Chapter 4
Chapter
Four
“You want me to what?” I ask, my voice faint.
It’s been two weeks since the alien’s odd response to the rabbit marked with my scent, and it’s resumed its hunger strike despite further attempts to provoke it. The subject no longer reacts to the animals we send in.
“Retrieve the surviving rabbits and the remains of the others,” Akimov says, speaking slowly, as if that was the problem. “They’re beginning to rot.”
I take a breath to steady myself. Another. “I was assured I would have no direct contact with the subject.”
He scoffs. “I’m not asking you to go into the cell itself,” he says, as if it should have been obvious. “You’ll merely need to enter the first security door and use a tool to retrieve them through the slot on the inner door.”
Merely, he says. There will still be a locked set of doors between the alien and me, but I’ll be closer than I’ve ever been before. Closer than I’ve seen Akimov get to the thing in the whole time I’ve been here.
“And the alien will be rendered unconscious?” I ask.
He shakes his head, impatient. “The subject’s physical state is already unstable.
There’s no need to put further strain on it by inducing hibernation and awakening it again.
” Catching my expression, he scoffs. “There will still be a metal door between you and the creature. You will be in no danger.” A pause, scrutinizing me from behind his glasses.
“Tabs is out today, and Ramsey is in a meeting, but if you’re truly incapable of the task, I suppose we can wait. ”
I grit my teeth.
A few minutes later, I find myself outside of the cell door, heart thumping. Akimov scans me through the external door and shuts it behind me. Protocol, he says.
It’s cold within. This antechamber feels tiny now that I’m within it. The inner door looms above me, the one thing that stands between me and the alien. The metal is thick, strong, yet it feels like little protection when it’s the only thing standing between me and a dangerous alien life-form.
Yet I refuse to show fear, especially knowing Akimov must be watching on the cameras.
I crouch in front of the approximately six-by-four-inch metal slot that opens into the cell within.
I dubiously eye it, and then the grabber tool Akimov gave me; it’s a long, sturdy rod with metal clamps at the end.
Nothing high-tech, but hopefully enough to get the job done.
I’m only concerned about accidentally crushing the live animals.
But first I have to catch them. I take a breath and ease the metal slot open with the tool, slowly pushing the rod through and into the cell.
My first breath of air from the other side is even icier than it is in here, and foul, stinking of blood and rot from the remains of the alien’s meals that have sat inside for weeks.
There’s also another scent beneath it. A warm animal musk underlaid with something oddly sweet.
Almost like…chamomile? I blink and shake it off; my mind must be playing tricks on me, and I need to focus.
I can only see the room on the other side through a slot a few inches tall and half a foot wide.
It’s not easy, navigating the tool while squinting through the slot, trying to find the two rabbits that are somewhere on the floor within.
Both from this morning’s batch, and both completely ignored by the alien.
They won’t last more than a day without food.
And the alien. It’s in there, too. It was asleep in its pod when I saw it through the observation window. The oddly shaped bed looks much bigger this close up; from the vantage point of the slot, I can only see its metal side, with no view of the subject itself.
It sleeps most of the time, lately. As long as I’m careful and quick, it shouldn’t wake.
I lift myself up in a crouch, searching for the rabbits. Movement catches my eye, and I spot one in the corner, its nose twitching and ears perked. Holding my breath, I slowly move the metal tool closer, careful not to startle it. I get the tool close, closer, and reach for it.
The rabbit startles and jumps away, slipping free of the claw’s grip. The tool hits the wall in my clumsiness, producing a metallic clack.
I freeze. Breathe. Angle myself to eye the sleep chamber again, but there’s no sign of movement from the alien.
Wiping sweaty palms on my slacks, I adjust my grip and try again. Coming in at a different angle this time, moving even more slowly as I place the metal jaws of the claw tool around the small, quivering animal.
Then I clamp them shut, and the animal lets out a high-pitched scream of distress. I freeze for a second, sucking in a sharp breath, and quickly pull the animal toward me. My hands are shaking as I grip the tool, anticipating the alien to emerge from its sleep chamber and lunge at any moment—
But I pull the rabbit safely into the exterior chamber with me. I drop the frightened animal on my lap, where it sits frozen, trembling. Its little heart must be beating even harder than mine.
“Shh, it’s okay,” I whisper, stroking two fingers gently over its head. “You’re safe now.”
Though perhaps that’s a lie. I have no idea what they intend to do with the animals now that they’ll be free.
I shake the thought off. There’s still one more rabbit to save.
I nudge the one on my lap until it hops off onto the tile, and then angle the grabber tool through the slot again.
The second rabbit is on the far side of the room, drinking from a puddle of water on the floor, next to the overturned plastic jug that the alien drinks from.
But how was the jug knocked over? It’s heavy, though perhaps the alien is strong enough to do it on accident…
I slowly shift the tool and reach toward the rabbit. I’m forced to scoot closer to the slot, stretching the tool to its limit. A little closer, a little closer, and—
The metal rod jolts in my grip. I gasp, instinctively trying to pull back, but it’s stuck tight.
I tilt my head, trying to look through the slot to see if it’s caught on something—and I see the alien standing in the middle of the room, gripping the tool with two fingers.
It tilts its head at an unnatural ninety-degree angle, eyes shining oddly in the light as they fix on mine through the slot.
It blinks, then sniffs the air, and there’s a screech of metal as the rod crumples in its loose grip.
Gasping, I drop it, and the tool disappears through the slot.
I scramble away until my back is pressed against the exterior door.
Just in time, because, impossibly fast, the alien catches the slot’s metal covering before it slams shut, and the tip of a tentacle slithers through.
It’s pale blue and fleshy, rotating to search along the door, prodding at the air.
Looking for me. Can it reach me here? I scramble to my feet and try to open the exterior door, but it’s locked from the outside.
I glance over my shoulder, and the tentacle is twisting through the air toward me.
A scream tears out of me, and the appendage stretches further, as if excited, veins standing out as it strains to reach me.
I catch a glimpse of a single eye peering through the slot beside it, pupil dilated as it fixes on me.
That smell I noticed before—musk and sweetness, the oddest hint of chamomile—is stronger now, almost overwhelming in the small space of the antechamber.
The animal snarls something that sounds like a word, though not one I know. Something that sounds like taujak.
The tentacle slithers closer, closer…
And instead finds the rabbit, frozen stiff with fear on the floor. The alien snatches it up, and with a swift, brutal twist, squeezes the animal so hard that it severs it in half, splattering me with gore.
I scream. That could’ve been me. That will be me if I don’t get out of here; the tentacle is already reaching for me again. “Help!” I plead. “Let me out, oh, God, let me out, it’s—”
Then the door swings open, and I stumble outside with a gasp. Ramsey catches me with one arm and slams the door shut with the other.
“I’ve got you,” he says. “You’re safe, Calliope. You’re safe.”
As I shut my eyes and half collapse in his arms, I think of the rabbit, quivering in my lap as I said the same words.
My hands shake the entire drive to work the next morning, but I show up anyway. Despite the terror of that moment in the antechamber, I’m fine, I tell myself. The alien didn’t even manage to touch me.
For some reason, the scent of the subject sticks in my mind like nothing else.
That musky warmth, the hint of sweetness…
I remember it so strongly that sometimes I swear I can still smell it.
When I brewed myself a cup of chamomile last night, as I always do before bed, it reminded me of the alien so powerfully for a moment that I was dizzy.
Perhaps it’s a symptom of PTSD. Yet the powerful scent-memory doesn’t make me want to avoid the lab. If anything, oddly enough, I feel a pull to return.
But I have to be more careful. The more I think about it, the more suspicious I find it that I was supposedly the only one available to perform that task.
Me, whose scent the alien had a noticeably strange reaction to.
And it hasn’t escaped my notice that Ramsey showed up to pull me out, even though he was supposedly in a meeting when Akimov sent me into that antechamber.
I’m prepared to walk away if Akimov tries to force me into anything like that again.
But despite what happened, I don’t want to quit.
I’m invested in this research. Even when I’m outside of the lab, it consumes my every waking thought.
I want so badly to be able to understand the creature in that cell.
My stomach flips as I see it through the observation window again.
But the alien is still today, crouched on the floor.
The scientists crowd around the window, murmuring, and I squeeze in among them to get a better look.
In front of the alien lies the small, still body of the final rabbit, the one I failed to extract.
The alien’s human disguise is unreadable, its face like stone. But it stares down at the tiny creature’s corpse for a very long time before murmuring something in its foreign tongue and straightening up.
I wish I could understand what it’s saying. I’m almost tempted to ask if I can try speaking to it myself, but then I flash back to seeing its eye through the metal slot, its tentacle straining to reach me, the rabbit mashed to a pulp in its muscular grip.
I shudder, grabbing the edge of the table to steady myself. No, I shouldn’t speak to it. Better for me to remain in the background, avoiding any more of such a dangerous creature’s attention.
Akimov tries—in vain—to speak to it through the intercom as usual, but the alien ignores him like every other day. It leaves the body of the rabbit to retreat into its sleep pod, and it doesn’t emerge again.
As the others discuss its behavior, I flip through Mulford’s notebook, searching for anything about its native language. Hearing it speak reminded me of that word it spoke to me through the metal slot. Taujak.
Mulford’s notes don’t hold any answers. It seems he was focused on teaching the subject our language rather than learning its.
But he writes about how quickly it picked up vocabulary and grammar.
Learns and adapts rapidly. High neuroplasticity to complement its shape-shifting ability?
And then, written in the margins like an afterthought: It is smarter than they think.