“Okay, people. Let’s look alive.” Claire Brookes stood before the Matter Reduction Device, bathed in its prototypical lunar glow that radiated almost as brightly as her emerald eyes. Behind her was a row of several technicians with their bespectacled pupils bowed to the ground, not allowed to embrace as much of the light. Though the woman’s spine was ramrod straight, she kneaded her gloved knuckle between each finger, cracking and popping the joints, her lower lip etched just a little shorter than normal.

            The machine, drawn from someone’s most fantastical science fiction nightmare, hummed with rebellious life while the dazzling blue orb powering it crackled louder by the minute. Flanked by the curved edges of the machine’s casings and bound in a million multicolored wires connected to every possible outlet without threatening a fire hazard, the invention that held the potential power to shrink and grow its subjects held attention of all like a newly arisen idol. However, it wasn’t the light upon which everyone’s gaze was fixed, but the singular white square in the center of the room shielded behind translucent blast shields, all affixed beneath a dimly lit rectangular grid aimed squarely at its epicenter.

            In that epicenter sat a three-inch tall girl: blonde, slender, and rigid as a miniature Buddha statue. Her legs were folded, her hands placed in her lap. Carly looked even less nervous than Claire as the pair of them held an unblinking staring contest from a twenty-foot distance, though Michelle, who huddled on a chair at the end of the line aggressively studying the device’s every move, looked more anxious than any.

            “Cross your fingers,” Goodwin muttered at his superior, his fist already around a lever as he inched it forward, the fingers of his opposite hand dancing across a touchpad keyboard.

            “Why?” Claire asked abruptly.

            “I don’t know. Luck?” he said, stifling a chuckle and rummaging at his disheveled hair once the device’s settings were optimized.

            “There’s no such thing as luck,” the redhead snapped. “And anyone who thinks so has no place on this staff.”

            “Okay… touchy, touchy,” Goodwin murmured, not particularly bothered by this thinly veiled threat given his necessity for the job. “Everyone ready?”

            “Yes,” Claire said. Her eyes narrowed in on Carly through the glassy barrier. “What about the star of our show?”

            Her lips remaining unbudged, Carly nodded her head a single time. Her fingers slid down the side of her calves and wrapped slowly around her bare heels in anticipation.

            “Star, huh? You want me to say lights, camera, action?” Goodwin piped in.

            “Just pull the damn lever.”

            “All right. Let’s get the show on the road, or whatever,” he said. Hand hovering over the panel for another second, he planted his thumb into the center of the screen.

            The orb throbbed with color and energy. Everyone surrounding the clear encasement protectively posted a hand before their eyes. Even Carly was moved to blink as the grid above lit up with the same azure light and flashed in a singularity of the thunderous mechanism’s power.

            When everyone’s pupils had readjusted to the low luminosity of the makeshift lab, there was a palpable exhalation of disappointment as a collective unit, none more potent than the one expelled between Claire’s lips.

            Carly remained peacefully seated in the center of the expansive size alteration field, still the size of a thumb, a tiny smile curled into her mouth.

            At least one victory was experienced in the room. As much as the diminutive girl wanted to regain her former size, glory, and toy, that wish was currently dwarfed by the desire to see Claire thoroughly distressed over her own failure. It was too satisfying not to smile.

            “Well?” Claire’s clawed hand was already clenched into the scruff of Goodwin’s food-stained excuse for a lab coat. The woman, in her combat boots and towering black-clad leggings, gazed down at the considerably shorter man, her green eyes on the verge of flaming into a pyre. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

            “Me? You’re the one who told me to go ahead with a first trial even though I’m still missing six-three terabytes of necessary data to align her DNA signature with the… look, I’m not going to spend another four hours explaining Step One to you,” Goodwin grunted, making a meek attempt to wrestle free from Claire’s gloved hands. Her knuckles only seemed to tighten as her other arm braced against his neck, catching him at the back of his skull and pulling his unkempt locks into the leathered creases of her digits.

            “Why don’t you try?”

            “Ow, fuck! The point is, the chances of that test working out were about one in eight-hundred-septillion… all right, maybe a little better because I’m so much further of ahead of everyone else in this room, but it really sort of evens out once you factor in Johnson over there almost overloading the entire machine last week because he put a decimal in the wrong spot.”

            One of the technicians coughed into his fist, but Claire’s penetrating gaze never deviated.

            “I think you’ve spent enough time trying to tell everyone how much smarter you are. I’m just waiting on some results to back it up. Just like you,” Claire said, parsing every word through gritted teeth. Her biceps bulged through the skintight stealth suit as she tested Goodwin’s footing on solid ground. His heels left the floor momentarily.

            “Look, if you want results, you’re gonna need to help me close that gap. Because it’s either gonna take odds so good they’d hit big at Vegas every night for their whole life, or…”

            “Wait,” Claire grunted, placing her thumb over Goodwin’s flapping lips. She nodded in the direction of everyone behind her without turning. “Give us the room. Take the rest of the day… no, the afternoon off. I want everyone back to review the results of the first trial by 1700 hours.”

            Steadily the half a dozen bodies filed out of the room, keeping their chins continuously pointed to the floor, the air of defeat hanging amongst them as they shuffled.

            “Should… should I…” Michelle questioned, taking a few steps closer to Carly’s testing square. Her limbs still appeared to quake from the stress.

            “No. Leave her here. I’ll take her back myself. Go take your break too,” Claire ordered.

            “Oh. All… all right,” Michelle answered. She gave a nod and the most reassuring smile to Carly she could muster, though the shrunken girl’s gaze was still intently trained on the two far more interesting people in the room, before the raven-haired employee exited through the reinforced steel door as well.

            “Or what?” Claire demanded at last, her breath hot on Goodwin’s scalp.

            “…or I’m gonna need the boy. The other one.”

            “Right,” Claire said. “And remind me exactly why you do?”

            The man rolled his eyes, ruffling his facial hair between the tangle of Claire’s accusing fists still clinging to his person. “Look, the kindergarten version of it is that I can’t unlock the universal method for matter control until I figure out what it is that’s inside them… both. It only worked on them and no one else because they share genetic material, that much is clear. But I can’t plug into the variables until I know what they all are. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of fancy-looking bullshit.”

            Claire studied the pitiful man and his blubbering face for a few more moments, her own pinched countenance nearly atrophied from tension, until her cheek muscles and knuckles simultaneously released. Goodwin toppled awkwardly onto the swivel chair positioned in front of the touch panel, missing and crumbling to the floor before Claire’s firmly planted boots.

            “So what you’re saying is, you’re absolutely goddamned useless until I risk bringing even more attention to our operation than I already have, is that it?” Her right foot rose up, the iron base of the boot teasing along Goodwin’s stomach and tracing up to his chest, full capable of collapsing it if she were to shift her weight with enough speed.

            “What I’m saying is, if you want me to keep blindly guessing with what you’ve given me, we’re either gonna die of old age before we crack it, or this girl is gonna accidentally blow up, and then you won’t even have half the equation. Is that enough incentive for you?” Goodwin muttered, somewhat unnerved by the presence of the powerful sole positioned above his fragile organs, but his defiance remained in full force as he fired a fleck of spittle onto the leather gloss of Claire’s footwear.

            Rather than responding, Claire provided a small shove into Goodwin’s abdomen with the toe of her boot and wiped the spit away on his coat, earning a last sputter from the man as she sauntered around the control panel with a single smack of a button that lowered the blast shields tick by tick. By then, the only thing separating the ginger commander from her miniature prisoner was the blank ivory space of the testing floor.

            “Do you hear that, Carly?” Claire said, her hands fastening to her hips. “Big brother is coming to visit you.”

            Heart fluttering faster than it had even during her remarkably potent orgasm under Michelle’s fingers while she dreamed of a far more appealing reality, Carly ascended to her full height of under three inches, though she didn’t bother looking up to meet Claire’s emerald gaze.

            “Are you going to keep that deal?” the girl muttered, the expected answer already evident in her leaden tone.

            “That depends on you,” Claire said genuinely with a shrug. “As long as we get what we want, without making a big mess, we won’t have use for him anymore. Either of you, in fact.”

            “So what does that have to do with me?” Carly scowled quietly. “I did what you asked me to.”

            “Yes you did. And I think that’s worth rewarding. But I need more. I’m not going to risk losing my investments just because you want to fuck your big brother.”

            Carly’s every muscle, bone, and tendon seethed with nuclear vigor, but she remained still, save for her lower jaw, which pierced her soft lip in focus of keeping herself from shredding her throat in unbridled screams of pure rage. She tasted a metallic droplet of blood on the back of her tongue.

            “Look,” Carly gasped, drained of air, her heart railing inside her ribcage. Her skin steamed with sweat and pheromones that tingled on every pore. She’d returned to normal. The room around her no longer expanded at an unknowable scale. It was small, private, conquerable.

            Like the world around her.

            “Yes. I see.” Jack’s tiny voice sounded out from the dizzying ground below as he stood a mere inch away from the altar of his regrown sibling’s marvelously sculpted toes, which she tapped softly at the floor, alternately flushing pink and pale as she drank in the sight of him down there at his rightful scale. Cardly could hardly get enough oxygen, her vision had swum into such a vortex.

            God. She wanted him everywhere. Feeling his helpless limbs flailing under her almighty capability, his mouth fighting to sample her, his adorable cock squeezed into every surface it could reach in gratitude. His whole being melded into the oily wrinkles of her sole, coiled around her uvula while her taste buds explored his taut frame. Then pass him between the hills of her breasts and all the way down into the sacred crevice of her ass, where she could take him as a throne, and mark her return to power for absolute certain. And then, finally, pull him just a little further forward, between the pulsing lips and inside her, where he’d be safe forever.

            “Are you all right?” she crooned as she stooped down closer to the floor, keeping her foot perfectly fixed in its pre-ordained position on the ground. She savored the sight of her shadow swallowing him up, like she so longed to. “Did they hurt you?”

            “Y-Yes… before. They did,” he sniffled. “They told me things. Made me believe… wrong things.”

            “Oh, little bro,” she cried, feeling the warm moisture gush from her eyes as she reached down to him, stroking her pinky finger along his tender cheek. A shock ran through her arm at the mere privilege of touching her property again, the hierarchy reordered to correctness again. It was almost too much to bear. Within a minute the tears were splashing down atop her writhing toes. “I’m so sorry.”

            “Why did you let them take me, Carly?” he whimpered, his own voice cracking as the miniature naked boy at her toes broke into his own sobs, which only intensified his sister’s. He was so powerless. So nonexistent without her. “Why did you give me away?”

            “I didn’t. I never would. They twisted you, turned you against me and everything we had,” Carly vowed bitterly. Her finger continued teasing along her shrunken subject’s cheeks, working the pad of her swirled digit down his back and along his thighs, eventually seeking into the crook under his crotch and massaging his dick, which immediately began to firm. She smiled affectionately, her cheeks glowing rosily. “But that’s all over now. I have you now. And you’re not going anywhere.”

            Nodding in comprehension, Jack instantly dropped to his haunches. "Please. Keep me, big sissy. K-Keep me. I'm y-yours, forever. Please. It's all I've ever w-wanted." Crawling forward the remaining distance, Jack pressed his face squarely into the puffy pad of Carly’s monumental big toe. His lips aligned with a ring of her unique print, the clean air he’d previously been poisoning himself with at last replaced by her earthy aroma and salty excretion. Already she could feel his tongue gnawing and suckling at the greasy, ridged skin, taking in as much of her essence back into his body as he could to make up for lost time. Her finger only continued tickling along his junk, even as it nudged him forward and increased the pressure between his delicate face and her heavenly foot. It was a lot of weight, but he could take it. She knew he could. And he would.

            “I love you, little bro. I love you so much,” Carly wept as she cradled his miniature erection in the curve of her fingertip, the stirring inside her quickly transforming to a hormonal stampede that had been held inside her feminine flower for so long, unrequited and unbloomed. It only amplified as his microscopic tongue and teeth fought to service her toe, so weak and so incapable of protecting him from anything, yet willing to risk every heartbeat just so she would know he understood he was back beneath her, where he was needed, and where they both learned to find space in the universe.

            “Sophie,” Carly spat out at last, surprising Claire and almost inducing a flinch from the monolithic redhead. “Sophie is how you have to do it.”

            “What do you mean?” Claire said. “That’s the cousin, isn’t it? What about her?”

            “She’s how you get to him.”

            “What makes you say that? You haven’t even been around them for a year and a half. I’m not looking for blind handouts here, Carly. I need good information that minimizes risk to my work going up in flames, or you don’t get to have a boy-shaped dildo by the end of this. That’s the deal.”

            “She’ll do anything for him. And he’ll… do the same,” Carly testified hollowly, a vengeful fury flooding her veins at the very prospect of whatever psychological torments Sophie had utilized to redirect Jack’s mind into some poor estimation of an average human being. As someone who had experienced firsthand the violent and revolting measures to which Sophie was willing to go to protect the poor, frightened boy, then Carly was willing to bet the relationship ran both ways.

            “So you’re saying…”

            “Take them both,” Carly followed up. “And you won’t have any problems.”

            A fresh protest resting on Claire’s lips, the woman nonetheless kept it to herself, noting the finality emanating from the miniature mouth of the shrunken dirty-blonde victim below her. Rather than countering again, she merely marched into the testing field, stamping a boot onto either side of Carly’s exposed body like twin obsidian pillars, railroading her between.

            “I’m willing to trust you, Carly. One last time,” Claire said as her gloved hand lowered, engulfing the light and air around the tiny girl as her fingers clutched Carly into the padded palm. “You don’t get a third chance.”

            “And I don’t want one.”