ASTERWICK 14 - 1983 (Patreon)

01.05.83 – 4:02 p.m.

Ash Lake Annex – Northwest of Asterwick, OR

Jennifer Blake               --Previously: 6’10” 321 lbs | Current: 5’7” 110 lbs

Michelle Mendoza      --Previously: 6’7” 301 lbs | Current: 5’5” 132 lbs

Stephanie Rhodes      --Previously: 6’9” 322 lbs | Current: 5’3” 120 lbs

Tara Whitman                --Previously: 6’6” 294 lbs | Current: 5’6” 170 lbs

Jennifer Blake could fit inside her old clothes again. That was how they knew she was getting better. The gray sweatshirt had no broken seams. Its sleeves reached her wrists. When she sat at the recreation-room table, both knees passed beneath it without touching, and the chair accepted her weight with the indifferent squeak of furniture doing an ordinary job.

Five foot seven. The number appeared on every chart now, underlined as though the line made it more convincing. Somewhere in a locked cabinet, another chart still recorded six foot ten and three hundred twenty-one pounds. Jennifer had watched a technician carry it away in November. He had handled it like an embarrassing photograph.

She put both hands around a cup of tea that tasted of paper and waited for the warmth to reach her fingers. It never quite did. Across the table, Michelle Mendoza sat inside a cardigan too large at the shoulders, working a crossword with a pencil worn down to its metal collar. Stephanie Rhodes had tucked her feet beneath her on the couch. Tara Whitman stood beside the radiator, holding one palm above it to determine whether it was actually on.

They looked like four women waiting for a bus. Michelle was five-five again. Stephanie, five-three. Tara had regained the soft middle she remembered from before the lake, along with the weary habit of tugging her shirt forward when she sat. Their faces had returned from photographs. Their bodies had followed. Nothing else had.

“Seven letters,” Michelle said, studying the crossword. “Freedom from restraint.” Tara glanced over from the radiator. “Do they give you a hint?” “That was the hint.” “Liberty,” Jennifer said. Michelle counted the squares, then wrote it in. Tara held her hand closer to the radiator. “Liberty, it has a nice ring to it. This thing still isn’t on.” “Ask Powers when she gets here,” Stephanie said. “They fixed it last time she complained.”

Jennifer checked the clock above the observation window. Four-oh-two. Powers was late. Tara kept her hand above the cold radiator anyway. The room had once been a supply office. They knew because the shelves had left pale rectangles on the cinder block and STORAGE still showed beneath the new paint on the door. In December it had become a privilege: books without hard covers, a television receiving two channels, a table, four chairs, and a couch whose vinyl opened behind Stephanie’s knee.

Six supervised hours together each day. They slept separately. They ate together when staffing permitted. They could use the bathroom without asking, provided the bathroom door remained unlatched. The camera above the television turned. The one over the radiator did not. Jennifer had spent a week deciding whether that meant it was broken. Then a guard told Tara not to stand on a chair beneath it. Some questions answered themselves.

At four-ten, Corporal Ames opened the door. He always checked the window first, even now. Six months of being frightened by them had settled into his shoulders and stayed there. “Doctor’s here.” “Woohoo,” Michelle said without looking up, twirling her finger in mock surprise.

Powers entered carrying a folder rather than her metal case. Navy jacket. Cream blouse. Damp hair at the nape of her neck. January had reached the surface, if not the room. Jennifer looked for rain on the doctor’s shoes because rain was something she could not manufacture from memory. There was a little on the toes. Actual weather, brought underground in quantities too small to share.

“How is everyone feeling?” Powers asked. Tara held her hand above the radiator again. “Practically tropical.” Powers crossed to the valve and turned it. Jennifer watched the small act of competence. That was the difficult thing about her. Sometimes the doctor fixed exactly what hurt. Sometimes she decided the hurt was necessary and wrote it down.

“The last three weeks have been consistent,” Powers said. “Your measurements, blood chemistry, cardiac function. No spontaneous expression.” “Except words,” Michelle said. “We still have those.” Powers let that pass. “The treatment is holding at a maintenance dose. This changes what I can argue for.” Jennifer lifted her eyes from the rain-dark leather. “Release.” “Eventual release, yes.”

Stephanie lowered her feet from the couch. Nobody spoke. The word had been used often enough to wear smooth, but it still caught them. In August, release depended on stable measurements. In September, it depended on explaining the measurements. In October, the explanation needed review. Jennifer remembered every version. They had given her plenty of time to remember.

“It will require a continued regimen,” Powers said. “Follow-up examinations. We need to establish that stability can be maintained outside the annex.” “Outside,” Jennifer said. “That sounds useful. We could start there.” “You know it isn’t that simple.” “I know you keep saying we’re well enough to leave while we’re sitting behind a locked door.” Jennifer set her cup down. Carefully. These days everything she did was careful in a smaller way. “If this is the thing you were waiting for, let us go upstairs.”

Powers looked toward the observation window. “I cannot authorize civilian discharge on my own.” “Then don’t, call it a medical decision.” The radiator gave a thin knock. Heat began moving through it at last. Tara stayed beside it, palm open, expression closed. “I am trying to keep decisions about your bodies under medical authority,” Powers said.

Jennifer remembered the first morning underground. The forms laid on the floor. The doctor offering protection inside a locked cell and calling it the best she could do. For a while Jennifer had believed that best meant the beginning of something. Now it looked more like a place to stop. “Whose authority?” she asked. Powers held the folder against her side. There was no good answer in it. “I’ll come back when I have something definite.” “Bring a coat,” Tara said. “For one of us.”

That evening, the laundry cart struck the doorjamb while Nurse Bell was giving Jennifer her tablets. It was a small accident with a large audience. A wheel stuck. The orderly pushed harder. A stack of sheets slid into the corridor, and Bell turned to tell him he was catching the brake with his shoe.

Jennifer had been sitting on the edge of her bed with the paper medicine cup in one hand and water in the other. She set both beside the supper tray so Bell could help gather the sheets. Bell came back, took her pulse, asked the three questions she asked every evening, and marked the clipboard. Nausea. Headache. Unusual warmth. Jennifer said no to all three. The tray went out with the cups on it. Jennifer remembered the tablets only after the door locked.

She stood, took one step toward the call button, and stopped. Missing medication meant Bell returning, an incident report, another temperature reading, and somebody turning on her light at midnight. The tablets had no name they would tell her. The nurses called them maintenance. Powers called them treatment. Nobody had ever explained what one missed dose would do.

Jennifer waited to see. By nine she was hungry. Not merely interested in food. Hungry. The distinction woke her out of the mild, padded fatigue that usually carried her from supper to sleep. Her stomach contracted around its meager portion of meat loaf. She thought about the hot dogs at Ash Lake and felt saliva gather beneath her tongue. She sat up. Her toes were warm.

The change was so ordinary she almost dismissed it. Then she pushed the blanket away and pressed her feet to the concrete. The floor was cold. Her feet stayed warm. Heat occupied them from the inside, steady and small, extending through her calves like a power line being repaired section by section. Jennifer lay back and listened. The ventilation rattled above the door. Somewhere farther along the corridor, a guard coughed. Below those sounds came another: low enough to mistake for a pump, sweet enough that she knew it was not one.

Her teeth seemed to hear it first. She remembered water shining beneath her legs. Kevin on the shore with a towel. The helpless weight before the sudden strength. The same note had traveled through the annex in July, when the pipes shook and the guards forgot to pretend they knew what was happening.

Jennifer put one palm against her abdomen. Nothing moved. No violent pressure. No seams pulling apart. Just a warmth she had not felt since the doses began climbing in the autumn. She could not decide whether she had been relieved when it disappeared or merely told that she should be.

At breakfast she ate the eggs, toast, and stewed fruit before Michelle had finished arguing about the eggs. The tea tasted like tea. Weak tea, but a recognizable attempt. “Someone’s festive,” Michelle said. “I slept.” Michelle glanced at Jennifer’s empty plate. “Apparently I need more sleep.” Jennifer took the morning dose. By lunch, the warmth had thinned. By four, the hum had become a thing she could almost convince herself she had imagined. Her hands were cold around the cup again.

She watched the surface of the tea until the guard asked whether she wanted another bag. “No,” she said. “Thank you.” The next morning she began keeping records in the margins of an old botany paperback. Not measurements. The annex took those for her. Observations: appetite, temperature, sleep, the time she heard the hum. She used the printed names of plants as references, because a column of numbers would have invited questions and because she did not have enough numbers yet.

Her professors had taught her that noticing a change was not the same as knowing what caused it. She needed more evidence. After six months of listening to doctors declare her stable while she barely had the energy to get out of bed, she was not ready to trust a conclusion just because she wanted it to be true.

Over the next three days, she let some doses go untaken. She did not write down how. That was not the experiment. The experiment was what returned afterward, and whether anything returned that could give her experiment away. She told none of the others. Michelle would want to try it. Stephanie would ask whether Mark might be allowed to see her if she could stay ordinary without medication. Tara would pretend not to care, then care enough to lose sleep. Jennifer could bear making a dangerous decision about her own body. She was not ready to make one by example about theirs.

By the following Friday, she was waking before the lights. Not from a nightmare. Because she had finished sleeping. She lay listening to the quiet machinery and felt her pulse move through her wrists with a weight she remembered. At breakfast, she hooked two fingers beneath the tray to lift it from the trolley. The thin aluminum bent slightly around them. She stopped before the orderly noticed and supported it from below. At the table she ate slowly. That required more effort than bending the tray.

Her sweatshirt was snug across her shoulders and back that afternoon. Only a little. She lowered her arms and waited for the fabric to settle. It did not. The cuff that had reached her wrist on Wednesday stopped above the knob of bone now.

Tara looked up from her library book. Jennifer picked up her cup before the look could become a question. In the bathroom, she stood beside the mirror and compared the top of her head with a hairline crack in the tile. Higher. Not much. Enough. Her abdomen had acquired a firmness beneath the familiar thinness. When she flexed her hand, a tendon stood up cleanly between thumb and wrist. Her body seemed to be finding parts it had been instructed not to use.

She should have felt frightened. She did feel frightened. Underneath it was something harder to admit: relief. She did not miss being enormous. She missed waking with enough life inside her to want the day, even this day, underground with no place to go. She missed hunger that meant something. She missed a body whose every sensation had not been turned down until she could tolerate what was being done to it.

The sweatshirt in the mirror looked less like a drapery and more like clothing on a person. Jennifer held her own gaze. The thought had arrived too neatly. It could be hers. It could be something inside her rewarding the return of its preferred conditions. A biology major ought to know better than to confuse a favorable response with consent.

She had no control subject. She had no version of herself that had never entered Ash Lake. All she had was this woman in the mirror, looking alert for the first time in weeks, and the uneasy possibility that alertness did not belong entirely to her. Behind the tile, the hum deepened. Jennifer shut off the tap. It continued. On Saturday morning, the blood draw took longer than usual. Bell filled the tubes, labeled them, and went away. At four-thirty, Powers came instead of the orderly bringing tea.

She was holding Jennifer’s botany book. Powers closed the door behind her. Not all the way. Ames remained outside, visible through a strip of corridor. Jennifer saw him look toward the camera before he settled beside the frame. “Your plasma is active,” Powers said. Jennifer sat on the bed. Her feet reached the floor sooner than they had on Wednesday. “Active how?”

Powers set the book on the bolted table and took a capped specimen tube from her pocket. Above the dark blood, fine pale strands crossed the straw-colored fluid. They moved while the tube remained still, gathering toward one side of the glass. Jennifer leaned forward despite herself. “They’re aligning again.” “They never entirely stopped. We reduced their coherence. This is different.” Powers turned the tube. The strands adjusted and held. “How many doses?”

“I don’t know.” “Jennifer.” “Some.” Powers put the tube away. For a moment the professional stillness left her face, showing something tired and genuinely afraid beneath it. “You need to resume the regimen.” “Why?” “Because the response is accelerating. Your blood is behaving differently from the July samples. Whatever we have suppressed has continued changing while its physical expression was dormant.”

“You keep calling it treatment,” Jennifer said. “Is it removing anything?” Powers looked at the specimen in her hand. “No. The material remains. We suppress its activity so it cannot produce the physical changes.” Jennifer watched the pale strands hold their direction. “Then I’m not recovered. I’m medicated.” “You are stable.” Jennifer looked toward the locked door. Stable had become a word for what they could safely keep.

Jennifer looked at her wrists. “So you weren’t stopping it.” “We were controlling symptoms.” “You were controlling us.” “Both can be true.” Powers pulled the chair from the table but did not sit. “If you become medically unstable, every argument I have made for discharge disappears.” “Which discharge? The one after Christmas? Or the one after the next observation period?” “I have kept you out of trials you do not know about.”

Jennifer looked up. That sounded like truth. It was worse than an excuse. “Tell me about them.” “Not now.” “Then you’re asking me to be grateful for things you won’t tell me, and take medicine you won’t name, so men you won’t let me meet can decide whether I’m allowed to leave.” Powers lowered herself into the chair. Beyond the door Ames shifted his weight. Jennifer heard his belt creak. She had heard it every day for months. She knew when he was tired and when he wanted somebody else to be responsible.

“The suppressant made me cold,” Jennifer said. “I slept and still woke tired. I stopped being hungry. I thought that meant I was getting used to being here.” She touched the shortened cuff. “I missed a dose by accident. I felt better. When I took the next one, I felt worse again.” “Feeling better does not mean being safer.” “Safer for whom?”

“For you. For the other women. We do not understand the connection between you and the lake.” “I know. I can hear it.” Powers stopped moving. “You hear it too,” Jennifer said. “When?” “At night. Right now, a little.” The doctor looked toward the floor. Jennifer watched that involuntary glance and understood that she had given away more than she meant to. Whatever the laboratory knew, it had not included this.

“You need to let me help,” Powers said. Jennifer rubbed her thumb along the edge of the mattress. “You keep talking about getting my old body back. I had it back. I didn’t feel like me.” She swallowed. The next part frightened her enough that she made herself say it precisely. “I don’t know whether that’s because I’ve changed or because something is making me want to change. I want to find out. I can’t find out while you’re keeping me quiet.”

“That is why this needs supervision.” Jennifer looked toward the open door. “Then supervise. Tell me what you know. But I’m not taking another dose just so you can keep me here.” Powers followed her glance. “Not everything is negotiable.” “It’s my body,” Jennifer said. “I should be the one who decides.”

The words stood between them without rising. Jennifer had expected saying them to make her feel brave. Instead, she felt tired in an ordinary way, the way people felt after explaining something that should never have required explanation. Powers opened her mouth. A voice came from the corridor before she could answer.

“Doctor. Step outside.” Major Keene filled the doorway in fatigues pressed sharply enough to look new. His hair had gone grayer since July. Nothing else about him seemed altered. Behind him stood Bell with a metal tray and two soldiers Jennifer did not recognize. Powers rose. “This is a medical consultation.”

“This is deliberate noncompliance with a containment protocol.” Keene looked at Jennifer’s wrists, her shoulders, the bed. He was measuring a problem against an old solution. “She is returning to expression.” “We have not established the trajectory. I need serial samples before introducing a loading dose.” “You need her stabilized before you do anything else.”

Jennifer stood. Slowly. She kept her hands open beside her thighs. The room felt warmer now. Or she did. “I haven’t threatened anyone.” “Sit down,” Keene said. “I want to speak with the others.” “You do not set conditions.” The sentence returned from July with nothing worn away. Jennifer remembered the dynamometer breaking before she had squeezed hard. The cot that would not hold her. The men frightened by a woman who had not yet decided to resist them.

Powers moved between Keene and the bed. “No injections until I know what this formulation will do at her present activity level.” Keene addressed the soldiers. “Wrist restraints. Seat her. Nurse, administer the ordered dose.” Bell did not move. “Doctor?” “Wait,” Powers said. The radio on Keene’s belt crackled. Someone in recreation was demanding to see Jennifer. Michelle’s voice carried faintly down the corridor beneath the reply: “Then get the doctor. I don’t care what the light says.”

Keene took the radio. “Return all three to secure rooms. Restrict communal access indefinitely. Any refusal, restrain and medicate.” “They haven’t done anything,” Jennifer said. He clipped the radio back onto his belt. “Then they’ll cooperate.” The first soldier entered. Young. A red patch at his neck where his collar rubbed. He had brought restraints sized for the person Jennifer appeared to be. She let him take one wrist because she was still trying to give Powers a chance to stop this. Steel closed cold against her skin.

“Major,” Powers said, “you are converting a manageable situation into an emergency.” “We can debate management afterwards.” “And release?” Jennifer asked. Keene looked at her as though she might be some kind of strange insect. “You have demonstrated why that is not under consideration.”

Not delayed. Not pending. Not under consideration. Jennifer stopped waiting for Powers to find the right words. There were no right words. The condition for leaving was obedience, and obedience could always be tested again. The ‘treatment’ had not opened a door. It had made it safer to keep one closed.

The second soldier took her other arm. Jennifer looked at Bell’s tray, at the syringe waiting beside the gauze, and felt a hard pressure gather beneath her ribs. For days she had breathed around that pressure, keeping it small. She had moved slowly, eaten slowly, waited for it to settle. Now she stopped asking it to.

“Let go,” she told the soldier. He tightened his grip. “Sit down, please.” The please was almost unbearable. Jennifer drew one full breath. Something deep below the room answered. The heat did not arrive as a wave. It opened everywhere at once, in her shins, behind her breastbone, inside the small bones of her hands. Jennifer felt her skin pull tight around a frame that had begun making room beneath it. Her next breath filled farther down than the first. The sweatshirt lifted away from her stomach, then pressed against it again as muscle gathered under the cotton.

The soldier holding her elbow loosened his grip. Too late. Her forearm lengthened inside his hand. The change was small enough to see and large enough to make him step backward. Jennifer’s knees straightened without her permission. A deep adjustment passed through both thighs, bone and tendon shifting together in proportions she could feel but could not name. Her hips rose. The edge of the bed dropped beside her. The soldier’s face, level with hers a moment earlier, began slipping lower. A velvety deep moan escaped her lips involuntarily, the warm sensation of a good, deep stretch took over.

“Release the cuff,” Powers said. Keene backed into the corridor. “Get the larger restraints.” Jennifer tried to tell them she could still hear. The words caught behind the next breath and she groaned instead. Her ribs spread, not breaking, finding new positions with an intimate series of pressures beneath the sternum. Her heart struck harder once, then settled into a slower, heavier beat. The sensation was terrible in its competence. Nothing inside her seemed surprised.

The cuff bit. Jennifer looked down and saw flesh rising on either side of the steel. She had time to think about circulation, about nerves trapped against bone, before her wrist thickened again. The hinge gave a tiny metallic click. Not the lock opening. Something less designed.

Bell put the tray on the table and stepped back. Gauze fell to the floor. The soldier fumbled for his key, then stopped because the cuff was no longer round enough to accept it. Jennifer held her arm away from him. “Move your hand.” Her voice came out rough, filled with more air than she expected.

He obeyed. She closed her fingers, carefully keeping the damaged metal turned toward the floor. A pin sheared. The cuff opened sideways and struck the concrete between her feet. The sound was almost disappointingly small. Her deck shoes tightened next. She felt each toe pressing forward inside thin canvas, felt the soles become too short beneath lengthening feet. The floor touched her skin with a coldness that vanished almost at once.

The sweatshirt’s sleeves climbed past her wrists. Her upper arms filled them from within, muscle gathering in separate, heavy masses that moved when she reached for balance. The seams at both shoulders whitened. Her back widened against the cotton until there was no loose fabric left anywhere above her waist. Below it, the elastic trousers pulled hard over her hips, and straining across thickening glutes.

Jennifer braced one hand on the bed. The frame bent under it. She took her hand away. She had meant to steady herself. Not break the bed. She fixed her eyes on the door and made the next breath deliberate.

“She’s definitely growing,” someone said from the corridor. The height strip was painted beside the observation pane. Jennifer had stood against it every week. Now the measurements belonged to other people looking in. She could see above the soldier’s head. She could see the top of Powers’s pinned hair. She could see dust on the camera housing that nobody had bothered to clean because nobody expected a patient to look down at it.

“This is the prior expression,” Keene said. He wanted it to be. Jennifer could hear that much. “Hold the corridor.” Her body grew heavier, faster now. Weight descended through her spine and spread into her pelvis, thighs, feet. Her legs thickened to support it before she had time to wonder whether they could. Muscle tightened into dense layers along her back. Her abdomen pulled inward, then pressed outward in a hard, ridged brace that made each breath feel anchored.

The soles of her shoes separated as her feet pushed through the front, growing wider. The sweatshirt split at the left shoulder. A thread snapped, then another, each giving up a little more room. The opening traveled toward her neck, baring skin so hot the air against it felt cool. She raised up her arm and rer right sleeve tore from armpit to elbow. She watched the cloth hang away from an arm that seemed to belong to someone else.

She was still inside it. That was the strangest part. No distance. No loss of thought. Fear remained, but it had acquired edges. Door. Nurse. Soldier. Other women. She could place each thing in relation to the next. Powers stood beside the table with one hand pressed to its edge. Jennifer looked down at her and remembered the cuff that had barely met around her arm in July. The instrument that stopped at two hundred pounds. They had called those limits. They had been limits of equipment.

The trousers pulled tight down both thighs. A seam opened outside her knee, then climbed in short, ugly jerks as new mass drove the fabric apart. Her thighs thickened over her knees spreading the pant legs further apart. Jennifer’s hands broadened, the fingers remained hers, scar beside the index nail from a broken beer bottle in June, but the scar spread over a knuckle no longer fitted to the memory. She flexed once and felt power occupy the whole motion, wrist to shoulder, without the awkward gap she remembered from the lake.

For one breath everyone waited. Jennifer knew this size. The room had held it before. She remembered the mattress on the floor, the blanket, Powers looking at her with satisfaction hidden a second too late. Her old enormous body returned around her like a place she had once lived. Then her heel slid backward as her foot lengthened again.

She couldn’t control herself and doubled over with a heavy grunt, “mmmgghhh, oh god.” The sensation was intoxicating. Powers looked at the height strip. Then at Jennifer’s face. The next adjustment traveled up her spine slowly enough to feel every part of it. Her hips rose another fraction. Her head closer to the wire cage around the ceiling bulb. The hum deepened until the metal table answered with a faint vibration.

“She’s still—” Bell stopped. “I can see,” Powers said. Jennifer’s shoulders widened beyond the remaining sweatshirt. The back split down its center, releasing the pressure with a long rip. Her heavy breasts surged with size and bounced free from the flimsy cotton shirt. Her body was adapting to its new weight as it arrived, joints setting beneath the load, tendons pulling taut with a strength she could feel extending into the smallest bones.

“Seven feet,” the corridor voice said. It had lost its certainty. A tremor moved beneath Jennifer’s feet. Water knocked inside a pipe above the door. The first alarm began: one note, repeated. Red light washed across Powers’s face. Jennifer had to lower her head to keep it clear of the bulb. Her shoulders rose past the top of the observation pane. The room had become a box with people in it. She knew it had always been one. Knowing and feeling were different things.

The last stretch took longer than the others. Pressure held her in place while height climbed through legs and torso, then settled into more mass: back spreading, thighs thickening until the torn trousers hung in panels, arms filling with weight that no longer felt like something added. The elastic waistband broke. The pants drifted to the floor. Jennifer grunted once more then felt herself smile, she felt powerful, huge. The height tape stopped at the top of the door frame, her head rose higher than even the frame.

At last the upward movement stopped. She waited. Her body continued becoming heavier for three slow breaths, feet spreading against concrete, shoulders rounding into a scale that made the door seem badly proportioned. Then the pressure ceased. Jennifer stood with her head bent. She was breathing. Thinking. Warm. Hungry.

Powers stared at her, lips parted. “There wasn’t a maximum,” she said, so softly Jennifer almost missed it. “We measured a stopping point.” Keene was speaking into his radio. The words meant teams, weapons, sealed exits. Jennifer looked at Bell. “Move away from the door.” Bell moved. The soldier tried to block Jennifer’s path, then looked up at her and reconsidered. She waited until he was clear. Even that cost time.

Powers stepped forward. “Jennifer. Let me—” “You’ve had six months.” Jennifer’s voice filled the little room without being loud. The doctor’s eyes flicked toward the corridor. Jennifer went through the door sideways. Her shoulder scraped the frame. Paint crumbled against her skin. She felt the contact, adjusted, and kept moving.

The corridor smelled of hot electrical dust and the familiar bleach that never quite left the floor. Jennifer knew every door in it. One through Four. Observation. Laboratory. Checkpoint. For six months she had watched other people travel between those places and understood that movement itself was part of what had been taken from her.

Two soldiers stood outside Michelle’s room. One raised his rifle. Jennifer stopped. The muzzle looked small. That did not make it harmless. “Get away from her door,” she said. “On the ground.” His voice broke on the last word. Jennifer looked at his hands. At the narrow space behind him. At the other soldier, reaching for the wall alarm as though another alarm would improve things. She could reach him before he finished. She knew that with certainty.

Powers came out behind her. “Do not fire. There are personnel in every direction.” The rifle shifted toward the doctor’s voice. Jennifer moved. Not at the man. At the barrel. She caught it beneath the front sight and lifted, turning it toward the empty ceiling before his finger closed. The shot broke overhead with a flat concussion. The bulb above Cell Two burst.

Jennifer flinched. She still flinched. She bent the barrel upward, feeling steel resist and then yield inside her palm. The soldier let go. Jennifer lowered the ruined rifle to the floor rather than swing it. “Go.” The second soldier took his arm and pulled him toward the checkpoint. Jennifer watched until both were clear. Then she turned to Michelle’s door.

“Michelle.” A face appeared behind the narrow pane. Small, frightened, still Michelle. Her eyes lifted, kept lifting, and stopped. “Holy shit.” “Stand back. Against the far wall.” Michelle vanished from the glass. Jennifer put her fingers around the door’s recessed edge. There was barely room for them. She pulled. The door stayed shut. Something inside her shoulder tightened into a deeper layer of strength, and she felt the lock transfer its resistance into the frame.

She changed the angle. Pulled inward and sideways, not toward the hinges. Steel groaned. A line opened between frame and cinder block. Jennifer stopped when pieces began falling, waited for them to settle, then pulled again. The bolt tore through its housing. She caught the door before it fell into the room and set it against the wall outside.

Michelle stood beside the mattress with both hands pressed to her stomach. Her cardigan hung loose. Jennifer remembered those hands forcing a containment door hard enough to terrify soldiers. Now they were shaking. “Are you all right?” Jennifer asked. “Apparently I’ve been missing the exercise class.” Michelle looked past her. “Steph and Tara?” “Next.”

Stephanie was already at her window. Jennifer told her to move back and opened the door the same way, slower where a pipe bracket crossed the frame. The work felt less like lifting something heavy than persuading something brittle not to shatter in the wrong direction.

Stephanie emerged barefoot. Her head barely reached Jennifer’s chest. She stared up with the stunned concentration of someone trying to recognize a friend in a bad photograph. “Jen?” “It’s me.” “You’re sure?” Jennifer looked down at her. “You still owe me twelve dollars from the lake.” Stephanie made a sound that was almost a laugh. “You said Kevin was paying.” “He wasn’t there when you said that.”

The name hurt in its old place. Good. Jennifer had worried there might not be an old place left. Tara’s door opened with a crack that traveled through the block around its hinges. Jennifer held the broken panel clear until Tara came out, wearing the ugly brown shoes the annex issued for supervised walks that had never happened.

“We’re leaving,” Jennifer said. Tara looked at the door. At Jennifer. At the other women. “I was going to ask if we had permission.” “I think I’ve worked it out.” Michelle reached for Jennifer’s bare forearm and drew her hand back. “You’re burning.” “Does it hurt?”

“No. It’s—” Michelle touched her again, briefly. “Warm.. Amazing.” Stephanie rubbed both arms. “I’m warm too.” Jennifer looked at them. Michelle’s face had begun to flush. Tara opened the top button of her blouse beneath the blanket. They stood closer than they had been allowed to stand for months, three smaller bodies gathering around a fourth, and the hum seemed to find a place in the space between them.

“I can hear something,” Tara said. Michelle turned toward the laboratory. “The pipes?” “Not the pipes.” The pipes answered anyway. A heavy knock moved along the ceiling toward the north wall. Behind the observation glass, someone shouted that the intake was isolated. Another voice demanded to know why the pressure was still climbing.

Jennifer looked through the laboratory doorway. A rack of tubes trembled on the counter. Pale material inside them gathered into lines bright enough to see from the corridor. The lines all leaned the same way. For a second she wanted to stop. To look closer. To ask what an organism without an obvious nervous system could be receiving, and how four bodies were answering at once.

Then a boot struck concrete beyond the checkpoint. She turned back to her friends. “Stay behind me.”  “I’m suddenly starving,” Stephanie whispered. Jennifer heard Michelle inhale sharply. Her cardigan sleeves had drawn closer to her upper arm. She was getting taller, the cardigan snugging around her filling out chest.

“Later,” Jennifer said. “We find food later.” She had no idea where. The promise frightened her more than the broken rifle. The checkpoint’s pressure doors began closing. Jennifer reached them before they met, put her shoulder into one panel and her hand against the other. For a moment the hydraulic system held her between them. Then a coupling burst somewhere overhead. Oily fluid sprayed behind the upper housing. The panels stopped moving.

She pushed one back into its recess and held it while the others passed. Beyond lay the freight elevator. Its call light was dead. Of course it was. Jennifer had known it would be; she still looked. The large door in the rock had always made leaving seem possible if somebody would only turn two keys. To its right was the stairwell.

They had practiced evacuation once in October. Thirty feet of corridor, one flight of stairs, back to their rooms. The official reason had been familiarization. Jennifer had memorized the whole diagram beside the door anyway. She remembered a service landing above the elevator shaft, a fire bulkhead, and stairs continuing into the maintenance building.

She tried the handle. Locked. “You knew there was another way,” Michelle said. “I knew there was a drawing.” Jennifer pulled the handle until the mounting plate tore away. “We’ll see how honest it was.” She drove her palm against the door beside the lock. Once. Twice. The steel folded inward enough to clear the bolt. She pushed the door open and crouched beneath it.

The stairwell was narrow, bare concrete and galvanized rail. Jennifer’s shoulders brushed both walls when she turned. She went up sideways, one hand against the inner wall, testing each step before giving it her whole weight. Behind her, the other women ran.

The hum followed through the concrete. It did not grow quieter as they climbed. At the upper landing, a wired-glass window looked into a service vestibule. Jennifer saw the staff lift open on the other side. Powers came out with Keene behind her. He had a radio in one hand and the other on her elbow, directing her toward a wall console.

A steel bulkhead stood open across the stairs above Jennifer. Beyond it waited another flight, a strip of warmer light, the smell of wet wood. Outside was close enough to smell. Six months, and now it was twenty steps away. “Seal the north exit,” Keene said. Powers put her hand over the console.

Jennifer stopped below the bulkhead. The machinery above it was heavier than the cell doors, housed inside the concrete itself. She could try to hold it. She could fail. Behind her stood three women who could not. The stair beneath her gave a faint grinding sound. Tara caught Stephanie by the arm. Michelle reached for the rail and pulled its bracket loose from the wall.

Jennifer looked through the glass at Powers. The doctor looked back. Her gaze moved over Jennifer’s shoulders and the hand braced against concrete. Then it went to the other women. “Now,” Keene said. Powers’s fingers rested above the switch. She was not searching for it. Jennifer could see the label from the stairs: NORTH FIRE ISOLATION. No uncertainty about which control. No question about what it did.

“Doctor.” Three seconds passed. Maybe four. Enough for Jennifer to see Powers look at the ordinary-sized women once more, then at the enormous one the annex would never call stable again. The doctor’s mouth tightened. Jennifer remembered what she had said in the cell: trials you do not know about.

Jennifer turned. “Go. Under it. Now.” Stephanie slipped past her. Tara followed. Michelle hesitated at Jennifer’s shoulder, then ran. Powers’s hand remained where it was. Jennifer crouched, lowered one shoulder, and pushed beneath the housing. The warning bell began. Steel descended behind her. Jennifer threw herself forward into the upper flight, catching the wall with both palms. The bulkhead struck the landing where her heel had been and sealed with a force that shook dust from the stairs.

Keene’s voice carried through the sealed bulkhead, muffled but sharp. “You waited.” Jennifer stopped on the stairs. She could no longer see Powers at the console. No explanation followed. Those few seconds did not make the doctor innocent. They did not return July, or August, or any of the mornings Jennifer had counted beneath fluorescent light.

It had given them these stairs. Jennifer went up. The maintenance building smelled of hose rubber, old fuel, and rain. Its overhead door stood shut. A red beacon turned above the personnel exit. Jennifer broke that door outward at the lock and held it clear for the others. Night entered in a cold sheet.

Not ventilation. Not a draft from a room somebody else controlled. January air, wet enough to taste, filled her larger lungs. Tara stopped on the threshold and began to cry. She made no sound. Stephanie took her hand and pulled her through. A searchlight came alive above the yard. White glare swept over stacks of gravel, a parked truck, the torn doorway. Jennifer stepped in front of the others. The light found her and held. Somewhere by the road, a man shouted. An engine started.

“Trees,” Jennifer said, pointing toward the fence at the edge of the yard. “Wait for me there.” The other women ran toward it. Across the clearing, she spotted the helicopter. If it got into the air, the trees would offer much less protection. She checked that all three had reached the perimeter, then sprinted toward the aircraft, her powerful legs covering the distance in seconds.

Jennifer tore open the pilot’s door with a screech of rending metal. She rammed her fist into the control panel, the pain barely registered but the damage was absolute. Sparks popped and smoke puffed from ruined dials. She rammed her fist once more into the controls for good measure then ran for the trees.

Jennifer reached the others beside the fence. Rain mixed with hard little grains of sleet that struck her shoulders and melted. Her friends hunched beneath the overhanging branches, waiting for her to open a way through. She wanted coats for them. A car. Kevin, with his ridiculous careful face, waiting somewhere he could still be found. She had none of those things. She had three women depending on her, and enough strength to tear a door from a wall. The difference between those facts was suddenly immense.

At the edge of the yard, a fence blocked the way. Jennifer bent a post outward, peeled the mesh aside, and held the sharp edges apart while the others crawled through. She followed crouched low. Her feet sank into cold mud on the far side.

The forest received them without welcome. Dark trunks. Sword ferns bent beneath slush. Water running through every hollow in the ground. Jennifer moved ahead, breaking low dead branches by hand, choosing gaps wide enough for the others instead of the easiest path for herself.

The searchlight cut between the trees. They ducked behind a fallen cedar and waited while its beam traveled above them. Jennifer counted three separate breaths beside her. Michelle. Stephanie. Tara. All too fast, all still there. “My sleeves,” Michelle whispered. She pulled at the cardigan cuff. “They’re tight.” Michelle let out a little uncontrolled moan. Stephanie pressed one hand to her belly. “I can’t stop thinking about food.”

Stephanie was panting heavily, feeling the heft of her breasts, which were filling out her sweatshirt now. Tara touched Jennifer’s shoulder. Her fingers were cold at first, then not. “That sound. Tell me you hear it.” Jennifer nodded. The women were all growing, slowly, but inexorably, their bodies responding to the power of their titan friend.

The hum lay beneath the rain, beneath the idling engines. Not coming from one direction anymore. Moving through the ground and the water caught among the roots. It stopped when Jennifer held still, or seemed to. When she breathed, another note joined it.

She did not know whether it was following them. She did not know whether they were following it. Far below, through a break between the firs, Ash Lake showed black beneath the winter sky. A narrow band of pale color gathered under its northern shore. Green folded into violet, slow and deep. The colors traveled against the wind-driven surface, disappeared beneath the bank, and returned in a puddle beside Jennifer’s bare foot.

She pulled her foot away. The color stayed where it was. “Jen?” Stephanie said between panty breaths. Jennifer looked down at her friends. They were all shifting now, clothing tightening around larger frames. Tara released an involuntary moan. “Oh fuck, this feels good..” She flexed a thickening bicep and smiled as the sleeve strained to its limit.

Jennifer was seven and a half feet tall in the Oregon woods with no shoes, no money, no destination, and a body the people underground would want back more badly than ever. She held a branch aside. “Keep close, I know you’re all growing but we have to keep moving. We can’t wait until you’re finished.”

The women stumbled beneath it one at a time. Jennifer followed, lowering her head among the firs. Behind them, the searchlight returned to the empty patch of mud and found four sets of footprints filling with rain. Under the roots, something pale moved in the water. It did not follow the footprints. It spread beside them, quietly, as though it had all the time in the world.