The distant sound of keys grinding in the lock crunched in Alison’s ears. Muffled as her hearing had become over the past hour of painful quality time with her cousin, who now stood at twice her height, the two-inch girl had honed her senses through the soreness and bruising to await the creak of the apartment door hinges. Finally her silent patience had paid off. Her mother was back.

            “All set, babe?” Tony questioned to his girlfriend. He hunkered on his knees, prepared for the limited number of assaults he could endure without falling at his miniscule size, and placed his hand down against the slender small of Alison’s back. He propped her up by his shoulder, supporting her feather weight against his knee, as a clear display of her continued oxygen use. Seeing a potentially dead girl laying between the pair of them would do them no favors when Anna entered, and he knew it.

            “I’ve been fucking set for two goddamn years,” Ashley spat, her voice still musical with righteous glee. She gave Alison a sporting flick to the black eye, earning no more than a flinch from her martyred younger cousin, who’d resolved not to speak or attempt engagement after her unsuccessful escape earlier on the floor.

            “Just stay calm. I know you want to, but don’t yell… too much. Just… talk straight, babe, and this will go okay. I believe in you.” Tony seemed to be convincing himself almost as much as her, though probably Ashley just a little more.

            “Fine.”

            The door handle twisted, the final lock coming undone, and the passage swung open. Anna stood innocently, silhouetted against the dimly lit hallway behind. The low glow of the TV still hummed from behind, providing just enough guidance to deliver her gaze to the sight awaiting in the center of the ottoman. Tony and Ashley, standing defiantly alone, or so it appeared, until the two-inch figure draped over Tony’s leg was processed in the woman’s mind.

            Alison, her vision still swimming from the beating, had difficulty picking out her mother’s expression amidst the shadows, even when she towered so high above them now. It was difficult not to experience the briefest of heart flutters to witness a human being at such massive scale for the first time, even if it was the one who could deliver her from this nightmarish mess.    Anna blinked, shutting the door behind her with startling slowness, not bolting toward them with fists raised skyward for a deadly blow, as Tony had presumed. Rather, the woman’s countenance remained mostly composed, save for the bulge of her eyes on the initial moment of recognition. Otherwise, she was a paragon of serenity as she set her purse down on a side table, and took several tentative steps across the carpet, toward the ottoman, where her tiny family stood in a threatening huddle. She flossed her dark hair between long fingers.

            “Not another step, bitch,” Ashley roared.

            Tony had a feeling his girlfriend would be the one to make the first comment in these negotiations. It was hard to lay any guilt on her, though. Not after everything she’d been through; Tony had suffered serious losses, of course, but nothing like what he measured in her.

            Anna’s lips pursed, her hands halting at her sides, and she obeyed, coming to a full stop not three steps away from the ottoman. Her sandals softly slapped at her heels: the only sound in the intervening seconds.

            “Now move back. Three. No, four steps,” Ashley spat, clearly anxious about the very real possibility of her aunt leaning over in one mad swoop, hand outstretched. They were currently in range, after all. Then she added, just in case the point wasn’t made: “Fucking cunt.”

            A solemn, single nod. Anna folded her hands behind her back, possibly for reassurance that she wasn’t going to attempt anything heroic. Close enough for more accurate study, her eyes zeroed on her now-tiny daughter, battered and swollen, but nonetheless breathing heavily, eyes open and conscious to the dangerous world surrounding her.

            “It looks like you’ve had a busy evening,” Anna said quietly, her voice as unchanged as her face.

            It puzzled Alison to hear not a single note of panic in her mother’s voice, but also somehow reassured her. Her mother’s tone was as low and collected as it had been when they first entered the Yeager household eighteen months before and encountered the anomaly of science and reality which allowed them to begin rebuilding their lives, at the cost of two others.

            She’d trusted her parent on that confusing night as well, and it had gotten her this far, until her own serendipitous misfortune had cost her a few feet in height. Alison knew she’d have to summon that same trust again.

            There was an assured stillness in her mother’s body that Alison noticed now which she couldn’t say she’d truly seen before, and probably couldn’t have, until she was looking up at her parent from a size nearly equal to that of her thumb. And she was certainly massive now.

            “Just fucking stay there,” Ashley grunted, though she’d been given no prompting by movement or response from their blackmail recipient. To Alison, her cousin sounded more concerned with reminding everyone in the room that she was still in control of the situation.

            “All right,” Anna said. Conversationally.

            Tony wrapped his arm tighter around Alison’s stomach, securing her against his knee. His other hand had risen, sliding up the miniature girl’s spine, until it was poised decisively against the back of her neck, giving him unique leverage to inflict some cranial damage, should too much seismic activity occur around him, or a giant hand come crashing down from above. It was a pose he and Ashley had spent the better part of the past half hour carefully devising for maximum effectiveness in convincing Anna of their ability to snap the links of Alison’s bones, should they be given sufficient reason to.

            “Is my daughter all right?” Anna asked, hands still folded behind. She looked to Tony rather than her niece, perhaps sensing which of the hostage-holders was the more self-possessed at this moment.

            “Yes,” he said, knowing how important it was to establish their cards here. He patted his hand against the back of Alison’s scalp. “She’s a little beat up. But she’s breathing, honest. She’s gonna make it.”

            “Hold the fuck up. I haven’t decided that part yet,” Ashley growled. She shot her boyfriend a look which he couldn’t quite read: somewhere between a hopeful beg and a leer of betrayal. “Whether or not she’s ever all right again is gonna be up to you, Auntie.”

            “Okay,” Anna said. “What do you want?”

            “See, told you she’d go along with it,” Ashley hissed to Tony. She cupped her palm under her tiny younger cousin’s chin, prodding at her willowy neck, threatening to temporarily impede the flow of air down Alison’s throat. The smaller girl gurgled, writhing gently against Tony’s leg, but didn’t offer further resistance.

            “Just tell me,” Anna said.

            “You’re gonna take us to my dad’s brother’s house. Uncle George and Aunt Tamara,” Ashley said. She took her time pronouncing

            “All right.”

            Ashley’s mouth was already opened again, teeth bared and foam around her lips, but she quickly shut up, her brow narrowing to a frown. She obviously had been expecting, and preparing insults for, a substantially longer argument over the matter. The hysterical girl shrugged.

            “Okay, so here’s what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna go get that fucking hamster cage you kept us in when you took me to your creepy friends to fix my legs. You’re gonna open it, then step way back while we get in with your precious little girl, and then you’re gonna drive us to their house.”

            “Fair enough,” Anna said, just as placid as ever. “And then what?”

            “You’ll get the next part after you do what I said first, bitch.” Ashley chuckled under her breath, obviously savoring this moment more than anything in the past two years. Perhaps longer than that. It was more maniacal fun just verbally berating Anna, even, than it was punting Alison across the ottoman.

            The two-inch hostage batted her bleary eyes, steadily getting her vision back as the swelling around her eye settled to its new mass. She tried to make eye contact with Anna, who mostly kept her steely vision trained to either Ashley or Tony at all times, never the space around them, and not to the battered girl hung over the young man’s leg. A soft gurgle in her stomach: the desire to call out for her mother clawed at her throat, but Alison resisted the urge. Whatever her mother’s reason for this behavior, there’d be an explanation soon enough. Or so she hoped. It was hard to know what was real emotion and what was a winding sense of painful dizziness at this stage.

            “What are you standing around there for?” Ashley demanded. Her fingers balled into a fist and thrust into Alison’s abdomen, purging the girl’s already-shriveled lungs of air in a single blow. A shudder rippled through Alison’s body at the impact on her already bruised ribs as she choked for oxygen. “Get the fucking cage.”

            “Okay,” Anna said. Her body held still as stone while her daughter received her ninetieth punch to the gut of this long night. Her hands appeared out from behind her back again, causing Ashley to brace back against the soft terrain on her haunches, eyes wild with anticipation for assault.

            “Get it NOW.”

            Anna nodded and turned toward the door, delicately landing each step such that the ottoman wasn’t rattled, no sudden movements made to startle her trigger-happy niece. She disappeared into the bedroom.

            “This is going fucking great,” Ashley huffed with almost sexual joy into Tony’s ear. She prodded her knee into Alison’s stomach again, but seemed satisfied enough with the effectiveness of the plan to stave off another demonstrative attack on her already considerably plum-speckled body. A euphoric grin spread Ashley’s cheeks wide, and even Tony found himself bearing an involuntary exhalation and a relieved smirk he couldn’t quite shake.

            They were closer than ever. It had never been so real except in dreams, up to now.

            Tony scooped Alison’s prone body up into his arms, cradling her close to his chest. Their breathing synced together. The hamster cage set down on the platform, its grated gate opened up with an unsettling creak. Anna’s fingers separated from the carrier handle atop the structure as she backed away, at Ashley’s barked instruction.

            Confident in their security, the four-inch pair clambered into the cage and huddled at the center, shielding their prize from any prying thumbs that might emerge from the shadows. As predicted, though, Anna’s palm only returned to close back around the handle.

            “Just fucking watch yourself,” Ashley crowed as Anna collected her keys and purse back over her shoulder. “Remember, there’s two pairs of eyes on you right now. If you try something I don’t like, then there goes cute lil’ cousin Ali. Just like that.”

            “I understand,” Anna responded robotically. She folded a dark cloth towel over her wrist. “I’m going to cover you up until we’re in the car, all right?”

            “Just hurry up.”

            The cage lifted up, the towel fluttered down, and they were off at a stately pace. Tony nodded, proud of his girlfriend for mostly-keeping her unbridled rage in check, at least in the ways that counted. With a free hand, he grasped her arm, giving her a reassuring squeeze.

            “What are you doing?” Ashley hissed at him. She jostled his knuckle away and crept forward on her haunches toward the wall as the towel concealed the shrunken inhabitants of the hamster home. “Keep both hands on her. On her.”

            “Right, babe. Sorry,” Tony sputtered, easing the heel of his hand against Alison’s chin, though with decidedly less force than when Ashley was watching over his shoulder. He was even careful, he realized after a minute of the journey downstairs to Anna’s rundown vehicle, not to place his fingers over Alison’s bruises. Why this was, he couldn’t begin to say, other than realizing he must’ve been feeling a very particular type of kinship with combat veterans who’d lost limbs.

            “Hold tight,” Anna said, setting the cage into the passenger seat and casting the towel aside. The key twisted in the ignition, the engine only chugging at first, but a second crank brought it to life.

            “How long will it take?” Ashley demanded.

            “Two hours at least.”

            “That’s not how long it takes,” the girl snapped, her voice instantly harried. Her bones shivered through her arms. Her tiny eyes were jaundiced with paranoia. “What the fuck are you planning, huh?”

            “It will take that long if I have to drive slower. To make sure you three are safe.”

            “Oh, yeah, I’m sure you’re real concerned about us, aren’t you? Don’t fucking lie to me just because you know you’re about to lose.”

            “I’m not concerned, dear. You know that,” Anna said with quicksilver cool. “I’ve told you before I won’t lie to you, and I still won’t. But you won’t be hurting my daughter any more than you already have. And neither will I.” Her eyes locked to the road ahead.

            “We’ll see about that,” Ashley vowed under her ragged breath, fingers steepling together in near-religious reverence. She wrapped both arms back around Tony’s shoulders for support as the car lurched into the twilight promise of impending liberty, in all its animal glories.