Jane put up with a lot of smart comments— returning each in kind—but she put up with exactly nothing when it came to how her lab worked.

Jane washed her hands as Reyer got out some glasses. She poured Jane and the absent Ciro wine. She got water for herself and the captain.

Jane shot down half her wine as if it was whiskey and held it out for a refill.

Reyer smiled as she poured. “Go easy on this stuff, or you’ll have to go out gambling again.”

From over by the side of the room, they heard Ciro say, “The sacrifices one has to make for science.”

Jane said, “If we decide to stay, I’ll have to go out again soon anyway. Our time is running out in this annex, and I’m short on lab animals. And wine.”

“Is it worth it to stay?” Vas asked. He started dividing the steaming food among the plates.

“Worth it to whom? I could stay at this project for the rest of my life and not exhaust all the questions I have. You guys are probably more practical. You’ll want to know how to find them and how to kill them.”

“It would also be nice to know how many there are and what kind of a threat they pose,” Alix said, passing Jane her portion.

“Wouldn’t it?” The doctor drank some more wine.

“Weren’t you telling Miss Reyer you’ve done as much as you can?” Vas asked.

Jane grumbled something under her breath, then said, louder, “I can think of more observational experiments. I guess I’m just frustrated.”

“I heard.” Vas smiled. “The microscope.” He put aside the skillet and sat down at the kitchen island.

“That’s only the start of it,” Jane said. “There are so many simple questions that I might be able to answer if I only had the right tools or opportunities.” She stared at the wine in her glass. “If only I could talk to one.”

Jane looked up when the silence in the room grew too pronounced for her to ignore.

“You mean a xeno?” Reyer asked.

Jane picked up her fork and poked at her food. “A human-xeno. Obviously.”

“You don’t speak to rats?” Ciro asked.

“Only you, Wonder Boy.”

“Sorry, Dr. Jane, there’s only so far I’m willing to go to help with your experiments. I refuse to become a lab rat.”

“I couldn’t use you. I need them to be intelligent.”

“Ha ha.” Ciro stood up from the ground where he’d been sitting, but his attempt to pry himself away from his computer was only moderately successful. He was still hunched over the tablet he had turned into his console.

Alix put down her fork. Something about her interest unnerved Jane. “Would talking to a human-xeno help you?”

“It might,” Jane said, “if I could get them to talk to me.”

“Do they know about themselves? If they were never sentient before they became humans, would they have memories of their species?”

“I don’t know for sure, but it’s a possibility.”

“What makes you think so?” Vas asked.

Jane glanced up at him.

“Was it in the video you saw where the xeno took over the interviewer?” he added.

She shook her head. “There were other reports—strange reports—being made by trained Supremacy scientists that stated assumptions and never cited evidence to back it up. I couldn’t understand what was going on, so I dug a little deeper—”

Adan, brother to Ciro Vas, could spot a tech-euphemism from a light-year away. “You mean you hacked your way into some highly classified, secured files?”

“Well, yes. But I had to!”

“That’s my girl,” Ciro muttered as he came over to join them.

“What did you say?” Jane snapped.

He pulled out the stool beside her and sat down. “I said, ‘way to go.’”

She gradually turned back around. “It took me a long time, but I found…the other files. Videos of human-xenos that had been captured by the Supremacy.”

“You didn’t tell us about those, did you?” Reyer said.

“I mentioned them. I didn’t give details.”

“Why not?” Ciro asked

“Ciro, eat,” Vas commanded.

Jane looked from face to face. Ciro, true to his dopey-dog nature, seemed hurt and baffled by the fact that Jane had kept something from him. Vas and Alix, however, seemed neither surprised, nor inclined to rebuke her. They must have accepted the fact she might hold information back. Which meant they thought of her as an enemy.

Why did that make her so angry?

They had kidnapped her—as she relentlessly reminded them. But still…

Jane looked down at her plate and stabbed at an innocent bit of food. “I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to make the Supremacy look bad.”

Ciro had watched Dr. Jane dispassionately use scores of lab animals to further the cause of science. He hated to imagine what on those videos could have qualified as “bad.”

“They tortured them?” Alix asked in a soft voice.

“They were only xenos,” Jane said.

“They didn’t look like xenos. They looked like humans.”

Jane didn’t answer.

Reyer took a sip of her water and put down the glass. Without looking at Jane, she said, “We don’t need details about what they did. Not yet. Did you learn anything from those videos?”

“They’re desperate to survive,” Jane said.

“Isn’t that most creatures?” Ciro asked.

“Not all creatures. And not like them.”

“That means they would have been easy to torture,” Reyer noted. “Did they start talking?”

“One of them did. She seemed to know things and remember things that she shouldn’t have known as the human she’d copied, but by that time, she was in pretty bad shape. She was panicking so much it was hard for her to function.”

There was an uncomfortable pause in the conversation.

“Torture isn’t a reliable way to get information,” Reyer said. “People will either say nothing and die saying nothing, or they’ll say anything to make the pain stop. They’ll make up whatever they think their captors want to hear.”

“But there’s a possibility talking to one of them might reveal something,” Ciro said.

The pitch of his voice sounded odd to Jane, but before she could comment, Vas said, “I think I may have to make a new rule about no science at the dinner table.”

“Science is messy,” Ciro said. “That’s probably a good policy.”

“No more conversations about science at the dinner table,” Vas clarified, knowing good and well he didn’t need to.

From over by the corner where Lynx had put himself, the bot said, “Master Ciro, considering Dr. Jane’s precautions, the concern that the table may become contaminated or might be harboring unwanted or unusual bacteria is negligible.”

Jane said over her shoulder, “Thank you, Lynx,” then turned back to the table. “At least he gives me respect.”

“Who better than a robot to appreciate cold, heartless logic?” Ciro said.