CHAPTER ONE: LILLY

A few hours ago, Lilly thought her friends had simply disappeared, and there had been a stretch of maybe fifteen minutes in Dean Everett’s house when that was the worst thing she knew.

She remembered the clothes more clearly than she wanted to. Not because they had been frightening, exactly. Clothes were stupid. Clothes were what happened when a body spent enough time around other people to become embarrassed by itself. But without anyone inside them they had looked indecently personal: Dean’s jeans slouched around themselves on the floor, somebody’s shirt with one sleeve turned inward, shoes waiting in pairs with the dumb patience of dogs. There had been phones. Keys. A watch that talked. The residue of ordinary people interrupted so completely that Lilly had kept waiting for the joke to explain itself.

Finn had been there.

That was the part her mind kept trying not to touch.

He had been full-sized then, which had seemed like a permanent condition because Lilly had never before needed to think of her brother as having a size. He had been Finn-sized. Taller than her. Annoyingly capable of reaching things. His hands had been his hands, large enough to take her phone away when she was driving badly, or push her shoulder when she was being an asshole, or make that little flattened gesture over a table when he had decided everybody needed to shut up and let him think.

By the time the night ended she had watched one of those hands disappear between the wet folds of a golden retriever’s tongue.

Brooke moved in the cube beside hers.

Lilly looked at her.

There were two transparent walls between them and approximately an inch of air, though distance had become difficult to think about since an inch could now be a room, a fall, a stretch of open ground you might die trying to cross. Brooke had her forehead against the clear wall. The cocktail napkin she had tied around herself at the party was still there, stiff in places from dried cheese and whatever else the mansion had contributed to it. One side had torn. Brooke kept holding it closed at her hip with two fingers without seeming aware that she was doing it.

Her other hand was against the wall between them.

Lilly did not put hers up.

Brooke left it there anyway.

She looked awful. Not movie-awful. Nothing art-directed about it. Her spray tan had gone patchy with sweat and grime. Honey-brown hair clung in dried strings around her face. There was a dark bruise forming along one thigh and something reddish under one knee where the skin had been abraded raw. Her eyes were swollen from crying, but she was no longer crying.

That made two of them.

Lilly wondered whether Brooke could see Finn when she looked at her.

Probably.

It seemed fair.

The van moved beneath them with a low, continuous vibration that the cube softened without quite erasing. The floor had been designed for feet their size: faintly textured, slightly warm, enough traction that every turn did not fling them against the walls. The air coming through the vents was gentle. No gusts strong enough to knock them down. No cold pouring across bare skin fast enough to become dangerous. Whoever had built the boxes understood that a five-millimeter human being was not just a normal person reduced photographically until the dimensions looked funny.

Someone had thought about heat loss.

Someone had thought about airflow.

Someone had thought about the coefficient of friction under a human foot smaller than a grain of rice.

Lilly hated them for their thoroughness.

She had spent the last hours being nearly killed by things that did not know she existed. Carpet fibers. Shoes. A phone. A dog whose ordinary happy breathing could move the hair against her face. The whole world had become lethal mostly through innocence. Marc’s house had not wanted anything from her. The marble did not hate her. The shoes had not chosen where she stood. Lacy had been hungry and curious and happy to find something moving.

The people in the van had built her a floor.

That difference kept opening inside her in places she did not want opened.

Across the rack, Dean sat with his back against the rear wall of his cube.

She had never seen Dean Everett fail to occupy a room before, even when he had technically not been invited into it. His whole thing had always been the assumption that attention was a renewable resource and he had somehow been born with mineral rights. He talked with his hands, his eyebrows, his shoulders. He flirted with cashiers who hated him. He could make apologizing sound like a sales pitch for whatever he had done wrong.

Now there was almost nothing happening in his face.

His knees were bent. One arm rested across them. His head leaned against the wall behind him, and his eyes had been fixed for so long on some point beneath the rack that Lilly eventually looked down to see if there was something there.

There wasn’t.

Lucy was not in any of the cubes.

Neither was Theo.

Lilly had noticed that almost immediately and then done nothing useful with the information.

There were too many reasons for someone not to be there now.

Dean’s face told her Lucy was probably one of them.

What kind, she didn’t know.

She could have asked him if the boxes had allowed them to hear one another. She had not tried. Dean had not tried either.

Zara stood in her cube rather than sitting. One hand braced against the clear front, the other holding her opposite elbow close to her side. She had been hurt somewhere during the night; Lilly could see it in the careful economy of the way she shifted her weight. Zara’s face was composed in the way people’s faces became composed when composure was no longer an emotion and had turned into manual labor. Her eyes moved constantly. Hinges. Fasteners. Vent slots. The men outside the rack. The silver-haired man. The device in his hand.

Every few minutes her attention came back to the cubes.

It paused at Dean.

It paused at Kyler.

Once, for longer, it moved through the empty slots as though the right angle might contain somebody they had missed.

Theo, Lilly thought.

Zara had kept asking about Theo.

Lilly looked away before Zara could catch her watching.

Susan was curled on the floor with both arms wrapped around herself, naked and furious about it in a way that seemed to require energy Lilly could not imagine having. She kept dragging her hair over one breast and then forgetting, shifting, covering herself again. Her mouth moved occasionally. Lilly couldn’t make out the words through the walls, but Susan’s expressions required very little audio. At one point she looked up toward one of the cameras and clearly told it to go fuck itself.

Some things survived extinction-level humiliation.

Officer Mendez was kneeling rather than sitting, her spine straight despite the fact that she had no uniform anymore. The uniform had apparently belonged to the version of reality in which a badge could stop anything. She kept speaking toward the front of her cube in deliberate bursts, stopping between them as if waiting for an answer. Her hands made small controlled gestures. Name. Rank. Questions. Demands. Procedure being assembled around herself piece by piece because somebody had taken everything else.

Marc was still wearing the purple scraps.

Lilly did not know exactly what they had once been. Some expensive shirt, probably, now reduced to a few torn strips that had traveled with him or snagged around him somehow in whatever impossible arithmetic Kenneth’s machine used to decide that clothing was not part of a person but certain bits of metal sometimes were. Marc sat slumped in them like a dethroned toddler prince. His blond curls were flattened against one side of his head. His cheeks were blotchy. He had cried hard enough that snot had dried above his upper lip.

He caught Lilly looking and immediately rearranged the purple fabric across his stomach.

Even now.

Especially now.

Edie paced.

Her cube was barely long enough to deserve the word, but she had found the exact number of steps it contained and seemed determined to wear them into the floor. Three one way. Turn. Three back. Sometimes two and a half because she altered the angle to inspect something along the wall. Her eyes kept dropping to the seam where clear material met the base. She had already tried one vent. Lilly could tell from the faint redness around two fingertips.

Edie looked like a person who would spend six months escaping a prison through a hole too small to see because somebody had told her there wasn’t one.

Kyler was pressed against the front of his cube with both palms flat.

Something had happened to Kyler after they were separated.

Something beyond all the other things that had happened to everybody.

He had always been restless even when he was technically still, his face making tiny negotiations with boredom, his mouth threatening to become a joke before the rest of him caught up. Lilly had seen him laugh at situations that would have made other people call their parents. She had seen him treat catastrophe like it had accidentally wandered into his party and might as well have a drink.

There was no joke in him now.

His hands remained spread against the wall. His mouth had opened once, soundless from where Lilly sat, and the expression on his face had been so naked that she had looked down.

Not naked like the rest of them.

Worse.

Whatever he had seen, Edie knew.

That was obvious too.

Every time Edie turned at the end of her pacing, her eyes found Kyler’s cube before they found anything else.

Kenneth was alone in a darker box.

Of course he was.

Even captivity had understood that Kenneth Wright needed special packaging.

His cube was reinforced at the corners and tinted enough that Lilly had to wait for the changing light outside the van to see him clearly. He sat with his arms around his knees, naked, glasses somehow still with him because the universe apparently had a very specific sense of humor about nonliving matter.

Lilly remembered those glasses in Marc’s study.

Remembered standing at full size across from him while he explained things with the exhausted superiority of somebody correcting a child who had asked why the moon followed the car. Chrono-Analog Exchange Unit. Adjacent realities. Homologues. Controlled bridge. Not shrinking.

She had watched his face more than she had listened to half the vocabulary.

People lied in different places.

The mouth was overrated. Everybody watched the mouth. Lilly liked the little delay around the eyes, the fraction of a second between somebody deciding what they wanted you to believe and their face receiving instructions.

Kenneth had been angry about Dean stealing his invention.

That part had been real.

His concern for the people Dean had endangered had not.

Lilly had seen that almost immediately. Kenneth had wanted the device back with the clean intensity of someone who considered possession an ethical argument. Whatever he told himself afterward, the moment ECHO had said Welcome, Creator, something in Kenneth had relaxed.

Then he had used it.

Lilly remembered the flash less clearly than she remembered his face just before it.

The study had become impossibly large around her. Carpet had risen in coarse pillars beneath bare feet. Her body had arrived naked before her mind understood that nakedness had become the least interesting emergency available. She remembered Finn’s voice somewhere in the confusion. Edie swearing. Marc, who had thought all of it was spectacular right until the machine included him.

Afterward the party had ceased to be a party in the way a person ceased to be a person after somebody started discussing their organs individually.

Everything separated.

Routes. Rooms. People.

Lilly had kept Finn in sight until she couldn’t.

Then she had him again.

Then Brooke was stuck.

The memory did not arrive as a sequence. It never did. It came wrong, beginning with the smell.

Dog breath.

Warm and wet and meaty, carrying whatever Lacy had eaten before she found them, immense only because Lilly had been close enough that each exhale became weather. Then the slick orange surface of the cheese around Brooke’s legs. Finn’s hands digging. Brooke sobbing that she was stuck. Lilly trying to help and not helping enough. The floor trembling under a dog whose tail was probably wagging.

Finn had looked at the dog.

Then at Brooke.

Then at Lilly.

There had been enough time in his face for her to understand before she allowed herself to understand.

No.

She had said it.

Maybe screamed it.

She could still feel the shape her mouth had made.

Finn had gotten Brooke free.

Lacy’s tongue came down pink and wet and vastly alive, a muscular surface shining with saliva. It struck Finn and folded him against it with casual adhesive force, the thin body that had been her brother’s body one moment and prey the next disappearing upward before Lilly could get to him. She had seen one arm. His hand. His face turned sideways against the tongue. Then teeth beyond him, huge and white and stupidly clean.

The mouth closed.

Lacy swallowed.

There had been movement in the dog’s throat.

That had been all.

Finn had not exploded. There had been no final speech. The room had not recognized the importance of what happened. The dog had licked cheese from the floor.

Brooke’s hand remained against the wall beside Lilly.

Lilly lifted her eyes and found Brooke watching her.

Brooke’s lips moved.

Lilly could not hear.

She knew the shape anyway.

Sorry.

Lilly closed her eyes.

That was almost worse than if Brooke had said nothing.

A click sounded above her.

Not loud. The cube had a tiny circular grille set into its upper corner. Until now Lilly had assumed it belonged to ventilation, but a woman’s voice emerged from it at a safe volume, crisp enough to make her open her eyes.

“External audio relay active.”

ECHO.

Lilly knew the voice immediately.

Apparently trauma had customer service.

The silver-haired man stood at the front of the van holding Kenneth’s device in one hand.

He was difficult to look at for reasons Lilly could not reduce to handsome or ugly. He was handsome, probably. Tall, lean, silver hair, pale skin, gray eyes. His suit fit with the sort of perfection that usually meant somebody had paid an offensive amount of money to make fabric pretend gravity was optional.

But there was something finished about him that made ordinary attractive people seem unfinished by comparison. No habitual fidgeting. No unconscious adjustment of a cuff. No shifting his weight because one ankle had started to hurt. He had been standing in nearly the same position for several minutes, and Lilly had begun to wonder whether he blinked at normal intervals or simply performed blinking because other people found it soothing.

He held the black device loosely.

Kenneth watched him.

That was the first time Lilly had seen Kenneth move in a while.

Not much. His head lifted.

The silver-haired man noticed.

His mouth changed slightly.

Not a smile.

Something private and pleased.

He took a phone from inside his jacket.

“You have the secondary team?”

A voice answered too faintly for Lilly to distinguish through the relay.

“Good. No, leave the remaining scene intact until forensics has documented the exchange signatures. I am not interested in what local police believe happened. They will believe what survives.”

He listened.

“Correct.”

Another pause.

“Tell His Imperial Majesty that the device has been recovered. Origin cohort secured. Wright included.”

The person on the other end said something.

For the first time, the silver-haired man’s face showed something Lilly recognized without effort.

Annoyance.

“I am aware he does not have a phone.”

Longer this time.

His eyes closed once.

“Then find someone who dreams.”

He began to lower the phone, stopped, and returned it to his ear.

“And bring Red Bull.”

The call ended.

Nobody in the cubes appeared to know what to do with that.

Susan stared.

Marc’s mouth opened.

Even Mendez stopped talking.

Lilly looked toward Brooke and discovered Brooke looking back with the expression of somebody who had been kidnapped by a death cult and was irritated that the death cult had somehow found a way to become less professional.

The silver-haired man checked something on the phone.

It rang almost immediately.

He answered without greeting.

“Yes.”

A woman’s voice, distant.

He listened.

One corner of his mouth tightened.

“Of course she will be there.”

The sentence carried history. Not affection. Not exactly hatred. More the exhausted certainty of discovering a specific raccoon had once again gotten into the same garbage can.

“No. Do not delay intake. Katrine can interfere in person.”

He hung up.

The van slowed.

The change in motion moved through the rack as pressure beneath Lilly’s feet rather than a dramatic jolt. She steadied herself with one hand on the wall. Brooke did the same. Dean barely reacted.

The silver-haired man approached Kenneth’s cube.

At their scale the movement should have been overwhelming, but the distance remained large enough that he was simply a man crossing a room, except a man whose shoe was long enough to lie Lilly down inside it and still have space beyond her head and feet. He stopped well short of the rack and looked through the tinted wall.

Kenneth stood.

He had been curled inward so long that the movement seemed to hurt him.

The audio relay clicked.

The silver-haired man’s voice arrived through the tiny speaker rather than through the air.

“Mr. Wright.”

Kenneth’s mouth moved. A microphone somewhere inside his cube caught it and raised the tiny sound into the van.

“You know who I am.”

It was not a question.

His voice sounded rough. Lilly had never heard Kenneth sound physically tired before. Emotionally exhausted by everybody else’s stupidity, constantly. Actually tired, no.

The man’s expression warmed by a degree.

“I know quite a bit about you.”

Kenneth walked closer to the front wall. Whatever shame he felt about being naked had apparently been processed, categorized and dismissed as inefficient.

“Then you know you shouldn’t touch that.”

His eyes stayed on the CAEU.

The silver-haired man glanced down at it.

“Still proprietary.”

Kenneth said nothing.

The man waited.

He seemed to enjoy waiting in a way that made Lilly’s skin prickle.

Then, with a small theatrical exhale through his nose, he said, “Ha. Ha. Ha.”

Each syllable came separately.

Nobody laughed.

His eyes remained on Kenneth.

“Looks like it’s checkmate, Mr. Wright.”

Kenneth’s face did not change immediately.

Lilly watched the change happen somewhere deeper. A muscle touched his jaw. His eyes moved from the device to the man holding it, and whatever he wanted to say passed through several filters before he discarded all of it.

He turned his back.

The silver-haired man watched him do it.

That pleased him more than any answer would have.

The rear doors opened.

White light flooded the van.

It did not feel like daylight.

Several full-sized figures appeared outside. None wore the black armor from Marc’s house. That difference bothered Lilly more than if they had.

A woman in work pants and a blue polo climbed into the van first. Another person behind her wore a high-visibility vest. There were gloves. Clipboards. A rolling equipment platform. The ordinary equipment of people whose job involved moving objects from one place to another without dropping them.

The rack containing the cubes unlocked from the wall.

Lilly felt the mechanism release beneath her like the click of a seat belt.

The silver-haired man stepped aside while two workers guided the entire assembly onto the platform.

Nobody looked particularly amazed.

One of them checked a manifest.

“Ten?”

“Ten.”

“Special containment?”

“Wright.”

The worker leaned toward Kenneth’s darker cube, not close enough for breath or body heat to matter, only enough to verify a label.

“Got him.”

That was it.

Lilly looked at the woman’s face.

Late thirties, maybe. Tired. Hair pulled back. A faint indentation across the bridge of her nose from glasses she was no longer wearing. She handled the locking mechanism with the bored competence of somebody who had moved fragile scientific equipment all week and wanted to go home.

The platform rolled.

The van disappeared behind them.

For a while Lilly could see almost nothing except fragments.

Concrete.

Painted lines.

A service corridor.

A gray metal door opening ahead.

Fluorescent fixtures passing overhead one after another, each becoming a hard white rectangle in the roof of her cube before sliding away.

The rack had been covered on three sides by an opaque transport shell, perhaps to protect them from air movement, perhaps so nobody passing could look down and notice ten naked microscopic people being wheeled through a building.

Through the front, Lilly caught pieces of clothing.

Work shoes.

Dark slacks.

A lanyard swinging from somebody’s belt.

Blue lettering on the side of a plastic case passed too quickly for her to read.

The cart stopped.

An elevator.

She knew the feeling before she heard the doors. The faint floating wrongness in her stomach, absurdly small now but apparently still committed to being a stomach.

They descended.

For longer than she expected.

Mendez stood during the entire ride, one hand against her cube wall for balance.

Zara had noticed the descent too. Their eyes met briefly across the rack.

Not basement, Lilly thought.

Or not just one.

The doors opened into another corridor.

Pipes ran along the ceiling. Electrical conduit. Cinderblock painted an institutional beige that seemed specifically designed to discourage memory. Somewhere beyond the transport shell a motor hummed continuously.

One door had a sign.

Lilly caught only part of it before they passed.

MECHANICAL

AUTHORIZED—

Then it was gone.

The corridor after that became cleaner.

Not suddenly. That would have been theatrical. The pipes thinned out. The concrete floor acquired a finish. The doors lost dents and warning stickers. Cameras appeared in black hemispheres at ceiling corners. The workers’ badges touched readers and locks opened with soft electronic clicks.

There was no giant vault door.

No skull emblem.

No armed guard dramatically stepping from shadow.

The world simply became less available to everyone who had not been invited.

Lilly thought of UCLA without wanting to.

Not because she knew where they were. She didn’t.

Because institutional hallways all shared a family resemblance, and she had spent too many hours walking through university buildings where one wrong turn took you from posters about student wellness into a corridor full of exposed pipes and rooms that smelled like dust.

Somewhere, people were probably starting morning classes.

Her phone would be wherever Kenneth’s machine had left it.

Maybe Edie’s car was still at Marc’s.

Maybe somebody had texted Lilly.

Where are you?

u alive

class??

Finn’s Discord friends might already be wondering why he hadn’t logged in.

Her mother would—

Lilly stopped.

Not deliberately. Her mind simply reached a door and refused to open it.

The cart turned.

A new set of doors parted.

The laboratory was not what she expected.

The laboratory was not what she expected.

There was lipstick on a coffee mug.

That was the first thing Lilly really saw.

Not the steel table it sat on or the bank of monitors behind it, not the articulated lamps folded neatly against the wall or the cabinets whose handles were long enough to lie down on. A mouth had been here. Somebody’s actual mouth. The lipstick had dried into a dark berry crescent along the white ceramic rim, one soft edge smeared where the woman had drunk from the same place twice. From where Lilly stood inside her cube, the print looked obscene in its intimacy: wax, oil, the faint dragged texture of skin, a ghost of a lower lip several times longer than Lilly’s entire body.

Someone had been drinking coffee while waiting for them.

Maybe not waiting. Working.

That was worse.

A gray sweater hung over the back of a chair. Loose paper had accumulated beside a keyboard. Somebody had left a pen uncapped. Under the desk, one pointed black heel lay on its side beside a pair of stockinged feet, apparently kicked off by the woman sitting at the observation station because even secret underground laboratories eventually lost arguments with uncomfortable shoes.

Nothing in the room seemed to understand what had just happened to Lilly.

Nothing looked impressed.

The bay-loader woman pushed the transport platform farther inside.

She had begun to smell faintly through the cube vents sometime in the elevator—not offensively at first, just warm human proximity, deodorant losing a long administrative war against sweat, old coffee, whatever mint gum she had been chewing until it stopped helping. Now that she bent close to guide the rack around a workstation, Lilly could see the darker dampness spreading beneath the arms of her blue polo and a few strands of brown hair plastered against the side of her neck.

Her face passed above them.

Not near enough to become the whole world, but near enough that Lilly could see things nobody at normal height would have had any reason to notice: a blocked pore beside one nostril, the little red crescent where she had worried at a blemish on her chin, a streak of mascara surviving beneath one tired eye. The woman breathed through her mouth while she shoved the heavy cart, and for a moment her lips parted above the rack, huge and dry at the edges, revealing the blunt white architecture of molars.

She looked exhausted.

Lilly liked her more than the soldiers.

Not enough to want her anywhere near them.

The woman at the observation station looked up.

She was younger than Lilly had first thought from the posture—thirties, probably. Thin, dirty-blonde hair gathered into something that had once intended to be tidy, large brown eyes behind rectangular glasses. A white coat hung open over a pale blouse and dark trousers. One heel remained on her foot. The other was apparently the refugee under the desk.

The woman did not stare at the rack.

Her eyes widened, but her body stayed almost perfectly still, hand resting on the mouse.

Then she looked at her screen.

Back at them.

Back at the screen.

Lilly knew that rhythm.

Disbelief did not always look like disbelief. Sometimes a person checked the same fact twice because reality had become embarrassing.

The cart turned slightly, and Lilly caught the monitor at an angle.

Her own face was on it.

Not the face inside the cube.

The old one.

The normal one.

Her UCLA student photograph had been blown across a section of the screen large enough that one of her eyes was wider than the bay-loader woman’s hand. Dark hair around her shoulders, mouth neutral, that faint half-asleep hostility she developed whenever strangers instructed her to smile naturally.

Above a column of information was her name.

CALDER, LILLITH

Something inside her recoiled at the formality of it.

Lillith belonged to paperwork. Class rosters. Medical forms. People reading off a clipboard when they did not know her yet.

Finn only called her Lillith when he wanted to annoy her.

The thought slid a blade under something she had been holding shut.

She looked away.

The woman at the terminal clicked to another file.

Dean appeared.

Then Zara.

Not photographs taken tonight. Student records. Old faces from the world above ground, before anybody had needed to place approximate millimeter measurements beside them.

They had not been identified after capture.

They had been expected by name.

The silver-haired man came in behind the cart.

The woman at the terminal did not acknowledge him immediately. Her shoulders changed before her face did, some minute tightening between the shoulder blades that told Lilly more than an eye roll would have.

He stopped behind her chair.

“How long?”

“Since acquisition or since they entered my lab?”

Her voice was unexpectedly soft. Slightly husky from fatigue.

“Transport.”

“You know how long transport took.”

“I am asking whether there were deviations.”

The woman continued reading the screen.

“You were standing in the van.”

That was not an answer.

It was also clearly the answer she intended him to have.

The silver-haired man watched the side of her face for a moment.

She ignored him so completely that the hostility became almost private.

Interesting.

Lilly filed that away because apparently her brain was still accepting new paperwork.

The bay-loader woman released the brakes with one sneaker and wheeled them toward an open section of floor.

“Where do you want the rack?”

The woman at the terminal pointed without looking away from the monitors.

“Receiving track. Don’t unseat anybody yet.”

“Wasn’t planning to.”

The bay-loader woman stretched her lower back with both hands and grimaced.

“Fucking thing weighs more than my son.”

Nobody responded.

She sighed, bent again, and shoved.

The casual domesticity of the sentence made Lilly’s skin crawl.

A son.

Of course she had a son.

Why wouldn’t she?

Maybe he was asleep. Maybe she had packed his lunch. Maybe there was a half-finished school project drying on a kitchen table while his mother rolled ten kidnapped people through an underground laboratory and complained about her back.

The cart clicked into position.

Only then did Lilly see the thing built into the wall beyond it.

At first it was just glass and warm light.

Her brain tried to call it a display case, then a dollhouse, then neither word would stay still enough to matter.

It occupied a broad section of the wall, shallow and strangely flat, an entire little architecture exposed in cross-section behind one uninterrupted face of clear glass. Across the upper level Lilly could make out the suggestion of communal space—furniture reduced to recognizable shapes, a counter, little pools of light—and a narrow stairway descending through the middle into smaller rooms beneath. Opaque partitions divided those rooms from each other.

Every one of them faced outward.

That was what she understood first.

Whatever privacy existed in there ended at the glass.

The whole place looked less like a home than one of those cutaway illustrations in children’s books where you could see everybody in an apartment building at once: someone cooking, someone sleeping, someone sitting on the toilet because apparently the illustrator had gotten bored.

Except nobody here had drawn the fourth wall.

Lilly’s eyes caught on the stairs.

They were tiny.

No.

They were normal.

That difference moved through her body before she could stop it. Each rise belonged beneath a foot. The handrail belonged beside a hand. They were stairs rather than something a five-millimeter person would have to climb with both arms.

Her thighs loosened.

Barely.

Enough that she noticed.

She hated it immediately.

The woman at the terminal stood.

For the first time she came nearer to the rack.

Her attention did not move over their nakedness in the way Lilly expected. She seemed almost incapable of seeing nudity as a social fact. Her gaze kept stopping at knees, wrists, the rise and fall of ribs, the angle of a jaw. When she bent closer to Kenneth’s darker cube, her face passed into enormous detail behind the clear walls: wide brown eyes magnified by the lenses, pores softened under pale makeup, one fine blonde eyebrow hair pointing stubbornly the wrong direction.

Kenneth stood to meet her stare.

The woman watched him breathe.

That seemed to interest her more than anything he could have said.

She turned back to the screen.

“Respiratory excursions are clean.”

The silver-haired man glanced down at Kenneth as if he had personally arranged this.

The woman ignored that too.

“Do you have the capture imaging?”

“Uploaded.”

“I want the pre-exchange records beside the live feed.”

“Already there.”

“I am aware they are already there. I want them aligned.”

A technician at another terminal began working.

The woman slipped her remaining heel off under the desk and stood barefoot in her stockings, one hand braced on the table as she leaned toward the monitor.

Lilly had no idea why that detail bothered her.

Maybe because this woman was comfortable here.

The laboratory door opened.

The woman who entered had apparently been built for an entirely different genre.

Dark glossy hair. Bright blue-green eyes. A cream suit so sharply tailored that the sterile room suddenly looked as though it had dressed poorly for its own meeting. Silk moved beneath the jacket when she walked. A gold watch flashed at one wrist. Her pointed heels struck the floor with quick, clean little impacts that Lilly felt only faintly through the receiving rack when she came nearer.

She was beautiful.

Lilly resented noticing.

Beauty had become difficult since the exchange. Full-sized faces carried too much information now. Skin texture, saliva on teeth, dampness in the eye, the faint pulse beneath a throat. Attractive people had been designed to be observed from conversational distance, not from the scale of something that could shelter inside the curve behind an ear.

The woman came in looking irritated.

“I swear to God, if this is another fucking—”

She saw them.

The sentence stopped.

Not elegantly.

Her mouth stayed open around whatever the next word had been.

The room changed around her.

Lilly felt it before anybody spoke. The woman at the terminal noticed too; her head turned slightly, watching the newcomer watch them.

The beautiful woman took one step toward the rack.

Another.

Then faster.

“Jesus Christ.”

The silver-haired man shifted aside as she approached, either because he was being courteous or because she had made it obvious she would walk through him.

She stopped at the painted yellow arc surrounding the receiving track.

Her heel landed exactly on it.

She looked down.

Looked up again.

Did not move her foot.

“Mira.”

The woman at the terminal had a name now.

Mira.

“Don’t.”

Katrine looked at her.

Lilly knew the second name from the silver-haired man’s phone call before she had ever heard it attached to a body. Of course she will be there.

So this was Katrine.

Mira pointed at the yellow line.

“Your foot.”

Katrine looked down again.

“Oh.”

She moved back half a step, then immediately leaned over the line with her entire upper body, technically obedient in the way children obeyed rules they thought were stupid.

Her face descended toward the rack.

Lilly had experienced full-sized people looking for tiny humans before. Searchlights. Soldiers. Guests peering at floors without knowing what they were seeing.

This was different.

Katrine knew.

Her enormous blue-green eyes moved over them slowly, intelligently, and with such naked pleasure that Lilly felt more exposed than when the Syndicate stripped the last possibility of rescue away from them.

Katrine came close enough that the contours of her face stopped resolving as a face and became surfaces: the soft valley beside her nose, the wet shine along the lower edge of one eye, lipstick perfectly feathered into the vertical lines of her mouth. Her lips were full, painted something warm and muted, and when they parted Lilly saw the dark interior behind her teeth.

“Oh my God,” Katrine said again.

This time she sounded almost happy.

Lilly preferred the soldiers.

Mira had already turned back to the screen.

“They’re stable so far.”

Katrine ignored the qualification.

“All ten?”

“Apparently.”

“Apparently?”

“I haven’t cut them open.”

Katrine looked at her.

Mira glanced over the top of her glasses.

“What?”

For a second Katrine smiled.

Not because Mira had been funny. More like something old between them had arrived and found its chair.

Then she looked back at the rack.

“Pull up the male.”

“Which male?”

“The—” Katrine gestured impatiently at them, stopped herself, leaned closer. “The one there.”

Her finger lifted.

Lilly followed the direction.

Dean.

Of course.

Mira looked from Katrine to Dean, and some tiny thing happened in her expression that Lilly did not yet understand.

“Everett.”

“Fine. Everett.”

Dean sat up straighter in his cube.

The relay was still live. He had heard his name.

Mira brought his file onto the monitor.

Katrine moved closer to the screen instead, watching a magnified live image of Dean where every scratch and bruise became billboard-size.

She stared at his hands.

Lilly almost laughed.

After everything.

Hands.

Katrine touched two fingertips to the monitor without seeming aware she had done it.

“Look at the fucking knuckles.”

Mira kept typing.

“I am.”

“No, look.”

“I have eyes, Katrine.”

“Those are normal.”

Mira’s fingers stopped.

Neither woman spoke for a few seconds.

Katrine’s face had gone strange.

Not soft. Lilly doubted soft was available in that particular operating system.

Shaken, maybe.

She looked down at Dean again.

“We never got that.”

Mira exhaled through her nose.

“I remember.”

“The Warsaw series had those fused little mitten things.”

“I remember.”

“And Virginia—”

“I remember Virginia.”

Something in Mira’s voice closed the door.

Katrine heard it.

She stopped.

For several seconds neither woman looked at the other.

Lilly did.

Whatever Virginia meant had weight.

Katrine recovered first. She always would, Lilly suspected.

She bent toward the rack again, studying Dean’s ribs as he breathed.

“All that money.”

A little laugh escaped her.

It sounded genuinely incredulous.

“All those years. We made one with its spine outside its fucking back and sent champagne to the board because it lived until morning.”

Mira said nothing.

Katrine looked toward Kenneth.

“And this little asshole makes ten.”

Kenneth’s head lifted.

“Not ten.”

His amplified voice came from the cube relay.

Katrine froze.

Her eyes found his dark containment.

Kenneth stood behind the tinted wall, pale and thin and absolutely committed to being Kenneth even while naked inside something a normal woman could close her fist around.

Katrine straightened.

“What?”

Kenneth came nearer to the front wall.

“You said I made ten. I didn’t.”

Katrine looked at Mira.

Mira looked interested now.

The silver-haired man did not.

Kenneth’s eyes stayed on the women.

“It is not miniaturization.”

Katrine’s mouth pulled slowly to one side.

“Okay.”

Not disbelief exactly.

Permission to continue.

Kenneth did not.

He looked at the CAEU in the silver-haired man’s hand.

Katrine followed the look.

Something passed through her face—irritation at having her attention redirected, perhaps.

“Ike, move.”

There it was.

Ike.

The silver-haired man looked at her.

“You are obstructing Wright.”

“I am aware of where I am standing.”

“Then be aware somewhere else.”

Mira’s mouth tightened.

Not quite a smile.

Ike moved one step.

Lilly gave him the name because now she had one to give.

Katrine bent again until Kenneth had a clean view of her.

“Why isn’t it miniaturization?”

Kenneth’s gaze traveled up her face.

“You don’t have enough information for that answer.”

A little brightness came into Katrine’s eyes.

Not anger.

Enjoyment.

“Try me.”

Kenneth looked away.

Actually looked away.

Katrine laughed once.

“Oh, I like him.”

“No,” Mira said.

She had gone back to typing.

“You like that he ignored you.”

Katrine did not bother denying it.

She looked at Dean again.

Lilly caught that.

First Kenneth.

Then Dean.

Different looks.

Kenneth interested her mind.

Dean had done something else simply by sitting there bruised and furious and beautiful enough that he had probably spent his entire life confusing consequences with personality development.

Lilly watched Katrine watch him.

She watched Dean realize.

His posture changed almost imperceptibly.

Not flirtation. He was too broken for the old performance to arrive intact.

But the machinery noticed fuel.

Of course it did.

Lilly hated him a little for surviving in such recognizable ways.

Then Dean’s face went blank again.

Katrine saw that too.

Her interest sharpened.

The bay-loader woman cleared her throat.

“If everybody’s done having a religious experience, I need to get these out of transport.”

Katrine straightened.

The woman had put on fresh nitrile gloves while nobody was looking. Powder-blue stretched over broad fingers. One thumbnail had chipped clear polish beneath the glove; a torn cuticle showed red through the translucent material.

Mira sat.

“Everett first.”

Dean stood immediately.

“No.”

Everybody in the lab heard him.

The loader woman looked down.

Dean pointed toward the open room beyond the rack.

“Whatever you’re about to do, no.”

The woman scratched the underside of her jaw with one gloved knuckle.

“Okay.”

Dean stared.

“Okay?”

“Yeah.”

She checked something on the dock.

Dean looked at Mira.

Then Katrine.

“I said no.”

Katrine crossed her arms.

“I heard you.”

Dean waited.

“So?”

“So you said no.”

His expression shifted.

Lilly knew Dean. Agreement bothered him more than arguments when he expected resistance.

The bay-loader woman unlocked his cube from the rack.

Dean lurched sideways as the floor moved beneath him.

“Hey. What the fuck?”

The woman slid the entire cube into a clear support cradle. She did not touch him. She did not need to.

Her hands closed around his world.

For the first time Lilly understood how small the cubes actually were.

One of the woman’s thumbs ran almost the full height of Dean’s enclosure. The pad bulged against the clear cradle, fingerprint ridges visible beneath blue nitrile like pale crop circles. She lifted him effortlessly, elbows bending, and Dean rose into the air inside her hands.

The motion made Lilly’s stomach drop even though she remained still.

Dean looked down.

Bad idea.

The table, rack, floor—all of it fell away beneath him while the giant woman’s torso filled the world behind his box. The polo stretched damply across her stomach. One breast shifted beneath the cheap fabric as she turned, not erotic, not even remotely; just an enormous piece of another person’s body obeying gravity without caring that Dean Everett was being transported past it.

Dean stopped shouting.

That frightened Lilly more than the shouting.

The woman carried him to the habitat.

A receiving slot opened near the upper-left edge of the glass.

His cube fitted into it with a clean mechanical certainty that made Zara’s eyes narrow.

The thing had been made for these boxes.

The woman locked Dean into place.

“Seal.”

Mira checked her terminal.

“Good.”

“Pressure?”

“Equal.”

The front wall of Dean’s cube opened.

Beyond it waited the short passage into the habitat.

Dean stayed where he was.

The loader woman leaned closer.

Her tired face descended beyond the cube.

Dean craned upward.

“You can go in,” she said.

“I can also stay here.”

“Not really.”

“Then why’d you phrase it like a suggestion?”

The woman blinked at him.

Lilly saw the exact moment she decided she did not care enough to argue.

“Habit.”

Dean gave a short, unbelieving laugh.

It almost sounded like him.

Almost.

Then he looked through the opening.

The habitat beyond had changed now that a person stood at its mouth. The warm little geometry gained scale. A room. A floor. A space Dean could cross without climbing.

He did not.

Katrine had drifted closer to the yellow line again.

“Is he always like this?”

Zara answered from her cube before Lilly could decide whether anybody should.

“Yes.”

Dean turned toward her.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

There was no joke in Zara’s face.

Dean’s disappeared too.

The bay-loader woman rested one hand on her hip.

“Mr. Everett.”

“Dean.”

“Fine. Dean. I need you through the door.”

“I need a lot of shit.”

“I know.”

“You really don’t.”

“No. I probably don’t.”

Something about the answer took the next sentence out of him.

The woman touched the transfer control.

Dean saw.

“What’s that?”

“Assisted transfer.”

His eyes moved to the rear of the cube.

A transparent panel had begun to advance.

Dean put both hands against it.

The panel kept coming.

“Hold on.”

Mira looked at his readings.

The woman stopped the control.

Dean’s breathing came louder through the relay.

He examined the panel.

Rails.

Seams.

Pressure sensors.

His eyes moved faster.

Lilly watched engineering drag him out of grief for several seconds simply because a machine had insulted him.

“You’re using load feedback.”

The loader woman looked at Mira.

Mira looked at Dean.

Dean pushed.

The panel stopped instantly.

He let up.

It resumed.

“Oh, fuck you.”

Katrine smiled.

Dean saw her.

“You like this?”

Her smile did not change.

“I like that you figured it out.”

“Great. Put it on my fucking résumé.”

He pushed harder.

The plate stopped again.

Dean braced one foot behind him, then realized there would soon be nowhere behind him to put it.

The expression on his face altered.

Not panic yet.

The arrival of panic.

He kicked at the lower edge.

The plate froze before impact became dangerous, then resumed when his foot withdrew.

“Jesus Christ.”

His voice had lost its shine.

“Okay. Stop.”

The loader woman did.

Dean looked through the opening.

Then back at the panel.

“You’re going to keep doing this.”

No one answered because none was necessary.

He turned toward the rack.

His eyes found Kyler.

Then Zara.

Lilly.

Maybe the empty spaces too.

His face hollowed.

For one second he was the Dean from the van again, sitting with Lucy’s absence beside him.

He stepped through the opening.

The hatch closed behind him.

The habitat microphones found his breathing immediately.

His voice came into the laboratory from a different speaker now, clearer, less boxed-in.

Dean heard himself.

He looked up.

“Cool.”

A pause.

“So there’s surround sound.”

Nobody laughed.

He rubbed both hands over his face.

“Fantastic.”

Katrine did.

Just once, quietly.

Dean looked toward her.

Lilly watched that look land.

Not flirtation.

Assessment.

He had learned that she found him funny.

He would use it eventually.

The fact that she knew he would use it might be part of why she liked him.

Zara went next.

The bay-loader woman reached for her cube and Zara moved to the center before the floor lifted.

No screaming. No argument. She watched the woman’s fingers, the cradle, the dock, the sensor lights. By the time her cube locked into position, Lilly could almost feel the calculation finish.

The hatch opened.

Zara looked once at the rear panel.

Then she walked through.

Katrine tilted her head.

“No fight?”

Zara’s voice came through the habitat intercom.

“You showed me the machine.”

Katrine smiled faintly.

Zara was already looking past her.

Not at faces. At who stood where. Mira at the console. Katrine near the line. Ike slightly apart. The bay-loader woman physically doing the work.

Authority was reorganizing itself in Zara’s eyes.

Dean came toward her.

“Hey.”

Zara looked at him.

He opened his arms halfway.

Not a joke. Not charm.

Something more pathetic and more human.

Zara stepped in.

The hug lasted perhaps two seconds.

Then she drew back and studied his face.

“What happened?”

Dean’s eyes changed.

He looked away.

Zara did not ask again.

She turned toward the rack.

Theo was still not there.

Lilly saw her count anyway.

Susan’s cube came loose with a click.

The bay-loader woman had barely lifted it before Susan folded inward, one arm across her breasts, the other hand dropping between her thighs.

The movement was so instinctive it hurt to watch.

Susan had spent years using visibility like money. Hair, makeup, clothes, posture, exactly how much leg, exactly how much cleavage, exactly which photograph went online and which friend was told to delete it.

Now an exhausted giant woman held her naked in two blue-gloved hands while another beautiful woman watched from outside a glass house.

Susan’s face burned red.

“Can you not hold me like that?”

The loader woman looked down.

“I’m holding the carrier.”

“I know.”

Susan turned away from her enormous face and somehow that was worse; now the woman’s damp blue polo and the soft, ordinary bulk of her body filled Susan’s horizon instead.

The loader woman seated the cube.

Susan stared through the opening.

“I need clothes.”

Katrine looked at Mira.

Mira was already checking Susan’s file.

“After baseline.”

Susan stared at her.

“No.”

Mira glanced up.

Susan’s voice shook.

“I don’t need an outfit. I need a fucking Kleenex. Give me something.”

Katrine came nearer.

Susan saw her and pulled herself tighter.

At this distance Katrine was devastatingly beautiful in the way natural disasters sometimes photographed beautifully from far enough away. Smooth dark hair, bright eyes, pale silk, lipstick. Her face lowered toward Susan’s cube.

Susan recoiled.

Katrine stopped.

That interested Lilly.

She had not expected Susan to recoil from her.

Something in Katrine’s eyes sharpened.

“We need visual baseline before we cover anything.”

Susan’s mouth opened.

“You need to look at my tits for science.”

Katrine’s lips twitched.

Mira answered without looking over.

“Among other things.”

Susan stared at her.

Mira kept typing.

Lilly nearly laughed.

The sound never made it out.

Susan looked into the habitat.

Dean had already turned his back.

Zara saw him and did the same.

Susan noticed.

For one second her face broke around the kindness.

Then pride got there.

She walked through.

The hatch sealed.

Susan stood in the little room with one arm still tight across herself.

“Are there cameras in here?”

Mira answered.

“Yes.”

Susan closed her eyes.

“Everywhere?”

Mira hesitated.

That was answer enough.

Susan looked toward the laboratory.

“Katrine.”

Katrine’s brows lifted slightly at the use of her name.

“If I see one second of me naked online, I will haunt your fucking bloodline.”

It was an absurd threat from a woman five millimeters tall.

Susan meant every word.

Katrine smiled.

“I believe you.”

Susan hated the answer.

She walked away from the glass.

Officer Mendez did not wait for the loader woman to instruct her.

The moment her cube opened onto the habitat, she crossed.

No spectacle.

No fight for the sake of proving there had been a fight.

She landed inside their new world and immediately turned toward the glass.

“I want the name of this facility.”

Silence.

Mendez stared at Mira.

Then Katrine.

Then the silver-haired man, whom Lilly could now think of as Ike.

“Someone is going to answer me.”

Ike regarded her.

Mendez pointed at him.

“You first.”

“You already know my affiliation.”

“I asked for your name.”

Katrine looked at him.

Not helping.

Mira continued typing.

Ike seemed to understand that nobody intended to rescue him from the indignity of being questioned by a naked police officer smaller than his thumbnail.

“Ichabod Bezel.”

Mendez repeated it immediately.

“Spell it.”

The smallest wrinkle appeared between Ike’s brows.

Katrine turned her face away.

Lilly saw her smile.

Ike spelled it.

Mendez repeated the spelling.

“Position?”

“Principal scientific director.”

“Employer?”

Ike’s expression cooled.

“The Syndicate.”

Mendez absorbed that.

Her shoulders remained straight.

“I need access to LAPD command. I need counsel. There are injured people here who need medical attention.”

Mira looked over the current health displays.

“They’ll receive it.”

“That wasn’t a request for your reassurance.”

Mira looked at her.

Mendez pointed toward the outer door.

“I want a phone.”

“No,” Ike said.

Mendez’s jaw clenched.

“Then I want the location.”

“No.”

The word was almost gentle.

Mendez stared at him for a long time.

Lilly watched something happen inside her that had nothing to do with fear.

Procedure had finally reached a wall with no appeal process.

Mendez turned away first.

Not defeated.

Saving energy.

“Zara.”

Zara looked at her.

“Remember the name.”

“I have it.”

Mendez nodded.

The law had become two women memorizing a man.

Kyler saw the loader woman reach for his cube and stopped being still.

“No.”

The word came over the relay before the lock released.

Edie was already at her wall.

“Kyler.”

He looked at her.

The bay-loader woman paused with one hand on the release.

Kyler shook his head.

“Don’t.”

Nobody seemed sure whom he meant.

Maybe all of them.

The woman waited.

Kyler looked at Ike.

Whatever lived in his face then made Lilly’s stomach draw tight.

“You.”

Ike did not move.

“You fucking—”

Kyler’s mouth worked around something that would not become language.

Edie pressed both hands to her own glass.

“Ky.”

He looked at her.

Only her.

“Don’t let them.”

She stared back.

“I’m right here.”

That was not a promise she could keep.

Kyler knew.

His mouth twisted.

For a second Lilly saw the old reflex arrive, that little gleam before he turned fear into something obscene enough to laugh at.

It died.

“Yeah,” he whispered.

The loader woman lifted him.

Kyler backed against the wall while her giant hands closed around the carrier.

His whole body would have disappeared beneath one of her palms.

The woman’s face was directly above him now, tired hazel-brown eyes, pores, the shine of sweat along her upper lip. She had a little piece of mint gum lodged between two rear teeth.

Kyler stared up at her.

Something about that ordinary mouth seemed to make everything worse.

“Put me down.”

“I have to move you.”

“Put me the fuck down.”

“I can’t.”

“You can. You are literally doing all the moving.”

The woman shut her eyes for one exhausted second.

“Okay.”

“No, not okay—”

She carried him to the dock.

Edie paced her cube in a tight, furious loop while Kyler was seated into place.

The hatch opened.

He did not go.

The bay-loader woman looked at Mira.

Mira checked his vitals.

“Give him a minute.”

Ike said something too low for Lilly to catch.

Mira’s face hardened without turning toward him.

“I said give him a minute.”

There was history in that too.

Kyler sat down.

His knees came up.

He looked through the opening at Dean, Zara, Susan, Mendez.

Then at Edie behind him across the room.

The minute passed.

Nothing.

The loader woman put her finger on the assisted-transfer control.

Edie slammed both hands against her cube.

“Wait.”

The loader looked toward her.

Kyler did too.

Edie pointed to herself.

Then toward him.

“Put me in first.”

Mira understood.

“So do I.”

Ike looked at her.

“That is not the transfer order.”

Mira finally turned in her chair.

“He is tachycardic and she regulates him. We are establishing baseline, not proving you can alphabetize.”

Katrine laughed.

Ike did not.

The loader woman waited.

“Am I moving her or not?”

Katrine waved a hand.

“Move her.”

Edie’s cube released.

Kyler watched every inch of the journey.

Edie did not waste the relay on the scientists. She kept talking to him.

“Look at me.”

He did.

“I’m going in.”

“I know.”

“I’ll be right there.”

His breathing slowed.

Not much.

Enough.

The bay-loader woman seated Edie’s cube.

Edie inspected the receiving seam before the hatch had even finished opening, fingers moving along the lower track, eyes on the pressure plate.

“Pressure cutoff?”

Mira looked over.

“Yes.”

“Mechanical or software?”

“Both.”

Edie considered that.

“Can it crush you?”

The loader woman frowned.

“It stops before it hurts you.”

“I asked if it can.”

Mira answered.

“Yes.”

Edie nodded.

Information acquired.

Then she went through.

She crossed directly to Kyler’s entrance and sat on the floor outside it.

Did not hold out her hand.

Did not tell him everything was okay.

She simply sat.

Kyler stared at her.

The bay-loader woman reached for the assisted-transfer control again.

Kyler stood.

“Don’t.”

She stopped.

He looked at Edie.

“Move.”

Edie shook her head.

“No.”

“You’re sitting in the fucking door.”

“Yeah.”

“If I walk in I’m gonna step on you.”

“Then don’t.”

His mouth almost twitched.

Almost.

He stepped over her.

The hatch sealed.

Kyler made it three feet into the habitat before his legs failed him.

Edie got up and followed.

She sat beside him again.

Their shoulders touched.

Neither said anything.

The loader woman returned to the rack.

Marc had apparently been watching all this and deciding captivity was not happening to him correctly.

“No.”

He clutched the purple scraps around himself when his cube unlocked.

“No, hold on.”

The woman lifted him.

Marc’s voice climbed.

“Can you just—Jesus Christ, your thumb.”

The loader woman stopped.

“What?”

“Your thumb is covering the entire fucking side.”

She looked at her hand.

Moved it half an inch.

“There.”

Marc stared through the now-unobstructed wall.

“Thank you.”

Then, after a second:

“That is not me consenting to any of this.”

“Got it.”

He swallowed.

The woman carried him toward the habitat.

Marc looked down and immediately stopped looking down.

“Oh my God.”

Katrine watched him pass.

Marc saw her.

His eyes widened.

Not attraction.

Recognition of hierarchy. Even now, he could smell expensive from a hundred relative yards away.

“Are you in charge?”

Katrine’s eyebrows rose.

“What makes you think that?”

Marc gestured vaguely at her.

“You’re dressed.”

Susan actually laughed.

It came out wet and startled and she covered her mouth immediately, like she had betrayed herself.

Marc looked at her.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, what?”

“Nothing, Marc.”

His cube docked.

The habitat opened.

Marc stared at it.

Somewhere beneath fear, his face pinched.

“Oh, absolutely not.”

Dean looked over.

Marc pointed through the hatch.

“Is that glass furniture?”

Dean rubbed his eyes.

“Please don’t.”

“What? Why would you put glass furniture inside a glass—”

His voice cracked.

The rest fell apart.

Marc looked back toward the lab.

“My house.”

Nobody moved.

His face suddenly had nothing ridiculous left in it.

“Is my house still there?”

Katrine’s expression changed slightly.

Marc waited.

“Were there people still inside?”

No answer.

He looked down.

The purple fabric slipped from one shoulder and he yanked it back into place.

“I need to know.”

Nobody told him.

Marc went through without being forced.

The complaint about the furniture did not come back.

Kenneth was next.

His darker cube required the loader woman to swap the standard receiving collar for a reinforced adapter. She did it with the resigned irritation of someone changing a printer cartridge.

Kenneth watched every movement.

So did Mira.

When the loader lifted his cube, Kenneth did not recoil from the giant hands around him. He studied them only long enough to confirm they were not touching the enclosure improperly, then went back to watching the mechanism.

Katrine came closer.

“Wright.”

He ignored her.

She smiled.

Kenneth’s cube seated.

The hatch opened.

He did not enter.

Not yet.

He looked at Mira.

“You’re Swan.”

Mira pushed her glasses higher.

“Yes.”

“I read your continuity work.”

Something like interest moved through her face.

Kenneth continued.

“The premise is wrong.”

The interest survived.

Katrine looked delighted.

Mira said, “You can tell me why after you get out of the transport box.”

Kenneth glanced at the rear panel.

Then the habitat.

“I’m not resisting.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“No. You thought I was trying to bargain.”

Mira leaned back in her chair.

“I wasn’t thinking about you that deeply.”

Lilly watched Kenneth dislike her.

Good.

Katrine laughed.

Kenneth’s attention shifted to her.

“You’re Anselmo.”

“That sounded judgmental.”

“It was identification.”

Katrine’s smile widened.

Dean, inside the habitat, muttered, “Oh, these two are gonna have sex or kill each other.”

Zara looked at him.

“What?”

“I’m just saying.”

“You’ve been in captivity fifteen minutes.”

“I contain multitudes.”

The line landed.

Nobody laughed.

Dean’s face collapsed almost immediately afterward, ashamed of having sounded like himself.

Kyler stared at the floor.

Lucy remained absent.

The joke died where it fell.

Lilly felt something in her chest twist.

Kenneth walked into the habitat.

The hatch shut.

He went nowhere near Dean.

Brooke’s cube detached from beside Lilly.

The space between them opened.

Lilly hated that instantly.

Brooke turned toward her as the loader woman lifted her.

Their eyes met.

Brooke did not put her hand to the wall this time.

Maybe she had learned.

The blue-gloved hands carried her away.

Lilly watched the woman’s fingers around the cube and saw Finn without seeing him.

Not the dog.

She refused the dog.

Just the fact.

Brooke was alive.

Hands were carrying her somewhere because Finn had made sure there was still a Brooke left to carry.

That was enough.

More than enough.

Brooke’s cube docked.

The hatch opened.

She looked through it at the others.

Then back toward Lilly.

The loader woman waited.

Brooke spoke softly.

“Is Lilly next?”

The woman checked the rack.

“Last one.”

Brooke nodded.

“Okay.”

She went in.

No fight.

That was Brooke too.

Not submission. Logistics.

She crossed into the habitat and immediately looked back at the dock.

Waiting.

Lilly hated her for that.

Not really.

That was the problem.

The bay-loader woman came for Lilly.

Up close, she looked even more tired.

A loose brown hair had adhered to the sweat at her temple. Her gum had returned, jaw working slowly as she bent over the rack. The polo smelled faintly sour now through Lilly’s vents, not because the woman was filthy but because a body the size of hers produced more evidence of itself than Lilly could escape.

Her gloved fingers released Lilly’s cube.

“Okay, sweetheart.”

Lilly looked up.

The woman froze.

“Sorry.”

Lilly had not said anything.

Apparently her face had.

The woman sighed.

“Okay, Lilly.”

Better.

Not much.

The cube lifted.

The floor vanished beneath Lilly.

Her stomach went weightless, then returned.

The laboratory moved around her.

That was the part nobody full-sized would ever understand. The bay-loader woman took three steps and the universe translated sideways. Tables crossed horizons. The luminous wall of the habitat grew. Katrine’s cream-clad body shifted behind it, one pointed heel planted on the floor like some glossy architectural object. Mira’s face passed above the monitor. Ike stood farther back with Kenneth’s machine in one hand, apparently unwilling to come any closer than necessary.

Then the loader woman adjusted her grip.

Her thumb moved across Lilly’s field of view.

The blue pad alone was wider than Lilly was tall.

Beneath the thin nitrile, fingerprint ridges curved in dense pale whorls. A small hangnail under the glove had drawn a line of blood beside the woman’s cuticle. Lilly could have stood inside the crescent of it.

She imagined the glove tearing.

Not because it would.

Her brain simply offered her things now.

The woman’s face lowered to check the dock.

Her mouth was there.

Too close.

Not Lacy.

Lilly’s body did not care.

Her stomach clenched so hard it hurt.

The woman’s lips were dry, one corner chapped. Gum shifted behind her teeth. A thin string of saliva joined her tongue to a molar for half a second before breaking.

Lilly stopped breathing.

Not Lacy.

The cube protected her.

The woman did not even know what she had become in Lilly’s head.

“Seal looks good,” she said.

Her voice came cleanly through the relay.

Lilly could not answer.

“Pressure equal.”

The loader woman seated the cube.

The giant face withdrew.

Lilly breathed again.

Brooke stood beyond the opening.

The habitat was suddenly not an outline.

It was somewhere her body could go.

She could see only what stood directly ahead: floor, part of the communal room, Brooke, Dean farther back, Zara near the glass, Susan turned partly away, Mendez standing, Edie on the floor with Kyler, Marc, Kenneth alone.

Lilly stepped through.

The floor met her feet with a softness so slight she almost missed it. No polished wood threatening to throw her sideways, no carpet fibers knotting around her ankles, no grit large enough to become terrain. Her weight belonged to it. Her body understood before she did, releasing something deep in her legs, and the relief was so immediate and involuntary that shame followed right behind it.

The hatch sealed at her back.

For the first time since Kenneth had exchanged her, Lilly stood in a room that had been built with the expectation that someone her size might survive inside it.

She looked through the glass.

Beyond it, the laboratory had become impossibly large again: Mira at her monitors, Katrine standing near the yellow line in cream and silk, Ike farther back with the black shape of the CAEU still in his hand. The bay-loader woman peeled one blue glove from her enormous hand and let it fall inside out into a waste bin, then reached for the second with her teeth because apparently kidnapping ten microscopic people did not exempt anyone from being tired and gross at work.

Lilly’s eyes drifted past them.

Above the observation station hung an old wooden cuckoo clock.

Beside it, glowing an obscene radioactive green against the clean white wall, a cat clung desperately to a branch beneath the words:

HANG IN THERE, BABY!