“You mean it wasn’t true?” Banks asked. He and Bergman had let their firearms relax again. A quick glance at Ramsay was enough to know that yes, he saw it too, and that he accepted it…for now. He appeared to be evaluating the girl’s grip on her syringe, which, I saw, had likewise slackened.

“No, it wasn’t. I was falling for him. I just didn’t know it then.” A smile crept across her face. Her eyes lit up in a way that accentuated the sliver of humanity she still clung to, and at the same time showed how much she’d lost. She paid no attention as the her up on the screen itemized the reasons why she and Miller weren’t right for each other. The irony was lost on her, apparently.

“We weren’t really out of gerbils” she continued with a laugh. “We still had those two from the regen tests. We hadn’t tested anything much that day; they made it through without a scratch. But it was a drawn-out process with a lot of down time, and we had to find some way to pass it. Miller started talking in this squeaky little gerbil voice, describing the experiment from a gerbil’s point of view, and acting like it was just another day at the office, and talking about his weekend plans and his gerbil wife and kids. He got me into it, and before long we were going back and forth, and having whole gerbil conversations about our unexamined gerbil lives, and I know it sounds stupid and childish and not at all professional but by the end of the test we’d gotten pretty attached to the little guys. The next day we went to pull them again, for something riskier this time, and…I don’t know. I guess he could tell I just wasn’t ready to say goodbye. He took them out of circulation.”

She was in a different kind of trance now. One I had no trouble at all understanding. “Yeah, we were falling pretty hard. He could already see the life we were going to have outside…going steady, meeting parents, fighting and making up, getting married and moving out to a place in the suburbs with a big yard and good schools for our two or maybe three kids…he even named the gerbils after them! That is, he named the kids after the gerbils, or…well, we named the gerbils together that day, one apiece, as part of our game, and from then on, whenever he thought about the future, he gave the kids those same two names. Like it was a funny story we could tell when they were older, how we named them after the rodents that helped bring us together all those years ago. That sort of thing.”

“But like I said, I didn’t know it at the time.” She turned the needle in contemplation. Bergman re-trained his rifle, but Banks left his at ease, unsure if this was a renewal of her threat. I didn’t know how to respond. How did she find that out? Did Miller confide in her later on? That kind of cutie-pie talk wasn’t at all the Miller I knew, but maybe he broke down in his moment of extremis? Or was there something more sinister going on here? As often happened in situations like these, the question I eventually asked was the one I already knew the answer to.

“But…you know it now?”

She met my gaze. The spark in her eyes had faded, and the smile had left her face, leaving a sunken, drawn, yet somehow knowing look that seemed to hear my unasked questions.

She swiped her holo in response.

“And does he always walk around in those sweat-stained T-shirts?” The girl on the screen was still rambling about Miller, or perhaps rambling on again…it wasn’t clear how much time had passed. “I mean, I know we’re not going clubbing or anything, but we’re not hanging out at the frat house either! We’ve got team meetings, and conference calls, and the closed circuit. Why not class it up a little?”

Britt smiled knowingly, content to let her dig as deep a hole as she liked. She was saved further embarrassment by the hydraulic hiss of one of the doors. It was Miller, back from the incubation room. He looked confused.

“Something wrong?” Britt asked.

“Dial it up.” Miller joined them at the control module and flopped into one of the chairs. “Inky.”

Britt obliged. He tapped a sequence of buttons on the console itself instead of swiping, as if he couldn’t bear to swipe away from the code roiling on its surface. As if he didn’t want to touch it.

The screen phased to show the center of the incubation chamber, a bright room girdled in steel and pocked with airlocked ventilation, and the cage set up therein. It hung suspended at shoulder height, tethered by cables so it didn’t sway but touching as few of the surfaces as possible. LifeStat systems whirred in the background, cycling on and off asynchronously as they worked to maintain atmosphere within the specifications allowed. Miller, featureless in his bio-suit, hunched over the cage with his back to the camera, tapping at the glass, observing. Two white rabbits trembled nervously within. One of them stood on its hind legs and pawed at the bars in an exploratory fashion, while the other gnawed at some pellets that had been set in one corner. The latter stared as it ate, its eyes like drops of the blackest oil pooled in its snowy fur.

“After this.”

Britt nudged the playback forward three, four, ten full minutes as Miller rolled his fingers over in a get on with it kind of gesture. “There!” Miller exclaimed at about the fifteen minute mark. “That’s where things went off the rails.”

Britt re-started the replay. The rabbits had changed positions in the interval. The one at the pellets had eaten its fill and now was huddled beside the in the corner. The other sniffed around it in an oscillating arc, sussing out a way that it could sneak in for a bite or two.

“What are we – ”

“Just watch,” Miller interrupted. “Any second now.”

The more active of the two inched its way towards the pellets. The other eyed it warily, watching it with oily eyes that seemed to pulse with pale blue light as it crouched deeper and deeper into its stance. Then, just as the first dipped its nose in for a bite, it attacked. Its legs flexed and its abdomen stretched as it leapt towards the other’s throat. Its teeth gnashed a gleaming white in the harsh light of the chamber. Its whiskers, stippled on the ends with froth, quivered in the air.

The other noticed, too late, the danger it was in. The attacker’s teeth were at its neck before it mounted a defense. They sunk into the fur, thickest there, and burrowed to the flesh beneath. Bright blood sprang from the rift the opened in the skin. It smeared on the attacker’s face and the victim’s scruff alike, staining both a sickly pink, and matting down their pristine coats. The victim thrashed and snapped its jaws in an attempt to counter, but this availed it nothing save a mouthful of air and fluff. It kicked its legs in a blind panic, at its attacker, at the cage, at its bedding, at the empty air.

The other held. Its jaws worked deeper into its victim’s flesh, severing tendons, opening veins, gutting it one surgical snip at a time. Blood sheeted on its teeth. Its whiskers dripped with crimson oil. Its eyes, cold and dark, stared with an intense indifference as its victim’s thrashing began to slow. Sinews hung like jungle vines, guide-wires from the pulsing goo in its scruff to the blood pooling on the floor. The victim kicked, feebly, a few times more, then collapsed. It lay on its side, twitching, for another minute or two as its body realized it was dead, then was still.