“Alright,” Leah said, turning to May as they climbed the stairs. “What I want to know is how you managed to piss off that lady so bad in the span of five minutes that she felt the need to shoot you.”

  May chuckled darkly. “You heard her going on about the curfew. She came out of the stairwell just in time to see me leave the room, and she gave me a warning to get back inside. Obviously that wasn’t my room and I don’t have Noah’s magic keycard, so I couldn’t very well do that. So she came right over and kind of got in my face, and said I have three seconds to get back inside. And when she got to zero I’m pretty sure she tased me.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  “Look, I’ve never been hit by a taser before. I’m sure if I wasn’t infected it would’ve been a lot worse, but it only made me fall over for a few seconds, and as soon as I was able, I just picked myself back up and pulled the wires out. I think we were both a little confused at what was happening.

  “She didn’t pull the gun until she realized the taser was ineffective. She pointed the gun at me and backed up, and that’s when you all finally decided to come out. I wonder what she thought when we all came out of the same room, if she was even paying attention.”

  “So she really was just crazy,” Clarissa said, shaking her head. “Must be part of the Insight hiring process. A checkbox, ‘Are you comfortable shooting at a kid’?”

  “Seriously,” Brian muttered. “Everyone here is insane.”

  “Looks like nobody gave that guard’s radio message a second thought,” Noah commented. “No alarms going off, no people anywhere.”

  “They probably assumed she could handle a ‘couple of kids making trouble,’” Brian grinned. “After all, she’s apparently at liberty to shoot everyone and everything. What hope do we have against that?”

  “But that’s the thing,” Noah said, furrowing his brows. “All she did was shoot. She didn’t even try to blind us. It’s like she had no idea about the dust at all.”

  “Insight’s a big place,” Elias replied. “They’re probably working on all sorts of crazy stuff. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was never told about their most recent project.”

  “That seems like somewhat of a security oversight,” Noah muttered.

  “I would say so, yes.”

  By now they had arrived back in the hallway with the treatment room. There were still no employees to be seen.

  Noah glanced around. “For some unfathomable reason, all the doors look exactly the same, so it might take a bit of trial and error to find the vat room. I can’t remember exactly which one it was.”

  “That’s fine,” Brian said. “We should probably check the other rooms anyway. For all we know, there could be a dozen more vats stuffed to the brim with dust hidden away somewhere.”

  “I’m almost afraid of what we’ll find,” Clarissa said warily. “They’re probably committing war crimes in here.”

  “That’s Insight for you,” Brian murmured. “Pushing the limits of science with complete disregard for laws, morals, or sanctity of life in general.”

  “Says the guy who literally ripped someone apart, what was it, ten minutes ago?” Clarissa glanced sideways at him.

  “I’m sick,” he said flatly. “There’s no comparison.”

  They went to the very first door and paused there. “What if we find Insight workers inside?” Leah asked.

  Everyone except Clarissa gave her an odd look.

  “Do you really have to ask?” Noah muttered.

  Leah frowned. “Do you possibly think you could avoid killing everyone? A lot of the people here might not be as evil as the company they’re working for."

  “I sincerely doubt that.”

  “Just try not to go for any vital bits, alright?”

  “I'll try,” Noah mumbled. His friends nodded their halfhearted assent.

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “You can have this,” Noah said after a moment, pulling out the syringe gun and holding it out to her. “I know I won’t need it, and you’ll be practically defenseless until you pick up an injury.”

  She grimaced but accepted the offering. “Thanks.”

  “What about me?” Clarissa pouted.

  Brian stared at her. “Is your hatchet just for show?”

  “‘Is it for show?’” She laughed. “You just watch, buddy.”

  “There probably won’t be anyone inside,” Leah said, giving Clarissa a slightly worried look.

  “Let’s find out.” Noah pushed the door open and led the way into the room.

  It was about the same size as the vat room, though most of the available floor space was taken up with filing cabinets and several large freezers. A long table at standing height extended down the center of the room, written notes strewn across it. There were no workers present.

  “Check the cabinets and freezers for anything that looks like it could be a receptacle for the dust,” Brian ordered. “If they’re unlocked, that is.” He went to the closest one and gave it a tentative tug. He smiled when it slid out easily.

  To no one’s surprise, the filing cabinets held files. They didn't have time to go through the endless papers, but a brief page-through of one of the drawers revealed old funding requests and project plans dating from six years ago. They soon moved on to the freezers.

  Noah half feared they would be filled with the bodies of Insight’s past victims, but the contents were perfectly mundane, consisting of countless capped vials, labeled and lined up in wire racks. The transparent material allowed him to see that they contained some kind of liquid varying in color from transparent to dark pink. Noah grabbed one to peer at the label, but it was an indecipherable mix of letters and numbers, so he shrugged and put it back.

  The next freezer was full of cardboard boxes, which upon further investigation contained sealed packets of congealed amber sludge. None of them could identify what it was, but it wasn’t dust, so they left those be and moved on to the final freezer.

  It was locked shut.

  “Well, that’s inconvenient,” Brian said. “And not a little suspicious.”

  Elias stepped over to the first two freezers and inspected the closing mechanism, opening and shutting the doors. They were both currently set to be unlocked, but the unengaged plastic bolt was clearly visible when the doors were open.

  “These things aren’t built to be vaults, they’re built to be freezers,” Elias observed. “The lock looks pretty fragile. We might be able to break it, with enough force.”

  Brian acknowledged him with a nod and braced himself against the frame of the locked freezer, straining on the handle with all his strength. The door remained firmly shut. Noah joined him a second later, barely fitting his hands beside his friend’s on the small handle, but even their combined might was insufficient to snap the plastic bolt within the door.

  “Er, I might have misjudged the strength of the lock,” Elias admitted.

  “Clarissa,” Brian huffed, stepping back. “You think your axe could make a dent in this?”

  “Come on, you know it’s a hatchet,” she corrected. “And no. It is designed to chop wood, not metal. At best, the blade would dull, and at worst it would completely break off, hit one of you, and make you go crazier than you already are.”

  “Wouldn’t want that to happen,” Brian muttered.

  “I don’t suppose the key is laying around nearby,” May said.

  Noah glanced at the table. There wasn’t a key immediately visible, but he leaned over anyway to get a better look at the various papers which someone had failed to gather up at the conclusion of some past meeting.

  He quickly realized the subject of the notes was the dust. Observations, experiments, and data were recorded in neat lines, almost more than seemed possible from a single day of research.

  “Look at this,” he said, gesturing vaguely to the table in its entirety. “They’ve been busy.”

  He picked up a paper at random and scanned down its contents, then laughed. “They’ve made a whole acronym for it already. DUST: Dispersing Unicellular Survival Toxin.” He wondered if ‘Survival’ referred to the dust, or the person who had it.

  “Sounds about right,” Brian remarked, peering at his own sheet of notes. “Listen to this- after a subject has been injured, the hunger ‘persists even beyond the event of total physical recovery. Given the opportunity to consume additional flesh following regeneration, test subjects will do so every time. Once exposed to the compulsion, a subject will not return to their normal mental state until they are cured.’” He turned to Noah. “But we already know that, don’t we?”

  “Sure. Does it say why?”

  Brian narrowed his eyes at the paper. “No, although down here it mentions that there is no known maximum capacity for dust storage within a subject’s lungs.”

  “That makes sense,” Elias reflected. “That tiny pendant is holding enough dust right now to fill a gymnasium. The dust can pack itself impossibly tightly.”

  “So I’ll never feel sated,” Noah murmured.

  Leah glanced over with a frown. “That’s what you get out of all of this? Sure you will, as soon as you’re cured.”

  Brian flipped the page over. “It says ‘see further notes,’ but there’s nothing else here.”

  “This might be it,” May said, holding up another sheet of paper. “Or it’s related, at least. Remember the device Heinrich mentioned that’s supposed to assuage a subject’s hunger? Well, apparently the scientists discovered some side effects while they were trying to figure out how to make it have more than a temporary effect. ‘When a subject achieves a certain concentration of dust within their body, they begin to display elevated physical faculties, with an approximate twenty-five to thirty percent increase in categories including strength and speed. This effect can be achieved through either consumption of flesh or a large dose of dust directly into the lungs, and scales proportionally to the amount ingested. While in this state, a subject’s supply of dust will rapidly deplete until they have returned to their usual capabilities.’”