Dylan stared at the fridge, its shelves skeletal and bare. The meatloaf was gone. The potato salad tub looked like it had been licked clean by a feral animal. Even the jar of pickles Aunt Marla's 'sacred' pickles, the ones she'd warned him never to touch was empty, its brine pooling at the bottom like a sad, salty puddle. His stomach growled, loud and insistent, as if he hadn't just eaten enough to fuel a small army.
*What the hell is wrong with me?*
He slammed the fridge door shut, the sound too loud in the silent kitchen. His reflection in the stainless steel warped back at him pale, greasy-haired, eyes wide with a mix of guilt and panic. Aunt Marla would be home soon. She'd open the fridge, and her face would do that thing. The 'thing'. The slow blink, the pressed lips, the sigh that sounded less like disappointment and more like grief.
"You're eating again," she'd say, trying to sound cheerful. "That's… good, right?"
But it wasn't good. Not like this. Not when he'd devoured a week's worth of groceries in two hours. Not when his appetite felt less like hunger and more like a black hole, sucking in everything it touched.
He slumped against the counter, clutching his stomach. It ached, stretched tight as a drum, but the gnawing emptiness beneath the pain was worse. Like his body was digesting itself.
*Maybe you're dying. Maybe NovaGen poisoned you. Maybe this is how it ends exploding in a kitchen, surrounded by empty Tupperware.*
The thought almost made him laugh. Almost.
Last month, Aunt Marla had dragged him to Dr. Pritchett, the family GP with a mustache that looked like two caterpillars fighting. "Depression can suppress appetite," Pritchett had droned, typing notes into a computer older than Dylan. *"But this? This is… *unusual.*"*
Unusual. That was the understatement of the century. Dylan hadn't just 'lost' his appetite he'd lost the ability to taste, to care. Food was ash. Water was glue. But now? Now he couldn't stop.
He grabbed a sponge and scrubbed at the counter, erasing crumbs and grease stains like they were evidence. The clock ticked. The sink dripped. Normal sounds. 'Human' sounds. But his mind kept looping back to the static, the gaps, the woods.
*What if it's not stress? What if it's… them?*
They'd injected him with something. A drug. A parasite. A tiny machine replicating in his gut, demanding fuel.
No, maybe he was metabolizing memories. Burning through the missing hours like calories.
"C'mon that sounded stupid."He thought of something better. Of course he was just a messed-up kid with a death wish and a Costco-sized bag of issues.
The sponge slipped from his hand, landing with a wet slap. Dylan left it there.
Upstairs, his room felt too small, the walls pressing in. He flopped onto his bed, staring at the water stain on the ceiling a Rorschach blot that sometimes looked like a screaming face, sometimes like a tree. Today, it looked like a question mark.
*What happens when she finds out?*
He checked his phone. No texts from Marcus. No missed calls. Just a notification about a meme page he'd muted months ago.
The front door creaked open downstairs.
"Dylan? You home?"
Aunt Marla's voice. Normal. Warm. *Doomed.*
"Yeah!" he called back, too loud, too bright.
Footsteps climbed the stairs.
Aunt Marla stood in the doorway, grocery bags sagging in her arms. Her eyes darted from Dylan to the empty wrappers on his desk.
"You… ate."
Dylan forced a grin. "Uh. Yeah."
She set the bags down, slow, deliberate. "The pickles too?"
"They were… calling to me?"
She blinked. Then, to his horror, she laughed a sharp, startled sound. "Kid, you've got the appetite of a grizzly bear."
Relief flooded him, hot and dizzying. "So… you're not mad?"
"Mad? Honey, I've been begging you to eat for months." She ruffled his hair, her calloused fingers warm. "We'll figure it out. Ramen's cheap."
Dylan's throat tightened. *She doesn't know. She doesn't see.*
As she left, humming, he pulled out his phone and texted Marcus:
**"You up for a gas station run? I need snacks. *Lots* of snacks."**
The reply was instant:
"Duh. I'll bring the getaway car."
.........
Meanwhile at NovaGen, the lights never dimmed. They hummed, sterile and relentless, in a boardroom high above Claiborn. The walls were glass, the chairs leather, the air thick with the scent of money and menace.
Apart from that the amount of pressure couldn't be calculated by any science genius. The silence was deafening, it was a meeting, the kind if meeting that you know, comes with dire, often harsh and unwise decisions.
Every one seated on that table was under intense pressure. Something had definitely happened which no one could explain for the main time. Everyone except one man at the head of the table brought his fist down on the mahogany desk. "Thud.!"
"Explain," he said, his voice a gravelly rasp, "how two 'teenagers' breached a facility."
The word 'teenagers' dripped with venom, as if adolescence itself were a security threat.
Around the table, six executives stiffened. None met his eyes. Dr. Eleanor Voss sharp glasses, sharper smirk, tilted her head, unbothered.
The man's name was Roland Kray and nope, NOPE, he wasn't the CEO, he wished . Short, bald, and built like a fireplug stuffed into a tailored suit, he radiated fury like a radiator. His face was a topographical map of rage: flushed cheeks, throbbing temple veins, a jaw clenched so tight it could crack walnuts. The mahogany desk, comically large, dwarfed him, its polished surface reflecting his scarlet face like a funhouse mirror.
Then who the hell was this guy?